Monthly Archives: September 2017
Ashes Cricket Coming This November
Melbourne-based sports game studio Big Ant has revealed Ashes Cricket, developed in collaboration with Cricket Australia and promising to be the “most realistic and authentic recreation of the sport ever.”
Following last year’s licensed Big Bash 2016 game, which was mobile-only, Ashes Cricket will be Big Ant’s first licensed cricket game for PC and consoles. It will feature fully licensed stadiums, as well as all the real players from the men’s and women’s Australian and English cricket teams.
Big Ant’s previous cricket games – the popular Don Bradman Cricket and Don Bradman Cricket 17 – do not contain licensed players or stadia and rely instead on their wide range of customisation tools that allow users to create and share real life players, equipment, kits, and cricket grounds. Ashes Cricket will still feature the player, stadium, and logo creators, and we’ll also be able to create competitions, tours, and match types.
Forza Motorsport 7 Offers 4K Ways to Improve on Greatness
For me, Forza Motorsport’s career mode started to get really great with Forza 4. That, in my opinion, is when Forza found the hard-to-quantify “soul” that so many other racing games lack – and, not by coincidence, when Forza made the leap from very good sim racing franchise to world-class. Forza Motorsport 7 again looks like it’s going to impress in the single-player campaign department.
I played the first hour of Forza 7’s solo mode, dubbed the Forza Cup. It opens with three races, each as a different well-known driver, and each race is not only on a different track but set in different weather conditions. It’s a clever way of showing off the depth, breadth, and new features that Motorsport 7 is packing.
It’s a Big Week for Venom, Samurai Jack, and Lois Lane
With dozens of comic books to choose from, let us show you which are the best coming out this week. Take a look at this list spotlighting our favorite comics that we know are money-well-spent and new books that look cool and are backed by some top-tier talent.
Check out our picks, then head to the comments to let us know what you’ll be buying this week!
Writer Gail Simone | Artists Aaron Lopresti, Matt Ryan | Cover Artist Darick Robertson (DC Comics with Dark Horse Comics)
Valve Offers $30,000 in Dota 2 Custom Game Contest
The Winter season is fast approaching, which for Dota 2 fans means wondering if Valve has prepared any special in-game events for the holiday season. It has been years since Valve has put on a winter holiday event for Dota 2, and this year they are relegating responsibility to the community, offering up a $30,000 for a custom game they can use for their 2017 Frostivus event.
Today, in a post on the Dota 2 Blog, Valve announced Frostivus is coming back via a custom game contest. Creators will have until November 20th to create and submit a game that is "heavily themed around the Frostivus season." The game can be either competitive or cooperative, but must be multiplayer and must be an original concept (to avoid re-skinning of older games). Valve recommends playtesting your game with the community prior to submitting, or at least involve the community in development to receive feedback. The creator (or creators) of the winning game will receive $30,000 from Valve and will presumably see their game used officially as a part of the Frostivus 2017 festivities.
Star Trek Discovery: Jason Isaacs Explains His ‘Wartime’ Captain
Star Trek: Discovery’s Jason Isaacs is kind of rare as far as Trek actors go in that he’s an actual fan of the franchise (his fellow castmember Anthony Rapp also has some Trekker street cred, as anyone who follows him on Twitter can attest to). And for Isaacs, who plays the Discovery’s Captain Gabriel Lorca, that doesn’t just mean that he knows the ins and outs of James T. Kirk’s Enterprise, or that he can namedrop episode titles. No, he also understands that, at its best, Gene Roddenberry’s creation has to be meaningful to audiences in a way that reflects what is important in the real world of the here and now.
I spoke to Isaacs recently during a break from shooting Discovery in Toronto, and we dug in on this notion of making Star Trek count for something beyond just entertainment, as well as how Lorca is a wartime captain, what the character thinks of the Klingons, why it’s O.K. to have conflict among Starfleet members, and more. Read on for highlights from our chat…
Incredible Images of Saturn From NASA’s Cassini Probe
The Cassini mission, undertaken as a joint effort by NASA, European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency, concluded with dramatic images of Saturn's rings. The images were shot just before Cassini was destroyed upon entering the atmosphere of Saturn.
The mission started 19 years ago, when a rocket carrying the Cassini payload left Earth. It spent 13 of its 19 years in space orbiting and studying Saturn and its moons.
Check out the images below to see the last images from what was unquestionably a successful mission.
Earlier in the year, NASA was taking submissions to send messages into space. The messages were being sent to Voyager 1, which is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth. The Voyager 1 launched 40 years ago.
The Thrills and Chills of Halloween Horror Nights
Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando kicked off with nine haunted houses, five scare zones, and two live shows this year, delivering all the scares and thrills the attraction has become known for, not to mention a few laughs along the way.
Five of the houses were based on horror movies or shows, including American Horror Story, Ash vs Evil Dead (responsible for the aforementioned laughs), Saw, The Shining, and the Blumhouse Productions flicks Insidious, The Purge, and Sinister. The other four were original concepts, featuring possessed Scarecrows stalking an abandoned farm, Nosferatu-style vampires so horrific it’s like they’re out to restore the reputation Twilight ruined for their kind, a Voodoo Queen and her human-sacrificing minions who have taken up residence in a wrecked steamboat, and warrior demons slaughtering angels in a battle between heaven and hell.
Kingsman Director Shares Vision for Next Superman Film
Matthew Vaughn has confirmed he's been in talks with Warner Bros. to helm the sequel to Man of Steel, and even shared his vision for the film.
Speaking to HeyUGuys at a press event for his upcoming film Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Vaughn confirmed reports from earlier this year that he's been in talks to direct the Superman sequel. After noting that he's currently planning for a third Kingsman movie, he said, "I don't know what I'm going to do next but I have had chats about Superman, I love Superman."
EA Teases Battlefront 2 Galactic Assault Locations
New Battlefront II locations for Galactic Assault will be revealed soon.
Electronic Arts took to Twitter to tease which planets might be featured in the upcoming sequel, asking fans to begin decoding its cryptic message, currently shown as a bunch of question marks.
Galactic Assault is a large-scale team-based multiplayer mode in Battlefront II that spans all three Star Wars trilogies and contains specific objectives tailor-made to each setting. One of the locations, Naboo: Theed, was unveiled at EA Play earlier this year. Walker Assault from the first Battlefront is also confirmed to return as Galactic Assault on Hoth.
Reddit User Reveals Cross-Platform Play Bug in Fortnite
Cross-platform play is something various game companies have experimented with over the past few years, and over the weekend Fortnite players on PS4 and Xbox One got to experience it as the result of a network issue.
The issue was first discovered by Reddit user "PRE_-CISION-_" who noticed something strange while playing Fortnite's Battle Royale mode on his PS4. He was killed by a user named "zCypher Nine" a tag that would be impossible to create on PSN because it contained a space.
Intrigued by his discovery, PRE_-CISION-_ switched over to his Xbox One and did some digging, quickly discovering a user with the same name on Xbox Live, as well as a teammate that zCypher had been playing with. PRE_-CISION-_ documented his evidence in a Reddit post, which contains Twitch clips and screenshots of his discoveries.