Even if you’ve played every Pokemon game, there’s a good chance you’ve never played it competitively. That’s because competitive Pokemon has a high barrier to entry, and there’s a lot you need to know just to start battling. That said, competitive battling is exciting and incredibly rewarding–it’s worth it, and Sword and Shield are a great place to get started.
In the video above, we break down that barrier to entry so you can actually enjoy battling. Part 1 of this mini-series is all about how Pokemon’s stats work: species stats, IVs, natures, and the basics of EVs. What do all those words and acronyms mean? This video explains all of them with plenty of charts to make it a lot less intimidating.
In GameSpot’s Pokemon Sword and Shield review, Kallie Plagge wrote, “In collecting, battling, and exploring, Sword and Shield cut out the bloat and focus on what makes these pillars of the Pokemon games so captivating in the first place. You’re not held back by overly complicated back-end systems or hoops to jump through; from the outset, you can start wandering the Galar region, seeing its new Pokemon, and trying out its new battle strategies with very little in your way. This leaves you free to enjoy what Pokemon is all about, and that makes for an incredibly strong showing for the series’ proper debut on Switch.”
Deadpool is the latest big-name character to hit the Fortnite scene. Joining the ranks of Thanos and John Wick, the Deadpool challenges continue in week 2, season 2.
Each Friday, two Deadpool Fortnite challenges will be unlocked. Originally these challenges were going to drop on Thursdays, but according to a tweet from @FortniteStatus, they have been moved to Fridays.
Deadpool thinks Thursdays are enough of a challenge. Throughout the Season, check for his updates every Friday.
Deadpool isn’t the only addition to the game. During the first two weeks a Brutus skin will be available with specific quests to unlock the skin. There are currently 20 challenges to complete towards the Brutus skin. On completion of 18 of these challenges a ghost-like version of the skin will be unlocked.
Check out our Fortnite hub for all the latest news and challenge walkthroughs.
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The follow-up to The Dark Pictures – Man of Medan was first glanced after that game’s credits, where we got out first teaser trailer for Little Hope. Now, we have a better idea of when this next episode will arrive, and it won’t be as long a wait as it was for Man of Medan.
Little Hope will release in Summer 2020, effectively meaning that we can expect it sometime between June and August. Bandai Namco also debuted a new trailer, but don’t expect new footage–it’s mostly made up of streamer reactions to Man of Medan (and a celebration of actor Will Poulter’s casting in Little Hope), with the release window announcement buried in the comments below the video.
Little Hope is set in the titular town, which is isolated and abandoned. Four college students, along with their professor, are trapped by an impenetrable fog, and have to escape the “nightmarish visions” that are pursuing them. It’ll be up to the player, alone or with a partner in co-op, to search the town and discover what is happening, how it’s connected to them, and–hopefully–how to escape.
Some screenshots have also been released, showing off the game’s cast (and again celebrating the casting of Will Poulter).
In a press release, Pete Samuels, CEO of developer Supermassive Games, said that the studio was “Delighted by the reaction from players and the success of Man of Medan.” He went on to say that they “really appreciate feedback from the community and the team remains committed to the goal of making each new instalment deliver further thrilling horror experiences.”
Man of Medan was, itself, a follow-up on Until Dawn, which became something of a PlayStation cult hit. Although Man of Medan wasn’t received as well in GameSpot’s review, the online multiplayer aspect of the game earned a lot of praise: “It feels like you’re working together to wring as many interesting outcomes as you can out of the game, and effectively doubling the number of potential choices leads to a much stronger sense of variety.”
Although combat in previous Baldur’s Gate titles has traditionally focused around the use of real-time mechanics, Baldur’s Gate III uses a turn-based system. For developer Larian Studios, it’s always been a no-brainer to make Baldur’s Gate III a turn-based game.
“It was never really a question,” Baldur’s Gate III design producer David Walgrave said, according to USG. “We’ve been doing turn-based for a while now. We’re pretty good at it. Dungeons & Dragons is turn-based in itself, so it makes a lot of sense.
“Even after we implemented the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, the result was so different from what we concocted with Divinity: Original Sin that we saw that the combat designers would have to do it completely different, so that was a challenge,” Walgrave continued. “And we’re doing things that we haven’t done before, so, for us, it was the best choice.”
Though the implementation of a dice roll is definitely Dungeons & Dragons, the turn-based gameplay of Baldur’s Gate III is very reminiscent of Larian Studios’ Divinity Original Sin series–it makes sense for the developer to return to what it knows. “Part of the decision is that we know turn-based, and secondly, it’s that Fifth Edition [D&D] is played in rounds, so it kind of made sense,” Baldur’s Gate senior writer Adam Smith told VG247.
“It lets you do things like separating the party and having one person on high ground and one person on low ground,” Smith added. “It means when the combat starts, there’s a better sense of, ‘I’m going to get a sense of the tactical situation. I’m going to send this person over here, I’m going to do that, I’m going to send this person behind and shove an enemy.'”
In our own coverage of Baldur’s Gate III, creative director Swen Wincke spoke about how he hopes for Larian Studios to transcend the legacy of the game, and also discussed the challenges of creating the game and working with Wizards of the Coast.
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Coming from the developers of Minit, Disc Room is a sci-fi dungeon crawler that immediately makes it clear that you will inevitably meet your death–quite often. As a reimagining of the developer’s game released on itch.io in 2016, the new take on the hardcore dungeon-crawling dodger places you in the role of an interstellar scientist who has to explore a massive underground network filled with rooms lined with killer buzzsaws. As soon as you come in contact with the deadly hazards, you’ll meet your grotesque end. But that’s not where your journey stops. Your repeated deaths can satisfy certain conditions, such as lasting a certain amount of minutes or dying by a particular hazard a certain number of times, allowing you to access to more areas of the facility.
We had the chance to go hands-on with Disc Room at PAX East 2020, and its masochistic approach to a challenge reveals a surprising sense of depth to its progression. In the above gameplay, it’s clear that you certainly have to do a lot to survive in the various rooms of death. Your demise reveals the path forward, and in some cases, your character will adopt certain traits from their fate–which includes an ability to dash, gained from rapidly moving buzzsaws. It’s an incredibly challenging game, but its unusual and bizarre setting makes it worth going another round in the proverbial meat grinder.
The Borderlands movie has been in the works for a half-decade already, and it’s still just getting started. But it crossed a major milestone recently when Gearbox announced that Hostel director Eli Roth had come aboard to direct the video game adaptation.
Roth appeared at the Gearbox PAX East panel today in Boston–he grew up in Newton–where he reacted to joining the movie and shared some new insight. In particular, he revealed that he wants to cast cosplayers in the movie, and then do terrible things to them.
Starting off, though, he did his best Boston accent. You really need to watch the full video for the complete effect, but here’s what he said: “Dude, it’s f**king wicked awesome to be here. I got f**king wicked hammered last night, went to Dunkies this morning, had like four cruellers, I’m like wicked wired right now.”
Regarding the Borderlands movie, Roth said his partnership with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford–who is a producer on the movie–and the other creative partners is like a “mad, insane family.”
As announced previously, the Borderlands movie is being written by Craig Mazin, who wrote the comedies The Hangover 2 and 3 before moving to more serious fare with HBO’s Chernobyl. Spider-Man veterans Avi and Ari Arad are also producing.
Roth stressed that it is only very early days for the Borderlands movie. “I’m so excited to do something. I think the movie is going to be great. We’re just getting started, so there is nothing to share yet,” he said.
Roth did say that he is creatively energized by seeing Borderlands cosplayers at PAX. What’s more, he said he hopes to be able to cast some of the best Borderlands cosplayers as extras who will be horrifically slaughtered in the movie. He hopes to give them “awful deaths” which is right up Roth’s gore-minded alley with Hostel and Cabin Fever.
“It’s going to be a long road before we get there, but there’s no better way to kick it off [than being here at PAX],” Roth said.
In addition to his directing credits, Roth played Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz in the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds.
Netflix’s Altered Carbon is not always easy to follow. When you have multiple actors playing more than one character thanks to various characters taking over other characters’ bodies, people who have been alive for millennia, and a central mystery involving ancient aliens and their futuristic technology, it can be a lot to take in. If you got to the end of Altered Carbon Season 2 and feel totally lost as to where things might go next, don’t worry–we have you covered.
Warning: there are spoilers after this point! Beware if you haven’t finished Altered Carbon Season 2 yet.
At the end of Season 2, Anthony Mackie’s Takeshi Kovacs (who is different from Will Yun Lee’s Kovacs, who we’ll call Kovacs Prime) is dead, having sacrificed himself to thwart the Elder being who’d invaded Quellcrist Falconer’s stack. Kovacs allowed himself to be infected, then used the power of the Elder to rain “angel fire” down on himself, killing them both.
Of course, that’s not the end of Kovacs, since Kovacs Prime is still running around. In a hearing, he manages to skirt the punishment for having been temporarily “double sleeved” in two bodies at once, and he convinces the Protectorate that he’s still loyal to them, all while plotting with Falconer about their next moves. It seems that, no matter what their shared experiences amount to, Kovacs is drawn to Falconer under any circumstances.
In any case, that should have been the end for Mackie’s version of the character–but, of course, this is Altered Carbon, so things can’t be that simple. It’s revealed at the very end that Poe somehow made a backup of Kovacs’ DHF–the contents of his stack–and is in possession of a digital copy.
The ramifications of this for the story going forward are potentially huge. The version of Kovacs that Poe copied is the one who experienced all the events of Season 1 and Season 2. That said, he won’t necessarily be played by Mackie again in the future, since he might be re-sleeved into yet another new actor’s form, or could even simply appear in virtual space as his original body (that of Kovacs Prime, actor Will Yun Lee).
In any case, at the end of Season 2, there’s a Kovacs running around plotting with Falconer, and another one on ice in Poe’s memory banks. And Altered Carbon Season 2 showrunner Alison Schapker is confident that, should the show get renewed for a Season 3, yet another new actor will take up the mantle of Takeshi Kovacs.
“I think that I can say with confidence that, with every season, I do feel I’m drawn to a new sleeve, a new planet, a new mystery,” Schapker told GameSpot. “One of the moments I loved from Season 1 was those boots walking out of the elevator–I remember watching it and leaning forward in my seat, and being like, ‘Oh, who’s going to be the next Kovacs?’ And I wanted that feeling watching the stack at the end of Season 2. ‘Oh, wait, Poe copied that consciousness! Who could it be? Where’s that stack going to end up?’ So yes, that’s very much a dangling thread and a promise to the audience that that stack’s going to end up somewhere, and that’s part of the surprise and the fun of coming back for Season 3.”
“Now, that said, I love Will Yun Lee. I think he’s part of the soul of the show,” she continued. “We called him Kovacs Prime. He’s a chess piece on the board, and leaving him embedded in the Protectorate, that was conscious. And I also love that Quell went off, and I have loved leaving Anthony Mackie is a ghost in her mind since, for so long, she was the ghost in his. So yes, all of that, it stays. We don’t have a Season 3 yet. We really, really hope people show up when the show drops, because I think this world is so much fun, and I really think it has so much potential to keep going, so I hope we can.”
As for Falconer, actress Renée Elise Goldsberry told GameSpot that her character will focus going forward on bringing down the Protectorate. “The big enemy here is the Protectorate and their abuse of this technology, and basically, what they’ve done in the world and to many worlds with the use of this technology,” Goldsberry said. “In Season 2, we see Quell and Kovacs fighting their way back on Harlan’s World, and they’re fighting somebody else’s battle. Right? It’s not their battle. It’s a battle that’s a universal battle. It’s a wrong that has to be corrected, but it isn’t their ultimate battle. So, my hope is that what Season 3 affords us, is for Quell and Kovac Prime to go back to the real root problem, which is the technology that has allowed the Protectorate to hold the world hostage.”
Altered Carbon Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.
Altered Carbon, which we called “a cyberpunk masterpiece” in our Season 1 review over two years ago, is back on Netflix for a long-awaited second season. And those who have already spun up the show for another go have likely noticed that the vibe is pretty different from Season 1. Gone are the trappings and tropes of a future-noir gumshoe mystery with a brooding protagonist and neon-soaked gutters; instead, Season 2 is a more straightforward action thriller, set on a different world, with an almost entirely new cast, and with a very different tone.
“I love the world that Season 1 set up,” Altered Carbon Season 2 showrunner Alison Schapker told GameSpot during a recent interview. “Season 2 is…a little bit more of a thriller. They’re more on the run. I don’t think it has to be any particular subgenre of cyberpunk or sci-fi.”
Schapker took over as showrunner during production on Season 2, receiving the torch from Season 1 showrunner and show creator Laeta Kalogridis. The two worked together on the new season for around six months before Schapker, whose previous producing credits include sci-fi shows like Alias, Fringe, and Lost, took over entirely.
The Season 1 world she referred to is one in which humans no longer fear death the way we do now, thanks to the invention of the “cortical stack,” a small disc installed in your spine that holds “you” inside it. If your body “dies,” your stack can get “re-sleeved” in a new one, and you go on living, albeit sometimes with a totally different appearance (don’t worry, we also have a handy Altered Carbon glossary defining all these weird terms). Poor people don’t get to choose where or when they get re-sleeved, while the wealthiest in society keep regular back-ups and clones of themselves on-hand in case of accidental sleeve death.
“I love that you have this kind of class-based resource, and what that looked like, and the stratification of society, I thought, was fascinating,” Schapker said. “And I thought the character of Kovacs was a great lead character.”
Kovacs, played by Joel Kinnaman in Season 1 and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Anthony Mackie in Season 2, finds himself in highly different circumstances this time around. Season 1 Kovacs was re-sleeved hundreds of years after his arrest and the destruction of his rebel group, the Envoys, and tasked with solving the “murder” of a Meth (short for “Methuselah,” the richest of the rich). “I felt like that was a Kovacs who really had nothing left to lose, and was kind of in a state of shock, and sort of almost bitter, or cynical,” Schapker said. “[The Envoys] hoped for a world, and he woke up in a world that was the exact opposite.”
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Altered Carbon: 5 Biggest Book To Show Changes
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But Season 1 flashbacks to Kovacs’ earlier life (during which he’s played by Will Yun Lee, who has a major role in Season 2) showed what the character was like before–tough, but also hopeful and loving–and Mackie’s version in Season 2 is somewhere in between, thanks to the knowledge that his leader and love, Quellcrist Falconer, might be out there somewhere after all.
“I was very excited, in Season 2, to find him in a different moment,” Schapker said. “He’s on his own and he has a mystery that’s way more personal, on a planet that’s way more personal. I was super excited to almost take the themes of Season 1 and now look at them through a more personal lens, and see where this mystery would take us.”
That mystery puts Falconer, played by Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry, at the forefront. “Quell was very much a ghost in Kovacs’ mind in Season 1,” Schapker said. “She was a memory. She was this person he carried around in his consciousness, and he longed to find her. And in Season 2, he does, but is she the person he remembers?…In a world where any mind can be in any body, that’s the first thing Kovacs has to ask.”
“Quell’s gone through a dramatic change,” Goldsberry told GameSpot. “She was 100% in support of [Kovacs’] journey in Season 1, and in Season 2, that is the opposite. She is on her journey. He’s actually there to help find her and bring her back to herself and to help her figure out how to save this particular world that they’re on, and humanity. So when we meet her in Season 2, it’s, I think, the first time we really meet her.”
Simone Missick, who played Misty Knight in Netflix Marvel shows including Luke Cage and Iron Fist, plays a new character in Season 2: the bounty hunter Trepp. She’s hired to track down Kovacs, and winds up partnering with him to protect her homeworld.
Simone Missick as Trepp in Altered Carbon Season 2
“I think that one of the positive things about this season and the show was that you see so many female leaders on the show,” Missick told GameSpot. “What I love about the show was all of us are, in a way, atypical to the way that Hollywood would normally cast and present these women, these characters. I feel very fortunate to be able to embody the character of Trepp. This is the first time we’ve ever seen her. This is her original sleeve, and this is who she is, and she looks like me. I think that there’s no conversation about it on the screen; there’s never a conversation where the characters are like, ‘Well, me as a black woman,’ or ‘Me as a black man.’ It’s just that these people are who they are.”
Instead, the disparities in society are all based on one thing, their natural epicenter: money. “It’s an interesting commentary on society’s values and what value we place on human beings, based on how much money they have and how much they’re worth,” Missick continued. “At the end of the day we, as human beings, fight over black or white or brown, but it’s really green. It’s really money that is the thing that’s the great divide and the great separator. I think that Altered Carbon does a good job of showing that that is the future.”
“We do these incredible things, but then there’s limits to our knowledge–and there’s always the unintended consequences,” said Schapker.
Those consequences become very clear over the course of Altered Carbon Season 2, which, although the vibe has changed, is definitely still the same show in the end.
Altered Carbon Season 2 is streaming on Netflix now.
The newest feature coming to Pokemon Masters is the Battle Villa, a tower of challenging battles that can knock out sync pairs for an entire day — but only in the Battle Villa. This new event likely won’t be the thing that brings you back if you’re a lapsed player (though maybe the new chapters and sync pairs added since launch can), but it is an interesting way to mix up daily in-game tasks.
If you are one of those lapsed players, here’s a short rundown of all the other things added to Pokemon Masters since its launch last summer:
The Battle Villa was definitely designed with longtime players in mind given how quickly it gets difficult. The challenge in this event space is to defeat as many of 25 “halls” of enemies as you can to earn tons of rewards before the two-week event is over. Each hall can have one to three rounds of opponents waiting, and you can scope out their Pokemon weaknesses through the Area Details menu like you can in any other battle.
But unlike the rest of Pokemon Masters, any damage your sync pair takes stays with them for the whole day and you can only select nine sync pairs to play within the Battle Villa for that day. You can heal during a battle and once out of battle if you have the right items. However, you can’t heal any sync pair that have fainted within the Battle Villa, so you’ll need to wait until the next day to get them back.
I went into the Battle Villa with several sync pairs of varying types at max level. At first I felt confident I’d clear the Battle Villa quickly. My recommended power was almost always vastly over what was recommended — at least for the first five halls. By the time I completed the fifth hall on the first day of playing, my sync pairs were starting to struggle to deal out enough damage to keep them in the fight. The Battle Villa did test my strategy, which was nice. I felt a bit more pressured to not only consider the obvious type matchups, but to also think about how my three sync pair’s skills and moves work together to try and prevent pairs from fainting.
By the seventh hall, I lost significant momentum. Not necessarily in a bad way, but my sheer power wasn’t really giving me much of an advantage anymore. Some days it felt like I was just throwing pairs at a Hall to weaken them enough until I could cycle in the real damage dealers back in the next day. Opponents don’t recover health and any progress made in a hall persists between days. I do wish there was a way to revive at least one sync pair per day, though. If my sync pairs were all generally lower level, I feel like the Battle Villa would be more of me throwing sync pairs at battles with little chance for success rather than having options for tactics.
If you make it far enough into the Battle Villa (and have sync pairs at level 80) you can start earning a new item for the new Lucky Skills. These Lucky Skills are bestowed at random and can raise a sync pair’s stats with a Crunchy Lucky Cookie or prevent stats from being lowered with a creamy lucky cookie. There’s also a Crispy Lucky Cookie that shields sync pairs from status and “certain other conditions.” There’s also a Lucky Scroll for learning Lucky Skills. You can’t earn too many of these is a complete Battle Villa run, so you’ll want to save them for your favorite pairs.
The Battle Villa is an interesting addition to Pokémon Masters’ daily offerings. I know if I want to attempt to make it through all 25 halls (and get the numerous rewards that come with it) I’m going to need to get to work to do some extra training with all my sync pairs. I do wish the final rewards were more appealing than more Lucky Skill, leveling items, and just enough gems for a few more pulls, but I do appreciate having a new challenge to conquer.
Happy Pokémon Day! Miranda Sanchez is an executive editor at IGN and is celebrating the day with her Sobble, Pikachu, and her other favorite Pokémon. You can chat with her about Pokémon and other video games on Twitter.
Westworld Season 3 is right around the corner and if you’ve been keeping up with the trailers, you’ve probably been asking yourself some questions lately–namely: What the heck even happened last season and what is actually going on? How did a show about robotic cowboys turn into something that looks and feels like a mashup of Blade Runner and The Dark Knight? What actually happened to your favorite characters to get them into this mess?
Well, don’t panic. We found ourselves in the same boat. We painstakingly broke down each moment of Season 3’s final trailer and then turned our attention to the past, poring over each and every moment of last season to try and piece together exactly what happened to each of our favs. Needless to say, it was a little confusing. But never fear, we pressed on, took rigorous notes, and did our best to reassemble the out-of-order events of Bernard’s scrambled memories.
The revelation that Delos had actually been stealing information on every guest to ever set foot in the park–using the cowboy hats as brain scanners, no less–dovetailed into an even bigger revelation that the plan for the park all along had actually been to “turn guests into hosts.” This process would be completed using a giant host-creating super-server called the Forge, which not only housed all the stolen guest information, but could create any number of host bodies to install them into. Unfortunately, however, Delos quickly learned that turning a human into a host was more complicated than just uploading their brain wave patterns into a computer and, as far as we know and despite rigorous testing (conducted by an AI version of Logan–you remember, William’s friend from back in the day?) they never quite cracked the code in any sustainable way.
But the hybridization of hosts and humans is the least of Dolores’s problems–she made it all the way to the Forge to try and destroy the recorded human data altogether, before deciding that it would be more beneficial to upload her fellow hosts into a super-server all their own called the Valley Beyond or the Sublime. The net result of this choice is a little hard to quantify but it basically means that Delos lost a whole bunch of their saved human data, and then the entirety of their host programs–or, well, the host programs that weren’t killed by Delos security before the upload completed. So, at the end of Season 2, Dolores (in disguise) managed to rescue a grand total of five non-uploaded hosts, which she spirited off of the island and into the real world.
That’s where Season 3 will likely pick up, with Dolores and her scrappy band of rescued hosts bringing their fight to their creators–unless, of course, there’s some other twist we just haven’t seen coming. This is Westworld, after all.
Now, let’s take a closer look at where exactly each major character ended up, where they’ll likely be in the future, and what you should remember about their stories going into the next chapter of the sci-fi epic.
