Summer is nearly here, and so are some great Memorial Day sales. Among your standard gardening tool and outdoor furniture deals that seem to appear just about every holiday, we’ve also spotted some great sales on gaming gear, and the Xbox One deals are pretty good this year. Want to know where to shop? We’ve provided a list of the best deals below.
How do you choose between the various Xbox consoles? We’ve taken some time below to describe each option in a little more detail.
Microsoft currently sells three different Xbox consoles — the Xbox One S, the Xbox One S All-Digital, and the Xbox One X. The Xbox One X is the high-end model, offering 4K HDR and the best video quality out of any of the consoles. While the Xbox One S does also support 4K, the experience isn’t as great.
The Xbox One X has additional graphical processing capabilities, the ability to stream and record in 4K 60fps, and a better frame rate while gaming. It’s simply the best gaming experience available: Microsoft claims it’s four times as powerful as any current console.
If you don’t need a disc drive and 4K isn’t as important to you, consider the Xbox One S All-Digital. It’s the cheapest of the bunch, offering close to the same user experience as the run-of-the-mill Xbox One S, with the main difference being all games have to be downloaded over the internet and stored on the console or a hard drive.
We don’t see this as too much of an issue for most casual gamers, making it an excellent option for those who are just looking to game on an occasional basis. While it’s not the instant gratification of popping a disc in and playing, you have a 1TB drive to work with. That’s enough for about 15 or so games at any one time — and on a decent broadband connection, you’ll be able to download a game without too much waiting time.
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.