Over the past few years, the enormous success of Rocket League has prompted a host of other multiplayer titles that offer their own spin on competitive sports. Now, Redspace has launched Gunball, an explosive new take on tennis that has been designed with the HTC Vive headset in mind.
As with tennis, Gunball players will be serving up balls — but in this case, they’re using guns in place of rackets. Propelling these balls through goal rings is the name of the game, although that might be easier said than done given the carnage that plays out in any given round.
With goal rings moving around the arena, and score multipliers tied to skillful serves, there’s a degree of complexity to Gunball that should make its online leaderboards rather competitive. Players will need to use every one of their balls efficiently to garner a sufficiently impressive score over the span of each timed session.
The game is set to launch with two themed environments; Stadium, which apes the look and feel of a traditional sports arena, and Rainbow Volcano, which is as zany as its name suggests. Both stages have five different goal ring layouts, giving players various different configurations to come to grips with.
Gunball looks set to be a great high-score game for dedicated players to dive into, competing for bragging rights with their friends. However, the concept is straightforward enough that the development team at Redspace has high hopes for its capacity to introduce novices to VR.
“With Gunball, we feel we’ve created the ideal ‘jumping in’ point for new VR users,” says Jeremy McCurdy, Redspace’s games technical lead. “Built around a comfortable experience but with a deep level of skill underneath it, we feel this game is great to show off VR to friends who may have never experienced it. But it’s also an amazing skill-based exercise for VR veterans as well.”
Gunball is available now via Steam for gamers will access to a VR headset. It’s priced at $15, but its creators are running a launch promotion that offers the game for just $9.75 from now until July 5, as part of the Steam Summer Sale.
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.