Month: April 2018

What would you do to bring balance to the universe? It’s a question that, in one form or another, countless characters have faced throughout the history of fiction. Heroes and villains–Jedi and Sith, hobbits and Dark Lords alike–have endlessly tried to tip the scales of good and evil one way or the other. Few have had so succinct a solution as Thanos.

This is it–the movie, and the villain, that a decade of laboriously mapped out and meticulously crafted Marvel Cinematic Universe fiction has led to. Marvel made fans a promise when Samuel L. Jackson donned Nick Fury’s eyepatch and told Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative at the end of Iron Man: It would all culminate here. They doubled down on that promise over and over across the subsequent decade of MCU movies, raising the stakes every time a new Infinity Stone entered the fray or Thanos made another of his rare on-screen appearances.

Now the gloves are off, and the Infinity Gauntlet is on Thanos’s hand. And Avengers: Infinity War is a payoff of galactic proportions.

Thanos has been lurking in the MCU’s wings for years now, pulling strings and orchestrating plots like Loki’s invasion of Earth in the first Avengers movie and Ronan’s assault on Xandar in Guardians of the Galaxy. Having lost his patience for subterfuge and with five of the six Infinity Stones located, the Mad Titan decides to finally get his hands dirty in Infinity War. He sends his minions, the Children of Thanos, to Earth to retrieve two of the Stones, while he goes after the others himself.

Infinity War doesn’t introduce a lot of new characters, understandable considering the ridiculously enormous cast it already has to work with. The Children of Thanos make up four of those new faces, and they toe the line between campy fun and cannon fodder–they’re cool, but they won’t make much of an impression in the grand scheme of the movie.

And how grand a scheme it is. To mention only what we know, and not spoil any of the surprising cameos–of which there are a few–Infinity War is juggling protagonists and sidekicks from the worlds of Iron Man, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor, Spider-Man, and the Avengers universe at large.

Incredibly, Infinity War actually manages to do every single one of these characters justice. Some of them only get a few lines in the movie, or just a couple of awesome shots during a huge battle, but that’s understandable. The fact that Infinity War actually feels like a well-balanced movie, with time for small, emotional moments between characters in addition to the multiple budget-breaking battles, is undeniably impressive.

There are two factors that help it there. For one thing, with a few exceptions, these are all characters we’re already intimately familiar with. (That said, if you haven’t been keeping up with the MCU for the last decade, good luck.) For another, this is really only half a movie, despite being long as heck. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, and it certainly doesn’t detract from the film. If anything, it probably would have turned out a lot messier if they’d tried to cram the whole story into one film. And Infinity War does end on a note of finality–there’s no massive cliffhanger, but instead a coda that may come to feel like a bridge only when Avengers 4 arrives in 2019.

As has been the trend in the MCU lately, Infinity War is also extremely funny, though it occasionally feels like it shoehorns gags into otherwise serious scenes just to break the tension. The action, on the other hand, is as imaginative as you’d hope with all these different heroes with wildly varied powers coming together–and every bit as excellent as we’ve come to expect from directors Joe and Anthony Russo, the brothers behind Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War before this.

As promised, Infinity War is Thanos’s movie. This is by far the most we’ve seen of the iconic villain since his proper debut in the first Guardians of the Galaxy, and the movie does a decent job fleshing out his backstory and motivations. There are some aspects from the source material that you might find yourself missing if you’re well versed on the books, but from the movie’s shocking opening moments, Thanos is established as an absurdly powerful and nearly unstoppable force. And Josh Brolin plays the Titan with the exact right amounts of menace, humor, and emotion that the surprisingly complex character demands. In a word, Thanos is phenomenal.

But this is still an Avengers movie, and the payoff really comes from the unions and reunions we’ve come to expect from that name. When the first Avengers movie brought Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, and Hawkeye together in 2012, the goosebumps that came from seeing heroes from disparate franchises fighting on-screen together proved that the Marvel blueprint works on a large scale. And that was after just a few movies and four years; Avengers: Infinity War extrapolates that same sensation over a decade and 18 films, and the results are exponentially more fun, exciting, and awe-inducing.

Avengers: Infinity War does justice both to the promise Marvel has been riding on for the last decade, and the source material that inspired it. Somehow, for all its fire and fury–the raw spectacle of it all–Infinity War is a surprisingly human story, both for the heroes who have to put all their doubts aside and unite, and for Thanos, a genocidal alien who succeeds as a character because he’s infused with real emotion. Infinity War reminds us why these characters, one and all, matter, and why they mean so much to fans.

Marvel has accomplished something truly incredible here, although at this point it’s no more than the absurdly high quality bar Marvel fans have come to expect. It’s been a long road getting here, but it was worth it.

The Good	The Bad
Payoff of all these characters coming together	Some humor feels shoehorned in
Thanos is a phenomenal and complex villain	Not much time given to the few new characters
Impressive balance among all characters
Creative battles that use all the heroes’ powers
Plenty of humor interspersed throughout
Has time for emotional moments as well

A new patch is now available for Microsoft’s shared pirate game Sea of Thieves. Developer Rare has rolled out update 1.0.5 for the title on Xbox One and PC, but as its numbering suggests, it’s fairly minor, primarily addressing a number of bugs and other issues.

The update weighs in at 1.36 GB on Xbox One, while the PC equivalent clocks in at a slightly smaller 1.25 GB. Among other things, it resolves the last remaining spawning issues that have been cropping up since the game launched. Specifically, the patch fixes an issue that would prevent Skeleton Fort and Bounty Quest Skeletons from spawning correctly.

In addition to that, Rare says players will “no longer be stuck with a single weapon slot” following the update. Your weapon choice will also now persist across sessions, and you’ll no longer play the same shanty two times in a row. Beyond that, the Kraken will no longer be able to spawn around rocks, players can no longer get stuck behind the bar in the Pirate Hideout, and your ship will no longer launch through the air spontaneously while sinking.

You can find the full list of changes in update 1.0.3 in the patch notes on the official Sea of Thieves website. Rare also teased that a variety of new clothes, weapons, and items are on the horizon for Sea of Thieves. The developer didn’t reveal exactly when the items will be available in the game, but it did hint that they’d be “arriving soon.”

Beyond this week’s patch, Rare has some big content updates planned for Sea of Thieves. At least six major updates are in the works for the game, the first of which is called The Hungering Deep and launches next month. It adds a new AI threat, gameplay mechanics, and rewards. The big updates will be supplemented with regular weekly events that feature new goals and rewards.

Huddled together in a crater, they gather around their last hope against the cold–an aging steam generator. Fueled by coal, it can kick out just enough heat to give the last bastion of humanity a faint glimmer of hope. A moment like this illustrates the essence of Frostpunk, a survival-style city-builder where you must lead a lonely band of survivors not against encroaching armies, but against a frigid storm that’s wiped out most of the human race.

As temperatures plunge well below freezing, it’s your job to guide the remaining populace towards establishing a successful, self-sufficient camp. You’ll need hunters and hothouses, mines and saw mills. And you have to keep all of these machines running in temperatures that would make even the hardiest penguins shiver.

The essentials are pretty simple, though. People need houses and jobs. Because this is a survival situation, everyone works on a near-constant basis. The day starts at 5:00 AM, and people have a few hours to finish any construction projects before they head to their primary job for 12 hours. Then they head back home, finish a few small tasks, and go to bed.

This cycle is hugely important because you’ll need to always make sure you have enough fuel to keep the generator running through the night. A major part of this is planning out when and where people need to be to complete their tasks. If you survive, you’ll build outwards in concentric rings, ensuring that, as you expand, your core can keep up with the heating demands and provide enough warmth for your citizens to combat the pervasive chill.

This all works seamlessly, too. There’s a natural pattern to it all, and you’ll be given little challenges throughout the day to help give you a bit more structure. Often, these are emergent consequences of past decisions. If you were able to keep people alive through the night, but not warm enough, then they could get sick–posing a new set of challenges to prioritize for the day after. If any one element of the city is neglected a bit too long, then you’ll start getting more strident demands from your people, which often become more intricate, two-to-three-day goals. The structure for it all is elegant and precise–you always have just enough work, and you’re never left without near and moderate-term goals to help give you direction.

Your mission is also strained by all manner of unavoidable disasters. Everything from sudden cold snaps and necessary amputations to mining disasters and refugee crises crop up, requiring your intervention. This forms what could be called the crux of the game–balancing hope and discontent. Compassionate actions give your people hope. They remind the huddled masses that we (in the general sense) haven’t lost touch with humanity. Dispassionate or draconian acts, however, drain the collective will. Unlike most moral choices in games, neither are unilaterally better.

Compassionate actions are typically better long-term goals for short-term hits. For instance, taking on gravely injured or terminally ill refugees will help hold your people together–reminding them that if they are ever left out or lost, they will be found and cared for. At the same time, medical care in the post-apocalypse is damned near impossible, and if you don’t have the facilities to care for the people, you’ll soon end up with a pile of bodies spreading disease throughout the colony. Manage to fix up the wounded, though, and you’ll have an able-bodied workforce embued with the unbreakable spirit of hope.

These are the kinds of choices Frostpunk lives on, and what separates it from every other comparable game. Frostpunk gets a lot of mileage from it, too. It’s hard to cling to the moral high ground–even if you succeed–when you’re reminded of the sacrifices you’ve made along the way. That gives your decisions weight in a way that SimCity and many of its ilk simply can’t. Here, the effects of disasters are tangible, and the game rightly blames you for your personal failures.

One of your citizens approaches you: “Children should be put to work. We’re all in this together, and we need help right now.” Then, you’re shuffled over to a rough-hewn book of laws for your band. There you can, with a click, start putting the kids to work. Or you could build child shelters to house the kids and keep them healthy and safe from the cold. The citizens didn’t present you with that second option–and why would they, they can only see what’s immediately in front of them?

Frostpunk itself, in the tutorial, notes that the people you serve are always looking for a solution, but not necessarily the best one. What’s ultimately best depends on the emergent challenges you face. Do you have a mysterious illness spreading wildly through the camp? Are you struggling to find coal, forcing you to char firewood and construction materials to keep the generator going? These questions are constant and agonizing throughout. Frostpunk drips cynicism and bleakness. And yet it is that hopelessness, that fundamental need of human beings to persist in spite of everything that Frostpunk seeks to embody most. You become the bulwark against fear–even as you look across the land and internalize just how hard this fight will be.

That’s powerful precisely because it hurts. Every time you make a tough call, doubts linger. If you had been better, if you had chosen differently, maybe you’d have been able to save everyone. Adding to the distress, Frostpunk’s Hope meter shows you the consequences of your decisions right as they happen. Send children into the mines and you can watch the camp’s faith evaporate as a whole chunk of meter gets lopped off.

This system–balancing the will of the people against their own needs–works so well precisely because every mechanism in the game is built to support that core idea. Your job is to manage the emotional fortitude of the people as much as it is about anything else. In time, you’ll be able to form scouting parties, outposts, and build a sprawling network of makeshift towns and settlements that stand together. But again, that arc intersects with countless brutal decisions. Should you send a scout to help survivors fight off bears? What about risk turning off an electrical super-weapon that fries everything it touches–but with the potential of a new safe haven from the world outside? The story of your civilization, of your masses hoping, is forged in the choices you make along the way. And they become a part of the narrative you build.

Frostpunk is among the best overall takes on the survival city builder to date. Its theming and consistency create a powerful narrative through line that binds your actions around the struggle to hold onto humanity in uncertain times. Hope is a qualified good, but you may not always be strong enough (or clever enough) to shelter that flame from the cold.

Avengers: Infinity War is about to hit theaters, but fans may be wondering where these characters came from and the source material Marvel drew on for this upcoming movie. Luckily, Comixology currently has an Avengers sale that includes a lot of fantastic stories at less than half the cost.

Comixology, a supplier of digital comics, has a sale running through May 10 which will allow you to save up to 75% off collections and single issues of Avengers stories, many of which have a connection to Infinity War. We’ve sifted through the sale and found some of the best stories for you to pick up and read.

For all of these trades, single issues are available as well for $1, but you’re going to want the collected editions. Many of these stories can be read for free for members of the Comixology Unlimited subscription service.

Civil War–$5 (Originally $13)

The collection contains Civil War #1-7

While the 2016 Captain America movie did its best at adapting this 2006 Marvel event–written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven–the movie only scratched the surface of the story, which gets a whole lot more in-depth into superheroes registering their identities with the government. Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four play a large role in this story, which the movie just couldn’t put on the big screen. Check it out here.

Secret Invasion–$5 ($15)

The collection contains Secret Invasion #1-8

At some point, Secret Invasion will find its way to the big screen, even if it’s years from now in Avengers 8. The 2008 story was written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Leinil Francis Yu, and it follows the Avengers as they find out that members of the team have been replaced by shape-shifting Skrulls. It’s a tale of espionage, and one of the most memorable alien invasion stories in comics. Check it out here.

We’d also recommend 2004’s New Avengers, issues #1-47, as the build up to the event is just as important as the event itself. Sadly, these issues are not on sale.

Infinity–$10 ($35)

The collection contains Infinity #1-6, New Avengers (2013), #7-12, Avengers (2012) #14-23 and Infinity: Against the Tide Infinite Comic #1-2

The 2013 storyline highlights the return of Thanos to the Marvel Universe. It involves both the cosmic characters and Earthly characters of the Marvel Universe, as secrets are revealed about Thanos. The main storyline is written by Jonathan Hickman with art by Jim Cheung. Additionally, the tie-in issues feature writers Jason Latour and Nick Spencer and artists Mike Deodato Jr, Leinil Francis Yu, Stefano Caselli, and more. Check it out here.

Infinity Gauntlet–$4 ($11)

The collection contains Infinity Gauntlet #1-6

This classic early-’90s story is more than likely a large part of the source material for Infinity War. In this comic, Thanos has control of the Infinity Gauntlet along with the Infinity Gems. He’s nearly invincible, and it will take the entire Marvel universe to stop him. The story was written by Jim Starlin and drawn by Ron Lin and George Perez. Check it out here.

Thanos Rising–$3 ($9)

The collection contains Thanos Rising #1-5

After the release of Marvel’s The Avengers, the comic book publisher released this comic, which explores the younger years of Thanos. Essentially, this is his origin story. It’s filled with sorrow, death, tragedy, and a whole lot of other things that made the Mad Titan what he is today. It is beautifully illustrated by Simone Bianchi and written by Jason Aaron.

Check it out here.

Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers

A lot of what is discounted for Comixology’s sale was written by Jonathan Hickman, who had a tremendously brilliant run on both Avengers and Fantastic Four. The main Infinity story mentioned above is his as well. His work is dense, complex, and incredibly intelligent. It’s well worth your time and money to check out his stories, many of which are lead-ins to Infinity. Here’s some recommended reading from him.

As it turns out, that new trailer isn’t the only bit of the Venom movie fans are getting a taste of. Sony, which is developing a slate of movies based on characters from the Spider-Man comics, had also released a poster for the upcoming film–and it’s a creepy one.

In the image, which you can take a look at below, Tom Hardy, who plays mild-mannered journalist Eddie Brock in the movie, is mid-way through his transformation into Venom. That pesky alien symbiote just can’t get enough of him as he becomes one of the deadliest looking anti-heroes–in case the trailer didn’t make it super clear, he is definitely an anti-hero–ever committed to film.

While the trailer offered a first look at the character’s design in the film, unlike the original Venom teaser, the detail on this poster goes a long way in showing how close they’re sticking to the design first introduced in the comics. The design is also taking a smart step away from the only other live-action version of the character, which appeared in 2007’s Spider-Man 3.

In that film, the Venom suit took inspiration from Spider-Man’s costume, including its webbing design. Without Spider-Man in these new movies, it makes sense to shy away from those links. However, it will be interesting to see if the movie mentions the beloved web-slinger in some fashion. While this film doesn’t exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe alongside the current Spider-Man (Tom Holland), having a Venom movie in a world where the character doesn’t at least exist somewhere is very strange.

Whatever the case, comic book fans are in for something very different from Venom, which also stars Riz Ahmed, Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate, and Woody Harrelson. It hits theaters on October 5.

The week is young, but we’re already seeing loads of special offers on video games and hardware trickle in. Here’s a rundown of all the best video game deals available so far this week, so strap in and get ready to save money.

In the market for a PS4 Pro? Target has the best deal around by far. You can get a 1TB PS4 Pro for $320 now through April 28. That’s a savings of $80–not too shabby. If you’d rather join the Xbox One X camp, you can get a great deal from Best Buy that comes with the console, plus a 4K TV and two games, all for $550. That saves you over $150 you can then spend on games and accessories. Best Buy also has a bunch of games on sale this week, plus $10 rewards credit for pre-ordering Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, or Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo Switch.

If digital PlayStation games are your primary focus, you’re going to love the discounts in this week’s PlayStation Store sale. You can get titles like Monster Hunter Worlds and Persona 5 at pretty hefty discounts. As often happens, PS Plus members get additional savings on each game.

On the Xbox side of things, Microsoft has launched its weekly Xbox One game sale. It has lots of great deals, including discounts on A Way Out and Forza Horizon 3 and Hot Wheels Expansion Bundle.

This week’s savings aren’t limited to games that are already out. With its Totally Digital promotion, Sony is offering a 20% discount on select digital game pre-orders from the PlayStation Store. Some of the indie games in the promotion look pretty promising.

But no video game deal beats free. If you want a fine game to pour dozens of hours into, you can also snag a free copy of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition on GOG. There are a couple of small hoops to jump through, but free is free. And we’re closing in on your last chance to scoop up April’s free games from Twitch Prime. Speaking of, Amazon and Twitch just announced May’s free Twitch Prime games.

We’ll cover all the video game deals worth looking at, so keep coming back all week for more of the latest ways to save money on games.

The week’s best video game deals so far

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