Monthly Archives: January 2015

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Supergirl Has Found its James ‘Jimmy’ Olsen

CBS' upcoming Supergirl series has found its James Olsen in True Blood's Mehcad Brooks.

EW has the news, and stresses that Supergirl's Olsen will be a different take on the character from the one we know from the comics (aka 'Jimmy' Olsen). Brooks' character will be photographer at CatCo, the media company where Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, works, and had previously been working in National City for mysterious reasons. He may be a potential love interest for Kara, played by Melissa Benoist.

brooks Brooks in True Blood.

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The Marvellous Miss Take Review

We need more heist games in our lives. Stealth games are a dime a dozen, but only in heist games are you required to play with confidence. We need the thrill of strolling into a heavily-guarded museum or bank and lifting priceless items from under everyone's noses. And we need to feel vindicated and smug as we walk out of the place with no one the wiser. That's the essence that The Marvellous Miss Take attempts to embody, steering you to fearlessly swipe paintings and sculptures under the careful watch of patrons and guards. But though the game wants you to feel like you're overcoming incredible odds thanks to your innate cunning, its unreasonably small levels and erratic enemy behavior destroy the very confidence it demands of you.

But first, you're eased into a life of crime. You play as Sophia Take, an art enthusiast who saw her great aunt's collection swindled away and split among greedy one percenters. She takes matters into her own hands and sets out to steal the art back. (She even resembles everyone's favorite world-class educational thief, Carmen Sandiego.) Though Miss Take is brimming with resolve, she soon reveals that she's a little unsure of herself to Harry Carver, a well-to-do and benevolent master thief who she bumps into in the middle of a caper. Together with Harry and pickpocket Daisy, Sophia slowly accumulates more and more of her great aunt's collection, gaining more confidence with each heist. These three figures form the core of the game's story and characterization, and, though it's tempting to paint them as one-dimensional afterthoughts, the game pulls off some subtle tricks to fill in the gaps.

You'll learn to hate the color blue after seeing so much of it in this game.

Sophia's initial uncertainty carries into the player experience as well. You must abscond with all the art on the current floor and then either board an elevator or make your way to the exit. Guards' fields of vision are represented by giant blue cones that protrude from their eyes as you look down on the floor from a semi-isometric view. The levels themselves are cramped, with guards' vision often filling 75 percent of a room, making success seem impossible. But the game invites you to overcome these feelings by trying to gradually make you realize the ease with which you can accomplish your goals. The controls are dead simple, as the game can be played solely with the mouse. Just click on a spot, and Sophia moves there. Hold down the left mouse button and she starts running, though her haste makes noise that attracts guards, as does whistling by holding the mouse button down over her.

You start the game feeling intimidated by the sheer number of blue cones covering the levels. You feel shy about walking up to grab a painting while a guard's back is turned, but you learn to time your pacing in order to boldly walk to your target before the guard is any the wiser. You're afraid to set foot in a heavily-guarded area for fear of stepping into a guard’s field of vision, but being seen doesn't get you caught immediately. Instead, a glimpse of you only gets a guard's attention and lures him or her to the last point at which you were seen. Stay in sight too long and you alert the guards, but duck out of sight in time and you can lure guards to wherever you need them to be.

The UI is super stylish, which makes the plain look of the rest of the game even more disappointing.

Even Sophia’s partners' side missions encourage you to come out of your shell. Harry has a leg injury and needs a cane to walk, so he's unable to run. This means that his heists happen at night when guard activity is at a minimum. He must sneak around armed with only a weird ball-like contraption, which makes noise when thrown against a wall. This teaches you not to rely on running to and fro and also encourages you to actually use the many power-ups the game gives Sofia, such as smoke bombs that block vision or teleporters that let you make a quick getaway. Daisy's missions, on the other hand, require you to get up close and personal with guards, picking their pockets to get keys and make off with a safe's contents. Though Daisy's prowess at pickpocketing means that she can approach guards without them becoming suspicious, it teaches you, when being Sophia, not to be so timid when it comes to worming your way through the guard-filled minefield. When you start getting the hang of navigating the security and playing the guards like saps, your confidence starts to snowball until you feel like a master thief. And clearly Sofia does too, as after clearing a level, she puts her hand on her hips and throws heavy shade at the mooks she just put to shame.

The moments in which you should be slipping past a heavily-guarded room to snag a bust are often ruined thanks to a guard who happens to turn the wrong way.

At least, that's the experience the game wants you to have, and occasionally it succeeds. But, though the game attempts to convey scenarios that make you feel like you're succeeding against all odds, the game commits the sin of actually stacking the odds against you. The fact that most rooms are bathed in blue does make the levels somewhat unmanageable even when you learn all the tricks. The cramped corridors and tiny rooms make maneuvering more of a chore than it needs to be. Worst of all is the inconsistent enemies, who, aside from the frequency with which they change direction, are completely unpredictable. Guards patrol in whatever direction strikes their fancy with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Now, not having predictable patterns isn't necessarily a bad thing if a game is designed with unpredictability in mind, but with so little space to work with and only one tool at your disposal at a time, you often find yourself waiting for an enemy to happen to wander to just the right spot so that you can enact your plan. This also means that the moments in which you should be slipping past a heavily-guarded room to snag a bust are often ruined thanks to a guard who happens to turn the wrong way. This takes your supposed skill out of the equation somewhat and makes the game a frustrating slog.

Glue freezes enemies in place for a period of time.

It also doesn't help that the world itself isn't terribly interesting. For a game that seems built on slick intrigue, the levels themselves all play just about the same, albeit with varying degrees of frustration. Each floor you have to tackle is just a bunch of hallways connecting a bunch of bigger rooms. You barely ever get to use the environment to your advantage in clever ways, adding a thick layer of monotony to proceedings. Gimmicks such as dogs who can smell your footsteps, security cameras, and lasers add some much-needed variety, but once you encounter them once, you've seen all they have to offer. Levels also offer no visual panache, looking very sterile and plain, which is disappointing because the game's soundtrack embodies the slick, stylish world of high-class thievery.

The Marvellous Miss Take aims to be a different kind of confidence game, one in which you stroll into a level like you own the place and take whatever you wish with ease. All the pieces are in place to build you up and make you a virtual master thief, and Sofia's journey is the perfect embodiment of this process. It's just a shame that the game's level design and enemy combine to short-circuit the experience throughout, because there are so many individual pieces that make the game really easy to like. Sofia deserves better.

When Can You See The Walking Dead Movie Spoof?

ARC Entertainment has acquired the rights to distribute a Walking Dead spinoff movie -- titled The Walking Deceased -- for a North American release on March 20.

Check out the first round of images from The Walking Deceased (that clearly show the film's Walking Dead influences) below:

walking-deceased

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Watch All the Super Bowl TV Commercials

This Sunday, millions will be glued to their TVs, watching Super Bowl XLIX - and of course, all of the commercials that come with it. As the most-viewed event on TV every year, the commercial time for the Super Bowl remains a mega-hot commodity for advertisers, who continue to pull out all the stops in terms of production value and celebrity involvement.

Watch the Super Bowl XLIX Movie Commercials Here

As we get closer to Sunday, many of these ads will have an early debut. We'll be updating this story as more of the ads are released, letting you get an early look at what's to come Sunday, at least during those commercials breaks...

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Nintendo Worldwide Amiibo Sales in the Millions

Nintendo released the numbers for the third-quarter of its fiscal year, and it revealed that the company sold 5.7 million amiibo worldwide.

That comes to roughly 1.6 amiibo for every copy of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, with numbers for Smash reaching 3.39 million total units worldwide.

Amiibo functionality isn't just limited to Smash, of course. Mario Kart 8 and Hyrule Warriors support the figurines, and the upcoming Kirby and the Rainbow Curse will have amiibo functionality, as well. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker will be getting amiibo support in an update in March, and there are many more games for both 3DS and Wii U with amiibo support planned.

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First Photos from the Max Steel Movie

We've got our first glimpse of the upcoming live-action Max Steel movie, based on the successful Mattel toyline-turned-animated series.

Check out the first batch of images from Max Steel, featuring young stars Ben Winchell (A.N.T. Farm) and Ana Villafane (Los Americans) -- plus a glimpse of the titular armor -- below:

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Gravity Ghost Review

Childhood is terrifying. Childhood is beautiful. Childhood is full of wonder. And childhood is marked by the continual loss of innocence that comes with each new year. Learning that the unexplored experiences which is exciting and enticing could kill you is part of growing up; as is learning that there are consequences to all of our actions no matter how pure our intentions may be. Those are heavy themes for adults to handle, let alone children, but they rest at the core of delightful platformer Gravity Ghost.

In Gravity Ghost, you control the ghost of Iona, a recently deceased young girl who lives on a secluded island with her two younger sisters and her older sister, Hickory, who became their guardian after the tragic death of their parents. The circumstances leading up to Iona's death unfurl throughout her story as tensions between her and Hickory arise: she believes that her sister's fiancé was responsible for their parents' deaths. You meet Voy, a seemingly tame wolf that Iona has befriended. And you watch Iona retreat deeper and deeper into her own heartache and isolation as the mystery and tension surrounding her death grow.

Gravity Ghost combines the aesthetics of Maurice Sendak with the narrative power of classic Don Bluth films like The Secret of NIMH, yet there's little to compare the game's overall style to. The art is like the pages of an illustrated children's book come to life with painstaking details and a beautiful colored-pencils effect, and before the (welcome) heavier elements of the story arrived, I grinned ear to ear at the sincere innocence of it all. But Gravity Ghost is a story about the price of innocence, and it explores guilt and death and family from a child's point of view without sacrificing clarity of insight and without ever looking down on or being condescending towards the perspective of its young star. Gravity Ghost operates on pure empathy, and the story's denouement left me on the verge of tears.

Gravity Ghost's gameplay is also quite good, although it never quite reaches the magnificent heights of the game's storytelling and art. Gameplay revolves around platforming with a physics twist. You leap back and forth between planetoid objects of varying sizes and manipulate the gravity wells of each object to shoot yourself across the levels. Along the way you collect stars which open the doors to finish each level, and flowers which lengthen ghost Iona's hair and allow you in turn to collect the ghosts of dead animals and terraform planets. Returning those animal-ghosts to their former bodies also leads to the sublimely animated cutscenes which move the story forward.

This maelstrom will make sense by the end.

The variety of celestial objects in the game is a perfect fit for its tight three-hour running time. Gas giants allow you to bounce like a pinball machine. Fire planets propel you high in the sky off their steam. Water planets allow you to dive beneath their surfaces to collect stars and flowers. And gem planets are super-dense with stronger gravity wells than normal. Over the course of the seven constellations--with around 80 or so small levels in total--that make up the game's campaign, you also gain the ability to terraform the planets from one type to another, which is necessary for solving many of the game's simple puzzles.

Leaping back and forth between the gravity wells to collect the stars and flowers and ghosts and power-ups isn't always the smoothest experience, but the game gives you a host of tools to circumnavigate most potential sources of frustration, except in timed segments where the looseness of the gravity physics can become aggravating. Despite the looseness of the controls, bouncing and floating between the planets is an oddly Zen experience and it becomes quite soothing before long. It also helps that the soundtrack, from FTL composer Ben Prunty, adds to the game’s strange rejuvenative power.

The worst thing that can be said about Gravity Ghost is that I crave more of it.

Beyond the occasionally frustrating timed segments, the worst thing that can be said about Gravity Ghost is that I crave more of it. The game is short. It took me just over three hours to do a 100-percent run for each star and ghost and power-up. And, once you've beaten it, there are few incentives to go back and play again, minus chasing a couple of achievements you wouldn't think to chase on your first go around. But while Gravity Ghost may be short, it never overstays its welcome. Each constellation is the perfect length, and the game continues to implement new mechanics and kinks into the core gameplay up to the final levels.

It's easy to capture the happiest moments of being a child: friendships, vacations, exploring the vast, uncharted world in front of you. But it's hard to convey the toughest moments, those moments that we compartmentalize and repress beyond recognition as adults. And it's especially hard to convey such moments in language and images that both children and adults can appreciate and understand. That Gravity Ghost accomplishes this feat with such seeming ease is a testament to its imagination and its power.

NFL Denver Broncos’ Julius Thomas Plays Call of Duty with IGN

During IGN's world premiere live stream of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's Havoc DLC, Julius Thomas, Tight End for the Denver Broncos, joined us to play some Team Deathmatch on the new map, Urban.

As we play, we answered your Twitter questions about our favorite perks, the best of the new DLC maps, and more. If you missed the end of the stream, we closed things out with a few full rounds of the new Exo-Zombies mode.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's Havoc DLC is available now on Xbox One and Xbox 360. It's coming to other platforms soon. We'll keep you updated as we learn more.

Brian is an associate editor at IGN. You can follow him @albinoalbert on Twitter. 

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Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered Out Tomorrow

David Cage's cult classic murder mystery Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered is now officially confirmed and out tomorrow for PC, Mac, Linux, and iOS.

Last week, a countdown appeared on achillingfeeling.com, hinting at a project somehow related to Quantic Dream's interactive drama from 2005. The page now redirects to an official website for Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered.

A supposed Amazon listing for the remastered edition also leaked a few days ago, but now its existence is official.

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Ranking DC’s 15 Event Comics

DC Comics is set to kick off their next major event called Convergence this April as elements from the old DCU will make a comeback in a conflict that spans the multiverse. With that big event on the horizon, we figured now would be a good time to look back at DC's past events and see how they measure up today.

Event comics and crossovers are just part of the territory when it comes to superhero comics these days. Ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths set the standard for epic, spectacle-driven superhero stories in the DC Universe, DC has been pumping out one event after another. Some of them have been immensely entertaining, while others are better left gathering dust in the quarter bin.

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