Month: December 2020

Gran Turismo has a new car being added to its Vision series of theoretical future cars, and this one is a beastly electric panther. The latest addition is a hypothetical endurance racer–the Jaguar Vision GT–a hypercar that is designed to be an all-electric sports-endurance racer that is capable of a top speed of 255 mph.

This speed is achieved with four electric motors that have Formula E origins, and are capable of producing 1,877 horsepower and 2,478 pound-feet of torque. Theoretically, that means that the Jaguar Vision GT can do 0-60 mph in 1.65 seconds. If the car were real, that speed stat would put it far ahead of the current acceleration record holder, the 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder that has been independently timed at 2.1 seconds when it leaves the grid.

The Jaguar also features a much lower and wider body, with the driver cockpit situated further to the rear. A few nods to the past can also be found in its design, with Jaguar saying that DNA from the 1951 C-type and 1954 D-type vehicles are present. For the powertrain, engineers came up with a novel battery cooling system that uses liquid nitrogen.

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“The Vision GT SV is a dramatic and visually arresting car which showcases what’s possible when the traditional boundaries governing real-world car design are completely removed,” said Julian Thomson, Jaguar Design Director. “In bringing this car to life with a full-size design study we’ve been able to showcase the most extreme version of an electric Jaguar race car that is inspired by the past but looks fearlessly to the future.”

It’s clear yet though which Gran Turismo this car will debut in, such as Gran Turismo Sport or Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation 5, but you’ll need to wait until next year to start setting some lap time records with Jaguar’s hypothetical vision for the future.

Nintendo took a relatively novel approach to game releases with Super Mario 3D All-Stars earlier this year, launching the game but promising that it would only be on sale for six months–even for the digital version. This seemed like an odd move that could artificially inflate the cost of these games on the resale market, but for Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser, it was about celebrating the franchise’s anniversary.

Speaking to Polygon, Bowser said that while it wasn’t a feature Nintendo would be using more widely, it thought the six-month window for certain games like Super Mario 3D All-Stars was appropriate. It’s also being used for a handful of other games, including Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & The Blade of Light. The free Super Mario Bros. 35 is also only available for a limited time as part of the anniversary.

“Super Mario 3D All-Stars has sold over 2.6 million in the US alone,” Bowser added. “And so clearly, consumers have been able to jump in and enjoy that. And it’s not a strategy that we’re going to be using widely, but it’s one we thought was very unique for the actual anniversary.”

Bowser added that he couldn’t discuss any plans Nintendo may have beyond March, so it’s possible something could change there. However, if you want to get the game, we don’t suggest waiting. Nintendo has, thankfully, not artificially limited supply for the physical version, and it’s readily available at most retailers. The large sales could be because of fear of missing out on the game, though it will still be sold for several more months.

It’s entirely possible that Nintendo starts selling individual versions of the three games included in Super Mario 3D All-Stars in the future. The collection is also missing Super Mario Galaxy 2, and we wouldn’t be surprised if that got re-released at some point. For now, however, nothing has been announced.

Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny is set to release on Nintendo Switch in summer 2021. But you don’t have to wait to secure a copy for themselves, because this turn-based strategy sequel is available to preorder at a number of retailers right now (see it at Amazon).

In Disgaea 6, you play as Zed, a young zombie from the Netherworld who’s on a quest to conquer the most powerful God of Destruction ever recorded. Are you a bad enough dude to kill a god? This sequel, the first new entry in the series in six years, is also the first one to feature 3D graphics. So that’s kind of cool.

NIS says Disgaea 6’s adjustable gameplay settings make it a good starting point for newcomers to the series. And in case returning fans are worried about running out of things to do in the game, the maximum level is 99,999,999. That’s a lot of 9s.

Preorder Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny

• Get it at Amazon – $59.99
• Get it at Best Buy – $59.99
• Get it at GameStop – $59.99
• Get it at Target – $59.99

The physical version of Disgaea 6 is called the Unrelenting Edition. It comes with the following items:

• “Defiance of Dissonance” soundtrack digital download
• “Behind the Seams” mini art book
• Reversible coversheet

Disgaea 6 Limited Edition

• Get it at NIS America – $99.99

Available exclusively from the NIS America Store, the limited edition includes the following:

• “Defiance of Dissonance” 1-disc soundtrack
• “Behind the Seams” hardcover art book
• “Stitched Together” pin set
• “Roll Call” 28″ x 40″ cloth poster
• Steelbook case

No Preorder Bonus

No preorder bonuses have been announced for the game, nor have we seen any retailers offer exclusive bonuses. If that changes in the future, this is where we’ll put drop that information.

Note that Disgaea 6 is also coming to PS4 in Japan, but there’s been no announcement that a PS4 version will be released in the West.

Other Preorder Guides

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Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

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Whether a $499 smartphone can qualify as “budget-friendly” is up for debate. But after extensive testing, what’s not up for debate is that the Google Pixel 4a 5G is the absolute best budget smartphone you can find in the price range. A 3,800mAh battery, a better-than-decent camera, a sleek design, and a powerful processor help catapult the Pixel over most of its competitors.

In fact, it’s got most of the same features as the $699 Pixel 5, though they diverge in several small but meaningful ways. It’s not water-resistant, it doesn’t have wireless charging, the battery is a tad smaller, and its display is 0.2 inches larger. It also sports a polycarbonate body, while the Pixel 5’s is aluminum. Despite the weird official naming, the Google Pixel 4a 5G is a totally different – and much better – phone than the Pixel 4a. The 4a is physically smaller, with a smaller battery, a slower processor, and (obviously) doesn’t have access to 5G.

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Google Pixel 4a 5G – Design and Features

It might sound a bit hyperbolic, but the Pixel 4a 5G is one of the best feeling phones I’ve ever held. The size is perfect for my hands. At 2.9 x 0.3 x 6.1 inches (W x D x H), it’s on the larger side – a full half-inch taller than the iPhone 11 Pro. But the Pixel 4a 5G can hide its size behind a weirdly sleek plastic frame, one that makes it feel sturdy, relatively high-quality, and much grippier than something like the aforementioned iPhone.

While that plastic body feels less premium than an iPhone and less sleek than the glossy plastic on other Android phones, I still really enjoyed its feel. A plastic phone comes with a sense of freedom. This isn’t a phone you’ll cover in a case. You’ll drop it, and it will (hopefully) be fine. And despite the polycarbonate body, the craftsmanship in the Pixel 4a 5G is undeniable.

It’s as subtle as could be, with a matte black body with minimal branding  –  just a grey Google “G” on the back. If you prefer a colorful phone, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Like the Model T, it comes in one color: black. On the back, you’ll find a fingerprint scanner and a square camera bump that houses the same 12.2 MP dual-pixel camera and 16MP ultra-wide camera as the Pixel 5. There’s just a single flourish of personality in the design: a white button on the side. (The non-5G version of the 4a comes in a more spritely baby blue color, accompanied by an awkward macaroni-and-cheese orange button).

The front is equally sparse, with a medium bezel and a minuscule hole-punch front-facing camera. (Hilariously, that hole-punch is in precisely the right spot to completely obscure the countdown timers on ads in several freemium games I played.) The top is equipped with the not-quite-dead 3.5mm headphone jack; the bottom, a USB-C port, and stereo speakers (which are recessed in strangely large gaps near the port).

Inside the phone, you’ll find a respectable Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G, 6GBs of RAM, and a 3800 mAh battery that can keep the 6.2” OLED up-and-running for an advertised 48 hours.

Of course, the star of the show is the 5G cellular capabilities, and this is where your mileage will seriously vary.

While 5G will drastically increase your internet bandwidth, it’s anyone’s guess if you’ll even have it. Despite being on AT&T and firmly in the company’s 5G coverage map, I was only able to receive a “5Ge” connection – which is, put simply, marketing fluff that encompasses most of AT&T’s LTE network. Even so, I was able to receive 175mbps down and 58.5mbps upload speeds. That was more than fast enough for Stadia, GamePass, and more, but less than a tenth of what AT&T’s reported theoretical peak of 2Gbps. If I didn’t get a chance to see real 5G in the Bay Area, I suspect 5G is still more scattered than advertised.

Finally, inside the box, there’s a USB-C to USB-C cord and – being this is Google, not Apple – an 18W USB-C charger.

Google Pixel 4a 5G – Performance and Gaming

The Pixel 4a is powered by Qualcomm’s powerful (but not most powerful) processor, the Snapdragon 765G. Not going the flagship route helps keep the Pixel 4a’s price down, but it also prevents the phone from rocking the buttery refresh rates you may have seen on other devices (Pixel 5 included).

Fortunately, the refresh rate limitation was one of the only areas I noticed sub-flagship performance, but I did notice it. Especially after testing the OnePlus Nord N10 5G, an even cheaper phone with the same processor and a 90hz refresh rate. Still, the Pixel was perfectly capable of playing every game I threw at it, from Call of Duty: Mobile to Asphalt 9 to Elder Scrolls: Blades. Surprisingly, the phone never got hot, not even after an hour of graphically-intensive races in Asphalt 9. Even when I was charging the phone simultaneously, it held up admirably.

The phone’s 3800 mAh battery also performed well, only draining 5% in 15 minutes of playtime across games and services. This held no matter which intensive Android games I tried. I also experienced the same 5% drop while streaming Doom Eternal on Stadia.

And on that note, if you can find a reliable 5G connection (or even 5GE), you can stream games almost flawlessly. I tested Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming for literal hours, and my experience was as close to flawless over the network as I’ve ever experienced. (And again, I was on AT&T’s supercharged LTE network, not real-deal 5G.) In fact, for whatever reason, I had more issues over my much-faster WiFi than I did over cellular data. But bill-payers beware: if you have a data cap, streaming will help you find it quickly. In five minutes of Stadia, we’ve burned through more than a gig of data, and an hour spent 10GBs of bandwidth.

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Google Pixel 4a 5G – Camera

The Pixel 4a has the same camera system as the Pixel 5, which includes a 12.2-megapixel main and a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera. Between the two, you can take shots at .6x, 1x, and 2x zoom.

These cameras take sharp photos. Individual strands of hair were clear even when zoomed in. The camera system is perfectly fast, as well. Unfortunately, in many images, the saturation was entirely out of control, casting sunset portraits in an unrealistic orange glow while tinting the grass an almost-alien hue of green.

Meanwhile, the selfie camera couldn’t make my quarantine hair look good, but did take decent photos, especially when utilizing the face-smoothing portrait mode. In low-light, the portrait mode substantially reduced noise but smoothed my face enough to make me look almost like a videogame character.

To test Night Sight, Google’s low-light feature, I took a variety of photos in varying degrees of gloom, including some too dark situations. That kind of lighting is never going to yield tack-sharp images, but I was extremely impressed with the results, nonetheless. You have to hold the Pixel steady while your sensor lets more light in, but Google seems better at compensating for movement than Apple. Several of the photos I took looked almost entirely lit if a bit soft.

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Google Pixel 4a 5G – Purchasing Guide

The Google Pixel 4a 5G is available for $499 at Amazon, Best Buy, and direct from Google.

Netflix has announced that Shadow and Bone, a new original series, will premiere globally on the streamer in April 2021.

Based on Leigh Bardugo’s worldwide bestselling Grishaverse novels, the series will explore a world that is cleaved in two by a massive barrier of perpetual darkness, where unnatural creatures feast on human flesh, and a young soldier uncovers a power that might finally unite her country, though it may take more than magic to survive, as dangerous forces start to plot against her.

Jessie Mei Li will star as Alina Starkov, the central protagonist, alongside Archie Renaux as Malyen Oretsev, Freddy Carter as Kaz Brekker, Amita Suman as Inej, Kit Young as Jesper Fahey, and Ben Barnes who will portray General Kirigan in the upcoming series, which is coming from Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment, together with Eric Heisserer, Leigh Bardugo, Pouya Shahbazian, and Lee Toland Krieger.

You and I are going to change the world. Shadow and Bone is coming April 2021, only on Netflix. pic.twitter.com/5Z8cONCdJD

— NX (@NXOnNetflix) December 17, 2020

The eight-episode series will combine the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology, both of which exist in the same universe, but take place across different timelines, meaning that fans of the fantasy book series’ will be able to witness the two stories come together to form a new cohesive narrative, with “certain characters meeting certain other characters” from the two different timelines.

“We’ve taken the stories of Shadow and Bone and the characters of Six of Crows and we’ve brought them together in what I think will be a really unexpected way,” Bardugo said of the upcoming Shadow and Bone series. “Eric [Heisserer] and our writers’ room and our directors have built something entirely new that still somehow stays true to the characters and to the heart of the stories.

“Eric took two fantasy series — with powers and creatures and horrors and heists — and molded them into this cohesive, incredible thing. I don’t think I could’ve been more lucky in the person that we found to hand the keys over to. It wasn’t just the keys to a book or one series, it was a whole world I had been working on for the better part of my career.”

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Bardugo, the bestselling author of the two fantasy book series’ on which the Netflix series is based, also explained why she thinks the show will appeal to both longtime fans of the books as well as brand new viewers, saying that audiences are going to “encounter a world that feels fully realized” yet unlike “any place they’ve been before.”

“When I was on set, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay in that world longer,” she said. “When you start an endeavor like this, you don’t know what’s going to happen. To have your expectations surpassed, to see magic on top of magic, and to see things come to life in a way that is bigger and more beautiful than you ever could have hoped, it’s impossible to fathom.”

Over the years, Netflix has garnered a reputation for spending enormous amounts of money to secure original streaming content for its platform in a bid to stay ahead of its competitors in the increasingly crowded streaming landscape. In fact, it was projected earlier this year that Netflix would be spending $17.3 billion on new content for 2020, up from $15.3 billion last year.

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For more on Netflix’s entertainment offerings, check out everything that is new to the platform this month.

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

The fifth anniversary of Kojima Productions had very little to say about its future this week, but the studio isn’t done with its debut game Death Stranding just yet.

Death Stranding has crossed over with other games in the past, such as a promotional Half-Life: Alyx campaign that added a Headcrab and the Gravity Glove to Hideo Kojima’s postal-apocalypse game, but the next PC-exclusive collaboration will see it team up with Cyberpunk 2077 for a free and large content update.

Death Stranding will receive six new missions that feature characters and lore from Cyberpunk 2077 and a new hacking ability that allows players to stop MULE sensor poles from activating, stun enemy machines, and short circuit enemy vehicles.

There’ll also be a few themed cosmetic items, such as a Reverse Trike vehicle with improved jumping power, a silver hand gauntlet modeled after Johnny Silverhand’s robotic arm, and new holograms including a SAMURAI symbol signboard or an Atlas Trauma Team vehicle hologram. All that, and Silverhand’s iconic sunglasses.

The Cyberpunk 2077 crossover isn’t too surprising, as Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima has a cameo in the CD Projekt Red game. Death Stranding also happens to be 50% off right now on Steam, if you feel like taking a plunge into Kojima’s mad hiking odyssey. Alternatively, the Cyberpunk 2077 content will also be available in the Epic Games Store version of Death Stranding.

Yesterday, it was something of a whirlwind for both Devotion studio Red Candle Games and GOG owner CD Projekt. First, Red Candle Games announced that Devotion–previously un-released on Steam because of controversies regarding a certain Chinese politician–would finally come back via GOG, but it only took a few hours before GOG reversed that decision. However, Red Candle Games isn’t giving up.

In a post on Twitter, Red Candle Games acknowledged GOG’s decision to not release the game and said it was “willing to understand and respect it,” but it also said it would not be giving up yet. There’s certainly not a drought of online game platforms in 2020, with Epic Games Store seeming like the most obvious choice after trying both Steam and GOG. However, the Chinese conglomerate Tencent does also own a piece of Epic Games.

CD Projekt’s decision to pull the game before it launched was odd given how quickly it seemed to have happened. The company said it received “many messages from gamers” regarding Devotion, resulting in its removal, but given the political controversy surrounding its original removal from Steam, there may be more to it. There is little divisive about the game other than one piece of art, and when the game was first announced to release on GOG, reactions were almost universally positive.

Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt’s other main source of stress right now, with a rough launch, even on PC, that has reportedly resulted in studio executives losing up to $1 billion in stock. After initially suggesting those on consoles request refunds from Microsoft and Sony, developer CD Projekt Red said it didn’t have a special system in place to make this happen and even stopped recommending PS4 players request refunds. The game will be coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S with native versions, likely in 2021.