Monthly Archives: May 2016
Outlander Stars Promise ‘Upsetting’ Fallout to Jamie’s Big Betrayal
Full spoilers for Outlander's Season 2 episode "Best Laid Schemes..." continue below.
With Jamie (Sam Heughan) arrested and Claire (Caitriona Balfe) beginning to lose her baby, the Frasers are in about has bad a situation as they've ever been.
But while their love for one another has always been the thing that bound them together, Jamie breaking his promise to Claire about dueling Black Jack Randall (Tobias Menzies) -- and her subsequently starting to miscarry their child -- is a pretty big hurdle to overcome.
DC Artist Darwyn Cooke Passes Away at 53
Artist/animator Darwyn Cooke has passed at the age of 53, following a battle with cancer.
Cooke's family confirmed his passing via a post on his personal website, saying, We regret to inform you that Darwyn lost his battle with cancer early this morning at 1:30 AM ET. We read all of your messages of support to him throughout the day yesterday. He was filled with your love and surrounded by friends and family at his home in Florida."
NBC Orders The Blacklist: Redemption Spinoff
NBC's spinoff project for The Blacklist has been ordered to series and received and official title.
According to Deadline, the show—starring Famke Janssen—will be called The Blacklist: Redemption and serve as the second new spinoff series that NBC will debut next season, joining Chicago Justice.
Ryan Eggold as Tom Keen and Famke Jannsen as Susan "Scottie" Halsted in The Blacklist: Redemption.
NASA’s Plans Include Force Fields and Cryogenic Chambers
The US National Aeronautical and Space Administration is looking to make non-fiction out of some very sci-fi concepts. The organization has selected 8 proposals with "the potential to transform future aerospace missions," including manned missions to Mars.
Its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC Program, allows "proposers to further develop concepts funded by NASA." Proposals can be worth up to $500,000 USD after demonstrating "initial feasibility and benefit."
Among the proposals are an "interplanetary habitat configured to induce deep sleep" for long-term missions such as a Mars trip, the "Magnetoshell," which utilizes magnetized plasma to impede "atmospheric flow" and help slow high-velocity spacecraft, and others, such as the construction of a growable space habitat with equivalent Earth gravity.
Soft Body Review
Soft Body is a playable kaleidoscope, an ever-changing symphony of motion, color, and sound. It’s a mixture of different genres, combining the best aspects of bullet hell games, puzzle games, and Snake to create a challenging and mesmerizing experience.
You control two snakes that either move in unison or independently, dependent on the given level. The control inputs typically only require the left and right analog sticks. Using them, you guide snakes around a geometric landscape filled with angular enemies that emit waves of projectiles. You have to complete a collection of small objectives in order to beat each level, which usually involves moving a small ball or circular object around a maze, “painting” borders by touching or merely coming close enough to them, and destroying nearby enemies. The objectives remain simple and straightforward throughout, but the layout and challenges vastly differ from puzzle to puzzle. Despite their variance, none of the puzzles stray too far from Soft Body’s established rule set, and each design features the similar visual stylings and effects while also introducing new colors and contrasts.
While minimal, Soft Body’s controls can be disorienting, particularly when you have to control each snake independently. It is a game of trial and error, requiring precision and careful navigation. In its worst moments, some puzzles devolve into a series objectives with no apparent connective tissue, including levels with two maze-like objectives located at opposite corners of the screen and divided by a large barrier that needs to be “painted” in order to complete the level. The void in between each of these objectives was basically a minefield of projectiles and enemies that felt added in for sheer navigational challenge alone and gradually grew more tiresome. These moments are rare, but their design still comes across as haphazard when compared to more organized levels whose puzzles follow a more logical flow.
Tiny visual and aural flourishes breathe life into Soft Body's two-dimensional stages. When the snakes under your control come into contact with objects, particle effects spout onto the screen. When you complete your objectives, decorative background shapes spin and shake in excitement. These elements are enhanced by Soft Body's sound design, which is just as minimalist yet striking as the visuals, adding impact to each interaction between snakes and their environment. Every touch, hit, or movement around borders generates electronic chirps, and both the sights and sounds blend together to create a captivating, Zen-like experience.
Visual and aural flourishes breathe life into Soft Body's two-dimensional stages.
For such a bizarre, abstract game, Soft Body has a consistent visual language that communicates when and how enemies will act. Your foes take the forms of circles, squares, and triangles, each of which has a specific animation telegraphing its upcoming attacks. One circular “turret” latches its aim onto your snake and follows its movement for several seconds before the line representing its aim solidifies and the turret fires a projectile. Squares have a core that slowly swells toward the borders of the full shape, releasing a wave of deadly, circular projectiles once it reaches its edges. These enemies never break from Soft Body’s established rule set and language, making it consistent to solve despite its ever-changing presentation.
Experimentation and identifying the reactions of the environment are essential to solving Soft Body’s puzzles, since new elements are sprinkled in throughout, often without any explanation. In one level, I saw a triangular border surrounding an enemy inside. Despite not having seen triangles in the game prior to that point, I swam up alongside it and discovered I could paint it to be my color. This speaks to the strength of a well-designed puzzle game: when the rules are consistent and the challenge is set up around that core rule set, solving puzzles remains satisfying in the long run. Soft Body embraces that concept while refusing to limit itself to being one predictable string of levels.
Soft Body is captivating. It’s the fish tank to my inner cat, a fascinating display of methodical movement, clever sound, and unusually satisfying puzzle solving. It’s a minimalist, meditative arcade throwback whose simplicity sometimes backfires into chaotic design, but more frequently delivers challenging and beautiful puzzles.
Tastee: Lethal Tactics Review
In Tastee: Lethal Tactics, your plan is more important than the action that follows. It's a game of bets and bluffs, and if you telegraph your next move, you'll likely lose. Tastee doesn't always communicate its ideas effectively, and there are frustrating barriers to hurdle, but there's a tense, layered, turn-based strategy game waiting on the other side.
It all revolves around simultaneous turn-based combat in two phases. In the planning stage, you direct the stance, movement, vision cones, and attacks of four individual mercenaries fighting your opponents. In the action phase, you watch your plan unfold--all while the enemy does the same.
This forces you to think on several levels as you extract briefcases of money, defend control points, and eliminate enemy soldiers from an overhead view. You not only have to plan out your own attacks--you also need to consider the route your opponent might have in mind. So while your sniper may have one doorway covered, and your grenadier is ready to move around the corner of that building to get in position, this could all fall apart in the action phase if your opponent anticipated it. The resulting clashes are whiteknuckled displays of who saw the bigger picture in the planning phase.
This structure isn't new--Tastee borrows from games such as Frozen Synapse and Laser Defense Squad, which use similar phase-based combat systems that emphasize careful planning over reactionary tactics. As was the case in those titles, you spend most of your time in the planning stage, your squad members frozen in place, trying to think two steps ahead of the opponent. Facing another human exacerbates the tension of the missions. Tastee's AI performs well, but matches become cutthroat poker games when you can relate to, and exploit, another player's perspective.
Considering the numerous mechanical layers at play, and the nuance they display on each level, there's a steep learning curve to Tastee's combat. In fact, its tutorial only teaches the bare fundamentals of movement, aiming, and attacking before thrusting you onto the battlefield, either in multiplayer or the single-player missions. Because of Tastee's unforgiving difficulty--characters can die from only one bullet--most of your learning is based on trial and error. I spent almost two hours before I completed a mission without any casualties.
The 30 single-player missions focus loosely on a band of 12 misfit mercenaries fighting against the drug cartels in a desert wasteland. The story is sparse and and repetitive, and serves mainly to introduce new characters, complete with unique abilities to use on subsequent missions: flashbangs, door breaches, ricochet grenades, and enhanced sniper rifles, to name a few. They're some of the game's best aspects, as they create stronger attachments to their respective owners.
The loss of each soldier isn't permanent, but reverberates throughout the rest of your mission --losing a mercenary means losing a useful superpower, as it were. Augustus' Scout ability, for instance, lets you spot nearby enemies through the fog of war. If you can deduce which direction a soldier is running, and where he'll emerge from behind cover, you can set a sniper's sights on that exact spot. These abilities seem simple at first, but reveal deeper uses as you learn them.
There are numerous mechanical layers at play at any one moment.
Tastee's stellar map design is the catalyst for all of this planning and subsequent action. Missions span a variety of sandswept urban locales, from construction yards to abandoned shanty towns. Concrete walls funnel soldiers through choke points, wooden boards create complex sightlines, and low barriers provide opportunities for cover. The environments present a fine attention to detail, both in how they force your squad into precarious scenarios and how they allow you to master your surroundings. There's a sadistic thrill to circling your opponent's squad, eliminating them one by one, and setting up ambushes to stop their attempts at escape.
Maps can become something of a conundrum, however. Tastee's bigger arenas play host to numerous smaller encounters and nuanced skirmishes, lending a sense of cohesion to the separate huts, garages, and gas stations. The problem is, these bigger maps add to the confusion that sometimes rears its head in Tastee.
During the action phase, it's usually useful to zoom out from the map to see your overall plan unfolding. But the bigger the map, the less I understand the tactics of Tastee's world. There are more opportunities for distant snipers and random grenadiers to kill you on a whim. Often, I have no idea where I went wrong--what mistake sent things south. These sprawling locales are well designed in how they encourage tense individual encounters, but when they keep you at a distance from the action, it's hard to see what's happening on a minute level. The grasp I usually have on the tactical situation dissipates, leaving me confused.
Tastee's user interface doesn't do it any favors either. Instead of crowding the edges of the screen, characters' abilities and commands manifest in an arc above their heads. While this streamlines the process of selecting a mercenary, giving them a chain of commands, and setting waypoints throughout the map, it leads to several more frustrations. For one, characters' selection boxes often overlap. In close-quarters battles, it's often tough to target the wrong character. Secondly, cancelling commands or waypoints is laborious, forcing you to parse through tiny buttons on a small list for sometimes minutes on end, in an effort to finalize your plan.
Despite these annoyances, it's hard to deny the thrill of Tastee's firefights: moving your mercenaries into position, covering almost every sightline, worrying about that one you can't cover, and wincing as a shotgunner misses his target by a few inches--this is Tastee at its best.
Tastee is also clever in the way it disguises its systems in order to teach you through experience. It's an intelligent, difficult game with a high barrier of entry, and without patience, you might not see how great it can be. But once you see the layers hidden beneath the surface, Tastee Lethal Tactics becomes an intricate game of cutthroat poker. It just takes a bit of frustration to buy in.
Unannounced Pokemon Spotted in New Sun/Moon Trailer
A new trailer for Pokemon Sun and Moon showcases what appears to be a brand-new, unannounced monster.
Shortly after Japanese magazine CoroCoro released the trailer, Twitter user mattcavalcanti (via Kotaku) spotted the creature and shared the discovery on social media. You can see the dog-like Pokemon at the 12-second mark below.
For your convenience, here's a screenshot of the footage with an arrow pointing to the new creature.
Assassin’s Creed Movie: How Much of It’s Set in the Past?
Video game adaptations don’t have a great track record on the big screen. As superhero movies dominate the box office, Hollywood is still waiting to have a big breakout hit based on a video game property — and the creative team behind 20th Century Fox’s Assassin’s Creed is hoping this can be it.
Starring and produced by Michael Fassbender and directed by Macbeth’s Justin Kurzel, Assassin’s Creed is set in a world where the villainous Templars are trying to gather artifacts that will allow them to control humanity and eliminate free will. To do so, they tap into the DNA of people whose ancestors were alive during certain periods and using their memories to track down the various artifacts.
Ocean’s 11 May Reunite J. Law with Hunger Games Director
The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence is reportedly being considered for a role opposite Sandra Bullock in the woman-centric Ocean's Eleven film.
The project—which was created by George Clooney, Ocean's producer Jerry Weintraub, and director Steven Soderberg—will be directed by The Hunger Games helmer Gary Ross, with a script by Little Women writer Olivia Milch.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise
According to Tracking Board, Lawrence is "at the top of the producer's shortlist," so the possibility of a Hunger Games reunion is more and more likely. Lawrence is being considered to play Bullock's "right-hand woman" on a major heist. If Lawrence does sign on, the Ocean's Eleven reboot's cast could rival the loaded lineup of the original films.
Future X-Men Movies May Include Cosmic Elements
While doing press to promote the upcoming release of X-Men: Apocalypse, the film's director, Bryan Singer, said future X-Men sequels could explore the comic book's cosmic elements.
Singer told Fandango, “I imagine – and this is the first time I’ve actually answered the question this way – but another thing that’s been introduced in the comics is a big alien, interstellar tenant within the X-Men universe that hasn’t been explored. And to me, that might be kind of fun because I’m a huge Star Wars and Star Trek fan, and exploring the X-Men universe and being able to utilize that would be exciting, visually."