Month: July 2018

In honor of the Fourth of July, Best Buy is running a huge sale right now on all kinds of items, from computers and TVs to movies and games. We’ve dug through the sale to find the most appealing deals on the games, hardware, and accessories you want. Here are some of the highlights of Best Buy’s Fourth of July Sale.

In terms of hardware, if you buy an Xbox One, you’ll get a free copy of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, save $10 off an extra controller, and save $10 on a three- or six-month Xbox Live Gold membership. You can also save $20 on select 2DS XL systems.

Speaking of Nintendo’s older handheld machine, Best Buy has a deal that gets you 50% off select Nintendo 3DS games if you buy one at full price. It applies to some fantastic games, including Super Smash Bros., Pokemon Ultra Sun/Moon, Metroid: Samus Returns, Mario Sports Superstars, and many more.

Nintendo Switch owners can pick up Super Mario Odyssey for $49 this week, or Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 for $20. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze also got modest price cuts, down to $55. PS4 and Xbox One owners can get Far Cry 5 on sale for $40 this week as well.

Sports game fans have an array of options. FIFA 18 is on sale for $30, Madden NFL 18 is down to $25, and NBA 2K18 is $20. If fighting is more your thing, you can grab UFC 3 for $40, or if you’d prefer something more theatrical, you can get WWE 2K18 for $20.

Finally, if you’ve been putting off upgrading your TV, now may be the week to pull the trigger. Best Buy has a ton of televisions on sale, with 4K sets starting at $230, meaning you can almost certainly find a deal on a TV that fits your size and budget preferences.

Grand Theft Auto V players in GTA Online have reported receiving in-game messages stating that Grand Theft Auto VI will launch in 2019. Developer Rockstar Games has addressed the rumors, confirming the messages are fake and not from official channels.

GTA Online players reported receiving the message, which reads “Rockstar Message GTA VI Coming 2019,” on Reddit and the GTA Online forum. This inevitably prompted people to ask the Rockstar Support Twitter account about it. The response follows below; it confirms it is indeed a hoax, as suspected.

Although Rockstar hasn’t provided any information on how this happened, the Reddit community has speculated that an opportunistic hacker is using mods and a flaw in the Rockstar Social Club’s messaging system to send out the message. Perhaps the biggest giveaway is that the pop-up messages are predominantly appearing in the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC versions of the game, where mods are more prevalent.

Obviously, it’d be incredibly out of character for Rockstar to simply reveal the release date for the next entry in its biggest franchise in such a haphazard way. Rockstar like to be very measured in the way it reveals games, delivering fleeting teases and drip-feeding little details to build up excitement.

On top of that, casually announced GTA VI would steal all the thunder from its next game: Red Dead Redemption 2. As confirmed in July, Red Dead Redemption 2’s release date is October 26, 2018. The much-anticipated sequel will be available for PS4 and Xbox One. Rockstar hasn’t said whether the game is coming to PC, but one of the programmers working on the game has indicated Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC is in development.

It is not always easy to be a WWE fan. Everyone knows the matches are scripted; the horse left the barn back in the late 80’s, when WWE began openly referring to its product as “sports entertainment.” But still, like any other fictional show, fans can still enjoy it so long as it is presented well. We suspend our disbelief for a couple of hours.

But WWE doesn’t always make this easy. WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, who approves every segment before it goes on the air, has an objectively crass, juvenile sense of humor. And because of this, a few segments make it onto live TV that no one could possibly defend. They make the company look awful. They make the wrestlers look awful. And in a few instances, people’s careers have never recovered.

Here are the 10 most cringeworthy segments of the past decade, from 2008 to 2018. So, there’s no Gobbledy Gooker and there’s no Katie Vick in this gallery. These are trainwrecks of the more recent variety.

There’s a recurring source of tension in Ant-Man and the Wasp thanks to Scott Lang’s sentence of two years under house arrest for his actions in Captain America: Civil War. No matter how many zany adventures Paul Rudd’s character has in this sequel, he has to periodically race back to his San Francisco apartment and re-don his ankle bracelet whenever hapless FBI agent Jimmy Woo (the funny Randall Park) decides to check in on him. It’s a fun bit, and it harks back to an earlier age in the MCU, when a Marvel hero’s biggest concern could be staying out of trouble with the law.

We’ve yet to see what a post-Infinity War world looks like in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Regardless of how it eventually gets undone, what effect will Thanos’s finger snap have in the short term? How will the tone shift in Avengers 4? Those questions are irrelevant in Ant-Man and the Wasp, which quickly places itself before the events of Infinity War. That may be a knock against it for those hoping for some answers, but this movie’s tone is much lighter as a result, perfectly in line with the original Ant-Man‘s.

The first Ant-Man introduced Scott Lang (Rudd) along with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly). Ant-Man and the Wasp directly picks up their story following Scott’s involvement in Civil War: Scott’s two years of house arrest are almost up, but Hope drags him back into a life of illegal heroism in a plot to save her mother, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet van Dyne, from the “quantum realm” in which she’s been stranded for 30 years.

How can Janet be alive down there after all this time? How could Hank and Hope possibly find her? This movie is brimming with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about things like “entanglement” and “quantum tunnels.” It gets a little exhausting, but the movie is self aware about its own ridiculousness; at one point, Scott asks Hank and his colleague Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne) whether they just stick the word “quantum” in front of everything to make it sound more scientific. Good question, Scott!

Ant-Man and the Wasp introduces a couple of new villains in the forms of Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, who stalks the heroes in hopes of stealing their secret lab, and Walton Goggins’ Sonny Burch, a black market merchant who decides he wants the quantum tech for himself. Goggins is his typical hilariously sleazy self, while John-Kamen’s more overtly dramatic performance fits her character.

But most important is the Wasp herself, Evangeline Lilly’s Hope van Dyne, who completely owns this movie. Hope proves–unsurprisingly–to be a much more capable Ant-Man than Ant-Man himself, with confidence and skill that are thrilling to watch. It makes the entire plot of the first movie–that Hank had to enlist the deadbeat Scott in the first place instead of just trusting his daughter to do the job–seem even more ludicrous in retrospect. Hopefully Lilly decides to stick around the MCU for a while, as her presence would be much appreciated in future installments.

Like the first Ant-Man, this movie has great fight choreography that sees both heroes frequently changing from normal to small to massive and back again in creative ways. Some of the most fun sequences are car chases where one or more vehicles are constantly shrinking down to Hot Wheels size and back to normal, throwing off pursuers and causing general zany chaos.

There’s an added dash of humor from the fact that Scott’s suit for much of the movie is malfunctioning, leaving him unable to control when he changes size. That leads to an especially funny sequence where Scott is running around his daughter’s middle school at about 3 feet tall, trying to remain undetected. Cassie herself is still played by the ridiculously charismatic Abby Ryder Fortson, who gives Paul Rudd tit-for-tat in every scene they’re in together.

Michael Peña’s Luis returns with a vengeance too, with his voice-overed montage gag from the first–in which he tells a story while the characters he’s describing act it out–is funnier than ever. This time around he gets injected with a sort of truth serum, causing his rapid fire rambling to span topics ranging from Scott’s psychiatric health to his family’s love of Morrissey. He’s more actively involved in the story, as well, which is pure wish fulfillment for viewers who loved his character in the first movie.

Like the original Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp is primarily a palette cleanser in the MCU as a whole (the first movie was sandwiched in between the dense Age of Ultron and the dour Civil War). Ant-Man and the Wasp is hilarious, fun, silly, self aware, and creative. Filled with pseudo-science gobbledigook, crazy action, and multiple villains all vying for screen time, it’s one of the most comic-booky MCU movies yet. The fates of all our favorite heroes after Avengers: Infinity War may still be up in the air, but in the meantime, Ant-Man and the Wasp is a welcome distraction.

Fortnite season 5 is almost here, but no superhero franchise is complete without a big-budget blockbuster motion picture. To that end, Epic is holding a contest for aspiring filmmakers to cut together their own masterpiece, with some notoriety and virtual bucks on the line.

The fan films must be at least one minute in length, and no longer than five minutes. They’ll be judged on creativity, mastery of the Replay tools, and “Fortnite-ness”–the quality of capturing the tone of Fortnite. You can only use your own original gameplay and royalty-free audio, and no voice-over narrative or on-screen text is allowed. Submissions should include the hashtag #FortniteBlockbuster. They’re due by July 11 at 11:59 ET.

Winners will be announced on July 24. Five finalists will get 10,000 V-Bucks, and one grand-prize winner will get 25,000 V-Bucks. Plus the grand prize winner will have their film featured at Risky Reels, complete with the title displayed on the marquee and a poster for the film displayed in-game.

You just have to upload your submission to YouTube, make it publicly visible and searchable. Email [email protected] with your full name and Epic ID. Full contest details are available through the official site.