Monthly Archives: January 2015
Wrestling Wrap Up: Sting’s First Appearance on RAW
Well that was certainly an eventful go-home RAW for the Rumble. And I still don't know what the eff's gonna happen n the title match. Reigns is still probably the top choice to win the Rumble itself, but who he'll face come Mania time is in flux.
Going purely off opposite momentum, Rollins will be the one walking out of the PPV with the belt. After Cena wins it and Rollins uses his MITB contract to cash-in. As of this moment, it's the most commonly accepted outcome. Doesn't mean things won't go down differently, but this scenario has now become the baseline. Brock could still keep the belt until Mania, sure. And (sigh) Cena could win and stand triumphantly as a 16-time champ. As much as that would create so much vomit in so many mouths. Also, Rollins MITB cash-in attempt could even be held until RAW - though there's a hard drive to get WWE Network subscribers now that the U.K. and Ireland have access so they might want to, I dunno, make the Rumble awesome and exciting.
Magnetic: Cage Closed to Debut at PAX South
Indie studio Guru Games has announced it will debut its next game, Magnetic: Cage Closed, at PAX South.
Magnetic takes place in a futuristic prison run by a sadistic warden, who gives the player character a magnetic gun for a chance to escape. The path won't be straight-forward, though, as the prison consists of randomly shifting chambers. The announcement promises these chambers will run the gamut from classic puzzle scenarios to moral choices. It features a branching storyline as well.
The first-person puzzler will is set to come out in March. It will hit PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One for $15, with a PC special edition available for $20.
It's being published by Gambitious Digital Entertainment, and will be hosted at the Devolver Digital booth 1243. IGN will be at PAX South, so keep an eye here for more details.
WWZ Sequel Starts From a ‘Clean Slate’
The sequel to the zombie blockbuster World War Z is scheduled to begin filming this October. The treatment for the movie was penned by Steven Knight, who most recently scripted and directed the critically acclaimed drama Locke, starring Tom Hardy, and is also the creative force behind the British gangster series Peaky Blinders.
Knight was asked about why he wanted to do World War Z 2 during a chat with Indiewire's Thompson on Hollywood blog.
"I thought, 'why not? What fun.' It’s not quite like the other, we're starting with clean slate. When they've signed off we're on," said Knight.
IGN Live: The Race to Beat Destiny’s New Hard Raid
Hard Mode for Destiny's latest Raid, Crota's End, launches Wednesday, January 21, and IGN's Alfredo Diaz is leading a group of Guardians in an all-out race to beat it before anyone else in the world. They currently hold the World Record for the fastest completion from beginning to end in Crota's End Raid, 13:56 (10:52 w/exploits).
Our show starts at 9:30 a.m. PT, after a half hour of raid prep the raid will kick off at 10:00 a.m. PT.
Tune in during the times below, according to your time zone, on this page, your mobile device, IGN's Twitch channel, YouTube, PS4 App, and Roku.
- Pacific (PT): Wednesday, January 21st: 9:30 a.m. - Raid Completion
The Interview is Coming to Netflix
Despite terrorist threats and a spur-of-the-moment digital release, The Interview has so far made $40 million from online and on-demand sales and rentals, Sony reports.
Currently, the movie is available on numerous streaming services, including Google Play, YouTube, Xbox Video, and iTunes, as well as on cable, satellite, and telecom providers. Additionally, a Blu-ray release is now in the works.
Khan Academy Gets a New and Improved App
The non-profit educational group, Khan Academy, has made all of its online courses and over 150,000 training exercises available on its fully redesigned iPad app.
Khan Academy's first iPad app from 2012 only offered videos from the popular website's online courses. The new app is much more interactive, taking the site's several learning exercises and converting them to a more mobile-friendly experience.
According to The Verge, Khan Academy product director Matt Wahl is interested in bringing Khan Academy to additional platforms, such as Android, in the future. For now, iPad and iPhone are their focus.
Saints Row IV: Gat out of Hell Review
Saints Row developer Volition loves Johnny Gat. Saints Row fans, in general, like Johnny, but Volition loves that psychopath, and it's been trying to share the love for three games now, only to have him overshadowed by the gang of puckish rogues we know today. In that way, Gat Out of Hell was almost a foregone conclusion. Johnny was always going to get his time in the solo spotlight and all Volition needed was a good excuse to get that band of rogues we've come to love so well over the last three Saints Row games out of the way so it could happen.
The irony is that when Gat Out Of Hell succeeds, it succeeds around Johnny, not because of him. He is more of a cipher than the player-created Boss. That's not because he's a bad character--he is slightly one-note here, and the storyline isn't doing the heavy lifting it does in the main game--but because Volition's obvious focus on world-building in Gat Out Of Hell is so strong. Virtually everything else small and character-based suffers as a result. This isn't necessarily the add-on you buy because you're looking for some sense of finality from these characters--How The Saints Saved Christmas actually managed to do more of that than anyone could have expected. You buy it because you're looking for one last jolt of wild, unhinged chaos from Saints Row in a brand spanking new playground, as the series as we know it moves onward and upward. Gat Out Of Hell delivers that, but it could have delivered so much more.
When the game starts, The Boss (who can be imported from your Saints Row IV saves) is kidnapped by Satan himself for an arranged marriage to his demonic Disney princess daughter, Jezebel. Without even thinking twice, Johnny and Kinzie jump through a gateway to Hell to come to The Boss' rescue. Hell, in the Saints Row universe, feels like the unholy marriage of the nuclear, wind-blasted hellscape of the Keanu Reeves Constantine flick, and Biff Tannen's gaudy sleaze palace in Back to the Future II. It's about half the size of Steelport, but built entirely from scratch, and vastly more imaginative in its design. The humor is still persistent, with mean little passive aggressive jabs at its denizens on every street (a common billboard from Hell's ad bureau simply says "If we're being honest, this is all your fault."), but the city succeeds at bringing a broken, high-rising verticality to the mix, where floating platforms, impractical architecture, and arcane artifacts jut out of every corner. With the added details granted by next-gen horsepower, it's possibly the most memorable town Volition's ever plopped us in.
You get every opportunity to enjoy that architecture, as the flight controls no longer have you gliding through the air like a gun-toting flying squirrel, but with full-on angel wings. It's got a lot in common with the Arkham titles in its approach to flight, with a right combination of dives, daredevil stunts, and split second timing needed to dart through the air above, around, and through gaps in buildings like, well, a boss. It's far more forgiving of mistakes, though, and you're able to get up to some breakneck, insane speeds in the process.
Much of Johnny and Kinzie's combat repertoire is copy-pasted straight from Saints Row IV, although Johnny does get his own special animations for some seriously brutal melee combos. Superpowers make their way back, with a few minor tweaks (Stomp now has a vacuum variant, Telekinesis gets swapped out for the ability to summon monsters to your aid, Blast can drain life instead of setting things, redundantly, on fire). There are no costume options for characters or guns this time around, but the guns are all insane enough to make up for the lack of customization, especially the seven hidden weapons based on the deadly sins. Everything has its own hellish twist, though the variety has taken a minor hit.
All of this is literally in aid of one thing: destroying everything. Where the freedom to wreak havoc was mostly just implied in previous games, Johnny and Kinzie's entire mission in this game is to get Satan's attention, and nothing gets Big Red to take notice more than murder, mayhem, and chaos. A lot has been brought over from Saints Rows past--Mayhem and Survival and variants on those two themes are a mainstay--but once again, Volition did take the time to make some improvements. Insurance Fraud, in particular, had started to become a slog, but the activity is now Torment Fraud, which now involves accelerating the pain and suffering of a poor derelict soul in order to get him out of Hell and back into the Almighty's good graces again ahead of schedule, all while Jane Austen narrates his hilarious life story. The Trail Blazing races now take full advantage of the flight ability, involving some ridiculously fun rides through claustrophobic caverns, alcoves, buildings, and 90-degree vertical climbs.
Earning new abilities is now done by activating a hidden glyph with your powers, and fending off waves of powerful enemies with nothing but that ability and your guns. Opening up gateways to teleport around Hell is done by activating glyphs in dark chasms scattered throughout Hell, fending off numerous high-powered demons before a Legionnaire mini-boss demon shows up. The best new mini-game involves trying to prevent falling souls from getting into Satan's hands before they hit hellish ground, so Johnny/Kinzie have to snatch them up in midair. It feels like a side mission from a Superman game we never got, and plays better than any Superman game ever did.
Aside from a repetitive new King of the Hill activity, all the activities are still as fun as ever. The issue is, well, that's it. While normally there are campaign missions guiding the madness in a particular direction, with the side missions there to speed up ability development, here, it's the entirety of the game, other than an occasional side mission to rescue some of Hell's more infamous inhabitants along the way. Therein lies the biggest problem with Gat Out of Hell: Those inhabitants--namely William Shakespeare, Vlad The Impaler, Blackbeard, and the DeWynter Twins from Saints Row: The Third--are set up as major helper characters whose assistance you'll need to cause the most ruin during your time in hell. What you'll get are a few nifty bits of historical fan fiction--in which Shakespeare became Satan's spymaster general and Vlad The Impaler's castle in Hell ends up being turned into Hell's official frat house--and then being sent on, you guessed it, more side quests. Each figure has Loyalty Quests, and you keep waiting for the character-specific material that made Saints Row IV's Loyalty Quests absolutely imperative, but they never come. If the missions weren't as fun as they were, it'd be far more of an annoyance. The reality is that it just makes the expansion feel a little more watered down than its premise and its best ideas deserved. The DeWynters running a security company in Hell, and Shakespeare being beloved by Satan's daughter as a private tutor are absolutely ripe with ideas, and it’s disappointing to watch nothing come of them.
Sadly, this problem extends to the main storyline, where Johnny is trying to rescue The Boss from Satan's clutches. While the much ballyhooed musical sequence is a highlight, the game never capitalizes. Once Johnny and Kinzie have done enough to invoke Satan's Wrath (which literally, has a little meter in the menu screen), a cutscene triggers, allowing the story to continue, and all the best parts happen without your input. When Johnny finally gets to crash the fateful wedding, the best parts of it (a demon shootout, culminating in a certain tag-team move that's going to make many a wrestling fan grin ear to ear) happen during the cutscene, leaving only the final, irksome boss fight, leading to six short, amusing, but ultimately somewhat anticlimactic endings. The best part of the main story is Johnny and Kinzie being led by the nose by Dane Vogel, Ultor's dead CEO voiced by Jay Mohr, who gets to play a lot looser (and a lot more alcoholic) than in Saints Row 2. The expansion's best lines come from him, and he makes the tutorials a blast to live through; when the game finally shifts focus to the impending marriage at hand, his presence is missed. That's something that can be said much less about Johnny and Kinzie. Both are fun to hang out with in their own rights, but the expansion's truncated nature means we don't get nearly as much out of them as we want and need. It makes the expansion feel like a brief afternoon visit with old friends, as opposed to an epic send off, which wouldn't be expected of an expansion, but a premise this great warrants more than what we got.
Saints Row IV’s current gen spit shine is enough of a cause for celebration, so the fact that Volition decided to throw in a new expansion to boot feels like an embarrassment of riches on principle alone. It's an expansion that leaves a lot to be desired, only because there’s enough fertile ground to support a full blown game. It's the kind of expansion that gets you imagining what else this world and these characters are capable of, which is the best kind of disappointment you can have.
Japan Wants to Build a City Under the Sea
As rising sea levels pose an increasing threat to island dwellers, a Japanese civil engineering company has come up with an ambitious solution: an underwater city.
The proposed Ocean Spiral would consist of a large sphere just below the surface and about 546 yards in diameter, occupied by homes, businesses, and hotels.
Under that, a spiraling structure leading down to the sea floor would provide a way for scientists to extract resources for energy.
In a statement to The Guardian, Shimizu Corp spokesman Hideo Imamura said, "This is a real goal, not a pipe dream."
Comedy Central to Roast Justin Bieber
Comedy Central is set on taking the piss out of pop singer Justin Bieber. The network announced today that Bieber will be this year’s Roastee.
The Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber (#BieberRoast) will tape in Los Angeles. Tape and airdate to be announced shortly.
“Justin has been asking us for a few years to roast him, and we just kept telling him to go create more source material first. We’re thrilled he listened,” said Kent Alterman, President, Content Development & Original Programming, Comedy Central.
Past Roastees include Bob Saget, Pamela Anderson, James Franco, and Donald Trump.
Justin Bieber.
New LEGO RPG Announced
Nexon Korea has partnered with Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment and TT Games to publish a LEGO RPG with several LEGO properties.
So far, Nexon has only announced LEGO Ninjago as one of the properties featured in the mobile game. It's unclear whether the RPG will include some of the major LEGO properties, such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, but Nexon said in a press release that more announcements are coming. The game is scheduled for a 2016 release –– initially in Asia –– on iOS and Android devices.
LEGO Ninjago has proven successful since the property's 2011 introduction, garnering a movie deal that will include some of the talent behind the recent The LEGO Movie. The upcoming film, which is also scheduled for a 2016 release date, is part of Warner Bros.' attempt to expand the LEGO cinematic universe.