Month: September 2020

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Microsoft has already stated the Xbox Series X will support all third-party Xbox One accessories, but as far as the PS5 goes, it’s been a little unclear which ones will be compatible. Thankfully, one company has cleared up the confusion for its gaming headset line. Astro Gaming announced that all of its headsets will be compatible with PS5 and Xbox Series X as well as PS4 and Xbox One, though some may require a firmware update to work with the next-gen consoles.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X will work with Astro’s A10, A20 Wireless, A40, A40 TR, and A50 Wireless gaming headsets. As for pre-amps, the MixAmp Pro TR will work with both PS5 and Xbox Series X, while the Xbox Series X will also support the MixAmp M60 and MixAmp M80–the latter two MixAmps are designed specifically for the Xbox One controller.

While Astro’s C40 TR is one of the best PS4 controllers you can buy, it won’t be compatible with PS5 games. It will, however, work with any PS4 games on the new console, thanks to backward compatibility. The best Xbox One controllers, on the other hand, will be fully compatible with the Xbox Series X.

Unfortunately, we still don’t have a PS5 or Xbox Series X release date or price, though it is expected for them both to launch in November. Sony recently started taking PS5 pre-order reservations, and if you haven’t already, you should definitely sign up. Microsoft recently stated they’ll announce an Xbox Series X price and release date “when [they’re] ready.”

Disney’s new Mulan film comes to Disney Plus this Friday, September 4, but it’s not included with the standard subscription price. Instead, it costs $30 USD on its own to stream through a “Premier Access” program.

If you’re willing to wait a few months, you can stream the movie at no extra cost on Disney Plus when it arrives on the platform for everyone in December. This was revealed through an updated page on the Disney Plus website, as first spotted by The Verge.

The “Premier Access” offer for Mulan will be available until November 2. Starting on December 4, Disney will let all subscribers watch the movie for no extra cost.

Reviews for Mulan will begin to appear online this Thursday, September 3, so keep checking back for more on the film. We also recently learned that “tens of thousands” of people auditioned for the role of Mulan in the film, while a producer on the project also spoken about how the unique release strategy for Mulan may affect the movie business going forward.

In other news about Disney Plus, The Mandalorian Season 2 will arrive on the streaming service on October 30.

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There’s an important milestone in every adult’s life when they realize that their parents aren’t just monolithic figures known only as Mom and/or Dad, but people in their own right who have hopes, dreams, thoughts, and desires that have nothing to do with their children. That’s not exactly new territory in other art, but it’s a rarity in games. In the few that do explore that idea, it’s usually Dad who gets the attention. That makes Dontnod’s Tell Me Why a fascinating anomaly right off the bat. It is, without question, a shattered portrait of a single mother, pieced back together by those who knew her best. The framework of the game screams narrative murder-mystery, but the game takes a Knives Out approach to that; the question of who killed Mary-Ann Ronan is answered by the end of the first episode. Why she died is a far more complex question, and the answers depending on unreliable, traumatic memories throws another wrench into the mix.

The memories in question mostly belong to Mary-Ann’s twin children, Tyler and Alyson. The facts from the start are these: Mary-Ann and her kids live in a tiny middle-of-nowhere town in Alaska called Delos Crossing. The family is poor, relying on handouts from other folks in town, while all the entertainment comes from either nature itself or Mary-Ann’s fantastical imagination teaching her kids how to tell stories with and to each other. Over time, however, Mary-Ann’s mental health deteriorates, culminating in a fateful night where Mary-Ann suffers some sort of mental break and attacks Tyler, who is later accused of killing her in self-defense. Tyler is sent away to live in a group home, while Alyson is taken in by a family friend, a cop named Eddy. Fifteen years later, Tyler and Alyson finally reunite to go back to their old house and clear it out to be sold, only to unearth some harrowing truths about their mother and their hometown–and everyone’s roles in how Mary-Ann died.

There are quite a few mysteries to be unraveled in Tell Me Why, but calling Tell Me Why a mystery suggests the game is more action-packed, twisty, and turny than it actually is. It’s actually closer in tone and mechanics to Fullbright’s Gone Home than Dontnod’s own Life Is Strange. There’s still quite a lot of Life Is Strange in this game’s blood, though. Most of Tell Me Why involves simply walking around, pressing A when you come close to anything highlighted to hear characters expound on a particular object and continue the story, making dialogue choices for characters along the way. The developers’ design ethos is familiar, they’re excellent at making towns and communities that are awash in detail, places that feel rich, lived-in, and full of history and culture. That’s particularly special in Tell Me Why, given the cultures represented here that are rarely if ever presented with this kind of TLC, if they’ve ever been presented at all. In particular, the way the indigenous Tlingit tribe is simply woven into the fabric of Delos Crossing, and doesn’t call out to itself as exotic or foreign is just excellent. There’s much to be said about the existence of The Other being portrayed not as a strange curiosity, but a fact of life in a narrative.

The issue with Tell Me Why is that it occupies an awkward space where it actually doesn’t scale things back enough. It’s a game that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself when it’s not giving you characters to converse with or story-advancing items to examine. There’s just so much meandering around with item collection, random chores, and puzzle-solving–none of which are terribly difficult or tricky, but neither are they particularly engaging, or fun, or even germane to the larger plot. The game hits the sweet spot occasionally. A sequence where Tyler and Alyson have to sneak into the police department archives and piece together a complete record of the night their mom died before someone actually shows up has a nice bit of tension to it. There just aren’t enough sequences like that to justify how much legwork it takes to advance things along.

The game is at its strongest when it leans into its best mechanic: The twins’ mildly psychic powers, because a Dontnod game isn’t complete without a supernatural hook. They can talk to each other and share/visualize memories without speaking. More often than not, the game uses it in a way you’d expect from exploration games of this sort: When you’re walking around the house or other locations, a particular area or object creates a hazy visual re-enactment of the twins’ childhood memories. Tell Me Why goes a step further than just using them to convey exposition–these memories are hazy because they, like real memories, aren’t reliable. Many of the big choices in the game revolve around how selective memory can be, choosing which version of a moment to believe and why, and what believing a certain version of a story can do to a relationship. That’s rather powerful given the intense emotional nature of much of the game, and has Dontnod returning to a more thoughtful method of branching decisions we haven’t seen it dig into since 2013’s still-underappreciated Remember Me.

The main issue is there’s just not enough gameplay-wise that exists on that level. There are maybe two moments that might qualify as action quick-time events; one’s a fishing mini-game, and the other involves helping Alyson slow her breathing during an anxiety attack. The dialogue choices are very often binary, changing the mood of a conversation rather than the drastic changes your decisions in Life Is Strange can bring on. Despite a murder being at the center of the game, what passes for big “J’ACCUSE!” moments often come down to rather melancholy scenes of regret and emotional honesty, with the major choice often coming down to whether to forgive someone or not.

On its face that doesn’t sound like a game-breaking negative, and really it isn’t; Tell Me Why eschews high stakes in favor of emotional payoff, which can be just as gratifying in the right hands. There just isn’t enough of it in this game to justify a three part series of episodes three hours long, and the game reaches catharsis at such a languid pace, each episode feels much longer. Tell Me Why runs in circles around the same emotional touchstones for too long for much of its play time, and it takes its sweet time getting to the point of any given scene when the facts we need to know about each character have either been well-established or easily guessed.

Having said that, when Tell Me Why does have a point to make with the less crucial plot points, it’s in favor of giving depth and shading to all the things that we should see more of in games, especially when it comes to how it portrays indigenous cultures, religion, sexuality, mental illness and yes, as the game is extremely eager (and rightfully so) to remind us, the presentation of mainstream gaming’s first playable trans protagonist. Tyler Ronan, in particular, is indeed a revelation. The fact of his gender is played as a simple facet of his life, and not the source or byproduct of any of the game’s varying traumas. Tyler is allowed to simply exist in this game, as a complete human being, just like every other character in it.

It’s commendable keeping Tyler’s gender out of the conversation when it comes to this game’s primary conflict, but it creates a bit of a vacuum in the plot. It’s a story in search of an edge, of a more effective conflict, of something to truly hurt so the healing lands better. There’s a softness to the core plot of this game, despite the death and pain at the center of it, one that leans heavily into absolving the support systems that failed Mary-Ann Ronan and left her two children damaged. The game seems dedicated to never letting any trace of evil creep into the narrative. It’s an extraordinarily grounded, restrained story, which makes the elements that don’t give our protagonists the answers they seek feel more like wheel-spinning. The puzzles and collection bits that are typically the bread and butter of this type of game make an awkward fit with the rest of the narrative. It’s a game of so much empathy and respect it can’t stand to see its characters handle their flaws in any way but the best possible way, even when you make the choices that shun the people of Delos Crossing.

And even still, there’s something to be said for that type of story, one that allows players to explore heightened emotions with the blows that come so harsh in the real world, but padded and safe here. The saving grace of the game isn’t Tyler, though, as mentioned, his presence is a strong and welcome one. It’s actually Mary-Ann herself, one of video gaming’s scant few mothers and perhaps the one character allowed to be more than just her neuroses, her failures, or even her children. All the townspeople of Delos Crossing have their complexities, but there’s far more nuance in the things we learn about her over time, the tragic benefit of exploring her life in the past tense as opposed to every other character’s current state. Tell Me Why’s entire narrative hinges on completing our picture of Mary-Ann, and the promise the game makes and fulfills is that this person certainly lived a full but complicated life–and the messy end she meets is everyone’s burden to bear, whether they choose to carry it or not.

Mary-Ann reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, a girl known primarily as a victim. It’s only until the movie Fire Walk With Me that we know just how much was going on behind the eyes of that idyllic photograph we saw of her every episode. In Tell Me Why, our clearest, enduring image of Mary-Ann Ronan is the dead woman whose childrens’ lives were destroyed after her death. Finding out everything beautiful, intelligent, and loving that was going on behind those eyes is the most powerful thing in Tell Me Why, and matched in how her life created two strong, empathetic children who knew her well and didn’t even realize it. There’s a lot of empty disengaging space to be filled in in this game, but with a little patience and sympathy, what it does provide you is worth the effort.

Evergate surprised me. It looked at first to be slightly derivative of Ori and the Blind Forest, and I became interested in it because of those similarities, not in spite of them. In actuality, its common traits with Ori are superficial, and its strong focus on the puzzle part of the puzzle-platformer genre makes for a rich and wholly distinct experience.

You play as Ki, a small wisp occupying the afterlife and awaiting reincarnation by journeying through the Evergate. When a crisis threatens to undo the entire afterlife itself, Ki assists by going through the Evergate to relive key memories throughout time and solve the mystery behind the looming disaster. If that concept sounds heady, it is. The game doesn’t give you much exposition to start, so you spend the first few hours piecing together the mythology at play. Characters freely throw out terms without explanation, and it’s on you to catch up.

The main gameplay hook bears a strong resemblance to one of the main platforming mechanics in the Ori games. In those, the “Bash” move lets you spring off objects in mid-air, shooting in a particular direction. Evergate uses the same basic concept, but plumbs the depths of it as a deep well of puzzle mechanics. The entire game is built around a series of nodes with different effects, as long as you have a clear line of sight to an ethereal white object or grounding. As you progress further, finding these sightlines and discovering the order of nodes to hit becomes increasingly complex–and often acrobatic, as you use a time-slowing mechanic to line up your shot in mid-air.

The creativity of Evergate comes from seeing the wide variety of different nodes, referred to in-game as crystals, and how they can be used to create complex interlocking platforming puzzles. Your goal is always to reach a marked gate, but it is always well out of your reach or blocked by some obstacle. The platforming controls are simple but natural, as jumps carry just enough of a satisfying floatiness to match the wispy hero’s animations. But crystals are the key navigational tool, with greater stacking effects if you line up more than one at a time.

The most basic node shoots you off in a direction just like in Ori, while one might start a fire to burn down obstacles and another generates a circular gravity field that you can use to burst out from any angle. Each of the 10 worlds introduces a completely new and often wholly inventive puzzle mechanic, and eases you into learning its implications before combining it with the others you’ve previously seen. By the end, you’ve become a bona fide expert in the effects of each crystal, and it’s very satisfying to plan a route through a stage’s obstacles, springing between nodes and barely touching the ground.

Evergate is a puzzle-platformer at heart, though, and it takes the second half of that designation just as seriously. Planning your route is nothing without execution. As you progress into the later stages, even once you know the solution, it takes a certain degree of precision to solve the stage and reach the exit. It’s in those moments that the finely tuned controls feel especially welcome. I failed stages more times than I can count, but it was always my own fault by missing the moment by a hair.

By nature of its platforming roots, Evergate also feels remarkably improvisational. Puzzle games are often designed with specific solutions in mind, and in broad strokes you can see how some of these stages have a particular flow as well. But sometimes you’ll discover a path that obviously wasn’t the intended one, riffing your way through nodes like a jazz musician, and the systems are flexible enough to let you. There are no power-ups or character progression, so at the start of any stage you always have everything you could possibly need.

The 10 worlds are various memories scattered throughout time, telling the story of two souls who are linked, but the story is only half-successful. Evergate aims to be a poignant fable about how the people we love can disappoint us, and that we need to be patient and kind in an attempt to see the world through their eyes to understand how we’ve disappointed them as well. When it delivers on this message through dialogue, it actually is very sweet. But the majority of the story is told through brief animated vignettes, and it’s not always completely clear what’s happening in them. Between the lack of clarity in those story sequences and the en media res presentation of the lore, it’s difficult to connect with the characters or conflict until the game is nearly over.

The environments themselves are also less differentiated than you might imagine for a game that spans from Chinese gardens to a neon near-future. Part of that is a product of the puzzle elements, which need to retain some visual language across multiple stages. The backgrounds are suitably differentiated, but since your focus is on the platforming, it doesn’t feel much like traveling to different time periods. The clearest exception is the future, which introduces elements like drone robots and force fields that dampen your abilities.

On the whole, though, Evergate is remarkably clever. It’s a short and sweet treat of a game that constantly invents new ways to interact with the world and to blend game elements together, making for a satisfying test of brainpower and reflexes.

One of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, has contracted COVID-19.

In a post on Instagram, The Rock revealed that in addition to himself, his wife and his two children contracted the virus about three weeks ago.

“My wife Lauren, as well as my two baby girls, and myself, we have all tested positive for COVID-19. I can tell you that this has been one of the most challenging and difficult things we have ever had to endure as a family,” he said.

He added: “Stay disciplined. Boost your immune system. Commit to wellness. Wear your mask. Protect your family. Be strict about having people over your house or gatherings. Stay positive. And care for your fellow human beings. Stay healthy, my friends.”

The Rock went on to say that he and his family are now “on the other end of it.” They are no longer contagious. “We are, thank God, we are healthy,” he said.

The Rock said he and his family contracted the virus from close family friends, and they feel “devastated” to have given the virus to his family.

In the full video, The Rock talks about what you can do to protect yourself amid the pandemic, including being stricter about social gatherings and boosting your immune system and staying committed to wellness. He also strongly urged people to wear masks.

The Rock is just the latest big-name celebrity to test positive for COVID-19. Some of the others include Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Antonio Banderas, Idris Elba, Daniel Dae Kim, and Jackson Browne.

Netflix continues to sign top talent to create new shows and movies for its platform. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, having left England and relocated to California, have reached a deal with the streaming network to create all types of content for the platform.

Through a new production company, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will make documentaries, docu-series, feature films, scripted shows, and programming for children, according to The New York Times, which broke the news.

Markle played a major character on the legal drama Suits, but the report said she has no plans to start acting again. However, she and her husband may appear in some of the documentary shows they are producing for Netflix.

“Our focus will be on creating content that informs but also gives hope,” the couple said in a statement to NYT. “As new parents, making inspirational family programming is also important to us.”

Given the profile of the royal couple, Netflix likely paid a pretty penny to sign them, and the story mentions that the couple was looking for a deal valued at around $100 million. Harry and Meghan also reportedly “quietly” spoke with Netflix rivals Disney and Apple before signing the deal with Netflix.

The famous couple have had a busy 2020. In January, they surprised many by announcing they were retreating from their royal responsibilities. Queen Elizabeth II eventually gave the OK, and the couple are now living in Malibu. They just recently bought a $14.7 million compound in Montecito, California.

Before partnering with Harry and Meghan, Netflix teamed up with President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for their own TV shows and movies for the platform.

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