Digital Eclipse’s Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is an excellent and comprehensive look back at the company’s now classic video game lineup, with games to play and extra content to interact with. So far, it’s gotten one DLC: The Wider World of Atari, that added even more titles. Now, it’s about to get its second, thanks to an acquisition it made earlier this year.
Atari announced The First Console War on Friday, and it’s about, as you can guess, the company’s first console war with the Intellivision, although it’ll touch on a specific element of it. In the 1980s, Mattel was publishing games on the Intellivision. At some point, it decided to release versions of these console exclusives for its main competitor, the Atari 2600, under the M Network label. There are 19 of these games coming to Atari 50 with The First Console War, which is set to launch on November 8 for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4 Atari 50 owners.
You might not recognize some of the names. For example, what is Astroblast? Is that like Astrosmash? Well, a lot of games got different names when Mattel ported them over. Thankfully, the Atari M Network names are similar to the originals.
Atari acquired its rival Intellivision in May, therefore ending the video game industry’s oldest console war and acquiring over 200 games, including more than a dozen M Network games. Atari CEO Wade Rosen said following the announcement that the company wanted to distribute the games, and was looking into possible ways to create new games based off those IPs.
Digital Eclipse, which Atari also owns, makes games that are both retro remasters and interactive museum exhibits, and The First Console War is no different. The DLC will feature interviews with M Network programmer Jane Terjung, game historians Leonard Herman and Mike Mika, and former Atari developers David Crane and Garry Kitchen, along with a new timeline breaking down this era in video game history.
Correction: A previous version of this story identified a game called Anteater when it should’ve been Antbear.
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.