After months of service outages, Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop are back online.
Nintendo’s two virtual marketplace services went down in March of this year. In a statement to Kotaku on the outage, Nintendo acknowledged the downtime but had nothing to report other than that the shops were undergoing maintenance and that it would provide updates on them at a later date. It seems it completely skipped the update and simply put both back online instead.
While the virtual shops are back online, that doesn’t mean you can load up on points and go shopping for virtual console and Wii Ware games like it’s 2006. The Wii Shop Channel was shut down in 2019 and the DSi shop closed in 2017. The closures effectively limited their usage to window shopping, redownloading previously purchased games, and listening to the classic Wii Shop music. Nintendo recently reported that the Wii U and 3DS eShops are following these discontinuations very soon.
“As of late March 2023, it will no longer be possible to make purchases in Nintendo eShop for the Wii U system and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems,” Nintendo announced. “It will also no longer be possible to download free content, including game demos. Furthermore, as this date draws closer, related services will cease to function.”
If you just want an excuse to hear that catchy shop music again, there is a Chrome extension that adds songs from the Wii Shop Channel, 3DS eShop, and DSi shop to marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and more.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.