Monthly Archives: May 2016

FX Orders Sons of Anarchy Spinoff

The Sons of Anarchy spinoff show, called Mayans MC, is getting a pilot, courtesy of FX Networks.

The company has ordered a pilot script for the drama series, which comes from Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter and producer Elgin James. In fact, on top of producing, James, who directed the film Little Birds, will script the first episode for Mayans MC.

Mayans president Marcus Alvarez (Emilio Rivera) in Sons of Anarchy. It's unknown who will star in the spinoff, Mayans MC. Mayans president Marcus Alvarez (Emilio Rivera) in Sons of Anarchy. It's unknown who will star in the spinoff, Mayans MC.

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The Magic Circle: Gold Edition Review

The Magic Circle is another entry in the burgeoning but fascinating subgenre of games about the process of making games. Most games in that niche tend to aim small, often taking up the perspective of underdogs struggling to make tiny personal games in an industry filled with multimillion-dollar productions. The Magic Circle, on the other hand, aims big. It’s the product of AAA veterans, evidenced by some impressive technical wizardry, but also by the tone and timbre of its commentary, which pointedly deconstructs the egos of business types that tend to rip creativity up by the roots during big-budget game development.

The titular Magic Circle, in-game, is an old-school series of text adventures whose reboot has been mired in development hell for years. It’s finally beginning to take shape as a triple-A, first-person, Skyrim-like RPG, but the creative direction of the game is being split three ways. The game’s original creator wants to go ambitious and artsy; the game’s creative director just wants to push out a game that will actually sell in the current landscape; a scheming, passionate intern with the support of the series' fanbase wants to put out a game that’s basically the original series, repackaged, and will do whatever it takes to see that happen.

In the middle of it all is you, a lowly tester, forced to play a constantly changing rudimentary build, all while watching the creators float around the landscape, squabbling over the game’s minutiae. A playable demo is set to appear at a thinly-veiled version of E3 in mere days, and the creators are trying to push out something that will keep everybody happy, to virtually no avail. Their game is barely functional: the planned painterly landscape is still rendered mostly in black-and-white; creatures and objects lack proper behavorial programming; and the persistant remnants of a previous, cancelled build from the 32-bit era remain in place. One of the team's older testers, however, has decided to take action, and since you’re the only player with boots on the virtual ground, he grants you access to a few developer tools. Your task is to explore the unfinished game world in hopes of finding a way to lock the actual developers out of the game and craft something playable out of the mess.

With the in-game creators calling the state of the unfinished build a disaster, the irony here is that it takes serious ambition and programming chops to render a game world like The Magic Circle, which has to come across as broken, lazy, and unfinished, but still functional enough to suit a playable fourth-wall breaking experiment. Despite a long initial load time, the fact that you can transition between three distinct aesthetics without so much as a stutter is truly impressive. But even then, not as impressive as the game’s bread-and-butter mechanic: the developer tools.

You’re given the ability to recode the attributes of any object or enemy in the game, changing the names, movement, attacks, AI, and elemental weaknesses/affinities. The number of possible combinations allows for a lot of creativity. If you want to strip some of the mean little dog-like enemies of all their powers so they wander around aimlessly, you can. If you want to give a stationary rock the ability to walk and set its “Ally” setting to yourself so you have a literal pet rock following you around, you can do that. If you want to arm a bunch of spider-like enemies with laser rifles and the ability to fly, that’s also an option.

Remember this next time an E3 presentation glitches up on stage.

Most of the fun of The Magic Circle stems from the sheer joy of experimentation, solving the game’s tricky environmental puzzles in an open-ended God Mode. That mandatory experimentation does have a tangible downside, though, as the game does a poor job of explaining how to weild your control over the world early on. There also a number of seemingly unintended technical issues. Reconfiguring attributes is a mechanic that feels like it would be far more suitable to control with a mouse and keyboard rather than a controller, as the UI for making edits can get terribly twitchy since the same button you use to jump is used to make selections on the edit screen. With automated characters getting stuck behind walls or turning invisible when there’s too many onscreen, there are glitches that you have to contend with. But none of these complaints are enough to dilute the overall joy of flexing your creativity as a virtual developer. Most of the games of this ilk tend to settle for being rather linear interactive narratives. The game is better for executing something new and distinctly enjoyable in how it ties its gameplay and story together.

The only major disappointment is that there’s not enough of either. Only about half of the game is built around exploration and the edit function, though an extended climax does something unexpectedly magical with the idea. But even if you get meticulous about the endgame, The Magic Circle is on the short side, and just when the game truly settles into a groove, the narrative kicks into high gear and your time with the development tools is stripped away.

If only this was a menu for people.

Thankfully, the narrative is well-crafted, often funny, and salient about how much strife goes into even the smallest decision about a game’s design. The game’s storytelling apex is a five minute rant by the in-game Magic Circle’s creator about the impossible expectations of the industry, presented through an ingenius interactive gambit. There’s irony in the fact that the actual game’s greatest idea is eventually overtaken by an overambitious story, especially considering that one of the characters argues that the game’s audience doesn’t care about story to begin with.

It’s hard to definitively say if The Magic Circle succesfully achieves its high-minded aims. Those expecting to play around with the physics of an open video game world will find themselves lamenting the lack of control and additional objectives after a short period of time, and those wanting nothing more than to find out where the narrative goes will be discouraged by how frustrating the gameplay can occasionally be. The essence of The Magic Circle is somewhere in between. As a piece of work meant to comment on modern game design, it’s wholly successful at creating a scenario perfectly illustrating just how Herculean a task it is for developers trying to create a game with a perfect balance.

3 Ways Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 Radically Reinvents Itself

Five times now over the past 25 years, Sid Meier and his teams of expert strategy game designers have created the Earth and populated it with competing nations. Each iteration of the notoriously addictive Sid Meier’s Civilization series has taken the same concept of reenacting variations on humanity’s history of conflict and technological development and built a similar, but distinctly different turn-based strategy game around it from the mind of a new lead designer.

Today, publisher 2K and developer Firaxis announced that the sixth iteration of the series will arrive in just six months on October 21, 2016; for Civilization 6, Lead Designer Ed Beach and his team are building on many of the concepts we saw in the hex-based Civilization V, but with some ambitious, fundamental changes to the way cities are built and scientific progress occurs that are aimed specifically at making sure playing this version never becomes routine.

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First Look: John Oliver’s Danger Mouse Character

Last year, Netflix announced that John Oliver would be lending his voice to the company's animated reboot of Danger Mouse.

Now IGN has an exclusive image of his character Dr. Augustus P. Crumhorn III, who is described as an "evil modern-day industrialist" and a reimagining of an old Danger Mouse villain.

Check out him out below:

John Oliver voices  in Danger Mouse John Oliver voices Dr. Crumhorn in Danger Mouse

"I've loved Danger Mouse my whole life," said Oliver in a statement. "Danger Mouse was a significant part of my childhood. So to get a chance to do it is like getting a chance to step into your childhood, which is both a magical and a potentially hazardous thing! It will be awesome, I can't wait to see it, let alone hear myself in it!"

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Game of Thrones Spoiler Source Could Face Legal Ramifications

A Spanish YouTuber who frequently posts Game of Thrones spoilers could see his day in court if HBO decides to prosecute.

Very few people—including United States president Barack Obama—have seen the show's episodes before they air, and it's unclear how the the man, who identifies as Dr. Jose Senaris, receives the information. In a post to Reddit, Senaris wrote he "never" knows when he'll get new information. It just appears in his email when the source sends it.

"If he's giving away detailed plot information, he definitely faces the possibility of being liable for criminal copyright infringement, no question," Deborah Gerhardt, professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, told US News in a long feature about the situation.

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New Gotham Images: Guess Who’s Back?

Gotham fans were already wondering if Jada Pinkett Smith's Fish Mooney was actually dead given the way she exited the Gotham in the Season 1 finale. Falling into the Gotham River, with no body uncovered, didn't exactly scream "gone for good." And then, down in the Indian Hill labs, there seemed to be a body in a capsule that could pass for Miss Fish.

So here she is! Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith), back with a vengeance, in photos from the next episode of Gotham. Unsurprising, we suppose, given Hugo Strange's recent pattern of bringing villains back from the brink. The question is: What will she be like in her new life? What personality will Strange have given her?

And not to be outdone, in these new photos from "A Legion of Horribles" - airing Monday, May 16th - is Brian McManamon debuting as Basil Karlo - aka the original Clayface.

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Witcher 3 Director Wants to Make More Witcher Games

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, Game Director on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, would love to continue working on the franchise, according to a recently published interview with Eurogamer.

While it would be surprising if we never got another Witcher game, given its critical and commercial success, nothing is written in stone. CD Projekt RED's plans for the franchise are a complete unknown, but Tomaszkiewicz's personal feelings are clear:

"Personally I hope that someday in the future we will do something more because I love the setting and I work on The Witcher games around 12 years right now," he said. "But I don't know what we will decided. The strategy plan they've got they will share with us soon. We'll see."

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Every Disney Infinity Toy Ever Made

Yesterday, Disney announced it's cancelling Disney Infinity, and has closed 21-year-old studio, Avalanche Software.

In memoriam, we have compiled every single Disney Infinity toy ever made, not including the currently unreleased 'Alice Through the Looking Glass' and 'Finding Dory' sets.

Click right to see them all, including the semi-transparent versions of select characters, which are referred to as "Infinite," and Star Wars figures with light-up lightsabers, known as "Light FX."

We recently went to visit Avalanche Software in Utah to find out how they make toys, and how the toy designs are animated and end up in a game. Check out the video below:

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Star Wars Celebration: Lucasfilm Boss to Attend as Panelist

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards will make an appearance at Star Wars Celebration Europe, Disney has announced.

Kennedy and Edwards will be joined by several special guests for a Rogue One-centric panel to kick off the the festivities, when the fan event begins on July 15. Tickets are available for purchase at the Star Wars Celebration's official site.

Just last week, Disney announced the dates for 2017's US-based Star Wars Celebration, which will be set in Orlando, Florida at the Orange County Convention Center.

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Justice League Villain Rumored

The villain in the upcoming Justice League movie may have been revealed in a new report today.

Watch out for potential spoilers in the article below.

Contrary to some talk, Darkseid won't be the villain in Justice League: Part One despite being heavily hinted at in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Instead, according to Birth Movies Death, the main bad guy will be Steppenwolf.

It now appears the monster in the strange "Communion" BvS deleted scene above was actually Steppenwolf.

Steppenwolf is the uncle of Darkseid and the military leader of Apokolips, and the two have a "contentious history" in the film, according to this report. The site adds that Darkseid "is a presence in the movie, and fully appears at the end of the film," but we shouldn't expect much from him until Justice League: Part Two. For more on Darkseid, check out Comics History 101 below.

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