I played a lot of games built to support Nintendo’s New 3DS XL handheld, but the most surprising was IronFall Invasion. Made by the three-person team at VDdev, the downloadable game is a full-fledged third-person shooter with dual-stick controls and six-player online play, plus a campaign mode. This is nothing amazing for a console game, but on the 3DS, it’s a fresh idea.
The extra ZL, ZR, and C-Stick on the New 3DS XL are all used to great effect.
The game mostly revolves around killing evil robots, but the cover system is particularly exciting. You can press B to hide behind objects. Sidling, jumping over, or shooting around corners or over cover is also possible — reminiscent of Gears of War.
Controls were tight in our first runthrough and you can customize the sensitivity of the C-Stick as well, if you’re not aiming as fast as you’d like.
IronFall Invasion doesn’t yet have a release date or price, but it should hit the eShop in “early 2015” and is best played on the New Nintendo 3DS XL. Check out our firsthand look.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.