Microsoft announced yesterday that it has entered a partnership with Oscar-winning husband-and-wife team Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh to create the third installment of the Halo Xbox video game franchise, as well as an entirely original game.
Director, writer, and producer Jackson and screenwriter Walsh brought the enormously successful Lord of the Rings trilogy and (more recently) King Kong to movie screens and innumerable DVD players worldwide. Almost a year ago, Microsoft signed Jackson and Walsh as executive producers for a theatrical movie based on the Halo franchise.
“Microsoft has built an amazing living canvas with Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, which allows the storytellers of our time to express themselves in a new medium. They have fundamentally changed how people think about games,” Jackson said in a statement. “My vision, together with Microsoft Game Studios, is to push the boundaries of game development and the future of interactive entertainment. From a movie-maker’s point of view, it is clear to me that the Xbox 360 platform is the stage where storytellers can work their craft in the same way they do today with movies and books but taking it further with interactivity.”
Under the terms of the deal, Jackson and Walsh will collaborate with Microsoft’s Bungie Studios to author two new interactive entertainment series for the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live platforms. The first will be a new series set in the Halo universe, while the second will be an entirely original property specifically designed to bring new audiences to the Xbox platform.
Separately, Microsoft Game Studios has also announced Halo Wars, a new real-time strategy title based on the Halo universe and developed by Ensemble Studios, creators of the Age of Empires franchise, in which players will command human armies as they first engage Covenant forces.
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.