Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is just around the corner - and we'll be bringing you all the updates live from the keynote right here. Tune in Monday, June 8 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 5pm GMT (Tues Jun 9 3am AET) to get all the news and announcements via our live blog.

Though Apple's exact plans are unknown, last year it centered its keynote largely around software announcements, like iOS 8, Mac OS X Yosemite, HomeKit, and Swift (among other things). Though our initial predictions of what to expect this year included seeing news on hardware and services like Apple TV and a rumored TV service, it's looking more likely that we'll again see a focus on iOS, OSX, and HomeKit due to delays.

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When Fantastic Four and Chronicle director Josh Trank dropped out of helming the second Star Wars Anthology film last month, rumors immediately began to circulate regarding why he left the project. Unconfirmed chatter indicated that the FF reboot had been a troubled production which worried Simon Kinberg, who was producing both the FF and Star Wars films, and that this had led to Trank’s being fired by Lucasfilm. But now both Trank and Kinberg have come out to talk about the director’s departure from Star Wars in an attempt to set the record straight.

In an interview with Hero Complex to promote this summer’s Fantastic Four, Trank denied the reports of trouble on that film, saying that he has been shocked by the reaction to his Star Wars departure. “People get so excited to raise their pitchforks,” he said.

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Hot on the heels of yesterday's All-New All-Different Marvel teaser image, we've got another look at the heroes of the Marvel Universe after Secret Wars this Fall, only this one certainly emphasizes the "all-different" aspect.

There are a few notable surprises.

First, Laura Kinney aka X-23 is the new Wolverine, which makes a certain degree of sense given that she's his genetic clone and has been a big player in the current Wolverines series. There's another Wolverine, but that grizzled, white-haired one is Old Man Logan from an alternate universe where he's the last hero in a United States ruled by super-villains. There's currently a Secret Wars series about Old Man Logan, so it looks like he might survive Secret Wars and become a part of the main Marvel Universe. Two Wolverines -- why not?

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Hot Toys' Avengers: Age of Ultron lineup is nearly complete, as the company just pulled back the curtain on their Scarlet Witch action figure.

The Hot Toys Scarlet Witch figure features a detailed likeness of actress Elizabeth Olsen. The figure is designed at 1:6 scale and measures about 11 inches tall. Like many of Hot Toys' female figures, Scarlet Witch features rooted hair rather than sculpted plastic hair. She includes a number of accessories, such as interchangeable hands, hex bolt effects and even Ultron's cold, metallic heart. Check out the figure below:

The Scarlet Witch figure is priced at $229.99 and is scheduled for release between December 2015 and February 2016. You can pre-order the figure now through Sideshow Collectibles.

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Today Hasbro announced a new Marvel Legends box set that will appeal to Marvel collectors and fans of Doctor Strange in general. USA Today revealed the new Doctor Strange-themed set, which will be sold as one of several exclusive items at San Diego Comic-Con next month.

Square-Enix Reveals New Batman: Arkham Knight SDCC Exclusive Figure

The box set features five Marvel Legends action figures, none of which are available individually. Included are Doctor Strange in his astral form, Doctor Voodoo, Magik, Hela and Dormammu, along with various accessories. The set also includes a full-scale replica of Strange's signature weapon, the Eye of Agamotto. The figures are housed in an elaborately designed book that replicates Strange's magical tome, the Book of Vishanti. Check out this impressive set below:

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Not only is Ghostface back for the Scream TV series -- the iconic killer also has a new look.

Courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, here's our first glimpse at Ghostface's mask in MTV's upcoming series...

According to original Scream director Wes Craven, the new mask isn't just a stylistic choice, but will actually play into the overall story: “The new mask is cool and scary and takes the series into a new direction...It also ties into the story, which I won’t give away."

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Imagine a Super FX chip version of Deus Ex: that’s Neon Struct whittled down to its essentials. If such a game had existed in 1993, we’d still be talking about it in the sort of reverent, hushed tones we’d use if we had been front-row center for Moses bringing two God-forged tablets down from a mountain. That Neon Struct still has enough going on to remain engaging in 2015 is a testament to the skill involved, but it simply can’t help but suffer under the weight of its own ambitions.

The set up is straightforward. You are Jillian Cleary, a woman of mystery who carries out espionage missions for the world’s most conspicuous spy agency against a backdrop of the neon cyberpunk future the 80s told us was coming. During the course of a mission, she discovers that the agency might be working as an illegal arm of whatever the future’s iteration of the Patriot Act looks like. People of interest the world over have been implanted with surveillance chips for the so-called “greater good.” Jillian is tossed in a cell for her silly belief in justice and clarity, but she breaks out and immediately goes to work to try and expose the truth.

Some heavy stuff goes on in Neon Struct storywise, which makes it all the more jarring that it’s executed in an aesthetic that's not that different from the original Star Fox. The soundtrack may be a decent enough mixture of Vangelis-lite synth tones and beats, but polygons are intentionally low-res, enemies and NPCs are faceless and voiceless, and although you’ll jetset back and forth across the country, environments always feature the same dark skies, sparse populations, and vague, looming, futuristic machinery. Instead of feeling like a final version, it feels like a pre-production build of a bigger cyberpunk adventure.

Stripping away the niceties of generations of graphical advancement is always a good road to take to get to the true heart of whether a game works or not. To wit, Neon Struct is functional as far as the most basic and fundamental stealth mechanics are concerned. There’s even a satisfying purity to it. You can run, jump, climb over obstacles within reason, and perform a silent, cool, Mirror’s Edge-like slide to slip into cover in a hurry. You have no weapons to speak of, though you do get a hacking tool, which allows you to bust open doors by playing a quick game of Breakout on whatever passes for an iPhone in this bright, shiny future. You also get a variety of stims, which give you a short but sweet special effect, like making your footsteps entirely silent or throwing a grenade that immediately teleports you to its location, Nightcrawler-style. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows you your visibility level, dropping to completely empty if you’re invisible, which can happen even if some guards saw you duck into a shady corner just 5 seconds ago. You can knock out guards and toss their bodies into the nearest convenient tidy pile somewhere, but the checklist at the end of each stage frowns upon such violence and offers higher grades to those who can get around without ever resorting to this direct approach.

I flunked every single time.

The do-no-harm approach can be done, and there’s plenty of challenge for folks who enjoy pacifist runs. The issue is that there are so few alternatives that don’t involve waiting out guards on a leisurely midnight stroll through an industrial complex or taking a nightstick to the face. Cold-cocking a guard is just sweet, instant relief. Not that the guards are terribly smart to begin with--they’re pretty quick to dispense nightstick justice. Even though you’re equally quick to crumple like a paper towel after taking two or three hits, it’s just as easy to watch them fumble around inches in front of your face and slip out of a hairy situation when they come stalking.

This is all perfectly well and good for a cheap-shot app offering quick doses of mindless stealth action on the go. The starting missions are simple sneak-in-sneak-out stealth runs, but Neon Struct has greater ambitions for its world. However, the sparse world building creates some gaping, disappointing holes. The better the story gets, the less the game built around it satisfies its needs. The earliest and best example is Jillian’s jailbreak. She’s just discovered a conspiracy that actually does go all the way to the top. When her grossly misogynistic boss has her tucked away in a detention facility until someone decides it’s neutralizing time, her field handler, an Indian gentleman by the name of Vinod, manages to bust in and hack her door open. This is all fine, but the very quality of the story betrays what you expect when she’s out. Most of the cells around her are empty, save one delusional prisoner. There’s a workout room for guards and a two-way glass room for visitations; otherwise, Jillian’s terrifying Guantanamo is a sterile, blocky hotel crawling with baton-wielding drones and the same three or four recycled textures. There are no indicators to be found besides the dots, question mark, and exclamation points placed over alerted guards, which helps with immersion but makes traversing the labyrinthine corridors a pain. That area’s one of the most frustrating moments in the game for the same reason. The one button allowing you to exit the facility is in a security room that you’d never really identify as a security room except that one tiny, inconspicuous switch is located on a ledge in a room you might entirely overlook.

The sterility might make sense for a government facility, but it makes less sense when the game drops you into big, well-known cities and everything is faceless, abstract, and completely missing a personality (besides the game’s default personality for everything, of course). A sequence on the next level has Jillian attempting to sneak into a medical facility to surgically remove the tracking device in her arm. You walk up to a bed, hit X, a spurt of red stuff hits the screen, and the objective is complete. Again, that’s all well and good for an art project or a proof-of-concept, but it’s not so great when we’re asked to engage with much bigger ideas and action.

It’s a double-edged sword, though. Can we really fault a developer for trying to give a very simple game more depth than necessary? It’s a tough call. Neon Struct has the right spirit behind it. It tries to be a rebellious, anti-government tale of capitalism and intelligence communities getting into bed with each other to the detriment of all, and that struggle is far easier to believe than many of gaming’s recent attempts to outdo William Gibson. But with the game-making tools at our disposal, that story should be told using as much fire and verve as can be mustered. Instead, it’s told here with a technical manual’s austerity. The story here acts as little more than the cellophane frames old-schoolers had to paste over their TVs to create a new background for the tiny lights that darted across the screen. Both do their jobs sufficiently, but we no longer have to simply dream of more.

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has provided a status update on the upcoming Xbox One exclusive Crackdown.

In reply to an inquisitive fan on Twitter, Spencer confirmed that development is progressing smoothly. However, he wouldn't go so far as to reveal whether or not the game will make an appearance during Microsoft's E3 media briefing.

@vittorionzoloo @PNF4LYFE Sorry, not announcing what games are where right now but Crackdown is making great progress.

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Warning: this article contains spoilers for Wolverines #20!

Marvel killed off one of their most iconic heroes in the aptly titled comic Death of Wolverine last year, and it doesn't appear that fans can expect a resurrection anytime soon. This week, Wolverines #20 teased the possibility of Logan's return and then promptly closed the door on that development.

Art by Juan Doe

Wolverines is a weekly comic that explores the fallout of Logan's death. The book has featured characters like Sabretooth, X-23, Daken, Lady Deathstrike and Mystique as they struggle to honor the fallen hero's legacy. Issue #20 wrapped up the series this week, culminating with Mystique betraying her teammates and harvesting their healing factors. Her goal was to use the stolen power to fuel a mystical ritual that would bring her deceased lover Destiny back to life. However, a message left behind by Destiny revealed the truth. The ritual wasn't designed to resurrect her, but Wolverine.

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Metaphor serves not only as one of the most used concepts in just about every medium imaginable, but also as the basis for entire works of art. Whole paintings are often metaphors for the artist's feelings or background, and movies can link chains of symbolism together to represent some more abstract concepts. Games can go further by inviting the player into the metaphor itself through interactivity, conveying difficult real-world problems like illness and societal inequalities. The trick to creating an effective metaphor as a game is to be subtle enough with your themes so they don't overwhelm the playing experience itself while simultaneously ensuring that the game still communicates the themes clearly. Sym, a platformer inspired by social anxiety, fails on both counts, leaving us with a clumsy, confusing experience whose bright spots are muted by rough design and heavy-handed themes.

Boiling down what Sym is about is simple: You play as a person trying to escape the prying eyes of other people by escaping into a world where they can't follow you, one where you can be alone. This is reflected in your experiences by your ability to sink into the floor and emerge upside-down on the other side. Suddenly, what were once solid platforms become empty space to move through, and vice-versa. Occasionally, you run into switches that cause blocks to appear and disappear in patterns marked with arrows, and, of course, you have to avoid enemies and hazards. However, most of the game's identity lies in its dual nature, forcing you to think about how far you need to progress before you have to switch orientation. Mapping out the correct path to the end is the most engrossing part of the game.

Sym's mechanics falter when they're put to the test, however. The floaty jumping mechanics don't match up well with the frequent pinpoint platforming you're required to do. It's pretty difficult to land on a patch of safe ground only as wide as you are with the amount of control the jump physics allow, and not in a good way. Compounding matters is your character's hitbox, which extends past your actual body ever so slightly. You'll die by drawing too near a saw blade without ever actually touching it. And then there are narrow shafts you have to fall into at just the right angle or else get stuck awkwardly along the edge. The levels themselves are interesting thanks to good use of the orientation switching mechanic, but that's the only bit that works as advertised. These issues are small, but they add up, sucking away the promising potential Sym initially displays.

But its biggest failing is in how it fails to convey anything meaningful about its inspiration from social anxiety. You can see the obvious starting point for the extended metaphor in the central mechanic. Sinking into the floor is synonymous with hiding from the world's prying eyes as they try to drag you out into the light and consume you. What developer Atrax Games is going for here is pretty clear because of the game's very literal interpretation of these platitudes. The first set of levels features giant eyeballs that stare at you without trying to hurt you. In these levels, only environmental hazards, like sawblades and pitfalls, can harm you. Later stages have actual enemies that will kill you, like carnivorous plants that spontaneously grow out of seeds you see on the ground or hungry beasts that pace back and forth looking for a meal. Even the people you meet later on prove to be foes, pulling you out of your hiding place in the ground as you dissolve in a fit of social paralysis. It's all very on-the-nose, but you can see a vague character progression as fears intensify and you careen towards either finding friends amidst your anxiety or hiding away forever.

Though the game practically screams its inspiration at you, it has nothing coherent to say about social anxiety. The levels feature the aforementioned allusions to a hazardous world you must hide from, but everything else is muddled. The levels themselves rarely tell any sort of story on their own. Instead, anguished phrases are used to fill in the gaps where the game's thematic design drops the ball. But these also confuse any thematic ties the game manages to establish by reading like a moody high school student's musings scrawled in the margins of a notebook. That in itself is a cool idea, and it goes with the pencil-inspired graphics. But they don't reveal anything or lead the themes anywhere except to depict anguish for anguish's sake. Until the game splits off briefly into two different sets of final levels, the messages convey the same depth of pain and panic throughout. In fact, they sometimes border on incoherent ramblings not dissimilar to the stereotypically exaggerated dialogue you'd hear from a schizophrenic person on an episode of Law and Order, which matches poorly with the meager thematic progression the levels suggest. It's confusing, distracting, and occasionally insulting to those who suffer from social anxiety.

The few themes that do come through loud and clear--hiding from social situations, the fear and consequences of being caught in one, and the eventual message that finding and sharing the connections and burdens between people is the beginning of the answer--all would make a fine foundation for a game like Sym if they were handled with more subtlety. Likewise, the erratic writing plastered everywhere contributes very little, actively obscuring any sense of progression the themes try to develop. Even when divorced from its themes, Sym manages to be mildly entertaining but just shy of a competent game thanks to the many small yet significant design flaws you have to work through. Most disappointing, though, is that Sym manages to successfully convey nothing enlightening, moving, informative, or even coherent about social anxiety. Hiding may be a central mechanic in Sym, but obscuring your meaning to this baffling degree is never the answer.