80 Days, Inkle’s fantastic choose-your-own-adventure-style adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel about gentleman adventurers circumnavigating the globe, is coming to Mac and PC on September 29, according to an announcement from the developer. Inkle has partnered with British studio Cape Guy to rebuild the whole game in Unity, and it will be available on Steam, Good Old Games, and Humble for $10.
In this charming text adventure, you assume the role of Passepartout, the valet employed by the wealthy and eccentric English gentleman Phileas Fogg when he accepts a wager to travel around the world in 80 days or less. Starting in London, you plot your course from city to city, buying and selling various items to fund your travels and encountering adventures and scenarios along the way. The writing and artwork are utterly charming, and it’s one of our favorite mobile games in recent memory.
The huge number of potential routes to take and choices to make gives the game a great deal of replayability, which will be enhanced in this new version with a massive infusion of new content. The addition includes “thirty new cities, over 150k words, and two major new world-spanning plotlines. Love, betrayal, thievery, murder, poker and piracy await!” The new content will also be added back into the original, mobile versions of the game in a free update a few days following the release of the PC version, the developer confirmed via Twitter.
@thewillennium yup: free update a few days after the PC launch
— https://bsky.app/profile/inklestudios.bsky.social (@inkleStudios) September 10, 2015
This is the first project for indie studio Cape Guy, otherwise known as former Rocksteady developer Ben Nicholson. The name alludes to the fact that Nicholson programmed the original cape physics for Rocksteady’s now classic Batman: Arkham Asylum. His coding chops will go towards making the already lovely game really sing on the new platforms, with new visual touches such as “fancy new colour and shading effects, including a day/night cycle that moves across the surface of the globe.”
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.