Month: March 2019

Hollywood has gone from occasional reboots to semi-regular reboots to now building definite reboots into future plans for a mega-franchise. And gone are the days when studios would give viewers a bit of breathing room between an original story and its inevitable re-telling. Nowadays, if a valuable IP doesn’t click the first go-round, it’s resurrected in just a few years.

With the news that James Gunn’s Suicide Squad movie isn’t a sequel to the 2016 DCEU film, but a total reboot called The Suicide Squad, we’re presented with a grand opportunity to sift through all the recent reboots and marvel at how little time has passed between films.

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Cinematic universes are a big deal these days and it seems like every studio is looking for the next big Marvel-like franchise that can span across movies, TV, and beyond. We’ve witnessed plenty of false starts and minor successes, but so far no other franchise has been able to capture that shared universe spark. That just might change once the adaptation of Black Hammer hits screens because it’s a comic book superhero series that naturally lends itself to the concept of a cinematic universe.

What Black Hammer Is About

Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Dean Ormston crafted a beautiful saga with Black Hammer. Launched in 2016, the series became a massive critical hit and took home the Eisner for Best New Series. It has quickly become one of Dark Horse Comics’ flagship books and the indie series that everyone is talking about. It was no surprise when it was announced that it had been licensed for a live-action adaptation by Legendary Entertainment. The studio has yet to reveal whether they plan to adapt Black Hammer into film or television, or some mix of both, but the flexible nature of the series could easily fit either format.

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Trover Saves the Universe is insane. It basically feels like a playable episode of Rick and Morty. The animation style is the same, the humor is the same, and heck, you’ll even hear Roiland use both Rick’s voice (on certain enemies) and Morty’s (Trover himself). I am left to genuinely wonder if the only reason it isn’t a Rick and Morty game is because Roiland didn’t want to share the profits with Adult Swim and/or he didn’t want their corporate approval process slowing him down.

Anyway, all of that is to say that Trover Saves the Universe is hilarious. I don’t laugh out loud at games nearly as often as I’d like, and without a doubt, Trover got more audible, involuntary laughter out of me than any game since Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s last two South Park RPGs. My demo of Trover – the full game is out on May 31 for PS4 and PSVR – was with Tanya Watson, co-founder and studio director of Roiland’s game development house, Squanch. Watson confirmed what I suspected while laughing my way through Trover’s first proper mission: that Roiland ad-libbed all of the dialogue. The designers sketched out levels and gameplay based on a high-level outline, and then Roiland came in, played it, and hopped into the VO booth to record lines for literally every conceivable scenario. And he did it on the fly. Think of it as a Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of approach, which is both amazing and difficult to pull off. Roiland and Squanch seem to be well on their way to doing just that.

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A man has pleaded guilty to stealing a combined $122 million from Google and Facebook between 2013 and 2015.

Evaldas Rimasauskas of Lithuania managed to steal $99m from Facebook and $23m from Google by way of a simple plan: he sent invoices to the tech giants for items they hadn’t ordered. Astonishingly, both companies paid up.

A story at Boing Boing explains that the invoices were sent alongside a variety of forged paperwork, including contracts and falsely signed letters, to maintain an air of legitimacy. Rimasauskas even mocked up emails that appeared to come from corporate executives to support his demands for payment.

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After 3 decades, the Black Knight is back in Stern Pinball’s Black Knight: Sword of Rage. First appearing in the 1980s, the titular Knight may be pinball’s greatest adversary, especially in the 1989 sequel where he taunted players with delightfully ’80s-sounding robotic callouts and maniacal laughter.

In an upcoming 2019 game revealed today, the Black Knight will take his most prominent place in the game yet, with a massive, animated figure placed prominently in the playfield, thwacking pinballs back at the player with a flail and defending against your shots with a miniature shield.

Check out the first trailer for Black Knight: Sword of Rage below:

The first two Black Knight games were notable for their upper playfields, a raised wooden playfield in the rear of the game accessible via ramps and other methods with its own flipper and set of targets to shoot for.

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Now is the perfect time to begin your journey into the glorious world of PC gaming. Amazon’s deal of the day has all kinds of PCs, as well as PC accessories, on sale. If you’ve been on the fence about PC gaming, I will give you this advice: get a gaming PC. I’ve been playing most of my multi-platform games on PC for years, and I’m spoiled now.

Prebuilt Gaming PC Deals

For $1099, you can get a powerful desktop gaming PC. Inside this CYBERPOWER rig is a liquid-cooled AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2GHz processor with 16GB DDR4 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB graphics card. There’s also a 240GB SSD and a spacious 2TB HDD to store all your games.

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Remedy Entertainment – makers of Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break – has never made a bad game, and if my first hands-on with their latest, Control, is any indication, they’re not in jeopardy of breaking that streak. In the same way that Max Payne basically forced you to always keep moving, Control does the same – but adds in a bunch of superpowers, a bizarre and compelling setting, and gleefully rips the environment to shreds in the process. My first hands-on with it was everything I hoped for.

As Jesse Faden, the newly appointed head of the mysterious Federal Bureau of Control, you’re handed a unique Service Weapon that can transform and upgrade in different, player-controlled ways, and asked to keep the strange forces threatening our world at bay. My demo took place in the Central Research section of The Oldest House – the nickname for the Brutalist-architecture, space-bending building that the Bureau calls home. In it, a hostile force known as The Hiss has begun attacking, meaning you’ll see suspended, floating bodies, people frozen in time and space, and aggressive bad guys who seemingly teleport in – some of which have powers like yours.

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