Nintendo’s presence at this year’s E3 is probably its most limited to date, but that hasn’t stopped Ubisoft from valiantly throwing its weight behind the house of Mario and Zelda.
In a somewhat odd announcement during Ubisoft’s E3 press conference, it revealed that Just Dance 2017 would also be coming to Nintendo’s next console, code-named NX.
In an interview with MCV, Alain Corre, Ubisoft executive vice president of EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), revealed that the mega publisher believes NX will bring back that massive, yet elusive, Wii audience.
“We have always appreciated the relationship with Nintendo, the co-creation and the fact that they are really concentrating on quality — they have fantastic brands,” Corre said.
Yes, Corre is right, Nintendo does have fantastic brands, just poor market sense. Compared to the Wii, which sold an astonishing 101.18 million units worldwide, the Wii U has done abysmally by comparison. At only 13.14 million units sold to date, it’s one of Nintendo’s poorest selling consoles ever. It seems that bundling an underpowered console with a mediocre tablet-like controller for over $300 didn’t inspire consumer confidence, even with an impressive suite of software.
Ubisoft has had a lot of success with Nintendo in the past. “They are addressing the family market in a very different way, their own way, which we appreciate,” Corre said. “We have done a lot of products and successes with Nintendo in the past, and we believe that the NX will recapture a lot [of] the lapsed Wii players. So we will see when they release it, but we are confident.”
It’s not very common for publishers to announce games for consoles that have yet to be fully revealed, but Ubisoft has done this in the past. When it announced Watch Dogs in 2012, it hinted that it would be coming to next-gen platforms, even though neither Sony nor Microsoft had revealed anything.
As of now, it’s unknown when Nintendo will release its new console, but considering that Microsoft’s Project Scorpio and Sony’s rumored PlayStation Neo are also set to drop in 2017, the console space is only getting more competitive.
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.