The 2014 update to the Call of Duty franchise will be called Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare; the first trailer is out right now and the game itself will come out on November 4, 2014. No mention of platform availability (“all of them” is a safe bet), but the trailer is made up entirely of Xbox One footage.
Related: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review
Sledgehammer Games’ first effort in the series as the sole lead developer — previously, the team worked alongside Infinity Ward on Modern Warfare 3 — seems to focus on future conflicts in a world where enhanced soldiers, hover-bikes, and Kevin Spacey overseeing private military forces are all a thing.
That looks an awful lot like House of Cards star and all-around bad-ass Kevin Spacey, right? That’s because it is. Spacey appears to be the campaign’s Big Bad, the top dog at a major private military operation who, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, declares a beef with the U.S. government.
You’re probably wondering at this point exactly why you’re seeing a trailer for a game that wasn’t supposed to be revealed until Sunday. It all started when Variety took a listen to an audio clip of Spacey reading the line, “And you think you can just march into these countries based on some fundamentalist religious principles, drop a few bombs, topple a dictator and start a democracy? Give me a break.” That’s from the trailer, and it popped up on the Internet earlier this week.
The sharp folks at Variety claim to have run the audio through a “sonic visualizer,” which spit out a blurry picture of a man “looking like Spacey, holding a military weapon” — yeah, we know, but take a look yourself at the source link. Nothing definitively Call of Duty there, but the audio clip suddenly made a whole lot more sense when Activision’s official Call of Duty Twitter feed tweeted out this teasing video:
#ANewEra of Call of Duty arrives May 4th. http://t.co/h8dvBN5sTW
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) May 2, 2014
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when our friends over at Destructoid got a hold of leaked media, including the now-official trailer you see above, and a rough synopsis of the story (again, as laid out in the official trailer). Activision issued the official trailer in the early morning hours today.
The countdown timer for Sunday’s reveal is still up on CallofDuty.com, so it’s not yet clear if the trailer is the only thing that was set for Sunday’s reveal. We’ll be checking in with Activision PR today for clarification, and will update this post accordingly when we hear back; seems like they probably had a late night.
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.