During the June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase, Undead Labs showed off a new trailer for State of Decay 3. While the trailer didn’t reveal a release date, it did show some new gameplay. The studio also has a new logo, representing its transition from being an indie studio to an Xbox one.
The trailer shows a desolate world filled with zombies and third-person shooter gameplay. The atmosphere feels much more fantastical and supernatural with its red hues, and is akin to Redfall rather than games with a more realistic tone like The Last of Us or Days Gone.
For the new logo, Undead Labs worked with 51 Eggs, a branding company. The logo looks to be a skeleton key, referencing that its flagship franchise is in the zombie genre. “We wanted to give the creatives we work with a collective identity that transcends zombies,” said studio head Philip Holt on the studio’s website.
Undead Labs was founded in 2009 and partnered with Microsoft to release State of Decay in 2013. State of Decay 2 was released in 2018, and Undead Labs was acquired by Microsoft shortly after. In 2020, Undead Labs announced that it was developing State of Decay 3. Aside from its initial trailer, there was radio silence about the game until now.
The June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase also revealed other Xbox first-party games, including Doom: The Dark Ages.
State of Decay 3 doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will launch for PC and Xbox Series X|S. In the meantime, check out the best mods to implement in State of Decay 2.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.