Prime Day continues to grow into a retail holiday and Amazon is including Twitch in the festivities. There’s a celebrity gaming competition going down in Las Vegas and London called the Twitch Prime Crown Cup running throughout the days leading up to Amazon Prime Day. Along the way, there will be content drops for FIFA 19 and Apex Legends.
The Twitch Prime Crown Cup will have eight celebrities competing against each other in Apex Legends. Practice rounds will take place on July 11 and 12 and they’ll be streamed on the official Twitch Prime channel. July 13 is where the competition heats up and the competitors start by fighting through the Streamer Challenge. Winners then progress to the Crown Cup main event and participate in rounds of pool play. The Crown Cup finals should start by 7 p.m. PT. The participating celebrities for the Twitch Prime Crown Cup haven’t been revealed yet but there will be event commentary done by Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, the duo also known as Jay and Silent Bob.
FIFA 19 players and Prime subscribers will be able to take advantage of content drops over the next two months and they start on July 9 at 11 a.m. PT. The drop is focused on the Ultimate Team mode and participants will get a Twitch Prime Pack that guarantees at least one player with a rating of 86 overall.
For the Apex Legends crowd, they will be able to take advantage of some content drops that also celebrate the launch of the game’s second season: Battle Charge. Starting on July 3 at 11 a.m. PT, Prime members will receive four in-game content drops over a three-month period. A Sweet Dreams skin for Wattson and Stellar Stallion skin for the L-Star heavy machine gun are included, highlighting the new weapon and Legend arriving in Apex Legends on July 2.
Engagement for the Twitch Prime Crown Cup may depend heavily on the celebrities involved, but the content drops should keep people coming back for a bit. On Prime Day, July 15, Twitch will also host a “Twitch Sells Out” event where the Prime sales items that relate to the gaming community will be highlighted.
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.