The Planet Coaster community is no stranger to wild and extravagant designs. Users have created everything from pitch-perfect recreations of famous real-world roller coasters to massive post-apocalyptic theme parks inspired by the Fallout series. But one user has gone a step further and re-created one of the most famous movie sequences in film history — the Death Star trench run.
The ride starts out inside a rebel carrier, where you pass through hangars filled with iconic Star Wars ships, like the Millennium Falcon, and oddly enough, a snowspeeder. The ride kicks off with a jump to lightspeed, followed by a flight through an asteroid field and a pitched battle between an X-Wing squadron and a handful of TIE fighters.
From start to finish, the ride is richly detailed, featuring film-accurate props and backgrounds, culminating in a tense cork-screwing ride through the Death Star trenches before a leap back to light speed. The ride itself borrows from the best parts of Disneyland’s Star Tours and Space Mountain to create an unforgettable digital roller coaster experience.
Who is the architect of this impressive feat of digital engineering? According to Kotaku, a Steam user by the name of Chuck Maurice. He’s also created two other roller coaster and theme park experiences for Planet Coaster, both of which are just as lovingly detailed as the Star Wars ride.
Maurice’s first two outings, a Mount Everest expedition, and a still-in-progress recreation of a lost temple inspired by the Indiana Jones films, feature similarly detailed environments and impressive engineering.
It’s not the first time an ambitious Planet Coaster user has brought Star Wars into a digital theme park, but it’s certainly one of the most impressive examples. If you have Planet Coaster, you can download the ride right from the Steam Workshop.
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.