Nintendo isn’t known for embracing shooters, but it announced one of its own during its digital presentation at E3 2014. Splatoon a shooter with a distinct Nintendo-style, arming gamers with paintball guns and challenging them to cover their environment in paint.
Splatoon is a multiplayer focused title, tossing players into a 4v4 arena to do their combat. Players will take control of half-human, half-squid characters who are capable of covering the world with paint in various ways. The goal of the game is to spread your team’s color over more of the world than your opponents, a game style that is reminiscent to the graffiti mode in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series.
Visually, the game bright and colorful, as one would expect a paint-themed game to be. A third-person camera shows off the impressive world and quirky characters. The human side of the characters spread the paint, while the squid side moves rapidly through the paint laid by teammates, allowing players to move up walls and plan attacks and ambushes.
Splatoon is expected for release sometime 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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.