It’s the final episode of Generation Next. And while most of GameSpot is looking back at the year that was in regards to the Best Games of 2020, the Generation Next crew are taking this week to look forward to 2021.
2021 is full of possibility. Both Xbox Series X|S and PS5 will have been out in the wild for a few months by the time it kicks off, so we’re sure to start seeing more and more announcements for games exclusively releasing for the new console generation. Lucy, Tamoor, and Jordan are already looking forward to the year, especially for the release of the sequel to 2018’s God of War as well as the possibility of hearing about more Elden Ring and Hollow Knight: Silksong.
But let’s dream big, yeah? It worked for Tamoor in his prediction that Demon’s Souls would launch alongside PS5. The trio talk through their “it probably won’t happen but like, what if it did” predictions for 2021, including Anthem 2.0 being surprisingly good and Bluepoint releasing a remake of the original Metal Gear Solid.
And with that, Generation Next–GameSpot’s weekly show dedicated to discussing everything and anything about Xbox Series X|S and PS5–comes to a close. Y’all have been a great audience, and we’ll see you in the new year with more original content. Generation Next may not return, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of something else taking its place. Stay tuned!
I was quite a young girl when I first got interested in video games. It was something of an awkward transition. At the time, games were largely considered “boy toys,” so moving from typical “girly” things like princess dolls and My Little Ponies into gaming was jarring at times, especially since not a lot of games catered to the cute, colorful things I’d been enjoying at playtime to that point. Sure, I loved the fantasy worlds of Mario and Sonic, but I also wished there was a fun gaming playspace for me that echoed the fluffy-cats-and-rainbow-unicorns aesthetic of my Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers.
Had my third-grade self seen Calico, an open-world animal cafe and social interaction game, she would have lost her mind. Calico embraces an aesthetic and theme that is shamelessly, unabashedly girly in the best ways–a world of happy magical girls living in pastel-colored lands with fluffy, cotton-candy trees where all kinds of lovable animals roam freely. But while Calico’s concept and visuals are a delight, the simplistic, bug-ridden gameplay dragged me kicking and screaming out of the childhood fantasy world I so wanted to exist in.
Calico is very cute (screenshots captured on PC).
Calico starts off with your created player character inheriting a cat cafe in a faraway world where magic is very real and a part of everyday living. Your job is to fill your little cafe with animals, decorations, and cute kitty-themed pastries while exploring the world and helping your new friends with various errands. It’s a very laid-back, play-as-you-please experience in the vein of other life-sim games, but with an air of play and fairy magic baked in: You can buy potions with funny effects to use on yourself and your animal friends, like shrinking down to mini-size to cook, zooming around while riding on giant red pandas and bunnies, decorating your house with clouds, flowers, and cat paws, and collecting basically any animal in the game (that isn’t already someone else’s pet) to be a part of your cafe or your traveling posse.
You’ll meet plenty of new faces as the game progresses, including potion-making witches, nature-loving flower friends, and even a few furry human/animal hybrid folk. Many of them will ask you for help with various minor problems, like rounding up animals or baking a specific treat to give to a pal, and will reward you with money, fashion, furniture, and recipes for the cafe. You won’t find anything in the way of conflict or combat here–the worst that happens is some characters feel awkward talking to each other and need you as a go-between. At certain points, you’ll need to open up a new section of the world, which involves completing a specific quest chain, in order to progress further.
It’s a very basic gameplay loop, but also Calico’s biggest problem: It’s very simplistic. If you’re expecting even a basic cafe-running simulation, you’ll be sorely disappointed, as there’s very little you actually do with the cafe besides set up furniture and sometimes bake things. You mostly run errands and finish simple quests until the ability to unlock the next area opens up, then repeat the process. There’s a decent amount you can do outside of this–there are lots of toys you can use to play with animals, fashion items to collect and wear, and creatures to find and archive in your notebook–but it starts to wear thin fairly quickly, especially because rewards feel so sparse. There aren’t many surprises; you won’t be given spontaneous gifts or hear random weird conversations like in Animal Crossing, and there’s rarely incentive to improve the cafe or run it well beyond the occasional request from a friend for a specific animal or decoration.
An interior in Calico.
Calico is also plagued with numerous bugs. While things like clipping and funny movement of characters or animal friends are forgivable, Calico has a fair few disruptive bugs that can ruin the game flow and, at worst, require a restart. During play, I’ve found myself getting trapped inside objects, starting conversations with characters that end abruptly for no apparent reason, and even get tasked with questlines that I shouldn’t be able to because the area in question isn’t open yet. It’s also worth noting that the Switch version runs quite poorly in comparison to the PC version: I played both, and eventually had to move to PC because the choppy frame rate and visual hiccups in the Switch version became a literal headache.
My eight-year-old self would have absolutely loved Calico to bits, I’m sure. Unfortunately, I am no longer a wide-eyed, curious 8-year-old girl–I’m a game reviewer whose tolerance for bugs and simplistic gameplay has worn thin over the decades. As much as I wish I could view Calico through the eyes of an imaginative youngster, I can’t. Perhaps if you are better at embracing your childlike fantasies, you may be able to overlook Calico’s many flaws and appreciate its imaginative, fairy-dust-sprinkled charm, but I feel that the magic will wear thin quite quickly.
Patty Jenkins, the director of both Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman 1984, has revealed that Warner Bros. made her change the ending of the original film.
IGN’s Joshua Yehl spoke to Jenkins during Wonder Woman 1984’s press tour and asked her if the decision to make this new film’s finale more “personal and intimate” as opposed to the original’s “epic battle with lots of visual effects” was a conscious choice.
“The original end of the first movie was also smaller but the studio made me change it at the last minute,” Jenkins explained. “And so, that’s always been a little bit of a bummer that that’s the one thing people talk about because I agreed, and I told the studio we didn’t have time to do it, but it was what it was and I ended up loving it, but that was not the original ending of the movie.
“This time around, you know what I loved about it? I love that it has both at the end. We had visual effects… a big battle, which I just dug into and had such a blast executing, which I felt so satisfied with. But ultimately the end of the movie is much more pared down. That was really, really fun. No spoilers, there’s all kinds of stuff going on, but, yeah, it was really fun to shape it differently.”
In our Wonder Woman 1984 review, we said it “is a film with a heart full of hope and love; a nostalgic look back to a beloved time that provides escapism from an exceptionally difficult year.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
t’s pretty amazing how fast you can fill up a PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X/S hard drive. Video game install sizes can often weigh in at or above 100 GB. Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen consoles have less than 1 TB of usable space, which can fill up quickly. Players may need to invest in external hard drives for their PC or purchase a custom NVMe SSD for their Xbox if they want to keep games installed and updated; PS5 doesn’t currently support storing or playing PS5 games from an external drive.
Some of the largest game installs on this list are popular titles like Rainbow Six Siege, Call Of Duty, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. This list includes full games with their DLC, expansion, and in some cases high-resolution texture packs installed.
Many of the stories featuring Geralt of Rivia are, at their core, mystery stories with a medieval fantasy twist. The first season of the show operated primarily on a mixed-timelines premise that was confusing at times and definitely didn’t work for everyone, but season 2 seems to be digging into that mystery premise based on a page of the first episode’s script posted by Netflix to Twitter this week.
The story starts with a merchant and his family traveling alone by carriage, finding themselves looking for lodgings in an empty town. The merchant turns his back for a second and then back around to find his wife missing, his daughter covered in blood.
Geralt narrates over it. “You dogged my every footstep. But struck down others I passed on my way. Why?” he begins. “I was meant to end up alone, wasn’t I? So I would finally begin to be afraid?”
It’s a dark place to start for an already dark show, and fans of the books might recognize this as hinting at the short story “A Grain of Truth.” The story is a clever one, so we won’t spoil it here.
This post is just the latest in a string of posts Netflix is hashtagging #Witchmas. The streaming service dropped a first look at the logo for the upcoming Witcher animated series, some set photos from season 2, and a new episode of the Witcher’s Bestiary web series.
The Witcher Season 2 is currently in production. Production has stalled a couple times due to interrupts pandemic-related and otherwise. Netflix has not yet set a premiere date for the show aside from saying its coming in 2021. The pandemic has almost certainly made that date even harder to nail down.
The Witcher, based on the same characters and novels as the game from CD Projekt Red, stars Henry Cavill as the titular Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, with Freya Allan as Ciri and Anya Chalotra as Yennefer. Season 2 is set to add Kim Bodina (Killing Eve) as Geralt’s mentor, Vesemir and Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju as Nivellen, among others.
CD Projekt Red has released another hotfix patch for Cyberpunk 2077–it closely follows on the heels of Patch 1.05, which addressed numerous glitches that occur in the opening hours of the main campaign. This new hotfix, Patch 1.06, doesn’t fix as much, but it addresses the noteworthy save file corruption glitch.
Patch 1.06 fixes the glitch that caused your save file to become corrupted if it exceeded a certain limit–something that could be done if you were holding onto too many items in your inventory. The patch is live across Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
Unfortunately, the patch cannot recover what has been lost. If you’ve already fallen victim to the save file glitch, your save will still be corrupted. Patch 1.06 simply prevents the bug from ever occurring again. You can see the full breakdown of what Patch 1.06 does in the full patch notes, which are listed below.
Cyberpunk 2077 Hotfix 1.06 Patch Notes
Quests
Dum Dum will no longer go missing from Totentanz entrance during Second Conflict.
Console-specific
Improved memory management and stability, resulting in fewer crashes.
PC-specific
Removed the 8 MB save file size limit. Note: this won’t fix save files corrupted before the update.
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Resident Evil Village, stylized to include the roman numeral VIII in the title, is the next game in the main Resident Evil series. It is a direct follow-up to Resident Evil 7, but developer and publisher Capcom has been insistent on using its full title rather than an abbreviation like RE8 in order to stress the importance of the mysterious village at the heart of the game. We got our first look at Resident Evil Village during Sony’s PS5 reveal event in June. While we know some detail about the setting, characters, and how it ties in with the previous game, we don’t have a release date or other crucial information just yet.
Here’s what we know about Resident Evil Village so far. For more on upcoming games, check out our most anticipated games of 2021.
When Does Resident Evil Village Launch?
Resident Evil Village does not have an official release date yet, but we know it’s scheduled to launch sometime in 2021. A recent leak points to a possible April 2021 launch, but until we hear from Capcom officially, we cannot verify this information ourselves.
Will Resident Evil Village Be On PC, PS4, And Xbox One?
Resident Evil Village is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Capcom has given us a few glimpses of Resident Evil Village since its reveal in June 2020. Its announcement trailer from Sony’s PS5 event set a dark, fairytale-like tone for the sequel and revealed the return of Ethan Winters, Mia Winters, and Chris Redfield. It also gave us our first look at the European village setting.
Its second trailer debuted during Tokyo Game Show, which you can see below.
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Resident Evil Villlage Story Trailer | PS5 Showcase
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Will Resident Evil Village Have Multiplayer Or Battle Royale?
Capcom has not confirmed whether or not Resident Evil Village will contain some kind of multiplayer mode, but given Resident Evil Resistance, which launched alongside the Resident Evil 3 remake, we’re not completely discounting the possibility. A recent leak hinted at some kind of Resident Evil-related multiplayer project, possibly a battle royale mode, but we don’t have any official details at his time.
Will Resident Evil Village Have DLC Or Microtransactions?
It’s still early, so we haven’t heard about any Resident Evil Village DLC or expansions yet, and until we know more about the possibility of a multiplayer mode, it’s unlikely Resident Evil Village will include microtransactions of any kind.
How To Preorder Resident Evil Village
Resident Evil Village has not gone up for preorder yet, but we will update as soon as it does, so keep checking back!
2020 was a strange year in film. We saw theaters shutting down, several major titles pushed back, and other films taking a gamble and releasing to streaming services. Despite the craziness, there were still films that stood out and were well worth your time. Here are our picks for the best movies of the year unranked, plus our choice for the #1 movie of 2020.
This year’s top 10 featured an eclectic mix of genres. The list includes comedies like Palm Springs and Bill & Ted Face the Music, lockdown horror flick Host (Shudder), the sci-fi mystery The Vast of Night, the action filled Bad Boys for Life, family friendly movies Onward and Sonic The Hedgehog, the sprawling Netflix Drama Da 5 Bloods, and of course, super hero films like Wonder Woman 1984.
Our top award went to an unexpected bright spot of a film. Watch the video above to find out our movie of the year! To read why we selected these movies for our top 10, check out our gallery on GameSpot.
