Diablo 2: Resurrected won’t feature ultrawide monitor support when it launches on September 23 due to the discovery that the wider screens break AI mechanics within the original game.
Following the technical beta for Diablo 2: Resurrected, developer Vicarious Visions and Blizzard Entertainment took to updating fans on a number of in-game features that the team has revisited. As well as briefing players on changes that had been made to console lobbies and offering more insight into the removal of TCP/IP support (which it dropped back in August), Blizzard also updated fans on the subject of ultrawide monitors and why players won’t be able to utilize the full width of their 21:9 screens when the game launches.
According to Blizzard, the issue mainly stems from the game’s AI not registering players at distances available to those using 21:9 ultrawide screens. The update post expands on issues caused by ultrawide screens in the game:
“Ultrawide monitor support being modified was a subject we saw heavily discussed across our channels following the Beta. In the Technical Alpha, players with Ultrawide hardware saw their full 21:9 screens utilized during that test. However, during that test we identified limitations affecting those players and others. For example, the AI failed to sense the player and trigger attacks. Furthermore, players with 21:9 monitors were able to pull many more monsters into battle at a range limit beyond the original game’s intention. In a scenario where players (for example: playing a ranged class) were attacking monsters, players with 21:9 monitors could hit enemies with that extra screen space, but the monsters would not pull or react, but could still be defeated. Ultimately, the AI doesn’t register getting hit from that additional distance a 21:9 monitor provides. That’s not intended, especially if you’re sharing a game with a 16:9 user. To protect the integrity of everyone’s experience and promote an equal playing field for all, those with Ultrawide monitors will be able to have their game screen purview extended to 19:9 (the maximum length of the in-game limitation zones) with a vignette on the sides of the game screen.”
Blizzard acknowledged that players are likely to have paid top-dollar for their ultrawide monitors and in doing so may feel irritated by the inclusion of black bars on the screen during their playthrough. In response to this, Blizzard has said that that it will continue to “explore possible solutions that don’t change how the game is played.”
Elsewhere in the post, Blizzard said that two of its core principles for the game are “protecting the authenticity of the original Diablo II experience and making it more accessible in this modern age.” Whilst finding a way to include ultrawide monitor support would arguably lean into the latter, a future patch to address the issue currently looks far from certain.
To read more about the upcoming remaster for Diablo 2, you can check out this piece that details everything you need to know about the game.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
As the first major original JRPG on new consoles and the latest installment of a very long-running series, Tales of Arise comes with a lot of expectations attached. Arise sets out to refresh its visual presentation and gameplay to appeal to a new audience, but it also tries its best to retain what has made the Tales series so beloved among its longtime fans: fun characters, fast-paced combat, and an epic sense of scale. While it manages to succeed admirably at most of what it tries to do, a few shortcomings keep it from being the new standard-bearer for RPGs to come.
300 years ago, the planet Dahna was invaded by the people of their neighboring star, Rena, and crumbled beneath the might of the Renans’ advanced technology and knowledge. Since their conquest, the Renans have destroyed the once-vibrant Dahnan culture and enslaved the planet’s people. One day, a nameless, amnesiac slave known only as Iron Mask finds himself caught up in a supply train hijacking by rebel forces–and discovers that the freight is a Renan woman with a strange curse. As he gets swept up in a Dahnan rebellion, Iron Mask discovers new powers, his true name–Alphen–and a connection to the Renan girl, Shionne. But this tiny slave rebellion grows into something much bigger.
The beginning of Tales of Arise is a marked departure from the chipper banter and adventuring most Tales games lead off with. With heavy topics like slavery and oppression taking center stage in the narrative, the overall tone of Arise’s story for the first several hours is quite dour, drilling into you the sheer misery and desperation of the Dahnan people. Fortunately, once your party fills out, the familiar Tales party dynamics come back in full force, with characters’ personalities bouncing off each other in numerous entertaining dialogue exchanges. The rapport among your teammates–and watching their interactions change as they go through individual character arcs–is a major draw, and you’ll find yourself eager to keep playing just to see the team react to the latest turn of events around the campfire or complain about the latest broken dungeon elevator.
It’s good that the characters are so likable because they really help carry the story through some rough patches. The abuse and liberation of oppressed peoples is very challenging and prescient subject matter to tackle, and generally, Tales of Arise handles the material well–but at times it disappoints by not diving beyond a superficial level into some of the difficult moral issues the story presents. The pacing can also feel rushed, as the plot frequently introduces characters who we don’t get to know well but are suddenly rendered very important to the current events, and then quickly exit the narrative after contributing their major story beat. While the narrative in Arise’s latter half shifts thematically, many of the same issues remain throughout.
Like most JRPGs, the narrative in Tales of Arise is very linear. That isn’t a bad thing, however, as the constant promise of new lands to explore or new dungeons to delve into is a strong impetus to keep moving. You are also presented with numerous optional side quests to tackle, should so you so choose, and a very convenient fast-travel system makes it easy to return to previous areas should you want to do additional exploration or resource gathering for crafting and cooking. (There’s also a surprisingly satisfying fishing minigame at ponds throughout Arise that, if you’re not careful, will consume far too much of your playtime.)
But as beautiful as Arise’s environments are, the big gameplay draw lies in its battles. The Tales series has always leaned heavily on the appeal of its robust, action-oriented combat, and Arise is no different in this respect. When you encounter enemies during exploration, you’ll be spirited off to a combat screen where you’ll go toe-to-toe with foes in a small arena. During combat, you can move freely and execute a variety of normal and special attacks called Artes, which you assign to controller buttons. Naturally, you can also jump and guard/dodge enemy attacks. Heavy emphasis is placed on positioning, dodging, and chaining attacks together to land massive combos, breaking down foes’ resistances to set up a team-based finisher called a Boost Strike. While you can only directly control one character at a time, you can give your three companions detailed strategies to follow, and their AI tends to function quite well.
There’s always something fresh and new being added to combat … making Tales of Arise’s battles feel consistently exciting
There are some interesting new twists to combat this time around, however. Offensive and restorative Artes no longer use the same resource pool, as healing spells (and environmental interactions) now utilize a separate, party-wide Cure Points stock. This separation allows for all characters to focus more heavily on offense during battle, as there’s no need to worry about saving a specific character’s Artes for healing in emergencies–though characters like Shionne will still need to be ready to switch between fighting and healing when needed, and the Cure Points pool always needs to be carefully monitored.
Each character is also given unique perks that differentiate themselves and establish their particular roles in battle, making each of them play wildly different from each other. Alphen can sacrifice HP after using Artes to deal extra damage; sprightly mage Rinwell can charge and hold her magical Artes to chain together combos more easily; elegant knight Kisara guards with her massive shield rather than dodging and performs enhanced Artes out of her guarding stance; and so on. Each character also has a unique, limited-use Boost Attack that serves a distinct purpose, like Law’s armor-shattering punches or Dohalim’s movement-restricting vines.
Many of these layers to combat aren’t revealed or aren’t obvious right away, instead being rolled out over the course of the game. A good chunk of each characters’ skills will need to be opened up as you play through the Skill Panel system, where you spend SP earned throughout the game to enhance your characters’ abilities in combat. There’s always something fresh and new being added to combat as a result, making Tales of Arise’s battles feel consistently exciting.
When Tales of Arise’s combat is at its best, it feels like a well-oiled machine, with Artes flying, enemies being smacked around and juggled through the air, armor being crushed, and guards being broken, all topped off by a spectacular finishing Boost Strike or Mystic Arte to crush foes into oblivion. But it’s not always that smooth and satisfying–sometimes there is just so much happening on-screen at once (with much of it out of your control) that it’s difficult to keep track of what Artes your squad is tossing at the enemy and what attacks they’re flinging back at you, particularly during boss fights or when you’re taking on a large enemy pack. It’s not uncommon to find yourself severely damaged or KO’d without fully understanding why in these cases–and while it’s fairly easy to pick yourself back up, it’s still frustrating. There were numerous times when I felt like I was playing at my best and still getting pummeled for reasons that were unclear. Unlike many other Tales games, Arise doesn’t offer any co-op play, so you can’t rely on a buddy to help keep things under control, either.
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And then there’s the DLC problem. While Tales of Arise offers some paid cosmetic DLC–extra costumes and decorations, which don’t change gameplay–it also offers “gameplay boosting” packages that grant bonuses like permanent EXP and SP boosts, massive shop discounts, reducing all crafting and cooking materials needed to 1, and so on. While this is an optional purchase, the fact that it exists at all constantly made me second-guess the game’s design decisions: are healing items expensive to teach me to take less damage, or to get me to buy a shop discount DLC package? Are boss fights so much harder than standard fights because the designers really want to test my skills, or because I didn’t get that EXP boost DLC? I often felt like money and resources like SP were kept scarce, so instead of focusing completely on having fun and exploring Tales of Arise’s various gameplay systems, I was often wondering if I was being subtly pushed to buy gameplay advantages.
Taken as a whole, Tales of Arise is a very good RPG, boasting beautiful visuals, a wonderful cast of characters, and engaging combat mechanics–but its flaws (and that odious DLC) are also difficult to ignore. If you’re looking for a lengthy, charming, and engaging JRPG to play on your shiny new console or PC gaming rig, Tales of Arise is certainly a fine choice. Just don’t go into it expecting an all-time classic.
Are you ready for a serial killer tale that is not just gory and vicious, but also wickedly funny and slyly sweet? Ready or not, Titane has arrived like a blow to the head, violent, nauseating, and deliriously dizzying. Fitting, since a blow to the head is the start of its anti-heroine’s tale, leaving her with the titular titanium plate embedded in her skull. But a warning to the faint of heart — or stomach — this is a supremely strange ride, and your mileage may vary.
Years after the formative car crash that made her part metal, 32-year-old go-go dancer Alexia (mesmerizing newcomer Agathe Rousselle) splits her time between twerking on hot rods at car shows and casually murdering anyone who dares come too close. With the law on her tail, she goes into hiding by binding her breasts, shaving off her hair, and posing as the long-lost son of a rugged firefighter named Vincent (Vincent Lindon). However, her true identity isn’t all she has to hide. A night of torrid car sex means her body is becoming a ticking timebomb, dripping with oil and dread.
“Hot femme fatale goes into hiding” might sound like a relatively simple crime-thriller setup, but on this framework, co-writer/director Julia Ducournau builds details that are savagely surreal and unapologetically transgressive. She welds the madness of midnight movies with the stranger-than-fiction details of a disturbing true-crime case, in which a French con man preyed on a grieving family desperate for hope. (Related: Watch Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter). Together, these elements form a radical vehicle for exploring the terrain of broken souls and found families.
Within all this weirdness and violence, Ducournau works in a deranged sense of suspense and humor. A scene where Alexia purposely breaks her own nose is not only stomach-turning, it’s unnervingly funny. It’s not that violence is played for laughs. Instead, Ducournau sets up our expectation for the violence, and then slows the pace to make us twitch in anticipation of the impact. Laughter becomes our release valve. Alexia’s coolness in these moments is so shocking that it’s grimly hilarious, so much so that the impact of her blows need not even be onscreen to illicit cries, moans, or guffaws. A sound design rich with bone-crunching, flesh tearing, and organs squishing is powerful enough.
This sensational collision of body horror and comedy makes Titane a sensational follow-up to Raw, the cannibal coming-of-age film that first won Ducournau international acclaim. That menacing yet madcap movie also centered on an introverted antiheroine who had an irrepressible urge for violence. Here, however, Ducournau refuses to start off with a character who is sweet and meek, much less remotely affable. Alexia is hell on wheels from the first scene, revving her engines without a care to whom it might harm. Over the course of the film, she barely speaks. There are no monologues spelling out excuses for her bad behavior. No confidantes will display her softer side. Remarkably, this is Rousselle’s first feature film role, yet she scorches on screen. Alexia’s motivations are left unspoken, but her feelings are clear through every fearsome grimace, every hard stare, every slinky swivel of her hips, and even a stone face finally falling to softness. Rousselle is ruthlessly riveting, whether dancing, devastating, or crumbling.
Alexia is hell on wheels from the first scene.
Storied French actor Lindon proves her perfect match on screen. Playing an aging firefighter determined to be a protective and devoted dad, he’s got Big Christopher Meloni Energy. His burly muscles flex with a desperation to wrestle his world into order. His face clenches in efforts of patience. This projected toughness makes moments where he dances goofily or gently hugs all the more profound. The tension shifts from if he will find out who Alexia really is to the potential emotional fallout of that discovery. While Titane is full to the brim with jaw-dropping reveals, ghoulish gore, and twisted humor, it is plumbing the complexities of two characters who feel impossibly lost and unloved, so this mind-bending ride ultimately lingers in your heart.
With the new NFL season kicking off this week, EA Sports has announced a free trial for Madden NFL 22 will be available starting tomorrow and running through the weekend.
The free play trial begins September 9 and ends on September 12. It will be available on all platforms across console and PC, as well as via streaming through Google Stadia.
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EA also announced some new statistics about player behavior in Madden NFL 22. Starting off, the recent launch of the college football mode Campus Legends led to a 600% increase in “player engagement” in the Superstar KO mode compared to Madden NFL 21, EA said.
EA also announced the most popular teams in Madden NFL 22 so far, based on games played, and the Baltimore Ravens lead the way, with the Tennessee Titans, Kansas City Chiefs, Arizona Cardinals, and Dallas Cowboys rounding out the rest of the top five.
The most popular teams in the Campus Legends mode, meanwhile, were LSU, Clemson, Florida, Oklahoma, and Miami–in that order. You can see many more stats in the graphic below.
Some of the early stats for Madden NFL 22
EA did not, however, share any sales data for Madden NFL 22. This is actually not a big surprise given that EA–and publishers across the industry–now tend to focus more on ambiguous statistics around “engagement” as opposed to hard sales numbers.
EA also announced that Madden NFL 22’s MVP Edition is 25% off right now to celebrate the start of the NFL season. Additionally, Madden NFL 22’s first seasonal event, Madden Moment: Ultimate Kickoff, begins this weekend, promising new challenges and gear to unlock.
GameSpot’s Madden 22 review scored the game a 7/10. “When everything’s working as intended, Madden 22 marks a recent high point for the series. The gameplay doesn’t move the needle much mechanically, but changes to the AI make for a more interesting and varied challenge, while Gameday Atmosphere and Momentum brings every team’s fans to life to palpable effect,” reviewer Richard Wakeling said.
While the majority of us have been visiting the WhatIsTheMatrix.com website and selecting the red or the blue pill at different times of day in an effort to catch a new teaser generated from our choices, Twitter user @linuxct delved into the page contents to better understand how the time detection on the site worked.
After a bit of digging, the talented techie explained on Twitter how they then proceeded to reverse engineer the page to “see how they were generating the URLs for the videos of every possible combination.” The results of that process were then compiled into CodePen, where users can generate links for any specific video they want to see.
I ended up reverse engineering the page (just a bit 😳) to see how they were generating the URLs for the videos of every possible combination.
I also created a Codepen that will generate a link to any video you want to see in specific. Check it out! https://t.co/btAiWnmsn7
The “Matrix 4 Promo Video Finder” allows you to personally select the different variables that influence the outcome on the site, including the time of day that you visit, the pill color selected, and the number of days until the trailer release date. After submitting the information, you are then presented with a link to the corresponding teaser.
WhatIsTheMatrix.com was the website that launched with the original Matrix movie and included multiple hidden pages accessed by codes, as well as games and comics based on the film. It was an early experiment into viral web marketing for a film – however, the new take on the old site has launched into a very different internet landscape.
If you don’t have time to click through and watch the thousands of unique teaser videos on the site or you simply can’t get enough of the footage on display, then you may want to keep your eyes peeled for the Matrix Resurrections trailer, which is coming up on September 9 ahead of the film’s official release on December 22.
Actor Bob Odenkirk has returned to the set of Better Call Saul and is filming again as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman in AMC’s acclaimed drama for its sixth and final season.
Odenkirk tweeted today, September 8, that he is “back to work on Better Call Saul!” He added: “So happy to be here and living this specific life surrounded by such good people.” Odenkirk also thanked his makeup artist, Cheri Montesanto, for “making me not ugly.”
Back to work on Better Call Saul! So happy to be here and living this specific life surrounded by such good people. BTW this is makeup pro Cheri Montesanto making me not ugly for shooting! pic.twitter.com/lTAfPg7dDp
Filming on the series stopped for a period of time, but later resumed for scenes not involving Odenkirk. Now, the production is back up and running in a more full-on way, it seems, with Odenkirk ready to step in front of the camera again.
The 13-episode sixth and final season of Better Call Saul is currently slated to release in early 2022, or so it’s believed, though whether or not the schedule changed due to the filming interruption is unknown.
In addition to his acting career, Odenkirk is writing a memoir that will dig into his long career in entertainment. Odenkirk recently starred in the action movie Nobody and received praise for his performance.
After a year of playing games online, it’s time to get your friends together, sink into a couch with some snacks, and play games the old-fashioned way. Couch co-op is still around and thanks to a massive sale from Microsoft, Xbox owners can take their pick from over 160 games. The Microsoft couch co-op sale ends on September 13 though, so it’s best to check out these deals sooner rather than later.
The ongoing couch co-op sale includes every kind of co-op or multiplayer game, from relaxed, arcade-y titles to competitive fighting games. For instance, Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S users can pick up one of this year’s premier co-op titles, It Takes Two, for just $30, down from $40. Lego games also take up a sizable chunk of the sale’s listings, and feature some heavy discounts, with Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens dropping to $5 from $20.
Not every game on the list emphasizes couch co-op though, with some requiring an online connection to play together. Descenders, which has online co-op for up to eight players, is currently on sale for $12 as part of the sale along with two of Grand Theft Auto V’s special editions that include extra cash in GTA Online.
If Mario Party is a full meal, WarioWare has always been more like a bag of popcorn: a quick, delicious snack, but try to eat it for dinner and you’ll be craving something meatier before long. WarioWare: Get It Together! is no exception, with rapid-fire microgames that are a delightfully wacky test of both reaction speed and problem solving – this time with the interesting new twist of using unique characters that control differently. But while Get It Together! looks great and can be a lot of fun, some dud characters and its fleeting multiplayer modes keep it from being a regular part of a balanced party game diet.
All of Get It Together!’s madness is introduced through a brief but entertaining story mode, the entirety of which takes about two hours to complete. The story itself involves Wario, now a game developer himself, and the employees at his company getting sucked into the video game they are making to do battle with its bugs. That setup has nothing to do with playing the actual microgames, which give you a word or two of instructions and just a few seconds to follow them before throwing you to the next one, but the short cutscenes that kickoff each stage and the conversations between them can be very amusing.
But we’re not here for the plot, and WarioWare’s single-player modes have always been more about going for high scores in a variety of ever-escalating themed playlists rather than beating them once and moving on. That’s a fun challenge, particularly with the later playlists that have a larger pool of microgames to throw at you. The story levels are also playable in co-op this time around, which is certainly a nice inclusion, if one that can feel like a “little brother mode” since the games seemingly haven’t been adjusted for two simultaneous players.
Choose Your Character
Solo or co-op, however, Get It Together!’s assortment of microgames provide exactly the kind of madcap hilarity I want from this series. One second you’ll be removing a statue’s armpit hair and the next you’re scrambling to feed baby birds. The fan-favorite, Nintendo-themed games are also a joy, asking you to do things like deliver a present in Animal Crossing or complete a teatime in Fire Emblem. There’s a healthy mix of ridiculous moments and quick challenge here too, which allows you to tangibly improve as you begin to recognize levels.
That familiarity is mitigated by the new unique characters. There are more than a dozen to use, each with abilities and movement styles that can give the same microgame a different flavor when you swap between them. For example, Wario himself can fly anywhere on screen freely and punch left or right with the press of a button, while his pal 18-Volt is stuck sitting still as he shoots discs from his head to affect the level from afar. They each have their strengths and weaknesses for certain microgames, and story levels ask you to pick a roster of three to five characters that you’ll randomly swap between, adding some additional spice to stages you’ve beaten a dozen times.
The unique characters can shake up familiar microgames nicely.
Both the characters and the animations accompanying these playlists also deserve a shoutout for just how good they look. Get It Together! isn’t trying to push the bounds of modern graphics or anything, but the elaborate backgrounds between each microgame and the overall art direction are vibrant and full of personality. Tons of life has been poured into areas that could have otherwise safely blended into the wallpaper – including with the characters themselves, who use adorable 3D models that are made to look like chibi 2D sprites, making them wonderfully expressive despite their minimal designs.
But while the roster is visually diverse, some of these characters are just objectively worse versions of others, mechanically speaking. Why would I ever want to use video game enthusiast 9-Volt, who is stuck constantly skateboarding left-to-right and can throw a yo-yo directly upward, when the robot Mike can also shoot upward but fly anywhere on the screen freely while doing so? Similarly, the dog-cat duo Dribble and Spitz can fly but only shoot right or left, respectively, whereas ninjas Kat and Ana have the exact same directional restriction… but can never stop jumping up and down, making them far worse.
Meanwhile, the popular witch Ashley blows all the folk I just mentioned out of the water by being able to fly while shooting any direction she likes, and a unique option like the terrifying mother 5-Volt can be borderline unusable for some games since she only moves and attacks by teleporting. As a result, despite being given free choice of the roster, it felt like I was avoiding half of my options like the plague. There are definitely still enough good ones to keep the story levels interesting, but it’s a shame that “the same but worse” was used as a template so often.
Nevermind, Don’t Choose Your Character
The other half of the WarioWare coin is its multiplayer, which is hit and miss in Get It Together!. There are a total of 10 modes in a section called the Variety Pack, which range from head-to-head microgames to co-operative score-attack minigames to other oddball entries like a fighting game. The three score-attack modes are largely dull (including a super boring side-scrolling platformer, which I never actually finished a full run of without quitting because it was just so mind numbing), but the PvP options can be a lot of fun… at least, for a little while.
Multiplayer is fun, but the modes don’t hold their shine for long.
Apart from one of its two solid 1v1 modes and a janky volleyball minigame that’s only good for a couple rounds of entertainment (hot tip: 18-Volt is completely busted in this one), none of the four-player PvP modes actually let you pick your characters. Instead, they’re usually randomly picked and frequently changed, which feels like a truly baffling decision. That includes a clever territory-capture game with its own small set of unique PvP microgames (which are cool, but unfortunately get old fast since there are so few) and a Smash Bros.-style fighter that had promise but is let down by forced mid-match character swaps, causing it to devolve into the bad kind of party game chaos.
Only two of the seven modes that allow for up to four players are even about completing the regular microgames (one of which is WarioWare’s returning balloon inflation mode) which leaves Get It Together!’s multiplayer in a very strange spot. Everything about completing these games and the zany, unexpected madness of adapting on the fly can be a good time with friends, but you are given so little control and things are so random that none of it holds its shine for more than a few rounds. I absolutely enjoyed myself while I was playing, but after trying everything the Variety Pack had to offer, there’s not enough of lasting interest here to ever make Get It Together! a staple of my party game rotation like past console WarioWare games were.
To give credit where it’s due, Get It Together!’s story mode manages to make good use of its characters (at least the ones that don’t suck), and the genuine appeal of chasing high scores solo is further emphasized in the Wario Cup mode – a weekly unique score challenge with ranked leaderboards. It’s hard to tell how much long-term appeal this mode will hold having only seen two brief but entertaining challenges so far, but it is another neat inclusion to keep things fresh. That said, for having a ranked option, it’s a little strange to me that your score is partially influenced by how much you’ve engaged with Get It Together!’s cosmetic gacha system.
Don’t freak out: there are no microtransactions here whatsoever, so that’s good. However, completing games will earn you coins that can be spent on loot boxes that contain “Prezzies” of various rarities that are then given to characters to level them up and unlock cosmetic recolors. It’s a relatively ignorable system for those who don’t care and a decent (if perplexingly convoluted) way for dedicated players to be lightly rewarded for their time – but your character’s level will also increase your ranked score in Wario Cup for some odd reason. That’s not the end of the world in a goofy single-player score-attack mode with no real-money way to buy Prezzies, but it is a confounding decision all the same.
You might recognize Hotel Diablo as the title of Machine Gun Kelly’s 2019 album, but the artist is reviving that story in a brand new form for 2021. The Hotel Diablo graphic novel is a horror anthology tale where each story draws inspiration from the album.
IGN can exclusively present a preview of Hotel Diablo, which is cowritten by Kelly, Eliot Rahal (Knock Em Dead) and Ryan Cady (Future State: Green Lantern) and published by Z2 Comics. Check out the slideshow gallery below to see more:
The comic features an ensemble team of artists that includes Martin Morazzo (Ice Cream Man), Victor Ibañez (Jean Grey), Amilcar Pinna (Generation X), Nelson Blake II (Byte-Sized), Roberta Ingranata (Doctor Who) and Rachel Smartt. Here’s Z2’s official summary for the book:
Between Heaven and Hell lies a waystation for the soul–a place where your deeds in life are the keys to your eternity in the afterlife–at the Hotel Diablo. And it’s Lidia Lopez’s first night behind the front desk! Every guest’s got a story to tell and a lesson to learn…
Hotel Diablo is scheduled for release on Tuesday, September 28. The softcover edition is available for preorder on Amazon, while Z2 is also offering standard and Deluxe Edition hardcovers through their official website. The latter includes a slipcase, a set of three prints and a vinyl reissue of the album.
A newly discovered glitch in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gives a one-finger salute to gravity, opening up fresh possibilities for speedrunners to beat the game as quickly as possible.
As reported by Kotaku, speedrunner LegendofLinkk recently shared a new glitch on Twitter that allows Link to fly around the map as they please – and explained how to achieve it with relative ease:
Unpause, Aim your Bow and cancel with B, head over to a ledge link will climb up, start holding B and climb the ledge, if you go neutral on the control stick or stop holding the B button link will start falling normally.
Previous means of getting around the map in the air have been affected by both gravity and stamina bars, whereas this new glitch allows players to remain at a consistent height as they travel freely above Breath of the Wild’s open-world landscape.
The glitch is new enough not to have a formal concensus around its name – although some have taken to calling it bow lift smuggle sliding (BLS Sliding) – but it’s already being widely hailed as a game-changer for speedrunning in the game. YouTuber and speedrunner JoeDun, who managed to complete a 100% no damage run of the game earlier this year, made a video on the new BLS Sliding tactic, saying it “might be the start of something amazing” for the speedrunning community.
JoeDun spoke further in the video about how the changes could affect different areas of speedrunning within the game. “What does this mean for Breath of the Wild speedrunning?” he says. “Well, a lot […] my favorite category 100% might actually be changing a lot just due to this trick alone. Since you can basically use anything you can pick up to start this trick, things like the letter quest and Ruta will be super easy and fast”. JoeDun went on to speak about a number of other popular speedrunning categories that could be opened up to new possibilities following the discovery of the glitch.
Twitter user @RicitosDeCaoba further suggested that BLS Sliding could even bring about its own speedrunning category in the game as it’s used by more and more players, suggesting that this would be similar to “no limit” runs attempted by players in the game.
And I believe that new category will be the same as the “no limit” runs but including the new glitch, so… I don’t know, time will tell. Depending on how broken is comparing to bomb launch.
— ☀️Helienne☀️Se pronuncia /E-lién/ (@RicitosDeCaoba) September 7, 2021
How truly useful the new glitch is will likely be found out over the coming weeks, as speedrunners across the community look to integrate it into their runs. For now, it seems that members of the community are getting to grips with the new skill and enjoying exploiting it for every grain of time it saves.
For more on Breath of the Wild, you can check out our dedicated page for the game where you’ll be able to find a range of the latest news and clips surrounding the title and catch up with the story so far.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
