Camrus Johnson is leveling up for the rest of Season 2 of The CW’s Batwoman. Playing the role of Lucas Fox, he’ll become a crime fighter on his own under the guise of Batwing. The CW has revealed the first images of the suit, and it’s fantastic.
The Batwing suit was created by costume designer Maya Mani, who had assistance from Diana Patterson and illustrator Andy Poon. Ocean Drive Leather created the suit, and James Fairley at Amazing Ape sculpted the helmet. Check it out below.
Photo Credit: Justina Mintz/The CW
“I wanted the Batwing suit to represent the bond between father and son, to show the love and respect that Lucius Fox had for his son, Luke,” said Mani. “It was conceived within the realm of a child’s imagination; the suit is a bit fantastical and based on the whimsy of a young boy’s dream–complete with rocket boosters and hidden bits that pop out! The Batwing suit represents the combined talents of a solid team who all came together and met the many challenges of encompassing lights, moving parts and the need for mobility head on, bringing this character to life.”
Batwing will be joining forces with Batwoman–played by Javicia Leslie–to fight some crime, and by crime, we mean cleaning up a mess the duo created during the current season. However, Fox must overcome his own issues before he can fully become Batwing.
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing Batwing since we decided to make Luke Fox a fundamental part of our Bat Team way back in the pilot development stages,” said executive producer Caroline Dries. “I can speak for Cam when I say, So has he! But this character couldn’t come out of nowhere. We built this character from a deeply personal and complicated Luke story that we began setting up in season one, and I look forward to unfolding it over the course of Season 3.”
Batwing made his comic book debut in Batman Incorporated #5 in 2011. At that time, Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham created the character to be the Batman of Africa. Yanick Paquette was the first artist to draw the character Batwing. This wasn’t Fox though. At this time, David Zavimbe was under the cowl–an orphan in the DRC–and had his own vicious villains to battle, like Massacre. Zavimbe eventually retired and Lucius Fox’s son, Luke, took over as Batwing. Like his father, Fox is a genius in tech and a former MMA fighter, so he has all the makings of a great member of the Batfamily.
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For many Fortnite players, the best part of any season is the challenges, and for those players, the Fortnite Season 7 challenges kick things off with a bang, including a challenge that demands you place rubber ducks in Retail Row, Pleasant Park, and Believer Beach. Featuring non-repeating Legendary Quests, the weekly challenges are a lot more varied than they have been for a long time. Here’s how to complete this final Legendary Quest for Week 1 and earn yourself another 30,000 XP.
Retail Row Rubber Duck Location
Drop into the basketball court for the first rubber duck.
Before we locate all three of these rubber ducks, it’s worth knowing that their locations can change from round to round, but just barely. If you drop where this guide says to go, you’ll still find the ducks very close nearby if not precisely where we’ve found them. Having said that, let’s take a quack at it.
In Retail Row, you’ll want to drop near the basketball court on the southeast corner of the named location. Sometimes on the court, sometimes next to the nearby house, your first duck will be right in this area.
Pleasant Park Rubber Duck Location
Like the others, the Pleasant Park rubber duck can swap between a few spots.
In Pleasant Park, you’ll want to look for the gas station along the eastern road in the village. Sometimes it’ll be found right against the podium you see above, and other times it will be on the other side of the gas station, but it will always be right around this spot. Collect this duck to be two-thirds of the way through the challenge.
Believer Beach Rubber Duck Location
After all, what is a pool if not a big bathtub?
One of the Season 7 map changes is also home to your final rubber duck. For this one, you’ll want to search around the pool near the eastern parking lot. We found ours right on the lip of the pool, but it can move just slightly. As always, look for its golden glow to spot it if it’s changed its location just slightly.
When Stonefly promises a chill and tranquil adventure it’s not telling the whole truth. Annika, a capable young pilot searching for her engineer father’s stolen mech, finds herself under frequent attack from the bugs that protect the resources she so desperately needs. Much of Stonefly is spent propelling your insectoid mech through an arboreal maze, hopping from leaf to leaf and catching the breeze to higher layers of canopy. But the various minerals you must extract to craft mech upgrades are fiercely protected, and so the game’s rhythm becomes one of sedate exploration punctuated by frantic skirmishes.
While Annika can modify her mech for combat, improving existing functions and installing new ones, the pattern remains the same throughout. While airborne, she can shoot at enemies directly below her; damage them sufficiently–basic enemies take only one hit while the toughest will require multiple strafings–and they flip over onto their backs. Once vulnerable, enemies can be blown off the edge of whatever leaf or branch constitutes the current battlefield, and thus eliminated.
It’s a neat system in theory that echoes the typical shield and health combo of many shooters and other action games. You’ve first got to take out an enemy’s shield by flipping it onto its back, then you can target its health by cannoning it out of the arena. Unfortunately, a few additional factors contribute to the flow of combat feeling overly chaotic and ultimately frustrating.
For a start, many of the enemies are quite small. Worse, they also tend to be of a similar colour to the resources you’re trying to mine. When the screen is busy with dozens of enemy bugs, several clusters of similarly-hued minerals, and the bullets and impact radii of your shots and your enemies, it is very difficult to properly discern what’s going on. On many, many occasions–at least once every single fight, by my reckoning–I took damage or was bounced out of the arena by something I hadn’t even noticed.
Exacerbating the frustration, the combat controls are overly complicated yet full of redundancies. The jump button launches you into the air. The shoot button also launches you into air, though not quite as high as the jump, before you start dropping bullets and slowly drifting down again. Hit jump a second time while airborne and you dive to the ground, which is not what you want while hovering above an enemy target, while a third button also brings you immediately back to earth. Holding down the left-trigger modifies all the face buttons for a second selection of abilities that sound useful but rarely are, and good luck remembering what does what in the heat of battle anyway.
Blowing a vulnerable enemy out of the arena entails blasting it with a gust of pressurised air, accomplished by holding down right-trigger for a full charge or tapping it for a quick jet. The difference here feels like it should be meaningful, but I rarely had time to wait for a full charge or carefully target with the right-stick. But the fact that both abilities use the same button means that I was all too often accidentally charging when I wanted to tap, or tapping on the few occasions I actually wanted to charge. In both cases, there’s significant knockback, too, and as such it’s all too easy to hurl yourself backwards off a branch when you’re trying to blast the enemy in front of you.
Gallery
Sometimes the combat does come together. When you’re able to read the battlefield clearly, prioritise the immediate threats, and focus on eliminating the most dangerous enemies–and when the controls are doing all the things you want them to do–it feels satisfying to clear an encounter. Recognising that a new wave of enemies will appear when you knock out these specific earlier enemies, or that clearing that resource node will trigger the arrival of these particular enemies, introduces a welcome element of strategy and empowers players to manage the flow of combat, alleviating its frantic nature.
Despite these advantages, you’re still at the mercy of an overly punitive negative feedback loop. Taking damage will gradually incapacitate your mech’s systems, ultimately preventing it from performing any function more advanced than walking around. In the more demanding combat encounters, this usually means that getting hit and losing systems will only increase the likelihood of getting hit again and losing more systems. The more damage you take, the less ability you have to avoid taking even more.
Repairing the mech is tied to a cooldown that is never explained and even after completing the game I never felt confident I understood why I wasn’t able to repair damage now, nor how long I’d have to wait until I could. I’d simply try to dodge enemies until the repair icon lit up again and I could press the button. Scraping through by the seat of your pants in such situations can be a thrill. I enjoyed the moments when the tables were turned and I’d have to spend the next 10 seconds or so desperately trying to disengage, but only when afforded the space to do so, when the play area was large enough to allow a bit of hide and seek. Too often combat occurs in enclosed arenas and you’re penalised for straying beyond their limits. It’s extremely annoying to think you’ve found a moment to recharge only to be picked up and dumped back into the heat of the action because you wandered beyond an arbitrary line.
Stonefly fares better when you’re left to your own devices and encouraged to survey its strange landscape, free from the stress of its combat. You’re expected to learn each area as you explore, with the lack of a detailed map or clear objective markers emphasising that this is not a game that’s going to hold your hand. Despite the alien, almost abstract nature of the terrain, a mental map slowly takes shape as you traverse each area, the contours firming each time you revisit.
Learning the layout is important when every new task requires you to collect increasing quantities of specific resources. Remembering how to navigate to that particularly rich vein of dinotite massages that part of the brain that enjoys performing a methodical task with precision. But it’s also a pleasure to leap into the unknown, drift on a passing breeze and discover what’s around the next tree trunk.
If anything, Stonefly could afford to be a bit weirder. A striking art style, with its low poly environments, garish colours, and scratchy, almost pencil-sketched shadows adding texture, enhances the otherworldly atmosphere. The hints at weirdness are welcome, but it doesn’t go far enough. In the end, it’s just another type of tree or fungus and the leaves are a different colour. There’s still a sense of mystery whenever you first set foot in new territory, but it’s diluted by prior experience of realising that things aren’t going to change THAT much.
Reinforcing that feeling is a structure that offers little deviation. Objectives tend to come in two forms. Sometimes you’re tracking something, typically when first venturing into an area, which involves following the little fireflies that guide you in roughly the right direction until Annika tells you she’s noticed some clues in the environment. It’s disappointing that Annika picks up on these clues herself, without your input, and it ends up feeling like you’re watching her work something out rather than actually participating in the solution.
Gallery
But most of the time you’re heading back into previous areas to gather the resources needed to fulfil your current objective or because you want to craft one of many upgrades. And this is where the grind kicks in. You fly out, beat up some bugs, scoop the minerals they were guarding, and head back. Turns out you still need 500 of that and 800 of this, and if you get another 1,600 all up you can buy this too. So you fly out, beat up the same bugs, scoop the same minerals, and head back. When this is the vast majority of objectives, the process of doing it yet again becomes tiresome. If the narrative pulling you through was stronger, the grindy repetition might be more tolerable. But the story is slight, the promise of its early mystery dissipating into too many dead ends.
Stonefly takes flight in a fantastical world where you glide amongst giant trees, branches twisting improbable pirouettes in the sky. But the initial wonder soon sputters under frustrating combat design and runs aground against the mundane grind of its progression structure.
In a recent appearance on The Tonight Show, iconic actor Robert De Niro confirmed that he “more or less” improvised the “You talkin’ to me?” line from Taxi Driver. For those who haven’t seen the classic 1976 film (and you really should, as soon as humanly possible)–the movie tells the story of Travis Bickle, a taxi driver and veteran whose mental state deteriorates as he works nights in a decaying New York City.
De Niro tells Jimmy Fallon that “more or less” it’s the line people yell out to him most when spotted in public. Added the actor, “[They’ll yell it] from odd places. You know, a bunch of kids pull up next to me… I remember years ago in LA and down in the Valley or somewhere in Culver City, kids pull up next to me in a red light and say ‘you talkin” and I don’t know how they recognize me or whatever.” De Niro said he never responds to fans shouting at him.
The “you talkin’ to me?” line kicks off a speech that has become a pop culture mainstay even today, all these decades later–in 2005 it was ranked tenth on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes, a list of the top quotations in American cinema. In Taxi Driver, De Niro, as Bickle, is staring at himself in a mirror, and imagining a confrontation that would give him the opportunity to draw his gun and use it.
Minecraft’s big new free Caves & Cliffs update is out now on all platforms, ushering in the next wave of mobs and blocks. The update is available for the Bedrock and Java editions of the popular sandbox game across console, PC, and mobile.
Part 1 of Caves & Cliffs is out now, and it adds new mobs and blocks to the game. One of the new mobs is called the axolotl, and it’s “very much a predator” despite how cute it may look, developer Mojang said in a blog post. Another new mob is the goat, which is also cute, but they are dangerous up close. “If you happen to be standing near a body of water when the goat’s head connects with your blocky body, you might be bumped into the glow squid,” Mojang said.
As for the new blocks, these include the dripleaf, pointed dripstone, caves vines and glow berries, azalea and azalea leaves, flowering azalea and flowering azalea leaves, hanging roots, rooted dirt, moss carpet, and moss block. Other new blocks include glowing lichen, powder snow, and deepslate, along with new amethyst geodes. A new element, copper, is also includes with the Caves & Cliffs update, allowing you to craft lightning rods.
Check out the images in the gallery below to get a closer look at the content in the new Caves & Cliffs update for Minecraft.
A long list of new open positions on the Activision Careers website point to a new Call of Duty mobile game. According to the listings, the game is being developed by Activision Mobile, a “new in-house studio, dedicated to developing the best AAA mobile games in the world.”
This is the first time we’ve seen any mention of a new Call of Duty mobile title or Activision Mobile. “We’re incredibly excited to build out our teams and get to work, and invite you to join us in making something special,” ends some listings.
The studio is currently hiring for every imaginable position, including engine programmer, graphics engineer, UI engineer, and product manager. As such, it seems like Activision Mobile is still being built up, so a new Call of Duty mobile game from the studio likely won’t arrive for quite a while.
While Call of Duty Mobile doesn’t receive the same attention from core audiences as other mainline entries in the Call of Duty franchise, it’s still one of Activision’s most lucrative titles. According to Activision, the game has been downloaded over 500 million times since launching in October 2019. Of course, all those downloads come with a massive amount of revenue. From in-game transactions, the free-to-play Call of Duty title has earned Activision over $1 billion since its launch.
We have reached out to Activision for comment and will update this article if, or when, we get a reply.
Call of Duty news doesn’t stop with the somewhat unintentional reveal of a new mobile entry in the franchise. Call of Duty: Warzone’s next season is coming up, and will be previewed on June 10 during the Summer Game Fest.
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Our nation was rocked to its very core at the recent revelation from actor Elizabeth Perkins that Robert De Niro was very nearly her co-star on the classic 1988 dramedy Big, and with him in the adult Josh role, it would have been a “horror movie.” After a few months of leaving us all to convulse in wonder over this surprising information, Jimmy Fallon has thankfully asked De Niro about what happened during a recent Tonight Show appearance.
Whereas Perkins recalls the only reason De Niro didn’t move forward with the role was due to “scheduling conflicts,” the man himself explains: “We had a thing, an issue with the negotiation so it went the way it went, so that was fine.” And that’s all he had to say on the subject. Check out the clip below to hear the man say it himself, even though most likely you can hear his voice in that clipped sentence, anyhow.
Big eventually landed Tom Hanks, thankfully, and Hanks’s most recent film isNews of the World, and he has at least three other movies on the horizon, including playing Geppettoin the live-action Pinocchio. De Niro has two films currently in post-production. Perkins recently had a memorable run on the short-lived Netflix series GLOW, playing Birdie Howard.
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Sony’s next big PlayStation 5 exclusive, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, releases this Friday, June 11. Ahead of that, reviews for the game have begun to appear online, and it looks like Sony has another hit on its hands.
GameSpot’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart review scored the game a 9/10. Reviewer Steve Watts said the game is “flashy and technically impressive without feeling self-important.”
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His review added: “It’s just as silly, sweet, and earnest as the Ratchet & Clank series tends to be, while the new generation of hardware makes this entry look and play better than ever.”
Other reviews beamed about Rift Apart as well, and you can see a sampling of excerpts from reviews below. For more on the critical reception to Rift Apart, head to GameSpot sister site Metacritic. You can also check out GameSpot’s Rift Apart preorder guide.
Game: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Platforms: PS5
Developer: Insomniac Games
Release Date: June 11
Price: $70/£70/$125 AUD
GameSpot — 9/10
“Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is flashy and technically impressive without feeling self-important. It’s just as silly, sweet, and earnest as the Ratchet & Clank series tends to be, while the new generation of hardware makes this entry look and play better than ever. Like the heroes and villains and their dimensional counterparts, this one may appear different or carry itself with a new accent, but there’s an underlying truth to the person underneath. At its core, it’s still your trusty old pals on another grand space adventure. That’s what’s important.” — Steve Watts [Full review]
ScreenHub — 4 Stars
“We will see a lot of this over the next couple of years. Experienced studios equipped with powerful new tools to help better realise existing design ideas and push them to satisfying extremes. They’ll wash us over with waves of audiovisual and tactile splendour, convincing us that the future is here. It’ll be nice. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apartis very nice. But I can’t wait for someone to lead me out further, into those deeper, unknown waters.” — Edmond Tran [Full review]
VentureBeat — 5/5
“Developer Insomniac Games’ new action-platformer is the PS5’s Halo or Super Mario 64: an early standout release that justifies the console’s existence. But like those games, it is also an instant classic by which we will judge the entire upcoming generation.” — Jeff Grubb [Full review]
IGN — 9/10
“Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is a stunner. It not only gives the latest generation of consoles a game that looks as beautiful as the improved tech promised, but it’s also a fantastic experience to play. Insomniac has been around the Ratchet and Clank block plenty of times before, but Rivet and other new characters add so much charm, wit, and heart to a franchise I’ve loved for most of my life. That’s coupled with series-best action-platforming gameplay and incredible art and sound design across the board. Rift Apart may not be the biggest adventure around, but its big heart, wild weapons, and incredible detail easily make it one of the most memorable of the year so far.” — Jonathon Dornbush [Full review]
NME – 4/5
“Rift Apart is entirely what you expect from a new Ratchet and Clank adventure. It’s a joyous, stunning, playable Saturday morning cartoon, providing a generous helping of family-friendly blasting. And that’s both its biggest strength and its greatest weakness. Despite its incredibly slick exterior, there’s little new gameplay wise to really push the envelope or surprise players. Where the constant reinvention of a Mario title keeps the gameplay feeling fresh by bombarding the player with new mechanics, Rift Apart instead relies on visual splendour for its variation, wowing you with a string of setpieces between repeated sections of familiar-feeling gameplay. Those that came away from its initial reveal wowed at its Rift-based premise will leave bitterly disappointed. Still, that’s not to say that there isn’t fun to be had here–and when everything looks this good, it’s easy to forgive a bit of repetition.” — Tom Regan [Full review]
The Guardian — 4/5
“Humour has always been a defining feature of Ratchet & Clank, right back to its origins on the PlayStation 2, but it doesn’t try too hard. It’s funny in a laid-back, undemanding way, and the story is similarly easy to digest. Rift Apart did not exactly challenge me, but it entertained me immensely. It’s just such a lot of fun, and so gorgeous I still can’t quite believe it. If this is an indication of how the new generation of consoles can infuse familiar-feeling games with new wonder, we’re in for a great few years.” — Keza MacDonald [Full review]
Game Informer — 9/10
“I had a smile on my face most of the way through Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. It’s a great continuation of the series that is just a joy to play. It steals your eye with its stunning vistas, makes you care about the characters, and is loaded to the hilt with fan service (especially in the alternate dimension and a weapon you have to assemble). Insomniac clearly had a blast working on this game and leaves us with a tease for an even bigger adventure right before the credits roll.” — Andrew Reiner [Full review]
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A new season of Fortnite means a new landscape of weapons to learn. Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 7 goes heavy on the sci-fi, so there are several new weapons to master, in addition to some previous weapons being vaulted or unvaulted. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the new list of weapons you’ll find across Apollo. Put on your tinfoil hats and get in there with these Fortnite Season 7 vaulted and unvaulted weapons, then stay tuned as we break down all the brand-new weapons first arriving on the island.
Fortnite Season 7 Vaulted Weapons
Dual Pistols, we hardly knew ye.
One of the first questions many players seem to have when a new season of Fortnite launches is: What weapons have been vaulted? In Fortnite Season 7, the list of vaulted (no longer available) weapons isn’t too long, but it might include something you got used to, so check to see what’s absent.
Infantry Rifle
Revolver
Harpoon Gun
Dual Pistols
The lack of a harpoon gun means there’s no other way to fish than with a good old-fashioned pole–okay, or you can still blow up fishing spots with grenades if you’re feeling dangerous. In addition to those, the Flopper fish, Stink fish, and Vendetta fish won’t be found in the waters of the island, at least not right now. Keep in mind that Epic likes to vault and unvault additional items as a season goes on.
The Infantry Rifle was only around for a few weeks of Season 6 before it was vaulted once more, while the Revolver seems to come and go almost alternatingly across Fortnite seasons, so don’t expect it to be gone for long.
Fortnite Season 7 Unvaulted Weapons
After a three-month absence, Snipers are back in Fortnite.
Epic would never remove a bunch of items and not replace them with others. The list of unvaulted weapons is actually even longer than the vaulted list, so players can enjoy access to more weapons at the start of Season 7. Here’s the list:
Bolt-Action Sniper Rifle
Heavy Assault Rifle
Suppressed SMG
Pistol
Hand Cannon
Snipers have returned after taking the entire Season 6 off, to either your dismay or excitement depending on how adept you find yourself to be aiming down the scope. While the Revolver and Dual Pistols depart, two other handguns–the Pistol and Hand Cannon– return to replace them. Joining these weapons, other unvaulted items include the Launch Pad, which can be placed on any player-built flat surface to send you gliding across the map.
Aliens have invaded Fortnite as Season 7: Invasion has begun. Along with new weapons, new locations, and new UFO vehicles, the new season brings a brand-new collectible in Alien Artifacts. What are they and what do they do? We’ve got the answers for you right here.
Alien Artifacts are a new collectible currency similar to the gold Bars in previous seasons. Unlike those Bars however, these artifacts have a specific purpose: unlocking customizable parts for Kymera, the first skin unlocked in the Chapter 2 Season 7 Battle Pass.
Using the artifacts found around the island you can design the Kymera skin to your liking, changing its head shape, eyes, skin color and more. Most options cost between two and 17 artifacts.
Alien Artifacts are located through normal exploration of the island, appearing in random places where they can be collected by walking through them like ammo or materials. It is still unclear whether or not some locations will always spawn artifacts, but the pool of water where the Spire used to be in the center of the map seems to spawn them regularly.
The other method of obtaining Alien Artifacts is through Cosmic Chests, a new type of chest unique to Season 7. Cosmic Chests are loot chests frozen in giant crystals and suspended in mid-air. Opening them requires a team of players, meaning they will only appear in non-solo matches.
To open the Cosmic Chest, your team must do the following:
Locate a Cosmic Chest and have your team gather around it.
Upon activation, a beam of light will attach to one or more members of your team.
Those members must attack specific points on the crystal, and only those members can damage said points.
The beams of light will shift throughout the party, so repeat the steps with all party members until the chest is freed.
Prominent Fortnite Twitter account HypeX has shown gameplay of a squad opening a Cosmic Chest, which you can see below.
Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 7 brings an alien invasion to the island, adding Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty and DC superhero Superman as part of the Season 7 Battle Pass. Check out our full breakdown of what’s new and what to expect when you drop in the middle of the Invasion for the first time, as well as all of the unvaulted weapons and Season 7 Week 1 challenges.
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