For 25 years, Sid Meier’s Civilization series has been a pillar of PC gaming. Few games, if any, have captured its epic scope, spanning the whole world and the entirety of human history. Civilization VI launches later in October, but we have been fortunate enough to get our hands on a preview build and tinker with it for the last week.
Join me live on Twitch at 11 a.m. ET and we will rewrite history together. We’ll check out this long-anticipated game in action and give you a preview of my still-forming opinions about it in anticipation of our full review and guide when it arrives fully in October.
The jump from Civilization V to VI is perhaps less dramatic than we’ve seen in previous games, but there are definitely some fundamental changes to how the game is played. Most notably, cities have been unstacked, with all of your buildings spread out on the map in specialized districts, along with world wonders also taking up a tile. This makes the puzzle of growing and specializing your cities much crunchier, with the particular layout of the map mattering more than ever before.
The second major change is that Civ V‘s cultural policies have been fleshed out into a full cultural tree, absorbing some of the less technological milestones from the extant science tree. Much of the new culture tree is filled with policy cards that can be slotted into a new system of government types that can be unlocked over the course of play. The net result is a richer game for players that like to focus on the more humanistic elements of civilization.
There are plenty of other changes, big and small, throughout this complex game’s many systems. The preview build we currently have features 10 of the 20 leaders that will be available at launch. As a preview, keep in mind that things are still subject to change, so we’ll be reserving real judgement until we have the final version.
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.