Month: August 2019

Capcom has released compilations of the classic Mega Man and Mega Man X games, and now another spin-off collection is in the works. Capcom has announced the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch with a release date of January 21, 2020.

The collection includes six games: Mega Man Zero 1-4, Mega Man ZX, and Mega Man ZX Advent. It promises an artwork gallery, music player, and a new Z Chaser mode with leaderboard. The Zero and ZX games were notoriously difficult, so this compilation also includes a “Casual Scenario Mode” and “Save Assist” to let you enjoy the story at your own pace.

The Mega Man Zero and ZX games appeared on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS platforms. They take place hundreds of years after the Mega Man X games and star the sword-wielding Zero with a new art style and surrounded by a different cast of characters. They were notable for their use of an open-world area and a more RPG-like power-up mechanic. ZX allowed you to play as a male or female protagonist for the first time in the series.

These were also among the earliest games made by Inti Creates, which has gone on to develop the Mega Man-like series Azure Striker Gunvolt, along with other retro-styled games Blaster Master Zero and Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon.

The collection was leaked before the announcement with a brief appearance on the PlayStation Store in Hong Kong, but now Capcom has made the announcement official with additional platforms.

New Cyberpunk 2077 information is set to be revealed this week ahead of its April 2020 release. CD Projekt Red is hosting a stream for the upcoming game that will unveil a 15-minute edit of what was shown to attendees and press at Gamescom last week.

The stream will be hosted by Hollie Bennett, CD Projekt Red’s UK head of comms, and will feature interviews with a lineup of developers ready to shed additional insight on the footage that’s shown. The stream promises to delve into the thought process behind creative decisions, reveal information about Pacifica–one of the districts of Night City–and share tons of new information on the playstyles you’ll be able to adopt in Cyberpunk 2077.

The company also planned to showcase gameplay at PAX West but there’s been a change of plans and it will be streaming from Warsaw instead. “There are many logistical (and some creative) reasons behind this decision,” CD Projekt Red said on its website. “The most important thing we want to say is that we’re sorry for the change of plans. We know that many of you waited to meet us face to face in Seattle and it bums us out that we won’t be able to see each other there.” Despite this, the PAX cosplay contest is still on, there just won’t be a developer panel on-site.

The stream takes place on August 30 at 2pm EST // 11am PT // 6pm GMT // 8PM CEST on the official CD Projekt Red Twitch and Mixer channels.

We also recently learned that the map in Cyberpunk 2077 is smaller than The Witcher 3, but that it’s much denser. The game is expected to have a new game plus mode, too, and will feature a harder difficulty that turns off the game’s UI. Meanwhile, CD Projekt Red says it is looking into multiplayer. Producer Richard Borzymowski told GameSpot that while nothing could be confirmed, the team will “think [about expansions]” after game development is done.

Cyberpunk 2077 launches April 16, 2020 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, with an unannounced release date for Google Stadia.

In the age of memes, Jeff Goldblum has become as known for his spirited off-screen persona as he is for his various film roles. So naturally, when he heard the news about the split between Disney and Sony, putting the future of Spider-Man films in flux, his reaction was appropriately Goldblum-esque.

In an interview on the D23 red carpet, Goldblum expressed his ruffled shock and horror at the news.

“No! This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’m crestfallen! Save–what’s happening? I didn’t know any of this,” he told Variety. After pausing a moment for the interviewer to explain the situation, he continued, “I’m not a business person, whatever you say is Greek to me. I don’t know, it will all work out, I’m sure. Good luck, they’ll figure it out.”

At the time Goldblum reacted, news was still breaking of the impending split. Since then the situation has gotten more certain, with Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige suggesting the days of Spider-Man in the MCU are over and star Tom Holland talking about future post-Marvel Spider-Man projects.

Naturally, the always meme-ready actor immediately became a meme, with the Internet seizing on both his wild gesticulations and the dramatic emphasis he put on his feelings.

Goldblum himself is no stranger to the MCU, having played The Grandmaster in Thor Ragnarok. He’s also continuing his relationship with Disney with an original show on the streaming service Disney+. The World According to Jeff Goldblum is a travel docu-series produced by the recently acquired National Geographic brand. It captures his reactions to everyday culture ranging from Korean barbecue to synchronized swimming. It will be available upon the launch of the service.

A new Mortal Kombat movie is on the way, and now the film has cast three more of its lead roles. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jessica McNamee (The Meg) will play Sonya Blade, while Josh Lawson (House of Lies) has joined the movie in the role of Kano. Deadpool 2 actor Lewis Tan has been cast as well, but there are no details yet on the character he plays.

Tan played Shatterstar in Deadpool 2 and Zhou Cheng in Iron Fist. He also has history with Mortal Kombat specifically, as he portrayed Kung Jin in the Mortal Kombat X: Generations series.

Greg Russo, who is also writing the script for the new Resident Evil reboot movie, is writing the screenplay for the new Mortal Kombat film.

This latest round of casting news follows the announcements from earlier this month of the casting for Liu Kang, Mileena, and Jax. And while it is not confirmed yet, it’s also reported that Thor: Ragnarok actor Tadanobu Asano is in talks to play Raiden, according to Deadline.

The new Mortal Kombat movie will be directed by Australian commercials director Simon McQuoid, who is making his directorial debut with the project. Aquaman director James Wan is producing. The movie will shoot in South Australia, and is set to be one of the country’s biggest productions ever there.

The first Mortal Kombat movie, released in 1995, was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who would go on to make the Resident Evil series. The movie made more than $120 million worldwide, but its 1997 sequel, Annihilation, was a disappointment by comparison with only $51 million.

An internet video series called Mortal Kombat Legacy ran from 2011-2013.

The newest Mortal Kombat game, Mortal Kombat 11, is the best-selling video game of 2019 so far.

Back in 2012, a movie based on Metro 2033 was announced, but little was heard about it in the years that followed. Now, it’s been reported that things are picking back up, though much has changed.

According to Variety, Russian media company Gazprom Media will produce a movie based on Dmitry Glukhovsky’s book Metro 2033; this was also adapted for the 2010 video game.

According to Variety, filming will begin next year with a premiere date set for Russia on January 1, 2022. There is no word yet on the worldwide release details, nor is it known who will star in it and who will direct.

Gazprom Media’s Valery Fedorovich said, “This is a dream project, the most ambitious and large-scale film that we have ever launched. We intend to invest an unprecedented sum … in the production and promotion of this movie both in Russia and abroad.”

Glukhovsky said in his own statement that he received “numerous offers” over the past decade to turn Metro 2033 into a movie, and he turned them all down until now. “In Russia, I didn’t see any producers who could make a good [screen adaptation of] this book. It just seemed impossible. But now I finally met a team that I can entrust Metro with,” he said.

In 2012, it was reported that MGM had obtained the rights to make the Metro 2033 movie, but now it seems the rights changed hands and went to Gazprom. It was announced at the time that F. Scott Frazier, who wrote the Vin Diesel movie xXx: Return of Xander Cage and has also been tapped to write the Gears of War movie, would write the Metro 2033 film but that seems to have changed as well.

In Metro 2033 the game, players spend much of their time in underground subway tunnels travelling from station to station, climbing to the surface on occasion to explore the toxic atmosphere.

As for the Metro video games, Metro 2033 was followed up by 2013’s Metro: Last Light. The latest game, Metro: Exodus, came out in February 2019 to positive reviews. All of the games were developed by 4A Games.

Bungie and Activision worked together on the Destiny franchise up until the two companies split up earlier this year, with Bungie self-publishing the sci-fi series going forward. Bungie’s David Dague has now discussed the split-up in more detail, notably dispelling the idea that Activision was a “prohibitive overlord.”

“I think we need to dispel the notion Activision was some prohibitive overlord that wasn’t letting us do awesome things,” Dague told Eurogamer. “We launched this franchise with Activision, naturally and over the course of time we both decided we had different goals for what we wanted it to be, so we both went our separate ways. It was amicable, and here we are making this game on our own, doing what we think we need to do to make it awesome.”

In addition to funding and offering a deep network of resources in publishing, sales, marketing, and more, Activision put some of its own studios, High Moon and Vicarious Visions, to work on Destiny content to help spread the development load. Those studios will no longer be working on Destiny, so how does Bungie plan to fill that gap?

“By doing all the work ourselves!” Dague said. “We’re committed to doing all the things we’re doing right now–Solstice of Heroes is ours, Moments of Triumph, Shadowkeep, Season of the Undying and three more seasons after that… There’s really nothing more to say but we’re on our own now and Destiny will be what we make of it.”

Just recently, Destiny 2 director Luke Smith spoke about how developing the content for the game’s Annual Pass was “harder on the team than we anticipated.”

“Working on the game was starting to wear people down,” Smith said. He added that all of the work that went into creating the new content “put the team into an unsustainable development cycle.”

Going forward, and now with Activision no longer having a say, Smith said Bungie has developed a “more systemic, standardized set of mechanics for progression to keep our teams healthier.”

Going back to Dague, he told Eurogamer that the day-to-day development on Destiny hasn’t changed that much following Bungie’s split with Activision. “Things aren’t that different, really,” Dague said.

Discussing the Activision-Bungie break-up earlier this year, Activision management said the Destiny franchise was failing to meet its commercial projections. “Destiny is highly critically acclaimed, high quality content, but it was not meeting our financial expectations,” executive Coddy Johnson said.

Destiny 2’s next big expansion is Shadowkeep, and it launches in October. Ahead of that, Bungie has rolled out cross-save support–and it’s pretty great.

The upcoming biopic about Richard Montanez, the creator of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, has found its director. Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria will direct the film, according to Deadline. The movie is being produced at Fox Searchlight, the movie studio that made Oscar-winning movies like Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, and The Shape of Water; the company is now owned by Disney.

According to Deadline, there were multiple contenders for the Flamin’ Hot job, and Longoria won out after wowing Fox and producer Devon Franklin with her “authentic approach to portraying” the story.

A movie about Flamin’ Hot Cheetos might sound pretty out-there, but the story of Montanez is so compelling that it was likely only a matter of time before it became a movie. Montanez was a janitor at Frito-Lay before creating the snack and amassing untold wealth.

Montanez is the son of an immigrant and worked on farms picking grapes in southern California. He later got a job as a janitor at Cheetos manufacturer Frito-Lay, and during his time cleaning toilets there in the ’70s, he came up with the idea for a new variety of Cheetos.

According to a report, Montanez got the idea for a hot variety of Cheetos while he was eating a cup of corn. “I see the corn man adding butter, cheese, and chile to the corn and thought, ‘What if I add chile to a Cheeto?'” he recalled.

According to the report, Montanez bolted into his mother’s kitchen and whipped up some spices for a test version of the snack. He apparently called the president of Frito-Lay to propose his new flavour and was given two weeks to prepare a presentation. The president apparently loved the idea, and the Flamin’ Hot variety is now among Frito-Lay’s best-selling products worldwide. Montanez is currently an executive at PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay.

The Flamin’ Hot movie is being written by Lewis Colick, who previously wrote October Sky and Ladder 49. There is no word yet as to who will play Montanez in the Flamin’ Hot movie or when it will release.

It appears Epic Games is teasing some kind of collaboration or crossover event between the massively popular battle royale game Fortnite and Gearbox’s shooter-looter Borderlands 3.

The Fortnite Twitter account posted a mysterious image that says, “When you see it…” The message used the hashtag #FortnitexMayhem.

This hashtag, combined with an image of a Psycho bandit from the Borderlands series makes it pretty clear this is in all in reference to some kind of crossover event between Fortnite and Borderlands. The most obvious possibility is that Borderlands skins are coming to Fortnite, but nothing is confirmed at this stage.

Epic and Gearbox are already working together, as Gearbox is releasing Borderlands 3’s PC version on the Epic Games Store as a timed exclusive through April 2020. A promotional event for Borderlands 3 within Fortnite would likely be kicking off soon, as the game releases on September 13.

Fortnite has hosted numerous collaborations and crossover events, including one of its biggest ever when Thanos from the final Avengers movies appeared in the game with his own limited-time mode. Additionally, there was a Fortnite x Stranger Things crossover event as well.