Microsoft and 343 Industries are playing dirty. The Halo community is one of the most vibrant and lively around, and with the imminent release of Halo 4 this November the fans are looking for any pieces of news, footage, or general information about what to expect from the now Bungie-less series being developed by a group specifically made up of people whose only goal in life is to make excellent Halo games.
The publisher and developer decided to leverage this heightened level of attention and began to send out a series of emails, each with a chunk of artwork that read “Your piece of the Halo 4 puzzle,” knowing that Halo fans couldn’t resist such tantalizing bait.
The fans then rallied and went to NeoGAF, where they worked together to reveal what turned out to be the cover art for Halo 4, and pretty sweet cover art at that (see above).
That’s dirty pool Microsoft and 343 Industries, cleverly making fans of Halo cooperate. How dare you bring fans together. Expect to hear more on Halo 4 at this E3, then look for it exclusively on the Xbox 360 on November 6.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.