The E3 trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations was quite sweet, an action-fueled CG battle set to music featuring an aging Ezio Auditore. We already knew that he’d be a returning star in the upcoming game, along with his ancestor Altair, but not much has been revealed about where modern-day assassin-in-training Desmond Miles will be left following the events that occurred at the close of last year’s game. A newly released trailer sheds some light on how Des is doing, to go along with story details gleaned from E3 demo sessions of the game.
The spoiler-lite version of the end of Brotherhood is: Desmond did something bad, something really bad, though it seems that it wasn’t a voluntary choice. Revelations picks up in the aftermath of that incident, with our hero now trapped inside of the Animus and trying to piece his shattered mind back together by reliving the memories of his ancestors. His newfound isolation is highlighted in this trailer, which doesn’t once give us a peek at Ezio or the new game’s Constantinople setting.
Instead we see Desmond in a series of locations that resemble the final puzzle room seen in the last game. Geometric shapes floating in space with no rhyme or reason to them. We’ll presumably be jumping all around and on top of those things at some point. Probably story-advancing palate cleansers to break up the flow of the game, serving much the same role that Desmond’s visits back to present-day Monteriggioni did in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. This new trailer might not have the same style that the E3 one did, but with the game not coming until November we’ll take what we can get.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.