After announcing last fall that it would drop Tiger Woods as the namesake for its golf franchise, EA brought the next iteration of the series to E3 with a new name and a new look. EA Sports PGA Tour will be the first post-Tiger Woods golf game from the company and is being developed with the Frostbite 3 engine.
EA Sports skipped a 2014 release for its usually annually updated golf franchise, opting to focus on the next generation of the series. We got the first look at what changes are coming at E3 2014. In development for both the PS4 and Xbox One, EA Sports PGA Tour will utilize the Frostbite 3 engine, which has been used to power the biggest titles from EA’s non-sports lineup including Battlefield 4 and Need for Speed: Rivals. It will mark the first sports title to take advantage of the technology.
EA also made note that the new direction of the franchise will include the standard, real life settings that players are accustomed to but will also move into the fantasy realm, allowing virtual golfers to shank shots over the top of battleships.
EA Sports PGA Tour is expected to be available in spring of 2015.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.