Have you ever wondered how much it would hurt to take flying uppercut to the face from Ryu, Ken, Akuma or any of the many other Street Fighter characters who employ a Shoryuken-style move? Whatever you’ve imagined, it’s actually much, much worse.
Video game mythbusting channel VSauce3 have done their best to logically translate the force and effect of the dragon punch, based on how it’s been depicted in the series for decades, and use physics to re-create the damage in a real-world setting. As it turns out, the act of moving from a crouching position to leaping many feet off the ground and punching a person so hard that they fly up in the air with you is a superhuman feat. By their calculations, taking a dragon punch to the chin should knock your head clean off. Fatality.
To make their calculations, the team started with a specific animation from Street Fighter II: Ken using his dragon punch on a stunned Zangief. From there, they used physics to determine how much force it would take and a person for a fist to launch a Zangief-sized person a full body-length up in the air. From there, they calculate how high —more than 20 feet— and how fast —more than 20 miles per hour— Ken could jump if he didn’t hit anybody.
To re-create the shoryuken in the real world, they use a robot arm and a head-and-torso shaped target. They made the right decision.
Obviously this is all speculation: The “science” and math employed is based on the premise that Street Fighter moves were animated to scale and exist in a world where the laws of gravity apply. Their logic seems fine, as good as you can hope for, but ultimately the Street Fighter universe and reality are world apart.
All of this, by the way, is an extremely roundabout way of reminding you that the human body is very fragile… So do not try this at home. Getting punched in the face no fun, even without super-dragon powers.
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.