Borderlands – Tales from the HQ is a series of animated shorts based on Gearbox Software and 2K Games’ popular shooter, and it’s coming to YouTube in December 2013. The content is a product of the game-maker’s partnership with the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California that kicked off earlier this year. Over the past eight months, students involved in the school’s “Borderlands Cooperative” have worked with limited in-game assets while on deadline to develop this series of shorts set within the game’s universe.
What’s neat here is that the project started out with the goal of developing a single short film, but the scope had to expand when more than 100 students got involved. One film became three, and the trio of projects was ultimately chosen from a pool of 14 storyboarded concepts. The finished content won’t be live until next month, but you can get a sense of what to expect in the video below, which showcases student Leslie Harwood’s episode, Bride of Frankentrap. Take note that it’s not the finished piece.
Here at DT Gaming we’re big fans of any initiative built around encouraging young people to step up and make amazing things in the interactive entertainment/video games space. This seems to have been a fruitful partnership for all parties, and we look forward to seeing next month what the Academy of Art University students came up with.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.