Monthly Archives: October 2017

Marvel’s Kevin Feige Says Spider-Man: Homecoming MCU Timeline Issue Will Be Resolved

Spider-Man: Homecoming has fans scratching their heads over a wrinkle in the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline, and studio president Kevin Feige said Marvel Studios plans to officially clarify it.

Minor spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming, which will soon be released on Blu-ray and DVD, follow.

One opening scene in Homecoming takes place immediately following the Battle of New York, the climactic ending of The Avengers. The movie then transitions to a period eight years later, after the villainous Adrian Toomes has built a successful black market operation off the stolen technology. This is the time period when Homecoming takes place, but it doesn't square with the presumption that Avengers took place in the year of its release, 2012.

Continue reading…

Arrow Needs to Fix Black Canary

There's plenty of reason to be excited about the return of Arrow this week. The series is coming off its best episode ever, a dramatic season finale that wrapped up Oliver Queen's five-year journey and left the majority of the show's cast in imminent mortal danger. And even though it's apparent now that the majority of Team Arrow will survive Prometheus' final attack, the stage is set for a drastically different sixth season. But if the series is going to take advantage of that clean slate, it's going to need to prioritize one character in particular - Black Canary.

Black Canary has always been a particular sore spot for Arrow. The series has never given us a true, direct adaptation of the Black Canary of the comics. Instead, the Arrow writers have essentially fractured the character into pieces and spawned a number of different offshoots. There's Laurel Lance, crusading lawyer-turned-costumed vigilante. There's her sister Sara, a party-loving college girl molded into an elite assassin. There's Dinah Drake, a a completely unrelated character who just happens to have the right background and metahuman power to take up the Black Canary mantle. And that's not even counting Laurel's Earth-2 doppelganger, Black Siren, or Evelyn Sharp's brief tenure as Black Canary.

Continue reading…

Steep Hits the Olympics With New Expansion

“Living dangerously?” asked the developer as my skier held his grab to the very last second, barely sticking the landing. Still, the judges at Pyeongchang were impressed, awarding my run with a top score in the Slopestyle competition. One more run like that, and the gold was mine. But in my next run, I got a bit ambitious on my double backflip and landed on my head, the ragdoll physics splaying my poor skier across the snow. The commentators were aghast. The crowd went silent. With such realism, I half-expected an ambulance to wheel onto the snow. I not only ended up knocking my skier out cold, but out of medal contention. Ouch. Such is the duality of going for glory in Steep: in attempts to reach new heights, you’ll either achieve Olympic glory or gloriously fail. In Steep’s latest expansion, Road to the Olympics, the outdoor action sports simulator gets a surprising addition: a story. In the campaign, you get to make your mark as a “legendary” skier or snowboarder at the Pyeongchang Olympics across three freestyle events. But true to the original game, the expansion offers a new set of mountain playgrounds to jump, traverse, and plummet down – plus ten new events to conquer. Snowboard_1280

Continue reading…

Comic Book Reviews for October 11, 2017

It was another major week of comic book releases. DC reached the halfway mark in the epic Dark Nights: metal crossover and continued to explore the fallout of the Mr. Oz reveal in Action Comics and Detective Comics. Marvel inducted a number of ongoing books into the Marvel Legacy era, including Amazing Spider-Man, Deadpool, Defenders and All-New Wolverine. And IDW delivered the penultimate chapter of the First Strike crossover.

Scroll down to check out our reviews for these and various other new releases, and be sure to let us know your favorite books of the week in the comments below.

DC COMICS

Continue reading…

South Park Creator ‘Would Love to Make a FPS’

After now having worked on two South Park role-playing games, series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker discussed what other genres they might like to explore.

"I would love to make a first-person shooter. I'm not even kidding," Stone said in an interview with IGN. "Some sort of first-person, going through a 3D thing where you're seeing characters."

Stone went on to note how the role-playing genre is such a good fit for South Park, saying, "I love the way we do

and Stick of Truth where the whole conceit behind those is it looks like the show." Parker also pointed out how "RPGs just play so well into... writing, and applying to characters," which makes the genre such a good fit for South Park.

Continue reading…

How South Park Made Its Brand of Production Hell Work for The Fractured But Whole

Last-minute deadlines have never stopped South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker from getting things done, even when their own bodies won’t cooperate.

TV show executive producer Frank C. Agnone II told me the story of being nearly finished with The Fractured but Whole, the sequel to 2014’s outstanding South Park RPG The Stick of Truth, but the TV team’s usual last-second process left Parker with 10,000 lines of dialogue to record just one week ahead of a big deadline. As if that wasn’t a tall enough task on its own, Parker then got very sick and ended up having emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder. Following the operation, Parker somehow convinced his doctor to let him temporarily leave the hospital to go get the dialogue laid down, and on the way back to the hospital, an exhausted Parker said to Agnone, “I just want this game to be sweet.”

Continue reading…

Yoshi Was Originally Going to be a Horse

Mario's reptile mount Yoshi was initially supposed to be a horse.

The dinosaur's origins were revealed in an interview with the developers of Super Mario World and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

The interview was conducted as part of the Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES developer series, looking behind the scenes at some of the classic titles available on the retro console.

Super Mario World director Takashi Tezuka disclosed the details surrounding his creation. "Shigeru Miyamoto said he wanted Mario to ride a horse! When we were making Super Mario Bros. 3, he had drawn a picture of Mario on a horse and hung it on a wall near where he used to sit. I would look at that and think, "I think he wants Mario to ride something.

Continue reading…

IGN Happy Hour: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus Special

IGN's Tristan Ogilvie and Luke Reilly sat down with Jens Matthies, Creative Director on Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, to get an insight into the development of the upcoming Nazi-slaying shooter sequel. Additionally, Jens spoke at length about his time at Starbreeze, the chaotic development of seminal shooter Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, working with Faith No More's Mike Patton on The Darkness, and how keen he'd be to make a game based on the Robocop license. Download it now!

Download the IGN Happy Hour: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus Special - Audio Version (31.8Mb)

Continue reading…

PUBG Just Hit 2 Million Concurrent Users on Steam

The massive success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has pushed the game to the top of Steam's current player listings, and now the game has broken the 2 million mark.

It's the first Steam game to do so, and sits atop its mighty throne looking down on other Steam heavyweights like Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Team Fortress 2.

Two years ago, Dota 2 was the first game to break 1 million users on Steam, a milestone reached by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds earlier this year.

Continue reading…