Street Fighter V is coming out this month, so Capcom has begun its final marketing push before the game hits stores. For most publishers, that push means publishing new trailers, livestreams, blog posts, and, occasionally, they host a party or some other kind of event.
And then there’s Capcom UK, which hired London-based Hip-Hop dance theatre troupe ZooNation to perform a live round-robin-style dance battle called “Street Fighter V Hits London” at a launch event for their game Wednesday. The group dressed up as six fighters, including four classic characters — Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Cammy — and newcomers Laura and Rashid. The fighting is … Well, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a promotional dance performance inspired by a video game.
This is not the first event or installation created by Capcom UK that might have caused North American game fans to scratch their heads, including “Wesker & Son,” a pop-up butcher shop set up in 2012 to promote Resident Evil 6, which sold fake human flesh. While this isn’t nearly as odd, one would have hoped Capcom would have remembered that other companies have tried similar events before, with horrifying results.
Meanwhile, Capcom has teamed up with Machinima for a live-action prequel web series, Street Fighter: Resurrection. The series, which premieres in March, will focus on Charlie Nash and “set the stage” for the story in Street Fighter V, according to Polygon. Releasing the series after the game’s launch may seem a little late, but Capcom has said it intends to play a longer marketing game with Street Fighter V, releasing a “cinematic” single-player story mode for the game in June and releasing a larger number of patches and updates in free updates.
Street Fighter V comes to PlayStation 4 and PC February 16.
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.