2020 was the first year since 2009 without a Marvel movie. Feels weird, doesn’t it? And while the next MCU movie–Black Widow–won’t be hitting theaters until at least May 7, there is a new Disney+ show coming your way taking place in Marvel’s expansive cinematic universe: WandaVision.
The new TV show follows Vision (Paul Bettany) and Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) as they live their lives, seemingly trapped in a sitcom which bounces around between time periods. If the video above is confusing to you, don’t worry, as we’re all trying to make heads or tails of what’s happening.
Most likely, the show will explain what happened to the duo in the Avengers: Endgame aftermath. Though, it’s worth noting Vision was still definitely dead when that movie ended. This will probably include how Vision came back to life and how he got the Mind stone back on his forehead–if it’s really even there.
How to watch:
There is only one way to watch WandaVision, and that’s on Disney+. The streaming service costs $7 a month (or $70 a year), and you can watch movies and TV shows from Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, National Geographic, and of course, Disney. Additionally, you can bundle Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN+ for $13 a month.
New episodes of WandaVision will hit Disney+ on Fridays at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET, so you’ll have to stay up late to check out what the duo are up to or avoid all the internet Friday morning before you have a chance to watch.
However, this isn’t the only thing we’re getting from Marvel this year. As previously mentioned, Black Widow arrives on May 7, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings on July 9, Eternals on November 5, and Spider-Man 3 on December 17. However, that’s just movies. Disney+ has a few more TV shows coming this year, including The Falcon and The Winter Soldier on March 19, Loki in May, and What If…?, Ms. Marvel, and Hawkeye landing sometime later this year.
Below, you’ll find the release schedule for the first season of WandaVision.
WandaVision episode air dates:
Episode 1: January 15
Episode 2: January 22
Episode 3: January 29
Episode 4: February 5
Episode 5: February 12
Episode 6: February 19
Episode 7: February 26
Episode 8: March 5
Episode 9: March 12
And after you’re finished watching each new episode, head back to GameSpot for tons of coverage, including checking out all the Easter eggs you may have missed.
Rust, the multiplayer survival game, will implement its first monthly update of the year on January 7 at 11 AM PT / 2 PM ET. The devs stated in a Twitter post that players should expect a blueprint and map wipe, as well as Twitch drops. Other specifics are unknown as of this time.
We’ll be releasing our regular monthly update on January 7th at 19:00GMT / 14:00EST. The update will bring a forced blueprint + map wipe and we’ll be enabling Twitch drops! further details will be posted in the update blog on the 7th. pic.twitter.com/L0kZ4B7CRH
A blueprint wipe deletes, as the name implies, blueprints and players’ data, including inventory and positions. A map wipe removes player-made structures, but keeps intact natural terrain and NPC towns–effectively resetting a map. Facepunch, the dev, regularly pushes map wipes at the beginning of every month.
Facepunch will also be enabling Twitch drops, a feature that rewards players for watching Rust streams on Twitch. To get this feature, you need to activate Twitch drops on your Steam account. You can identify which streams to watch by checking if it has the Drops Enabled tag.
2020 was a pretty good year for Rust. It made Steam’s Top Sellers and Most Played list, and streamers with big followings have been spreading the good word about the multiplayer-only survival game.
Though Rust is only available for PC and macOS players currently, a console edition is in development. Double Eleven planned to release Rust’s console editions in 2020, but was unable to. The company reassured players it was still working on the console port. A new release timeframe has not been announced yet.
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The new year means another 52 weeks packed with all sorts of cool new offerings hitting Netflix. While the upcoming week isn’t exactly bursting with new content to set the tone appropriately, there’s still plenty peppered throughout the next few days to keep you busy while you shake off the rust and get used to your non-break schedule once again.
On January 5, the streaming service debuts the self-explanatory History of Swear Words. Hosted by Nicolas Cage, the show offers “an education in expletives: the history lesson you didn’t know you needed… Through interviews with experts in etymology, pop culture, historians and entertainers, the six-episode series dives into the origins of ‘F***’, ‘S***’, ‘B****’, ‘D***’, and ‘P****.'” We could offer more details still, but chances are you will know immediately whether this will be your thing or not. All in all, it remarkably looks to be one of the more conventional Nicolas Cage roles.
On January 8, Martin Scorsese’s unusual documentary Pretend It’s a City will be released. The movie is about Scorsese’s longtime friend author Fran Lebowitz, and promises to be a “furiously funny guidebook every New Yorker has at one point wished for.”
One of the other clear standouts of the week is Ratones Paranoicos: The Band That Rocked Argentina, a documentary about one of Argentina’s “most enduring rock band,” told through vintage concert and backstage footage. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the group–you can quickly familiarize yourself via Spotify–the movie looks well worth a watch as it reinforces music’s staggering ability to touch people across all man made borders. Ratones Paranoicos have heavy R&B influences and above all else draw inspiration from The Rolling Stones, and this documentary is a fascinating look at a surprising band with far-flung creative North Stars. It comes to Netflix January 6.
Of all the things you might have expected from the third season of Netflix’s Cobra Kai, there was one element that took many fans by surprise. After all, following the Season 2 finale, there was plenty to cover–Miguel’s (Xolo Maridueña) coma, Johnny (William Zabka) being ousted from Cobra Kai, and the aftermath of the high school karate riot. Still, Cobra Kai Season 3 managed to follow up on all of those story threads and include something unexpected: A deeper look at Sensei Kreese (Martin Kove), the villain of the first Karate Kid movie that then reappeared on the Netflix original series at the end of Season 1.
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 3 of Cobra Kai. If you haven’t seen the new episodes yet, what are you doing here? Go open the Netflix app and watch the third season now.
Cobra Kai has explored events from the past before, even, giving some hints at Johnny’s childhood before the first Karate Kid movie. However, there’s an entire subplot running through the new season to highlight the man Kreese was before founding Cobra Kai. We learn his humble origins as an awkward busboy at a diner, who ultimately finds himself enlisted in the Vietnam War. We then follow him throughout the war, reporting to a commanding officer that lives the “no mercy” lifestyle that would ultimately become the foundation of the Cobra Kai dojo.
It’s a series of truly horrifying events for Kreese. Now only are he and his troop captured by enemy forces, but his commanding officer blames him for the capture and reveals that the woman Kreese loves was killed in a car accident. Then, the two are forced to fight over an open pit filled with venomous cobras. Ultimately, Kreese adopts the officer’s no mercy credo and kicks his leader into the pit to his death.
While Kreese has always been a villain throughout the Karate Kid franchise, seeing the moments that led to him breaking bring an entirely new dimension to the character. For the show’s creators, it was an important step to take.
“He was presented in the ’80s as this Darth Vader character who was just bad. He was a guy who was just telling his students to do bad things, to take advantage of bad situations,” executive producer Josh Heald said. “He was just a black hat. On our show, we really strive to present antagonists in shades of grey, so that when you’re with the antagonist–or somebody who’s presented as one–you can start to at least understand what makes them tick, what their perspective is, and where they came from.”
Executive producer Jon Hurwitz was quick to compare the revelations about Kreese to other aspects of the series. Our approach to Kreese is very similar to the approach to Johnny, and our approach to any character on the show. When we were young and growing up, we hated Krease [and] we hated Johnny,” he explained. “As we got older, we started to have the perspective of, ‘Why was that person such an a**hole? Why were they a jerk?’ Oftentimes, with the benefit of hindsight, you’re able to realize, ‘Oh, this person, grew up in a troubled household. Or this person had this bad experience that happened to them that kind of helped shape who they were in certain ways.'”
Hurwitz hopes viewers will see the events that hardened Kreese and that they make fans “potentially root for his own redemption one day,” much like they do for Johnny now.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Kreese is going to magically become the hero of the story, much like his former student has. After all, he continues to do some truly terrible things to everyone who doesn’t fall in line behind him.
That all said, now that you’ve seen what created Kreese, the producers were quick to note that the story told in the flashbacks will come into play in future seasons. “We’ll have to see what happens with Kreese in the future, but there’s a reason why we do all these things,” executive producer Hayden Schlossberg said.
One clear reason was revealed in the Season 3 finale of the series, in which Kreese calls his old army buddy Terry Silver to help in taking down Johnny and Daniel for good. For those that don’t remember, Terry was first introduced in The Karate Kid Part III, in which he was a wealthy businessman that helped Kreese relaunch Cobra Kai after the event of the first Karate Kid film.
To see how big of a role Terry will play and whether actor Thomas Ian Griffith will reprise the role from the third film, fans will have to wait. While Cobra Kai has been renewed for Season 4, we don’t have a release date yet.
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In a recent job listing for a senior software engineer, Microsoft remarked that they were planning on making some extensive visual changes to the Windows UI to remind their user base that Windows is still a hip OS, as reported by Windows Latest.
The listing stated: “On this team, you’ll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers.” The ad has since been altered to remove any references to this Windows makeover, as Windows enthusiasts began to notice it in the listing.
Codenamed Sun Valley, the UI reboot was originally reported on by Windows Central back in late October 2020. According to this report, the planned refresh will most likely arrive as part of Windows 10 Cobalt during the 2021 holiday season, and will be bringing significant updates to user-interfaces like the File Explorer, Action Center, and Start menu. The update is meant to modernize the user experience to match a world that has become accustomed to more lightweight and navigable platforms.
Microsoft has been focusing on its visual and tactile experience with Windows products in recent years, working to improve mouse vs trackpad interactions and touch sensitivity on Surface products, along with releasing new Windows icons and tweaking the Start menu last year. All of these improvements reflect Microsoft’s renewed desire to improve Windows following moves like putting Surface chief Panos Panay in charge of Windows client and hardware as a whole, and other reshufflings of that team.
Microsoft had previously split Windows after former Windows head Terry Myerson left the company, with most of Windows’ core development being moved over to Azure, the cloud and AI team. Now that development is all back under one roof. With Windows usage up during the pandemic, this was probably just the shot in the arm Microsoft needed to make good on its long promised UI changes.
Valve is looking for a psychologist to join their team and help develop future games and its storefront, Steam. A new listing has been posted to their official site looking for someone to join the studio out of its Bellevue office in Washington state.
“We hire people with broad skill sets who also exhibit deep expertise,” the listing reads. “Psychologists at Valve contribute to a wide variety of initiatives across the company and are trusted to prioritize their work in collaboration with their peers.”
The job listing indicates that candidates will need to “research compelling new hardware technologies” in order to create new experiences for players. Valve received praise for how Half Life: Alyx used virtual reality technology to push the medium forward. The VR shooter was GameSpot’s Game of the Year in 2020.
“Valve brought together different mechanics that we’ve seen in VR games thus far–gun handling, reloading, reactive physics, object interaction, environmental puzzles, horror–and executes on them in top-notch form,” wrote Michael Higham in his Game of the Year writeup about Half Life: Alyx last year. “The result is a cohesive whole, never over-relying on one concept or gimmick and instead making them complement each other from start to finish.”
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After a handful of major release date delays, Wonder Woman 1984 is finally here–and you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your home to watch it. It’s streaming on HBO Max for the price of a subscription.
Chances are, if you’ve already made time to watch, you’ve got a few questions about the ending and what it all might mean for the DCEU moving forward. Or, maybe you’re just a spoiler-hound looking for all the answers before you even sit down to see the movie through. We’re not here to judge you if that’s the case, but we will get into the ending here so, naturally, massive spoilers for WW84 from here on out. Consider yourself warned.
We explain the dreamstone, the Duke of Deception, the stories of Max Lord (Pedro Pascal), Diana (Gal Gadot), and Cheetah aka Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), We also break down the post-credits scene and it’s surprise cameo, what could happen in Wonder Woman 3, and our best theories on how WW84 relates to the DCEU going forward!
Have you fantasized about becoming a trainer in Pokemon? Well here’s your chance: Niantic wants to cast players’ Trainer avatars as Trainer NPCs during the Pokemon Go Tour: Kanto event. If selected, other players will be able to challenge and battle your Trainer.
Niantic will choose candidates through a competition. You can enter by posting on Twitter before January 11, 11:59 PM PT. The post must include the following elements: a Trainer profile screenshot showing the avatar’s full name and outfit, a list of three Pokemon you’d want on your team, and the hashtag #PokemonGOTourContest. There are restrictions on which Pokemon you can include: They must be originally from the Kanto region and cannot include Ditto, or any Legendary or Mythical Pokemon.
Niantic will evaluate submissions based on “creativity of avatar outfit, general theme, Pokemon team composition.” Each person can only enter the competition once, and eight winners will be selected. Niantic will inform winners through Twitter DMs around January 18.
We’ll get to see the winners’ avatars live in Pokemon Go on February 20, when the Kanto event launches. Regardless of whether you purchased a Kanto event ticket, you will be able to see the Trainers on the map and battle them. Pokemon Go’s Kanto Event seeks to bring the Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green experience to players and will feature the 150 original Pokemon.
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A handful of DSiWare games are no longer available on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. The games, including ones that have been published by Nintendo, have a “This software is currently unavailable” disclaimer posted on their store page.
“All DSiWare games released before mid-May 2011 have been deactivated on the eShop, including the classic Shantae Risky’s Revenge,” reads a tweet from a user who first discovered the removals. “Luckily I got it on my DSi before that shop shut down. Grab from those still for sale while you can!”
Other DSi games no longer for sale, gone but not forgotten: – Asphalt 4 – X-Scape – Aura Climber – Zenonia – Spotto! – Mighty Flip Champs – Escapee GO! – Dr. Mario Express – Mr. Driller – Soul of Darkness – Legends of Exidia – Spin Six – The Oregon Trail – Glow Artisan Many more.
Some of the games that have been removed include Shantae: Risky’s Revenge, Dr. Mario Express, Mr. Driller: Drill Till You Drop, and many others. Players can still access their copies of these games and redownload them from the eShop. However, those who haven’t purchased these titles are unable to purchase or download them.
DSiWare is the name for games and applications purchased on the Nintendo DSi shop. That digital storefront was closed in 2017 after being open since 2009. Select games were still available on the Nintendo eShop, up until today. We don’t know if the these games will return to the eShop or if this change is permanent. Nintendo hasn’t made an official statement yet.
The Nintendo 3DS has seen a successful lifespan with almost 76 million units sold as of September 2020. We’ve seen support for the platform dry up over the past few years as Nintendo has focused on the Nintendo Switch.
A new month has begun, which means a new set of Field Research tasks and rewards are now live in Pokemon Go. That’s not all; a new Research Breakthrough encounter is also available this month, giving you a chance to catch another rare Pokemon in the game.
Each Research Breakthrough you achieve in January 2021 will lead to an encounter with Chansey. You’ll achieve a Research Breakthrough once you’ve amassed seven stamps. As a refresher, one stamp is doled out for the first Field Research task you complete each day, so you’ll need complete at least one task daily for a full week to encounter Chansey.
If you don’t manage to achieve a Research Breakthrough before the month ends, don’t worry; any stamps you’ve earned will carry over, so your progress will go toward next month’s Research Breakthrough.
Other new Pokemon encounters are also available as potential rewards for completing this month’s Field Research. You can see the list of tasks and their possible rewards, as compiled by The Silph Road, below.
January 2021 is another busy month for Pokemon Go. Developer Niantic has a number of January events lined up for the game, including an Unova Celebration and another Community Day. The studio is also bringing a handful of Legendary and Mythical Pokemon back to Raids this month, with Genesect set to return from January 5-12.
Pokemon Go January 2021 Field Research
Catching Tasks
Field Research Task
Rewards
Catch 5 Pokemon with Weather boost
Poliwag, Vulpix, or Swinub encounter; 200 Stardust, 3 Razz Berries, 1 Pinap Berry, or 5 Poke Balls
Catch 10 Pokemon with Weather boost
500 Stardust, 6 Razz Berries, 2 Pinap Berries, or 5 Great Balls
