Nintendo director Hitoshi Yamagami unveiled a brand new IP for the 3DS at an E3 2014 roundtable. Titled Code Name: S.T.E.A.M., the game combines third-person shooting and turn-based strategy into one package. The theme is also a mashup of sorts, meshing a steampunk vibe with a classic (silver-age) American comic books and aliens inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Developed in conjunction with Intelligent Systems, the developer behind the Fire Emblem and Advance Wars series, the game follows Captain Henry Fleming and his team — on a mission assigned by President Abraham Lincoln — as they defend Earth from an alien invasion. Fleming and his cohorts have guns and items powered by steam backpacks. Players get a limited amount of steam to use per turn on moving and shooting up aliens.
The game was devised to get more people interested in turn-based gameplay.
“People have a timidity about turn-based strategy so I started thinking about why it is that people have this aversion to turn-bases strategy games,” Yamagami explained. “There is too much abstraction in turn-based games. This creates an emotional disconnect between the player and the world of the game.”
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.