If you’ve been looking for the right moment to jump into VR, Thanksgiving weekend will be a good time to save money on expensive VR headsets. Starting on Thanksgiving and running through Cyber Monday and Black Friday, Amazon will have both Oculus and HTC Vive headsets available for discounted prices. These deals will only be up while supplies last, so there is a chance you won’t get what you want if you wait too long to pull the trigger.
We’ve rounded up Amazon’s Oculus and Vive sales in one place, so you can compare and decide which deal is best for you. Simply click the product link to get whisked off to Amazon to make your purchase.
The Oculus Go, an entry-level VR headset from Oculus, doesn’t require you to have a fancy PC to use it. In fact, this mobile VR quality headset doesn’t even need a smartphone to run. All of the processing power is stored in the headset. The all-in-one headset is lightweight and has access to all the games available on Gear VR, as well as some exclusive apps. You can also use it to watch live sports, TV shows, and more.
The Oculus Rift offers high-powered PC VR. This bundle comes with two Oculus Touch controllers and six free games: Lucky’s Tale, Robo Recall, Quill, Medium, Dead and Buried, and Toybox. The Oculus Rift features room-scale VR and great tracking to give you an immersive experience. You need a gaming PC to connect to the Rift, so make sure your graphics card and RAM (at least 8GB) are up to snuff. For graphics cards, you need a Nvidia GTX 1050Ti/AMD Radeon RX 470 or better.
For VR enthusiasts, the HTC Vive Pro is a premium option with fantastic performance. The Vive Pro has 360 degree headset and controller tracking that feels startlingly precise. In terms of resolution, the Vive Pro is unparalleled. Visuals are incredibly crisp and clear, with a maximum resolution of 2880 x 1660, a marked increase over the original Vive headset. The headset is comfortable to wear and easy to setup, too. If you’re on the fence about spending $700 on a VR headset, make sure to check out our review. The major downside of the Vive Pro is that you have to buy controllers separately.
The Vive Pro “2.0” is marketed more towards businesses than the average gamer. The price sort of gives that away. It comes with two Steam VR 2.0 base stations for even more precise tracking and a pair of Vive controllers. With the Vive tracker ecosystem, you can pull real-life objects into view. Again, though, the Vive Pro Virtual Reality System is marketed for business use, such as aerospace and automotive companies.
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.