When watching Star Wars for the first time, it’s easy to imagine yourself in so many roles–Jedi, smuggler, bounty hunter, fighter pilot, princess–but tough to pick just one. Hasbro is making it easier than ever to pick with their newest Black Series helmet, the Star Wars: The Black Series Wedge Antilles Battle Simulation Helmet.
Wedge Antilles is one of the few characters from the original trilogy that lived through the whole series, participating in some of the biggest battles and piloting iconic ships. He went on to star in a long-running series of Star Wars books published under what is now the Star Wars Legends banner, and continues to pop up in the new canon Star Wars novels as well, like the Aftermath trilogy.
The Wedge Antilles Battle Simulation Helmet is modeled after the legendary pilot’s from the films. The wearable helmet offers interior padding, electronic lights, and sound effects. There are three speakers inside the helmet to create, according to the official press release, an “immersive surround battle simulation experience while synchronized LED lights inside the visor simulate blaster fire from enemy vehicles.”
Also inside the helmet is a switch that lets you choose between a simulation of piloting Wedge’s X-Wing at the Battle of Yavin, or the Snowspeeder he piloted at the Battle of Hoth. Of course, Hasbro’s use of the word ‘simulation’ here is rather tenuous. There’s no on-screen display or anything, so you’d better be looking at least at a paused image from a Star Wars battle when you flip the simulation switch.
The helmet will go for $99.99 when it hits shelves sometime in June 2021. You can order it right now through the official Hasbro Pulse site. If you’re more of a Jedi type than a pilot, though, make sure you keep an eye on the “real” Lightsaber that Disney is making.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Outriders can be a tough game once you start to get into it. Despite access to a host of different ludicrous superpowers, you’re still human at the end of the day, and if you get nailed with enough bullets or slashed by enough monster claws, you’re going to die. You can mitigate some of that incoming damage with Outriders’ cover shooter mechanics, but because of the way most character classes recover health, you need to be constantly slaying foes. If you’re not using equipment mods to help with that, you’re kind of playing the game wrong.
There’s a pretty deep and robust modding system in Outriders, but it’s easy to overlook. First, when you’re introduced to the system, you don’t really need it yet. Second, you go through so much gear in Outriders that you might be thinking, “I’ll wait till I get the really good stuff before I start making changes.” Unfortunately, that’s a mistake–by not modding your gear, you’re likely making the game much harder than it needs to be.
Gear mods can give you significant perks for your armor and guns, making your abilities and status effects a lot more powerful. Even relatively early in the game, you should be tuning your gear to fit the powers you like and the enemies you expect to face to give yourself the biggest advantage you can. But to do that, you need to understand how mods work and how to create character builds, even with less-than-optimal gear. Here’s everything you need to know about modding in Outriders, including why you should be doing it.
How Modding Works
The mods on different pieces of armor and weapons can give you massive bonuses and increase your strength.
In order to start modding your gear, you’ll need to progress the story of Outriders far enough to rescue Dr. Zahedi. That happens pretty early in the course of things, and once he joins your team, he’ll allow you to make changes to your equipment back at your camp and truck. You require two kinds of currency to mod items: Leather for armor and Iron for weapons. You can get Iron from those blue metal hunks sticking out of rock walls scattered throughout the game; Leather comes from creatures you kill. Both kinds of currency will also drop from weapons you dismantle.
Once you’re regularly earning items with blue icons, representing the second of four equipment tiers, you’ll start to see that they come with special mods. These mods each have their own tier, indicated by a Roman numeral 1, 2, or 3. The better the gear, the higher the perk tier it can take. But even at the first level, these mods are significantly helpful, especially on armor. Your armor mods convey a bunch of upgrades to your class abilities, often giving you shields, extra health, or extra damage on a specific ability.
While you’ll constantly be swapping whatever gear you’re using for new stuff with higher numbers in Outriders, you’ll want to pay attention to the upgrades your mods give you. You can customize your gear by swapping mods between pieces to get exactly the loadout you want, synergized with the abilities you have equipped, by visiting Zahedi. To unlock a perk in the modding menu, you need to dismantle a piece of gear that already has it. Once you’ve done that, you can add the perk to one of your gear’s mod slots, so long as you pay a small fee in Leather (or Iron, if you’re talking about guns).
The Benefits Of Modding Armor
Switch mods around based on which abilities you plan to use in a mission–it’ll save your life, and it costs next to nothing.
Especially as you start to climb up toward World Tiers 7 and 8 and beyond, the difficulty of Outriders can increase significantly. You’ll find an ebb and flow as you earn better gear, but you can mitigate big difficulty spikes with your equipment mods. At almost all times, you want to have mods on your armor that benefit the abilities you use most, or at least, are using at the time. If you’re wearing armor with mods meant for abilities you don’t have equipped, you’re completely wasting it.
Armor mods can make a decent ability phenomenal very quickly. For instance, the Devastator’s Earthquake ability is pretty solid–it deals damage in the area in front of you, goes through cover, and can interrupt enemies when they’re attempting to attack you. But mods make it significantly more powerful: one gives Earthquake a huge damage upgrade; another gives you a second Earthquake charge so you can use it more often; another gives you armor based on how many enemies you catch with the ability; and another inflicts Bleed on enemies hit by Earthquake, which synergizes with other Devastator skill tree upgrades. If you throw a few of these on your armor, suddenly you can use Earthquake way more often and have it protect you and heal you much more easily. If you like Earthquake, or any other ability, you should be using the perks that bolster it.
The thing about these mods is that they make it much easier to stay alive in a fight. Character classes in Outriders all heal themselves through combat, and with the Trickster and Devastator, you need to be constantly pushing the attack to heal yourself and stay alive. (It’s a little different with the Pyromancer and Technomancer, but in both cases, dealing damage and killing enemies is key to survival.)
So every time you return to your camp, talk to Zahedi and switch the mods on your armor to bolster your abilities. Be sure to also dismantle the gear you’re not using and don’t need to sell to increase your store of mods. Getting into this habit relatively early will cut the difficulty of some of Outriders’ toughest fights because you’ll have huge advantages, with your abilities healing you more and doing more damage.
Don’t Forget Your Weapons
Adjusting weapons so that you get good synergies can make you way more deadly on the battlefield.
It’s less important than modding your armor, but modding your weapons is also a good idea, especially if you’re doing a lot of harvesting and have materials to spare. Like armor, you can swap the mods on your guns by dismantling weapons you’re not using and then changing the mods equipped to the ones you are.
This is a very good idea if you start to notice that there are certain weapon mods that synergize with your character class (like Burning and Ash with the Pyromancer) or that give you an advantage (like freezing allowing you to take enemies out of the fight as the Devastator). Think about which mods work best for your character and how you play, and also how you can use your primary, secondary, and sidearm weapons together based on their mods. For instance, nailing an enemy with a few Toxic rounds from one gun, then freezing them with the other, can let you rack up damage without that combatant threatening you. That gives you time to handle the rest of his squad, or gives you options for dealing with tough Altered enemies that like to chase you out of cover or hit you with Anomaly powers.
The point is, you get huge benefits from having modding your armor and weapons with mods that work together. Outriders will continue to get tougher and tougher as you climb its World Tiers; spend the time to mod your gear so that you can stay powerful even against amped-up enemies. You’ll have a much better time working through Outriders’ story with the right alterations to your equipment.
Outriders is a game that isn’t defined by big new ideas, but rather a variety of familiar elements mixed together in experimental ways. It’s a role-playing game with loot-shooter elements; it’s a serious, dark sci-fi outing that often comes with a pretty big dose of humor; it’s a third-person cover shooter that demands you rush out and smash enemies with your ludicrously lethal magic powers. Whether this mixture works for you will determine how much you’ll enjoy exploring the war-torn planet of Enoch and the last desperate vestige of humanity clinging to life there.
Outriders blends well-known video game elements into something new and challenging, and while it takes itself seriously, it isn’t self-serious. The game is about the human race destroying its home, violently colonizing new spaces, and tearing itself apart, but its heavy themes are often lightened up by a general blockbuster goofiness and characters defined by their gallows humor. You find a place within it as an accidental superbeing with space magic powers on the newly colonized planet Enoch, and you’re mostly just annoyed that irritating people are wasting your time with their gopher chores. It’s a fun, self-aware fit.
Though Outriders looks like a live game of the loot-shooter persuasion, it’s actually much more Mass Effect 3 than Destiny 2–like Mass Effect, RPG progression, an expansive story, and cover-shooting are more the engine of the game than chasing the next new gun. Although it does have a hearty dose of gear progression, Outriders is a cover-shooter RPG, leaning heavily into an epic story told with tons of dialogue, cutscenes, character interactions, and collectible lore.
Developer People Can Fly has clearly drawn a lot from its past work on the Gears of War series in creating Outriders. Rifle-sporting enemies take fortified positions to unload on you at a distance, backed up by shotgunners who try to close the gap, armored troops carrying chainguns who plod toward you through the open, and cleaver-wielding sprinters who charge straight at your face to drive you out of cover.
The gameplay core of Outriders is shooting, and you’ll have a mess of guns at your disposal. Though you can only have two main weapons and a sidearm equipped at any given time, you’ll have lots of options thanks to the loot-shooter half of the Outriders formula. That means you can pair a sniper rifle with a shotgun or assault rifles and SMGs, and since you’re constantly searching for weapons with better stats, you’ll cycle through a lot of different loadouts in a short amount of time.
What makes these weapons especially fun is the myriad different properties and status effects they can have, like dispensing poison, blowing enemies up, freezing people solid, and more. Recalling Gears of War again, Outriders’ shooting is reliably solid, fun, and feels good–but finding synergies between your weapons’ weird properties is a lot of what makes the shooting part of the game rewarding. The deeper into Outriders you get, the more fun the shooting becomes as you start to rack up the Legendary guns that do awesome, ridiculous things. The core shooting is spiced up with wrinkles like hitting enemies with lightning strikes, healing you for landing headshots, and dropping comets on people.
Gallery
Things get weirder in its merging of space superpowers with the cover shooter core. You can choose from one of four ability classes early in the game: Devastator, Trickster, Pyromancer, or Technomancer. These each have the general roles of tank, rogue, damage-focused mage, and debuff-focused mage–the Devastator uses gravity attacks for close-range kills, the Trickster teleports around to get the drop on enemies, the Pyromancer is a mid-range fire-flinger, and the Technomancer can summon turrets and rockets that also poison or slow targets.
Each class has a different way of replenishing health through combat, generally by focusing on their specific strengths. The Devastator, for instance, heals you for every close-range kill, encouraging you to get in close to enemies to hit them with powers like a short-range earthquake. Combat becomes a constant calculus between when to cut the distance and take down an enemy and when to take cover, bide your time, and protect yourself.
That combination can be a bit confusing and, as a result, combat is a place where Outriders can both sprint and stumble. You’re playing a shooter where you use cover to keep yourself alive, but you’re often encouraged to leave cover to keep yourself alive. That push and pull of avoiding incoming damage and taking the fight to the enemy requires you to constantly manage the battlefield, as well as your ability cooldown timers. If you jump out of cover and go wild with all your powers on an approaching enemy, you’ll leave yourself exposed for all their friends and quickly find yourself cut down by incoming fire.
That means having an earthquake ready to stun incoming fighters is essential to saving your life, since it allows you to grab kills while keeping your head down. Similarly, abilities like the Trickster’s teleport, which instantly puts you behind enemies in cover, are just as useful for dramatically repositioning yourself across the battlefield as they are for eliminating foes. But you can rarely just go all-out with your guns and abilities–you really have to think about where you are, where your enemies are, and how you can best eliminate them without exposing yourself.
It can feel unintuitive at first, but when you do find the balance between using your powers, healing yourself, and staying out of fire, Outriders creates some pitched, frantic battles that use cover just enough to give you a second to breathe, without pinning your shoulder to a single chest-high wall and leaving you there for minutes on end. As you hit tougher battles in the late game, the combination of overwhelming enemies and incredible powers and guns mixes together to create some explosive, nail-biting battles. These fights also highlight how well Outriders’ modding system works, even if it is a bit awkwardly implemented. Earning new mods requires you to scrap armor and weapons that already include them, and you can only change one of two mod slots on any given item, so figuring out how it all works can be a bit confusing. When you spec out your gear to make your powers and guns stronger, adding defensive buffs, higher damage, and better healing, though, you really start to feel unstoppable, and the game ratchets up the challenge to match.
But there are also times when you find yourself surrounded or cut off, trapped between enemies, unable to kill anything fast enough to heal or escape the onslaught to save yourself. Sometimes a situation just seems unwinnable, forcing you to die and try again. Luckily, Outriders generally only sets you back a bit for these losses, so you can re-enter a fight quickly and try a new approach. Facing tougher Altered enemies, who have powers similar to yours, can result in battles of attrition where you have to cheese the situation by scurrying out of the arena so enemies don’t all chase you down at once. And sometimes, even careful management of powers, cover, and your spacing on the battlefield aren’t enough to save you, and it’s these moments when Outriders can get frustrating because it doesn’t feel like you’re losing for lack of skill.
There are ways to deal with that issue, however. Outriders is largely pretty open and has liberal fast-travel, so you can bail on a mission to go do a side-quest without much difficulty, allowing you to grab rewards that can boost your gear and character. As mentioned, once you get comfortable with the modding system, you can make changes to your loadout that make specific powers more viable, allowing you to really lean into powerful builds that give you an advantage and reward planning and strategy. The difficulty of enemies is also determined by the overall World Tier level, which rises as you earn experience points alongside your character. World Tier also determines loot drops, so there’s an incentive to keep it on the highest level you can, but if you’re in a particularly annoying fight, you can always back it down a touch to keep yourself from stalling. The World Tier is a smart solution to the difficulty problem, and since it can be adjusted any time, it gives you a lot of freedom to avoid frustration at key moments.
The combinations of over-the-top guns, ridiculous superpowers, and huge groups of enemies creates some awesome combat moments. Outriders might not reinvent any of the ideas at play in its battles, but it mixes them all together in some really inventive ways. Not every single battle in the game works exactly as intended, but it’s not a problem with the mix–it’s when the arena layout of a fight puts your back against the wall, or when you’re not specced out to deal with an unexpected threat.
You can also play Outriders cooperatively, which elevates how frantic and wild combat can become. Having multiple superpowered players working together to stun enemies, teleport behind positions, spread out status effects, and dish out massive damage makes for a bombastic, sensory-overloading combat experience, especially in tougher endgame battles. It’s not a stretch to say that Outriders is best experienced with friends and other players–solo is fun but can get tough, while co-op fighting just continually highlights the game’s best features and encourages you to think creatively about combining powers, guns, battlefield control, and teamwork. After putting about 40 hours into Outriders, I regret not recruiting more pals to work through the main campaign at my side, especially because the game makes it very easy to drop into and play or replay every mission.
Unfortunately, playing together has been difficult since Outriders’ launch. Cross-play between PC and consoles, an element People Can Fly touted throughout the game’s development, is currently disabled (consoles players on separate platforms can currently team up, though). Some players have complained of server connection issues, and while I didn’t encounter any while I played on PC, I did have repeated crashes when connecting with friends and trying to play together. On console the server issues are more prevalent, with lengthy wait times when loading into the game and unexpected disconnects when playing.
These technical issues will likely get cleaned up over time, but right now, Outriders can be tough to play, and it’s frustrating that the game’s always-online nature means even those taking it on in single-player are stuck dealing with some of the problems. People Can Fly has said it’s working to improve the experience, but so far the most frustrating thing about the game has been those times when I was trying to load into an endgame Expedition mission and instead crashed to desktop two or three times before finally getting to play.
When it comes to narrative ambitions, I enjoyed Outriders’ lengthy story, although it winds up being darker and more disjointed than what is implied in the first half or so. People Can Fly has obviously put a lot of time and thought into the game’s lore, and there’s a lot of interesting writing to be found in journal entries and side-quests. What I liked most, however, is the unexpected mixture of desperation and humor. Enoch, the planet where Outriders takes place, was meant to be an idyllic new world for the remnants of humanity to colonize. Instead, it’s a war-torn hellscape where the last vestiges of the human race are literally ripping each other apart. The misery and torment of the situation is exacerbated by the Altered, like your character, who have gained godlike powers.
Coupled with the dark, serious, and gritty sci-fi take are the moments of levity that make Outriders feel human. One mission found a group of cultists sacrificing soldiers to the Anomaly, the weird Enochian storm that destroys electronics, rips apart buildings, disintegrates people, and sometimes bestows superpowers. Rather than plead with the Anomaly worshipers for his life, the soldier attempted to reason with them, explaining that there was nothing supernatural in the strange storms. “It’s just electromagnetic … scientific … sh-t!” the guy yelled before they kicked him over a cliff, and I couldn’t help but laugh. If I were trying to disabuse some fanatical cultists of their misplaced and lethal worship of a colorful electrical phenomenon, I’d likely say something similar.
Unfortunately, the longer it goes on, the less Outriders leans into that mixture of intense topics and blockbuster levity. Things get dark as time goes on, but the road trip-style story abandons examining how to handle being a human-turned-god and instead looks into atrocities related to scientific ethics and colonialism. In the end, it feels like Outriders shifts subjects a few times, leaving a lot of threads hanging and without bringing many to a satisfying conclusion.
But the moments where Outriders is taking daring swings at mixing disparate elements are when it’s at its best. The game is surprisingly deft at combining things that shouldn’t work together: Its story is often funny but similarly severe; its combat requires you to take cover and to charge; its abilities make you phenomenally powerful but prone to overestimating yourself. If you can find the balance in Outriders, People Can Fly’s RPG-shooter finds ways to combine well-worn video game ideas into something new and fun. Especially when you’re accompanied by friends and put the time in to really understand the game’s systems, Outriders rewards you with epic battle moments and a sprawling scope. It left me wanting to continue venturing out into the wilds of Enoch to see what I might find there–and to smash whatever it was with seismic earthquake magic.
Warning: Spoilers for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier through Episode 4 follow.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
It’s time for another edition of Slackin’ Off, where we share a fair amount of theories and/or speculation from the ever-twisting chain on IGN’s Falcon and Winter Soldier Slack channel.
Last week, our editors mused about possible candidates for the mysterious Power Broker. This week’s virtual office chatter mostly revolved around the vicious turn John Walker took when he became a Super Solider, and what that might mean for Sam down the line. Sam, who’s emphatically said that he’d never take the serum if it was offered to him.
In Episode 4, “The Whole World is Watching,” Sam’s history as a counselor for war veterans resurfaced as he tried to get through to Karli Morgenthau, only to have his best-laid plans foiled by an increasingly impetuous John Walker. With Zemo being staunchly anti-Super Solider — a notion that was reinforced this week when he destroyed vials of the serum (and didn’t swipe them in some sort of double-cross) — Karli’s humanitarian plight turning lethal, Sam’s refusal of hypothetical powers, and Walker’s worst tendencies being amplified by the dose he gave himself, The Falcon and the Winter Solider is returning to the MCU’s First Avenger roots, and the idea that Brooklyn boy Steve Rogers was a bit of a fluke as the serum usually warps those who get exposed to it.
Will Cap’s shield get retired for good after the murderous fiasco that ended this week’s episode or will Sam ultimately choose to redeem the idea of Captain America and accept the mantle? Or was Karli right when she said that Captain America was a dead idea, one that now only represents those left behind, and marginalized, by history? Is the idea of Captain America worth preserving or does the post-Blip world of the MCU need something different?
Read on further for some fun behind-the-scenes theorizing that we’ve been bouncing around at IGN in the wake of Episode 4. Oh, and be sure to drop your own take on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in the comments — and don’t forget to vote in our poll at the bottom of the page!
Theory: Sam Will Take the Super Solider Serum
Okay, so Sam flat out said that he’d never juice himself up with the Super Solider Serum. Zemo even noted how quickly Sam answered the question, as most people, even the most well-meaning ones, would still hesitate a little.
But is this setting Sam up for a big serum-related decision soon? He said he doesn’t want to be a Super Solider but… doesn’t that make him the best person to be a Super Soldier? You want someone who’s humble and knows the dangers of the dose. Steve may have been one in a million, but Sam’s already got the correct mindset for someone who gets the jab. One of the biggest problems with Walker is that he’s a “good soldier” but a flawed man. And a man who’s already been emotionally scarred by his time in combat.
Sam taking the serum doesn’t mean he’ll choose to be the new Cap, but he might have his hand forced, and take it in order to stop Karli, Walker, a combination of the two, or something else. Throughout these four episodes, Sam’s grown more willing, and more capable, of defusing a situation through dialogue and negotiation. This is the person you want leveled up by the Super Soldier Serum. Karli thinks it’s naive to believe that, in this new world, heroes shouldn’t get blood on their hands. That sounds a lot like Nick Fury when he tried to tell Steve that “SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be.” Which was basically the entire line of thinking that allowed Hydra infiltration and Project Insight to almost kill millions.
Then again, there is a strong counter-argument that the last thing Sam would do is take the Serum.
Theory: Sharon Is Working With Karli
Yes, Karli could have found out all that information about Sam’s sister, the names of his nephews, and where Sarah’s dock was from expert hacking or some sort of off-screen computer hijinks, but if you consider who Sam was in contact with during Episode 4, who he was asking for favors, there might be a deeper connection between Sharon Carter and Karli (Sharon, of course, still being the prime suspect for the Power Broker).
Whether Sharon is the Power Broker or not, there’s probably still some sort of connection between her and Karli, given Madripoor and the fact that Sharon’s also pretty damn disillusioned these days and most likely also opposes the return of hard set borders and old-era political strife. Somehow Karli knew where and how to steal the serum from the Power Broker, and her entire faction feels like it has someone more powerful behind it (even if she doesn’t know it), so it stands to reason that Sharon could be assisting Karli here and there. She could even be playing Karli from both sides, as both an ally and a (Power Broker) enemy.
Theory: U.S. Agent Is the Only Way Forward for Walker
From what we can tell, John Walker just blew his big gig as Captain America. Whether he’ll get immediately stripped of his status or continue on until the end of the season as a wild-card adversary is unknown, but it’s pretty clear that, after killing a defenseless man in cold blood in front of the entire world, he can’t be Cap. He’s a Super Soldier now though, and the government isn’t just going to trash a valuable asset like that. He both ruined and saved his career by giving himself the final vial of serum. It allowed him to act out violently, on his worst instincts, but it also sort of made him indispensable.
Sure, he could just get locked up and experimented on like poor Isaiah Bradley but most likely Walker’s path, like it was in the comics, is for him to become U.S. Agent – a tool for the government without the fanfare and presumed heroics that come with the Cap mantle.
Theory: The Power Broker’s Identity Will Come at the Very End
With only two episodes to go, one would hope the Power Broker doesn’t enter the mix now as a whole new enemy to deal with. At this point, having gone two full episodes without a Broker reveal, it’s probably best to save the big moment for the very end of the season – or even for the inevitable post-credits scene.
For the sake of cleaning up some of the clutter, the Power Broker should just continue on as a lingering MCU character. One who can be dangerous but also useful – kind of like what Zemo has become.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Did you have any lingering questions or theories? Share them below, and vote in this week’s poll too!
First shown off during the March ID@Xbox showcase, Soup Pot is the debut title of Manila developer Chikon Club. The adorable-looking cooking game captured my attention with the reveal that it possesses no fail states (a rarity for cooking games), so I caught up with Chikon Club’s Trina Pagtakhan and Gwendelyn Foster to talk about how the game grades the player without failing them.
Eventually, our conversation turned to other aspects of Soup Pot, such as the game’s connection to real-world events. Soup Pot sees you play as someone stuck indoors during a pandemic, teaching yourself how to cook in order to pass the time and have something to eat. Your only human interaction are the chat rooms for your livestreams that document your efforts and conversations with the people delivering ingredients to your door. You also fill your downtime by scrolling through a fictional cooking-based social media site called Cookbook, where you’ll remain apprised of what’s going on in the world. So even though Soup Pot is a cute, humor-focused exploration of Filipino and Southeast Asian cuisine, there’s a meaningful underlying narrative thread to the game too.
My conversation with Pagtakhan and Foster is transcribed below. Edits have been made to aid in readability. Soup Pot is scheduled to launch for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC in August.
Why make a game with no fail states? Cooking games have kind of almost always included some form of grading system.
Pagtakhan: Oh, but we do have a different way in which the game judges the player. So we didn’t want to put in a fail state because we wanted to encourage experimental cooking and having fun in the kitchen. So for the judging part, there’s this chat box that’s filled with your relatives who are either roasting you or praising you for the decisions you make in the kitchen. So if you put too much salt, they’re going to go like, “Oh, that’s too much salt. What are you doing?” And then if you bake it perfectly, they’ll go like, “Oh, perfect, perfect. That’s my niece right there.”
Hearing the food make little sounds as you pick it up and cook it is really cute–where did the idea for the food to “talk” come from? Why add a feature like that?
Pagtakhan: Oh, when we first started making this game, we initially just wanted to make a simple cooking game, and then it somehow evolved into a meme game in the process. And we also had Gian, our audio designer who was just making songs for us, saying these ingredient names in a gremlin voice. And then he added it into the game, and he kind of edits it to make it sound really cute. So, I think that’s one of the reasons why our game blew up in the first place.
Is the player the only character in the game, or are there other characters that they can interact with?
Foster: So, we are actually in the process of implementing a chat option. In the marketplace, you can ask for delivery. I don’t know if you’ve been in the Facebook marketplace, or if it’s the same there as it is here, but whenever somebody posts like, “Here is 70 kilos of fresh radish for a thousand dollars,” and then somebody annoyingly goes, “How much?” even though it’s already in the description. So that’s one of the things you can interact with.
You can also interact with the delivery people–this is a pandemic, that’s the reason why you’re streaming in the first place: You’re suffering from the pandemic, and you have to feed yourself. So that’s why you’re chatting with new people.
Oh, so this game takes place during a pandemic? Does Soup Pot have real-world connections to COVID-19 then that will be explored through the Cookbook social media app?
Pagtakhan: On the newsfeed on Cookbook, we will be putting in fake news articles, but they’ll be somewhat similar to real-world COVID-related events, like how the prices of the vegetables hike or plummet and how that affects the market.
Cookbook is how your character is able to stay connected to the outside world.
So how does that news feed work? Will Cookbook randomly update over time, or does the player have to do something in order to see new posts?
Foster: It’s both [laughs]. We have a timeline, but once you finish a certain number of recipes, then certain news events trigger–we wanted to do non-linear storytelling. So the news posts come in depending on the progress of the player. It’s initially a bit of fun, and then [the news] gets alarming. But the whole point of the social media is that it makes the downtime while cooking more enjoyable. And, in real life, people’s behavior during their downtime usually has them go through their phones. So we want to mimic that. There is evergreen news that just comes in at any time, whether it’s like facts about customs or beliefs. And then we have breaking news.
Do you get a sense of who someone is based on what they post to Cookbook, or how they comment on news posts?
Foster: Yeah. You will eventually discover who does fake news because of the pandemic. There is so much misinformation. It’s to recreate [the real-world]. There are certain things that would have gotten better if the proper information had been independently disseminated earlier.
Sounds like Soup Pot is a bit of a political game hidden beneath the trappings of a cutesy cooking game then.
Pagtakhan: On the surface, it’s a meme game, but it is a political game in a way that it informs people that there is absolutely really important stuff happening outside. But it’s not freaky. It’s just there to kind of act as a reminder for you. It’s a funny game, but also kind of serious.
Ah, so you got to dig past the meme to see the truth.
Pagtakhan: Yeah, you got to dig past the meme.
Is there a way to capture your creations in the game–like, take photos of your food or write down your own recipes?
Foster: Yeah. You can plate your dishes in any way, and then–essentially, you have like a profile where you can post your creation.
Pagtakhan: Our UI and UX director is also doing this avatar creator inside the game too so you can have a fake profile picture.
Foster: And then your profile is essentially like a real-life profile. You can post typewritten posts, and every time you take a photo, you can look back later and see your achievements.
You’ll have to multi-task in Soup Pot, moving about your kitchen and preparing different ingredients all at once (like real cooking) as opposed to playing through a collection of self-contained minigames.
Are there aspects of the game that take inspiration from Filipino or Southeast Asian culture beyond the food–the layout of the kitchen, for example?
Pagtakhan: Actually, for the kitchen, aside from the Filipino kitchen that we showcased in the trailer, we’re also planning to add a Japanese and a Korean kitchen via DLC. At launch, we’ll be showcasing the Filipino food alongside the Japanese and the Korean food DLC so that you can recreate more recipes.
Aside from that, people commenting on your stream, your relatives, they’re rooted in Asian culture. So you usually have these really judgy aunties, and so the chat will say things like, “Oh no. Why are you cooking like that? You should just go wash the dishes or something.” And then some uncles are going to go, “Oh, good cooking. Now you can marry a husband.” Things like that. And, back to the social media aspect, of course, there’ll still be some of those trolls, which will depend on the news, what kind of people you encounter, and what personalities they all have.
Foster: To answer your question, the more DLC that we have, essentially the more culture your social media will have. Like the Philippines was a colony of Spain for so long, so when you look at Mexican food, there are similar influences–like we actually have handmade tortillas here, though we do not make them like the way Mexicans make their corn tortillas.
We were also occupied by the Japanese before, so we actually have a lot of Japanese people, in general, here–they’ve been integrated into our culture. You learn how to use chopsticks at an early age here, both from the Chinese and Japanese influence. And then we have a lot of Koreans studying abroad in the Philippines. So there’s always a Korean grocery down the street. There was something that I read–I think a couple of years ago–that said that Brazilian food and Japanese food, even though they’re separated by oceans, have similar methods of preparation.
We’re only starting with Filipino food because it’s what we know. But at the same time, moving forward, I mean, even with the internet and everything, and even pre-pandemic, the more exposed you are to food, the more you realize how we’re all the same anyway.
So that’s why there are certain recipes in Filipino culture that we found in Portuguese or in Brazilian culture. I feel that, down the line, the more recipes that we have, the more integrated the cultures will apparently be. Especially in a world where there’s currently no international travel and there’s racism, the best way to just connect with people is through food that you’re sharing.
The releases of Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible 7 have been delayed. According to Deadline, the Top Gun sequel will now hit theaters on November 17, 2021, while the next Mission Impossible movie will arrive on May 27, 2022, which is Memorial Day weekend in the United States.
Both of these high profile Tom Cruise films are distributed by Paramount. Top Gun: Maverick was previously set to arrive on July 2, having been delayed several times prior to that. Production on the movie was completed in June 2019 and the first trailer was released at San Diego Comic-Con the following month.
The currently-untitled Mission Impossible 7 was originally set to arrive in July this year, before being pushed to the November date that Top Gun: Maverick now occupies. The movie recently finished production. The initial plan was for MI7 to shoot back-to-back with MI8, but in February, it was reported that Cruise’s promotional duties for Top Gun: Maverick meant that this was no longer happening.
Top Gun: Maverick also stars Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, and Ed Harris. It’s directed by Joseph Kosinski, who previously directed Cruise in 2014’s Oblivion. Mission Impossible 7, meanwhile, stars Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley Atwell, and Simon Pegg, and is helmed once more by Christopher McQuarrie.
These date changes follow the recent news that Paramount will be moving its big movies to Paramount+, the studio’s new streaming platform, after 45 days in theaters.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
A new gameplay trailer for the upcoming open-world MMO survival game The Day Before has arrived, and it’s giving off some major The Last of Us vibes. The game is set in a post-pandemic America where zombies are a constant danger and the remaining humans are fighting to control what precious few resources remain.
The 13-minute gameplay trailer from IGN provides the best look at the game yet. We see a player driving down a muddy road in an SUV who pulls into a dilapidated gas station to collect resources. Zombies show up and the player mows them down with an assault rifle and a pistol.
The trailer also shows off the game’s crafting system and some of the attention to detail in the environments. There is also a particularly tense encounter where the player tries to turn off a house alarm… but it doesn’t go so well.
The Day Before is developed by Fntastic, which is headquartered in the coldest city on Earth–Yakutski Russia. The developers don’t all live there, however, as Fntastic is an all-remote studio.
The Day Before is not the first large-scale zombie MMO game, as it follows the likes of DayZ, DayZ, Rust, and others.
Now you can spend more than a PS5 or Xbox Series X on an Optimus Prime figure that transforms itself. Hasbro announced the high-tech robotics toy at Hasbro Pulse Fan Fest, the company showcase of its upcoming lineup. The Optimus Prime Auto-Converting Programmable Advanced Robot – Collector’s Edition is available to preorder for $700. It’s estimated to ship on August 2.
The collectible is the result of a partnership with Robosen Robotics. Hasbro says the Optimus Prime can automatically convert between vehicle and robot form, race in its vehicle form, walk in its robot form, and respond to control commands by voice or mobile app. It will respond to voice commands like “Roll Out,” “Convert,” and “Attack.” It also features programmable tools for you to make your own functionality.
The figure measures 19 inches tall when in robot form and includes a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Plus, it is still a toy after all, so it comes with a battle axe and blaster, along with a charging cable and travel case. It’s based on the G1 (original) Optimus Prime look.
Gallery
“We are thrilled to collaborate with Hasbro and look forward to ushering in a new standard of robotics with the most advanced Transformers robots for consumers ever created,” said Robosen USA director Sean Tang. “The team is working hard to deliver an amazing user experience for fans of this esteemed franchise and produce Transformers that will be a premium addition to their collection with its superior functionality.”
