During PlayStation’s January 2024 State of Play presentation, Kojima Productions revealed the full title for its next game: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. The game will launch for PlayStation 5 in 2025.
Kojima Productions also showed off a new trailer with some wild imagery. It features what seemingly is a corpse being operated on, along with the iconic baby coughing up some sort of ship. Protagonist Sam Porter Bridges is now on a ship called Drawbridge, with a similar goal to what he had in his first adventure: connecting networks together. It looks like Higgs is also returning as an antagonist, this time with a weaponized electric guitar as he fights off some sort of mysterious samurai figure.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach was first announced at The Game Awards 2022 with a trailer showing main characters Sam Porter Bridges and Fragile in a giant ship at sea. The game is currently in development for PlayStation 5.
Sony has been putting more of its first party games on PC, but it’s unknown whether it intends to put Death Stranding 2 on the platform as well. The first Death Stranding was initially a PlayStation 4 exclusive at launch in 2019 until it arrived on PC in 2020. It even received a surprising PC Game Pass launch in 2022.
A Death Stranding live-action movie is also in development at A24. Kojima Productions is also currently working on another game with Xbox and Microsoft called OD, which was revealed last year at The Game Awards 2023, as well as a stealth action game with Sony.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.