Month: April 2018

April is home to some very heavy hitters, and I don’t just mean the literal batting cages found in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. This month also marks the return of Kratos in God of War and a new cardboard experiment with Nintendo Labo. The Switch is also getting two big ports: the superhero antics of South Park: The Fractured But Whole, and the anime fighter Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Trilogy.

Yakuza 6: The Song of Life — April 17

Available on: PS4

The next chapter in Kazuma Kiryu’s life sees him balancing a criminal past with raising a baby–the child of his own adopted daughter Haruka, who’s in a coma after a hit-and-run. Kiryu must investigate what happened, all the while throwing down in street fights and engaging in the series’ trademark minigames.

Further Reading:

God of War — April 20

Available on: PS4

Speaking of taking care of kids, Kratos has a son named Atreus. He’ll accompany the demigod as he battles the Norse pantheon in a new, much more open adventure. There are bigger areas to explore and optional bosses to take down as Kratos finds more outlets for this untamable rage.

Further Reading:

Nintendo Labo — April 20

Available on: Switch

Nintendo Labo is a unique concept: build peripherals called Toy-Cons from cardboard, then use them to play minigames. There are cardboard blueprints included, but the real hook is building any contraption you want, then programming it to work with the Joy-Cons using the Toy-Con Garage mode.

Further Reading:

South Park: The Fractured But Whole — April 24

Available on: Switch

On the not-so-kid-friendly side, the latest South Park adventure is coming to Switch this month. This sequel sees the residents of South Park dressing up as superheroes, and as the new kind in town, you can pick your own superpowers and choose a side.

Further Reading:

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm Trilogy — April 26

Available on: Switch

The Switch is also getting a port of the popular anime fighting game starring everyone’s favorite ninja. This trilogy includes Ultimate Ninja Storm 1, 2, and 3, plus a bunch of previously DLC costumes and episodes. Note that not every single piece of DLC is included.

Further Reading:

Even a year later, it’s not uncommon to come across astonishing videos of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo created a game with an incredible series of interlinking systems that can result in all sorts of weird, fun, and wild stuff. And where there’s a world where hijinks can ensue, there must be silly and funny video recordings.

Rather than convince you that you can ride a Guardian or something of the sort again this year, we’ve instead gone a different route for April Fools’ Day. We present to you Hyrule’s Funniest Home Videos–a take on the long-running clip show, featuring some of our favorite moments from Breath of the Wild. We even have our own spin on the theme song–sorry in advance that it’ll be stuck in your head later.

You can watch the full video above. Be sure to share your own favorite Breath of the Wild moments with us as well. Sadly, many of the best may have been lost, as Nintendo didn’t enable Switch’s built-in video capture feature until late in 2017, and the Wii U version doesn’t offer that at all. Still, there’s been no shortage of cool and delightful stuff to come out of the game, as we think the video highlights.

It may seem hard to believe, but it has been 15 years since “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s final wrestling match at Wrestlemania 19 on March 30, 2003. In the bout, Austin went toe-to-toe with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson–the third meeting between the two at WWE’s biggest show of the year.

That match put a cap on a WWE in-ring career that spanned nearly a decade and included six reigns as WWE World Champion. While he may not have been able to perform as long as names like John Cena and The Undertaker, there’s no doubting Austin is one of the most important–if not the most important–figures in WWE history.

It’s the feud between the Texas Rattlesnake and Vince McMahon that catapulted WWE’s Attitude Era to success against WCW during the Monday Night Wars, and it’s Austin’s matches against the likes of Bret “The Hitman” Hart, Triple H, and The Rock that made him a household name and one of the most popular figures in professional wrestling history.

That’s what makes his match at Wrestlemania 19 so fitting. In a black leather vest emblazoned with the letters OMR, which stand for One More Round, Austin made his way to the ring for one final confrontation with arguably his greatest in-ring opponent–and the only man who could give him a run for his money in terms of popularity–The Rock.

The story told in the buildup to the match was practically perfect and a textbook example of how to promote a Wrestlemania feud. After losing to Austin at Wrestlemania 15 and 17, The Rock was now on his way to becoming a movie star outside of wrestling. However, he couldn’t move on until he finally beat Austin once and for all on the grandest stage of them all.

Theirs was the sort of blood feud that is largely missing from wrestling today. In a world where AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura are going to Wrestlemania 34 to put on a dream match that will no doubt be an incredible sight to see, Austin and Rock made their issues personal each and every time. There’s no better example than this match between the two at Wrestlemania 19, which you can watch above.

It remains to be seen whether Rock or Austin will be involved in Wrestlemania 34. Both have made sporadic appearances over the years as their careers outside of wrestling continue to grow. That said, whether they show up or not, this is a match that will go down in history as one of Wrestlemania’s best.

Wrestlemania 34 airs live on April 8 on the WWE Network. Take a look at GameSpot’s comprehensive coverage of the show, including the full match card, predictions on who will walk out a winner, and everybody going into the WWE Hall of Fame.

It’s the start of a new month, which means a new batch of games have been added to Xbox Game Pass. Subscribers to Microsoft’s game service now have access to seven more titles on Xbox One, with an additional game arriving on April 11.

Beginning April 1, Game Pass subscribers can play the Xbox One edition of the acclaimed city-building sim, Cities: Skylines. That includes both the base game and its After Dark expansion. Players can also create their own mods and share them online thanks to a free update that arrived for the game last month.

Other new additions to Xbox Game Pass this month include the open-world hunting game The Hunter: Call of the Wild; the fast-paced first-person platformer ClusterTruck; the action-RPG Portal Knights; the unique side-scrolling strategy game Kingdom: New Lands; the brawler Sacred Citadel; and the crime thriller Late Shift. You can find the full list of this month’s new Xbox Game Pass titles below.

On top of those games, the robot-fighting game Robocraft Infinity is being added to Xbox Game Pass beginning April 11. Robocraft Infinity marks the first ID@Xbox title to join the Game Pass catalog on the same day it launches. It allows players to build their own custom robot designs and battle them against other players’ creations in Battle Arena and Deathmatch modes.

Xbox Game Pass is Microsoft’s Netflix-style subscription service for Xbox One. It costs $10 a month to subscribe and gives members unlimited access to a library of more than 100 titles for as long as they have an active subscription. Microsoft began expanding the service last month with the release of Sea of Thieves, which was the first Microsoft-exclusive title to launch at retail and on Game Pass simultaneously. You can see the full list of available games here.

April’s New Xbox Game Pass Titles

• Cities: Skylines
• ClusterTruck
• The Hunter: Call of the Wild
• Kingdom: New Lands
• Late Shift
• Portal Knights
• Robocraft Infinity — Available April 11
• Sacred Citadel

By Scott Collura

These days it’s generally assumed that anything in movies beyond the norm of reality — and even then, some of the humdrum stuff too — is achieved via CG. But that’s certainly not the case, as Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘s special effects supervisor Chris Corbould could tell you. From Force-destroyed huts to scores of falling bombs and beyond, many of the effects in The Last Jedi were created the good old-fashioned practical way.

On the occasion of The Last Jedi’s release on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital, I spoke to Corbould — who has worked on everything from The Dark Knight to a bunch of James Bond movies to The Who’s rock opera Tommy. He broke down some of the secrets of his trade…

No, not Jabba the Hutt. We’re talking about the hut on Ahch-To that is decimated by Luke when he interrupts Rey and Kylo Ren’s Force-convo. Corbould explained that, amazingly, the disintegration of the hut was accomplished through practical effects in camera.

“I think what we did do, which you’ll probably think was visual effects — there’s a scene where Luke Skywalker comes into his hut while Rey is having the big talk with Kylo Ren, and all of a sudden the whole hut blows backwards away from him,” he said. “We did that practically. So I was very, very pleased with that. We put the whole hut together like a big jigsaw, and then we attached a wire to every single individual piece. And then, on a cue, on a button, all those individual pieces were connected to pneumatic jerk rams, which jerked them all out in different directions.”

Since Mark Hamill is standing amid this Force-barrage of hut bits, you might think there was some element of danger to the effect. But Corbould says no way.

“No, no, all the bits were made of foam,” he said. “When we did it, I showed [director] Rian [Johnson]. I stood exactly where Mark Hamill was gonna stand. So, when you see that, a very exciting part on the Blu-ray coming out is the documentary. And I’ve never been part of a documentary like they’ve done on Last Jedi. And normally you have the behind the scenes people shooting in little key bits, but they miked us up for a lot of the film, even when we were doing our tests away from the set. So they saw all the trials and tribulations of the crew, not just the on-set bit, and I think that’s gonna be a really exciting little thing for the audience to look at.”

The Bombs Awaken

One of the most difficult effects for Corbould and his team to pull off on The Last Jedi comes early in the film when Rose’s doomed sister Paige Tico releases the bombs from her ship in a final act of self-sacrifice against the First Order Dreadnought.

“In the start of the film, there’s the big fight with the bombers all going towards the enemy, as it were,” explained Corbould. “And there’s a scene where there’s a bomb bay with about 30 rows of bombs, and a young girl is struggling — she falls down, and she has to let those bombs go, and eventually she gets a hold of the control to let them go. We rigged those 30 lines of bombs to all drop sequentially out the bottom of the set. The set was about 50 foot high, and all those bombs went down, and they sort of went out the bottom and out sideways, and then the CGI took them over and continued the run down towards the big Star Destroyer. That’s one of the practical effects.”

Noting that most viewers seem to think that sequence is completely CG, Corbould just laughed.

“It was a full-size set,” he continued. “They were round bombs, about 16 inches diameter. There were 30. There were two rows all the way around. They were two deep. So I think there were about 30 runs of bombs, if you like. Rian was very insistent that [as] they started off, they went clockwise, came to an end, and then went back anticlockwise for the second row. So, we had to get every one right, and there were a couple times we had one hold up, which, you know, it just stops! You have to start again, reload them all again, so you make sure you had all 30 lines all drop. I think we nailed it about 90 percent of the time.”

The Phantom Tree

We know now that one of the big surprises in The Last Jedi was the return of not just Yoda, but a practically achieved puppet Yoda to boot. But the little Jedi Master wasn’t the only non-CG creation in that scene. The tree on Luke’s island which contained the original sacred texts of the Jedi was also fully built on an exterior set at Longcross Studios in England. And when Yoda burned it down? That was real too!

“Some of my favorite shots were the Yoda shot with the burning tree,” said Corbould. “We rigged the tree, and I never — you know, when I read it in the script, I didn’t realize how big that tree was gonna be. It was enormous. And then Rian was very insistent that he didn’t want it to just burst into flames. He wanted — we did a lightning bolt effect, as it were. A big shower of white light and sparks. And then it slowly sort of caught, burned, and the whole tree caught alight. And then there was that conversation between Yoda and Luke Skywalker in front of it as it burned in the background.”

As it turns out, the burning of the tree served a dual purpose too.

“It was a very cold night when we shot that, so everybody was very happy when we lit that up!” laughed Corbould.

Exit Theatre Mode

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is available now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!