Remember the game Mafia? No, not the 2K-published third-person shooter series, but rather the classic party game where every day the players try to ferret out two hidden mafiosi among them who kill another innocent every night. Russian production company Enjoy Movies is adapting the game into a dystopian science fiction film, following in the inexplicable footsteps of other game to film adaptations like Battleship and Settlers of Catan.
As the above trailer shows, in a futuristic Moscow, Mafia has become “the most popular television show ever.” Eleven contestants gather in a set that looks like Who Wants to be a Millionaire by way of the Matrix trilogy and Tron to play Mafia while the rest of the world eagerly watches. Eliminated players are apparently subjected to some sort of VR hallucination based on their worst fears. It’s all magnificently unexpected and absurd, and you are best just watching it yourself. While you might be inclined to think this is a joke, the production values are actually quite high. Slash Film reports that the film had a budget of $10 million to $15 million.
Mafia is a classic social deduction party game of hidden roles and bluffing, first created in the USSR by Dmitry Davidoff in 1986. At the start of the game each player is secretly assigned a role, with an uninformed majority of villagers and an informed minority of mafia members. The game is divided into alternating day and night phases. During the night, the mafia members silently elect to kill one of the innocent villagers, while during the day all of the players discuss whom to eliminate on suspicion of being in the mafia. The game is won when either all of the mafia have been eliminated or the mafia outnumbers other players.
A standard party game and rainy day summer camp activity for people who grew up in the ’80s and 90s, Mafia serves as the foundation for a wider range of hidden role and bluffing games that are currently flourishing. The game itself has been re-themed around werewolves instead of mafiosi, and published variants such as One Night Ultimate Werewolf maintain the same basic structure while adding additional mechanics and hidden roles to complicate the strategy. It has also served as inspiration for more modern hidden role party games such as The Resistance, Coup, Two Rooms & a Boom, and Spyfall.
According to the trailer, Mafia hits theaters on Jan. 1, 2016. What other folk and party games would make good fodder for an inexplicable film adaptation? Red Rover? Capture the Flag?
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.