The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just came back for its second season, and Amazon Prime Gaming is showing up to appropriately offer a number of free The Lord of the Rings games for Prime users.
The highlights here are the critically acclaimed Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year edition and Lego: The Lord of the Rings, which are both free to claim for GOG with a Prime subscription. Both are available now. If you use Luna, you can also grab Middle-earth: Shadow of War. On September 19, you can grab Lego: The Hobbit as well.
Shadow of Mordor is most known for its Nemesis System, a unique gameplay mechanic that basically amounts to random enemies remembering you across fights. If you kill one orc, for example, he won’t have the chance to rise in the ranks, but another might if they last long enough. It makes it feel like your actions have narrative consequences in a way that few games have attempted since.
Like other Lego games, The Lord of the Rings version lets you play out the original trilogy but with Lego minifigs. The same goes for Lego: The Hobbit.
Continuing the streak from last month of Borderlands game series discounts to coincide with the movie release, Prime Gaming is also offering a number of Borderlands games for free on the Epic Games Store. You’ll get the immensely popular Borderlands 2, along with the spinoffs The Pre-Sequel and Tales from the Borderlands.
You can check out the full list of games coming to the service below. Just keep an eye on the code that’s being made available. Amazon is offering codes for GOG, the Epic Games Store, and its own Amazon Games App.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.