There is something unsettling about the idea of a living hat, yet it proved to be one of the best additions to Buy Now when it released in October. As a new friend of Mario’s, Cappy turned out to be equal parts adorable and helpful. Was this all a ploy to lower Mario’s defenses? As it turns out, a newly discovered glitch allows Cappy to make the titular character disappear.
According to a gameplay clip from Twitter user DefinitivNichtSacha (via Eurogamer), Cappy’s ability to kill off Mario appears to be accidental. In order to perform the glitch, Super Mario Odyssey needs to be running in two-player mode. After Mario uses Cappy to capture a Piranha Plant, which can only be done by feeding it a rock first, Cappy can then attack the plant, killing it and Mario in one fell swoop.
I found a glitch in #SuperMarioOdyssey‘s 2 Player-mode that lets Cappy kill Mario when capturing a Piranha Plant. #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/SzM3bMjZEN
— DefinitivNichtSascha (@NichtSascha) November 13, 2017
As players will discover, this sort of locks the game. Mario doesn’t exactly die but he does cease to exist. Cappy can still fly around and return to where Mario exists in spirit, but Mario can no longer progress. In order to continue, players can simply fast travel to a nearby flagpost to see their beloved hero reincarnated.
Nintendo has not mentioned the issue and it doesn’t appear to break the game, but it will likely be patched out in future updates. Anyone interested in recreating the glitch should try it before it’s too late.
Super Mario Odyssey launched on October 27 with almost universal praise, going on to sell more than 2 million units in three days. In our review, we praised its well-polished gameplay with tons of nods to past games. One modder enjoyed the new hat mechanics so much that they retroactively added them to Super Mario 64. While it is clear that the game was not intended for Cappy, his powers make it easy to take out certain enemies and reach difficult areas like the top of Peach’s castle.
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.