Avengers: Infinity War has been in theaters for less than a week, but the next Marvel movie is only two months from release. Ant-Man and the Wasp is released in July, and following a poster, the new trailer is here.
There has been some speculation about when exactly in the MCU timelineAnt-Man and the Wasp takes place, but this new trailer doesn’t provide any clues; in fact, the only other Marvel movie it references is the first Ant-Man. But it’s a lot of fun, with Paul Rudd back as Scott Lang and Evangeline Lilly getting joint-billing as Hope Pym, aka the Wasp. There’s plenty of outlandish action involving both Ant-Man and Giant-Man (Lang’s other, somewhat taller, identity), while Lilly’s Wasp looks like she will be a great foil to Lang. Check it out above.
In addition, Michael Douglas returns as Hank Pym, while Michael Peña (The Martian, Fury) is back as Lang’s criminal pal Luis. New cast members include Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Randall Park (The Interview, Trainwreck) as SHIELD agent Jimmy Woo.
Ant-Man and The Wasp is directed by Peyton Reed. It hits theaters on July 6 in the US, with the UK release set for August 3. Reed helmed the first film, taking over from Edgar Wright, who had worked on the movie for many years but left shortly before production began. Last year, Wright revealed that he has never seen the final film.
In an interview with Modern Myth Media last year, Reed spoke about his plans for the sequel. “For me, as a comic nerd, I have always thought of Ant-Man and Wasp as a team,” he said. “That’s a lot of what the second movie is really about–how they work together, and what their personal and professional relationships are like.
“To show her finally fully formed in this movie is really exciting. We really get to introduce this character into that universe. To me she’s not a supporting character in this movie. It’s every bit as much her movie as it is Scott Lang’s.”
It’s a new week, and that means another fresh set of digital gaming deals on Xbox One and Xbox 360. Microsoft’s Major Nelson announced all of these deals on his blog today, and we’re rounding up some of the notable offers here in this post for you to consider.
Moving to Xbox 360, there are some nice deals to be had on backwards-compatible Call of Duty games, including Modern Warfare ($15), Black Ops ($15), and Black Ops II ($16.50). The acclaimed Original Xbox game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which also plays on Xbox One with backwards compatibility, is marked down to $10.50, while another backwards-compatible Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed II, can be had for $15.
These are just a small sampling of this week’s Xbox One and Xbox 360 deals. Go to Major Nelson’s blog to see a complete rundown of offers, some of which require an Xbox Live Gold membership. The offers are good through May 7.
The fourth Avengers movie hits theatres about a year from now, but we still don’t know what it’s called or how will address all of the crazy stuff that happened in Infinity War. As it turns out, Marvel intentionally decided to not reveal the title just yet so as to not take attention away from Infinity War. That’s according to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who remarked in an interview with Collider that this plan didn’t exactly work out.
“It’s gotten completely blown out of proportion,” Feige said about all the talk surrounding the title of the Infinity War follow-up. “It will just be a name and the reason to hold it back was to keep the attention on Infinity War. That backfired a little bit because now everyone thinks what’s the name of the next one gonna be? But it was really just to keep the focus [on Infinity War].”
Feige went on to say that Marvel didn’t want to call the new Avengers movies Part One and Part Two; directors Joe and Anthony Russo said titling the movies this way would be “misleading.” Pretty much all Marvel Cinematic Universe films are connected, but the next Avengers movie will connect “very directly” relative to the others.
“It will be quite evident that the films obviously connect, as all our films do, but this in particular connects very directly,” Feige said. “And then we changed the Part One and Part Two, we said let’s just keep this Infinity War and we’ll talk about the next movie later. We had done things in the past that had taken attention off of whatever the film at hand is because we talked about this. For instance, Infinity War announcing before Ultron came out, and it worked out, it was fine, but it felt like let’s keep the attention on the film at hand.
One thing is for sure: the next Avengers movie is not going to be called Infinity Gauntlet, a title that Collider’s interviewer put forward. “That is definitely not what it is called. Definitely not called that.”
Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy has congratulated Marvel on Avengers: Infinity War surpassing Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ opening-weekend US box office record.
In an image sent from the Star Wars official Twitter and Facebook accounts, a lightsaber is symbolically handed to Iron Man, with the accompanying text “from a Galaxy far, far away…to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. CONGRATULATIONS on the biggest opening weekend in history! From Kathy and everyone at Lucasfilm”
Fortnite Season 4 does indeed see a comet crashing into the Battle Royale map, adding new crater areas, and an alien new item.
According to the official patch notes, “shards of a massive comet have crashed into the map altering the landscape.” In those crash sites, you’ll find Hop Rocks, a new consumable item that gives you low-gravity powers.
The latest Battle Pass has added a hundred new tiers of rewards, including 7 new superhero-themed skins.
In Save the World mode, a new quest line called Blockbuster has begin. Part 1, Origin Story sees Spitfire and Lok attempting to recruit a team of superheroes to investigate the comet’s landing.
Battletech’s superb brand of strategy joins Frostpunk, Zelda-like The Swords Of Ditto, and engaging roguelite RPG For The King in this week’s lineup of top Steam releases.
When you’re browsing through the Steam store for new releases, it’s sometimes hard to know whether games you’ve never heard of are any good. Steam Punks is devoted to digging and playing through them all and picking out our favorites to share with you. This week, it was a pretty easy task, because we’ve been looking forward to some of these games for a long time.
Coming from the same tabletop origins that spawned the Mechwarrior games, Battletech takes the universe of plodding, industrial mechs and epic space feuds to the tactical strategy space—and it feels like the perfect marriage. You’ll command your squad of four mechs and their respective pilots as you charge headfirst into deliberate turn-based battles across large, varied maps. Battletech’s version of tactical strategy is a detailed one—there are so many systems at play, and so much to think about with every turn.
Battletech also trades in the fantasy of running an interplanetary mercenary organization. Progression is open-ended, and you’ll have to worry about the business of paying your debts, keeping the lights, and making your next jobs pay well enough to offset the operating cost. There’s a bunch of great characters that flesh out a plot concerning a deposed ruler trying to take back her throne, and the presentation helps flesh out that 90’s industrial mechs fantasy.
It’s like Zelda meets Steven Universe and they had a roguelike baby! The Swords of Ditto plays on the concept hinted at in The Legend of Zelda—that every new generation, another will rise, become the hero, and continue the fight against an omnipotent evil—and crams that into one game. You’ll have four in-game days to go adventuring through the game’s randomized and delightful world to try and stop the evil Mormo. But if you fail, that’s it!
You’ll wake up as another character 100 years later and claim The Sword of Ditto for yourself to continue the fight, but things will have gotten just that little bit worse. The Swords of Ditto takes some pretty direct inspiration from the 2D Zelda games, can be played entirely in co-op, and trades pretty heavily on its charm, which makes everything from its items to its enemies fun to discover.
From the studio that brought you the cheery This War of Mine comes Frostpunk, a city management game where an apocalyptic winter has occurred, and you’re tasked with keeping the remaining population alive and warm around a huge furnace. It’s a tough game of resource and population management, urban planning, and making tough decisions with significant compromises.
But it’s deciding how you run this new society and treat the people in your workforce that’s going to going to stress you out—-you need them to be efficient, but at what cost? When do you start losing your humanity at the expense of survival? It’s a fascinating and brutal dilemma that makes Frostpunk something special.
A curious mashup of strategy, RPG, and roguelike genres, For The King sees you order a group of adventurers around a kingdom to stem the tide of chaos plaguing the land. You’ll find some familiar feeling turn-based RPG combat, but the catch is that each party member is a separate entity on the hex-based map. If you hit a random encounter while exploring and your allies aren’t around, good luck!
The dilemma between faster exploration and combat efficiency is what you’ll have to decide between as you uncover the game’s procedural maps. For the king sports a uniquely attractive low-poly art style and can also be played in co-op! It’s a good week for co-op and strategy games.
What new PC games have you been playing this week? Let us know on Twitter: @EdmondTran + @JessMcDonell
We take blind chances on new Steam games that look promising, and give you our personal recommendations on whether they’re actually worth spending money on
Avengers: Infinity War is the culmination of ten years and 18 movies-worth of interconnected storytelling. But what’s next? We don’t mean Ant-Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel, or the next Avengers 4 – those are set in stone, but after that – Phase 4 and beyond.
We interviewed Infinity War directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who have worked on multiple Marvel movies including Infinity War, and Marvel’s head honcho Kevin Feige, and asked them all about the future of the MCU. This was before we got to see the latest Avengers movie, so we couldn’t get stuck into specifics. Instead we asked them some larger questions about how Marvel may tackle things in the future.
