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Sunrise on the Reaping, the highly-anticipated Hunger Games prequel book, comes out tomorrow. It’ll tell the story of the Second Quarter Quell, the Hunger Games that Katniss’s gruff mentor Haymitch won. Considering the success of the previous Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which was all about the dark origin of despotic President Snow, it’s likely that Sunrise on the Reaping will be just as popular. There’s already a movie in development, coming out next November. Naturally, we’re all wondering if Suzanne Collins will pen another Hunger Games book. There’s a whole world to explore and years of history before Katniss’s story. But one thing’s for certain: Suzanne Collins’ longtime editor David Leviathan told Variety that while he’s not certain what stories Collins will want to explore next, she’s probably not going to do a sequel. “I believe the ending of Mockingjay is the ending of the series,” he said. Collins is very specific about what she writes and only revisits the world of the Hunger Games when she has something to say. “Suzanne always starts with the philosophical point she wants to explore,” explained Leviathan. “And I think Haymitch and the 50th Hunger Games were the perfect grounds on which she could make readers think about the nature of authority and questions of when we obey and when we rebel. One of the genius things about the prequel is that suddenly readers understand that history is made as much by the long game as it is by the immediate battles.” It’s comforting to know that if Collins returns once more to Panem, it’ll draw from the past and leave Katniss’s story with its satisfying finality. Sunrise on the Reaping comes out on March 18, with the movie adaptation set to hit theaters on Nov. 20, 2026.
Right now, you can pick up the Deluxe Illustrated box set of The Lord of the Rings trilogy for just $169.57 on Amazon (was $325). This is the lowest price we’ve seen for the three-volume box set, making this a prime opportunity to add the most epic printed version of this trilogy to your shelves. Arguably the finest edition of Tolkien’s saga ever brought to print, the illustrated trilogy of The Lord of the Rings includes unique cover art for each volume, in addition to an array of color illustrations and sketches produced by Tolkien artist Alan Lee, who provided much of the concept art for the Peter Jackson trilogy. Also included in this box set are a pair of poster-size foldout maps detailing Frodo’s journey to Mordor and the greater geography of Middle-earth, illustrated by none other than Tolkien himself. However, if you’d prefer to purchase Tolkien’s work piecemeal, you can also find substantial discounts on the deluxe illustrated versions of The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings on Amazon. Similar to the box set, each volume is quarter-bound in leather with a stamped cloth cover and is packaged in an illustrated slipcase. While the single-volume version of The Lord of Rings contains the same collectibles and ephemera included in the box set, the deluxe versions of both The Hobbit and The Silmarillion are packaged with unique maps and prints you won’t find anywhere else.
In the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu, a poll lists Pragmata as the magazine readership’s third most wanted game despite its indefinite delay almost two years ago. Pragmata received 466 votes, pushing it past big names like Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, all of which actually look like they may release within the next year. And this isn’t a one-off or fluke, either. Since its reveal in 2020, Pragmata has been a consistent figure in these Famitsu reader polls and in recent years has frequently ranked within the top three. In fact, you have to go all the way back to September 2023 to find an issue of the magazine where it wasn’t one of the 10 most wanted games. While the numbers are surprising, they don’t provide much context. We’ve seen just brief flashes of Pragamata over the last five years thanks to some pretty cinematics and brief snippets of gameplay, so it’s hard to understand exactly what Famitsu readers find so exciting. I’ll admit to being intrigued by the game after its reveal, but its rocky history has relegated it in my mind to the same place as Deep Down, another cool-looking Capcom project that garnered a lot of attention but never saw the light of day. As it stands, much of what we know about Pragmata comes from official Capcom marketing copy, which describes the game as “an all-new action adventure title that depicts a near-future dystopian world on the moon through a deeply profound story and setting,” descriptions which are echoed on the PlayStation and Xbox stores. Pragmata was delayed from 2022 to 2023 just six months after its reveal before being removed from Capcom’s release calendar altogether in 2023. “It is with a heavy heart that we must further postpone the release of Pragmata,” the development team said at the time. “Our team is currently hard at work making the best game that we possibly can, but we need more time. We will continue to do our best to ensure that the final product is one that is worthy of your patience.” Is Pragmata just another Deep Down, or might it make a return à la Fumito Ueda’s The Last Guardian and surprise even its most stalwart supporters? Is Capcom maybe holding out for a next generation release? It’s hard to say with any certainty, but what is clear is that Pragmata made a huge impression on the gaming public, and it would be a shame for Capcom to squander that kind of lasting excitement again.
Announced at The Mix + Kinda FunnySpring Game Showcase Monday, Atari is bringing back ’80s arcade defense game Missile Command. Titled Missile Command Delta, the new game comes from from 13AM Games and Mighty Yell and looks to be a more elaborate reimagining than we’re used to from Atari’s revivals. This isn’t the first time modern Atari has revived the Missile Command series — back in 2020, it released Missile Command: Recharged, a mobile 2D remake of the classic that made its way to other platforms a couple years later. That came as part of the Recharged series, which has also brought classics like Asteroids and Centipede back in updated but generally straightforward releases. Delta, on the other hand, looks to be a new take on the franchise, with the trailer showing a 3D environments set in an underground bunker, and the player interacting with a hex-based grid. Atari’s official description calls it a “turn-based mystery” and promises “a twisting, narrative thriller” as well as exploration and puzzles. Exactly how all that fits together, we don’t know quite yet, but there’s already more going on here than we’re used to from Missile Command. Atari hasn’t yet announced a release date, and the game is heading to PC, PlayStation 5, and Switch.
It’s been more than eight years since we were first introduced to the Nintendo Switch. What was once seen as a bold new concept and a reinvention of Nintendo’s console business — a move that initially spooked investors — now feels pretty normal. Widespread adoption certainly helped. Since 2017, Nintendo has sold a staggering 150 million Switch systems, and in 2025 the company hopes to keep that success going with the forthcoming Switch 2. As we inch ever closer to Nintendo’s big showcase for Switch 2 in the form of a dedicated Nintendo Direct, let’s look back at how the company originally pitched the Switch and what promises it made about the system’s capabilities. In October 2016, Nintendo lifted the veil on Switch, which it had previously been referring to by the codename NX. The company revealed the system with a video that highlighted the Switch’s most central feature: the ability to play games like a console connected to a TV and to play them on the go. Nintendo’s reveal of the Switch focused primarily on the console’s portable nature, but a few other features were also highlighted. Joy-Con controllers could be detached from the console, plugged into a shell called the Joy-Con Grip, and shared with a friend for multiplayer games. Up to eight consoles could connect to each other for local wireless play. Other features Nintendo touted at the time included: A capture button on the left Joy-Con that “players can press to take instant screenshots of gameplay to share with friends on social media.” That feature has since been downplayed somewhat, as Nintendo pulled support for posting screenshots to X (formerly Twitter) in 2024. An NFC touchpoint for using amiibo figures in games and an IR motion camera “that can detect the distance, shape and motion of nearby objects.” The IR motion camera wound up being used in about a dozen games, like 1-2 Switch, Nintendo Labo, Ring Fit Adventure, and WarioWare: Move It! “HD rumble,” which Nintendo touted as the most realistic subtle vibrations ever seen in one of its controllers. “The effect is so detailed that a player could, for example, feel the vibration of individual ice cubes colliding inside a glass when shaking a Joy-Con,” Nintendo boasted. “With HD rumble you can experience a level of realism not possible through sights and sounds alone.” “Nintendo Switch allows gamers the freedom to play however they like,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, then-president and COO of Nintendo of America. “It gives game developers new abilities to bring their creative visions to life by opening up the concept of gaming without boundaries.” The company also teased the online multiplayer service that would later be revealed as Nintendo Switch Online, and a smart-device application coming in summer 2017 that would “let users invite friends to play online, set play appointments, and chat” with other Switch players. Nintendo highlighted six games as part of its reveal, a mix of first- and third-party software: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, NBA 2K18, Super Mario Odyssey, and Splatoon 2. Fils-Aime showed off the Switch on U.S. television in December 2016, giving The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon a crack at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Fils-Aime told an excited Fallon that he could “play the game any way you want,” bragging about Breath of the Wild’s “if you can see it, you can go there” open world. Of course, Fils-Aime also made a big deal about the Switch console itself, making a dramatic reveal of the ability to play a game on a big TV then instantly switch over to portable mode and take it on the go. In the months leading up to the Switch’s launch, Nintendo continued to beat that drum, explaining the system’s three play modes — TV, tabletop, and handheld. The following hardware overview video is a concise example of Nintendo’s messaging: you can “switch and play” games with Switch’s unique motion- and infrared-sensing controllers for unique experiences like Arms and for more traditional games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. After launch, Nintendo Switch quickly proved itself and achieved “the highest sales for any system in Nintendo’s history in the first five days after its release,” according to a CBS This Morning interview with Fils-Aime. In that TV appearance, Fils-Aime once again talked about the “game changer” for Switch being that gamers could have that “big-screen experience” but also play games in “the taxi, the Uber, the subway, whatever it is.” But he also talked about Nintendo’s family-friendly strategy and the long-standing mandate that the company makes games for players “from the age of 5 to 95.” That mandate came from the late Satoru Iwata, who instructed Nintendo’s game designers to cater to all possible players, not just those who grew up with (and stuck with) Nintendo from its 8-bit days. Suffice it to say, the continued messaging that the Switch could be played anywhere, any way, and by anybody landed with consumers. Thus far, Nintendo has seemingly cleaved to that same approach for Switch 2, even though tens of millions of fans have heard the message loud and clear by now. But Nintendo still has more to say, and we’ll learn soon how the company plans to keep interest in the idea of a console-handheld hybrid for years to come.
This week the big news is, of course, the Severance finale. After really popping off this season and giving us more intrigue than ever, we’re finally nearing the completion of the Cold Harbor file and god, who knows what they’re going to do to Gemma (Dichen Lachman)? I’m on the edge of my seat, and I can’t wait to find out what kind of cliffhanger we’re in for. But there’s plenty of great new TV beyond that. As a die-hard fan of mysteries, I’ll be following The Residence, Netflix’s latest murder mystery that combines comedy with the White House, something we haven’t had in a long time. Here’s the best new TV premieres and finales this week. New shows on Netflix The Residence Genre: Murder mystery comedy Release date: March 20 Showrunner/creator: Paul William Davies Cast: Uzo Aduba, Giancarlo Esposito, Susan Kelechi Watson, and more “A murder in the White House during a state dinner” is a concept that will panic a lot of people — not least of which is the Secret Service, Capitol Police, and several other law enforcement agencies that would prefer to not make a big fuss. But Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), an eccentric and astute detective, is not so interested in any of the politics. Can she get to the truth of why this murder occurred? New shows on Hulu Good American Family Genre: Thriller family drama Release date: March 19 Showrunner/creator: Katie Robbins Cast: Ellen Pompeo, Mark Duplass, Imogen Faith Reid, and more Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid) is a Ukrainian orphan who has been taken in by Kristine (Ellen Pompeo) and Michael Barnett (Mark Duplass). The Barnetts initially are told that she’s a child with dwarfism, but slowly begin to worry that actually the story might be much more complicated than that. New shows on Paramount Plus Happy Face Genre: Moody procedural Release date: March 20 Showrunner/creator: Robert King, Michelle King, and Jennifer Cacicio Cast: Dennis Quaid, Annaleigh Ashford, James Wolk, and more Adapted from Melissa Moore’s 2018 podcast Happy Face and her autobiography Shattered Silence, both about how she was the daughter of the Happy Face killer, Happy Face is a fictionalized take on the true-crime reality: Melissa (Annaleigh Ashford) is forced to talk to her incarcerated father (Dennis Quaid) after decades of no contact when she sets out to save an innocent man on death row for a crime her father committed. New shows on Apple TV Plus Severance season 2 finale Genre: Twisty sci-fi Release date: March 21 Showrunner/creator: Dan Erickson Cast: Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, and more Mark (Adam Scott) is back with Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and all is not well in the world. How will his reintegration go? What does Lumon have up its sleeve? What is left of Cold Harbor? All answers and more in the finale, “Cold Harbor.”
Brandon Sanderson is one of the most prolific and popular fantasy authors working today. But between his several ongoing series, his Kickstarter book projects, adaptations of his work, and everything else he’s working on, he’s always made time for a few video games every now and then. In fact, just last week he released a list of his top 10 games of all time on his personal website, and they fit his work and personality perfectly. First thing’s first, here is Sanderson’s top 10: 10. Katamari Damacy 9. Undertale 8. Fallout: New Vegas 7. Super Mario World 6. The Curse of Monkey Island 5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 4. Halo 2 3. Final Fantasy X 2. Bloodborne 1. Civilization VI You can go to Sanderson’s original blog post to read a few of his thoughts on each game, but we have a few thoughts on this list (and how it ties into his work) that you won’t get from Brandon himself. Before we even get into the individual games, one thing that stands out right away is just how diverse it is. There’s practically a game for every genre in here — 4X strategy, first-person shooters, action games, RPGs, and even Katamari — which, it’s fair to say, is a genre unto itself. No one would have expected Sanderson’s list to stay beholden to his chosen literary genres of fantasy and science fiction, but it’s fun to image the ways that games like Undertale or Super Mario World have seeped into his work. There are, of course, a few entries on this list that seem a lot more related to his literary work, and even a few that help explain his worlds and writing. Games like Bloodborne and Breath of the Wild seem like natural companions for Sanderson’s fantasy worlds and work, fraternal twins tied together by the thoroughness of vision in their settings and the sense of adventure and experimental challenge they offer players. Meanwhile, games like Curse of Monkey Island and Fallout: New Vegas seem like perfect indicators of Sanderson’s sense of humor and the kind of irreverence he occasionally brings to his books as well. But the real skeleton keys to his work on this list are Final Fantasy X and Civilization VI. Anyone who’s read Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives series and encountered the way he blends together dozens of cultures and countries in its world should recognize the fact that it comes from someone who’s clearly spent hundreds of hours in Civilization, pushing the borders of their country’s influence through trade, culture, or simple warfare. Meanwhile, the blog post mentions that Sanderson is a lifelong fan of the Final Fantasy series, and it’s clearly shaped the way he views magic in his written worlds. It would take hundreds of pages to fully unpack the relationship between his Cosmere and the worlds of Final Fantasy, but for now, it’s enough to know that X is his favorite entry. Sanderson has never been particularly private about the art he loves, or the ways it’s influenced his writing. But with this list of favorite games as a starting point, let’s hope he delves more into how these games have influenced him sometime in the future.
The pieces were all there for 2021’s Mortal Kombat movie: a fantastic and deep cast, produced during a new era of video game adaptations, with strong costuming and behind-the-scenes footage of some very kinetic fight choreography. Instead, we got a pretty bland mess with limited fight sequences chopped up by the editing style. Most boldly (or troublingly, depending on your point-of-view), there was no Mortal Kombat tournament to speak of in the nearly two hours of Mortal Kombat. But good news: A first look from EW at the sequel reveals the upcoming Mortal Kombat 2, due out this fall, will feature the titular fighting tournament after all. That tournament is now officially here in the sequel, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. If Earthrealm loses its 10th consecutive tournament against Outworld, then Shao Kahn will invade Earth and take over. “They keep score throughout the movie,” [Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed] Boon reveals of the tournament. “There’s a visual representation of who is winning…. It’s not just a tournament for the sake of a tournament. There are huge consequences, so you really are keeping score. And there are a lot of twists in it that keep you on your toes.” EW also includes a first look at Karl Urban as Johnny Cage, as well as Adeline Rudolph (Netflix’s Resident Evil) as Kitana and massive bodybuilder Martyn Ford as Shao Kahn. Each of those three new characters will get “movie-accurate” skins in Mortal Kombat 1 later in 2025, EW reports. Other new cast confirmed by EW include Tati Gabriele as Jade and Ana Thu Nguyen as Queen Sindel, and “other” characters intended to fulfill the team’s goal of increasing “the number of female characters.” Could that mean Sheeva making an appearance? We’ll have to wait and see. The returning cast includes two Shōgun stars — Tadanobu Asano as Raiden and Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion — as well as Joe Taslim as Sub-Zero, Mehcad Brooks as Jax Briggs, Jessica McNamee as Sonya Blade, and Lewis Tan as Cole Young (an original character from the first movie). Josh Lawson and Max Huang are also expected to reprise their roles as Kano and Kung Lao, EW reports, although both died in the first movie. This adaptation comes during not only a wave of video game adaptations, but specifically fighting game adaptations, as a new Street Fighter movie is on the way from Eric Andre Show and Bad Trip director Kitao Sakurai. Only time will tell if either will live up to the bonkers-fun original adaptations. Mortal Kombat 2 is scheduled to be released in theaters Oct. 24.
Shadow Briefings are challenges that can be found around the map in Fortnite. There are three different types of Shadow Briefings — Armory, Plunder, and Supply Drop. Each of the briefings will provide you with a variety of rewards as long as you can complete their challenge within a five minute window. However, Shadow Briefings aren’t the easiest objective to find. Luckily, they always spawn in the same location, so as long as you know where they are, you can grab some easy loot. Here’s where every Shadow Briefing is located in Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2 and how to complete them. All Shadow Briefing locations in Fortnite Shadow Briefings have a chance to spawn in any of the 21 locations marked on the map above in Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2. To easily spot a Shadow Briefing, look out for a laptop icon on your map or minimap. The laptop icon will appear when you’re in the vicinity of a Shadow Briefing, so you’ll know when you’re nearby. As you’re approaching a Shadow Briefing, you’ll notice a different icon above it and on the screen. These icons are associated with the Shadow Briefing’s objective. There are three different icons: Gun on top of a shield — Armory Treasure map — Plunder Parachuting crate — Supply Drop Check out the map above or list below to see where every Shadow Briefing is located. Placid Paddies (northeast of Whiffy Wharf and northwest of Flooded Frogs) — Armory Yacht Stop (under a beach house on the northern coast of the map) — Plunder East of Whiffy Wharf — Supply Drop Magic Mosses — Plunder Lovely Lane (at the end of an unfinished road in the northwestern region of the map) — Plunder North of Pumped Power — Armory Demon’s Dojo (northwestern building) — Supply Drop Burd To Go (gas station to the south of Whiffy Wharf) — Armory Brutal Boxcars — Supply Drop Shiny Shafts — Plunder Burd To Go (north of Shining Span) — Plunder Yokina Boardwalk (western coast of the map) — Supply Drop Former Burd POI (construction site south of Outlaw Oasis) — Armory Foxy Floodgate — Armory Seaport City — Armory Shogun’s Solitude — Plunder Canyon Crossing – Plunder Spiral Shoots (bamboo spiral maze located on the southern side of the map) — Plunder Masked Meadows — Armory Hopeful Heights — Supply Drop Kappa Kappa Factory — Armory How to complete Shadow Briefings in Fortnite Each location has one of three Shadow Briefings that can be completed — Armory, Plunder, and Supply Drop. Armory Shadow Briefings will reward you with 100 gold bars after you complete a damage challenge with a specific weapon within the five minute timer. Plunder Shadow Briefings will reward you with two Rare chests as long as you can find and dig them up within five minutes. Supply Drop Shadow Briefings will call in a Supply Drop, and all you have to do is search the crate and collect its items.
I don’t know — and frankly, don’t want to know — why the first thing someone did after a recent Zenless Zone Zero update was inspect feline genitals, but thanks to this intrepid detective work, we all have to live with the knowledge that the action RPG’s cats have jiggly balls. Zenless Zone Zero version 1.6 dropped on March 12, introducing a slew of changes to HoYoverse’s latest free-to-play game. And while players often quibble over every little gameplay adjustment, one change that seems to be a unanimous hit with the community are the “enhancements to pedestrian behavior in Lumina Square to make it more dynamic and diverse.” Among other things, this means the area’s felines are now able to walk around rather than stay put in static locations, which gave one player the perfect opportunity to capture footage of a tomcat’s swinging testicles. The animation is subtle, especially for a game as notoriously rife with jiggle physics as Zenless Zone Zero, but I’ve studied the footage and can confirm there is definitely movement independent from the rest of the cat’s body. Unfortunately, this update isn’t all fun and games. Zenless Zone Zero version 1.6 also swapped out two voice actors after they refused to perform in solidarity with the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike. HoYoverse may not be one of the video game developers explicitly targeted by the strike, but it also hasn’t signed onto an interim agreement ensuring voice actor protections against AI. “I was replaced as Soldier 11 because I am unwilling to perform work not covered by a SAG Interim Agreement during a strike for AI protection, the outcome of which will determine the future of our industry,” Soldier 11 voice actor Emeri Chase explained via Bluesky on March 11. “Every single actor [is] at risk of having their voice stolen from past union work, past non-union work, video content creation, or interviews,” Chase told Polygon the following day. “This is no longer a fight for fair wages, this is a fight for bodily autonomy and the right to our own voices.”
The Percy Jackson Disney Plus show has been greenlit for a third season — which means it’s reached the important milestone of adapting the books past the ill-received 20th Century Fox movie adaptions. The third season of the show will follow the events of the third book in Rick Riordan’s original Percy Jackson series, The Titan’s Curse. But most notably, book three introduces one of the series’ most popular and most groundbreaking characters: Nico di Angelo, son of Hades. [Ed. note: This post contains some spoilers for the Percy Jackson books] Fans have been looking out for mentions of Nico di Angelo since the first season of the Disney Plus show. Nico and his sister Bianca first appeared in The Titan’s Curse, where Percy and his friends are tasked to escort two mysterious siblings to Camp Half-Blood. Eventually Nico and Bianca learn that they are children of Hades, which grants them super-powerful death-associated abilities. Even after the original series wrapped up, Nico stayed on as a major player in the subsequent books (across the Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo series). He also has his own spinoff series, penned by both Riordan and author Mark Oshiro. The second book is set to arrive later this year. (Bianca, meanwhile… well, she doesn’t really appear after the third book). With a tragic backstory and perfect edgy goth looks, Nico has been a fan favorite since the very beginning. And he’s also notable for being the first openly queer character in the Riordanverse. He officially came out in 2013’s House of Hades. And 13 years ago, it wasn’t as common for gay characters to appear in young adult literature as it is today. The TV show is already way more diverse than the original books were, but characters like Nico had paved the way for more diversified children’s media. It’ll be a full circle moment to see him on screen for the fans who grew up reading his stories. And a whole new legion of young fans will get to experience a “honey, he gay” moment. “We’re so grateful to be continuing the story of Percy Jackson on Disney+. This third season will be new territory for the screen, bringing fan favorites like the Hunters of Artemis and Nico di Angelo to life for the first time,” said Riordan. Riordan also teased on his BlueSky that they would be looking to cast someone who resembles the infamous Disney-Hyperion official portrait of Nico from 2007. This was obviously a joke, but just in case you’re not familiar with the infamous Disney-Hyperion official portrait of Nico from 2007 — yeowch. Naturally, we will be looking for a Nico di Angelo who closely resembles the original Disney-Hyperion promotional art from 2007, since I know that is everyone's favorite depiction. 😏 — Rick Riordan (@rickriordan.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T15:53:03.169Z The second season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians is still in production and will hit Disney Plus this December. The first is available to stream on Disney Plus.
We didn’t know how good we had it in the 2000s. Sure, some things were awful, but the movie industry was something special. Every year felt like it held something new and fantastic: the Bourne movies, Avatar, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings, Pan’s Labyrinth, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Mulholland Drive, just to name a random handful. On top of that, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Atonement, Juno, and No Country for Old Men were going head-to-head at the Oscars. And as far as the eye could see, studios were funding ridiculously ambitious, ill-fated sci-fi blockbusters that no one really bothered to watch until they hit cable. These movies arrived at the perfect moment to be fascinating without necessarily being all that good. Hollywood was ready to spend loads of money on original ideas, and after The Matrix and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, sci-fi was having a moment. So, inspired by those movies, and smaller, more manageable examples like Alex Proyas’ Dark City and The Crow, directors set out to make their sci-fi dreams a reality. The only problem was that CGI was nowhere near advanced enough for the worlds these creators wanted to build, especially not at the budget they wanted to build them at. So, an entire micro-genre of unashamed, strange blockbusters was born, with high aims, moderate budgets, buckets of creativity, a bit of star power to get the green light from studios, and only the loosest semblance of a script to hold it all together. The recent release of Paul W.S. Anderson’s tremendously fun film In the Lost Lands felt like a perfect throwback to that era, with its complex mythology of a Christian cult and a ruined world full of magic — made up mostly of brown and gray CGI and anonymous metal beams. Anderson is a master of this particular type of movie (though audiences generally showed up for his Resident Evil movies), and his latest got us thinking with fond nostalgia on this bygone era of bizarre and unique movies. In that spirit, we put together a list of some of the very best of the 2000s (and early 2010s) era’s overly ambitious sci-fi movies, each one of which bombed — commercially, critically, or both. Despite their failings, though, the “flopbbusters” on this list have stuck in our heads and hearts for nearly 20 years, and that alone is a feat worth celebrating. Ghosts of Mars Most 2000s thing about it: Ice Cube’s character is named “Desolation Williams.” Where to watch: Free with ads on the Roku Channel, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango All of John Carpenter’s movies have a delightful B-movie flair to them. But Ghosts of Mars takes the cake in the category. It’s a pseudo-Western on Mars with an all-star cast, including Ice Cube, Pam Grier, and frequent flopbuster star Jason Statham. The premise is great and allows for a lot of Carpenter narrative creativity: When a freight train on a mission to pick up a prisoner (Ice Cube) returns with only one survivor (Natasha Henstridge), she is interrogated about the series of events, unfolding through a series of interweaving flashbacks. The performances are strong, and Carpenter scores the movie well as always, but the real strength of Ghosts of Mars is right there in the title. The Martian atmosphere is extremely spooky, and the red tones of the planet’s surface are gorgeous, an effect created by dyeing the gypsum mine they filmed in with red coloring. —Pete Volk Equilibrium Most 2000s thing about it: Gun Kata. Where to watch: Free on Hoopla, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango This entire trend in Hollywood owes its life, and its budgets, to The Matrix, but few movies on this list took that inspiration as seriously as Equilibrium. The movie is a pretty blatant rip-off, but I say that with nothing but love in my heart for it. Equilibrium takes place shortly after the end of World War III, in a city where emotion and art have been outlawed entirely. However, when John Preston (Christian Bale) suddenly finds a book of poems by W.B. Yeats, he discovers his own emotions and decides to fight back against and destroy the fascist government that has stripped people of the ability to feel. To do all this rebelling, Preston has to call upon his mastery of Equilibrium’s most incredible invention: Gun Kata, a gun-based martial art that is equal parts extremely silly and totally sick. All of Equilibrium’s shootouts and fights scenes involve Preston pulling off incredible feats with guns, doing Matrix-style wire work while shooting dozens of rounds a second out of his semiautomatic pistols, or beating people to death with retractable gun spikes. It’s all bizarre and incredible, and in certain ways feels like a precursor to the John Wick style that dominates action movies today. The exceptionally ridiculous Gun Kata action, combined with one of the bigger and more well-thought-out worlds on this list, makes Equilibrium an absolute flopbuster classic. —Austen Goslin Paycheck Most 2000s thing about it: Matt Damon turned down the lead part because he had just done an amnesia role with The Bourne Identity. Where to watch: For digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango Even many of my fellow John Woo die-hards won’t go to bat for this one. The movie that led to Woo’s temporary exile from Hollywood filmmaking, Paycheck is based on a Philip K. Dick story and follows a highly skilled engineer (Ben Affleck) whose work is so secretive that he gets his short-term memory wiped after every job. But when a job goes wrong, he has to try and retrace his own (forgotten) steps to get to the bottom of a mystery. I remember seeing this movie for the first time on cable when I was in high school, and I fully believe that’s the best way to watch Paycheck (on TV, with commercials… high school might be harder to recreate). And yes, it does have one of John Woo’s trademark doves. —PV The Chronicles of Riddick Most 2000s thing about it: The fact that the best version of the character only exists in the Xbox tie-in game. Where to watch: Prime Video or Starz Perhaps the best example of this trend, The Chronicles of Riddick is a sequel to Pitch Black, a wonderful sci-fi slasher that’s something like Alien, except if the xenomorph was played by Vin Diesel and he was sort of a good guy. But while the first movie is low-stakes and even lower-budget, the second movie blows the whole thing out to a universal scale. While we last saw him as a space outlaw on a backwater planet, when we next catch up with Richard B. Riddick, he’s pulled into a conflict with an intergalactic empire. The series pulls off its turn toward space opera surprisingly well, building out a whole spacefaring civilization that feels straight out of Warhammer 40K, complete with massive armor and weapons, a giant capital city, and incredibly convoluted lore. All of this is presented with a terrific blend of seriousness and camp, and while Riddick caring this much about the fate of the universe never quite makes sense, it is one of the most entertaining examples of Hollywood’s sci-fi excess you can find. —AG Death Race Most 2000s thing about it: Roger Ebert called it “an assault on all the senses, including common.” Where to watch: Max, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango If there’s anything that makes more sense than video games as Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation material, it’s a Roger Corman movie. The 2008 Death Race updates the great premise of Corman’s cult classic — prisoners compete in a deadly race to try and earn their freedom — and amplifies the vehicular action with some terrific car stunts and flips. You will truly feel the presence of Hollywood car action maestro Spiro Razatos, best known for his work on the Fast and Furious franchise. So many of Anderson’s movies would fit in this category: the (very good!) Resident Evil movies, Alien vs. Predator, and even some of his newer movies that don’t belong to this specific era. A key element of the mid-2000s flopbuster is a lack of embarrassment over the nerdy stuff in the material, and throughout his decades making video game adaptations and other seemingly silly projects, Anderson has never once flinched. He knows what you’re here for, he knows what he’s here for, and he delivers. All the 2000s flopbuster notes are here: plenty of CGI to build out the largely gray environments of the prison and the racetrack (but also for some grisly deaths), a villain whose plan makes no sense and whose motivations seem to flip on a dime, and a goofy, violent, fun time in a surprisingly well-realized dystopia. —PV Doomsday Most 2000s thing about it: The villain dresses like The Prodigy’s Keith Flint with a big ol’ biohazard symbol tattooed on his back. Where to watch: For digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube If your idea of a good time is listening to Malcolm McDowell ominously monologuing over a faux-John Carpenter synth score and post-apocalyptic motorbike rallies that function like Burning Man meets Cirque du Soleil, then boy, do I have a movie for you! Doomsday was critically panned when it was released back in ’08 as a derivative and uninspired riff on Mad Max and Escape from New York. And while this is true, it does very little to detract from its appeal as a damn satisfying, albeit very cheesy, action movie. Rhona Mitra kicks all kinds of ass as Major Eden Sinclair, a special ops soldier with a drone camera for an eye who is sent on a mission into a quarantined Scotland in search of a cure for a deadly super virus. Don’t focus too much on the plot. Instead, just soak in the gloriously over-the-top violence, gladiatorial spectacle, and at times shockingly striking cinematography and lighting. Hell, the climax even essentially boils down to an all-out road war, complete with leather-bound, man-eating ravers and slow-motion explosions. What’s not to like? —Toussaint Egan Daybreakers Most 2000s thing about it: Action/horror vampires. Where to watch: Free with ads on The Roku Channel or on the CW app, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon or Apple TV Vampires were all the rage in the 2000s, and while it’s tempting to credit Twilight with the whole thing, it’s important to remember that it really started with Blade in 1998, then the Underworld movies (which would be on this list had they not made as much money and as many sequels as they did) kept the bloodsuckers alive long enough for Bella and Edward to give them a second life. Amid all of that, though, were half a dozen or so smaller vampire movies of various genres. But not a single one of the vampire movies from this era was as big or bold as Daybreakers. Daybreakers takes place in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by vampires. Ethan Hawke plays a vampire hematologist who’s trying to solve for the fact that now that vampires rule the world, the world’s running out of blood to drink. In the middle of his research, he comes across a former vampire named Elvis (Willem Dafoe), who thinks he has a cure for vampirism that could save humanity, and maybe the vampires, too. From there, the movie turns into a pretty great little action thriller in a fascinatingly drawn world. Think Children of Men (a movie that could also be on this list but is simply a little too good for it) but with vampires and Willem Dafoe. —AG Gamer Most 2000s thing about it: The Neveldine/Taylor style of chaos cinema editing. Where to watch: Peacock, or for free with ads on Pluto TV During their six years making movies together, onetime filmmaking duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor made some of the most chaotically shot and edited movies of the century. This is a good thing: The Crank movies, their Ghost Rider sequel, and Gamer are all among the most visually distinct movies of their generation, with a palpable energy underneath the frantic editing style. In this one, prisoners on death row compete in a third-person shooter where they are the characters, controlled by gamers behind the scenes. The most popular and successful prisoner in this game (Gerard Butler) works alongside the teenager controlling him (Logan Lerman) to attempt to gain his freedom. Gamer was also ahead of its time when it comes to its satire of people’s time in virtual worlds, and features a delightfully over-the-top villain performance from mid-Dexter-era Michael C. Hall (that casting choice is a runner-up for most 2000s thing about Gamer). —PV Priest Most 2000s thing about it: A band of militant post-apocalyptic priests who are the good guys (also action/horror vampires). Where to watch: USA Network, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango Perhaps the wildest movie on this whole list, Priest is going to take some explaining. The movie is set in a world where humans and vampires spent hundreds of years at war, almost completely destroying the Earth’s surface. Finally, humans banded together in a theocratic society under the rule of The Church, which creates a specially trained group of warriors called Priests who can defeat the vampires. When they do defeat the vampires, The Church rounds up the surviving monsters and puts them in special reservations, but then immediately begins to enact tyrannical totalitarian control over the remaining humans. To escape this, many humans move outside the safety of The Church’s walled city, where they’re more susceptible to bands of roaming vampire survivors. Living outside the walls long after the end of the last war, one particular Priest (Paul Bettany) finds his niece has been kidnapped by vampires, and he has to cross the post-apocalyptic landscape — mostly made out of gray CGI slop — to return to his vampire-killing ways. It’s among the most ambitious and fun premises on this list, and it mostly results in an excuse for some pretty kick-ass vampire-killing action, all of which makes this an excellent addition to the flopbuster canon. —AG Dredd Most 2000s thing about it: A soundtrack consisting entirely of industrial music. Where to watch: Max, or for digital rental/purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango Another update of an existing franchise, the 2012 Dredd is a crisp sci-fi action movie equal parts The Raid (which happened to shoot almost simultaneously) and ’80s sci-fi throwback. Karl Urban stars as the violent Judge Dredd, on an assignment with his rookie partner (Olivia Thirlby) to take down a drug kingpin (mid-Game of Thrones Lena Headey, another strong casting-from-TV choice in this era that also qualifies as a runner-up for most 2000s thing about this movie) who rules over a skyscraping high-rise. The verticality in the 200-story building allows for tense and at times shockingly violent action augmented by the visual effects (especially the slow-motion sequences), and the lead performances are all strong. There are plenty of gray tones within the movie, fitting with the era, but the kinetic direction and strong performances hold it all together. Of note: Pete Travis is credited with directing the movie, but Urban has made it clear screenwriter Alex Garland is the one who really directed Dredd. —PV
The next installment in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, jumps out of an innocuous hay bale on March 20, but you can already save on the Digital Deluxe Edition at Newegg. Normally $89.99, this version of the game for Xbox Series X is discounted to $74.99 when you use the code XVDACSPP at checkout. This coupon makes the Digital Deluxe Edition just $5 more than the Standard Edition, and this package grants access to a variety of exclusive in-game cosmetic items and other content to expand your adventure. The array of extra items is led by the Sekiryu Dual Pack, a collection of armor, sword, and mount treatments for co-protagonists Yasuke and Naoe. Also included is the Sekiryu Hideout Pack, which offers some extra decorations for your hideout, and five Mastery Points for upgrades in your skill trees. In addition, you’ll get access to the “Thrown to the Dogs” bonus quest at launch, as well as the Claws of Awaji expansion, which is scheduled to be released later this year. Make sure to check out our pre-order guide for additional info on what’s included with each edition of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and where you can reserve a copy.
The new game releases this week may look a little familiar, but all of them attempt to push their genres or series in new directions. We’ve got a dark game about a plague outbreak where you’re finally a certified doctor instead of someone taking up the job out of necessity; a 33-player action game with large-scale battles that resemble raid fights in an MMO; and a baseball game with — wait for it — a roguelike board game mode. Oh, and there’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows at the end of the week, with a story set in feudal Japan and a whole base-building system. But that will come after Pathologic 3, which starts the week off with another macabre story of death and decay. Then there’s 33 Immortals, a game where you join up with a whole legion of players trying to survive against hordes of monsters. MLB The Show 25 promises a bunch of new additions to the series, including that roguelike board game mode. And if sports aren’t for you, Reignbreaker is a game that mixes medieval weaponry with a bit of cyberpunk. It argues that your everyday javelins haven’t gone far enough and introduces “motorized” javelins that explode and launch across the screen like a bullet. Here are our most anticipated game releases for the week of March 17.
While NFL free agency is in a frenzy at the moment, college football fans don’t have much to do except run mock drafts to see which NFL teams might pick their favorite players in next month’s draft. Well… that and grab EA Sports College Football 25 for $9.99 (86% off!), its best price ever, if they don’t already own it. The sale that drops the price all the way down to a Hamilton applies only for physical copies of the game on Amazon (Xbox Series X only) and at Best Buy (both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X). Now, if you own a discless console, you aren’t completely out of luck here. Both the PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store are offering a similarly spectacular discount on digital copies of EA Sports College Football 25 right now: The game is on sale there for $13.99 (that’s 80% off the $69.99 regular price). Sony’s sale runs until March 26; it’s unclear how long Microsoft’s deal will last. Even for offseason discounts, these are wild prices, especially considering that EA’s 2024 revival (after 11 years!) of its college football franchise was the No. 2 bestselling video game in the U.S. last year. If you need some more convincing, check out our review.
During a SXSW 2025 event, Hideo Kojima of Kojima Productions showed off a new trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach for PlayStation 5, which included a long-awaited release date. It’ll be washing ashore on June 26, almost six years after the launch of its predecessor. While we’re still waiting for a true deep dive into the game’s new mechanics, setting, and characters, it’s great to have a date locked in for what will almost certainly be a memorable and kooky experience. Pre-orders have gone live for multiple editions of the game, both physical and digital, including a pricey collector’s edition that’s available only through PlayStation’s direct-to-consumer site. We have all of the details below, so scroll down to find the best fit for you budget and level of fandom for the series. Death Stranding 2 (standard edition) Death Stranding 2: On the Beach will be available in disc form from various retailers, including Best Buy, GameStop, and through PlayStation itself. This $69.99 version is light on pre-order extras, although it will grant you some cosmetics to unlock. You’ll get three silver-tier skeletons that can be equipped to make toting gear easier (especially in the early game), plus a custom hologram of a Quokka creature. Death Stranding 2 (Digital Deluxe Edition) The Digital Deluxe Edition of Death Stranding 2 includes the base game and the pre-order extras mentioned above, plus a Machine Gun (level 1), three gold-tier skeletons, plus three patches for your suit. You’ll also be able to access the game two days before it launches for those who buy the standard edition. It costs $79.99. Death Stranding 2 (Collector’s Edition) For Death Stranding enthusiasts, as well as those who desire the highest-end gear for Kojima Productions’ games, there’s the $229.99 Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Collector’s Edition. It’s flush with bonuses, both in-game cosmetics and physical goods. You’ll also get two days of early access to the game. Aside from the full-game download — not a physical copy — you’ll get all of the digital items mentioned above, plus a collector’s box containing a 15-inch Magellan Man statue, a 3-inch Dollman figurine, art cards, and a letter from Hideo Kojima. This edition is available only at the PlayStation Direct store.
Vending machines allow you to purchase a variety of loot in Fortnite at the cost of bars. There are currently three different types of vending machines in Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2 — weapon-o-matic, mending, and Outlaw. Weapon-o-matic machines provide weapons and ammo, while mending machines provide healing items and shields. Outlaw vending machines are a new addition in Chapter 6 Season 2 and offer thermite, a Plasma Burst Laser, and an Outlaw weapon. As part of a kickstart quest, you must collect thermite from an Outlaw vending machine or from a Go Bag. Unfortunately, vending machines aren’t always marked on the map and they can run out of stock, so completing the quest can be a little tricky. To help, we’ve marked the location of every vending machine in Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2. All Vending Machine locations in Fortnite There are 21 total vending machines (11 weapon-o-matic, five mending, and five Outlaw) spread across the Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2 map. We’ve marked the location of each vending machine with their associated icon — a gun for weapon-o-matic, a medic symbol for mending, and a normal vending machine for Outlaw — on the map above. Keep in mind, there is a small chance that the vending machine doesn’t spawn in a said location — but luckily, there are plenty of vending machines that can be found around the map. Weapon-o-matic machines can be found in the following locations: All You Can Catch! (sushi restaurant northwest of Foxy Floodgate) Canyon Crossing Foxy Floodgate Hopeful Heights Kappa Kappa Factory Kite’s Flight (island south of Kappa Kappa Factory) Masked Meadows Plateau east of Demon’s Dojo Pumped Power Sakura Stadium (stadium southwest of Twinkle Terrace) Whiffy Wharf Mending machines can be found in the following locations: Brutal Boxcars Burd-to-go (gas station north of Shattered Span) Seaport City Train station southeast of Crime City Yokina Boardwalk (southwest of Outlaw Oasis) Outlaw vending machines can be found in the following locations: Crime City (three vending machines) Masked Meadows Seaport City
This recommendation of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap was originally published in conjunction with the film’s premiere on Max. It has been updated and republished for the film’s Netflix debut. Something started to feel oddly familiar to me about 19 minutes into watching Trap, the latest horror thriller from director M. Night Shyamalan, now on Netflix. The film stars Josh Hartnett as Cooper, a seemingly regular dad that happens to have a secret life as a notorious serial killer, who discovers that the pop idol concert he’s at with his daughter is in fact an elaborate… uh, trap designed by the FBI to arrest him. Having been tipped off to the plot by an overly eager concert vendor, Cooper proceeds to look for every and any way to escape the venue without eliciting his daughter’s suspicions. “Huh, this is kind of familiar,” I thought to myself as I watched Cooper push a woman down a flight of stairs to distract a pair of police officers guarding a set of doors. As Cooper’s attempts to escape grew more erratic and ridiculous, the realization finally dawned on me: I wasn’t just watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie, I was watching the cinematic equivalent of a perma-death, Master Assassin run of Hitman: World of Assassination. If you’re unfamiliar with the premise of the games, here’s the gist: In Hitman, you play as Agent 47, a bald, suave contract killer who travels the world performing assassinations of high-profile targets on behalf of a clandestine organization that works for the highest bidder. Nearly every mission of nearly every game in the Hitman series plays out the same way: You infiltrate a location, track down your target, execute them in any way you see fit, and then promptly exfiltrate without either being seen, captured, or killed in the process. Of course, as anyone who’s played a Hitman game will tell you, there’s more to the game than just the killing. Hitman: World of Assassination is a stealth game, yes, but it’s also a goofy puzzle game. The premise of every mission is the same, but the variability of locations and the nature of each individual target demands something else on the part of the player besides ruthless execution: situational awareness, an aptitude for improvisation, and most importantly of all, a sense of creativity that plays into the series’ brand of dark humor. Don’t be fooled by 47’s sleek three-piece suits, the game’s operatic score, or its exotic and picturesque locales, teeming with brooding fashionistas and dour-faced villains. Every mission in Hitman is populated with a dozen or more Rube Goldbergian death traps waiting to be sprung on a hapless target, to say nothing of the many unique (read: ridiculous) disguises one might discover and don during a playthrough. Cooper is not a contract killer; he’s a high-functioning sociopath and serial killer. Even if the differences are slight, the two are not the same. Where Cooper and Agent 47 might differ in their respective occupations, they have a surprising amount in common in terms of their modus operandi, as can be seen throughout much of the run time of Trap. Like 47, Cooper has an almost supernatural knack for spotting points of interest; cameras, locked doors, armed security guards, anything that might trip you up in a video game, Cooper’s got eyes on. As soon as he senses he’s in danger, Cooper’s entire outward demeanor shifts from his dopey dad facade to murderous focus, scoping for every possible opportunity that could afford him escape and going after it with dogged determination. Whether it’s stealing a kitchen uniform, lifting a keycard off of unsuspecting merch salesman, slipping past a group of heavily armed SWAT members and stealing one of their radios to listen in, or orchestrating a gruesome explosion as a distraction to move past a crowd of onlookers, Cooper displays the kind of cunning, guile, and yes, creativity that fans of the Hitman franchise would recognize from their own time playing as Agent 47. There have been two movie adaptations of the Hitman series to date: 2007’s Hitman, starring Timothy Olyphant, and the 2015 reboot Hitman: Agent 47, starring Rupert Friend. While both had unique interpretations of the game’s aforementioned master assassin, neither of them quite hits the mark in tapping into one of the more understated yet essential components of the series’ overall tone: its dark sense of humor. Where Hitman’s previous cinematic adaptations leave much to be desired in this respect, Trap excels simply by dint of Shyamalan’s own knack for twisted absurdity. Trap is a tense movie, yes, but it’s also a very funny one. A serial killer unwittingly ensnared in a sting operation is an interesting premise, but the fact that same killer is also a painfully awkward and perpetually put-upon father of a teenage girl is what elevates the situation into hilarity. Combine that with his uncanny ability to ingratiate himself into the good graces of nearly everyone he meets and his barely repressed desperation and anger at having been led into the clutches of federal authorities, and Shyamalan’s film expertly threads the needle between humor and horror to create an experience that’s both entertaining and surprising to watch unfold. Every action that Cooper took in attempting to escape from Lady Raven’s concert felt like watching back my own panicked improvisations as I fail at one of Hitman’s many “Mission Stories,” emergent prompts that Agent 47 contextually happens upon during the course of a mission that allow him an opportunity to more expeditiously (and often ridiculously) execute his target. Despite Cooper’s frequent missteps, there’s yet one more trait that he and Agent 47 have in common: persistence. No matter what happens, no matter how spectacularly the shit hits the fan, Agent 47 never gives up until the job is done — a fact that often creates some of Hitman’s funniest and most memorable moments. From chandeliers crashing onto fashion show walkways to rogue surgical robots eviscerating their would-be patients, 47’s determination to eliminate his targets more often manifests in ways that push the plausibility of their execution to their limits. With that in mind, a serial killer attempting to escape a pop idol concert without being caught by the police sounds exactly like the type of scenario that would play out in a mission of Hitman. He may not be as cool and collected as his video game counterpart when the odds are stacked against him, but Cooper somehow always finds a way to come out on top. He really missed his calling as a globetrotting killer for hire. Oh well; maybe he’ll consider a career change if Trap 2 ever happens. Trap is available to stream now on Netflix.
Writer Dan Watters and artist Hayden Sherman’s Batman: Dark Patterns is a miniseries showcasing four spooky mysteries. Every three issues forms a new arc pitting a young Batman against some new weirdness in Gotham City. This week, to kick off the series’ second arc, the weirdness is thus: Mr. Scarface, of the villain duo Scarface and the Ventriloquist, became an apartment building. In one issue, Watters and Sherman set up an homage to Gareth Evans’ lauded action movie The Raid: Redemption, as Batman steps in to rescue a police officer held hostage somewhere in Bledin Towers’ 215 apartments. Scarface’s disembodied voice rings from every wall, and his masked gang scrawls his visage on the facade. The mystery: Where, and who, is Scarface’s ventriloquist? It’s a bananas twist on an old, often overlooked villain, and a fabulous setup for action. This penultimate page reveal of Scarface’s plan was the cleverest thing I saw in comics this week. My editor, Tasha, however, had some entirely reasonable questions, in the spirit of our dialogue explaining the mysteries of Venom: The Last Dance. Tasha: Can we start with the “New gody, Gatman!” thing? Why can’t this, um, I guess evil building pronounce B’s? Susana: Yeah… that’s a traditional comics characteristic of Scarface and the Ventriloquist. Scarface can’t pronounce B sounds, because ventriloquists aren’t supposed to move their lips during their arts. It’s a little silly for my tastes, but I suppose if I’m out here stanning for the “dresses like a bat” guy, I don’t have a leg to stand on. Tasha: So it’s not because buildings have inflexible lips? Susana: Correct. Most buildings don’t have lips at all. Tasha: So I originally saw this panel out of context, which made it seem a lot weirder — reading the comic (and your note about this above) it’s clearer that Scarface’s latest acolytes drew that face on the building, and it didn’t just… manifest. But what do you think is going on here? Has there been a supernatural element to Scarface in the past, or do you think there’s just a guy with a megaphone hiding back there somewhere (and still not pronouncing his B’s even though no one’s watching him onstage)? Susana: What might be surprising for folks who know about Scarface and the Ventriloquist from, say, Batman: The Animated Series is that it’s pretty common for comics writers to play around with the idea that Scarface might not be the violent alternate personality of ventriloquist Arnold Wesker, and their relationship could be a spooky haunted-doll-type situation. I think Watters and Sherman are definitely playing with that uncertainty here. In a world as strange as Batman’s, it wouldn’t be impossible for a building to be possessed by a malignant spirit. But Watters and Sherman also establish earlier in the comic that the acoustics of Bledin Towers are really confusing, as in many ill-conceived concrete structures. Residents say sound bounces erratically through its hallways and stair shafts, making it difficult to tell where noises are coming from. It’s a situation where the Ventriloquist could very well be using an entire building to throw his voice. Tasha: Am I reading this right visually? Did the inhabitants of this apartment building really shove a sofa halfway off a balcony to visually represent Scarface having a cigar? Susana: YES. It rules. You see the couch in earlier panels, just sitting around like litter in the hallways. It’s a great detail. Tasha: Was the previous Dark Matters arc this weird? Susana: Oh, yes. It was about a serial killer called the Wounded Man, who could feel no pain but had embedded dozens of nails, pieces of rebar, and other sharp objects in his body, just close enough to his vital organs and arteries that it was nearly impossible to touch him — much less fight him or capture him — without killing him. Which, you know, Batman has a solemn oath against. Tasha: The bigger picture this initial issue sets up is of a run-down housing project that’s about to be torn down and replaced with condos, and a group of abandoned and likely to be displaced residents who don’t want to leave. It feels like there’s going to be a significant class warfare arc to this story. Is that typical for Scarface? For this team or this series so far? Susana: You’ve hit the nail on the head (of the Wounded Man). Just last issue, the Wounded Man’s powers and crimes turned out to stem from a Gotham suburb illegally built on top of a chemical dumping site that poisoned everyone who lived there. With this first issue of its second story, it really seems like long-term systemic abuse is the throughline Watters and Sherman are playing with — the way in which citizens of Gotham City are molded by the systems that make it such a hard place to live, not just the costumed serial killers. And they turned Scarface into a building. I love it. Issues 1-4 of Batman: Dark Patterns are out now, with issue 5 hitting on April 9.
It’s a strange time to be reviewing an Nvidia graphics card. The company sent me a GeForce RTX 5080 a month and a half ago, and in that time, I’ve played a lot of games and watched a lot of GPU benchmark comparison videos. But also in that time, Nvidia’s longtime competitor AMD (which has historically been the underdog of the two) released its new line of cards, including the Radeon RX 9070 XT, which is shockingly comparable to the RTX 5080 while being significantly cheaper (the 9070 XT retails for $599, while the RTX 5080 costs $999). I figured, maybe by the time I post something, you’d be able to buy either GPU. Here’s the thing, though — you can’t. Almost as soon as Nvidia’s new cards hit the market in February, they sold out in less than an hour. The AMD cards are also in extraordinarily short supply. More troubling, both the Nvidia and AMD GPUs have ended up selling for significantly more than their retail price, either because of enterprising resellers, or because retailers can and do take advantage of the fact that people are always willing to pay quite a bit more for these cards than the list prices. But even if you were willing to pay several thousand dollars for one of these cards, you still might not be able to get one for months — or longer, it’s hard to say right now. Not that many of these cards exist in the world at this time, seemingly. [Ed note: This is not a new problem.] I don’t have a 9070 XT to which I can compare the RTX 5080, and if you’re reading this and you care about that comparison, you’ve probably already decided which one you prefer and what you hope to get. You might be the kind of person who has also been watching comparative benchmark videos and is willing to wait however long it takes to purchase the best-performing card on the market. Or you might be somebody more like me, who purchases what’s available and affordable when I’m in a position to upgrade. I actually bought an RTX 4070 Ti Super last fall with my own money. At that time, rumors suggested that Nvidia would release new cards in early 2025, but I was worried about President Trump’s impending tariffs, and I guessed that the 50-series cards wouldn’t actually be available to purchase for a long time after their debut anyway. It’s why I actually bought all of the parts for a brand-new PC build alongside my new GPU. (Also, at that time I didn’t know Nvidia was going to send me an RTX 5080 to review. One cannot and should not count on such things, even in our line of work.) This PC, for readers’ reference, contains an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz 8-core processor, a Gigabyte X670 AORUS Elite AX motherboard, 64 GB of RAM, and a 1600 W power supply. I have two 1440p monitors and, unfortunately for testing purposes, no 4K displays. I am now capable of playing STALKER 2 on my PC. And it even looks good! In addition to feeling desperate to upgrade my PC before Trump took office, lest I make an already expensive upgrade even pricier, I just wanted to play STALKER 2, which didn’t run at all on my previous PC (the one that contained the RTX 3070 I reviewed in 2020, a card that’s slightly below the recommended STALKER 2 system requirements). I’m not saying that STALKER 2 ran poorly on my previous machine. It did not run at all. It wouldn’t even load. Now, the PC version of STALKER 2 wasn’t exactly optimized for success at launch, but I kept on trying after multiple updates, and it didn’t go well. It seemed like an ill portent. Plus, the RTX 3070 was by far the newest component in my PC at that time. I was planning to circle back to the RTX 3070 as my comparison point for this RTX 5080 review because I figured the differences between it and my RTX 4070 Ti Super would be somewhat negligible, or at least, not very exciting to write about. Instead, I’ve ended up realizing that my RTX 4070 Ti Super — by far the most expensive item in my new PC build — was not actually that great. I hate to even admit this because I’m still kind of pissed off about it, but here we go. I had actually realized this problem long before the RTX 5080 arrived on my doorstep. Most games looked good on my new PC build, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — and let me use a technical term here — looked like dogshit. I could have, and would have, spent more time trying to figure out where the bottlenecking was happening, or why the frame rate in the game would plummet any time I tried to actually turn up the graphics settings at all to take some nice screenshots of what should have been a very pretty video game. Even on normal settings, it still tended to look shimmery and grainy and just plain wrong. I’m now gratified to learn that I’m not alone in this experience. Googling “RTX 4070 Ti Super Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks bad” will yield tons of different forum threads on Steam, Reddit, and elsewhere from people having the same problems that I ran into. After a lot of tweaking with settings, I managed to find a sweet spot where the game looked pretty good and the frame rate wasn’t suffering, but I felt confused and disappointed that it didn’t look way better — and that this much effort was required to feel content with the results. After all, I had just upgraded my entire PC, and Great Circle was the first major AAA, graphically intensive game that was released after my big upgrade. It felt bad. I now feel extremely spoiled by how good my games have looked and performed in 1440p with the RTX 5080. As soon as I plugged it in and installed the new Nvidia drivers, Great Circle looked incredible, no tweaks required. With every setting maxed out, I was still able to average 120-125 frames per second in the game, even in wide-open areas with lots of moving assets on screen (with Nvidia’s DLSS Frame Generation technology on the 4x setting). STALKER 2 fared even better, averaging 160 fps on all “Epic” settings and only dropping to 120 fps when I ran into those massive anomaly areas with tons of stuff floating around in the air. Perhaps the most satisfying point of comparison for me was Cyberpunk 2077. This is a game with a lot of shiny, reflective surfaces, and I had a blast taking pictures of them all. I compared them to some of my old screenshots when I first played the game, on my previous PC with the RTX 3070 (which was a brand-new card for me when that game was first released), and it’s fun to see the improvements. Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten a big makeover (including DLSS 4 support and path tracing) since it was first released, and now, my PC has, too, and I get to reap the benefits. Cyberpunk 2077, with my RTX 3070 on the left and my RTX 5080 on the right. Cyberpunk 2077, with my RTX 3070 on the left and my RTX 5080 on the right. All of this said, would I have attempted to purchase an RTX 5080 on my own, had I not been sent one by Nvidia last month? I actually think I might have, but not for a long time — probably a year from now, or longer, once the card actually becomes widely available and affordable. By that point, my personal frustrations with the RTX 4070 Ti Super — itself not a particularly big jump in power compared to the RTX 4070 Ti and the RTX 4070 Super (yes, those are actually two other cards with extremely similar names) — might have motivated me to resell and trade up my GPU. Or perhaps in the intervening time, I would have troubleshooted whatever weird, unlikely bottleneck was happening with my GPU on Great Circle. I have the personal privilege, currently, of not having to figure that out anymore, because I have an RTX 5080 that makes everything look fantastic right out of the box with no work on my part at all. Even if I decide to upgrade to 4K monitors down the line, I’m not too concerned about whether the RTX 5080 can keep up. For a regular person who’s looking to purchase a GPU right this second, I don’t know that I can recommend the RTX 5080 because you literally can’t buy it right now. I mean, you can certainly try, and if you’re as anxious about impending tariffs as I am, then maybe you should, despite the resale markup you’ll probably face. Even Nvidia’s 40-series cards are currently selling for hefty price tags, and it might be a while before even those cards get cheaper. They probably won’t until the 50-series cards are more widely available, assuming that ever happens. This is part of why the entire competition between the Nvidia RTX 5080 and AMD RX 9070 XT is a theoretical one, at least for the moment. Unless you’re willing to pay top dollar for a wallet-gouging resale on the exact new card you want, you’re probably going to do what I did last fall, which was to purchase a decently new card that happened to be available at a bearable price during the time period that I was making said purchase. If that somehow ends up being an RTX 5080, I can promise you it’ll make AAA games look fantastic for the next couple of years. Also, I hope you’re surviving whatever is happening to you in the far future where that RTX 5080 was available to buy at a bearable price.
After seeing Kraven the Hunter in theaters in December 2024, I couldn’t stop thinking about one detail of the movie. Kraven’s arrival on Netflix this week — its debut for the streaming audience — brought it back to the forefront of my mind. Kraven was a huge box-office flop, scoring around $60 million worldwide on a $110 million production budget, but it’s the kind of flop that sparks morbid curiosity. This weekend, many, many Netflix subscribers will pop this flick onto their televisions or second screens, and find out that there was a superhero movie in 2024 where a white guy on a trip to Africa got animal powers by drinking a voodoo potion. My issue here isn’t about accuracy to the source material, to be sure. It is technically true that Kraven got his powers of enhanced strength and speed from a potion he stole from an African “witch doctor.” (It was 1964, in his first appearance, and I suppose Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were having a real “broad stereotypes” kind of month.) But most modern comics politely don’t mention it, because, you know, the use of “voodoo” as shorthand for “jungle magic” is racist. Not to mention a real tonal swerve for a movie trying to be more Eastern Promises than Indiana Jones. But then again, maybe my complaint is about accuracy, in a roundabout way. Sony’s interconnected cinematic universe of Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movies (Morbius, Madame Web, the Venom movies, and now Kraven) were born of a mandate to bend secondary comics characters into new molds as self-serious heroes or antiheroes in superhero action-thrillers. Kraven the Hunter might be the best example of how that limited brief was prioritized over other good and obvious choices. If you had to choose one of Spider-Man’s out-and-out villains to hold down his own movie franchise, Kraven is about as adaptable a character as you can get. After all, he’s almost not even originally from Marvel’s comics. In the grand tradition of great ideas that Stan Lee borrowed and polished up with superhero clothes, Kraven (full name Sergei Kravinoff) is just a Marvel adaptation of General Zaroff from Richard Connell’s seminal 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” the origin of the saying that man is the most dangerous prey for a hunter to subdue. Zaroff is the villain of the piece, an aristocratic Russian big-game hunter who contrives to hunt unwilling human victims on a private preserve for his own enjoyment. “The Most Dangerous Game” had already inspired several loose or direct adaptations in film, radio, and television by the time Lee and Ditko debuted Kraven in 1964’s Amazing Spider-Man #15. The story of a man with immense resources who uses them to pursue his terrifying desire to hunt people like they were trophy animals had already become a general trope in midcentury adventure fiction, much in the same way the battle royale has made a big splash in modern action movies and TV: It was a useful structure for presenting a variety of resonant metaphors. Kraven himself was just one facet of the larger trope — or a natural continuation of it into the superhero sphere, however you want to look at it. And Kraven remains one of the most flexible villains in Marvel Comics. Traditionally, Spider-Man is his nemesis, but in actual practice, he’s been pitted against just about everybody. Creators can make him hunt Black Panther or Captain America, or even make him close, personal friends with Squirrel Girl. He’s a superbly efficient hook because he’s really just a light reskin of a broader trope that’s been used in works as tonally disparate as Gilligan’s Island and Criminal Minds. And it’s not like villains can’t anchor a movie franchise — just look at the horror genre. Kraven and the Predator are the same archetype. But even when handed a potentially universal boogeyman, Sony’s mandate was to cram him into familiar framing: a morally questionable hero of an action-thriller set in a world largely without superheroes. The filmmakers took the guy whose iconic role is hunting innocent human beings for sport until a hero triumphs over him, and made him the Punisher with a lion head motif to his shirt instead of a skull. I don’t think this is necessarily because the folks behind Kraven, or other Sony Spider-Man movies, don’t see the potential that the source comics revealed in these characters. Both Kraven actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Kraven director J.C. Chandor have said they were indebted to J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck’s defining 1987 crossover Kraven’s Last Hunt, and hoped that they might one day get to adapt that classic story. But that was always going to be a tall order in the structure of Sony’s Spider-Man Films Without Spider-Man (formerly “SPUMC”), considering that Kraven’s Last Hunt is a story about Kraven losing his marbles after years of losses to… Spider-Man. He hunts down, subdues, and buries the wall-crawler alive so he can don Spidey’s costume and act out his crime-fighting duties while maintaining his own brutal hunting methods. At the end, Kraven feels so personally fulfilled by defeating Spider-Man and (in his eyes) successfully doing the hero’s job that he releases Spider-Man and takes his own life. He’s an Alexander with no more worlds to conquer. Given all that, there is simply no removing Spider-Man, and his lengthy preestablished rivalry with Kraven, from Kraven’s Last Hunt. And Taylor-Johnson and Chandor aren’t the only Sony Spider-Man figureheads who seem to know that the franchise will always be a two-legged stool without the webslinger. But on the other hand, it’s equally difficult to imagine a story in which Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven — a grim adult man who turned his back on his crime-lord family and dedicated himself to murdering the most difficult-to-find criminals of the world — sees the defeat and replacement of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, a peppy 17-year-old do-gooder, as an act so personally fulfilling that he would consider it his life’s crowning achievement. And that, I think, is at the heart of the voodoo potion choice. If you’re making a Kraven movie where he doesn’t have a rivalry with Spider-Man and he’s not even a villain, maybe you have to keep the voodoo potion. Maybe, once you’ve changed practically everything about the character to aim at an ill-fitting brief instead of a resonant update or revamp, all that’s left of the original property to mark it as an adaptation are the most extraneous, dated, and cumbersome comic book details. Like a voodoo potion, an Amazonian spider cult, a ferociously contrived medical-experiment-to-vampire transformation, or the Venom franchise’s gradual deflation into a series of comics references lashed haphazardly into a single script. If the priority isn’t to make the best adaptation, but to make a mold-fitting adaptation, it becomes a lot harder to make a good adaptation. With Sony’s admission that it has no current plans to continue its Spider-Man-less Spider-Man Universe, Kraven the Hunter doesn’t just stand as a capstone on that effort, but as the best example of its flaws. The problem was never that there are only a couple of ways to make a great movie out of Kraven the Hunter. The problem is that there are a ton of ways, and Sony still picked this one. Kraven the Hunter (alongside Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance) is streaming on Netflix now.
It’s nice to be cozy. I’m a huge fan of being wrapped up in a big blanket, sipping hot chocolate, and leisurely walks under colorful autumn trees. Cozy games are also great, and they’re an increasingly popular genre. While I’ve spent hours preparing the perfect farm in Stardew Valley or exploring Bahari Bay in Palia, it can be fun to subvert the genre and play a cozy game with a twist on the formula. These games are still cozy, but there’s something else added to make things a little uncomfortable, uneasy, or unpredictable. These games might have a greater message or a threat hidden amid its soothing, comfy vibes. A garnish of anxiety, fear, or danger can elevate the rest of the game’s cozy elements, making for a great experience all the way through.
Statistically, you probably haven’t seen the Monster Hunter movie, probably because it came out at exactly the wrong time. Paul W.S. Anderson’s adaptation of Capcom’s video game series was released in December 2020, during a period where many people were still staying home rather than going to the theaters. It’s one of the only box-office disappointments of Anderson’s career, but it’s one of his best collaborations with Milla Jovovich — an epic genre mashup that effectively delivers on the scale and danger of the games. As of Thursday, it’s finally available for streaming more widely on Hulu, and the timing couldn’t be better: There’s a new kick-ass Paul W.S. Anderson/Milla Jovovich dark fantasy movie out in theaters right now, and a new Monster Hunter game out at home. There might as well be a national Monster Hunter (2020) holiday, and I encourage you to celebrate it with me. The setup is essentially an isekai: Captain Artemis (Jovovich) leads a U.N. Joint Security Operations team sent to investigate a mysterious disappearance in the desert, before being transported to a fantastical world where they encounter many monsters and eventually an ally called The Hunter (Tony Jaa). There’s also a positively feral Ron Perlman, closer to his Beauty and the Beast look than anything he has done since. The most important thing to get right in a Monster Hunter movie is the sense of scale, and Anderson and his team absolutely nail it. The massive landscapes are peppered with impossibly large skeletons, and our heroes use giant weapons to face off against the hulking monsters. Anderson uses top-down shots and extended slow zoom-outs to evoke a larger-than-life fantasy world before going wide and letting the monsters fill the entire frame. He’s able to create moments of spectacular awe through spare and effective use of slow-motion effects. Plus, the whole thing looks great — it can be easy to miss in the nonstop action and frantic editing, but Monster Hunter has terrific lighting, with bright white sands in the desert contrasting darker scenes full of meticulously placed pops of light and color to draw your eye. But my favorite part upon revisiting the movie is how Monster Hunter mashes genres together. On the surface, it’s a fantasy movie pitting soldiers against hulking creatures. But Anderson uses that premise to seamlessly cycle between inspirations from some of the greatest monster movies in history, with an Alien-style egg laying, a Jurassic Park-esque stampede, a Shelob-like giant spider lair, some Jaws-inspired sequences with monsters swimming in the sand, and other kaiju and creature feature staples. That’s all on top of the terrific buddy comedy setup between Artemis and The Hunter. Neither can understand the other’s language, which leads to an at first contentious and eventually quite charming and funny dynamic, pairing his impish laugh with her sternness. (A particular highlight: Her delivering an epic “Let’s do this” before a big battle and him responding with a confused “Hmmm?”). One of the more controversial elements about Monster Hunter, even among my fellow Paul W.S. Anderson die-hards, is the editing style. Anderson brought in Doobie White, who had previously worked with him on Resident Evil: The Final Chapter but is perhaps best known for his work with Neveldine and Taylor on the chaos-cinema staple Gamer. The result is a lot of fast-paced editing. At times, it’s too frantic, especially during the action sequences, where you lose out on some of the fluidity of Jaa and Jovovich’s terrific action skills. One of the greatest athletes to ever grace movie screens, Jaa still delivers with some killer flips, impressive kicks, and one hell of a sword, even if the movie sometimes struggles to keep up with him. But the approach does effectively sell the turmoil of the world, especially as Artemis tries to understand exactly what the hell she’s gotten herself into and what rules this land is governed by. Anderson has a long history adapting video games, starting with his classic Mortal Kombat, running through his Resident Evil franchise, and looking forward with his upcoming House of the Dead adaptation. Some fans of the Resident Evil games rejected his movies at the time because of a lack of perceived faithfulness (these are definitely “vibes over fealty” adaptations), and while Monster Hunter brings in classes, costumes, and weapons from the game franchise, the actual monster hunts don’t resemble the ones in the games all that closely. But that’s OK! It feels like a Monster Hunter movie, and what separates Anderson from many other filmmakers adapting video game and comics projects these days is the fact that he isn’t embarrassed of the source material. He’s a true fan who also happens to have immense technical skill. And there may be more on the way, someday: The ending sets up a possible Monster Hunter sequel, and both Anderson and Jovovich have said they’d like to make another one and that Anderson has worked on a script. Add Tár into the mix, and you have a whole universe of great Monster Hunter movies. Monster Hunter is streaming on Hulu.
Rand al’Thor is a singular figure in the Wheel of Time series: Though there are other men who try their hand at channeling, Rand’s prophetic role as the Dragon Reborn means he’s the sole man who’s able to use magic effectively (or, at least, without eventually being driven mad). That also puts Josha Stradowski, the actor who plays Rand on Prime Video’s Wheel of Time show, in a unique position: In a show full of women channelers, Rand is the only male channeler with any real longevity on the series. Season 3 marks a big change for him, traveling with Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) and more eager to accept his role as the Dragon Reborn — and, with it, the burden of learning channeling. But as the third episode shows, the truth is — for as much as she is willing to guide him — Moiraine could never have the same relationship with channeling that Rand does. While she says she understands the “thirst” he feels, his description pushes deeper; for him it’s not just “dying of thirst” and coming upon a pond where “water tastes like life itself” — it’s gorging on a sweet poison that leaves him bitter and constantly threatens to pull him under. The fear they both feel about his metaphor seems palpable. But still she has to encourage him to find a relationship to channeling. It’s a small scene, but an important one to both Pike and Stradowski. “I think that was one of the scenes we wrote together with Rafe [Judkins, Wheel of Time showrunner], because this season, apart from showing the channeling in a different way, I also wanted the characters to talk about it,” Stradowski tells Polygon. “There’s so many presumptions about what it might be like, but they haven’t really spoken about it together.” For inspiration about where Rand was at, Stradowski says he thought of Mike Tyson, and how he “didn’t like the person who he needed to become in order to do whatever he did in the ring.” Which is, unfortunately, exactly what Moiraine is left to council Rand with. “You might not like the person you need to be, but you need to love both parts of it,” Pike says. “You need to be able to love the shepherd and the explosive power hub that you’re going to become.” That’s not to say it’s not without its risks: As Pike says of that final episode of the week, Moiraine feels decidedly on the outside of Rand’s growth, at once fearful of him tipping closer to madness (or, possibly, already there and taking it out on Egwene), but also knowing he needs to train. For Stradowski, the physical act of performing channeling is something he’s looking forward to developing, with Rand’s style being possibly a bit more singular than that of the women around him. “I hope we get to explore more because the channeling is so interesting,” Stradowski says. “It’s on a cellular level in the books — there’s a moment where they try to heal men that have gone mad because of channeling. And they look inside their brain and try to get the madness out. “And they look inside of Rand’s brain and they just don’t even dare to go there because it’s so messed up. So that’s where we want to go.” The first three episodes of The Wheel of Time are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes come out every Thursday.
Wanderstop managed to make me feel emotionally attacked while making tea, and I love it. If you’re looking for a cozy game to indulge in this weekend, whether indoors or in the pseudo-spring weather outside, Wanderstop is a great fit — and it’s discounted to $22.49 through March 18 on Steam as part of the Steam Spring Sale (was $24.99). Wanderstop gives you a chance to engage in typical cozy tasks like reading books, making tea, and decorating your cute little shop, but the narrative and design decisions provide some interesting wrinkles. As you progress through the story, you’ll find that Wanderstop has a lot to say on topics like burnout, being present, learning to let go, and working through tough feelings. If Animal Crossing is your friend who always agrees with your bad takes, Wanderstop is the therapist who challenges your negative self-talk. And just in case Wanderstop isn’t your cup of tea, we’ve also rounded up a short list of other games discounted during the Steam Spring Sale that you might want to check out.
When you’ve devoted years of your life to covering Street Fighter 2 history, it’s nice knowing you’re not alone. So when I heard about the documentary Here Comes a New Challenger a few years ago, I was excited to see another take on the greatest game of all time. Now available for free on Tubi, the movie takes a broad look at the game and its impact, featuring former Capcom staff such as Yoshiki Okamoto and Yoko Shimomura as well as those who were involved in the game’s broader cultural footprint, like Steven E. de Souza (who directed the 1994 live-action movie), Paul Davies (who wrote about the game in the media), and Mick McGinty (who drew the game’s Western box art). In an effort to spotlight game-related books and documentaries, Polygon is running an email interview series with the people behind them. We previously connected with Julian Rignall about his not-quite-an-autobiography The Games of a Lifetime, Paul Vogel about his Housemarque documentary The Name of the Game, and Lewis Packwood about his obscure game hardware book Curious Video Game Machines. Below, we have Here Comes a New Challenger director Oliver Harper discussing how the film came about, what he had to cut, and the challenges involved with putting game history on camera. Polygon: How did the idea for this kick off originally? Oliver Harper: The documentary In Search of the Last Action Heroes which had I directed before Here Comes a New Challenger had a section on Street Fighter the movie, and being a huge fan of Street Fighter 2 since it arrived in arcades I naturally really enjoyed covering the Van Damme film, which is a guilty pleasure of mine. So when it came time to think of what I would do next, I thought Street Fighter 2 would be a good direction to go. Having been a YouTuber for over a decade providing retrospectives on movies I grew up on and even video games, I was fully aware of the retro scene and knew the game still had a strong following. There had been a couple of documentaries on Street Fighter 2 but they didn’t really appeal to me, as they focused more on the competitive side of things, which is very important to the history of Street Fighter but in reality it’s a very niche side of the game because I never knew anyone who played or competed professionally in tournaments. It wasn’t a thing unless you lived in London and visited arcades on a regular basis. So I wanted my documentary to focus its impact on the general gamer, who enjoyed it on their SNES and Mega Drive and read the gaming magazines to get their fix, got hyped for the live action movie and ended up disappointed and found joy in discovering the animated movie thus making it more accessible to a larger audience. One of the challenges I ran into on the book was that people often had different memories — or different versions of stories — of what happened behind the scenes at Capcom. But we didn’t interview all the same people. Did you run into that much on the film? During the early stages of writing the questions for the interviewees, I had read your articles for Polygon on the development of the games to cross check what was said historically about the making of Street Fighter 2 and the various updates. I also went through all the old video game magazines from the USA and UK to make sure things were matching up. Most of the errors we encountered [were] with interviewees remembering dates and names incorrectly so we had to work around that or remove a section entirely because it didn’t make sense or it was inaccurate with a few details. I also found Capcom to be one of the pickier companies in what they were willing to participate in and how much they wanted to control what former employees said. Did you deal with Capcom much for the film? We didn’t deal with Capcom at all during the making and marketing of the documentary. I was informed early on that they were aware of the crowdfunding for it through a colleague of mine, but I had no direct contact with the studio throughout the whole production. Once we had finished the documentary and were in talks with some distributors, one had reached out to Capcom and they surprised me by saying both Capcom USA and Japan had seen the documentary and loved it. So the distributor was free to do what they wanted with it. It would’ve been cool if Capcom had publicly supported it or told people that they enjoyed it, but as it was unofficial and not commissioned by Capcom I understood they couldn’t do that. Favorite thing you had to cut from the film? We had a section on video game magazines that dealt with comparisons between the USA and the UK and how they shared information. I was a big fan of Computer & Video Games magazine, which Paul Davies had edited during I think its best years, and they wanted to mimic what the Japanese magazines were doing. And Games Master [was] more in favour of copying the American publications, so you saw this bias towards different franchises. CVG were still in support of Street Fighter whereas Games Master had shifted to Mortal Kombat. It was an interesting discussion but we couldn’t really find a place for it to fit. There was also a discussion on the drug taking on Street Fighter the movie. Troubled productions are often very interesting — people love some drama — but during the process of legal clearance it was suggested we remove those details to not upset anyone, and play it safe. Final thoughts looking back? I’m very happy with the documentary. I managed to cover everything I wanted to, we managed to achieve a lot on a small budget, [and] my crew did an amazing job shooting additional b-roll to provide a lot of variety visually to the documentary. I didn’t want to just do a talking head then a clip from the video game for its entire run time. I wanted people to be visually engaged with it along with the story. Of course, we were restricted somewhat by a run time. I wanted the audience to be able watch it in one go and not have it be a 4-to-5 hour documentary that people struggle to watch and have to return to over a couple of days, as the pacing becomes clunky and you fall into the problem of people losing interest. There [were] of course people I wanted to interview but things didn’t work out due to time or budget restrictions. There [were] some cases that people didn’t want to be on camera. It’s far easier for someone to commit to an interview if it’s via email and not having the stress of a camera team turn up around their house or office. Others had a bad experience with Street Fighter in the case of the arcade port of the live action movie, and they didn’t want to drum up the past. Which I felt was fair enough but more voices involved in that game would’ve been great. I hope more fans of Street Fighter 2 check out the documentary. On release we didn’t have the marketing muscle to get it in front of the fans, so I do believe a lot of the fanbase [is] unaware of it so hopefully they will discover it and have a nice trip down memory lane.
There are tons of cool sci-fi films to look forward to in the coming weeks. From Flying Lotus’ psychedelic horror thriller Ash to David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, there’s no shortage of exciting new releases to catch in theaters. If you’re looking for the best sci-fi movies to watch from the comfort of your own home, though, we’ve got a couple in mind that’ll give the latest slate of films a run for their money and then some. This week, we’ve picked an indelible sci-fi classic starring Harrison Ford and Sean Young, a critically panned superhero reboot that’s actually pretty good, and a maximalist action horror movie with guns and guts galore. Let’s take a look at what this month has to offer! Editor’s pick: Blade Runner: The Final Cut Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young Imagine this: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden, you look down and you see a tortoise that’s crawling toward you. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help, but you’re not helping. Why is that? You already know the answer, don’t you? Ridley Scott’s 1982 neo-noir opus is essentially a litmus (or Voight-Kampff) test for whether or not you’ll enjoy cyberpunk as a whole, as almost the entirety of the genre’s tonal, thematic, and aesthetic touchstones are attributable to the film’s singular vision of a petro-capitalist future teetering on the brink of collapse. It is, in many ways, a perfect sci-fi film, if not a perfect film, full stop. More than four decades since its theatrical release, Blade Runner remains a timeless and essential work of art. —Toussaint Egan Power Rangers Director: Dean Israelite Cast: Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler No matter who you ask, just about anyone will tell you that making a Power Rangers reboot movie in 2017 seemed like a terrible idea. And yet, director Dean Israelite pulled off one of the most fun, interesting, and inventive blockbusters of the 2010s. The plot of the movie is mostly a copy of the original show’s first episode. A group of five kids find magical coins that grant them incredible powers and the ability to transform into colorful-suited Power Rangers and talk to Zordon, a floating hologram head voiced by Bryan Cranston. At the same time that they gain this power, the evil Rita Repulsa, played by Elizabeth Banks in a ridiculously fun performance, awakens from her 65 million-year slumber with a new plan to take over the world that only the Power Rangers can stop. The fact that all this works is due in large part to the movie’s excellent cast, which includes a few stars, like Banks and Cranston, and several young actors who were about to break out, like Dacre Montgomery, Naomi Scott, and RJ Cyler. On top of that, the movie is smart enough to play everything straight, rather than being ashamed of its source material or overly nostalgic. —Austen Goslin Resident Evil: Retribution Director: Paul W.S. Anderson Cast: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Kevin Durand Paul W.S. Anderson is back in theaters with his new movie In the Lost Lands, which means it’s a perfect time to revisit one of the best entries in his excellent Resident Evil franchise. Resident Evil: Retribution is the fifth movie in the series, the third directed by Anderson, and it feels like the first time in the series he was given the space to go all out with his action. Alice (Milla Jovovich) has been captured by the evil Umbrella Corporation and is being held inside its top-secret base somewhere in Russia. The base itself has dozens of massive rooms, each designed to simulate some of the biggest cities in the world, like New York, Tokyo, and Moscow. This provides Retribution with the perfect excuse to stage some extremely cool action set-pieces in each of these locations, with thousands of teeming zombies attacking Alice and her allies. This premise makes Retribution a surprisingly strong jumping-on point for the series, and turns the whole movie into a fantastic sci-fi action romp. —AG
Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home. This week, Moana 2, the sequel to Disney’s animated splash hit starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Auliʻi Cravalho, finally comes to streaming (pun intended) on Disney Plus. There’s plenty of other exciting releases to choose from this week as well, including Anthony and Joe Russo’s The Electric State and the superhero action movie Kraven the Hunter on Netflix, the offbeat musical biopic Better Man on Paramount Plus, and much more. We’ve even got some some new releases available to rent on VOD, like the Oscar-winning drama I’m Still Here and the new horror thriller Borderline starring Samara Weaving (Ready or Not). Here’s everything new that’s available to watch this weekend! New on Netflix The Electric State Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix Genre: Sci-fi adventure Run time: 2h 8m Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie Loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel, the Russo brothers’ sci-fi adventure film stars Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) as Michelle, an orphaned teenager living in a retrofuturistic world where robots have been banished in the wake of an attempted rebellion. After befriending a mysterious robot with apparent knowledge of her missing brother, Michelle embarks on a journey to the fortified robot enclosure known as the “Electric State” in search of him. Chris Pratt co-stars as an eccentric smuggler who comes to Michelle’s aid on her quest, along with his robot partner (Anthony Mackie). Kraven the Hunter Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix Genre: Superhero action Run time: 2h 7m Director: J.C. Chandor Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger Following in the footsteps of Morbius and Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter is yet another Sony Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man in it. (And who knows? This might actually be the last one!) Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as Kraven, who in this version gets some animal-like powers after being injected with a serum. He’s also a conservationist and animal lover, instead of a poacher who just wants to go after the most dangerous game. An antihero! From our review: It’s a largely joyless affair, and Chandor can’t seem to decide on a dramatic or comedic tone, let alone a blend of the two. Taylor-Johnson often stands around delivering lines that seem intended to be catchphrases, but he does so with all the determination of someone who loathes the material. A quipper-hero Kraven is not, and neither is Taylor-Johnson. But then, practically every actor in the cast is entirely checked out. Rarely has a superhero movie featured this many talented performers phoning it in. But with such bland material, can you blame them? New on Hulu Control Freak Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu Genre: Horror thriller Run time: 1h 44m Director: Shal Ngo Cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Miles Robbins, Kieu Chinh In this horror movie, a woman is tormented by an itch on the back of her head that she can’t scratch away. With a premise this relatable, this movie’s sure to cause even the most hardened horror viewer to squirm a little. New on Max The Parenting Where to watch: Available to stream on Max Genre: Comedy horror Run time: 1h 40m Director: Craig Johnson Cast: Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn, Brian Cox Spending a weekend with your parents as an adult can be a little weird, but it’s particularly tough when the house you’ve rented for the event happens to be inhabited by a 400-year-old evil ghost. Then again, in this horror comedy, maybe even a ghost is better than spending too much time with family. New on Disney Plus Moana 2 Where to watch: Available to stream on Disney Plus Genre: Musical adventure Run time: 1h 40m Directors: David Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller Cast: Auliʻi Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Hualālai Chung The Moana sequel was originally supposed to be a Moana Disney Plus show. But now it’s a full-fledged theatrical adventure, with Moana once again setting off on a sailing journey. This time, she’s joined by a ragtag crew, including a Maui fanboy, a quirky inventor, and a farmer who doesn’t know how to swim. Dwayne Johnson returns as Maui, too, and Moana and her friends search for a distant, legendary island in an effort to make contact with other people who might live on the islands in the sea. From our review: Moana 2 may grow on me as well — frankly, my feelings for it could only go up from where they started. It’s been less than a day since I saw the long-awaited sequel (Disney screened the film for press just 17 hours ago), but unlike with the overwhelming let-me-hear-that-again rush of experiencing Moana for the first time, I don’t have the lingering gut feeling that I’ve missed something. In the end, Moana 2 is a vehicle for one banger, a feel-good throwback, and a few songs we’ll never talk about again, which doesn’t feel like enough for a brand-new Moana. New on Paramount Plus Better Man Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus Genre: Psychological drama Run time: 2h 15m Director: Michael Gracey Cast: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton Music biopics are getting a little same-y, which is exactly why Better Man tells the story of Robbie Williams by turning the British pop star into a CGI ape. That may sound bizarre, and it is, but the visual effect looks incredible and gives the movie plenty of room for creative and kinetic dance sequences set to Williams’ catalog of hits. New on Criterion Channel All We Imagine as Light Where to watch: Available to stream on Criterion Channel Genre: Romantic drama Run time: 1h 58m Director: Payal Kapadia Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam This beguiling drama from writer-director Payal Kapadia centers on Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), two roommates who work together at a city hospital. Both women find themselves at a crossroads in their lives, forced to choose between their own hearts and their obligations to their respective families as they navigate a city rife with dreams, hopes, and illusions. All We Imagine as Light was one of the best-reviewed new movies of 2024. New to rent I’m Still Here Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu Genre: Drama Run time: 2h 17m Director: Walter Salles Cast: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning drama follows the story of a family living under the yoke of Brazil’s military dictatorship during the 1970s. When her husband (Selton Mello) is taken away for questioning, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) must gather her courage and steel herself to protect herself and her family from the worst that the world has to pit against them. Borderline Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu Genre: Comedy thriller Run time: 1h 34m Director: Jimmy Warden Cast: Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails Scream queen Samara Weaving (Ready or Not) is back in her second horror feature of 2024! Borderline centers on Sofia, a famous pop star who wakes up one night to discover that her home has been invaded by Duerson (Ray Nicholson), an obsessive fan who harbors delusions of them getting married. To survive, Sofia will have to use every ounce of her cunning and wits to escape her captor and find help.
The Sane Jewel is a decoration in Monster Hunter Wilds that is a bit challenging to locate, but the effects granted by it are worth the trouble. If you’re struggling on how to get the Sane Jewel, or what it does, read on. We cover what the Sane Jewel is and tell you how to get one in Monster Hunter Wilds. What is the Sane Jewel in Monster Hunter Wilds? The Sane Jewel is a decoration type that can randomly drop at the end of hunts in Monster Hunter Wilds. But because it’s a rarity-5 decoration, many hunters haven’t found the jewel until they’ve hit a very high hunter rank. The Sane Jewel provides the skill Antivirus, which could be useful in high-level fights found deeper in the game. Antivirus’ skill description is: “Once infected, makes it easier to overcome the Frenzy and increase Affinity when cured.” Frenzy is a two-stage status effect inflicted by some high-level monsters, like Gore Magala. GameRant has an excellent guide to Frenzy’s stages, but to keep this focused to Sane Jewel, its skill helps you harness the Frenzy ability to raise your affinity. The three levels of the Antivirus skill boost affinity between 3% and 15%; slotting the Sane Jewel in some armor with the skill, or while wearing the Sanity Charm, could be very effective if you’re aiming to deal more critical damage. How to Meld the Sane Jewel in Monster Hunter Wilds If you haven’t had luck on random drops, the Sane Jewel is available to craft at the Melding Pot. It costs 80 Melding Points to create one Sane Jewel. The Sane Jewel’s availability at the Melding Pot seems to be gated behind a specific Hunter Rank. According to discussions on Reddit, some players discovered it after HR 100. These screenshots came from one Polygon team member who is HR 124 and who confirmed they could craft a Sane Jewel.
Both the Armorcharm and the Powercharm are powerful key items in Monster Hunter Wilds. You’ll get both of them as rewards for High Rank quests. You only get them as rewards the first time you complete each quest. The Armorcharm raises your defense by 12. The Powercharm raises your attack by 6. Our Monster Hunter Wilds guide will tell you how to get the Armorcharm and Powercharm and how to use them. How to get the Armorcharm in Monster Hunter Wilds The Armorcharm is a reward you’ll get from the “Secure Wounded Hollow” quest. You get this quest from Cobb in Suja, Peaks of Accord. For “Secure Wounded Hollow,” you’ll head into the High Rank area of Wounded Hollow. In that region’s arena, you’ll have to take on a pair of Hirabami. Once it’s completed, you’ll need to talk to Cobb again to get the Armorcharm. You’ll only see a brief message about it on the right side of your screen and then it just kind of disappears in your item box. When you’re done, head over to Rex to get another quest, “As Gatekeeper,” that you’ll need for… How to get the Powercharm in Monster Hunter Wilds Like the Armorcharm, the Powercharm is a reward from an optional quest, “As Gatekeeper.” This one is from Rex (who is wearing the same armor as Cobb) in Wounded Hollow. “As Gatekeeper” has you head back into the Wounded Hollow arena to take on a pair of Ajarakan. When you’re done, talk to Rex again to get the Powercharm. How to use the Armorcharm and Powercharm in Monster Hunter Wilds When you get them as rewards, both the Armorcharm and the Powercharm will get dropped into your item box. For them to help you, though, you’ll need to move them to your item pouch. You don’t actually use the Armorcharm or Powercharm as items. You get the benefits just by having them in your item pouch. They’ll take up a slot, but they do not get added to your item bar. To also help you understand Monster Hunter Wilds, we explain how to capture monsters, how to change weapons, provide some Seikret tips, and teach you how layered armor works.
Director brothers Joe and Anthony Russo love to dream big, on screen and off. After delivering the grandest season finale of all time, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the duo set off in a million different directions, including franchise-building at Netflix, partnering with Epic on Fortnite, and pontificating on the future of AI in movies. They do seem to love cinema (especially Heat), but in interviews, the filmmakers often sound more like engineers than storytellers — fascinated by parts and eager to experiment with tools that will let them go as big as possible. So maybe it’s no surprise that the Russos would jump at the chance to adapt Simon Stålenhag’s retrofuture robot-forward dystopian sci-fi tale The Electric State, or that, with a reported $300 million-plus budget to throw around, their new Netflix movie is all nuts and bolts and no soul. Despite the Russos’ clear appreciation for the Swedish artist behind Tales from the Loop (and its various incarnations as a TTRPG, board game, and TV show), and his haunting art in The Electric State, their Netflix adaptation opens by pouring out metric tons of exposition like concrete. Then it nudges its characters across the resulting smooth-brained surface like a couple of giraffes in roller skates. The finished product is a mess, and a sign that the Russos’ taste for “going big” might be unfit for the medium of film. Written by the Russos’ MCU cohorts Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, The Electric State stars Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a rebellious teenager living in an alternate 1990s that’s mellowing out after a robot uprising. As we learn in a dizzying data dump, humans were nearly outnumbered by worker bots until Muskian douchenozzle Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) invented the “Neurocaster,” a helmet interface that allowed fleshbags to inhabit the bodies of cyborgs and go toe to toe against the robotic rebels. Michelle finds society’s postwar dependency on Neurocasters like, totally wack, but her technological worldviews are upended when she meets Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), a cartoonish bot possibly possessed by her believed-to-be-dead genius brother, but suffering from Bumblebee syndrome, in that it can only speak through canned catchphrases. The two, with the help of ex-soldier Keats (Chris Pratt) and his own quippy robo-pal Herman (Anthony Mackie), hit the road to hunt down Skate, who Michelle believes is holding her brother captive. Ostensibly a straightforward road movie through the decimated landscapes of post-robowar America, The Electric State ends up flooded by whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys. Michelle and Keats are blank heroes who amass a battalion of metallic friends (a mailbot voiced by Jenny Slate; a Mr. Peanut automaton played by Woody Harrelson), all apparently programmed to be Saturday morning cartoon sidekicks. Muddy action fills the gaps between revelations about Skate’s ultimate plans, and so often, it’s rendered in drab colors and shadows. Ironically, the blend of live-action backdrops and polished visual effects puppetry lacks the depth of the 2D illustrations in Stålenhag’s book. The Electric State, the movie, is devoid of majesty. A Spielbergian throwback full of pre-visualized laser fire, quippy CG creations, and trailercore ’90s covers (that made me wonder if the Russos were a little jealous they didn’t get to make a Guardians of the Galaxy movie) probably made sense on paper for a creative team who needed to distill a Hollywood story from Stålenhag’s source material. But it overlooks a key part of the book: just basking in the art. At many points on Michelle’s journey, I was desperate for the plot to stop so I could stand still and soak up this strange alternate universe. I wanted to wander around the abandoned mall, now a sanctuary for refugee robots. I wanted to chitchat with the robo-cook. I wanted to play The Electric State. When I queued up the Russos’ movie, I was about 30 hours into Eternal Strands, the recent action/fantasy RPG produced by former BioWare devs. The game’s physics-based combat makes a truly chaotic but exhilarating experience out of fighting titan automatons and discovering traces of an ancient but fallen civilization. The mythology was not so unique that I sat through every NPC companion’s dialogue or read every scrawled bit of backstory — Fallout might be my standard-bearer for world-building gravy I want to lap up — but I luxuriated in Eternal Strands’ scale and elemental jank (complimentary). Watching The Electric State, as the characters zipped past abandoned bot husks and brushed against the larger political upheaval of the war, made me pine for the epistolary experience I was having over in Eternal Strands, where I got to set the pace. Instead, I got the speedrun. Branded mascots, pop culture references, and 1993 footage of Bill Clinton addressing a missile attack on Iraq’s intelligence headquarters edited to suggest he’s talking about the robowars aren’t enough to ground The Electric State in lived-in reality. The screenplay never brings viewers close to the conflict, past or present. It’s not a necessity for the story to do so — there’s a long history of post-apocalyptic fiction and other road movies that consider the weight of American culture through the eyes of one person’s drama — but Brown can’t do much with the stock character work on the page, and The Electric State is not Bones and All for robots. So the Russos rely solely on iconography to immerse us in the story. They probably needed 80 more hours and Unreal Engine 5 to pull it off. In two-hour cinematic form, The Electric State is the most generic version of what it could possibly be. Even the big finale fight scene feels like a mishmash of Endgame (nondescript overcast industrial lawn battleground) and Mad Max: Fury Road (Doof Warrior stand-in in the form of a robot taco). Saying that this movie feels like blockbuster entertainment written by AI seems a little rude — computers would probably have a deeper understanding of the robotic struggle — but it’s just that vacant. I don’t expect the official Electric State video game, a mobile-friendly puzzler produced by Netflix and the Russos, to fill in too many gaps. The Electric State is now streaming on Netflix.
I wonder if the developers of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — several years ago, when they were first outlining the game’s core pillars — felt like they knew what they were getting into when they decided to go the full-likeness route. That is, that the game’s protagonist wouldn’t just be “Indiana Jones,” but would look, sound, and move like Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, and specifically, the version of the character that fans knew and loved from the 1980s-era original trilogy. Y’know, Indy in his barrel-chested prime, not the senior citizen from the latter two films. It’s a miracle that any game gets made, but it’s particularly miraculous that MachineGames pulled off this incredibly ambitious goal — and it all comes down to Troy Baker. The renowned voice actor has delivered indelible performances as Joel in The Last of Us, Sam Drake in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, and many other video game roles, but there are few characters more iconic and beloved in the popular imagination than Indiana Jones. Anything but a pitch-perfect recreation of Ford’s voice wasn’t going to cut it. Courtesy of a new video published Friday by BAFTA, we have some insight from the developers at about how Baker managed this feat. He started the project with some method acting, in a sense: Baker showed up to the first table read — conducted virtually over Microsoft Teams because it was during the pandemic — with “Indiana Jones” as his screen name, and he also brought Indy’s fedora and bullwhip to the session, according to cinematic producer Mitra Ashkan Far. She and voice-over designer Emily Hesler give a lot of credit to performance director Tom Keegan, whose resume includes multiple Wolfenstein and Star Wars games. Keegan “would do so well at getting people into character,” Hesler says. Around the 7:20 mark of the 27-minute video, Hesler plays some voice-over recordings of Baker grunting as Indy — just a second or two of him crying out as he takes a beating — and calls out the special sauce that makes his performance so remarkable, and so Ford-like. “I think that’s so Indy right there,” says Hesler, laughing in amazement at the clip. “I don’t know, there’s so much personality in that, and so much more than him just getting kicked in the face.” To Hesler, the timbre of Baker’s grunts tells you that Indy is frustrated to find himself in this situation, but simultaneously, the performance somehow convey a sense of strength and resolve — that Indy isn’t helpless, and in fact, that he knows he’s going to get back at the goon who’s laying into him. “It has to have some, like, breathiness, I feel like,” Hesler continues. “Breathiness. I mean, there’s still tone there, but… oh, and something where he sounds kind of, like, annoyed at the same time, too. There’s got to be some sort of attitude or personality in it. And yeah, again, Troy pulls it off so well.” Even after the dozens of hours I’ve spent playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I still marvel at Baker’s performance as Indy, for which he shared in the 2025 DICE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Character. The game is scheduled to debut on PlayStation 5 this spring.
This story was first published in Switchboard, a newsletter from Polygon that delivers all the latest Switch 2 news, reporting, and rumors directly to your inbox. Sign up here to get it weekly. Nintendo’s Switch 2 reveal in January showed very little in the way of games, except an untitled new Mario Kart. We’ll have to wait a few more weeks to get a closer look at the company’s software lineup for Switch 2 — but we might have some helpful indicators about which of Nintendo’s internal development teams have been making software for the next-gen console for the past few years. While we wait for more official game announcements during April’s Nintendo Direct, let’s take a look at Nintendo’s 10 internal development teams, what they’ve been working on, and if they’ve had any runway to start making games for Switch 2’s launch window. (Keep in mind that Nintendo has a bunch of similar-sounding dev teams, so bear with us as we walk through who’s who and what they’re working on.) Nintendo EPD Co-Production Group Who they are: This team (a combination of EPD Group No. 2 and No. 3) works with outside studios like HAL Laboratory, Intelligent Systems, and Monolith Software on franchises like Kirby, Fire Emblem, and Xenoblade. The group also works with teams behind a variety of Mario and Pokémon spinoffs. Most recent release: It’s been a long time since we had a new Kirby game — Kirby’s Dream Buffet came out in 2022 — meaning the pink puff is due for a new adventure. EPD Co-Production Group still has two Switch 1 titles on its plate for 2025: Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition and Pokémon Legends: Z-A. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: Good, if HAL has a Kirby waiting in the wings. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 3 Who they are: The Zelda team. Most recent release: Production Group No. 3 released The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 2023 and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in 2024, so they’ve been quite busy lately. The team worked with longtime Zelda collaboration studio Grezzo on Echoes of Wisdom, but even with outside help, it’s going to be a while before we see the next big Legend of Zelda game. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: Nil. Nintendo typically announces new mainline Zelda games many months or years in advance. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 4 Who they are: One of Nintendo’s most experimental teams, Production Group No. 4 is behind swerves like Nintendo Labo, Ring Fit Adventure, and Game Builder Garage. Most recent release: The team most recently worked with partners on Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition and Alarmo. Production Group No. 4 is very likely working on new Switch 2 software, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the team building something around the console’s new mouse-control functionality. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: High. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 5 Who they are: During the Switch’s lifespan, Group No. 5 has been working on Splatoon and Animal Crossing. Before that, members of the team worked on games that highlighted Nintendo consoles’ unique features with Wii Sports and Nintendo Land. Most recent release: Splatoon 3 was released back in 2022, and has received regular updates. It’s been more than three years since Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ last major update, the Happy Home Paradise DLC. With more than 47 million copies of New Horizons sold, Production Group No. 5 is almost assuredly developing a follow-up. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: Good, especially if Nintendo wants to start Switch 2 off with a bang with a new Animal Crossing. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 6 Who they are: Another external R&D team, Production Group No. 6 works with developers behind the Metroid Prime, Donkey Kong Country, WarioWare, and Paper Mario series. Most recent release: The group just delivered Donkey Kong Country Returns HD (with Forever Entertainment) and is still working on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (with Retro Studios). So it has a relatively full plate. Production Group No. 6 also works with Next Level Games, the team behind Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Mario Strikers: Battle League, and they haven’t released a new game since 2022. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: Does a cross-gen Metroid Prime 4 count? Then pretty good! Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 7 Who they are: This is the team responsible for the development of 2D Metroid games and the Rhythm Heaven series. Most recent release: Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club. Beyond that, it’s unclear what Group No. 7 could be working on for Switch 2. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: This team has been pretty quiet lately, so the chance that it’s working on something new — possibly a new Rhythm Heaven or something fun/weird, à la Miitomo and Tomodachi Life — is excitingly high. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 8 Who they are: They make 3D Mario games, including 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey, so they’re kind of a big deal. Most recent release: It’s been nearly eight years since Odyssey, the most recent mainline 3D Mario game. Production Group No. 8 also worked on 2021’s open-world Bowser’s Fury expansion to Super Mario 3D World, a possible indicator that future 3D Mario games could further explore open-world designs. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: High. Maybe within the launch window. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 9 Who they are: This is the team responsible for recent Mario Kart games and Arms for Nintendo Switch. Most recent release: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Mario Kart Tour. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: All but guaranteed with Mario Kart 9. Nintendo EPD Production Group No. 10 Who they are: Production Group No. 10 is behind many of Nintendo’s 2D Mario games and the Pikmin series. Most recent release: The team released Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Pikmin 4 in 2023, so it’s had a little time to start working on new games for Switch 2. The team is also responsible for the Super Mario Maker series, a franchise that would showcase Switch 2’s Joy-Con mouse controls. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: That all depends on just how many Mario games Nintendo wants to release in 2025. Nintendo EPD – Smart Device Production Group Who they are: Nintendo’s mobile games team. Most recent release: In addition to supporting Fire Emblem Heroes and Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo’s smart device team recently released Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete, and basically wrapped up support for it. Odds of a new game for the Switch 2 launch: Probably close to zero, since the team works on Nintendo’s smart device software. Beyond its internal teams, Nintendo has a variety of subsidiaries and partners who co-develop games. That includes 1-Up Studio (3D Mario), Monolith Soft (Xenoblade), Next Level Games (Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Strikers), Nintendo Cube (Mario Party), Nintendo European Research & Development (Nintendo Switch Online), Nintendo Software Technology (Mario), Retro Studios (Metroid Prime, Donkey Kong Country), and Shiver Entertainment (porting work). Pokémon developer Game Freak, Grezzo, HAL Laboratory, and Intelligent Systems may also be working on or supporting Switch 2 software. Suffice it to say, Nintendo has a lot of people power to create a big library of new games, which could mean a very robust lineup of Switch 2 launch software.
Your GM puts up with your party’s antics week after week, so why not show them a little love by checking out DriveThruRPG’s GM Day sale? This sale includes plenty of core rulebooks if you’re looking to get introduced to a new system like the Alien RPG, Cyberpunk RED, or Dune: Adventures in the Imperium. But you can also find a wide variety of discounted supplements and other texts if you’re looking for ways to expand your favorite TTRPG, like Battletech Universe, the Colonial Marines Operations Manual, or Interface Red just to name a few. Hundreds of products from a variety of publishers are currently discounted as part of this sale, but we’ve pulled together a short list of core rulebooks for our favorite systems below.
Herbivore carapaces are an equipment material in Monster Hunter Wilds. You’ll get them from hunting certain small monsters or as rewards for certain hunts once you reach High Rank. The Low Rank version is called an herbivore shell. You’ll need herbivore carapaces for armor like the Death Stench set and the High Rank Doshaguma Mail. Our Monster Hunter Wilds guide will tell you how to get herbivore carapaces and how to collect them. How to get herbivore carapaces in Monster Hunter Wilds Herbivore carapaces come from High Rank Ceratonoths. And that’s it. You’ve got a 70% chance of getting an herbivore carapace each time you carve a slain Ceratonoth. Ceratonoths are only found in the Windward Plains. They’re pretty abundant, though. Head to your map and open the icon filter to find some — male or female, it doesn’t matter — and set a waypoint for your Seikret. There aren’t any hunts that reward herbivore carapaces and no large monster drops them. To also help you understand Monster Hunter Wilds, we explain how to capture monsters, how to change weapons, provide some Seikret tips, and teach you how layered armor works.
The horror movie Control Freak, now streaming on Hulu, has a super relatable premise: the intense, nagging sensation of a persistent itch. It stars Kelly Marie Tran (Raya and the Last Dragon, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) as Val, a motivational speaker tormented by an itch on the back of her head that she can’t leave alone. She tries bandages, wears many beanies, and ties down her hands when she sleeps. But the demonic itch steadily breaks down her body and her will, summoning something monstrous into her ordered existence. The movie, written and directed by The Park’s Shal Ngo, manifests the source of this torment as a paranormal monster connected to the generational trauma of Val’s parents’ flight from the Vietnam War. But the itch also has a psychological dimension anyone can relate to: It represents Val’s persistent, suppressed anxiety breaking through her attempts to clamp down on it. “I’m playing in these really high-anxiety moments in someone’s mind, and it got really intense,” Tran told Polygon in a video call alongside Ngo. Tran had never been in a horror feature before, let alone in a starring role requiring her to be in virtually every shot of a movie that was filmed in a 22-day sprint. “I’ve never done anything like that before. There were days where I would have, I’m not exaggerating, seven outfit changes in a day,” she said. “It was wild. I had a great time, and it was also really hard, and I learned so much.” But the physical and mental demands of the shoot took their toll. “By the end, I was pretty unwell,” she laughed. Ngo got the idea for the movie from a disturbing true story, recounted in a New Yorker article, about a woman who had an itch so bad, she scratched through her skull and into her brain. “It started with realistic body horror, like the actual horrors of having a body and having something go wrong in your wiring to the degree where something like that can happen,” Ngo said. “I thought [that] was very, very terrifying.” Hard agree. Developing the concept from his earlier short, Ngo initially went down a medically angled route that was “much more pedantic and about the science of the brain.” In that version, Val was a video game programmer. But Ngo felt the story worked better when he brought in elements that made it more personal. That started with a light satire of self-help culture, inspired by Ngo’s experiences with the Landmark Forum and David Lynch’s beloved transcendental meditation. (“It started to get a little culty,” he said.) For Tran, Val’s status as a motivational guru unlocked the character. “It hyper-pressurizes this feeling she has that she has to present herself in a way that seems polished and professional. She wants people to view her this very specific way,” Tran said. “And yet on the inside, she’s basically the opposite,” she said. “And I think there are a lot of people walking around in the world who have the same perspective no matter what your job is. I think that there’s a pressure that we can feel to try and seem like we have it all together and we might not.” In this context, Val’s self-help aphorisms have an ironic undertone. “For so much of the film, you’re seeing this person not listen to any of the things she’s telling other people to do, which I think is just the funniest, smartest juxtaposition,” Tran said. Then there were the paranormal elements, rooted in East Asian folklore. Ngo says the monster plaguing Val in Control Freak is based on “an ancient Chinese parasite that has to do with bad karma and this endless hunger. Then I used some creative license and turned it into something that was a little bit more Vietnamese. There’s different versions of these hungry demons in Korea and Japan that can never be satiated, that induce this hunger in you, and that just seemed to be a good starting-off point for the incessant itch.” Initially, Ngo says, he toyed with using generative AI to create a visually surreal monster. “I thought it would be very cool to do a pure AI monster in a movie. I was like, What if this is the first movie with an AI monster?” He discussed it with a friend “who does a lot of really cool stuff with AI,” playing with the idea of “this presence that was just constantly changing and shifting into something else.” In the end, though, he went with “something much more grounded and physical and practical [that] could really touch you and move you.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ngo introduced Control Freak’s focus on the Vietnamese American immigrant experience, which Tran really responded to. Val’s spiral begins with a quest for a missing birth certificate, which leads her to track down her estranged father and explore roots she had purposefully disconnected from. Just like Val’s father in the film, Ngo’s grandfather was a Buddhist monk who had served in the South Vietnamese army. That specificity spoke to Tran when she read the script. “My parents are refugees from the Vietnam War, so having that be part of Val’s father’s story and his experience, and that being the source of the demonic curse that’s taking over their lives — yeah, it felt really personal and relevant,” Tran said. “I’m just such a huge fan of horror, and I found the concept of addressing generational trauma within the genre really exciting, in addition to it being such a Vietnamese story.” Control Freak is streaming on Hulu now.
The Doom Slayer does a kickflip in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4. The game collection is coming to Game Pass Ultimate on July 11. There are a lot of things you can buy with an Xbox gift card. There are games, of course, plus add-on DLC. You can use it to purchase TV shows, and movies, too. Instead of having a recurring subscription to Game Pass that requires a credit card, gift cards make it easy to buy access to Game Pass on a month-to-month basis. Whatever it is you may want to buy, $100 digital Xbox gift cards are $85 at Newegg through Friday. Use the offer code SSEQAZ53 at checkout to knock $15 off your purchase. Your code will arrive promptly via email. This deal comes at a great time, as a number of great games have arrived on Xbox recently. There’s Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Balatro, Eternal Strands, and others, each worth buying at full price. Alternatively, you can get even more mileage out of your $100 gift card by subscribing to Game Pass Ultimate, which allows you to play each of the games I just mentioned on Xbox Series X, Series S, or on PC. Some anticipated games are coming soon to the service as well, including Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Atomfall, South of Midnight, and Doom: The Dark Ages, to name a batch of big-hitters. Good luck figuring out how to spend your gift card — it won’t be easy.
“Daffy Duck and Porky Pig get jobs at a bubblegum factory to pay their mortgage” reads like the plot of a classic Looney Tunes short. “Alien overlord taints that bubblegum with mind-control technology that turns consumers into zombies,” on the other hand, could be the logline of a 1950s sci-fi cheesefest. When the gum gains sentience, though, that’s a John Carpenter movie. That happens to be the situation Daffy and Porky (both voiced by Eric Bauza) wind up in halfway through the new theatrical feature The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. In the odd-couple step-siblings’ mad scrabble to hold down jobs and save their childhood home, they stumble across a scheme devised by a devious extraterrestrial overlord called The Invader (Peter MacNicol). In the first phase of his plan, The Invader reduces Daffy and Porky’s fellow townspeople to slavering automatons. They secure a sample of the gooey mystery treat for Petunia (Candi Milo) to study, to discern what’s gotten into the locals. At first, she comes up with bupkis. But when The Invader remotely triggers the gum, it bonds to a pair of novelty chompers, sprouts tentacles and eyestalks, and attacks the trio like they’re Kurt Russell and Keith David in The Thing, Carpenter’s masterpiece of chilly Antarctic paranoia: trapped in a small, confined space with nowhere to run and no one to save them, as the creature stalks them, relentlessly lashing at them with its feelers. It’s a mercy it doesn’t like fire, and also that Petunia keeps a flamethrower in her lab. The Day the Earth Blew Up director Peter Browngardt may have added too generous a splash of 1980s body horror to his lovingly rendered take on Looney Tunes, that beloved institution of American animation. Genre enthusiasts will relish the movie’s parallels with The Thing: the monster’s weakness against flame; the unnerving realization that familiar friends have become mindless, drooling thralls; the threat of a shapeless alien creature that can take nearly any shape it wants. Parents taking their kiddos to see it might find those similarities upsetting in the framework of a family comedy, which no one rightly expects to contain raw nightmare fuel. Goofy as the idea of a bubblegum monster may read on paper, The Day the Earth Blew Up makes it genuinely frightening on screen. The creature is a relentless purple abomination made of sticky appendages and teeth, roaring with the force of an ancient eldritch terror. What Browngardt and his bench of co-writers were thinking when they came up with this sequence will likely be a mystery to most, but not for Looney Tunes aficionados who love horror cinema as well. The franchise’s incongruous relationship to horror dates back to the 1950s; The Day the Earth Blew Up, which surprisingly holds distinction as the first-ever fully animated feature-length Looney Tunes film, contributes a new chapter to that history, keeping tradition alive with a combination of richly drawn elasticized animation and homage to a horror canon all-timer. Adding body horror to Looney Tunes isn’t a big leap for Browngardt, given the context. Looney Tunes has a deep catalog of horror-centric material. Once upon a time — 1991, to be exact — Warner Bros. tacked Darrell Van Citters’ short film Box-Office Bunny onto The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter to celebrate Bugs Bunny’s 50th anniversary. In the short, Bugs (voiced by Jeff Bergman, taking over as Bugs after the death of originating voice actor Mel Blanc in 1989) has his peace and quiet disrupted by the construction of a gaudy 100-screen multiplex atop his warren. Being the anti-authority rebel he is, Bugs pops out of the ground and into one of the theaters, and sets about outwitting Elmer Fudd, an usher, and Daffy Duck (who likewise avoided paying for a ticket, and throws Bugs under the bus to divert attention from his own crime). Bugs is as Bugs does; he bests Elmer and Daffy (each also voiced by Bergman) and traps them in a projection screen. They’re ecstatic to be in the movies, at first, but the growl of a chainsaw revving in the hands of a Jason Voorhees stand-in kills their buzz. It’s a funny gag, but constitutionally unsettling. We know what happens to characters in Friday the 13th films: They go to Crystal Lake, they stumble across Jason, they get dead. Granted, the “getting dead” part is omitted in Box-Office Bunny, but still, it’s best not to dwell on the implications of the climax, where Bugs sits back to enjoy Elmer and Daffy’s desperate off-screen screaming. Apart from a trio of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde riffs — 1954’s Dr. Jerkyl’s Hide, 1955’s Hyde and Hare, and 1960’s Hide and Go Tweet — Box-Office Bunny is arguably the most specifically horror referentialist Looney Tunes film, but countless others are shaped by horror’s hallmarks. In 1954’s Satan’s Waitin’, Sylvester the Cat dies, literally goes to hell, and then dies again and again, burning through his eight remaining lives. Bugs fends off badly drawn doppelgangers of himself, Elmer, Daffy, and Yosemite Sam in 1992’s Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers. Foghorn Leghorn knocks off another rooster in over-the-top slasher fashion in 2004’s Cock-A-Doodle-Duel. And 1964’s Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare ends with Bugs taking a brutal off-screen beating administered by the hulking robot he builds to do the same to Taz. (The execution may be meant to blunt the scene’s disturbing nature; Bugs begs his invention to spare him, to no avail, and the subsequent attack plays out in silence.) Coupling the scariest storytelling genre with the colorful, fourth-wall-breaking slapstick of adult-centric cartoons makes a bizarre contrast. Looney Tunes is abidingly silly. At times, so is horror, but its broader scope expresses a whole lot more; even screwball horror comedy invites viewers to stare into the mirror of their souls and take stock of what stares back at them. The genre is fundamentally an existential creative space where characters’ lives may be cut short at any moment, courtesy of whatever fiend is chosen to menace them. Typical Looney Tunes shorts are absent this quality, and instead embrace over-the-top farce, antics, and hijinks, occasionally mixed with social commentary about, for instance, American consumer culture or firearm fetishization. (To say nothing of the brand’s extensive racist past.) As an aesthetic as well as a format, Looney Tunes seems, on its face, an ill-suited partner to horror. It verges on paradox that the discrepancies separating horror from Looney Tunes cartoons are the same reasons they pair so well together. Looney Tunes sketches have higher priorities than horror cinema’s macabre existentialist fascinations, but think of how many times Wile E. Coyote fumbles his pursuit of the Road Runner so spectacularly that he ends up getting blown sky-high by his own box of TNT. Think of Bugs rigging Elmer’s shotgun to backfire in his face. Think of every instance across all of Looney Tunes’ shorts and features where characters are domed with a colossal wooden mallet. Nobody dies from the injuries they suffer in such incidents, of course. They come back well and whole for the next short, to be maimed all over again for our entertainment, to the envy of every victim in every horror movie ever. While death is far less final for Looney Tunes characters than their horror counterparts, though, it is nonetheless a chief reason people pay the price of admission for both. Just as people watch slashers, creature features, and countless other horror niches for the Kills™, they also watch Looney Tunes shorts to see Daffy eat a stick of dynamite and then snark about the results. If a duck taking a bomb to the gob is entertainment, and teenagers getting chopped to bits by a man in a hockey mask is also entertainment, then Looney Tunes and horror cinema are closer kin than meets the eye. Exaggeration is key, too. Picture Daffy’s bill hanging off the back of his head like a poker player’s visor. Then, unless you’re squeamish, picture Jason Voorhees folding up a sheriff like a picnic table in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Freddy Krueger turning Phillip into a flesh marionette in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), or Art the Clown, our modern-day slasher darling, using Santa Claus as his test subject for a practical science experiment with liquid nitrogen in Terrifier 3 (2024). Is it all that difficult to imagine Bugs making Elmer or Daffy into flash-frozen Popsicles? The difference is in the graphic details, and Looney Tunes’ regard for death versus horror’s. But under that surface, the former has a great deal in common with the latter — so much, in fact, that the strange, shocking birth of The Day the Earth Blew Up’s writhing bubblegum abomination isn’t all that strange or shocking at all. In fact, it’s one of the film’s many merits. Browngardt’s love for Looney Tunes is apparent in The Day the Earth Blew Up in the diligence he takes in contemporizing the series’ look. The linework is clean, the motion is fluid. He has an abiding respect to this cornerstone of American animation, which extends to its long connection with horror. That genre crossover feels like an obscure connection compared to Looney Tunes’ more popular iconography, from TNT blasting machines to the familiar ringed logo and opening music. But it’s no less essential to Looney Tunes’ spirit, which The Day the Earth Blew Up cheerily embraces. In our age of peak horror, that gusto is revitalizing.
When Final Fantasy 14’s 7.2 update — subtitled “Seekers of Eternity” — drops on March 25, it’ll bring with it all the flashy content players of the massively multiplayer role-playing game have come to expect from developer Square Enix. But nestled among all the info on dungeons, gear, and side activities in the patch notes were also details on a handful of quality-of-life changes that should greatly improve the simple act of exploring the game’s world. According to community translations of the latest Letter from the Producer stream, broadcast in the early morning hours of March 14, Final Fantasy 14 producers Naoki Yoshida and Toshio Murouchi shared two major adjustments the 7.2 update will make to sprinting and mounting. Instead of defaulting back to the normal walking speed when the sprint buff wears off, players will instead enter a jogging state with a speed somewhere between walking and sprinting as long as they remain out of combat in safe zones like cities and sanctuaries. Also, climbing aboard Final Fantasy 14 mounts will no longer require players to stand still as the action resolves. It only takes a few seconds to summon mounts in the current version of the game, but this short wait can feel awkward when you’re moving between locations in large zones. Think of it like the difference between hitting all green lights on a long stretch of road and having to wait at a red every block. Sure, the latter isn’t going to kill you, but you’d much rather avoid the stop-and-go loop. “[It] only took us 10 years,” Yoshida is translated as saying. “But we [also] have 10 years of muscle memory. It will take some getting used to.” And finally, when the new Cosmic Exploration mode is added to Final Fantasy 14 on April 22, it will feature a toggleable sprint that will never run out. The game’s Island Sanctuary mode from update 6.2 provided something similar in a unique, low-cooldown “isle sprint” ability, but Cosmic Exploration’s sprint is for all intents and purposes infinite, allowing players to zoom from objective to objective without worrying about reupping the speed boost. “We call it Cosmo Sprint,” Yoshida said, apparently. Square Enix has yet to provide official details about this update 7.2 content in English, but if you’d like to know more about what was shared during this morning’s Japanese-exclusive broadcast, be sure to check out the community translations here.
Spring may not start until next Thursday, but that’s not stopping Steam from leaping headfirst this week into its annual sale event to celebrate the season! From now through March 20, PC gamers can enjoy a wealth of sales featuring some of the platform’s most popular titles, including the usual daily flash sales for even more tempting purchases. We’ve scoured the storefront to bring you our picks for the must-buy titles to pick up during the sale. With experimental beat-’em-up brawlers, ambitious indie RPGs, frenetic first-person shooters, and more, these are the games you should keep an eye on during this year’s Steam Spring Sale. Just to note: if you’re looking for discounts on Monster Hunter Wilds, Civilization 7, and other new games, you’ll find those on Fanatical, not Steam.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Combat Zone, the latest iteration of Monster Fight Club’s light and flexible miniatures skirmish franchise, is now widely available — including at local game stores and online at places like Amazon. We finally cracked the lid on this $79 starter box, only to find a rich and accessible wargame with all the fixin’s inside. The only thing we didn’t find were traditional 3D plastic miniatures, but the overall package is so good that I’m not sure I mind their absence. If you have ever wanted to try your hand at a skirmish wargame, this might be the new best place to start. Cyberpunk Red: Combat Zone, launched in 2023, is a miniatures skirmish game where players use small numbers of units, often just six or eight on each side, to fight out thematic battles using dice and rulers. It’s a contemporary of games like Necromunda or Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team, Infinity, Halo: Flashpoint and others. Combat Zone launched with 12 plastic miniatures, some hefty die-cut terrain, and a dead simple ruleset that leveraged easy-to-read cards to speed up play — a combination of features we found irresistible. We especially called the game out for its price point, which at $120 was far less than competitors like Games Workshop charged for a similar experience. Cyberpunk Edgerunners brings the price down even further, coming in at just a bit more than your average hobby board game. But inside is the same kind of full-fat, sandbox experience found in the original, with all the open-ended gameplay and hobby inspiration (painting, modeling, and more) that you could ask for. Everything inside this box feels like an improvement over the original, from the quality of the cardstock to the layout of the manual itself, which is more attractive and easier to read with additional clarifications on things like hired mercenaries. Even the die-cut terrain is improved, printed here on more robust materials and with more clear instructions on how it all goes together. But again, there are no miniatures inside the box. Instead, players get a set of full-color, two-dimensional acrylic standees. These bright, detailed figures perfectly match the art on the cards and inside the manual, making getting up to speed with the ruleset a breeze. From the hobby perspective, using standees makes sense when you’re just learning to play. That way you can mix and match the units you fight with early on in your experience with the game, and then purchase and paint the 3D figures you really want to use later on and at your own pace. Add-on figures, including all-new factions not included in the box, start around $20. It’s an excellent way to grow your collection as you increase your skills as a player and as a painter. Of course, if the idea of playing a miniatures game with flat, pre-printed plastic standees — even just to learn how it works! — makes your flesh crawl, then there’s not much I can do to keep you from turning your nose up at the prospect. But for those who have yet to try their hand at the hottest, fastest-growing sector of the tabletop gaming space you’re in for a treat. Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Combat Zone is available widely, including on Amazon. The game was reviewed using a retail copy provided by Monster Fight Club. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
Fisch is a relaxing fishing adventure made in Roblox with a vast world and an ocean full of a fish. On your Fisch-ing adventure, you’ll trek the seas with your customizable gear from rod to bait to bobber, and catch a variety of unique fish. To help you get started, you can take advantage of codes, which will provide you with extra in-game currency, bobbers, and bait. Finding codes can be tedious, so we’ve compiled a list to make things a little easier for you. Check out the list below to see all active Fisch codes for March 2025, and how to redeem them. Fisch codes for March 2025 The active Fisch codes are as follows: THEKRAKEN — 2,500 C$ CARBON — Carbon Bobber SORRYGUYS — Two Kraken Tentacles and 1,000 C$ ATLANTEANSTORM — Two Hangman’s Hooks and 1,000 C$ GOLDENTIDE — Three Instant Catchers and 2,000 C$ NewYear — Two Holly Berries, two Peppermint Worms, and 1,000 C$ NorthernExpedition — Two Holly Berries, three Peppermint Worms, and 1,000 C$ RFG — Three Instant Catchers and 2,500 C$ MERRYFISCHMAS — One Holly Berry, one Peppermint Worm, and 500 C$ FISCHMASDAY — Two Holly Berries, two Peppermint Worms, and 1,000 C$ Although these codes don’t have an expiration date listed, they’ll likely expire at some point, so make sure to use them as fast as possible! How to redeem codes in Fisch To redeem codes in Fisch, select the “Menu” button at the top of screen, which will open a the settings menu. Scroll down until you find a text box with “Codes @WoozyNate” above it. Type one of the codes listed above into the text box and press enter on the keyboard to get your rewards.
The Nebula Awards, a long-running honor for excellence in science fiction and fantasy writing, has included video game writing since 2018. It previously bestowed its top prize in game writing to Elden Ring in 2023. FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki has now received the honor of a nomination once again this year, this time for Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree. Although Shadow of the Erdtree might be one of the more recognizable names on the list, it’s perhaps more impressive and just plain cool to see indie darling 1000xResist getting a nomination (especially given its snub at The Game Awards 2024), as well as Pacific Drive, which was nominated for Best Debut Indie Game at TGAs but did not take home that prize. All three games made Polygon’s own Top 50 Games of the Year list last year. Here’s the full list of the Nebula Awards’ video game writing nominees: A Death in Hyperspace by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor by Infomancy.net Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree by Hidetaka Miyazaki The Ghost and the Golem by Benjamin Rosenbaum Pacific Drive by Karrie Shao and Alexander Dracott 1000xRESIST by Remy Siu, Pinki Li, and Conor Wylie Restore, Reflect, Retry by Natalia Theodoridou For the full list of nominations, including for novels, novelettes, short stories, and so on, check out Nebula Awards’ website.
Trading allows you to exchange your cards with friends in Pokémon TCG Pocket — with a few limitations. Trades will come at the cost of Trade Tokens and Trade Stamina, and will allow you to get your hands on cards you’ve been missing or cards that you want to hoard. There are a few rules to trading, so you can’t trick other players into trading one of their full art cards for one of your twenty copies of Sizzlipede or send an entire binder over to another account. If you’re new to trading, there is a lot of information to take in all at once with how trading works, generating trade tokens, all of the rules, and more. But, we’ve made it a little easier for you to understand by summarizing it all! Here’s how trades work in Pokémon TCG Pocket and the rules behind trading. Update (March 14): The Pokémon Company announced upcoming changes to the trading system. We’ve edited the article to reflect this. How to trade in Pokémon TCG Pocket Prior to trading, make sure your Pokémon TCG Pocket app is updated to the latest version. Go to the Pokémon TCG Pocket store page on either the App Store on iOS devices or Google Play store on Android devices and update it. To trade, head over to the “Social Hub” tab and click on the unlocked “Trade” button. Here is where you’ll find the trade menu — along with your Trade Tokens and Trade Stamina at the top of the screen. From the trade menu, you can either initiate a trade or respond to a trade offer, but first, you’ll need to follow the trading rules. Upcoming Trade changes In a trade update coming at “the end of Autumn 2025,” Trade Tokens will be discontinued and replaced with shinedust. Currently, shinedust is a currency earned after you open booster packs and can be used to obtain flairs, but developers Creatures Inc. and DeNA are looking to expand the currency to cover trading as well. Once the update is live, Trade Tokens can be converted to shinedust, and you should be able to trade more cards than before. Additionally, you’ll be able to share which cards they’re looking to trade for with the addition of a new in-game feature. Pokémon TCG Pocket trading rules and restrictions There are five official rules that you must follow in order to trade in Pokémon TCG Pocket: You need one Trade Stamina to trade. One trade stamina will regenerate every 24 hours, but you can reduce the time with Poké gold and Trade Hourglasses. Cards must be of the same rarity. Trading a card with flair must be matched with another card with flair. Promo cards and cards with a rarity of two golden stars or higher cannot be traded. Additionally, certain high-rarity cards and cards from certain expansions cannot be traded. To see the full list of tradable cards, check the “Detailed trade list” in your app, which can be found by clicking the “?” icon beside your Trade Stamina. To trade rare cards (two diamonds) or higher, you need Trade Tokens. To get more, see our guide on how to get Trade Tokens. RarityTrade Tokens required Common (one diamond)0 Uncommon (two diamonds)0 Rare (three diamonds)120 Normal ex (four diamonds)500 Full art (one star)400 Although these weren’t stated in the in-game trade rules, here’s some more information you should know: You can only have one trade at a time. Whether you’ve started or received a trade offer, you are not able to start another trade until the current trade has been completed. If you don’t want your trades to be slowed down by trade offers, you can turn off all incoming trade offers by selecting the “Settings” button in the bottom right corner of the trade menu. You can trade cards no matter how many copies you have — meaning you can trade cards that you only have one copy of. With these rules in mind, you’re now free to initiate a trade or respond to a trade in Pokémon TCG Pocket! How to initiate a trade in Pokémon TCG Pocket To initiate a trade, follow the steps below: Select the “Trade” button and choose a friend to trade with. Choose a card to send in the trade. Wait for your friend’s response. Refresh your trade menu to find a “Trade response received” notification. Select the “Trade” button to view your friend’s trade offer, and either accept or reject the trade. If you accepted the trade, receive your new card from the completed trade. If you rejected the trade, start the process over! How to respond to a trade offer in Pokémon TCG Pocket To respond to a trade, follow the steps below: Go to your trade menu to find a trade offer from a friend. View the offered card and decide to either proceed with the trade or reject the offered card. If the card is to your liking, select a card of yours with the same rarity to trade and continue onto the next step. If not, reject the trade offer and wait for another offer. Wait for your friend’s response. Refresh your trade menu to find a “Trade agreement reached” notification. Select the “Trade” button to complete the trade and receive your new card.
Hoyoverse just wrapped up the Genshin Impact version 5.5 preview livestream, showing off all sorts of details about the upcoming patch. Most importantly, there were several codes that award Primogems and other rewards shown during the stream. Our Genshin Impact 5.5 livestream code list provides you with the three stream codes for rewards and explains how to redeem them. The stream showcased upcoming characters. We got a look at the Electro five-star Veresa, who is a competitive eater and a wrestler, and the Electro four-star Iansan, who we’ve seen designs for since before the game even launched. The Natlan story will continue on (after our short break last patch in Inazuma), with the characters finally getting to head to the home of the Collective of the Plenty. Genshin Impact version 5.5 livestream codes The codes are as follows: GI55Teteocan GoGoVaresa0326 CoachIansan0326 You’ll want to redeem these codes quickly, as they expire on March 17 at 12 a.m. EDT. They not only reward Primogems, but they also give Mora and Adventurer’s EXP to level up your characters. How to redeem Genshin Impact gift codes To redeem codes, you can log in and input them on the code redemption website. You can also input them in-game through the settings menu, but copy and pasting them in a browser is much easier. You can also click the links above, if you’re logged in on whatever device you’re seeing this post on. Once you redeem the codes, you’ll get the rewards via in-game mail shortly after that.
If the latest limited edition DualSense controller inspired by The Last of Us Part 2 speaks to your aesthetic, you can currently pre-order the new $85 controller from PlayStation Direct, Amazon, Walmart, and through GameStop if you’re a Pro member. The controller launches on April 10, sandwiched neatly between the PC launch of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, and the second season of The Last of Us series on Max. The black and white controller features white thumb sticks, bumpers, and triggers, in addition to a white PlayStation logo. The black hand grips and touchpad are covered with a variety of glossy black iconography drawn from The Last of Us franchise, including bricks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. You’ll also find white logos for the Fireflies and WLF, along with Ellie’s moth tattoo. A white The Last of Us logo is printed on the rear of the controller. This controller includes all of the features you’ve come to expect from the standard DualSense, with motion controls, haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and Bluetooth connectivity. While intended to be used primarily with the PlayStation 5, the controller can be used in Bluetooth mode on your PC, although you’ll need to use it in wired mode to access the fancier features.
Silent Hill is back in a big way. Silent Hill f builds on the momentum of the phenomenal Silent Hill 2 remake by charting new territory for the horror franchise. The upcoming game, which doesn’t have a release date, puts you in the shoes of a girl living in a Japanese town in the ‘60s. She’s dealing with some serious trauma — not helped by the fact that the town is being taken over by spores and monsters. The game seems keen to pass along some of that trauma to the player, with a haunting world filled with terrifying beasts and plenty of body horror to go around. While we don’t know how much longer we’ll be waiting for Silent Hill f to arrive, it’s already available to pre-order for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. It’s available to wishlist on Steam. There may be other editions available to pre-order in the future, at which point they’ll be added to this point. But until then, these are your current options for pre-ordering Silent Hill f. Silent Hill f standard edition The game’s standard edition will arrive in disc format for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and it’s available to pre-order at a number of retailers. Best Buy, GameStop, and Amazon have pages up for the game with a placeholder release date for Dec. 31. What’s unclear at the time of publishing is what, if any, pre-order bonuses come with the game.
The latest expansion for Star Wars: Unlimited, Jump to Lightspeed is finally available via online retailers. Jump to Lightspeed has launched with Booster and Prerelease Boxes just like the previous expansion, Twilight of the Republic, but introduces a couple of new ways to collect the Star Wars TCG in the form of Spotlight Decks and Carbonite Edition Boosters. We’ve found some select online retailers where you can purchase the new set, but you might want to consider checking with your local games store as well. As the name suggests, Jump to Lightspeed focuses on the ships, pilots, and fleet commanders of the Star Wars franchise; it introduces new Leader cards for characters like Grand Admiral Thrawn and Wedge Antilles along with iconic starships like the Millennium Falcon, Home One, and The Invisible Hand. We’ve provided the various options available to buy the new expansion below. Spotlight Decks Unlike the two previous expansions, Jump to Lightspeed won’t launch with a two-player starter box option, instead opting for a pair of premade decks built around Han Solo and Boba Fett. Jump to Lightspeed Spotlight Decks can only currently bought as a pair from Miniature Market for $34.99. Both of the 50-card decks include tokens, a rulebook, and a single Jump to Lightspeed Booster Pack to jumpstart your collection. Both Spotlight Decks also include four exclusive cards unavailable in Booster Packs. The full roster of cards for either deck can be found below. Prerelease Box The best way to start collecting cards from the Jump to Lightspeed expansion if you’ve already been introduced to Star Wars Unlimited is with the Prerelease Box. Each Prerelease Box includes a deck box, two premium leader cards from the new expansion, tokens, a quick-start rulebook, and six Jump to Lightspeed Booster Packs. You can currently buy Prerelease Boxes from Miniature Market for $29.99. Booster Box Booster Boxes for Jump to Lightspeed contain 24 sealed Booster Packs containing 16 cards from the new expansion. Booster boxes are currently available from Miniature Market for $84.99. The spread of cards for Jump to Lightspeed Booster Packs remains the same as previous expansions, with each 16-card pack containing nine commons, three uncommons, one rare or legendary, one base or token card, a Leader card, and a single foil card of a random rarity. Carbonite Edition Booster Packs Jump to Lightspeed is also introducing a new type of Booster Pack containing more rare variants of cards for dedicated collectors. While currently unavailable to pre-order, single Carbonite Edition Booster Packs will be available at launch for $24.99 each, with 12-pack display boxes retailing for $299.99. Markedly more expensive than standard Booster Packs, each 16-card pack contains a more impressive spread of cards with alternate art treatments including foil, Showcase, Hyperspace, and Hyperspace Foil cards. Only a single run of Carbonite Edition boosters will be produced, making them extremely valuable to collectors. Carbonite Edition boosters also introduce Prestige variants, ultra-rare versions of cards that feature unique art that can also potentially be a foil card or one of 250 serialized copies of that card.
Pokémon TCG Pocket’s developers say they will scrap the unpopular Trade Token currency in a sweeping update to how cards can be traded in the popular mobile game. A full update on the state of trades in Pocket was posted to the game’s forums early Friday morning, though the changes won’t be coming to the game until “the end of autumn 2025.” This follows more than a month of silence after developers Creatures Inc. and DeNA promised to rework trading. The feature was introduced Jan. 29, and developers promised changes soon after, as they were met with massive player frustration. Trade Tokens, the focal point of player’s unhappy feedback, were a required currency to make an in-game trade. To earn Trade Tokens, a player would have to destroy a duplicate card in your collection, making it quite costly to trade more valuable cards. According to this developer update, shinedust will now be the main currency required for trading. “When you open a booster pack, shinedust will be automatically earned if you obtain a card that is already registered in your Card Dex. Currently, shinedust is also required to obtain flair, so we are looking into increasing the amount offered since it will also be needed for trading.” The update does not mention how much shinedust will be required to make each three-star, four-star, or one-diamond trade. But it’s a currency given away freely during the game’s many rotating events. As the forum post notes: “[T]his change should allow you to trade more cards than you could before this update.” The forum post also reveals two features in development. One is the ability for players to share a list of cards they are interested in trading for, which seemed like an oversight to launch without in the first place. The second is a promise to further explore trading availability for two-star rarity cards and promotional cards, which are currently unable to be traded. As the update isn’t due out until fall, it’s likely we’ll get more specifics on the cost of trades with the shinedust currency in the future, but players will have a long time to wait before the updates go into effect.
Week to week, season to season, Severance viewers rabidly comb over plot revelations, character dialogue, and even the smallest of set props as they try to piece together the show’s central mysteries. One of the show’s most consistent but subtle messages about characters and conflict comes in how Severance uses color. Like everything Severance, it seems to be calculated; across clothing and set decoration — and even elements of the show’s animated intro, like actors’ credits — the creators of Severance tell a story through reds, blues, and greens. Severance’s use of color is not only highly intentional, it’s helpful in understanding characters’ intentions, allegiances, and behavior. For a show layered in puzzles and hidden meaning, it’s worth understanding what the show’s colors symbolize. Here’s a brief guide to the most prominent colors of Severance, and what the show’s creators are trying to tell us through visual clues. Blue The color blue is representative of Lumon and the work half of work-life balance. Lumon housing is blue. The Macrodata Refinement team’s badges are blue. Blue is the dominant color of innies’ wardrobes and that of many Lumon employees like Ms. Cobel/Selvig and, at times, Mr. Milchick (though he often sticks to black and white shades; more on that below). Watching the blues of Severance becomes its own key to understanding the shifting allegiances and psyches of the show. Helly/Helena’s wardrobe is one of the most frequently used means of expressing behavior through color in Severance, particularly in how it incorporates blue. When she first appears in the show’s first episode, Helly R. is dressed all in blue — but her clothing color shifts throughout the season, eventually incorporating white, brown, and yellow. This puts her more closely aligned with her fellow MDR workers, palette-wise, and seems to tease the true conflict between her outie and innie. When Helly R. conforms to severed floor life, she wears a monochromatic yellow dress, and later regresses to blue as she works to disguise her true nature. Red The color red is representative of the outside world — the life half of work-life balance. Scenes set outside Lumon, particularly around Mark, Gemma, Devon, and Ricken’s lives, prominently feature red. Ricken’s book The You You Are is “contraband” at Mark’s work, and its cover is predominantly red and orange. In their happiest flashbacks Gemma wears red clothes of varying hues. Mark wears red pajamas in Severance’s intro sequences. His outie drinks red wine to excess. Helly’s red hair — not actor Britt Lower’s natural hair color, by the way! — symbolizes her real-life separation from the rest of the MDR team. Ricken actor Michael Chernus is the only person whose name appears in red in the show’s opening credits. Red, blue, and purple The contrast of red and blue can be seen throughout Severance, including the red and blue betta fish that live in a divided tank in Mark’s home. It seems unsurprising that Mark’s house would be best personified by such a direct clash: While Mark ostensibly enjoys work-life balance through the severance procedure, he lives in Lumon housing, his outie is closely monitored by Lumon employees, and his living quarters are where former Lumon employees seek refuge. Even beyond The Horrors of the show, it is impossible for Mark to actually enjoy the intended privilege of being severed. But it’s not the only place: Conflict between red and blue is featured strongly in Petey’s arc in season 1. Petey wears a red and blue striped robe while hiding out at Mark’s as he struggles with reintegration sickness. Petey’s death scene is lit in red and blue, thanks to the flashing lights of police cars. Sometimes, red and blue come together in splashes of purple — and here’s where the colorblocking gets even more intricate. In episode 1 of season 2 of Severance, as Mark sprints through a seemingly endless hallway, he passes a purple meeting room, which appears to represent the recent Overtime Contingency Protocol that sent innies to the outside world. Intriguingly, some of Mark’s substitute MDR coworkers — Gwendoline Y. (Alia Shawkat) and Mark W. (Bob Balaban) — have red-blue or purple clothing; Gwendoline wears a purple dress and Mark W. wears red and blue suspenders, a possible indicator of their experiences with reintegration. One subtle use of purple in season 2 is clothing worn by Dylan’s wife, Gretchen. While she generally wears blue tones, she’s dressed in a light purple shirt in the scene in which she lies to outie Dylan about her visit with innie Dylan, indicating conflict between the two worlds she now inhabits. Green Green is seen throughout the show, but its meaning is less clearly defined than the usage of red and blue. Much of it appears to be related to the mysterious and important underground work being done at Lumon: The badges used by the Optics and Design and Mammalians Nurturable teams are green, and the nature of their work is thus far largely unexplained. Obviously, the grazing fields of the Mammalians Nurturable room is a lush grass green. The green carpeting and green dividers in the MDR office appear to serve as barriers between team members themselves and workers in the floors below. Much of what’s occurring underneath the severed floor is presented with green tones, including the Watchers Room and Gemma’s living quarters and clothing. Green is also the color of Mark’s brain — or someone’s brain — in the show’s animated intro. Christopher Walken, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry also have their names in green in the show’s opening credits. Green is also used in conjunction with red in a season 1 prop loaded with meaning: the red and green candle that Ms. Cobel steals from Mark, which also appears during the wellness session between Ms. Casey and Mark. Severance’s use of green could have multiple interpretations. As seen in the goat room, it could indicate flourishing growth, hope, fertility, and springtime. But in traditional color theory, green often also has negative connotations: greed, sickliness, envy, and bile. Green and blue Some of the intersection of these two colors is a bit open-ended, given how much green represents a sort of mystery. But they’re combined enough on the show to be of note — particularly on Helly. While Helly R. sometimes wears a mix of green and blue together on the severed floor, Helena Eagan’s dress in the season 1 finale shows an intertwining helix of green and blue, one of the show’s less subtle uses of color: That pairing of colors indicates Lumon’s work combining with new growth and the coming of spring — the show has thus far been set during what feels like neverending winter — with Helly herself representing a new generation of the Eagan family. Black and white Lumon administrators and security personnel, including Seth Milchick, Ms. Huang, and Mr. Drummond, all wear a lot of black and white. Medical personnel on the testing floor, where Gemma is trapped, wear almost exclusively white. These employees’ lack of color implies restriction and order — in some cases, the clinical, analytical, or coolly dispassionate demeanors required of their jobs. Also, Milchick just looks really cool in a black leather motorcycle jacket.
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