During Wrestlemania 37, WWE 2K22 was revealed alongside a first look at gameplay featuring Rey Mysterio and Cesaro.
The short clip, which you can see below, features gameplay captured from a work-in-progress build but showcases the new character models and action fans can expect when the game arrives later this year.
WWE 2K22 will be 2K’s first WWE simulation wrestling game since the poorly-received WWE 2K20.
In our review of WWE 2K20, we said, “WWE 2K19 looked like it stopped the downward trend for the series, but WWE 2K20 doubles back, breaks its ankle, and tumbles down the slope.”
Following the game being criticized by us and others for its poor performance, numerous glitches and bugs, and more, 2K announced that WWE 2K21 would be cancelled and that, in order to deliver the experience fans want from a WWE game, it would be extending the production timeline for what is now known as WWE 2K22.
To make up for the lack of a true WWE 2K game, 2K did reveal and release WWE 2K Battlegrounds that, unfortunately, also didn’t receive great reviews.
In our WWE 2K Battlegrounds review, we said that it “works as a shallow party game you play for an hour, then move on to something else, and that’s it.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
WWE’s Wrestlemania 37 is the company’s biggest PPV event of 2021. Numerous championship titles are on the line, feuds are coming to an end, and the walking flame-broiled zombie The Fiend will get revenge on Randy Orton. If that’s confusing, you clearly missed Randy Orton lighting the Fiend on fire as part of a professional wrestling match. Like last year, Wrestlemania 2021 is a two-night event. We’ve already covered Night 1, and you can take a look at our results, review, and recap here. Now, it’s time for Night 2, and we have you covered. Check out the live results for the show and reviews of each match from Night 2, as they happen below.
Months of preparation, story building, and production design have gone into this year’s Wrestlemania, which takes place at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. In the US, if you want to watch Wrestlemania, you need to be signed up for a premium Peacock account, NBCUniversal’s streaming service.
As Wrestlemania 37 is a two-night event, the 14 matches for the PPV have been split between the two nights. On Night 92, there are five championship matches, along with the highly-anticipated bout between The Fiend and Randy Orton. Check out the Night 2 match card below.
Night 1 match card:
Roman Reigns (c) vs. Edge vs. Daniel Bryan – Triple Threat for Universal Championship
The Fiend vs. Randy Orton
Asuka (c) vs. Rhea Ripley – Raw Women’s Championship
Matt Riddle (c) vs. Sheamus – United States Championship
Big E (c) vs. Apollo Crews – Intercontinental Championship
Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn
Tag Team Turmoil winners vs. Nia Jax & Shayna Baszler – Women’s Tag Team Championship
Throughout the evening, GameSpot’s Wrestle Buddies–Mat Elfring and Chris E. Hayner–will be updating you with the winners and losers as the show airs. Additionally, a few minutes after the conclusion of each match, we’ll be delivering reviews of each match, offering up our wrestling fan expertise. After the show, make sure to stick around for a special post-Wrestlemania episode of Wrestle Buddies.
Flappy Bird exploded in popularity several years ago with its simple gameplay and background elements that had pretty clearly been inspired from the Super Mario series. It was pulled and made largely unavailable–unless you had an Amazon Fire TV unit–shortly after it became huge. However, one developer has managed to bring the game back via an unexpected platform: the MacOS notification box.
With a cheeky tweet asking if others knew that such a thing was even possible, developer Neil Sardesai showed the full Flappy Bird game running via the Mac’s notification window. It’s actually based on a clone of Flappy Bird rather than the original version, but it’s pretty much indistinguishable.
You can try this clone directly in your web browser by clicking the link we put above, so playing it in the notification box is pretty much pointless. It’s not always about whether it is necessary for the ambitious, however, but merely whether it’s possible.
Flappy Bird is extremely difficult to master because of its physics, which force you to keep the bird popping upward as its weight tries to drag it down, but it also only requires single taps to play. This makes it perfect for the notification box, particularly if you want to get really angry several times a day while you’re also working on your computer.
Getting the game to work via MacOS Big Sur does require a workaround, which Sardesai explained in a later tweet. If you really want to play Flappy Bird via your notifications, however, it’s probably a step you’re willing to take.
The UserNotificationsUI framework was added to macOS in Big Sur. But for some reason there’s no Xcode template for Notification Content Extensions on macOS. So you have to make one for iOS and then change all your UI’s to NS’s
Just be careful if you decide to put the game on your computer. It was pulled, at least in part, because creator Dong Nguyen felt guilty about how addictive the game could be. Even with so many other games available to play on your computer, it could be hard to stop.
Space Jam is a 1996 film directed by Joe Pytka, adapted from his 1992/1993 shoe commercials, which follows the Looney Tunes characters as they recruit basketballer Michael Jordan to help free themselves from the tyranny of nefarious space aliens. Space Jam: A New Legacy is a 2021 film by Roll Bounce and Girls Trip director Malcolm D. Lee, which follows the Looney Tunes characters as they help basketballer LeBron James free himself from the tyranny of a nefarious computer system. The sequel, coming 25 years after the original, owes its existence to audience nostalgia; despite not being particularly good, the original nevertheless enthralled a generation raised on Jordan’s celebrity, persisting as comfort viewing ever since.
Nostalgia has always been big business, going back to 1973’s American Graffiti and even earlier, but the past decade has put it into overdrive. Aging films and franchises are resuscitated in the likes of Ghostbusters or Top Gun: Maverick. Shows like Stranger Things attempt to recreate the feeling of a bygone era, or at least of its pop culture. But the most interesting, uniquely late-capitalism category of nostalgia film is one championed by Warner Bros. – a category into which Space Jam 2, while also a sequel to a quarter-century-old movie, fits perfectly.
The philosophy behind this subgenre: Why stop at reviving one brand when the studio has a whole library of them at its disposal? In addition to the Looney Tunes characters, Space Jam: A New Legacy contains appearances by and references to (among others) The Iron Giant, King Kong, Batman, Robin, Superman, Mr. Freeze, The Joker, The Penguin, Gandalf, Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Space Ghost, The Mask, and characters from The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road, Game of Thrones, It, The Wizard of Oz, The Conjuring, and maybe even Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Famously, predatory cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew does not appear – but the rape-obsessed “droogs” from A Clockwork Orange do.
What stands out here isn’t hypocrisy over which specific sex offenders Warners elected to include in a kids movie, or even the selection of characters at all. It’s Warner’s cynical approach to its intellectual property.
Space Jam: A New Legacy isn’t the first Warners film to do this. It is, at the very least, the fifth. Three of its four Lego movies see most of their active participants come from Warner properties like Batman, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter (or rival franchises licensed through Lego). Ready Player One added more external brands to Warners’ own, largely due to director Steven Spielberg’s unparalleled pull with the industry. And now, Space Jam joins the fray, with a near-identical roster of Warner Bros. characters and even a digital-universe aesthetic evoking that of Spielberg’s film. The connecting factor? The screen is filled, constantly, with cameos from numerous disconnected pieces of pop culture.
Crucially, these aren’t homages, like The Cabin in the Woods’ sly remixes of horror icons. They are the actual characters, plucked from the Warners vault with no licensing necessary, and chosen seemingly for that reason. And sure, the studio has plenty of history to celebrate. Beyond Space Jam’s franchisey background extras, Warner Bros. has one of the best back-catalogues of movies for adults, ranging all the way up to envelope-pushing films from auteurs like Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell. Its output in the 1970s was a series of spectacular wins for mature entertainment, winning audiences and Oscars alike. Of course, it’s laughable to think that you’d see The Devils or Performance referenced in A New Legacy – but realistically, it’s just as bizarre for the other stuff to show up in a movie that has no connection to it whatsoever.
War Boys and droogs and Scooby-Doo — and many other familiar faces pop up in the Space Jam 2 trailer.
Decisions like these aren’t driven by story or character. It’s hard to argue that the new Space Jam wouldn’t be purer of story, style, and purpose (as much as those things matter in such a film) were it to stick to the Looney Tunes exclusively. For all the first Space Jam’s faults, the basic premise – a sports movie governed by cartoon physics – has potential, as proven by the existence of Shaolin Soccer. These decisions also aren’t even really aimed at the film’s ostensible child demographic; who among them would have any idea what a War Boy is?
Rather, the target audience for these character roll-calls is adults with cultural memories that fondly remember titles like The Iron Giant, Game of Thrones, and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. It’s an audience that probably owns, or has thought of owning, one of those posters that has a whole bunch of pop-culture icons hanging out in close proximity. It’s the audience that will go see the upcoming DC, Matrix, Harry Potter, and Conjuring films Warner Bros. has on its slate, so it makes sense to wave those brands in front of them. For that generation, the cameoing characters’ familiarity (and incongruity, when seen together) sparks an instinctive chuckle of recognition. “I remember enjoying that,” muses Warners’ idealised nostalgic viewer, “thus I must also be enjoying this.” The same could be said for memories of Space Jam itself.
This aggressive IP-brandishing makes depressing sense given the current media landscape. Every studio is busy consolidating brands, mostly angling them toward in-house streaming services. Disney is the most visible, with acquired brands like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Fox helping to sell its various streaming offerings around the world. Warners has been doing the same with HBO Max, but movies like the Lego films or Space Jam are more blatant statements of intent. Where Disney’s dominant branded entertainment has been mostly regular and confident, there’s a different tone to the Warner Bros. brand assertion. Like a street hawker spreading a coat full of watches, the studio comes across as desperate, machine-gunning its popular characters into audiences’ faces to remind them that some treasured memories come from Warner properties, too. Ironically, screaming that these brands are still relevant only makes one question whether they actually are.
The sad conclusion one must draw from all this speaks to the specific ways in which the studio values its back catalogue. Based on films like Space Jam and Ready Player One, the studio doesn’t see context or stories in its vault. It sees only IP to be exploited; iconography to be rubber-stamped into new environments, sometimes wildly inappropriately, to keep the properties relevant. Some of that exploitation lucks out and produces good films (Mad Max: Fury Road being probably the most wildly successful of the bunch), but ultimately, it’s still exploitation. IP is only as valuable as an audience’s awareness of it, after all, and they’re not going to get that gritty Clockwork Orange reboot off the ground if today’s kids aren’t raised seeing the droogs in their basketball cartoons.
Like its spiritual predecessors, Space Jam: A New Legacy will undoubtedly do well at the box office. Warners will surely be watching to see if, say, Jabberjaw the cartoon shark becomes a breakout character. Regardless, the studio is screaming into the void, yearning to prove itself in an entertainment market where IP ownership is king. The actual characters don’t matter, only their place in the collective consciousness. A Clockwork Orange used to be known as a singular work of artistic vision. Now it’s just another piece of iconography to slap onto one of many inevitable Space Jam Funko Pops, sandwiched somewhere between Scrappy-Doo and Pennywise. Hope you like brands, because they’re the future.
The semiconductor shortage that is affecting everything from computers to car production is also hitting the video game industry, and according to Nintendo, that could lead to Switch console shortages later this year.
In an interview with Nikkei (via VGC), Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa said that while the company has the materials it needs for “immediate production of semiconductors” necessary for Nintendo Switch units, that could change later.
“However, in Japan and other countries, demand has been very strong since the beginning of the year, and there is a possibility of shortages at some retailers in the future,” Furukawa added.
Thus far, it has been a perfect storm of difficulties in acquiring a new game console. This has been true particularly for the Switch’s main competitors, the Xbox Series X|S and PS5, which released last November but have been extremely tough to find. Retailers’ supplies were limited out of the gate, and many brick-and-mortar businesses weren’t stocking the system at all. Online, resellers using bots were able to snag many of the systems and put them on eBay for two or three times their MSRP.
In Nintendo’s case, the Switch is still struggling with stock. Amazon won’t be shipping the standard Switch bundle with red and blue controllers until mid-May. Other sellers looking to capitalize on the shortage can get away with charging more in the meantime.
