Month: March 2020

After unexpectedly shutting down less than two months ago, HQ Trivia is back once again.

The once-popular game show’s co-founder Rus Yusupov took to Twitter tonight to announce the return of the mobile game show, saying he and former host Matt Richards would be “back tonight” on the HQ app.

After the airing of tonight’s episode, a source has confirmed to The Verge that HQ Trivia is officially back for good after the company was acquired by an anonymous investor. Further, the source confirmed that more episodes will be airing in the near future, officially marking the return of the beloved mobile game show.

IGN has reached out to HQ Trivia for further clarification and will update this story if necessary.

A few short days after seemingly closing its doors for good, Yusupov shared on Twitter that he had “found a new home for HQ, with a company that wants to keep it running,” giving the community hope that the show would one day return.

Then, a few days ago the official HQ Trivia Twitter account tweeted a cryptic message and changed its bio to “BRB,” causing many to think the trivia show might actually be making a grand return — and they were right.

Things ended unexpectedly for the mobile game show in late February when employees unexpectedly received an email informing them that a deal fell through and HQ Trivia would be closing its door effective immediately.

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HQ Trivia was launched in 2017 and was met with immediate success from trivia lovers everywhere. However, in December 2018 HQ’s former CEO and co-founder, Colin Kroll died unexpectedly of a drug overdose.

Only a few months later, the original and beloved host Scott Rogowsky parted ways with the company after accepting a sports position with streaming service DAZN, and ten short months later HQ Trivia closed its doors.

It’s currently unclear when the next live show will air, so be sure to keep your eye on the official HQ Trivia Twitter account. Additionally, if you had any money left in your account when the company closed up shop, Richards has confirmed that you can hop on the app and cash out now.

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Andrew Smith is a freelance contributor with IGN and is an avid HQ Trivia fan. Follow him on Twitter @_andrewtsmith.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is looking like, by far, the most detailed and meticulous flight sim ever made, but there will inevitably be a divide between players who want to take it very seriously and players who want to do loops and fly erratically. Now, in a new video, the game’s multiplayer features have been revealed–and it looks like Microsoft is planning to cater to all kinds of players.

By default, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s live servers will put you in a shared online world with not only other players, but AI replicas of real-world flight paths, meaning that you’ll be able to track the flights happening all over the world in real-time while flying yourself. Time and weather conditions will also be synced up with real-world conditions in Live Player mode, which can be entered seamlessly without needing to join or start a lobby.

The game will show off “most, if not all” airplanes that are in the air in the real world at any given time. But players can also choose to create their own conditions if they so desire, or make realism less of a priority.

In addition to Live Players Only, you’ll also be able to pick an All Players mode, where you can fly by any rules you want, picking your own weather conditions and time. You can set up groups in this mode if you want to just fly with friends, or you can fly alone if you prefer.

The video also explains the technology behind the servers powering the game, and it’s all very impressive. At any given time, you’ll be able to see 50 players who are within 200km of you so as to not congest the skies.

Microsoft Flight Simulator was announced during E3 2019, and looks very impressive. It does not have a release date yet.

In most shooters pistols appear as a starter weapon, but Doom Eternal skips players straight to a shotgun instead. It turns out a pistol was once planned, but was ultimately cut out when it didn’t fit the flow of the gameplay. The weapon is still in the game, however, and can be accessed with console commands via Cheat Engine.

Console commands for Doom Eternal are available thanks to the work of SunBeam on Fearless Revolution Forums, while the pistol itself was unearthed by user Archangel73337. The full topic is worth a scroll for anyone keen to see what other secrets have been left hidden in the game’s code, inaccessible through normal gameplay.

Dave Oshry of New Blood Interactive was the one to post this little tidbit on Twitter.

Even without the pistol included, GameSpot’s reviewer Phil Hornshaw said Doom Eternal’s combat “is just as quick and chaotic [as Doom 2016], but requires you to constantly analyze everything that’s happening in order to come out victorious. Once you get the hang of the rhythm of Doom Eternal, it’ll make you feel like a demon-slaying savant.”

Warning: Full spoilers for The Walking Dead episode, “Look at the Flowers” follow…

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Some business up top here: For those who missed the news from this past week, The Walking Dead’s Season 10 finale has been postponed until later this year as the COVID-19 outbreak has prevented the post-production work from being completed. So Season 10, for now, will end with the fifteenth episode, “The Tower,” on Sunday, April 5.

Now, let’s dig into a “Look at the Flowers.”

With the nice trajectory this back half of Season 10 has displayed — the escape from the cave, the ramping up to the war and the elimination of Alpha (at a time that actually felt appropriate), and then the stellar Michonne exit episode — it was time for a come down. “Look at the Flowers” was about fallout more than anything else, as both Carol and Beta reeled from Alpha’s demise – each of them still communicating with her in their own way.

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Carol and Alpha

Carol’s arc this week wasn’t anything out of the ordinary as far as the character’s usual M.O. She took off, crumbling under her usual cocktail of grief and guilt. And along the way, Samantha Morton got to play Alpha one final time as Carol imagined her following her through the woods, heckling her with her own darkest fears. It wasn’t the greatest use of Carol, as we’ve seen her run through most of these beats before. In fact, we’ve seen many other characters hobble down this same road. It’s textbook Walking Dead. It’s why last week’s Michonne “multiverse” hallucination felt so fresh.

The turn at the end here involved Carol getting stuck under some rubble and having to fight for her life. The drive to save herself, and also be there for Daryl since he’s the only person she cares about who has yet to meet a grisly end (Sophia, Lizzie, Mika, and Henry were all mention by Alpha), infused her with a new appreciation of life. Enough to drive her back to Alexandria. Again though, most of this felt like recycled grief.

Beta the Country Star

While Carol was having her own personalized Alpha experience, in her head, Beta was spiraling. Carrying around Alpha’s head (which he forced a subordinate to stick his face near, with gruesome consequences), Beta seemed to be following her “commands.”

One meltdown later, Beta has now, apparently, reluctantly assumed the position of Alpha (meshing her own skin into his walker mask) and hit the road with a new pack of walkers  – which he summoned by blasting one of his own country music hits!

Yes, it was hinted at even more this week that Beta, in his past life, was a famous country star named “Half Moon” (if we’re going by the spattered poster that sent him into a tizzy). I don’t know if we’ll get any more confirmation than this tantrum, mind you. The show might just leave it at this. But then again, if Beta fully clashes with Negan, Daryl, Aaron, or anyone else, there’s a good chance that they’ll now recognize him and the story will actually call it out officially.

Also, it’s kind of cool that with Alpha’s pale skin connected to his mask, he looks kind of like a half moon now.

Negan’s Deal

A flashback at the top of the episode showed us the moment when Carol freed Negan from his cell, with the expectation that he’d kill off Alpha quickly. Smartly though, Negan recommended that Carol not give up on trying to kill Alpha in case he failed, which explains why Carol, even with Negan out there on a mission, still kept trying to go after her nemesis.

Both she and Daryl did seem to have some unrealistic expectations about how quickly Negan would get the job done. Negan even called it out at one point after being criticized over and over for taking his sweet time. “What is it with you guys thinking I took too long?” he asked, after Daryl expressed his anger over Negan letting the herd overtake Hilltop. And you know what? Both sides have a point, kind of. Yeah, Negan’s secret assassination op wasn’t easy. And there’s no reason to expect he’d be able to do it fast and easy. Or that he’d be able to do it at all.

But then again, as revealed in the episode, during Negan and Daryl’s uneasy bonding, Negan did like being a part of Alpha’s crew. He enjoyed being out of the cell and being embraced by a new group. And, like a drug addict, Negan enjoyed wielding a bit of power again as he moved up through the ranks and got Alpha to trust him. He noticed this rather pointedly when a few straggling Whisperers bent the knee to him as the guy who killed Alpha. Negan could have used that opportunity to kill Daryl and head out with a new bumbling crew, but he saw himself being tempted by a darkness that he’d now like to leave behind.

Negan’s now in good (well, we’ll use “good” loosely) with Carol and Daryl. Aaron is the big cat who remains staunchly anti-Negan. Let’s see how he reacts to the news that Negan saved the day.

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Eugene’s Expedition (to the Commonwealth?)

In the non-Alpha story, Eugene finally took off for his meet and greet with Stephanie. Yumiko and (a very weak) Ezekiel are with him, heading into a big city on horseback, echoing the famous shot of Rick riding into Atlanta from Season 1. There wasn’t much to this trek, aside from poor Ezekiel realizing this will probably be his final bow one way or another (especially when you consider his emotional farewell with Jerry), until the trio reached the city and saw that someone had chained up walkers all around town in little play scenarios in order to make it look like there were people doing “people things” (eating, getting parking tickets, etc).

That person, in all her giddy glory, arrived at the end, with goggles, a gun, and dyed purple hair! With an “Oh, my God. Hi!,” this character immediately stood out from the usual brooding. Slight comic book spoilers here: This is Princess – aka Juanita Sanchez. Played by Paola Lazaro, Princess marks the TV show’s first big foray into the Commonwealth storyline. In the comics, she meets an expedition, led by Michonne, traveling to the Commonwealth.

Since Season 10 is now, technically, ending with next week’s episode, I’m curious to see how it acts as a default finale given this big character debut. Maybe the season was structured like Season 9 was where the penultimate episode felt like a finale while the actual finale was its own story (complete with a small time jump).

In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the Pinocchio-esque quest of a child robot to become a real boy hinges on one thing: the love he feels for his mother. For Spielberg (and for Stanley Kubrick, who had been developing the project before he died), the incredible bond shared between parents and their children was fundamentally a human characteristic, and it was so deep, so profound, that if a being with artificial intelligence could experience it, they could basically be said to have achieved consciousness.

Westworld has proposed a similar idea before — particularly in the character of Maeve, whose abiding affection for her daughter was the reverie that both awakened her to the reality of the park and prevented her from escaping it. In the third episode of Season 3, Westworld is ready to explore that notion all over again.

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It starts with Charlotte Hale — or rather an exact Charlotte replica, indistinguishable from the real, late Charlotte, who was of course murdered by Dolores at the end of last season. As we discover at the outset of the episode, Dolores has implanted host-Charlotte with one of the pearls she managed to smuggle out of the park, and she’s been instructing this phony to continue leading Delos and negotiate with the company’s shareholders on her behalf.

There’s a lot going on at Delos these days, including a surreptitious takeover bid, some drama involving the fallout from the board killings, and the suspicion that there may be a mole at the top of the circus reporting things to the nefarious trillionaire Serac. But the episode manages to outline the intersecting problems with minimal confusion, and we now have a clearer idea of what Serac’s after and how Dolores, Charlotte, and even Maeve figure in to his scheme.

We know that the real Charlotte was the mole. She promised Serac that she would retrieve for him the park’s vast stores of visitor data, which he presumably wants to add to Incite’s gargantuan servers. Of course, host-Charlotte works for Dolores, Serac’s current target and budding arch-nemesis, and that’s going to make it considerably more difficult for them to maintain the illusion that Charlotte is alive and well and going about her business as usual. In any case, Serac continues to prove an intriguing, vaguely sinister villain, thanks to a fine turn by Vincent Cassel. The showdown between Dolores and Serac that the season is plainly leading toward is shaping up to be one hell of a battle, even if for the time being it’s strictly one of wits.

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But while Dolores wants her Charlotte facsimile to gather intel and ward off the prospective Delos takeover, all is not going so smoothly with the ruse. It’s an issue of personality: the “real” Charlotte seems somehow lodged inside the host body somewhere, lurking beneath the programming and fighting to get out, or else parts of Charlotte’s identity are so strong that they’re screwing things up.

Host-Charlotte can’t stop cutting herself, as if psychologically tortured, and this is clearly going to get worse before it gets better — as evidenced by the relationship between her and the real Charlotte’s son, who immediately senses something is wrong with this so-called mommy. Her son’s suspicion, as well as her conflicted affection, is the crux of the episode, and it’s maybe the most emotionally complex that Westworld has ever been. The hosts are becoming more and more human, yes, but here we have a case where a human seems to be becoming more host — where a human’s feelings refuse to die with their body, and where an identity is too strong to be programmed away. Of everything going on so far in the season, I’m most intrigued to see where this goes.

Charlotte’s son recognizes that the woman in front of him isn’t his real mother. Caleb’s mother, meanwhile, can’t recognize the man in front of her as her real son — “where’s Cal?” she pleads with him as he visits her in hospital, in a very clever parallel the show is smart enough not to underline. Caleb has made the possibly fatal mistake of lending Dolores a hand, and now the crime-share app with which he’s been making an illegal living has deemed him a lucrative target to track down and kill. You can’t help but feel for Caleb, whose life is endlessly disappointing and who can’t catch a break. On the other hand, getting involved with Dolores may help give his life meaning: as he tells her, unaware of the irony, she’s the most real thing that’s happened to him in a long time.

The season’s action sequences continue to impress — both Caleb’s attempt to defend an injured Dolores from a couple of goons and an equally dangerous exchange with a different set of goons who want to torture and kill him are thrilling. (I also loved the touch of Caleb’s faithful robot construction worker buddy trying and failing to come to his rescue, which was strangely poignant.) And the design of future Los Angeles continues to dazzle, from the look of the Delos headquarters down to the style of the cop cars and ambulances.

If last week’s return to Westworld and the parks seemed visually dull, that’s only because the outside world Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have created is so engaging. Even a two-second establishing shot of the hotel where Dolores meets Charlotte for a drink, covered in trees and vines, blew me away. (It doesn’t hurt that Westworld is shot on 35mm and looks downright sumptuous at times.)

Dolores elects to reward Caleb’s kindness with some revelations we will also find interesting: Rehoboam, Incite’s all-powerful computer, has actually computed so much data that it can predict exactly how and when someone will die. Caleb is destined to take his own life in about a decade’s time. The scene in which Dolores shocks Caleb with a verbatim transcript of the day he was abandoned by his mom certainly resonates in a world already dominated by Big Data — it’s another of the show’s sci-fi predictions that seems eerily plausible. What elevates it to the next level, though, is Aaron Paul’s outstanding performance, which makes it seem extremely intense and real. One of the obvious highlights of Breaking Bad, Paul’s already brought so much to this season of Westworld. Now that he’s teamed up with Dolores, I can’t wait to see what’s to come.