For gamers wanting to return to the underwater city of Rapture on their five-inch iPhone screens, there’s some bad news: Bioshock will not be getting the update necessary to run on new Apple software, meaning the game is officially dead.
The news comes from former Touch Arcade forum mod, Killercow, who noticed that 2K Games had updated its iOS Bioshock support page stating that the game will no longer be supported.
Not a real surprise but 2K stealthily edited its message on Bioshock's iOS9 compatibility, it's never coming back:https://t.co/iNGbOinYpe pic.twitter.com/zj2lDujWMf
— Killercow (@killercow) January 23, 2017
Bioshock was released on iOS in 2014 to a mixed reception regarding how it played on mobile. It currently sits at a 68 on Metacritic. Fans weren’t impressed by the much lower graphical fidelity on iPhone and complained that the game really wasn’t fit for mobile devices. It turned out that 2K Games lost interest in supporting the game months after release. The game was removed with the release of iOS version 8.4 due to incompatibility issues. 2K had stated that the game would eventually be updated. Somewhere between September 2015 and now, though, 2K made the decision to drop the project altogether.
It’s really unfortunate for those that dropped the $15 to play Bioshock on the go. While the game still does run, 2K cannot guarantee how well it will perform on later versions of iOS. For all intents and purposes, if gamers want to go through Rapture one more time, it’s best they look toward console or PC versions.
Bioshock was released in 2007 to near universal praise. Its mature themes and unique environment enveloped players in the underwater city of Rapture. It also forced gamers to make ethical or utilitarian decisions, bringing a layer of moral ambiguity that made it a major talking point for that year. Unfortunately, the team behind Bioshock, Irrational Games, downsized to just 15 employees after the release of Bioshock: Infinite, with most of the staff going their separate ways. Here’s hoping series creator Ken Levine can excite gamers once again, even with a significantly smaller team.
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.