Praised for its innovative game design and killer visuals, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild went from one of the most eagerly anticipated games of 2017 to one of the best reviewed games in recent memory. To celebrate the release of Breath of the Wild, the team behind the CemU Wii U emulator figured out how to get the game to run on a PC.
Just two days after Breath of the Wild hit store shelves, the CemU team had managed to get it working on their Wii U emulation platform. Don’t get too excited — it’s still in very early stages, and most of the game is unplayable due to game-breaking physics bugs and other major issues.
According to Kotaku Australia, you can’t get very far in the game, and performance is still a little rough. Running on an Intel Core i7-4790K, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780, and 8GB of system memory, the emulation delivers predictably choppy performance. The real achievement here is that it’s running at all, the CemU team went from barely being able to access the menus in Breath of the Wild to having access to the full game in just two days.
Motherboard spoke to “Exzap,” one of the CemU team’s developers, and shed some light on the magnitude of their achievement, as well as their plans for the future.
“The goal is to get every game running 100 percent eventually. How we get there and how long it will take is difficult to answer. But in regards to [Breath of the Wild] I think we will see small incremental improvements in almost every future CemU release. It’s been this way for most other games so far,” Exzap said, speaking with Motherboard’s Jordan Pearson.
Eventually, the goal is to have a fully functional version of Breath of the Wild capable of running in CemU, which could mean you’d be able to play the game at resolutions beyond its native 720p or 900p. That is, unless Nintendo’s legal team manages to squash the project first, an eventuality which Exzap says he’s already preparing for.
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.