Monthly Archives: July 2016
Salem: Season 3 Trailer
The longer wait has been difficult for fans, but Salem is returning this October - appropriately enough, just in time for Halloween. And now, the first trailer for Season 3 is here.
Leading into San Diego Comic-Con and the show's panel on Friday, the new trailer shows that things are worse than ever in Salem this year, on the heels of the death of Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery) at the end of Season 2. But with the devil himself bringing misery and death to Salem, Mary is the only one who can defeat him... if anyone can figure out how to bring her back to do it.
From creators Brannon Braga and Adam Simon, Salem stars Janet Montgomery (Human Target, Made in Jersey) as Mary Sibley, Shane West (Nikita, ER) as Captain John Alden, Seth Gabel (Arrow, Fringe) as Cotton Mather, Ashley Madekwe (Revenge) as Tituba, Tamzin Merchant (Jane Eyre) as Anne Hale, Elise Eberle (The Astronaut Farmer) as Mercy Lewis, Iddo Goldberg (Mob City) as Isaac Walton, Joe Doyle (Raw) as Baron Sebastian Marburg, and Oliver Bell (The Saint) as Mary’s son. Marilyn Manson guest stars in Season 3 as Thomas Dinley.
Dark Horse Expands the World of Overwatch
Overwatch fans will have plenty of opportunity to enjoy the game's colorful characters and universe on the printed page in the months ahead. Today Dark Horse Comics and Blizzard Entertainment announced a partnership that will result in a new Overwatch graphic novel and an art book.
The first fruit of this arrangement is that Dark Horse has begun republishing Blizzard's 8-page digital Overwatch comics through their own digital comics service. We recently learned that Overwatch #8 will focus on the series' newest character, Ana.
Overwatch graphic novel cover
Rocket League PS4-Xbox One Cross-Play Completed, Just Needs Sony’s Approval
Psyonix vice president Jeremy Dunham says work on Rocket League's proposed cross-network play between PS4 and Xbox One is now complete, could be up-and-running within "a few hours", and only requires Sony's approval to be released.
Speaking to IGN, Dunham explained just how close the groundbreaking feature - which would allow play across Xbox Live and PSN for the first time - could potentially be:
"Right now," explained Dunham, "we're literally at the point where all we need is the go-ahead on the Sony side and we can, in less than a business day, turn it on and have it up and working no problem. It'd literally take a few hours to propagate throughout the whole world, so really we're just waiting on the permission to do so."
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Is Real, Coming This September
The sequel to Bandai Namco's remix of the classic Pac-Man formula is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam in September as a digital release.
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 uses the "best aspects" from the previous Championship games and "evolves" them. One such evolution from the previous games is the new ability to "bump" ghosts, as well as "intense giant sized ghost boss battles."
There's also a new adventure mode in which players must chase "fast moving fruit," in addition to battling bosses.
Arguably, the best part of Pac-Man Championship Edition is the ability to turn the tables on the ghostly apparitions who torment Pac-Man to no end. When the hunter becomes the hunted, Pac-Man chows down on huge trains of ghosts in what may be one of gaming's all-time most satisfying mechanics.
Ubisoft CEO Has Seen the “Really Great” Nintendo NX
Yves Guillemot believes the NX will bring casual players back to the industry, based on what he's seen of the upcoming Nintendo console so far.
The Ubisoft CEO was speaking during a quarterly earnings call yesterday. “What we have seen is really great," he explained. "We think having a new machine coming is going to help the industry to continue to grow, and to take lots more casual players back to the industry.”
It's a callback to the successes of the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS, whose popularity was driven by a huge interest from non-core users. The Wii U famously failed to repeat the trick, despite Nintendo's internal predictions that it would match the Wii's 100 million sales milestone.
Pokemon Go Japanese Launch Delayed Because of a McDonald’s Email
Pokemon Go's scheduled Japanese launch today has reportedly been delayed after a McDonalds email leak.
As we reported yesterday, the Japanese launch was rumoured to be taking place today, July 20, with the game's first sponsored Gym locations coming in the form of 3,000 Japanese branches of McDonald's.
However, the leaked internal McDonald's email that formed the basis of that rumour is now seemingly the same reason the launch will not go ahead as planned.
According to Tech Crunch (which originally published the email, and is now presumably enemy no. 1 for millions of budding Pokemon trainers), that news went viral, and Niantic has now decided that the potential wave of new users would lead to server crashes.
8 Pokemon Go Changes We Really Want
Pokemon Go took everyone by storm when it released earlier this month for iPhone and Android. While we've been having just as much fun as anyone with Niantic's free-to-play, AR-driven Pokemon MMO, there are plenty of things we'd love to see added to make the experience even better.
Here are the Pokemon Go changes we want the most, in no particular order.
Pokemon Go doles out a small dose of XP every time you capture a Pokemon on the street, so it’s easy to end up with lots of doubles and triples in your collection (and more Zubats than you can shake a stick at) if you’re trying to level up. Transferring these extra Pokemon to Professor Willow earns you Pokemon Candy, an important currency used to power up and evolve Pokemon into bigger, stronger forms — another important activity if you want to take down a gym.
Major Twitch Streamer Banned Following CS:GO Gambling Accusations
James "PhantomL0rd" Varga has had his Twitch channel closed down as part of the recent Counter Strike: Global Offensive gambling controversy.
According to Eurogamer, Varga faces accusations he rigged CS:GO rolls on a website called CSGO Shuffle. Over the weekend, YouTuber Richard Lewis uncovered Skype logs which suggest Varga part-owns the website, and was fed information by the co-owner while he was betting.
It's a similar story to the recent scandal involving YouTubers ProSyndicate and TmarTn. These two have not been formally accused of cheating, and are continuing to make videos on their respective channels unhindered.
Microsoft Imagines Its Own Games as Pokemon Go Clones
The Donphan in room is simply too large to ignore, and now even Nintendo's rivals are getting in on the Pokemon Go phenomenon.
Case in point: Xbox UK today tweeted an image re-imagining its own games - Forza, Crackdown and Halo - as Pokemon Go clones (on Pokemon Go-lacking Windows Phones no less).
The notional Forza Go, Crackdown Go and Halo Go.
Star Wars Rebels: Season 3’s Big Clone Wars Connection
There was a lot to absorb in the big Star Wars Rebels: Season 3 trailer released this past weekend, between the reveal of Grand Admiral Thrawn making his introduction into canon, Wedge Antilles showing up as an Imperial cadet and Sabine holding the Darksaber. But one other notable moment came when we saw the Rebels crew fighting… a bunch of Battle Droids?
Star Wars Rebels co-creator/executive producer Dave Filoni worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars alongside George Lucas for years before the current animated series and when I spoke to him about the Battle Droids at Star Wars Celebration in London, where the trailer debuted, he noted, “There's several funny things about the Battle Droids. They first is they’re actually way better than the ones I had in Clone Wars."