Sony showed off the first gameplay trailer of Ghost of Tsushima, the upcoming samurai game from Sucker Punch Productions, during its E3 2018 press conference. If you thought the game was a beauty before, wait till you check it out in motion.
The nine-minute trailer takes us through Day 9 of the Mongol invasion on the island of Tsushima. The main character, Jin, hops on his horse, Nobou, and rides through a lush meadow. When Jin heads into the forest, he hears the sound of invading troops. He dismounts and we get our first glimpse at combat.
The swordplay is fast, fluid, and full of counters. While the sequences where you fight off multiple enemies look to hue closer to methodical hack and slash combat, one-on-one duels seem to be more strategic, almost like a 3D fighting game.
After Jin disposes of the enemies, he meets up with a woman named Masako, and they sneak their way up to a temple. This is where we see some stealth mechanics as Jin takes out one enemy while Masako shoots the other with her bow.
The trailer then showed off some of Jin’s more acrobatic moves, as he climbs up a building and swings with a rope to a rooftop. When he hops down toward the enemies below, the gameplay slows down, and the sequence turns into a mini-cutscene. There is a bit of a twist after Jin and Masako save the monk. Masako, acting on motives Jin didn’t know about, shoots the monk because he killed her family.
The pair, who seem to be close friends, proceed to square off in a duel. While sparring, Jin tries to persuade her to stand down. Thankfully, the friends don’t fight to the death and instead join up again when Mongol troops circle in on their location.
Based on this long sequence, Ghost of Tsushima is shaping up to be a beautiful and stylish action game from the studio behind the Infamous franchise. Ghost of Tsushima doesn’t have a release window yet, and we didn’t get any commentary from developers after the trailer ended. The gameplay trailer has us mightily excited for the PlayStation 4 exclusive.
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.