Nintendo is giving players the chance to check out the new Famicom Detective Club game’s first few chapters for free ahead of the game’s release for Switch.
Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is launching on August 29, but Nintendo is releasing a three-part demo on the eShop. Players can check out the prologue and chapter 1 starting the “evening” of August 19, followed by chapter 2 on August 22 and chapter 3 on August 27. If they decide to go ahead with the full game (which is now available for preorder for $50), players can also transfer their progress.
In this mystery adventure thriller, you’ll work to discover who’s behind a series of unsolved, eerie murders. A student is found dead with a paper bag over his head. Is it the work of the Smiling Man, an urban legend? Or is it something more grounded in reality but just as dangerous?
Emio is the first new game in the cult horror series in 35 years. It was announced with a spooky teaser on social media, prompting many to wonder if Nintendo was getting into more mature horror development (at least stuff that’s more intense than a Luigi’s Mansion game). A reprisal of a series that hasn’t gotten a new entry since, as you might’ve guessed, the Famicom retro console days in the 1980s was still a surprising reveal nonetheless.
Famicom Detective Club has two games: The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, both of which were only released in Japan. There have been re-releases, and Nintendo released remakes for the Switch in 2021.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.