It’s hilarious when a star snaps on social media — but more importantly, it brings attention to object of their ire. In this case Xbox Live was down, so Snoop Dogg took to Instagram and said what a few thousand Xbox gamers may have been thinking, “Ya’ll’s f**king server is f**ing whack man, ya’ll gonna make me switch to PlayStation.”
Before you Xbox fanboys (and girls) get your underwear in a bunch, we know you’re not switching, and that’s okay. The truth of the matter is that both systems (PlayStation and Xbox) have and no doubt will continue to have online issues. This October, 2015 saw an outage so significant that Phil Spencer, Xbox chief addressed the issue in response to a tweet from The Verge’s Tom Warren.
Now, thanks to Snoop, Xbox Live is back in the spotlight. While the outage seems to have been resolved, there’s no telling if – or rather when and where – the next one will surface. If it does, it might only affect online gameplay as some users reported with this outage, allowing Xbox owners to continue using system apps like Netflix and Hulu, at the very least.
PSN’s history has its own unfortunate moments. The April 20 curse affected the network with an extended outage in 2011. That was Anonymous’ “Operation Sony” retaliation for removing Linux and the jailbreak lawsuit against George Hotz, where hackers broke into SOE and PlayStation servers, snatching user data, including credit card info. Eventually Sony went to the FBI for help but PSN was down for nearly a month, from Hitler’s birthday until May 15, costing Sony over $170 million. The lost trust hasn’t been quantified; some PlayStation players still refuse to add credit card information to their accounts.
As a PlayStation loyalist myself, I noted PSN was down New Year’s Day. Reports spiked on January 4, with third party sites like Outage Report reflecting nearly 5,000 network-down reports from individual users. Sony recently assured PS Plus and PS Now users that it would extend their subscriptions as an apology for the starting the year off on a bad note.
Sony did offer five day PS plus membership extensions following their week-long Christmas outage in 2014 – the result of a Lizard Squad hack of both Sony and Microsoft that evolved into a lesson in cyber security from the Davids of the internet for the tech goliaths. Microsoft gave away a month of Gold by way of apology for an outage way back in 2012. Let’s see what they do this time around.
Going by the voluntarily reported numbers, PSN seems to have had more difficulties in 2015 than Xbox Live. The difference is that someone famous didn’t tell Sony off on Instagram.
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.