If there were any lingering questions of what a 1930s Steamboat Willie-style video game would look like, it’s Cuphead. Studio MDHR has revealed the first platforming gameplay for its new game, and it looks like a Depression-era Mega Man.
Before this trailer, many were wondering if the gameplay would solely revolve around boss fights, as previous trailers had shown. Seeing actual Mega Man-style run-and-gun gameplay should put many worries to rest. Much like in Mega Man, enemies will follow patterns, and players must memorize those patterns and adapt accordingly. Your character also has some new never before seen moves, like a giant blast and a dash. Using this in conjunction with jumping on enemies should make Cuphead a speedrun-friendly game.
Cuphead has adopted an animation style most reminiscent of Fleischer Studios, which gave us Betty Boop and Popeye. Studio MDHR has painstakingly hand drawn and hand inked every frame of animation. It’s really the only way to get the desired effect the team is going for. That means that for every enemy you see bouncing around, each one of those frames was hand made. This, of course, has led to a prolonged development schedule. Cuphead was first announced at E3 2014, but development started as early as 2010.
The team is relatively small and is being headed by brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer. The team has steadily grown to 16 members, most of which are on the animation end.
When Studio MDHR first showed off Cuphead, the team stated that they would like to release it on the Sega Master System. It’s uncertain if that will still come to fruition, but Cuphead is set to launch sometime this year for Xbox One and PC via Steam.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.