Month: January 2019

The private beta for The Division 2 is almost here, and we’ve outlined all the information you need to know in order to participate. Ubisoft has announced that new content will become available later in the demo, so you’ll need to check in past the first day to see everything.

The Division 2 leaves the New York City setting of the first game for a story told in Washington DC. The loot-driven RPG elements and third-person cover-based shooter mechanics from The Division return, but this sequel promises a larger focus on how a player’s choices will impact the in-game world. The popular Dark Zone from the first game has been multiplied into three in The Division 2, and how they work has also changed.

The Division 2 launches on March 15 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. The PC version, previously scheduled for Steam, is now releasing on the Epic Games Store instead.

When Is The Division 2’s Private Beta

The Division 2 private beta starts on February 7 at 1AM PT / 4AM ET / 9AM UK and ends February 11 at 1AM PT / 4AM ET / 9AM UK. The beta will be available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

How To Participate In The Private Beta

In order to participate in the private beta, you’ll need to be invited. You can get an invite in one of two ways. You can either pre-order The Division 2 or you can register on the game’s main website for a chance to win an invite. Pre-ordering the game is the only guaranteed way to participate.

You can preload the game 24 hours before it becomes available. If you plan on playing on PC, Ubisoft’s recommended PC specs–which put the game at 1080p and 60fps–requires an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core I7-4790 that’s paired with 8 GB of RAM and either an AMD RX 480 or Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 with 4 GB of VRAM.

What Can You Do In The Private Beta

There seems to be a fair bit of content available in The Division 2 private beta. On February 7, you’ll have access to a couple main missions, several open-world activities, one of the PvP modes, and one of the three Dark Zones.

Of the two main story missions, the first will take place in Grand Washington Hotel, while the second is located at Jefferson Trade Center. While exploring the world, you’ll find five additional side missions. If you want, you can also participate in The Division 2’s new Skirmish PvP mode or journey into Dark Zone East. You’ll be able to rank up to level seven throughout your time in the private beta, and unlock new skills to use.

Starting February 8, endgame content will be unlocked in the private beta. You’ll be able to try a level 30 agent, as well as one of the three new specializations. There’s also an endgame Invaded mission available.

The Los Angeles Rams will take on the New England Patriots at the Super Bowl this weekend. But for many viewers, Super Bowl Sunday is about the spectacle. The year’s biggest game, biggest half-time show, and of course, the biggest commercials. Advertising during the Super Bowl guarantees a massive audience and the prestige of sharing airtime with some of the most iconic ads ever created.

This year, companies like Amazon, Doritos, and Budweiser have already begun to show off teasers for ads that will air on February 3. Some of these are versions of the final ads themselves, but many are Internet-ready ads for the ads that we’ll see during the big game. Check out all that we know about for sure below. We also expect to see some movie trailers, including a likely look at some upcoming Marvel films.

Amazon Alexa

Amazon is advertising its Alexa virtual assistant with a series of ads, centered around a fictional Beta Testing program reserved strictly for celebrities like Harrison Ford. If anyone knows how to deal with smart-aleck robots, it’s him.

Avacados from Mexico

Who doesn’t love some guac to go with those chips? Avacados from Mexico, a marketing group for the tree fruit import business, created a commercial using that mainstay of advertising success: cute dogs.

Bon & Viv Spiked Seltzer

In one of the more high-concept ads we’ve seen so far, a group of mermaids pitch their spiked seltzer, Shark Tank style, to a gang of actual sharks.

Bubly Flavored Water

Singer Michael Bublé has riffed on his very adjective-like name before, and now the crooner is playing at being a bit miffed at the similarity with the flavored water brand Bubly.

Budweiser

The self-proclaimed King of Beers has become somewhat known for its Super Bowl commercials, so of course it’s planning to show up this year. This year it’s tipping its hat to sustainable energy, promoting its use of wind power with the help of its iconic clydesdale horses and (why not?) a cute dog.

Doritos

Perpetual football snack Doritos uses all that tortilla money to bring Backstreet back (alright), as the 1990s heartthrobs give Chance the Rapper a shot at joining their crew. We’ve only seen teasers so far so the big day will likely bring a longer ad spot.

M&Ms

Christina Applegate stars in a teaser for the little candy confections, as a frustrated woman locked out of her car by someone–or something–on the inside.

Planters Peanuts

A brief teaser for Planters shows the company’s monocled mascot tossing peanuts into the mouth of baseball great Alex Rodriguez.

Skittles

Skittles is very consciously making a point of not showing an ad during the game, instead advertising that it is hosting a full-blown Broadway musical. It stars Michael C. Hall and will play to an actual live audience in New York concurrent with the Super Bowl itself, with ticket proceeds and a matching donation going to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.

Stella Artois

In an ad for Stella Artois beer, fictional characters known for their associations with particular alcoholic beverages decide on a change of pace and instead order a Stella. Those include Carrie Bradshaw of Sex in the City eschewing her cosmo and The Dude rejecting a White Russian. This ad strategy may have backfired slightly for Stella, though, as the initial vague teaser starring Jeff Bridges raised hopes for a Big Lebowski sequel. Sorry, fans of The Dude.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate isn’t the only Switch game receiving a major update this week. Nintendo is also rolling out a new patch for Mario Tennis Aces. The update is slated to arrive on January 31 and will make a range of balance adjustments, kick off another Co-Op Challenge, and add a new playable character: Boom Boom.

Beginning February 1, players will be able to unlock the classic Super Mario Bros. 3 mid-boss by competing in the game’s Online Tournament mode; everyone else, meanwhile, will unlock him automatically after March 1. You can get a look at Boom Boom in action in the trailer above.

In addition to Boom Boom, Nintendo is bringing back the Boo Hunt Co-Op Challenge until March 2, giving players another opportunity to unlock special alternate costumes for Boo. This particular challenge uses Swing Mode and has players teaming up online to hit the ball at as many Boos within the time limit.

Beyond that, Nintendo is adding a Hosted Match mode for online and LAN play. AI is also being improved, and a number of characters are receiving balance adjustment. You can read about all of the changes in the full patch notes.

A number of new characters have been added to Mario Tennis Aces since the game’s launch, including Shy Guy, Diddy Kong, Petey Piranha, and most recently Luma, who arrived at the beginning of January. The game’s next free character will be Pauline, and she’ll be available in March.

Dan Gilroy made a huge splash when his directorial debut, Nightcrawler, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival to rave reviews. After a sophomore slump in Roman J. Israel, Esq., Gilroy is back with a vengeance by going full horror with Velvet Buzzsaw, a bonkers supernatural slasher disguised as an art film where instead of horny teens, it’s pretentious and greedy art snobs getting murdered.

Gilroy returns to the morally compromised Los Angeles, only instead of dark and gloomy city streets, Velvet Buzzsaw is a gleaming and colorful satire of the art world. We begin at an art show where we are introduced to a parade of zany and ridiculous characters that are completely unaware of their ridiculousness. Jake Gyllenhaal reunites with Gilroy to play Morf Vandewalt, a powerful art critic that never turns off his criticisms. Josephina (Zawe Ashton) is a receptionist with ambitions working under the commanding punk artist turned gallery owner, Rodora (Rene Russo). Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge) left Rhodora’s teaching to become her biggest rival. There’s also the art advisor with wealthy clients, Gretchen (Toni Collette). Rounding up the main cast is John Malkovich as a once great artist whose newfound sobriety ruined his artistic vision, and the one good-hearted and normal member of the ensemble, Coco (Natalia Dyer), a receptionist who keeps getting hired by people right before they die.

It’s a stellar cast (even Daveed Diggs and Billy Magnussen show up) filled with terrible people waiting to be slaughtered. After an old man dies in Josephina’s building, she snoops into his apartment and finds hundreds of paintings made by the dead man. As with every other character in the film, the deceased man had a ridiculous name, Ventryl Dease, and apparently, he really wanted his paintings to be destroyed once he died. Why? Well, for one they are creepy as hell. Fiery pits of hell surrounding screaming children with blacked out eyes, twisted limbs and other hellish images surround the sinister apartment. Gilroy and cinematographer Robert Elswit find beauty in the macabre, with striking city vistas and sinister interior shots, and of course, every murder looks like a work of art–there’s even a crime scene that gets mistaken for an exhibit.

There is a sense of levity and a real satirical tone to Velvet Buzzsaw, especially in the first act, which takes pleasure in showing how insane and preposterous the art world is. Each character is crazier and more terrible than the last, and as if their lives weren’t crazy enough, the various art installations seen in the movie range from creepy to outright hysterical–there’s a particularly funny installation in the form of a robot called Hoboman, who says nonsensical sentences like “I once built a railroad.” If Dan Gilroy had wanted to stop the film right there and just make it a comedy about awful people being funny, it would have worked. But then the murders happen…

After finding the creepy paintings, the ambitious would-be art agent Josephina does the logical thing and steals a few of them. When Morf declares the paintings to be masterpieces and Rhoroda expresses her desire to help sell them for a profit, more and more characters join in one way or another, getting intense acclaim and vast profits in the process by being close to the disturbing paintings. Of course, the disturbing paintings aren’t only that, as Rhodora and the greediness gang discover a sinister and possibly supernatural history tied to Dease’s art, which then start *checks notes* literally killing people.

Gilroy, who also wrote the script, takes full advantage of the over-the-top world of obnoxious art snobs and mixes it with the camp of a slasher film that results in a film with some relevant and articulate comments on the art world, told with the subtlety of a knife to the throat, all played with morbid humor that somehow works like gangbusters. The death scenes are numerous, each more absurd and gorier than the last. Killed by monkeys from a painting? Check. An exhibit where you stick your hand in a hole and suddenly your arm is cut in the bloodiest way? Check. A soundproofed room that suddenly starts torturing you with negative criticism? Sure, why not! Nothing is too preposterous or weird for Dan Gilroy, and the film is better for it.

Speaking of weird and preposterous, Jake Gyllenhaal is game for all of the film’s craziness and is fantastic at playing the snobby Morf, who can’t seem to be able to speak without criticisms. Even before having sex or at a funeral, he is commenting and critiquing his environment while constantly posing his hand under his chin, looking for new snarky lines. Meanwhile his Nightcrawler co-star Rene Russo perfectly captures the greed of doing anything for the almighty dollar, and Zawe Ashton is outstanding as Josephina, who has the widest turn from sympathetic to ruthless and greedy.

Velvet Buzzsaw may seem like a critique on greediness and our relationship to art on the surface, but what Dan Gilroy has created in nothing short of a surreal, campy and bonkers and entertaining ride through hell.

Velvet Buzzsaw is available on Netflix on February 1.

The Good
The wacky performances.
Jake Gyllenhaal is unchained.
The balls on this film for going as crazy as it does!
Most bonkers deaths since the roller coaster in Final Destination.

If you turn your Xbox One on right now and face nothing but a black screen, it’s not just you. Microsoft has confirmed that some kind of problem is impacting the system right now, and in an update, it says it should be fixed soon. [Update: Microsoft now says all of the ongoing problems have been fixed. “The issues surrounding Xbox One console startup, sign-in, title update errors, and our status page have now been resolved,” it said on Twitter. “Thank you for sticking with us while our teams addressed these issues and we appreciate the reports. As always, we’re here and we’re listening.”]

“We are aware of reports of Xbox One console startup, title update and sign-in errors,” Microsoft said in a tweet. “We will keep everyone informed once we have more information to share. Thank you all for your patience.” A subsequent tweet adds, “Our engineers are actively investigating and working on the issues outlined in our initial post.”

The usual source for additional details, the Xbox Live status page, was itself inaccessible for a time, which Microsoft also acknowledged. It has since come back online and lists “signing into Xbox Live” as the issue with Xbox Live’s core services, along with some encouraging news: “We are seeing indications that we are on the path to recovery with the Xbox Live sign-in issues, and we expect to be back up and running shortly.”

While Microsoft’s tweet makes this sound like a somewhat run-of-the-mill, if inconvenient, error, it appears to actually be much worse in some cases. When I booted up my Xbox One, the notification telling me my user account had automatically logged in came up, but the screen was otherwise completely black. While I was able to eventually bring up the guide, the system didn’t respond to any further inputs, though I could see that it was downloading an update for one game.

In addition to this, other users are seemingly unable to sign in to Xbox Live, preventing access to some games and online multiplayer. We’ll report back as more information becomes available.