If you have been waiting to get your hands on a PlayStation VR, now is your chance.
Sony announced Thursday via the PlayStation Blog that PlayStation VR headsets will be available at Best Buy and GameStop locations to demo around the country.
Starting Friday, 30 Best Buy and GameStop will have PlayStation VR units ready for consumers to try out. That number will quickly expand to 300 locations in North America and Canada by June 24. Sony has already set up a website where gamers can input their ZIP code to find the nearest location.
The following cities will have demos available tomorrow:
Sony will have a few games on display, including PlayStation VR Worlds, Eve: Valkyrie, Headmaster, Battlezone, and SuperHypeCube, with more games being added as PlayStation VR gets closer to launch.
The competition in the VR space is only getting more competitive. Facebook’s Oculus Rift and HTC and Valve’s Vive are battling it out in a bitter war, courting developers with exclusivity deals. Sony is looking to attract a different VR consumer — one that isn’t willing to shell out nearly $1,000 on a capable desktop rig as well as $600-$800 on a headset. By starting PlayStation VR at $399, Sony hopes that the more casual consumer will be attracted to its headset, especially those that already own a PlayStation 4. But because VR games are so much more demanding, it’s looking like Sony will most probably announce an upgraded version of the PlayStation 4 later this year, currently code-named Neo.
PlayStation VR is set to launch on October 13.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.