For the last week intense speculation has swirled around a leaked image of Nintendo’s E3 booth that features something called Mario Maker. As of today’s E3 livestream, Nintendo has confirmed that it is indeed real, and it looks like a lot of fun.
Mario Maker will provide you with a menu full of classic Mario sprites that you can drag and drop onto a grid to remix and create new levels. It appears that you will be able to seamlessly switch between building and playing, allowing for on-the-fly tweaking and iteration to accelerate your design process.
You will also have the option to jump back and forth between the 8-bit graphics of the original Super Mario Bros. and the 3D rendered New Super Mario Bros. Wii U, depending on how nostalgic you’re feeling at any given moment. Nothing is yet known about the meta-options for what you can do with your creations, but presumably Nintendo will follow the model of something like LittleBigPlanet wherein users can share and rate each other’s work in a growing marketplace of fan-made content.
The original Super Mario Bros.‘s levels have deeply informed all subsequent video game design — you only need to peruse any list of new and upcoming indie games to see our enduring obsession with the platforming genre that Shigeru Miyamoto’s masterpiece kicked off. It is thus only appropriate in this new era of player-generated and -shared content that Mario be used as the foundation for this kind of game design toolbox. World 1-1 is generally the first thing that anyone replicates when given a game design tool set, so it will be interesting to see where fans go when that is already their starting point.
Mario Maker will be coming to the Wii U and 3DS at some point in 2015.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.