Blizzard is now accepting applicants for its 2017 Heroes of the Dorm esports competition as the annual live-streamed event moves from its former home at ESPN to the greener pastures of Facebook Live.
Full-time students at any four-year college or university in the United States and Canada are invited to apply and competition is expected to reach a fevered pitch during the lead up to bracketed play in March.
Heroes of the Dorm is a Blizzard-organized competition centering around the publisher’s free-to-play MOBA Heroes of the Storm. The annual event invites competitors from universities across North America for a chance to win thousands of dollars in college tuition and scholarships.
The competition debuted in 2015 with a live-streamed championship series on ESPN2 and ESPN3. After returning to ESPN the following year for its second annual Heroes of the Dorm event, Blizzard announced that its 2017 competition will be broadcast exclusively via the Facebook Live platform. As of Wednesday, Blizzard has not announced whether simulcast streams will be available via YouTube and Twitch, as is common practice for other major esports competitions.
Group stage competitions and playoffs for Heroes of the Dorm will kick off on February 15 and Facebook will host streams of “select matches” through March 8. Bracketed play among the top 64 teams will begin on March 18 and the last four surviving teams will advance to the Heroic Four finals on April 8.
In addition to offering a $500,000 scholarship pool for competitors, Blizzard has cash prizes in store for viewers who can correctly predict tournament winners through the upcoming Bracket Challenge and Pick’em Challenge online contests. Registration for Heroes of the Dorm 2017 wraps up on February 11.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.