It’s OK, football fans. You can breathe. There will be a new Madden this year. Madden NFL 17, the next entry in the annual football sim franchise, is on the way and will hit stores August 23, publisher Electronic Arts announced.
In fact, almost everything about the announcement screams “business as usual.” Madden 17 will follow the clockwork release rollout the series has fallen into over the last decade. Now that the game is official, EA will give fans their first look at the new game and reveal which player gets the coveted/feared place on the game’s box art during the 6 p.m. SportsCenter broadcast on ESPN on Thursday.
Once that’s out of the way, the game is on track to launch in mid-to-late August, as it has every single year in recent memory. There will be ads, sure, but most fans don’t really need to hear more. If you love Madden, you love Madden: If you’ve been picking up the new game every year, no one needs to convince you to come back again.
There is at least one substantial change to this year’s pre-release fanfare, though. As Polygon pointed out, for the first time since Madden NFL 2010, EA has decide to pick who will grace the game’s box art internally. The publisher has held an annual fan vote to decide who gets the cover each year since 2009.
For now, the question is, as always, will Madden NFL 17 change enough — either by improving visuals or with new gameplay systems — to warrant purchasing yet another game? With last year’s Madden NFL 16, there was a general consensus that the changes to how players controlled their receivers and defenses made the experience more fun. We’ll start to get a sense of how the new game stacks up later this week.
Madden NFL 17 will be available on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One at launch. EA Access subscribers on Xbox One, however, will be able to play the game early.
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.