Monthly Archives: September 2019

The Russos on Why the Marvel-Sony Spider-Man Split Didn’t Surprise Them

Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo have opened up about the news that Spider-Man would be leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and both have said they aren't too surprised that it happened considering how hard it was to get him in there in the first place.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, the Russo brothers talked about how "extremely passionate" they were about bringing Tom Holland's Spider-Man in to the MCU.

“We were extremely passionate about it. This is something we really wanted to happen, and fought a long time internally at Marvel to make it happen,” Anthony Russo said.

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Celeste: Chapter 9 Free DLC Being Released This Month

Celeste, One of the best platformers of this generation, will be getting its Chapter 9: Farewell free DLC in just a few days.

A blog post on developer Extremely OK Games' website explains Celeste will be sent off with this free chapter that will be available to download for everyone who owns the game. This Chapter 9: Farewell DLC will be available on all platforms on September 9, though the Xbox One version may see a slight delay.

Chapter 9: Farewell will add over 100 new levels to the game, bringing Celeste to over 800 levels in total. These levels also come with new music and mechanics and can be unlocked by completing Chapter 8.

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Kojima Says Death Stranding Has ‘Very Easy Mode’ for ‘Movie Fans’

Hideo Kojima has revealed that Death Stranding will have a "Very Easy Mode" that is geared towards "movie fans," as there may be those who will play Death Stranding who may not usually play games but are drawn towards it due to its celebrity cast.

@Kaizerkunkun on Twitter, who also happens to be Hideo Kojima's personal assistant, announced that she finished a test play of Death Stranding and picked Very Easy Mode, which is "for ppl who usually don't play game,movie fans or RPG fans.

Normal or Hard Mode is for action game fans."

Kojima quote tweeted the tweet and said "Normally there’s only Easy Mode, but we added Very Easy Mode for movie fans since we have real actors like Norman, Mads, Lea starred in. Even Yano-san who never completed the 1st stage of PAC-MAN, was able to complete the game on Very Easy Mode."

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DC’s Birds of Prey Trailer Will Only Show in Theaters Ahead of IT Chapter Two

DC fans planning on seeing IT Chapter Two in theaters are in for a special treat. As reported by Variety, WB is including a new teaser trailer for Birds of Prey that won't be released online.

If you're not planning on seeing IT (or just have a deep-rooted fear of clowns), we have a breakdown of what's included in the new footage.

Appropriately, the teaser begins with a spoof of IT's opening sequence, featuring the same sinister music and the WB and DC logos being engulfed in a mass of red balloons. A silhouetted figure strolls through the balloons and smashes several with a hammer. But rather than Pennywise, it's Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, who says "I'm so f***ing over clowns."

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Sony Boss Says ‘Door Is Closed’ on Spider-Man Deal, For Now

Another nail has been driven into the coffin of the Sony-Disney Spider-Man deal by Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra.

“For the moment, the door is closed,” Vinciquerra said at Variety‘s Entertainment & Technology summit, as reported by Variety.

That said, Vinciquerra may have implied the door may one day open again when he added that “it’s a long life.”

Despite the split, Vinciquerra said there is “no ill will” between Sony and Marvel/Disney over the end of the Spider-Man deal.

Vinciquerra admitted the fan backlash to the split has made it “an interesting couple of weeks” for Sony.

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Nintendo Teases ‘New Experience’ for Nintendo Switch

Nintendo has teased a "new experience for the Nintendo Switch" that very much looks like a potential successor of sorts to Wii Fit.

Nintendo released a short video that showed Switch owners from around the world playing with a ring and a leg strap that Joy-Con can fit in to be able to track various body movements.

The video showed off various people physically acting out activities that resemble shooting a bow and arrow (Link's Crossbow Training, anyone?!), squeezing the ring, running in place while holding the ring, doing yoga, dancing, lifting weights, doing sit-ups, driving, and much more.

Nintendo promises that we will find out more about this new experience on September 12, although no time or further details were given.

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Blair Witch (Game) Review – Prying Eyes

The woods are easy to be scared of. It's difficult to reorient yourself if you get lost, with each passing moment bringing night closer and making an already unsettling wrong turn seem life-threatening. In Blair Witch, the woods are a character you have to fight against at every turn. Each cracking branch underneath your feet will startle you, every bit of movement in the distance trying to trick your senses into believing something is there. At its best, Blair Witch does a lot with very little to instill a strong sense of paranoia and dread, but it struggles to maintain that atmosphere throughout.

You play as Ellis, a former police officer that takes it upon himself to head into the infamous Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate yet another child disappearance during 1996. Ellis is troubled; he suffers frequent panic attacks that allude to post-traumatic stress from his time in the military and the police force, and he's pushed away everyone who cares for him as a result. Ellis is the perfect candidate for the persuasions of Black Hills Forest, making his ventures deeper into the woods more perilous with each passing second.

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To keep you from succumbing to stress and anxiety, you have Bullet--a gorgeous and loyal police dog given to you by your former sheriff–to keep you on track. Sticking close to Bullet keeps you calm and also lets you follow his helpful hints. Bullet will sniff out clues for you to inspect and trails for you to follow, making the labyrinthine forest easier to navigate. Bullet is also great at alerting you to imminent dangers nearby, barking at enemies lurking in the trees and unseen foes buried in a thick fog. In a way, Bullet's job is to escort you throughout most of Blair Witch's runtime, and it's truly disconcerting when he's not by your side.

Ellis' vivid and violent panic attacks are just one side effect of Bullet's absence, letting the horrors of Black Hills flood his reality and warp it. The woods themselves twist and turn, with trees overlapping each other to trap you in looping pathways or rearrange your understanding of where landmarks are. It makes it difficult to ever feel safe in any spot, since you don't know where to run should you need to. The general, overwhelming silence of the woods is undercut delicately with reverberating environmental sounds that heighten your sensory tension, making you jump at every little noise. Blair Witch achieves its most tense moments when seemingly nothing is happening at all, letting your imagination get the better of you just as Ellis begins to question his own sanity.

This doesn't persist all the way through, and it's Blair Witch's more surreal elements that don't quite stick. There are two types of enemies: those that burst into dust when you shine your flashlight on them, and those that you can't kill at all and have to avoid instead. When Bullet alerts you to enemies ahead, you can simply shine the light in the direction he's barking if they're killable; if they're immune, you can easily spot them as red outlines on your camcorder and sneak past them with little trouble. Either approach doesn't require much thought and neither of these encounters are that suspenseful, going so far as to remove you from the tension of the environment around you.

There's also the occasional puzzle as you venture through the woods, and although they are less intrusive to the overall atmosphere, they're hardly any more inventive than the enemies. The main puzzle mechanic works with your camcorder and red-labelled tapes, which in tandem let you manipulate parts of the environment around you. A massive log might be blocking your path ahead, but you're able to move it by rewinding a tape shot from the same location backwards a few seconds and continuing on your way. A locked door can be overcome in the same way, so long as you keep the tape associated with it paused at a point where the door stands open. The idea of manipulating time to your advantage is clever, but the solutions are so obvious that it's never satisfying to solve the puzzles they're attached to.

No Caption Provided
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So many of these enemy encounters and puzzles disrupt the flow of navigating the eerie woods that they get in the way of its overall effect, as well as the story's pacing. Blair Witch doesn't tell a complex tale, and its twists are drawn out over such a long time that it's easy to see them coming way before they have any chance to land impactfully. Each narrative thread comes to a head in the final chapters, where the subtlety of the woods is replaced with over-the-top surrealism that attempts to quickly wrangle all the loose ends thrown at you up to this point. Their resolutions are disappointingly predictable, making the promise of "your actions are being watched" at the beginning of the game an empty one.

There are additional endings to see if you follow some incredibly strict rules on subsequent playthroughs, but the one you're probably going to see on your first run-through is likely the one that will stick with you. You're only given one big choice to make that is both obvious and has a tangible impact on one facet of the ending you get. The rest of the choices are almost impossible to follow without looking up what they are first, and even then, they seem more like mundane challenges than intelligent pivots for the story to make based on your actions. The lack of clarity in the choices makes subsequent playthroughs far less inviting, especially when the faint spark of new puzzles and unfamiliar scares is no longer there to entertain you.

For all the gripping tension that its setting instills, Blair Witch can't maintain its initially frightening atmosphere and ends up losing it entirely by its conclusion. It doesn't capture the paranoid horror of its namesake in the same way, partly due to wonky enemy encounters that tread on the ambiguity of its central antagonist and one-note puzzle-solving that rips you out of its meticulously crafted atmosphere. While it's still unnerving to have the silence of empty woods pierced by the alerted barks of your canine companion, Blair Witch can't recapture its tense opening moments and carry them through to a strong and captivating finale.

Blair Witch (Game) Review – Prying Eyes

The woods are easy to be scared of. It's difficult to reorient yourself if you get lost, with each passing moment bringing night closer and making an already unsettling wrong turn seem life-threatening. In Blair Witch, the woods are a character you have to fight against at every turn. Each cracking branch underneath your feet will startle you, every bit of movement in the distance trying to trick your senses into believing something is there. At its best, Blair Witch does a lot with very little to instill a strong sense of paranoia and dread, but it struggles to maintain that atmosphere throughout.

You play as Ellis, a former police officer that takes it upon himself to head into the infamous Black Hills Forest in Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate yet another child disappearance during 1996. Ellis is troubled; he suffers frequent panic attacks that allude to post-traumatic stress from his time in the military and the police force, and he's pushed away everyone who cares for him as a result. Ellis is the perfect candidate for the persuasions of Black Hills Forest, making his ventures deeper into the woods more perilous with each passing second.

Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8

To keep you from succumbing to stress and anxiety, you have Bullet--a gorgeous and loyal police dog given to you by your former sheriff–to keep you on track. Sticking close to Bullet keeps you calm and also lets you follow his helpful hints. Bullet will sniff out clues for you to inspect and trails for you to follow, making the labyrinthine forest easier to navigate. Bullet is also great at alerting you to imminent dangers nearby, barking at enemies lurking in the trees and unseen foes buried in a thick fog. In a way, Bullet's job is to escort you throughout most of Blair Witch's runtime, and it's truly disconcerting when he's not by your side.

Ellis' vivid and violent panic attacks are just one side effect of Bullet's absence, letting the horrors of Black Hills flood his reality and warp it. The woods themselves twist and turn, with trees overlapping each other to trap you in looping pathways or rearrange your understanding of where landmarks are. It makes it difficult to ever feel safe in any spot, since you don't know where to run should you need to. The general, overwhelming silence of the woods is undercut delicately with reverberating environmental sounds that heighten your sensory tension, making you jump at every little noise. Blair Witch achieves its most tense moments when seemingly nothing is happening at all, letting your imagination get the better of you just as Ellis begins to question his own sanity.

This doesn't persist all the way through, and it's Blair Witch's more surreal elements that don't quite stick. There are two types of enemies: those that burst into dust when you shine your flashlight on them, and those that you can't kill at all and have to avoid instead. When Bullet alerts you to enemies ahead, you can simply shine the light in the direction he's barking if they're killable; if they're immune, you can easily spot them as red outlines on your camcorder and sneak past them with little trouble. Either approach doesn't require much thought and neither of these encounters are that suspenseful, going so far as to remove you from the tension of the environment around you.

There's also the occasional puzzle as you venture through the woods, and although they are less intrusive to the overall atmosphere, they're hardly any more inventive than the enemies. The main puzzle mechanic works with your camcorder and red-labelled tapes, which in tandem let you manipulate parts of the environment around you. A massive log might be blocking your path ahead, but you're able to move it by rewinding a tape shot from the same location backwards a few seconds and continuing on your way. A locked door can be overcome in the same way, so long as you keep the tape associated with it paused at a point where the door stands open. The idea of manipulating time to your advantage is clever, but the solutions are so obvious that it's never satisfying to solve the puzzles they're attached to.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6

So many of these enemy encounters and puzzles disrupt the flow of navigating the eerie woods that they get in the way of its overall effect, as well as the story's pacing. Blair Witch doesn't tell a complex tale, and its twists are drawn out over such a long time that it's easy to see them coming way before they have any chance to land impactfully. Each narrative thread comes to a head in the final chapters, where the subtlety of the woods is replaced with over-the-top surrealism that attempts to quickly wrangle all the loose ends thrown at you up to this point. Their resolutions are disappointingly predictable, making the promise of "your actions are being watched" at the beginning of the game an empty one.

There are additional endings to see if you follow some incredibly strict rules on subsequent playthroughs, but the one you're probably going to see on your first run-through is likely the one that will stick with you. You're only given one big choice to make that is both obvious and has a tangible impact on one facet of the ending you get. The rest of the choices are almost impossible to follow without looking up what they are first, and even then, they seem more like mundane challenges than intelligent pivots for the story to make based on your actions. The lack of clarity in the choices makes subsequent playthroughs far less inviting, especially when the faint spark of new puzzles and unfamiliar scares is no longer there to entertain you.

For all the gripping tension that its setting instills, Blair Witch can't maintain its initially frightening atmosphere and ends up losing it entirely by its conclusion. It doesn't capture the paranoid horror of its namesake in the same way, partly due to wonky enemy encounters that tread on the ambiguity of its central antagonist and one-note puzzle-solving that rips you out of its meticulously crafted atmosphere. While it's still unnerving to have the silence of empty woods pierced by the alerted barks of your canine companion, Blair Witch can't recapture its tense opening moments and carry them through to a strong and captivating finale.

Ranking Marvel’s Avengers by How Fun They Are to Play (in the Demo)

Finally having had a chance to play Marvel’s Avengers — specifically it’s tutorial level now widely available to be watched — I think I have a much better understanding of the experience that awaits in the full release next year. That, in part, came from hearing more about how character progression works for Marvel's Avengers, but also in actually playing as each of Earth’s mightiest heroes — and finding them all, generally, to be quite fun to play. Crystal Dynamics has taken on the ambitious attack of making essentially five action games in one, working to make a group of iconic heroes all unique and fun to play as if they were the stars of their own games.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Campaign and Special Ops Premieres Dated

Activision and Infinity Ward have announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Road to Launch, a scheduled list of events leading up to release that includes Betas and a deeper look into Crossplay, Campaign, and Special Ops.

Announced by Call of Duty on Twitter, Road to Launch begins next week with the PlayStation Exclusive Open Beta. The full schedule of events are as follows;

  • September 12-16: PlayStation Exclusive Open Beta Weekend
  • Week of September 16: Crossplay Details
  • September 19-23: Crossplay Open Beta
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