It’s time to take down the I.N.K.T. Corporation once again, but this time in glorious high-definition: THQ Nordic revealed at PAX East in Boston, MA, that Wii classic de Blob will be making its way to Steam later this year.
The premise of de Blob is simple: there’s an evil corporation out to turn the world monochrome, and it’s up to de Blob and his buddies to ensure the world stays vibrant and colorful. Players jump around a city leaving paint trails and beating up bad guys. Like many games from the Wii era, its themes and tones are very kid-friendly.
De Blob was released during the height of Wii system mania. The system was selling well, and because of its unique control system, many original games were created to take advantage of it. While there was a ton of less-than-stellar content released for the Wii around that time, gems like de Blob, No More Heroes, and MadWorld squeezed through the cracks.
On Metacritic, de Blob currently sits at a solid 82 on Metacritic, indicating that it’s well deserving of a play through. Because de Blob will be coming out on PC, it’s very unlikely that the game will support the original motion controls. But considering that, as a platformer, the game really didn’t benefit from waggle, the exclusion might not be such a bad thing.
De Blob also had a sequel which was released on the Wii, as well as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but as of now THQ Nordic has only listed the original game for release.
With many Wii titles still stuck on its aging standard definition hardware, here’s hoping the release of de Blob on Steam will prompt other developers to port games over.
There isn’t a release date at the moment, but de Blob is set to hit Steam sometime this year.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.