Author: Trafficblast

Final Fantasy 7’s Honeybee Inn sequence has been iconic since the original, and the recent Remake introduced a number of changes that made it more festive, inclusive, and memorable. But some of the originally proposed changes for it were just a bit too exuberant for the final cut.

In a Square Enix-published interview with the game’s co-director Motomu Toriyama, he says that Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Honeybee Inn choreography originally contained a pole dancing scene for which at least some filming was done. However, it was ultimately scrapped.

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“For [the Honeybee Inn] scene, we commissioned a team of professional dancers that create burlesque shows and choreography. They proposed changing the concept and choreography for each section of the dance-off.

“We actually went through multiple recordings and corrections when making the scene.

“Initially, for example, there was a pole dancing scene included, which meant that filming began on an elaborate set. We decided to take that part out due to the impact on the rating!”

Toriyama goes into quite a bit of detail about how the team wanted to makeover the Honeybee Inn sequence for Final Fantasy Remake to both satisfy fans of the original who expected to see Cloud crossdressing, while also making the event more of a celebration. He came up with the idea to create a musical number on stage as the central attraction, taking inspiration from traditional Parisian cabaret and burlesque dance shows.

“Given how famous the cross-dressing was in the original Final Fantasy VII, we were aware that people would have high expectations for the remake,” he said. “We knew we had to do it in a way that both lived up to those expectations, but took modern sensibilities into consideration.

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“For example, fans these days expect stories and dialogue in games to go beyond stereotypical depictions of gender. Through Andrea’s lines and the lyrics of the backing track, Stand Up, we tried to build in a positive and supportive message for Cloud during his cross-dressing scene.”‘

Other changes occurred throughout the development of this section. For instance, Toriyama says Cloud and Andrea originally had a longer section of dialogue that had to be cut down to fit the music. Another idea had Andrea meeting with Cloud at a bathhouse and giving him a massage in a scene that would have been a bit closer to the original.

Toriyama says that more scenes in the Remake sequels could differ significantly from the original and that players should look at the Honeybee sequence as a good example of how the developers at Square Enix could change things up.

Ultimately, the various twists and turns Honeybee Inn took worked out into an incredible spectacle of a sequence, one of many improvements to the original game that led to us being so impressed with its ability to breathe new life into a classic. Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade is out on PS5 now with a number of improvements including a new storyline with Yuffie, and we’re eagerly waiting to see what changes to the original script are in store for Part 2, which is now in development.

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Revealed at the Summer Game Fest Kickoff live event and then further detailed at the Xbox Showcase Extended, The Anacrusis is an upcoming four-player cooperative first-person shooter where you and your allies fight through waves of alien monsters. If that seems like an alien variation of Left 4 Dead, it should! The game is developed by Stray Bombay, a studio co-founded by Kimberly Voll and Chet Faliszek, the latter of whom is an ex-writer for Valve who penned Left 4 Dead.

I reached out to Stray Bombay to ask the studio about The Anacrusis’ overall narrative and how it plans to deliver a story over the course of folks’ many replays. Keeping in mind that players will replay the game multiple times, Stray Bombay has designed The Anacrusis to have “hundreds” of stories.

“The Anacrusis is created to be infinitely replayable,” Faliszek said. “That means the action, your tools, the enemy spawns are different each time you play. While the story isn’t infinite, we understand how people will play the game and that replayability shapes the way we tell the story.”

“The first time you play, you will get the goal-focused version of the story–we need to go here, do this, and take that over there. But when you play it again, experienced players don’t need that information. Instead, we have hundreds of other stories that we’ll tell the player to give them insight into the world, the characters, and the events playing out around them. We saw how smart players were with the little bit of environmental storytelling we gave them in the Left 4 Dead series so we wanted to expand upon that–more hints, clues, and information that they can piece together as they play.”

According to Faliszek, the team decided on this episodic style of storytelling from the very start. “And delivering that story episodically instead of just dumping it all at once lets us create cliffhangers and raise questions that payoff in later episodes,” he added. “Think: HBO series meets Left 4 Dead storytelling spanning multiple seasons.”

The story in The Anacrusis is meant to evolve over time, though how far it goes is yet to be seen. It’s possible that the first few runs through are simply a precursor to the main event, if the title of the game is anything to go by.

“The anacrusis is the beats before the song starts,” Faliszek said. “In the game, we’re with characters, caught up in something they didn’t create, in the beats before the alien fight turns to soldiers, pilots, and space fighters.”

The Anacrusis is scheduled to release for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC later this year, with cross-play support at launch. It will be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one.

FX Networks has released the first full-length, official teaser for the highly anticipated Hulu debut of the American Horror Story spin-off–somewhat confusingly titled American Horror Stories. The anthology series will hit the streaming service starting July 15, with two episodes back-to-back.

This first teaser, titled “Rubber Woman” at first glance doesn’t seem particularly creepy based on name alone. But as you can see for yourself in the clip below, it’s full of imagery that’s unsettling, unnerving, and noticeably paying homage to the infamous red room from everyone’s favorite disturb-athon, Twin Peaks.

Of course, it’s hard to exactly discern what this clip above might mean for the show itself, but at least we won’t have long to wait to find out. (We do at least know that the show is expected to feature throwbacks to characters/creatures from previous episodes from the flagship series.) American Horror Stories promises “a different horror story each episode,” and given that since 2011 the creators of American Horror Story have “sprouted a legion of dedicated fans who anticipate what terrors the next chapter will hold,” they’ve certainly earned the license to keep us in suspense a little longer.

American Horror Stories was recently announced to span 16 episodes, each running one hour, in its first season. Like its similarly titled American Horror Story, the upcoming series is co-created by Ryan Murphy (Glee, Nip/Tuck) and Brad Falchuk (Pose, Nip/Tuck). Later this year, FX–just to make it even more confusing–will air a new season of the unrelated but also similarly titled American Crime Story, which is also produced by Falchuk and Murphy, though instead chronicling true events in self-contained miniseries.

Rocket League is getting a new upcoming event called Summer Road Trip. Starting July 1, the vehicular soccer game will roll out limited-time modes and new classic cars in the item shop.

A total of five bundles will be available, including the Ford F-150, Summer Formal, Knight Rider, Back To The Future, and Jurassic World bundles. Four of them will feature an iconic car like the Ford F-150, KITT (Knight Rider bundle), DeLorean (Back to the Future bundle), and the Jeep Wrangler (Jurassic World bundle). One of them, the Summer Formal, is exclusively available on July 7 and includes the Fancy Formal decal for the Octane. There’s no information available yet on what the bundles will be priced.

The limited-time modes include Heatseeker Live, 2v2 Beach Ball Live, 3v3 Dropshot Rumble, Rocket Labs: 3v3 Loophole Live. They won’t all go live at once; dev Psyonix will sprinkle them across the weeks of July:

• July 1-7: Ford F-150 and Heatseeker Live
• July 7: Summer Formal
• July 8-14: Knight Rider and 2v2 Beach Ball Live
• July 15-21: Back to the Future and 3v3 Dropshot Rumble
• July 22-28: Jurassic World and Rocket Labs: 3v3 Loophole Live

In Heatseeker, the ball will go towards the opposing net when hit. Beach Ball, like the name implies, features a lighter beach ball than the usual soccer ball. In Dropshot Rumble, the rules of the game have been tweaked to breaking hexagon panels on the floor with the ball instead of the usual ball-in-net goal. Loophole asks players to score points by dropping the ball into holes on the floor.

In other Rocket League news, a Formula 1 crossover DLC was recently released. It costs $20 and includes decals like the Alfa Romeo and McLaren.

Rocket League is available free-to-play on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PC, and macOS.

A Chinese court has cancelled an auction for a criminal’s possessions after public bidding reached an unexpected $13.4 million. It is believed that the bids are an attempt to win a rare Yu-Gi-Oh card that is among the possessions.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the card in question is a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, contained in a special Yu-Gi-Oh Official Card Game 20th Anniversary frame. It is one of 500 limited edition cards that were released in 2019, and so very rare.

However, the card is currently valued between 200-300,000 yuan (approximately $31-46,000), and so the bidding reaching 87 million yuan ($13.4 million) is far beyond what experts would expected for the card, even among collectors. As such, the auction was suspended, with the auctioneers suspecting foul play.

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“The price is seriously inconsistent with the actual bidding price, and malicious bidding behaviour is suspected,” the auction platform, Alibaba Group, told the South China Morning Post in a statement.

More than 18,000 people bid on the card, which hit 500,000 yuan (approx. $77,000) in a matter of minutes. Considering it is unclear if the card is authentic or not – no checks have been made to ensure the card is not fake – then the bids are unusual.

The card in question previously belonged to Zhang Yujie, who was sentenced to life imprisonment last year due to embezzling millions of yuan from a government fund. Due to his life sentence, all his belongings are to be auctioned.

Blue-Eyes White Dragon isn’t a good card, though, at least according to our anime club back in 2015. For more bizarre news from the popular anime card game, check out our story of how a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament penalized players for being smelly.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.

Halo developer 343 Industries is looking into massively increasing the player count of Halo: The Master Chief Collection multiplayer matches.

Talking as part of an Xbox livestream, Sean Swidersky, Producer at 343 Industries, said “We’re doing some investigations on increased player counts above 16.”

343 Industries is doing investigations on increased player counts beyond 16 players for Halo MCC!
Up to 40-60 players potentially. pic.twitter.com/Lh9kWZg0Ch

— Mint Blitz (@MintBlitz) June 22, 2021

That investigation is looking at increasing the player count to as much as 60 players in a match.

“Halo is epic,” said Swidersky. “If we can add more people, which you can, but obviously with the performance on some of the other consoles… if we can add that kind of stuff to go higher than 16 players in these classic games, and hell, get up to 40, 60… you know what I mean? It would be wild.”

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Halo: Master Chief Collection is an Xbox One game, and so needs to run on the original Xbox One hardware from 2013, as well as the new Xbox Series X|S consoles. It’s worth remembering that the original Xbox One came before Microsoft’s drive to produce the world’s most powerful console, and so is feeling distinctly last-gen now. However, if 343 Industries can make it work, we could be seeing significantly higher player numbers in Halo matches. Quite how that will work in maps designed for 16 players… well, that’s another problem for 343 to investigate.

For more from Master Chief, check out what we learned from the Halo Infinite multiplayer reveal, and the latest trailer from E3 2021.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.

Harrison Ford injured his shoulder during a fight scene rehearsal for Indiana Jones 5, but filming is proceeding around him while he is treated and recovers.

Disney has confirmed the injury to Deadline, but the extent of the injury hasn’t been disclosed. “Production will continue while the appropriate course of treatment is evaluated, and the filming schedule will be reconfigured as needed in the coming weeks,” reads the company statement.

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This isn’t the first time Ford has injured himself on set in recent years. In 2014, he had surgery following an accident on set for Star Wars: The Force Awakens that involved a door on the Millennium Falcon causing him to break his leg. Though it delayed some aspects of filming at the time, Ford fortunately made a full recovery.

Indiana Jones 5 began filming this month across the UK, and the film is planned for release on July 29, 2022. The movie’s story has been confirmed to conclude Indiana Jones’ journey, and includes co-stars Mads Mikkelson, Boyd Holbrook, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Thomas Kretschmann. We got our first peek at Ford in full Jones regalia earlier this month.

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Harrison Ford has reportedly been injured while rehearsing a fight scene for Indiana Jones 5, according to Deadline. The full extent of his injuries aren’t yet known, but it involves the actor’s shoulder.

Deadline is also reporting that director James Mangold (Logan, Ford vs. Ferrari) will continue to shoot around Ford’s recovery. The actor is 78, and an appropriate course of treatment is currently being evaluated. It’s not yet known whether this will impact the expected release date of July 29, 2022. Filming for the highly-anticipated sequel recently began in the UK, and some fan-snapped images capturing the man himself in the leather jacket and fedora–and COVID mask–have quickly started appearing online.

In addition to Ford, Indiana Jones 5 will feature Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Hannibal actor Mads Mikkelsen. The movie is being directed by James Mangold, who took over for Steven Spielberg after he dropped out, making Indiana Jones 5 the first entry in the entire series to not be directed by him.

This upcoming sequel, whose plot and title hasn’t yet been announced, is the follow-up to 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The franchise is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, with Raiders of the Lost Ark hitting theaters back in 1981.

Similarly, actor Robert De Niro recently sustained a leg injury while he was in Oklahoma filming the new Martin Scorsese movie Killers of the Flower Moon.

Epic Games has pioneered numerous tools for online gaming, two of which it is now going to start distributing for free for any studios to utilize. The company’s anti-cheat software and cross-platform compatible chat solution is being added to the Epic Online Services suite, providing quick and easy access to any engine that is used for games across PC and consoles.

Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat isn’t a new tool, but it has previously only been licensed out by Epic to studios willing to pay. As the prevalence of cross-platform play has grown, Epic has seen the need to provide the software for free given how more and more games are letting players interact with PC–a platform where most cheating software is available.

This is the same anti-cheat software used in massive online games like Fortnite, which is a good example of how effective it can be. It isn’t perfect–cheaters still make it through while some players can be falsely flagged–but it’s likely one of the best solutions for studios that can’t pioneer their own.

This also applies to Epic’s cross-platform voice chat solution, which is also going to be added to the same free suite of tool. This tool allows for both one-to-one and larger party chat and comes with support for chat, agnostic of the platform your game is on. This is also the same solution used for Fortnite, so at least there’s proof of it scaling well with a massive player base.

The Epic Online Services suite isn’t exclusive to the company’s Unreal Engine, making it easy to integrate into other popular and easy to access engines, such as Unity. Epic hopes this will encourage more cross-platform integration for more games, but also a bigger account base as it continues to scale in every direction possible.

Some Sonic Prime concept art has seemingly leaked online, potentially offering fans a first look at Netflix’s all-new Sonic the Hedgehog series.

A Reddit user shared a link to Patrick Horan’s ArtStation post, where the artwork for the show was apparently glimpsed before allegedly being removed by the artist. According to Nintendo Life, Horan originally posted the images alongside a note that revealed he was responsible for “painting” and “cleaning up the layouts and color” of the concept pieces for the Netflix series.

Tails’ Channel, a website and social media channel dedicated to Sonic the Hedgehog news and updates, republished the colorful concept art that was reportedly leaked via the artist, showing the Blue Blur’s next adventure. The preview appears to tease a multiverse caper for Sonic and Tails, with one frame seemingly showing Sonic going toe-to-toe with Eggman and Co.

Breaking: Multiple #SonicPrime concept art found on artist’s portfolio. #SonicNews pic.twitter.com/E7cOp5vPEU

— Sonic the Hedgehog News & Updates · Tails’ Channel (@TailsChannel) June 23, 2021

Netflix’s Sonic Prime will consist of 24 episodes, following Sonic on a “high-octane adventure where the fate of a strange new multiverse rests in his gloved hands.” Whilst that might sound like a familiar premise, the series is said to be more than just “a race to save the universe,” with the streamer noting that Sonic will ultimately find himself on “a journey of self-discovery and redemption.”

The animated series is a collaboration between SEGA and Wild Brain Studio, with the two companies jointly handling production, distribution, and licensing of the series, alongside Ben 10 creators Man of Action Entertainment, who will be serving as showrunners and executive producers on the project, which was accidentally teased towards the end of last year.

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In addition to Netflix’s Sonic Prime, coming in 2022, a second live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie is in the works, with Jeff Fowler, who helmed the 2020 film, reportedly returning to direct the SEGA Sonic-oriented project from a script by Pat Casey and Josh Miller. Officially titled Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the sequel is scheduled to speed into theaters on April 8, 2022.

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Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.