Author: Trafficblast

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If you’re currently having some trouble signing into Xbox Live on your brand-new Xbox Series X|Series S (or on any Xbox platform in general), Microsoft is aware of the problem. The Xbox team is working on a fix.

“We’re aware that users are currently unable to sign into Xbox Live on various platforms,” Xbox Support posted on Twitter. “The right teams are looking into the issue and working on a fix.” You can follow the account to get updates on the issue at hand, or stay tuned to the Xbox Live Status page.

Microsoft has officially transitioned into the next console generation following the release of Xbox Series X|S. If you’re thinking of picking up either console but aren’t sure which to go for, editor Michael Higham has you covered with reviews for both. They’re listed below.

Xbox Series X|S Reviews

While you wait for Xbox Live to come back on, you can think about which of the new Xbox Game Pass titles you want to download next. Xbox is adding over 10 titles to Xbox Game Pass this month, including Tetris Effect: Connected, River City Girls, and Destiny 2: Beyond Light.

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Sony’s PS5 promotions appear to focus primarily on the US market and has noticeably pivoted away from Japan. Anonymous Sony employees who spoke to Bloomberg cite PS4’s relatively poor performance in Japan as the reason behind the shift.

Bloomberg’s article lays the math out: While Japan produces 10% of the PS4’s earnings, the US generates 35%, according to Macquarie Group Ltd. analyst Damian Thong. The PS4 also sold less than 10 million units in Japan, as stated by Famitsu, and performed more poorly than the PS3.

Sony disavows that it’s shifting marketing focus. Spokeswoman Natsumi Atarashi stated “our home market remains of utmost importance” and pointed out that PS5 is actually launching in Japan first.

However, company staff on the Japanese side have felt sidelined in PS5’s promotions and said they were “left awaiting for instructions from California.” An unnamed senior employee at PlayStation’s headquarters told Bloomberg they were “frustrated by the failure of the Japan marketing team to sell as many PlayStation 4 units as expected.”

Other signs also point to Sony’s shift in attention from the Japanese market: Reduction in Japan-based developer support teams, online promotional events that lacked Japanese subtitles at times, and a relatively small PS5 stock provided to Japanese sellers. Retailers have stated they’ve received only a few more units than they did of the PlayStation 3.

“It’s analyst consensus that PlayStation no longer sees the Japan market as important,” Morningstar Research analyst Kazunori Ito said. “If you want to know their take on the Japanese market, you need to ask about it because otherwise Sony wouldn’t talk about it.”

Sony’s marketing strategy for the PS5 looks like it will pay off. CFO Hiroki Totoki commented that the company could sell more than 7.6 million PlayStation 5 units in the first five months. Sony’s eventual goal for the PS5 is to match PS4’s lifetime sales and reach 100 million sales.

Check out our PS5 review if you want a first look on what you can expect from the next-gen console.

There’s a narrative reason for why this game is called The Pathless, but the name is also a reference to how it’s supposed to be played. It’s an open-world puzzle game with emphases on exploration and skilled traversal, and you are meant to wander and experience its world as you find it, rather than as a series of checklist objectives. The Pathless’ vast, puzzle-filled nature creates a nice, quiet space for running through the woods, lining up some tricky shots with your bow, and losing yourself in the moment.

In The Pathless, you are a woman simply known as the Hunter. You’ve come to liberate a ruined land, empty of all human life save for a masked villain called the Godslayer. The land’s protector deities, known as The Tall Ones, have transformed into villainous beasts that roam the wilderness. With the help of your eagle, an avatar of the eldest god, you must free the spirits and save the land. The plot is limited–aside from a few sparring exchanges between the Hunter and The Godslayer, the general tenor is simply, “keep going.”

To free the Tall Ones, you must collect their seals and reactivate monuments scattered around their domains. Each of the four regions is a beautiful, sprawling wilderness, with sweeping plains, peaceful rivers, and high rocky peaks. Hills and valleys are sparsely dotted with signs of life, past and present–friendly animals, ruins, and giant skeletons. There are just enough setpieces in each area so that there’s always a new objective on the horizon, without making the world feel crowded or even populated. When you’re running from place to place, you feel like you’re in nature–not a wasteland or a ruin, but somewhere untouched. It feels quite serene to run through.

Despite having very little plot, the world feels rich and textured, thanks to a highly specific architectural style and descriptive notes you’ll find with insight into the land’s history, as well as the Godslayer’s. That specificity makes the world feel more cohesive and lived-in, which in turn makes it more interesting to explore.

You don’t have to scour aimlessly, though: You have a headband, which gives you a special vision mode that highlights areas of interest as well as puzzles you’ve already solved. Even without it, signs of civilization generally lead to some kind of activity. With or without the vision mode, chasing after the glowing red puzzle spots still feels like a sort of directed wandering; you never know what puzzles you’ll stumble across along the way, nor do you know whether a puzzle will reward you with a seal or something else.

And sometimes, your wandering gets interrupted. As you search for seals to save the Tall Ones, they’re hunting you down. A giant red cloud roves around the map, more or less randomly. If you’re caught up in it, you’re forced into a stealth sequence where you must avoid the corrupted god and reach your downed eagle, which is injured by the storm. While it’s a good idea, in theory, to create some conflict, these sequences are more of a nuisance than anything. I always went in impatient, and found that I just wanted to return to exploring or figuring out the puzzle I was on.

Despite her title, the Hunter never kills anyone, and there’s barely any combat in The Pathless. The Hunter has a bow, but it’s mostly used as a traversal and puzzle-solving tool. All around the world, there are floating eye icons, which you can shoot to partially refill your stamina meter and boost your momentum. If you find a rhythm with running, sliding, jumping, and timing your shots well, you can sprint across the world with superhuman speed. It’s an intuitive system, though it takes time to learn how to pick targets and time shots so that you can keep running indefinitely. But, when you do, it almost feels like flying.

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Your other means of conveyance is your eagle friend. After a jump, you can press jump again to have the eagle grab your arm and help you glide across large gaps. If you press jump again, the eagle has a flap ability that will launch you straight into the air, extending your glide. When they don’t lead to seals, most puzzles reward you with golden orbs, which eventually power up the flap to give you additional jumps. A skilled player can basically fly; if you jump from a high point on the map, time your flaps well, and shoot eye symbols to build momentum, you can cover an incredible distance. And surveying the massive world from the air is breathtaking.

When you arrive at a puzzle, the bow and eagle also become your primary puzzle-solving tools. Though there are dozens of puzzles in each zone, they all fall into a few categories. There are a few kinds of trick-shot puzzles. Sometimes you need to line up an arrow to go through a flame to light a set of torches; in others, you need to line up a series of stone rings so you can shoot through them and hit a target. There are switch puzzles, which mostly involve using the eagle to pick up stone weights from afar and placing them as needed. Sometimes you’ll enter an area where a dark aura incapacitates your eagle, forcing you to scale a building without gliding or flapping. Though there are a limited number of puzzle archetypes, they consistently require you to be mindful, which makes them interesting to solve. And there’s something very satisfying about quickly firing off a shot that bounces across five torches, even though there isn’t much skill to it on your part.

And yes, on occasion, you do have to use the bow to fight. Each area gets capped off with a multi-phase boss battle with a glowing, red corrupted beast-god. Though you dodge projectiles and shoot weak points, they feel more like puzzles than boss encounters from more combat-heavy games. Not all the phases play out as combat–one has multiple hide-and-seek sections where you need to stay in cover to avoid getting burnt by fire breath–and the ones that do are pure pattern recognition.

These fights hit some incredible highs and some sore lows. Each one opens with a chase sequence where you have to chain symbol shots to run, catch up with your prey, and then shoot its weak points. Imbuing the traversal with more purpose than merely moving fast really elevates those mechanics, showing how graceful you can be and how fluidly the traversal flows.

On the other hand, the closer the game comes to offering a traditional combat scenario, the more toothless the encounter becomes. You can’t really lose–when you get hit, you lose some stamina and the phase silently resets–so those phases lack teeth. You can make it halfway through one of these sequences four or five times and it just feels like you’re in limbo.

There are only a handful of those moments in the game, though. Most of The Pathless plays to its mechanical strengths, free-form exploration, satisfying movement, and methodical puzzle-solving. At times, that lowers the stakes a little too much, but it maximizes the kind of gameplay the game is named for. For a player like me, who bee-lines for an objective every time, it’s refreshing to simply take things as they come. The Pathless is the rare game that gives you more by not asking too much, and that makes it special.

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One of Netflix‘s most interesting superhero shows is none other than Umbrella Academy. The streaming service announced today that the series is getting a third season.

Umbrella Academy Season 3 will consist of 10 one-hour episodes and will see the return of Steve Blackman as showrunner and executive producer. He’ll be joined by Jeff F. King, Mike Richardson, Keith Goldberg, and Jesse McKeown as executive producers.

Ellen Page, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Justin H. Min, Ritu Arya, and Colm Feore will all be reprising their roles from previous seasons.

Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, the writer and artist of the comic book series the Netflix show is based on, will serve as co-executive producers. Production will kick off in February in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Season 2 of the Netflix series debuted earlier this year, on July 31, and received a glowing review from M Downey, scoring an 8/10: “Umbrella Academy Season 2 manages to thread the needle in a way fans will appreciate. It’s enough of the same to feel comfortable and familiar while bringing enough of the new to the table to remain exciting and engaging. It may take its time getting off the ground and struggle with some early pacing issues, but at the end of the day its massive heart and lovable characters will sell you on even the clumsy pieces.”

The series takes place in a world where 43 women gave birth at the exact same time in 1989–even though none of them showed any signs of being pregnant. Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of them and made them into a superhero team. In present day, the long-estranged siblings are brought back together after their adopted father has died.

Actor, streaming service enthusiast, and Mint Mobile pitchman Ryan Reynolds is back with frenemy Hugh Jackman, promoting a strange and hilarious for-charity feud they’ve started via Sam’s Club. In a tweet Jackman sent out, the actors trade increasingly biting barbs that strangely twist–because of the holidays?–into a plea for forgiveness. Ultimately, they decide the only way to settle who the bigger man is through The Feud, a sweepstakes contest through the membership-only retail warehouse. Yes, it’s a little bit confusing, but it is also very funny.

At Sam’s Club, purchases of Laughing Man coffee go towards the foundation of the same name selected by Jackman, which helps support “coffee farming communities by investing in programs that clear the way to health, growth, and success for coffee farmers and their families.” Or, as Reynold’s says on the website: “Make every cup of coffee count. So Hugh can finally win something.”

Reynolds, meanwhile, is pushing Aviation American Gin, which will support SickKids Foundation, a charity “fighting for the health and well-being of children.” Jackman’s diss reads, “The gin’s pretty great. I’ll have to try it someday.”

At least right now, Jackman may have the edge–Reynold’s movie Free Guy was just bumped by Disney+ off the release schedule for this year.

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