Fallout Shelter has served as a fun little F2P time killer while we await the release of Fallout 4. Many players have long since maxed out their favorite characters and hit the Dweller limit. The last update added Deathclaw raids, which was nice but quickly grew tiresome. What we are left with is the task of completing our weapon, outfit, and legendary dweller collections. This week, Bethesda released update 1.2, which adds some refreshing new features to what has become a monotonous game.
With 1.2, you can save your Vault to the cloud, and can access it from multiple devices. If you are new to Fallout Shelter, or want to start over, you can skip the tutorial. Check out our survival guide for more tips.
The new Survival Mode is basically a hardcore mode. Resources drain at a faster rate, incidents cause more destruction, and dead Dwellers cannot be revived. If you’ve become attached to any of your little friends, you may want to avoid Survival Mode. Raiders now drop equipment when defeated.
An extensive statistics page shows total playing time, average Dweller stats, resource production, elevator rides, incident stoppage, dead monsters, and more. iOS Overseers get a bonus in the form of Piper, a character from Fallout 4. She appears at your Vault along with five free lunchboxes.
Keep your eye out for the Mysterious Stranger, from Fallout installments. He pops up at random inside your Vault, and if you are quick to catch him you are rewarded with Caps.
The updates help to refresh the Shelter experience, but not all changes are welcome. A new explorer limit cap of 10 has been implemented. If you’ve gone far enough in the game, you’ve no doubt realized that you don’t need every Dweller to keep the lights on. Rather than cram your storage rooms with residents who have nothing to do, you’ve sent them out to the Wasteland in large numbers. Well, now you can only send out 10 at a time. We have no idea why Bethesda would cripple the game like this, and the forums have already been inundated with complaints.
In addition to the listed changes and bug fixes, we noted ominous music in the background of the lunchbox menu and new sound effects.
We would like to see a “sell all” option for weapons and outfits in the next update. Over time, you can amass large numbers of cheap items that you don’t need, and tapping the sell button over and over is annoying. But if it means anything, we’ll just settle for the removal of the explorer cap.
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.