Triple jump your way to great savings over at Amazon, as Mario Day sales have begun early this year. While it’s possible more games and items will be discounted later, there’s already some great sales on several Mario related Nintendo Switch games. If that’s not what you’re looking for today, we’ve also got some handy deals on household items, other games, some Dell PCs and more!
The Atari 2600 is decades old, but a few industry pioneers aren’t giving up on the system yet. Alongside ex-Activision game designers Garry and Dan Kitchen, Activision co-founder David Crane has formed Audacity Games to develop entirely new games on the console–and that’s just the beginning.
Audacity Games is a new publisher “focused on designing and publishing boxed game products for a variety of retro game systems,” the company said in a press release. That means creating new experiences and publishing them for the extremely retro hardware. Because it’s 2021, however, those who buy the games will also get a download code that can run on Stella and Retron, if you can’t manage to track down an Atari 2600.
Every release comes with a download of a digital version (with the same serial number) which is Stella emulator compatible.
“For years our fans have been asking us to create new games. We heard you, and have decided to do just that,” said David Crane. “I have always said that I have as much fun making games as others do playing them, and the retro game systems are my favorites.”
The catalog of games the three developers have created is impressive, for sure. Crane played a role in games like Pitfall and Dragster, while Garry Kitchen’s biggest game may have been Donkey Kong on Atari 2600. Dan Kitchen helped develop the 2600 versions of both Ghostbusters and Kung-Fu Master. For now, only a teaser page is available for the company, but more information will likely be revealed soon and you can sign up for a mailing list.
Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One consoles will soon be getting a new upgraded Microsoft Edge Chromium-powered browser that is capable of playing Google Stadia.
As reported The Verge, testers in Xbox’s Alpha Skip-Ahead group can now access this new version of Edge, and while it still doesn’t have full mouse and keyboard support and is a bit buggy, it appears much better than the current solution.
One benefit of a Chromium browser on Xbox is allowing it to work with browser-based streaming services like Google Stadia and Amazon Luna. Additionally, even though Xbox consoles have native access to Xbox Game Pass, this could theoretically also allow for Xbox’s Cloud Gaming through a browser once Microsoft adds support for it in Spring 2021.
Furthermore, this should allow for improved compatibility with browser-based games and services like Skype and Discord through the web.
This early version also includes the same or a similar sync engine used on Edge, which allows for extensions, vertical tabs, Collections, and most other featured found on Edge’s desktop version.
Players who haven’t yet experienced the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy will apparently be getting a new option very soon. Listed before being taken offline, the Tomb Raider Definitive Survivor Trilogy will bundle all three games together in one package.
According to the Microsoft Store listing, which now gives you an error message, the bundle will be out on March 18. It contains Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. All three games are also already available on PS4 and PC, though Rise of the Tomb Raider was initially not released on PlayStation, with Microsoft publishing the game and holding console exclusivity for nearly a year.
The new Tomb Raider games essentially gave the series a clean slate, reimagining Lara Croft as a young archaeologist who gradually turns into a hardened survivalist–and killer–after an accident leaves her crew stranded on a remote island.
These themes continue in the next two games, and it’s unclear if this continuity will lead to a fourth game, but there is an anime-style series in the works. A film that essentially retells the story of the 2013 game was also produced with Alicia Vikander in the lead role, and a sequel to that is in the works. If you’ve played the game, you’ll even recognize one scene as an almost shot-for-shot recreation.
More recently, developer Crystal Dynamics has been busy with Marvel’s Avengers, a game that has struggled to gain traction after launching last year. It was actually already working on the game by the time Shadow of the Tomb Raider came out, as it handed off the development of that game to Eidos Montreal.
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More than 5,000 Final Fantasy 14 players likely woke up a few days ago to find their accounts had been banned. According to the development team, these players were engaged in real-money trading and advertisements, which could have ruined the game’s balance.
In a post on the game’s official website, Square Enix said that 5,037 accounts were banned for participation in real-money trading and “other illicit activities,” while another 814 were banned for advertising real-money trading.
Players can submit a cheating report within the game client to help curb the problem, and they can also report advertisements to stop others from offering these services in the game. It probably won’t completely eliminate the problem, but it should help reduce its prevalence.
Things like selling power-leveling services and other gear you don’t want for real money in MMO games is not new, but it’s certainly still frustrating to see other players literally pay to win with the best gear that they didn’t really earn themselves.
“… players should take care to steer clear of any activity that violates the Terms of Service,” Square Enix added, and that’s certainly true with an MMO. Back in my World of Warcraft days, a friend tried using a bot for a few seconds before his account was permanently banned. All that work went down the drain.
Final Fantasy 14 will receive its next expansion, Endwalker, later this year. The next single-player Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy 16, is also in the works for PS5.
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10 Cloverfield Lane, the second installment in producer J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield series, first hit theaters five years ago this week, so we’re taking a look back at the film and its controversial twist ending.
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All she has to do is get outside.
Lights flicker on and off. An electrical fire consumes the living room. Howard’s pained screams echo through the vents as his flesh burns from exposure to perchloric acid. Any way of life Michelle could have had in that bunker is long dead, the clock already ticking down to its inevitable destruction. Howard’s doomsday bunker, a monument to his monstrous need for control, is vaporized by an explosion mere minutes after she escapes from it. Sealed inside a hazmat suit she made out of shower curtains and duct tape, she takes her first steps back into a world she was told was no longer habitable.
She takes off her mask and breathes. The air is clean. For a second, she’s safe. For a second, she’s free. Then, she sees an alien ship in the distance. “Oh, come on,” she says. Given the controversial response to 10 Cloverfield Lane’s ending when the film was released five years ago, it’s a sentiment likely shared by many members of the audience.
And it was absolutely necessary.
Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) learns the truth about what’s outside in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
Trapped in a Box
The biggest objections to the ending generally appear to come from a feeling that the genre swap from contained thriller to the realm of science fiction was a step too far, that it came out of nowhere and undoes the logical and realistic style the movie possessed up to that point. How any individual person feels about the smoothness of the transition is, of course, subjective and not exactly something that can be argued with. What can be argued is what type of movie we’re dealing with up to the point that the ending occurs, both because genres are malleable, nebulous distinctions that often blend into each other, but also the timing and placement of doling out information does not actually change what type of movie we are watching.
As far back as Michelle’s (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) original flight from her fiancé in the opening scenes of the film, 10 Cloverfield Lane makes it clear that whatever catastrophic event is occurring is wide-scale: The radio mentions a “power surge” that has caused blackouts to many cities on the southern seaboard. Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) tells Michelle about giant red flashes unlike anything he’s ever seen. The woman who tries to break into the bunker has clearly been affected by some kind of chemical attack due to the intense burns on her skin. Strange vehicles are heard moving above the bunker multiple times, insinuating a military presence that is not our own, something that Howard (John Goodman)even theorizes could be related to “extraterrestrial signals.” While most of what we see is contained to three people inside a bunker, the larger story of an alien invasion is foreshadowed numerous times before the reveal. It was always a science-fiction film. Some people just didn’t notice it.
Watch 10 Cloverfield Lane along with director Dan Trachtenberg in our Watch From Home Theater below:
For most of the runtime, Michelle is presented as a crafty, resourceful, and determined woman who nevertheless is hampered by a perennial need to run away from her problems. We don’t know exactly what happened with her fiancé beyond a “fight,” but the first thing we see Michelle do is leave her entire life behind and flee. She elaborates on this aspect of herself when she tells Emmett a story about seeing a little girl in a hardware store who was being physically abused by her dad, and how it reminded her of her own relationship with her father. Michelle says she wanted to help the girl, to intervene the way her brother did when their father was abusive, but she couldn’t. “I did what I always do when things get hard,” she says. “I just panicked and ran.” It’s a self-accusation that hangs over the rest of the film.
What’s being communicated here is more complicated than simply guilt at avoiding difficult situations. Earlier, when Michelle first wakes up and tries to escape Howard on her own, he remarks that “you’ve got some fight in you.” Michelle isn’t helpless or passive. She’s not even completely lacking in courage. Her problem is being afraid to put herself at risk to help others. Living in Howard’s bunker is an abusive and dangerous situation, and running away from him is the correct course of action, but it’s also not a course of action that challenges her convictions about her own limitations. Simply revealing whether or not Howard was correct about what was going on outside doesn’t work as the ending of the film because it doesn’t resolve our protagonist’s internal conflict. Survival isn’t the only goal. For Michelle’s story to come to a close, she needs to change.
When Howard confronts Michelle and Emmett about using tools, he threatens them and demands to know what they’re up to. Both of them are complicit, but Emmett takes the blame, claiming he was making a weapon. Michelle knows he’s sacrificing himself for her, but she stays quiet. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the heartbreak perfectly, conveying with only her facial expressions the turmoil of knowing that like with her brother, she’s again allowing someone else to take abuse on her behalf, and she’s not courageous enough to stop it. Howard kills Emmett for this, which means that Michelle’s subsequent escape from him can by definition only be for her own benefit. If Howard was the only threat, then Michelle has only succeeded in keeping herself alive.
Yet after being attacked by aliens (and once again using her craftiness to save herself), Michelle is finally faced with a genuine choice. While driving away from Howard’s home, a radio broadcast tells survivors to either head to Baton Rouge to safety or to come to Houston to help fight off the invasion. Michelle is home-free. Nobody or nothing is forcing her hand. She is under no obligation to intervene. This is why a natural disaster or some other tragic situation that she wouldn’t really be able to assist with wouldn’t function for her character in the same way. A malicious force is hurting and killing other people, and Michelle can choose to run away or, for the first time in her life, put herself on the line to help others.
She turns the car towards Houston, and lightning strikes reveal more alien ships in the distance. What happens to her afterward is uncertain.
Another day, another Switch Pro rumour, this time from Bloomberg, which reports that a beefed-up version of the handheld will launch in time for the 2021 holiday season. It will allegedly include a 7-inch, 720p OLED screen and be able to output in 4K when docked.
Improving the Switch’s screen is one thing, but we’ve got some other gripes with Nintendo that we’d love to see it address with a Switch Pro, including eliminating Joy-Con drift, adding an ethernet port to the Switch dock, and even bringing back the eShop music. Please, Nintendo, we need all the serotonin we can get.
For more on Nintendo, make sure to tune in to Console Crew every Friday at youtube.com/GameSpot. Each week, Lucy James, Jordan Ramée, and Tamoor Hussain dig through the biggest PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo news stories.
