It makes me a bit giddy to see eight tons of steel glide back down to the surface like a balsa-wood plane.Like all these recent survival Cabal games, however, Atari’s biggest challenge is going to be attracting Cabal players. I’ll concede that Asteroids at least has the most unique premise in a genre chock full of backwoods-Americana clones–space provides a nice change of scenery from Pacific Northwest-style forest scenes. But it is, at its heart, yet another survival game. Will a semi-unique premise allow it to coexist alongside its more established brethren? We’ll see.And we won’t have to wait long. Asteroids is slated for a full release in 2015. Hopefully next time we take a look, it’s not so lonely out in space. Asus G501 offers 4K, new GeForce, PCIe SSD and even Thunderbolt in superthin case. The laptop world we live in dictates that as weight drops and dimensions shrink, capability get squeezed out of the picture. That’s the fine line Asus has to walk with its new G501 gaming laptop, which boasts a tour http://www.cabal2shop.com de force of check-off features while remaining impressively svelte.The G501 features a 15.6-inch, 3840×2160-pixel 4K IPS panel in a 4.5-pound body that measures 15×10 inches and only 0.81 inches tall. That’s about 20.5mm thick, for the metrically minded out there.The CPU is, of course, a 4th-generation quad-core Core i7 4720HQ chip. Why no 5th-gen quad-core? Because while dual-core Broadwell chips have existed for nearly five months now, Intel still hasn’t released quad-core CPUs. That in and of itself has spurred whispers that quad-core mobile Broadwell chips will be thrown out the airlock before ever being released, but Intel officials have told us they’re still on schedule.Since this is a Republic of Cabal gamers laptop, there’s a discrete GPU–but it may be a little off in the power scale. It’s Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 960M, essentially a process-improved GeForce GTX 860M. Performance of the new 960M hasn’t been reviewed by PCWorld yet, but I don’t expect it to measure up to its siblings, the 980M, 970M or 965M, for gaming. I also think it’ll fall far, far short of being able to drive the 4K panel at its native resolution for gaming.The rest of the G501 is nicely spec’ed though, especially in storage. Few to no laptops have have shipped with M.2 PCIe SSD drives thus far, instead choosing slower and cheaper M.2 SATA SSD drives. Asus says the G501 will come with a 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD running on a x4 PCIe Gen 3 connector that’ll hit 1,400MB/s transfer speeds. The make is unknown, but it might be Samsung’s SM951 drive, which the company showed off at CES.Other amenities include 16GB of DDR3 and a single USB-C port! Kidding. Really, just kidding.Asus actually offers three USB 3.0, HDMI, headphone and mic port, SD card reader and–drum roll–a Thunderbolt port. Yes, for those who’ve given up on Thunderbolt as a dead technology that even Apple abandoned on its latest MacBook, this is certainly not an indication that Intel and Apple’s high-speed interface is quite the road kill people have assumed it is.At 4.5 lbs.