We caught up with Blazer5 Gaming, the league leader in wins in the NBA 2K League, to talk about their journeys to playing NBA 2K on a professional level and to pick their brains about some NBA 2K19 player ratings.
Based in Portland, Blazer5 Gaming has a outstanding 11-1 win-loss record going into the playoffs, outscoring the competition by a whopping 99 points throughout the year. Digital Trends’ social media guru Riley Winn spoke with two members of the six-man team.
Connor Rodrigues, AKA Dat Boy Shotz, plays power forward. A longtime fan of the yearly basketball sim, Rodrigues went to the combine for open tryouts at the end of last season and beat out other 2K players for a spot on Blazer5. Dayne Downey, AKA One Wild Walnut, one of two centers on the team, started playing NBA 2K when he was nine years old on Xbox 360. At the combine, Downey qualified for the 2K League draft as a center and power forward. Blazer5 picked him with the sixth pick in the draft. He alluded to the fact that potential players go through both an application round and interviews before getting drafted. It’s worked out quite well for Downey, as he was recently named NBA 2K League MVP and Defensive Player of the Year.
Although they certainly seem happy playing a video game for a living, Rodrigues said he would prefer being an actual NBA player rather than playing as one in a video game. Neither of the pros have played with an NBA player, but Rodrigues said he would love to play with Kyrie Irving. Downey, meanwhile, would like to face off against Paul George. Both George and Irving are rumoted to be solid NBA 2K players.
We asked both pro gamers to assess a few player ratings recently handed out to NBA stars. They agreed that Damian Lillard’s 90 rating is perfect, and that LeBron James, the best player in the game, should be rated 99, not the 98 that the developers assigned him. But they disagreed on Karl-Anthony Towns. Rodrigues thought Towns’ 91 rating was too high, while Downey said the big man should be rated a point or two higher.
Check out the full video above for more insight from two of the best NBA 2K players in the world.
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.