While Half-Life: Alyx isn’t officially playable without a virtual reality headset, developer Valve knows that its dedicated fan base will likely mod the new release for traditional PC play.
“Yes, it’s going to happen,” Robin Walker of Valve admits in an interview with Polygon. “I’m fine with it. For the sake of the other members of the team, I don’t want to say I encourage you to do it, but it’s going to happen.”
Walker, who has a long history with mods as the creator of the original Team Fortress using Quake‘s engine, isn’t worried about a non-VR version of Half-Life: Alyx becoming playable. He notes that since the team designed the shooter specifically for virtual reality, the mod won’t be as enjoyable as the core game. However, Walker said he knows many non-VR owners want to check it out and believes that players will realize why the developer made the game exclusive to VR headsets after they experience it with a mouse and keyboard.
“It will clearly demonstrate to people why we did this in VR,” Walker says. As a developer, Walker has an interest in the fan reaction and if it will prove his beliefs right. “It will be a very crisp way of seeing all the stuff we got for the move into VR. If people play [a modded version on a standard display] and say this is just as good, that will teach me a lot. I will realize I’m wrong, and we didn’t get as much as we thought, and I love to know whenever I’m wrong.”
Half-Life: Alyx is now available for a host of VR headsets: Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality. The first game in Valve’s beloved first-person shooter series since 2007’s Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the prequel dives into the backstory of Alyx Vance as she attempts to fight off the alien Combine with her father. The choice to make the title exclusive to VR headsets has proved divisive among fans, as many can’t afford to buy a headset at this time, but it has received near-universal critical acclaim since being released.
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.