Nintendo continues to tease out new information about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the surprise series entry that allows you to play primarily as Princess Zelda for the very first time. On Monday, it released a new trailer that delves into some of the areas you’ll explore, ways you’ll travel across the map, and a new ability called Bind.
Bind looks similar to many of Link’s abilities in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. It lets Zelda grab onto objects and creatures in the world and move them as she moves. There’s also Reverse Bond, which allows you to move along with a creature you bind to. So if you want to fly across an area, you can Reverse Bond onto a bird and it’ll bring you along for the ride.
You can also use Bind on Echoes, the other previously announced Echoes of Wisdom ability that lets you create copies of objects.
The trailer also revealed several of the areas you’ll be exploring. For example, there’s Jabul Waters, which features a Sea Zora and River Zora that are at odds for unknown reasons. And, yes, there are underwater dungeons. There is also the Faron Wetlands, which is packed with Deku Scrubs who have a “voracious sweet tooth.”
There are a lot of places to move through, so the trailer announced two forms of travel (beyond walking, obviously). The first are waypoints, which you can unlock by finding them throughout the world and warping to them on your map. The second is a horse that you can use to move faster and run over weaker enemies. Using a carrot can summon them from anywhere.
One of the oddest additions are smoothie shops manned by business scrubs. Here, you can blend the ingredients you’ve gathered and drink smoothies for different effects, similar to how you can cook in the last two Zelda games. And, of course, there are different outfits for Zelda that can give her buffs.
Nintendo is still keeping a lot of details quiet, but the game is out on September 26 for Nintendo Switch, so we’ll know more soon.
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.