The new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, was initially scheduled to come to theatres in April but it was pushed to November due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been some time since we’ve seen or learned more about the film, but that’s set to change very soon.
A new trailer for No Time To Die will be released this Thursday, September 3. While we wait, a new poster has been released, showing Daniel Craig looking suave and wielding the super-spy’s trademark pistol. Have a look below.
No Time to Die’s release date is now November 20 in the US. As per usual for a 007 movie, it’ll be out prior to that in the UK, where it debuts on November 12.
The last Bond film, Spectre, was released five years ago in 2015, so it’s been a very long wait between films. No Time To Die hasn’t exactly had a smooth production; uncertainties surrounding it have ranged from whether Craig would return to the role of Bond, to changes in directors and writers. The COVID-19 delay was just the movie’s latest setback.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is a direct sequel to 2010’s Black Ops, and it features a number of the characters you might remember, including Frank Woods and Alex Mason.
Developers Treyarch and Raven Software have begun to share some new story details for the game, and specifically the roles that its main characters have to play.
The studios kicked things off with a profile on Frank Woods. In the events of Black Ops Cold War, Woods is in Trabzon, Turkey on January 13, 1981 when he learns about a new evil in the world.
“Woods learns about a legendary Soviet operative whose existence has been questioned even within the deepest ranks of the CIA. Within a matter of weeks, he joins a newly assembled team tasked with tracking down this dangerous figure at any cost, and the next chapter of his story begins,” reads a line from the story description.
The “legendary Soviet operative” appears to be a reference to the character Perseus. In one of the first trailers for Black Ops Cold War, we see a briefing where Ronald Reagan gives the green light to go after Perseus.
The next Black Ops Cold War post will “go deep” on the story of Jason Hudson, so check back soon for that.
While Black Ops Cold War may feature familiar characters, Activision has cast new actors to voice them. James C. Burns, who voiced Woods in the earlier Black Ops games, recently spoke out to express his disappointment that his role had been recast. The character Alex Mason was voiced by Avatar actor Sam Worthington in the earlier titles, but he has also been replaced.
Black Ops Cold War is due to launch on November 13 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The game is also coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and it will cost $10 extra to buy the cross-gen bundle that gets you an upgrade to the next-gen edition.
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We were supposed to learn more about Resident Evil 8 in August, but we will be hearing more about Village soon. Capcom has revealed that we’ll be learning more at this year’s Tokyo Games Show on September 27.
NVIDIA revealed its new 30 series of GPUs: the 3090, 3080, and 3070. The 3090 is said to be capable of 60fps gaming at 8K resolution, and will launch for $1500 on September 24.
PS5 devs, including the teams behind Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Resident Evil Village, and Horizon Forbidden West have written about the console’s SSD is helping them when developing games. Ubisoft announced a new Forward, which will take place on Thursday September 10.
It is now September, and neither Microsoft nor Sony have announced the release dates or prices for their next-generation consoles which are due to launch in just a few months.
Understandably, fans want to know when they can buy a PS5 or Xbox Series X and what they should expect to pay for them. However, those details remain a mystery, and now Microsoft has acknowledged the long wait.
Xbox UK marketing lead Samuel Bateman said on Twitter, “I understand everyone is excited to know and people want to plan purchases etc. We’ll let you all know when we’re ready.”
His comment came in response to someone pointing out that fans want to know these critical details to help budget and prepare. Someone else asked him about the launch lineup for the Xbox Series X now that Halo Infinite is delayed to 2021.
Bateman responded, “Let’s get you the launch date first, when you can see exactly what games are playable from day one.”
If you’re playing Pokemon Go on an older mobile device, you might find yourself needing to update soon. In October, the game will cease support for multiple kinds of device and operating systems, locking some players out of the game.
On Twitter, the official Pokemon Go account has announced an end to support for devices running Android 5, iOS 10, and iOS 11 in October. If you’re running iOS 12 onwards, you will be okay–unless you’re on certain older iPhone models.
Support for the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6, currently the oldest iPhones supported by Pokemon Go, will also be discontinued in October. An exact date has not been set, but an update will render the app unusable on these phones at that time.
In an upcoming update to Pokémon GO in October, we will end support for Android 5, iOS 10, and iOS 11, as well as iPhone 5s and iPhone 6 devices. Trainers with devices not specifically listed here will not be affected and don’t need to take any action.
Path of Exile’s next expansion has been announced, and it’s coming very soon. The “Heist” expansion for Grinding Gear’s action-RPG will launch September 18 on PC before coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for its console release on September 23.
Path of Exile: Heist allows players to hire thieves to help them steal artifacts that will help fund your crew as you plan an even more elaborate “Grand Heist.” So basically, it’s Ocean’s 11 meets an isometric RPG.
The expansion adds the Heist challenge league and nine more skills and support gems, while curses, steel skills, and spells have been revamped. The Grand Heists, as they’re called, give players the ability to earn special weapon and body armor enchantments, trinkets, new gems, and other items.
A new area called the Rogue Harbour has been added to Path of Exile, and it is here where you and your dastardly thieves will plan and prepare for heists. You can contract up to 13 different rogue characters, so it’s actually more like Ocean’s 13 than Ocean’s 11. The crew members can take on jobs like transportation, lockpicking, and demolition, all of which are vitally important when you’re trying to steal stuff.
As with any good heist, planning is essential. To that end, you can complete contracts that provide clues for what you need to know about the artifacts you’re trying to steal and how they are protected.
“If you can’t escape the Heist, you’ll lose everything you stole while infiltrating the facility. You’ll need to support your Rogue while they bypass security in order to reach the vault,” Grinding Gear said. “Be careful with how much commotion you cause, or you may trigger the alarm, causing the facility to be locked down. When this happens, it’s time to run.”All of your thieving leads up to the Grand Heist. For this most difficult heist, you need to acquire various blueprints that display where artifact vaults are hidden.
“These elaborate jobs require masterful planning, purchasing additional intel about the facility, and hiring multiple Rogues to assist with their many obstacles. This planning can result in a huge pay-off as each vault has its own exclusive rewards,” Grinding Gear said.
The Path of Exile: Heist expansion also marks the launch of Path of Exile for macOS. This new edition of the game is “fully integrated” into the PC edition, so players who have an account on Windows PC can play on Mac and retain their progress and microtransaction items.
Ms. Marvel is the heart and soul of Crystal Dynamics’ take on Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and the introductory level that kicks off the game’s story establishes her as the nerdy, hilarious, over-the-top fangirl that anchors the entire experience. The Avengers end up disbanded after a huge accident that remakes the world, but it’s Kamala’s experiences–finding her identity, searching for community, struggling with adults in her life letting her down or failing to understand her–that are grounding Marvel’s Avengers.
It all starts with an opening mission that focuses less on punching bad guys and more on what makes the Avengers heroic as people. A number of times now, we’ve seen the A-Day mission, in which you play as each Avenger as they fight an army of bad guys who want to do terrorism. It’s a quick snapshot of how each character handles before the game moves into its real story, in which you play Kamala trying to find and reassemble the Avengers to fight off the totalitarian threat of the villainous organization AIM. But it’s Kamala’s introduction with her father, wandering around the pre-attack A-Day celebration, that centers Marvel’s Avengers. She’s a kid who meets her heroes, who finds them caring (if awkward), and who takes from them all the best lessons to grow, after a five-year time skip, into a hero in her own right.
And so far, when Marvel’s Avengers goes hard on its story mode, I’m really enjoying it. It begins with Kamala accidentally getting the attention of AIM and outing herself as an Inhuman–a person who gained potentially dangerous superpowers after the events of A-Day in San Francisco. AIM has basically taken over the US as a security force, rounding up Inhumans with the backing of anti-superhero sentiment from the traumatized public. Kamala sees the injustice and sets out to find a fabled “resistance” that’s fighting back against AIM’s growing authoritarian power. She quickly becomes the game’s moral center as she starts working to re-recruit each of the broken Avengers to her cause.
The single-player campaign is full of character moments that tap into the best of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s take on the Avengers, with lots of beats that feel like they could have been lifted from deleted scenes in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War. Bruce Banner believes he and the other Avengers were responsible for what happened in San Francisco, and feels the group’s bravado to be its downfall. Tony Stark is pissed at Banner for betraying the team in admitting his ambivalent feelings to Congress, resulting in the Avengers’ disbanding. But like Banner, Tony is also struggling with his own feelings of responsibility, and rubber-banding between that and his arrogant belief that he could have fixed all the problems. Both are incredibly guilty over Cap’s death. And Kamala sees mentors in them both, but imperfect ones who she keeps having to drag back toward doing what’s right.
The story is full of human moments that make me want to keep going, like when Kamala meets other Inhumans for the first time or when Bruce and Tony speak after four years apart and hash out all their issues. The jokes and quips between all the characters are release valves for their trauma and their issues, and they’re quickly coming to rely on each other thanks to Kamala’s steadfast resolve. My feeling is that I’m about halfway through the main campaign (from what I can tell), and it’s a good story–the kind of thing that made me really come to like the MCU, especially around and after Captain America: Civil War.
It’s when Marvel’s Avengers pivots to its trappings as a live game that it stalls, so far. You slowly build up the defunct Chimera, the Avengers’ helicarrier that was at the epicenter of A-Day, unlocking rooms that let you do virtual reality training, store extra gear, and buy stuff from SHIELD agents acting as shopkeepers. Sweeping War Zone missions have you exploring big open areas full of AIM enemies, where you spend a lot of time breaking open boxes to get crafting resources and picking up loot and comparing gear numbers, and not really engaging with the characters beyond radio instructions from Stark’s AI, Jarvis.
The further into the story you get, the more Marvel’s Avengers takes on the feel of something like Destiny 2. I’m now taking challenges from faction leaders so I can increase faction reputation so I can unlock new gear in their stores that I can buy with the 10 different kinds of in-game currency I find on missions. I have a ton of gear with a lot of different perks that increase specific kinds of damage by granular, small percentages. Getting funneled into War Zones to hunt down components to fix the Chimera and earn gear drops kills the pace of the game, when all I really want are more scenes of Kamala and her awkward Avengers dads trying to work through their issues.
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Marvel’s Avengers Early Access Livestream
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It’s not that those live game things are bad, necessarily–although they are all really, really dense. It’s that they’re crowding up a much more interesting portion of the game. Loose from the story, getting into the minute details of character-building may well be pretty engaging. I’m enjoying unlocking new skills for my characters and slowly figuring out how best to use each of them, after all. But those things are holding my attention far less than my growing relationships with the characters of Marvel’s Avengers, and I’m eager to get out of the sprawling, hour-long War Zones and back to the more character-driven moments.
As with the beta, the longer I play with any given character, the more I’m enjoying the combat, although there’s a learning curve here that isn’t helped much by the game itself. You don’t get a good, proper combat tutorial until you open the HARM room about two hours into the game, but various chase scenes and small-scale fights with Kamala are, frankly, more exciting. That said, I like the depth inherent to each of the characters, especially as I unlock new skill-based abilities like better parries and more effective combos. Knowing which enemies to dodge, which to juggle, which to take out quickly, and which to parry is making combat more and more engaging as I get the hang of it. The drawback is that you need to get the hang of it for each character in turn, since they’re all just different enough to require their own bit of training.
I still have a long way to go in Marvel’s Avengers to get the full experience. I’m sitting on several character-specific questlines to complete, plus a bunch of missions that can be played in multiplayer (something I haven’t touched yet), and I haven’t put in the time just yet to really dive deep into the gear system. I’m especially interested to see how Marvel’s Avengers focuses on those aspects after the story content is exhausted and it starts to roll out its biggest challenges, like its raid encounter.
So far, though, I’m really enjoying what Crystal Dynamics is doing with these characters and with the Avengers story the developer is able to tell. It’s the heavily video gamey portions that are dragging me down, and I’m hoping Marvel’s Avengers will grow into them as I continue my adventures.
Stay tuned for my final review in the coming days.
Marvel’s Avengers has found its way into the hands of players who have early access, and many are now working their way through the campaign. The game is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X, but PC players can already get a massively improved visual performance out of the game–as long as they download the high-resolution texture pack, which is tucked away in the game’s Steam properties tab.
As TheGamer notes, to access this resolution pack, which weighs in at 26.7 GB, you’ll need to right-click on the game from your Steam library and select “properties”. From here, navigate to the DLC tab in the top-right, and click the “install” box.
Of course, you’ll need a more powerful PC (and a 4K monitor) to make the most of these textures. Check out the game’s recommended specs, which you’ll need to make the high-resolution pack worthwhile.
TheGamer reports that these textures “make a huge difference,” so if your computer can handle them it’s worth the download. If you’re interested in a new PC to play Avengers check out this deal, which comes with a copy of the game.
GameSpot is currently working on its review of Marvel’s Avengers. The game’s first DLC character has been revealed, and it’s Kate Bishop.
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