Batman: Arkham Knight launched relatively problem-free on consoles, but the same can’t be said for any other versions of the game. First the PC port of the game was plagued with countless issues, and now it’s bad news for those who were planning to play the game on other operating systems.
In a short post on steam yesterday, a Warner Bros. representative wrote a blunt message in the game’s Steam forums indicating that users who were hoping to play Arkham Knight on SteamOS were out of luck.
“We are very sorry to confirm that Batman: Arkham Knight will no longer be coming to Mac and Linux,” the forum post reads. “If you have pre-ordered Batman: Arkham Knight for Mac or Linux, please apply for a refund via Steam.”
This is obviously a disappointment, but it’s a move that was fairly easy to see coming. Last year the Mac and Linux ports of Arkham Knight, developed by Feral Interactive, were delayed to spring 2016. Feral said at the time that this was to give the game “extra development time needed to ensure good performance and wide-ranging support for OS X, Linux and SteamOS.”
In a fitting move, this came on the same day that the PC port of the game, pulled months prior, returned to Steam. When it originally launched, the game was buggy to the point of being unplayable for many users. Even after the game returned, bugs still lingered.
In December, the final piece of downloadable content for Arkham Knight was released. With the content for the game effectively finished, it could be that Warner Bros. made the decision that devoting more resources to the game wouldn’t be worth the extra revenue it would generate from being available on more platforms.
Feral was responsible for Mac ports of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, so the company was certainly used to this type of work. Of course, given the state of Arkham Knight on the PC, porting work could have been far more difficult.
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.