It was a good morning for both Mario and RPG fans. Today’s Nintendo Direct not only showed more of the new Super Mario RPG remake, but also unveiled a new port of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that’s coming next year to the Nintendo Switch.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a sequel to the original Paper Mario that many consider the best of Mario’s RPG entries. The original version of this sequel was released two decades ago on the GameCube. In The Thousand-Year Door, you play as Mario and his party of sidekicks, and you go on an adventure to find treasure and save Princess Peach from a group of aliens called the X-Nauts. As the title implies, the game takes place in a papercraft-style world that sets the Paper Mario series apart from the standard Mario RPGs.
Nintendo Switch’s version of The Thousand-Year Door is described by Nintendo as an enhanced port, which mostly just entails HD graphical upgrades. It’s not confirmed if there will be any additional features other than a small visual upgrade, similar to that of the HD Zelda ports.
This isn’t the first time that the Paper Mario series has appeared on the Nintendo Switch. Paper Mario: The Origami King is a much more polarizing entry in the series that was released in 2020 for the console.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door‘s enhanced Switch port joins the console’s great library of quality role-playing games in 2024. No specific release date has been announced as of yet.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.