During Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase, we got updates on a variety of awesome-looking indie games. Most notably, Cellar Games revealed that Rogue Legacy 2 would launch today on Nintendo Switch, shortly after the presentation aired, alongside the Fabled Heroes update. Sidebar Games also announced that Sports Story will launch in December.
The showcase was held on Wednesday, November 9, and featured 25 minutes of content from independent developers and publishers.
Other highlights include A Space for the Unbound, a slice-of-life adventure game that takes place in late 1990s rural Indonesia. It follows a relationship between a boy and a girl with supernatural powers who must explore their town and discover its hidden secrets when a mysterious force threatens their existence. It releases on January 19, 2023. Also shown off was Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly, the sequel to the original Coffee Talk visual novel. Here, you’ll brew coffee and speak with customers about their stories and get to know them. It releases in spring 2023.
Blanc is a co-op adventure game where a fawn and a wolf cub must work together to find their way home. The game supports local and online co-op play. It’s a Switch console exclusive and launches on February 14, 2023. ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni is an action-adventure game where you assume the role of a vengeful demon warrior named Kuuta and his spirit partner Kazemaru. They travel to a small island to defeat ancient demons that lurk in the lush forest. It launches on March 9, 2023. Pepper Grinder follows a treasure hunter named Pepper who gets shipwrecked and must reclaim what was stolen from her. Using her drill, she has to make her way through dirt and puzzles. It launches sometime in 2023.
Some other games were revealed to be coming to Switch such as the rogue-like Have a Nice Death, the narrative cooking game Venba, and the tactics game Desta: The Memories Between. These are already available on other platforms. There’s even more we didn’t highlight here, so check out the presentation yourself; you’ll find something that piques your interest.
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.