The second annual Meta Quest Gaming Showcase aired today and shared tons of new titles coming to the virtual reality headset’s marketplace. The show featured multiple titles set to release within the next year including Among Us VR, a VR Ghostbusters game, Moss: Book 2, and a new Mercenaries expansion coming to Resident Evil 4 – VR.
The Meta Quest 2 is a virtual reality headset with its own ecosystem from Meta (formally known as Facebook). Its yearly showcase acts as a direct for the console, previewing what’s to come, and this year’s event showed that there is a lot in store.
The stream featured several software highlights. Chief among them was the previously announced Among Us VR, which got a confirmed 2022 release date. Recent PS VR hit Moss: Book 2 is also coming to the headset this summer. Perhaps the most exciting news of the batch is that a new Ghostbusters game is coming to the platform. It appears to be a first-person ghost-hunting game, but details are scarce at the moment.
Meta Quest will also get its first officially licensed NFL game on VR with NFL Pro Era, where players will experience firsthand the quarterback experience or simply play catch with a friend.
Other game announcements include Red Matter 2, Espire 2, RuinsMagus, Cities: VR, and the follow-up to the highly acclaimed Boneworks, called Bonelab. Meta highlighted content coming to previously existing titles such as The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners –Chapter 2: Retribution and a new content pack coming to Beat Saber.
The Mercenaries mode is also coming to Resident Evil 4 in the form of a free update today. Owners of the classic horror title can experience the endless horde mode now and in it can unlock goodies like Big Head Mode, a black-and-white Classic Horror Mode, and a Golden Gun skin for their entire weaponry.
All of today’s announced titles and expansions are set to hit Meta Quest within the next year.
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.