Many fans of Blizzard’s popular first person hero shooter, Overwatch, will tell you that their favorite thing about the game is its characters, who overflow with personality. In an act of pure wish fulfillment, YouTube user Lion Montages has edited Blizzard’s cinematics and voice lines to make a trailer for a wishful-thinking “Netflix Original Series” adaptation the game. The result, above, speaks for itself.
Although the game features only competitive multiplayer modes, with no single player to speak of, its story is told both in-game through environmental details and incidental dialogue, and out of the game through animated shorts, text, and comics. Since the early StarCraft and Warcraft games, Blizzard has earned a reputation for producing Hollywood-caliber cinematic sequences for its games. This has peaked with Overwatch, which earns frequent comparisons to Pixar films for its charming, diverse, colorful, and recognizable characters, and generally upbeat attitude about “a future worth fighting for.” Fan engagement with the game’s characters and story is impressive, given how little official narrative content there is, so a lot of people are eager to make Lion Montages’ proof of concept into a reality.
Set in the recognizable future, Overwatch is about the former agents of a global defense agency created to deal with a war between humans and sentient machines (called Omnics). Following years of peace, Overwatch was disbanded but rising terrorism around the world and threats from a dark organization called Talon brings Overwatch’s former members back together. In practice, this has no bearing on gameplay other than providing a loose narrative frame to get cool characters shooting at one another. Any character can play with or against any other, regardless of their in-fiction loyalties. Many fans would no doubt enjoy a more in-depth look at their world, excited at the prospect of a huge ensemble cast and world-spanning story encompassing action, political drama, and all manner of interpersonal relationships.
Lion Montages, as the account name suggests, primarily posts fan trailers and machinima videos stitched together from video game footage, which has a long and illustrious history as an online practice. This is not, in fact, its first Overwatch video, with a shorter movie trailer posted last year (below) closer to the game’s launch. The new Netflix trailer shares a lot of the same footage but expands it with the videos that Blizzard has subsequently released.
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.