Monthly Archives: December 2019

Rise of Skywalker: 34 Best Easter Eggs, Callbacks and References

As the final film in a trilogy of Star Wars trilogies, The Rise of Skywalker is jam-packed with Easter eggs, callbacks and references to the earlier entries in the saga -- as well as a heck of a lot of celebrity cameos. Some of these are front and center and fairly obvious, others a bit more subtle, and plenty more hidden in the margins.

Here are our favorite nods, callbacks, references, and Easter eggs we spotted in Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker. Catch any we missed? Let us know in the comments below! As you probably guessed, full spoilers are in the slideshow below:

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Bloodshot: Valiant Comic-Movie to Be Turned Into a Video Game

Comic book publisher Valiant Entertainment will make games based on some of its comics, including Bloodshot and Ninjak.

As revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, Valiant will partner with game developer Blowfish Studios to create the adaptations. This isn’t Valiant’s first time making games out of its comics either, as the iconic Turok series was based on a series of its own.

According to THR’s report, CEO of DMG Entertainment (Valiant’s parent company) Dan Mintz said they are “thrilled to bring Valiant’s characters back into the video game industry and give fans the opportunity to play as their favorite superheroes.”

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s 10 Biggest WTF Questions

Full spoilers continue below for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so continue reading at your own risk.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is out in theaters, and with it concludes the Skywalker Saga. With the weight of eight movies on its back, J.J. Abrams’ second Star Wars film had a lot of ground to cover and a lot of lore to explore, tweak and… retcon?

To say we have some questions left hanging after we walked out of the theater is the understatement of a lifetime, so the IGN staff put together our 10 biggest WTF questions (and our best attempts at answers), from how exactly all that Rey Palpatine stuff worked, who the heck was piloting the First Order fleet and why lightspeed skipping was even introduced.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Bombs in China With Lowest Opening of the New Trilogy

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is on track for disappointing sales in China, one of the world’s largest movie markets. According to sales figures from preview nights, the final chapter in the trilogy could make less than any Star Wars trilogy movie to date.

THR reports that The Rise of Skywalker earned just $1.6 million on opening night (RMB 11.6 million) which placed the Star Wars movie in a “distant fourth-place.” If those numbers continue, the film is forecasted to make $17.8 million on opening weekend. This would trail The Last Jedi’s $42.5 million and The Force Awakens’ $124 million.

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A Star Wars Episode 10 Could Answer These Lingering Questions

With the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, some fans may be wondering what’s next for the franchise. Now that Episode 9 is out, will there be an Episode 10 that follows up on any of the loose ends we were left with? Read on to hear what Disney and Lucasfilm have planned next for Star Wars.

Will There be a Star Wars: Episode 10?

As things currently stand, there are no plans for Episode 10. The Rise of Skywalker has been billed as the conclusion not only to the Sequel Trilogy that began with Episode 7’s The Force Awakens but to the entire Skywalker Saga, which includes the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy. Those nine movies tell one story about the Skywalker family, and now that it is complete, the powers that be are going to let it sit for the time being. George Lucas originally planned for Star Wars to be nine episodes long, and even though the Sequel Trilogy doesn’t follow his original plan because Disney took over the franchise and told a fresh story, his grand vision for the franchise that he created in 1977 has now been achieved.

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The Rise of Skywalker Fans Are Obsessed With Babu Frik

Warning: Spoilers follow for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned. Seriously. Even if it's just about our lord and savior Babu Frik, they're still spoilers y'all. For more on TROS, here's the Ending Explained.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the conclusion to a saga over 40 years in the making, is definitely a divisive film. One aspect of the movie almost everyone agrees upon, however, is that Babu Frik is a precious, wonderful, special creature that has stollen our hearts and must be protected at all costs.

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The Witcher: What Is Geralt’s Last Wish with Yennefer?

Spoilers for Netflix's The Witcher and Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher novels continue below. For more on The Witcher, check out IGN's Season 1 review and get a full breakdown of who's who, from Renfri to Stregobor.

If you've seen The Witcher episode 5, "Bottled Appetites," then you probably have one big question hanging in the air: What was Geralt's last wish to the djinn? Bad news first: no one actually knows.

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Supermash Review – Flop Jam

It's easy to think of how some of your favorite video game genres might fit together. In the space of just pure imagination, it’s possible to completely deconstruct familiar tropes and wildly throw them against a wall to see what sticks, challenging established norms without consequence. It’s this sort of unhinged creativity that makes Supermash initially hard to ignore. By making it easy to choose two genres and mash them together with randomly determined results, Supermash seems to promise a near endless supply of retro concoctions. But instead of delicately blended results, the games that Supermash does spit out lack any identity, while feeling too similar to one another when they do work and downright frustrating when borderline broken.

The core conceit of Supermash is the ability to create new games from templates of genres. The genres on offer are varied, ranging from a classic NES action adventure in the vein of The Legend of Zelda to the sneaky steps of a Metal Gear-inspired stealth game. Each genre template plucks a core idea from its inspirations and uses that as the core mechanic for your eventual combinations. For example, a JRPG will lend turn-based combat to any game it’s matched with, while a shoot-'em-up will introduce vertically scrolling terrains to whatever other genre you choose to pair with it.

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Supermash is incredibly easy to get going--pick two genres, decide on a desired game length and difficulty, and use mostly single-use collectible cards to make small cosmetic and gameplay changes to the initial result. The rest is handled by Supermash’s procedural generation, which doesn’t always do the best job of masking the limited templates it's clearly working with. Within an hour, I was recognizing the same layouts in both stealth and action adventure mashes, and even routinely seeing the same visual palates used to dress them up in. Seeing the strings behind the puppetry would’ve been disappointing but forgivable, though, if the games themselves were any fun to play.

Most of the creations lack any substantial differences between them. Whether you’re playing a shrunken-down Zelda-like dungeon or jumping through a Mario-inspired platformer, you’re generally doing one of three things: finding a specific character, retrieving a specific item, or killing a certain number of a specific enemy, all within a short timeframe. These don’t change with the genres you’re putting together, which often makes genres meant to be less linear pointless. Genres like JRPGs or metroidvanias are much more than just their styles of combat or collectible upgrades, but Supermash never gives you levels or goals that reflect this. And even when the objectives do coalesce with the main genre influence, they’re just unsatisfying to play. Platforming feels floaty and imprecise, dungeon crawling becomes nothing more than a repetitive checklist, and shoot-'em-ups never capture the exhilaration of their inspirations.

Randomly assigned modifiers called "glitches" can somewhat differentiate one mash from the next, but more often than not, they result in more game-breaking issues. A glitch can, for example, spawn a new enemy every time you attack, or conversely heal you every time you take damage. These serve to either eliminate any challenge or increase it to frustrating levels, regardless of the difficulty setting you assign prior to making the game. Others are more frustrating, though. I had a glitch that moved me in a random direction for a few seconds after each attack, which made simple movement a chore. It forced me to just forgo combat entirely while navigating a dungeon, further restricting the already limited actions I had. There’s no way to turn these randomly assigned glitches off either, so when you’re dealt a bad hand, you just have to restart and hope for a better result next time.

That isn’t to say there aren’t some combinations that aren’t at least amusing. Playing a 2D stealth game with the turn-based combat of classic Final Fantasy games doesn’t work mechanically (having to go into an action menu to perform a stealth kill is ridiculous), but it does remind you of how good each of the individual parts are in other games. But Supermash’s multitude of little games never come close to reaching the entertaining heights of the genres they attempt to recreate, which makes it difficult to want to test the abilities of its random generation further after your initial attempts.

Encompassing all of this experimentation is a thin story about three friends trying to keep their video game retail store open, with the crew hoping to package and sell some of these new creations to spark some interest. Story objectives set some parameters for your next mashup, indicating what genres and modifiers to use, without really steering you towards any great outcomes. There’s an additional journal to work through with objectives tied to each genre you have at your disposal, each connecting small but throwaway stories within them.

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Progressing this journal is incredibly frustrating, though, since the items required for completion are populated into your generated levels at random. You’re forced to repeatedly mash together the same genres in the hopes of finally getting one that has what you need, which only serves to expose the repetitive nature of them even faster. Each chapter culminates with a boss fight specific to the genre you’re completing, and despite being some of the only handcrafted bits of retro action in Supermash, they fail to be any more exciting than the random contraptions you put together. Most are one-note and devoid of challenge, only requiring repetitive attacks and simple movements to overcome. They’re not worth the time you need to invest to unlock them.

It’ll be rare for you to want to save any of the creations Supermash lets you construct, which is indicative of how shallow and unsatisfying they all are at their core. In a bid to try and do so many things right, Supermash forgets the fundamentals of all the genres it tries to encompass, while also overreaching by trying to make them all work in some way together. None of Supermash’s creations feel close to replicating the joy of their inspirations, and instead serve as reminders that there are far more focused and polished attempts at each individual one that will reward your time better. There’s no doubting the imaginative idea at Supermash’s core, but it ends up choking on its ambition.

Supermash Review – Flop Jam

It's easy to think of how some of your favorite video game genres might fit together. In the space of just pure imagination, it’s possible to completely deconstruct familiar tropes and wildly throw them against a wall to see what sticks, challenging established norms without consequence. It’s this sort of unhinged creativity that makes Supermash initially hard to ignore. By making it easy to choose two genres and mash them together with randomly determined results, Supermash seems to promise a near endless supply of retro concoctions. But instead of delicately blended results, the games that Supermash does spit out lack any identity, while feeling too similar to one another when they do work and downright frustrating when borderline broken.

The core conceit of Supermash is the ability to create new games from templates of genres. The genres on offer are varied, ranging from a classic NES action adventure in the vein of The Legend of Zelda to the sneaky steps of a Metal Gear-inspired stealth game. Each genre template plucks a core idea from its inspirations and uses that as the core mechanic for your eventual combinations. For example, a JRPG will lend turn-based combat to any game it’s matched with, while a shoot-'em-up will introduce vertically scrolling terrains to whatever other genre you choose to pair with it.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

Supermash is incredibly easy to get going--pick two genres, decide on a desired game length and difficulty, and use mostly single-use collectible cards to make small cosmetic and gameplay changes to the initial result. The rest is handled by Supermash’s procedural generation, which doesn’t always do the best job of masking the limited templates it's clearly working with. Within an hour, I was recognizing the same layouts in both stealth and action adventure mashes, and even routinely seeing the same visual palates used to dress them up in. Seeing the strings behind the puppetry would’ve been disappointing but forgivable, though, if the games themselves were any fun to play.

Most of the creations lack any substantial differences between them. Whether you’re playing a shrunken-down Zelda-like dungeon or jumping through a Mario-inspired platformer, you’re generally doing one of three things: finding a specific character, retrieving a specific item, or killing a certain number of a specific enemy, all within a short timeframe. These don’t change with the genres you’re putting together, which often makes genres meant to be less linear pointless. Genres like JRPGs or metroidvanias are much more than just their styles of combat or collectible upgrades, but Supermash never gives you levels or goals that reflect this. And even when the objectives do coalesce with the main genre influence, they’re just unsatisfying to play. Platforming feels floaty and imprecise, dungeon crawling becomes nothing more than a repetitive checklist, and shoot-'em-ups never capture the exhilaration of their inspirations.

Randomly assigned modifiers called "glitches" can somewhat differentiate one mash from the next, but more often than not, they result in more game-breaking issues. A glitch can, for example, spawn a new enemy every time you attack, or conversely heal you every time you take damage. These serve to either eliminate any challenge or increase it to frustrating levels, regardless of the difficulty setting you assign prior to making the game. Others are more frustrating, though. I had a glitch that moved me in a random direction for a few seconds after each attack, which made simple movement a chore. It forced me to just forgo combat entirely while navigating a dungeon, further restricting the already limited actions I had. There’s no way to turn these randomly assigned glitches off either, so when you’re dealt a bad hand, you just have to restart and hope for a better result next time.

That isn’t to say there aren’t some combinations that aren’t at least amusing. Playing a 2D stealth game with the turn-based combat of classic Final Fantasy games doesn’t work mechanically (having to go into an action menu to perform a stealth kill is ridiculous), but it does remind you of how good each of the individual parts are in other games. But Supermash’s multitude of little games never come close to reaching the entertaining heights of the genres they attempt to recreate, which makes it difficult to want to test the abilities of its random generation further after your initial attempts.

Encompassing all of this experimentation is a thin story about three friends trying to keep their video game retail store open, with the crew hoping to package and sell some of these new creations to spark some interest. Story objectives set some parameters for your next mashup, indicating what genres and modifiers to use, without really steering you towards any great outcomes. There’s an additional journal to work through with objectives tied to each genre you have at your disposal, each connecting small but throwaway stories within them.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

Progressing this journal is incredibly frustrating, though, since the items required for completion are populated into your generated levels at random. You’re forced to repeatedly mash together the same genres in the hopes of finally getting one that has what you need, which only serves to expose the repetitive nature of them even faster. Each chapter culminates with a boss fight specific to the genre you’re completing, and despite being some of the only handcrafted bits of retro action in Supermash, they fail to be any more exciting than the random contraptions you put together. Most are one-note and devoid of challenge, only requiring repetitive attacks and simple movements to overcome. They’re not worth the time you need to invest to unlock them.

It’ll be rare for you to want to save any of the creations Supermash lets you construct, which is indicative of how shallow and unsatisfying they all are at their core. In a bid to try and do so many things right, Supermash forgets the fundamentals of all the genres it tries to encompass, while also overreaching by trying to make them all work in some way together. None of Supermash’s creations feel close to replicating the joy of their inspirations, and instead serve as reminders that there are far more focused and polished attempts at each individual one that will reward your time better. There’s no doubting the imaginative idea at Supermash’s core, but it ends up choking on its ambition.

Unannounced Ubisoft Project Canceled

Ubisoft Montreal graphics programmer Louis de Carufel tweeted today that a project they’ve been working on for the past three years has been canceled. Luckily, this has not resulted in any layoffs at the company.

“I just learned that the project I’ve been working on for the past 3 years has been canceled,” de Carufel tweeted this morning. “This is tough news because I’ve been working with all these people for around 7 years, during which we have shipped both Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2.”

De Carufel’s game which was canceled was never named, and according to their Linkedin profile, they’ve been working on an “Unannounced Game” for current-gen consoles since 2016. De Carufel’s previous credits also include Splinter Cell: Conviction and Shaun White Skateboarding.

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