Ellie and Joel are back in the reveal trailer for The Last of Us: Part II.
At the PlayStation experience in Anaheim, California, studio Naughty Dog revealed the first trailer to the follow-up of the critically acclaimed hit The Last of Us.
The trailer opens to bloodied, trembling fingers, which soon begin plucking away at an acoustic guitar. A female voice is singing a melancholic song of despair as a man with a handgun walks into the house. The trailer soon pans up to show an older, bruised, Ellie speaking to Joel, the main protagonist from the first game. Joel’s face was not shown, but he is probably sporting a few more gray hairs than before.
The original Last of Us was released in Summer of 2013. It quickly amassed wide critical acclaim. By 2015, it has won 249 Game of the Year awards — more than any other game in history up to that point. Just this year, The Witcher 3, by CD Projekt Red, beat that with an astonishing, and well deserved, 251 awards.
It can be argued that the first Last of Us was one of the greatest games ever created. Even on the aging PlayStation 3 hardware, the game was gorgeous, with a compelling story and some amazing acting. Sony eventually released The Last of Us Remastered on PlayStation 4, an upscaled and more pretty version of the game for more powerful gaming hardware. Oddly, the game has seen some technical hiccups on the PlayStation 4 Pro, a souped-up version of the standard PS4.
Sadly, a release date was not given to when gamers will see The Last of Us: Part II on retail shelves. But considering Naughty Dog studios’ tendency to work fast, we wouldn’t be surprised if the game is released sometime in 2017.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.