Nintendo freaked everyone out earlier this month when it released a mysterious teaser referring to “The Smiling Man.” We’ve now learned that this isn’t quite a horror game. It’s actually called Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, and it’s the first new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series in 30 years.
The Famicom Detective Club series started on the Famicom Disk System in 1988 and received a sequel just one year later. It remained dormant until those two games were remade on Nintendo Switch in 2021. Now, Nintendo is bringing the series back with an entirely new game. Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is not a full-on horror game from Nintendo, as some were speculating due to how creepy the teaser trailer was. Instead, Nintendo describes it as a “dark, twisted thriller” in its adventure game series.
In a developer interview posted to Nintendo’s YouTube channel, Producer Yoshio Sakamoto explains that The Smiling Man is an urban legend, a supernatural being known to “offer crying girls a paper bag with a smile drawn on it, in exchange for their life.” Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club’s store page reveals that players are assistant private investigators helping the police solve this crime after a student is found dead with a smiling paper bag over their face.
The protagonist of the previous Famicom Detective Club games returns, as does Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir’s Ayumi Tachibana. Although we don’t know much else about the story right now, Sakamoto believes the story’s ending could be quite divisive because “the script cuts right to the heart of what I had in mind from the start.”
Another surprising aspect of this teaser and reveal is that we won’t have to wait long to play this game. Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club launches exclusively for Nintendo Switch on August 29.
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.