Nintendo reportedly scrapped a live-action Legend of Zelda series with Netflix after news of the project leaked and circulated online.
As reported by Eurogamer, US comedian Adam Conover, who was working on a secret Star Fox claymation project around the same time, revealed that Nintendo canceled its proposed slate of video game adaptations with Netflix after someone from the company allegedly spread the word about the Zelda series. The Wall Street Journal shared details of the adaptation and Nintendo rescinded the show.
“Suddenly there were reports Netflix wasn’t going to do its Legend of Zelda anymore,” Conover recently recalled, speaking on The Serf Times podcast. “I was like ‘what happened?’ And then I heard from my boss we weren’t doing our Star Fox anymore. I was like ‘what happened?’ He was like, ‘someone at Netflix leaked the Legend of Zelda thing.’ They weren’t supposed to talk about it, Nintendo freaked out… and they pulled the plug on everything, the entire programme to adapt these things.”
News of the prospective live-action Legend of Zelda series with Netflix hit headlines back in 2015 when “a person familiar with the matter” reportedly told WSJ that the streamer had described the upcoming show as “Game of Thrones for a family audience,” with a story that would follow Link’s conquest to save Princess Zelda and the land of Hyrule. However, little more was said after that.
In the years since then, video game adaptations have become big business on Netflix as the games market has experienced rapid growth, and interest in gaming has exploded even more so during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Netflix wants to be the service that players turn to when they need to take a break from gaming, and the streamer is making big moves to make it happen.
The PlayStation Wrap Up, a breakdown of all the hours played, Trophies earned, and more, returns to deliver all your 2020 gaming stats, including any time your account has spent on PS5 so far.
You can head to the official PlayStation Wrap Up site to get your breakdown of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games you’ve played.
PS4 stats are the primary focus, with the number of games and hours played, your top played games, hours spent locally vs. online, your average playtime every day of the week, and more. The Wrap Up also includes some generalized stats pulling from all PS4 player data for games like The Last of Us Part 2, Ghost of Tsushima, and MLB: The Show 20.
Additionally, PS5 owners will see some stats as well, like top game and hours spent with it, total hours played, and the number of PS5-specific trophies earned.
Players can also grab a free dynamic PS4 theme in honor of the Wrap Up. To actually access the information as well, PlayStation requires players to have a registered PSN account, be 18 years or older, and have at least played on a PS4 for 10 hours during the last calendar year.
Scientists have managed to engineer spinach plants to send emails when they detect explosive materials – and social media is delighted.
Euronews picked up its trowel and dug through a Nature journal entry to provide details of the nanotechnology that has been used to transform wild-type plants, such as spinach, into infrared communication platforms capable of sending information to computers and smartphones through a process of sensor detection and wireless relay.
MIT engineers experimented within a niche field of science known as “plant nanobionics” and discovered that, per the report, spinach roots can “detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound often found in explosives like landmines, the carbon nanotubes within the plant leaves emit a signal.” This signal can then be picked up by an infrared camera, sending an email to alert scientists.
“Plants are very good analytical chemists. They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves,” Professor Michael Strano, who led the research, explained to the outlet. “This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier.”
Initially, the research was conducted to understand whether wild-type plants could be bioengineered to detect explosive materials, however, scientists now believe that the nanotech could be stretched further afield, whilst still remaining in the field, to engineer plants to warn researchers about pollution and other potential environmental issues.
The experiment findings were published in 2016 but the research recently resurfaced in headlines, sparking interest amongst social media users who immediately got the topic trending on Twitter.
The Design Director of Perfect Dark studio The Initiative has announced that he is leaving the project.
The Initiative’s Drew Murray revealed the news on Twitter (as spotted by VGC). Murray previously worked on Resistance, Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive at Insomniac Games before leaving in 2018 to help kickstart the Microsoft first-party studio. He is leaving to focus on his “life outside of work” and tweeted that the goodbye felt bittersweet after working with “such a talented and experienced team.”
“The team has the vision and talent to knock the game and franchise out of the park,” Murray tweeted in regards to the future of the project, noting that the reveal trailer still gives him goosebumps. Interestingly, Murray points out that, when he joined The Initiative, he wasn’t aware that the team would be working on a Perfect Dark game.
Murray says that the silver lining of this is that he will get to experience Perfect Dark as a fan on launch day. The Perfect Dark reboot project was announced in December of 2020 during The Game Awards and is promising to deliver an “eco sci-fi” first-person shooter. You can learn more about the game in our coverage of its reveal.
Sega and developer RGG Studio announced that they are re-releasing Judgment–the Yakuza series spinoff that first launched in 2019 as a PlayStation 4 exclusive–for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Stadia. The game will be remastered with “refined visuals” and will run at 60 fps to take advantage of the new hardware. You also won’t have to wait long; this new version is set to launch on April 23 this year for $39.99 USD.
Judgment takes place in the same universe as the Yakuza franchise but tells an entirely separate story from the mainline games. While it uses the familiar setting of Kamurocho and incorporates a few recognizable elements, such as the Tojo Clan and crime drama, you won’t need an extensive Yakuza background to enjoy it. You play as a Takayuki Yagami, a disgraced lawyer turned private detective who uncovers a much larger conspiracy–it’s a gripping story with a different tone from the Yakuza games but still has the same storytelling qualities.
The game plays much like previous Yakuza games with action brawler combat, however Yagami is a lot more acrobatic and it influences the way he fights. And Kamurocho is again a lively open city full of side quests and minigames to fill out the world. You’ll do detective work as well, investigating environments to find clues and questioning key witnesses and suspects to advance the plot.
This is the latest in Sega’s and RGG Studio’s effort to bring the broader Yakuza franchise to more platforms with visual and performance improvements. Just last week, the Yakuza Remastered Collection came out on PC and Xbox platforms (also via Game Pass), and I covered why Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 are important games that everyone should eventually play.
Note that you can also play the original PS4 version of the game on PS5, but without next-gen improvements–Sega has said that there will not be cross-buy between PS4 and PS5 versions of the game. Although Yakuza games have been made available on PC recently, Judgment will not be getting a PC version at the moment.
Commissioner Gordon is at odds with Batman as often as he is allied with him in the comics. Now, in a new comedic podcast, Commissioner Gordon is Batman. Actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays Gordon in the upcoming Matt Reeves Batman film, will step into the Dark Knight’s ninja boots in Batman: The Audio Adventures, THR reports.
Details on the podcast are sparse, but we know that this will be a comedic take on the usually dour character. Former SNL writer Dennis McNicholas wrote and directed the series, which will release sometime this year.
The cast list for the audio show is bursting at the seams with big names in comedy, much like the cast of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn, which has also found success putting a comedic spin on the world of Gotham City.
Apart from Wright himself, the cast includes Chris Parnell, Melissa Villaseñor, Seth Meyers, Brent Spiner, John Leguizamo, Ike Barinholtz, Bobby Moynihan, Kenan Thompson, Rosario Dawson, Jason Sudeikis, Alan Tudyk, Heidi Gardner, Brooke Shields, Paul Scheer, Tim Meadows, Fred Armisen, Ray Wise, Ben Rodgers, Katie Rich, Pete Schultz, Paula Pell, Toby Huss, and writer Dennis McNicholas.
Interestingly, Alan Tudyk has roles in both Harley Quinn and Batman: The Audio Adventures. The casting announcement did not include any roles beyond Wright’s Batman, so we don’t know if Tudyk will reprise his roles as the Joker or Clayface from Harley Quinn, but we’d love to see it.
In addition to Batman: The Audio Adventures, DC has a separate multi-year deal with Spotify to produce DC-related podcasts, including Batman Unburied from Dark Knight writer David Goyer. McNicholas is producing the project along with Angela Petrella, and Jon Berg is executive producing.
This is the second time in the last week that an actor from The Batman has popped up in another DC production, with actor Jay Lycurgo, who plays a gang member in The Batman, taking on the role of Tim Drake in HBO Max’s Titans Season 3.
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If you’ve never seen a film or TV show directed by Sion Sono, titles like The Virgin Psychics or Tokyo Vampire Hotel should clue you in on his brand of genre exploitation. Prisoners of the Ghostland — starring, among others, Nicolas Cage and Sofia Boutella — feels right at home alongside other energetic Sono romps like Tokyo Tribe, the Japanese virtuoso’s 2015 post-apocalyptic gangland hip-hop martial arts musical. Ghostland brings together just as many genres and inspirations, which might make your average moviegoer perform a cartoonish spit-take when they’re listed back-to-back.
The film is many things, from zany, post-apocalypse nightmare fuel, to a stylized mash-up of Western and Samurai cinema. It even occupies that specifically modern Nic Cage space born from unhinged commitment and debts to the IRS, riding a fine line between serious and tongue-in-cheek (Cage plays an imprisoned bank robber fitted with ball-threatening explosives and tasked with rescuing a young girl in a nuclear wasteland). And yet, none of these descriptors do justice to what the movie really feels like. If you’re in it for inventive action, there’s just enough of it to satisfy — though not nearly enough to blow you away — but Sono also made the film shortly after a life-threatening heart attack, which he claims killed him for 60 seconds and sent him hurtling through outer space. As fun as Prisoners of the Ghostland is, it’s also a dreamlike meditation on time.
One of the first images we see is a gumball machine in the corner of a pristine, high-security Japanese bank. After a robbery gone wrong — Cage, simply referred to as “hero,” bursts in guns-a-blazing alongside sadistic partner “Psycho” (an unrecognizable Nick Cassavetes) — the gumballs spill to the floor in a chaotic mixture of glass and blood. It’s a mission statement of sorts, a prelude to the film’s candy-colored violence and cartoonish bloodshed. Soon after, the camera takes a trip through Samurai Town, a narrow locale with heightened artifice, whose saloon-harems are fitted with swinging wooden doors and traditional Japanese hanging lanterns. The town’s residents — some white, some Japanese, some belonging to other ethnicities — sport outfits either out of the Old West or feudal Japan. Whether a given character speaks English or Japanese feels randomly assigned, and the music cues sound like Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western leitmotifs played on Japanese bamboo flutes.
When fearsome warlord The Governor (Bill Mosely, Repo! The Genetic Opera) arrives in search of Cage’s “hero,” the town gathers around him, welcoming him with coordinated chants. With handsome, katana-wielding right-hand man Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi) by his side, The Governor conscripts Cage into a rescue mission to find his missing granddaughter Bernice (Boutella) in exchange for his freedom, but the mission comes with some caveats in the form of Cage’s attire. He’s made to don intimidating black leather reminiscent of a bike gang — The Governor, standing in for Sono, dresses him this way because he likes the aesthetic — but the outfit is fitted with explosives on his arms, neck and testicles, which can be set off by the mere impulses to be violent or sexual in the presence of young women. It’s a means to protect Bernice from the one man capable of saving her, and it places Cage in an uncomfortable narrative predicament; the devices are bound to come into play, and bound to paint this “hero” in a rather untoward light. After all, Hollywood’s leading men are often defined by violence and sexuality (the latter was a key focus before Marvel subsumed the action blockbuster), so the blinking red lights on Cage’s neck and genitals pose a particular problem, in a film ostensibly about Hollywood imagery itself.
The film, after setting itself up as a rescue adventure, takes a couple of sudden left turns early on. It turns out finding Bernice isn’t a problem at all! Getting her to return willingly, however, ends up being the issue. In the meantime, she’s taken up residence — or been forced to; it’s left ambiguous — in an area called the Ghostland, a Mad Max-inspired dystopian desert township built around a clock tower, whose hands the residents lasso and desperately stop from moving forward. Bernice is encased, perhaps willingly, within the remnants of a mannequin, in a place where time is forced to stand still. Men who build engines and other devices used to move forward — like the delightful “Rat Man” and his rat clan — are considered outcasts.
Nick Cassavetes and Nicolas Cage in Prisoners of the Ghostland.(Photo: RLJE Films)
The film is steeped in dream logic (or illogic) when it comes to spatial and emotional reasoning. The Ghostland isn’t so much its own township as it is a realm of specific cinematic influence, not unlike Samurai Town. The two places don’t seem to have any physical relationship to one another; whenever characters set out to travel between them, their view is subsumed by phantasmagorical images of a zombie prison bus and robotic samurai backed by an enormous mushroom cloud (no conversation about the history of America and Japan’s cyclical cultural influence is complete without the spectre of nuclear power). Instead, the connection between the two towns is a temporal one. Sono has long been influenced by eastern and western genre pictures, and Westerns and Samurai films have impacted each other’s plots and aesthetics for decades. Samurai Town, therefore, is a symbol of a lawless past (complemented by Cage’s haunted flashbacks of people he’s killed). The Ghostland, similarly, is a symbol of a hopeless future, and a place rife with Greek choruses who push the plot forward through call-and-response. The two places are on a collision course, but not for any reasons grounded in waking reality. They simply feel like extensions of Sono’s aesthetic fixations; it’s his dream about cinema, in a way.
Cage absorbs each new idea or piece of poetic dialogue with something halfway between wide-eyed fascination and mischievous acceptance. “The hero” knows what kind of movie he’s in, but he’s not really the hero of this story. He merely fits the aesthetic mold of a traditional hero, standing where a hero would stand, dressing how he would dress, rejecting and accepting the call to heroism in places where Joseph Campbell might take notice. If the story has a real “hero,” it’s Yasujiro, a relatively understated character with a more subtle moral and physical arc, but it’s hardly surprising to see Cage unhinge his jaw and swallow the picture whole. (His particular enunciation of the word “testicles” is worth the price of admission).
Judgment, the Yakuza spin-off, is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and Stadia on April 23.
Originally a PS4 exclusive, the action game will come to new platforms with all of its DLC, “refined” visuals, 60 FPS performance, and improved loading times. It will be released at a $39.99 price point (UK and AU prices not available at time of writing).
Sega confirmed to IGN that cross-buy will not be supported for PS4 and PS5, and we could not get an answer on whether progress can be carried over from the PS4 version to the PS5 version. Furthermore, RGG Studios says it does not have plans to release Judgement for PC at this time.
Set in the same world as Yakuza, and in its familiar Kamurocho district, Judgment tells a very different story, with an almost entirely new cast of characters. Centred on lawyer-turned-private detective Takayuki Yagami, the game follows a muder mystery, alongside the Yakuza series’ usual bizarre sidequests and activities.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Although she hadn’t been seen since Thor: The Dark World, WandaVision episode four brought back the sarcastic Darcy Lewis, once again played by Kat Dennings, who has graduated to being a scientist in her own right in the ensuing years.
But with filming on Thor: Love and Thunder now underway in Australia, what are the chances that Dennings will reprise her role in the MCU franchise that introduced Darcy?
IGN’s Jesse Gill posed that very question to Kat Dennings today during an interview to promote the latest episode of Marvel’s WandaVision.
According to Dennings, the chances of Darcy hanging out with her old pals Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Love and Thunder appear highly unlikely.
“Well, I have not gotten a call so I kind of doubt it since they’re shooting it right now so probably not,” Dennings told IGN, adding, “but anything Marvel ever asks of me the answer’s always yes.”
While Dennings’ Darcy may not return for the fourth Thor movie, plenty of other MCU veterans are, such as Thor and Thor: The Dark World’s Jaime Alexander as the warrior Sif.
