Monthly Archives: June 2019
Adult Swim’s Final Space Could Fill the Rick and Morty Void in Your Life
Final Space was a bit of an oddity when it premiered on TBS last year. The network is not known for their original animated offerings, and its candy-coated visuals may have kept the door closed on older viewers who didn’t want to spend time with a show that looked like it was for kids.
Why then was late-night legend Conan O’Brien championing the show, attaching himself to it as executive producer? Why were science-fiction and comedy mainstays like David Tennant, Fred Armisen, and Ron Perlman lending their voices to its characters? (Alan Tudyk, Christopher Judge, Claudia Black, and Jane Lynch are all joining the voice cast in the second season.) Just like its mascot Mooncake, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, and series creator Olan Rogers is focusing on making that clear in Season 2.
NBA 2K19 Community Angered by Seemingly Unskippable Ads
NBA 2K19 players are complaining that unskippable ads are surfacing in the basketball sim game across multiple platforms.
In a Reddit thread created Saturday, Reddit user afilathiel posted a screenshot of a loading screen from NBA 2K, along with a caption reading “Unskippable ads in a 60$ (sic) game,
2K.”
NBA 2K19 Community Angered by Seemingly Unskippable Ads
NBA 2K19 players are complaining that unskippable ads are surfacing in the basketball sim game across multiple platforms.
In a Reddit thread created Saturday, Reddit user afilathiel posted a screenshot of a loading screen from NBA 2K, along with a caption reading “Unskippable ads in a 60$ (sic) game,
2K.”
Every Pixar Movie’s Opening Weekend Box Office
(This is an update to a Pixar box office article originally published in 2017.)
Toy Story 4 opened to an estimated $118 million at the North American box office, easily debuting at No. 1. While that amount is well below industry expectations for the film -- which had been widely pegged as opening with as much as $140 million -- it’s still the biggest opening weekend ever in the Toy Story franchise. It’s also the third biggest opening weekend (domestically) for a Pixar release.
Last year’s Incredibles 2 remains the highest-grossing opening weekend for a Pixar movie, earning $182.7 million when it bowed in June 2018. That’s followed by 2016’s Finding Dory with $135.1 million.
A New Ape Escape Game May be on the Way
While the world waits for King Kong to eventually get around to fighting Godzilla, another brand of apes are quietly waiting for their moment to shine once again. A new Ape Escape game may be in the works, if some suspicious tweets are to be believed.
A relatively new Twitter account by the name of @piposaru20th tweeted out this image, along with the translated caption: “Piposar (20 years since then. I've been running around, but i wonder if there's anyone chasing me anymore.” The image shows a titular ape from the Ape Escape franchise peeking around a tree.
Jeff Goldblum Admits He’s Never Played a Video Game in His Life
Mega-star and internet darling Jeff Goldblum has admitted he's never played a video game in his entire life.
Page Six reports it was during a Cannes Lions talk on Thursday when Goldblum stated to the crowd that he's never actually played a video game despite being in them.
“I know nothing about gaming even though I’ve been the voices for, what was it called? ‘Call of Duty.’ ‘Black Ops,’ I think,” said Goldblum to the crowd.
“We were killing zombies, I think. ‘Jurassic Park,’ I did that thing where I play my character Ian Malcolm … so I’m involved in that, but I’ve never in fact played a video game in my life.”
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Steam Adds LGBTQ+ Tag for Games
As originally reported by Kotaku, Steam has finally implemented an “LGBTQ+” tag for games on its platform after developers and players drew enough attention to the issue.
Steam’s game discoverability and recommendation algorithm is largely determined by their tag system. If you go to the page for, say, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, you’ll see tags like “Adventure,” “Lara Croft,” or “Female Protagonist.” Mouse over one of these and you’ll get taken to a hub page of sorts that shows you other similarly defined games. Historically, it’s been difficult for smaller studios to get their game noticed among the sea of possible choices, especially if their tags didn’t align with certain genres. Steam users have been able to make custom tags for a few years now, but Steam doesn’t use any of those for its algorithms, so they’re effectively useless. On top of all that, Steam removed custom tags from its hub functionality, essentially leaving developers who custom-tagged their own games as “LGBTQ+” in the dark.
30 Years Later, Michael Keaton’s Batman Is Still the Best
It's been 30 years since Tim Burton's Batman hit theaters and showed a world a wholly different vision of the Caped Crusader than the one made famous by Adam West. The 1989 Batman's legacy is hard to overstate. The film's release and the ensuing "Batmania" served as a taste of things to come for our superhero movie-obsessed culture. The tone, aesthetic and music directly paved the way for Batman: The Animated Series. But there's one thing a lot of moviegoers seem to forget. As much as Jack Nicholson's Joker tended to dominate the conversation then and now, Michael Keaton is the true unsung hero of Batman. 30 years later, his is still the best live-action Batman of them all.
It's understandable why Nicholson's Joker has always hogged the spotlight. He was the A-List talent Warner Bros. needed to sell moviegoers dubious about a cinematic reboot handled by the director and star of Beetlejuice. In fact, the studio was so desperate to land Nicholson they wound up agreeing to one of the most ridiculously lucrative contracts of all time. And by his very nature, the flamboyant, scenery-chewing Joker is always going to steal the show from a grumpy, soft-spoken man in a black costume.