After its pivot to digital events, the Evolution Championship Series (better known as Evo) is returning to an in-person event venue. A special announcement stream revealed that the festivities are returning to Evo’s usual home in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino on August 5-7.
The reveal stream not only shared a return to form but the games to be featured at the popular fighting game tournament. The lineup of titles includes:
This year’s Evo is the first to be hosted in-person since PlayStation’s initial acquisition of the famous tournament. PlayStation announced the return to offline competition last year during its Evo online edition, which received mixed reactions from both viewers and competitors.
Since then, Evo has undergone a lot of management changes. Popular Twitch streamer Pokimane became a co-owner of the event, but one of the most important changes is the fact that Rick “TheHadou” Thiher is now the General Manager of Evo. Thiher is the founder and owner of Combo Breaker, a tournament lauded as the best in the fighting game community, giving fans high hopes for this year’s competiton.
Fighting game fans can tune into Evo via its official Twitch channel from August 5 to 7. Registration is also open now for fans and competitors alike to purchase tickets at evo.gg.
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.
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.