Gamers may be getting an update to one of the greatest arcade games ever. Pac-Man: Championship Edition 2 has popped up on Korea’s software ratings board, meaning that the game could be very close to becoming a reality.
Pac-Man: Championship Edition 2 rated for PC/PS4/XB1 in Korea. https://t.co/mb87eh2XBC pic.twitter.com/LKfmInNYLW
— lifelower (@lifelower) June 24, 2016
Champion Edition 2 will follow-up Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, which was released back in 2010. It was kind of an odd release, considering the first Championship Edition, released in 2007, garnered only modest critical acclaim. But Championship Edition DX blew critics away with it’s neon colors and addictive gameplay. It currently stands at 93 on Metacritic.
Pac-Man has seen quite the resurgence these past few years. The iconic arcade character, that’s now more than 35 years old, has popped up again and again. After the release of Championship Edition DX, Pac-Man reappeared in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS. Sadly, due to character patches, he isn’t as competitively viable as he was at the game’s launch. But he’s still a fun character to play with nonetheless. Pac-Man then reappeared once again in Adam Sandler’s critically loathed Pixels, actually being featured on the films poster. Original game designer Toru Iwatani also made a cameo appearance.
More recently, Pac-Man appeared again, but this time in a new game titled Pac-Man 256. Developed by Hipster Whale, the same team that brought the incredibly popular mobile title Crossy Road, it riffed on the classic Pac-Man 256 glitch. In the original arcade version of Pac-Man, when dedicated players reached the 256th screen, the side would fill with random characters and numbers. This was because Pac-Man was intended to never end, as long as the player had one life. But because of hardware limitations at the time, the game’s internal level counter was stored in a single byte. When it reached 255, the game would try to call on fruit for the next level, but instead of calling seven, it would call 256. This then would end the game.
Here’s hoping that Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 gets announced soon.
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.