Sega announced that Sonic Frontiers will be making its way to consoles and PC on November 8. Sega revealed the release date at Gamescom Opening Night Live on Tuesday alongside a new cinematic trailer for the game.
Sonic Frontiers – arriving November 8, 2022! pic.twitter.com/jjaMDOSTdy
— Sonic the Hedgehog (@sonic_hedgehog) August 23, 2022
The release date was previously leaked in a Japanese trailer after another leak suggested that it could launch on November 15. Now, Sega has confirmed that the November 8 release date for Sonic Frontiers as the real one. That puts Sonic Frontiers in direct competition with God of War: Ragnarok, which comes out the next day.
The trailer opens with Sonic speeding past a little Koco to get to the Cyberspace gate and get past it against the wishes of Sage, who warns him that his actions are detrimental to the strange, brave new world he finds himself in and tells him to leave. When he gets out of Cyberspace, he sees a petrified Amy Rose trapped in a cage set up by the cybernetic robots, and his hand is weighed down by a new cybernetic power as he fights the robots and Sage.
There was speculation over whether Sonic Frontiers would even be released this year. It was previously scheduled to launch in 2021 as part of the celebration for Sonic’s 30th anniversary, but Sega delayed it to make sure it lived up to expectations. Then when the game’s first gameplay footage was released on IGN First in June, fans deemed the game unfinished because of problems with that build and speculated that it could be delayed. That ended up not being the case.
In Sonic Frontiers, the famous blue blur becomes stranded in a mysterious new land called Starfall Islands after getting separated from his friends while flying through a wormhole. As he traverses through the new open-world dimension, he gains mystical cybernetic powers like the Cyloop. Sonic also has new combat abilities that give him an advantage over the glyphic enemies residing on the island and the new gigantic robots Dr. Eggman has built to take over the world. He also meets some new characters, like the Kocos and Sage, a mysterious little girl who warns Sonic to leave Starfall Islands.
Sonic Frontiers will be released for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch on November 8.
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.