Xbox Live Gold members will be able to enjoy some AAA games for free in September, thanks to the Games With Gold program.
Microsoft’s Larry Hryb, known to gamers by his handle, Major Nelson, has revealed next month’s offerings, which feature some big titles.
Games With Gold is Microsoft’s equivalent to PlayStation Plus. It’s a subscription service that not only gets gamers on Xbox Live, but also nets four free games each month.
Next month’s big titles are Forza Horizon and Mirror’s Edge. Forza Horizon is a more arcade-like offshoot of the Forza franchise, and features a large open world to race around. Mirror’s Edge is a first-person action game that has gamers playing as Faith as she runs from rooftop to rooftop, trying to topple a totalitarian regime. Luckily, both games are backwards compatible, meaning that Xbox One owners who sold their Xbox 360s will still be able to play.
On the Xbox One end, gamers will get Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China. It’s a side-scrolling action game that treads far from the series’ third-person action-adventure roots. It’s the only game in the series to take place in China and features a female assassin. It takes place in 1526, and the main protagonist, Shao Jun, is an assassin trained by Ezio Auditore de Firenze. Firenze was the main protagonist from Assassin’s Creed 2 to Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. She returns to China to fight the Chinese offshoot of the Templars, who destroyed the Chinese brotherhood years earlier.
And finally, a new game, Earthlock: Festival of Magic, will be premiering on Xbox One, and is free to those with Gold subscriptions. It comes from Norwegian developer Snowcastle Games, and is a turn-based role-playing game that originated as a Kickstarter in 2011.
Next month’s Games With Gold will go live on September 1, and will be available to download until September 30.
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.