Arrested Development Season 5 is coming sooner rather than later, according to show creator Mitch Hurwitz.
In an open letter to fans on Twitter, Hurwitz stated that the fifth season will be arriving on Netflix “real soon,” stressing the release is just around the corner.
“If you knew when, you would not be wrong to be thinking “why are we all just hearing this now?”
On the next… Arrested Development pic.twitter.com/NjP26k9KE7
— Arrested Development (@arresteddev) May 1, 2018
With movies like The Terminator and Avatar under his belt, James Cameron is ready to spend a long time talking about science fiction in all forms of media.
AMC Visionaries: James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction premiered on AMC on April 30, featuring the director talking to practically anyone and everyone he could find that has their hands in the genre, but he’ll be the first to admit it’s not what it once was. In fact, it hasn’t been for a long time.
Though many of Cameron’s films are classified as sci-fi, he believes there was a turning point that definitively changed the genre.
The No More Heroes games, along with their creator Goichi Suda (AKA Suda 51) are no strangers to running with crazy, off-the-wall ideas. In the Switch exclusive Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, the titular character and his rival BadMan are teleported into living videogames and are forced to battle through bizarre challenges and bosses. Going for a more arcade-style brawler gameplay, fans were left a bit confused by the sudden change in scenery and aesthetic. But for Suda 51 and the developers at Grasshopper Manufacture, the new game–which they state is more of a side-story–is still the same quirky and ludicrously stylized No More Heroes game that they’re used to.
With that said, Suda still has ideas for where the series could go after the Travis Strikes Again which launches later in 2018, and how the Switch will be instrumental in that. During a chat with Suda at PAX East, he spoke about the fan reactions for the game, and that the upcoming Switch brawler is not No More Heroes 3. Evidently, Suda has much bigger plans for that.
Travis Strikes Again is a bit different compared to the other games on a structural level. Can you talk about how you wanted to approach this game in particular, and how you wanted to make it feel compared to the first two games?
Suda 51: One of the big differences about this game is that it’s made with a very small team, only 12 people. Because of that, I decided to go with a new style and make it a completely new adventure for Travis. With [No More Heroes] one and two, the formula for the series sort of got set in stone. I wanted to break away from that and do something totally different and pretty much just make a whole new IP with Travis Strikes Again.
It feels much more arcadey this time around, which is in keeping with the video game-y aspects of the narrative. Was this idea something that you’ve long held, or was it something that came as a result of the circumstances of making this game.
When I was talking with the staff, we decided that we wanted to go for a really arcade feel for the game, similar to stuff like Gauntlet–or rather like Smash TV. That sort of helped define how the game would play. The theme this time with the game is that Travis is going into these different game worlds and finding his way through them. I also want it to be sort of a journey through game history itself, and all the games I played as a kid really influenced me in forming that.
Given the small staff working on the game, it’s very much similar to indie development. Do you feel that Travis Strikes Again has that sort of vibe to an indie game?
Well, we started [development] last year in May with only four or five people. We’ve grown to 12 since then. I do feel closer to the indie style, which is actually how I started making games. So it’s kind of like a return to old form for me. Everyone is just an individual, they each have their own roles. It’s really us doing whatever we can when we can, rather than like some big team with people all working together on the same thing. Because it’s a small team, I get to talk directly face-to-face with them. We don’t have any big meetings to decide stuff.
Last year was the 10th anniversary of the original No More Heroes. When you started work on Travis Strikes Again, were you still keeping in mind fans’ expectations and passion for the series while trying to come up with this new game?
Of course that’s always on my mind and I really feel that it’s the voice of the fans that brought back Travis. I love Travis, and I always wanted to bring him back, but this is really something special for the fans. The 10th anniversary and now this year with the 20th anniversary of Grasshopper, I’m hoping that this game will be like a really fun present that he can give back to all his fans.
What’s it been like developing the game on the Nintendo Switch. In the last year it’s been out it’s been incredibly popular. It must be exciting to actually be a part of that line up of games.
It’s really fun, really exciting. Coming here to PAX and seeing all the excitement around the Nintendo booth and being able to be a part of that–it’s really great. The people at Nintendo are really great. They’re not very private. It’s like you’re part of a big family.
No More Heroes always comes up with some unique ways to handle motion controls. We were using the Pro Controller for our demo of Travis Strikes Again, though. Are you still keeping in mind that the Switch has sort of this unique set up and are you thinking of ways to try and utilize that for the game?
Yeah, so the core of the game design this time around is around the two Joy-Cons and being able to pull those off and being able to play two-player just with them and still being able to do a bunch of different moves. That’s one of the core concepts that they’re really focusing on. I really want to really utilize the vibration as well. I do like the Pro Controller, but in terms of the charging mechanic (shaking the controller in a crude gesture to charge your weapon), it’s definitely better to do it with the Joy-Con.
Last year at PAX West, you said that you were looking at including some references to other indie games in Travis Strikes Again. I noticed there was a Hyper Light Drifter shirt that Travis was wearing. Has any other games stuck else out to you over the course of making this game?I was playing Dead Cells this morning.
I was really impressed. It was so much fun and I was surprised that it’s an indie game. It’s so well made, and I was thinking I would build that into the game. Also, Party Hard 2 is really fun. I like that game a lot.
Looking back on the last 10 years working on the series, is there a particular moment within the game or even from its creation that sticks out to you?
There’s stuff like the saving on the toilet, and charging the beam-katana. That’s really symbolic of the No More Heroes series. One thing that really sticks out to me: the team and I came up with the beam-katana’s slash mechanic, where you use the buttons to attack and then you only shake the controller at the end to finish them off. I really felt that would be something that maybe would make it feel better playing. When I had the programmer put it in the game and actually tried it out for myself, I immediately knew in that moment, “Alright, this game’s going to be good.”
Lastly, with the new game coming out this year is there anything you’d like to say for fans that have been keeping the passion alive for the series for ten years?
I just want to say thank you for loving Travis. I’m so happy that I could revive the series on Nintendo console, and that I could bring a part of the Nintendo Switch library. I just want to get it out and let as many people play it as possible. I’m just happy that I can prove now that Travis is really back, and if this is successful, I’m planning to go straight ahead and make No More Heroes 3 as well.
Epic Games has released the Season 4 update for Fortnite, and it features some big changes for Battle Royale. Following the crash of some smaller meteors, the much-anticipated impact of the larger comet that’s been seen up in the sky in recent weeks has finally happened, revamping an area of the game’s map.
Many players were expecting the comet to destroy Tilted Towers when it finally hit. Epic had some fun with those theories, but the comet has instead come down elsewhere–specifically, in part of Dusty Depot. As a result, there’s now a huge crater that’s taken out one of the three warehouses that used to reside there, and a new name has been established for the area: Dusty Divot.
Dusty Divot is more than just a big hole in the map. A piece of the comet is stuck in the ground, and around it, the military has seemingly set up a base to examine it and keep people out (a bit like what happens in Thor). Of course, it’s easy to make it over the barbed wire fence, and not just because you can build a ramp. Small chunks of the comet called Hop Rocks have been scattered around the surrounding area, and by picking one up and crushing it in your hand, you temporarily defy gravity. This allows you to jump much higher (and slower) than usual.
Elsewhere on the map, the new Risky Reels area (a drive-in theater) seen in the Season 4 trailer has been added. There are also new elements to existing areas, like Anarchy Acres, and comet impacts scattered across the map.
You can check out Dusty Divot in the video above, but there’s much more going on in the 4.0 update than just changes to the map. Season 4 has begun, bringing new challenges and rewards to earn. The crossbow has been Vaulted, meaning it’s temporarily inaccessible in-game. Some tweaks have been made to how headshots work, and you can actually destroy stuff on the starting island now. You can see everything that’s changed in the Fortnite 4.0 patch notes.
Fortnite: Battle Royale’s comet has finally landed, signaling the beginning of Season 4. The game’s v4.0 update is live now on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and mobile, and although it doesn’t add any new items or weapons, it has still shaken things up significantly.
The first thing you’ll notice in Battle Royale is that the map has changed. The comet’s impact has been felt across the island, with multiple locations transformed by its impact and new points of interest created. In addition, a crater has appeared, and it’s surrounded by a set of glowing rocks. Developer Epic Games says if you consume these Hop Rocks, you’ll “lift off with low gravity.” Season 4 has also brought 100 tiers of new rewards, including new emotes, cosmetic items, and more.
Other changes to Battle Royale include the ability to destroy structures on the starting island (except the Battle Bus) and tweaks to how headshots work. Other parts of characters’ bodies will no longer block bullets from reaching their heads, meaning if your bullet hits a hand or leg on the way to your enemy’s head, it will still do as much damage as a regular headshot. This applies to all weapons except the Rocket Launcher and Grenade Launcher. Elsewhere, you can now see hit markers when looking through a scope, the Crossbow has been taken out of rotation and put into the Vault, and hand hitboxes have been slightly reduced in size.
In Save the World, part one of a new Blockbuster Event has been added with the new update. This event sees you “join Spitfire and Lok as they investigate the comet and gear up to recruit a team of superheroes!” For more details, check out the official patch notes below, via Epic Games.
The default action of keyboard button ‘B’ is now Emote, with keyboard button ‘V’ bound to bring up Team Chat. You can now cycle between Team Chat, Emotes, and Notes, regardless of which button you pushed to summon the picker.
May is officially here, which means the first half of this month’s Games with Gold lineup has arrived. Xbox Live Gold subscribers can now download two new games across Xbox One and Xbox 360, with another pair of freebies set to follow partway through the month.
On the Xbox One side, Gold members can grab the newly released Super Mega Baseball 2 at no charge. Like the first Super Mega Baseball, the game features deep baseball sim mechanics beneath its cartoony visuals, and this time around, players can compete against each other online. This month’s first free 360 title, meanwhile, is the Sega classic Streets of Rage. That game is also playable on Xbox One thanks to backwards compatibility.
Super Mega Baseball 2 will remain free to download throughout the entire month, while Streets of Rage will return to its regular price on May 15. Gold members can also still download one holdover from April’s Games with Gold lineup: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the 2015 stealth-action game set in Victorian London. That likewise returns to its normal price on May 15.
Beginning May 16, Microsoft will offer two more free games for Gold members. Xbox One owners will be able to grab Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the latest mainline installment in the popular stealth franchise. Platinum Games’ cult favorite shooter Vanquish will be the second free 360 title offered this month.
Both Metal Gear Solid V and Vanquish will remain free to download through the end of May, and the latter is also backwards compatible with Microsoft’s newer console, giving Xbox One owners four new freebies to grab this month. You can find the full list of May’s free Games with Gold lineup below.
Xbox One
Xbox 360 (playable on Xbox One)
Capcom is teaming up with iam8bit to produce a neat collectible for Mega Man’s 30th anniversary. The Mega Man 2 30th Anniversary Cartridge and Mega Man X 30th Anniversary Cartridge are limited editions priced at $100 apiece. They’re expected to ship in September 2018, and pre-orders are now open through iam8bit.com.
Each of the cartridges is a limited run of 8,500 units–7,500 in a standard opaque light blue, and a mere 1,000 in translucent, glow-in-the-dark blue. They’ll be in sealed, unmarked boxes, so whether you get the regular or the ultra-rare copy will be left a mystery until you open it. Plus, each cart is actually playable in your NES or SNES.
The Mega Man 2 cart is a dual-fold box with an instruction booklet with a forward by Mega Man collector and author Salvatore Pane. The Mega Man X cart is a tri-fold with a similar instruction manual forward by Jirard Khalil. Both copies also promise “retro pack-in surprises.”
The announcement kicks off Capcom’s “Mega May,” implying more surprises in store for the Blue Bomber. The character is preparing for a come-back with the release of Mega Man 11 later this year, and with E3 around the corner we’re likely to hear some more about it. So far we’ve seen glimpses of a new art style, but not much else. It’s coming to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch this year.
It’s very easy to dismiss Nintendo’s new line of Labo build-and-play toys as merely cardboard. For adults especially, building the Variety Kit’s five toys–or the Robot Kit’s suit–and playing their simple games might feel like a short-lived novelty. But there’s a surprising amount of depth to what you can do with the kit’s stack of cardboard sheets and cutesy software. It’s a remarkable educational tool and an opportunity to see your creations come to life, and that’s something very special, even if the games themselves don’t stand out.
The Variety Kit comes with five different Toy-Cons to build and then play with: the RC car, the fishing rod, the house, the motorbike, and the piano. In that order, the process of building them gradually increases in difficulty, with the more complicated projects expanding on the concepts introduced in the easier ones. The RC car takes around 10 minutes to build and is effectively a practice run, showing you the importance of precise assembly and how to work with cardboard without bending it in weird places. (The cardboard itself is pretty sturdy if you’re reasonably careful with it.)
After the “make” portion, you move on to “play.” The games are all relatively straightforward; drive the RC car, fish with the fishing rod, play piano using the piano. It’s more rewarding to see how the cardboard translates to the software than it is to play any of the games at length, though they’re deeper than they look at first glance. Even the most basic one, the RC car, has a self-driving function and a multiplayer battle mode; in the motorbike’s game, you can design your own tracks just by moving a Joy-Con through the air. The least interesting, at least from an adult’s perspective, is the house–the game there is to experiment with three insertable parts and see what kinds of rooms and mini-games they can unlock when in different combinations.
The piano is the most impressive component of the Variety Kit, with a regular play mode and a surprisingly deep studio mode. It only has 13 keys, but there’s a lever on the side that changes the octave, giving you access to a wider range of notes. You can layer recordings for more sophisticated songs, change the envelope and reverb of the notes before you record, and insert cards of different shapes into the top of the piano to change the waveform patterns. You can also create drum beats (composed of bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and cymbal sounds) using a kind of punch card that goes in the waveform card slot; the infrared camera in the Joy-Con detects the shape of the card and then uploads the card’s “data” into the studio UI.
Not much of this is apparent when you first start playing the piano, though. A lot of the depth can be found in “discover” mode, where three cheeky characters walk you through the technology behind each Toy-Con, any extra things you can make or do with them, and how the games work. Like with the building process, a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning how each of the Toy-Cons works and understanding why you had to make them a certain way. For kids in particular, there are straightforward explanations of abstract physics concepts that benefit from having the Toy-Cons as hands-on aids. There are also plenty of resources on how to fix the Toy-Cons, including how to repair bent or ripped cardboard (which is good for all ages).
In addition to the Variety Kit, there’s also a separate Robot Kit available. Instead of five different Toy-Cons, you build one large one: a robot “suit.” The basic suit consists of a visor and a backpack with pulley mechanisms for each of your hands and feet that control the in-game robot. The visor part utilizes the left Joy-Con’s gyroscope, while the backpack works using the right Joy-Con’s infrared camera and reflective tape. It’s a complex project that can take three or four hours to build, but the instructions are as easy to follow as they are in the Variety Kit, and it’s broken up into eight steps so you can pace yourself.
The Robot Kit’s games are especially geared toward children’s imaginative play. The main attraction is a destroy-the-city mode, in which you punch buildings to dust and rack up points. In addition to that, there’s a versus mode where two robots can battle and a “studio” mode where you can assign different sounds to the robot’s limbs and step and punch your way to a beat. You can also customize your in-game robot and unlock better abilities in a challenge mode. These games do show the different applications of the Toy-Con you’ve built, but they’re not likely to grab you for very long unless pretending to be a robot is your jam. Like in the Variety Kit, the Robot Kit’s discover mode is the place to learn more.
In both the Variety and Robot Kits, the secret endgame is the Toy-Con Garage, a mode where you can program your own games using if-then statements. You can pick an input, like “if the Joy-Con is face-up,” and connect it to an output, like “vibrate,” by dragging a line between them on the touchscreen. Depending on how many rules you weave into your program, you can make some decently complex games as well as mod the Toy-Cons you already made. It’s both a great learning tool at its most basic level and an opportunity to challenge yourself and apply everything you’ve learned so far.
It’s nice to have something to tinker with long after building the Toy-Cons, and that’s mainly because the official games are more like demos to show you how everything works. The only one likely to keep your attention for any length of time is the piano; everything else is a jumping off point, and you’re limited by how much it inspires you to create. And that’s just what Labo is at the moment: a great tool for creation, rather than for playing.
It’s officially May, which means a new bundle of free PC games will be available soon for Twitch and Amazon Prime members. This month’s offerings include a number of widely respected indie games. To find your freebies, just click the crown-shaped Prime Loot icon next to the search bar on Twitch. That opens a drop-down menu that contains your free games.
One of the biggest games this month is the mind-bending 3D platformer Psychonauts, in which you enter people’s minds and explore physical manifestations of their psyches. Gone Home is a first-person story-driven game. The adventure game I, Hope covers some heavy subject matter, and for those looking for fast-paced action, High Hell is a first-person shooter that encourages speedrunning.
Also free is the challenging first-person game Clustertruck, which has you sprinting across the roofs of semi-trucks as they race through the desert. Touch the ground and you’re toast. Finally, Titan Souls puts you in the shoes of a tiny character with a single arrow and asks you to take down enormous bosses. You don’t need a health bar in this game, because one hit spells death.
Twitch Prime is a perk for members of Amazon Prime. All you have to do to sign up is link your Amazon Prime account to your Twitch account. Once you do, you can download all six games for no cost between May 1 – 31. They’re yours to keep forever, even if you cancel Amazon Prime at some point down the line. The only catch is that you need the Twitch desktop app to install them.