Apple has announced that Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight Dig is coming to Apple Arcade next month. The service is getting another curious title in September too: a trivia game made by Tom Hanks.
Shovel Knight Dig is a puzzle game in the same vein as last year’s excellent Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, and is the first in the 2D side-scrolling rogue-lite series to have high color pixels and sound. In the game, the titular knight goes after Drill Knight and his digging crew after they blow up his peaceful campsite and steal his loot. Shovel Knight has to dig his way underground with his Shovel Blade — hence, the title — in order to get his loot back and stop Drill Knight and his henchmen while preventing the land above from collapsing underfoot.
Since Shovel Knight Dig is set in underground caverns, players will be digging downward and utilizing some new gameplay mechanics, like the Shovel Drop, to dig through large swaths of dirt. Each of the game’s levels have been designed with proprietary generation techniques to ensure infinite replay potential. It’s not exclusive to Apple Arcade though, as it will be coming to Nintendo Switch and PC at the same time.
September’s other big Apple Arcade release is a strange one. Hanx101 Trivia is Academy Award-winning actor, producer, and director Hanks’ first game — developed in partnership with BlueLine Studios exclusively for Apple Arcade — and it was created as a way for him to show off his love and passion for trivia. Hanks narrates the gameplay while players test their knowledge across a range of categories — math, history, science, geography, food, business, art, and technology — as they compete with other players to become trivia master.
Hanx101 Trivia launches September 2, while Shovel Knight Dig comes out September 23. The service is also adding a few more games next month, including Horizon Chase 2, Garden Tails: Match and Grow, and indie hit Gris.
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.