The X-Men animated series, which ran for five seasons from 1992 until 1997, had an iconic theme song. It’s an earworm, capable of being stuck in your head all day if you so much as think about it. But this extremely classy, wonderfully arranged cello version is so good, you’ll want to risk the headspace it’s going to take up.
Cellist Samara Ginsberg has recreated this theme on cello, but performing eight distinctive parts and then putting together an overlapping video. It’s extremely impressive, and more importantly, it sounds fantastic, emphasizing just how good the original piece was while also adding to it.
You can watch and listen in the video below.
The X-Men theme–which, by the way, I’ve always suspected inspired the Deus Ex menu music–was originally composed by Ron Wasserman, who also wrote Go Go Power Rangers, the main theme for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
Ginsberg has a Ko-fi account, if you loved the performance and want to thank her for it. The X-Men animated series is available on Disney Plus.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the original film in the fantasy series, has passed $1 billion at the global box office 19 years after it was originally released in 2001.
Following a re-release of the film in 4K 3D in China over the weekend, the movie has now reached $1,001,260,000 at the global box office. The entire franchise, meanwhile, has passed $7.74 billion worldwide, according to numbers crunched by Deadline.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone made $13.6 million over the weekend in China across 16,000 screens.
“We are thrilled to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone delight a new generation of audiences,” Warner Bros. executive Andrew Cripps said in a statement. “The popularity of the film with moviegoers in China, who are discovering it for the first time, proves that the appeal of these stories is truly timeless and universal.”
The Sorcerer’s Stone is just the second mainline Harry Potter movie to reach $1 billion worldwide, joining Deathly Hallows Part II ($1.4 billion). The least commercially successful Harry Potter film was The Prisoner of Azkaban, which made $796.8 million worldwide, and this gives you an idea about just how enormously popular the series was.
The main Harry Potter movie series ended in 2011 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. Another Harry Potter universe series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, debuted in 2016 and it was followed up with a 2018 sequel subtitled The Crimes of Grindelwald.
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When No Straight Roads launches on August 25, Switch owners will get a few extra features in their version of the musical adventure game. These include expanded co-op and control options, as shown off in the new trailer below.
While the game will have two-player couch co-op on the other systems, a third player can get involved on Switch. Thanks to the Switch-exclusive Assist Mode, which lets a player control Elliegator (an alligator assistant who can pick up items and assist in battle), up to three players can play together on the same system.
The Switch will also support touchscreen controls, as well as playing with a single Joy-Con or the Pro Controller. If you prefer playing on touch screens, it’s a nice bonus.
The trailer, below, is our first look at how the game runs on Switch, so it’s worth a look if you’re curious about this version.
While the digital version of No Straight Roads will arrive on Switch at the same time as the other versions, its physical release is delayed slightly–you’ll have to wait until September 15 if you want the game in a box.
Microsoft’s newest game, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, is off to a strong start with very positive review scores that make it one of the most highly rated titles of the year. There has been some turbulence, however, as players have notified Microsoft about bugs and other issues.
Microsoft has now launched an official bug-tracking website for Flight Simulator that houses the top reported issues and provides temporary workarounds. As of August 18, some of the top issues that don’t have fixes yet include the game getting stuck on the loading screen, slow download times, and the game failing to launch on some versions of Windows.
Exit out of Microsoft Flight Simulator (alt+F4) and relaunch the title one or two times
Try running the sim as an Administrator
Unable to Launch Sim on Insider/Pre-release Version of Windows
Try installing the Xbox App to launch the sim instead.
In the Windows Search Bar, type in Microsoft Store and click to open the Microsoft Store App
Search ‘Xbox’ in the search bar of the store and click on the Xbox (Beta) App.
Install this app, sign in, and try to launch Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Slow Download Times
Microsoft Flight Simulator uses data pulled from Bing Maps that is streamed into the game using Azure cloud technology, and this allows you to fly to basically anywhere in the world. The game is currently only available on PC, but it’s coming to the Xbox family of devices later on.
GameSpot’s own review for Microsoft Flight Simulator is in progress and will be published soon.
One of the first heralds that the world of gaming was going to be severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic was the cancellation of E3 2020, making this the first year without an E3 since the trade show began in 1995. With numerous online replacements and the bad taste left behind by an enormous data breach following the 2019 show, not to mention companies like Sony pulling away from the event, there’s been plenty of reasons to question E3’s future.
And now, E3 has become embroiled in another controversy, with an ill-conceived tweet linking to a sexist article going up on the E3 Twitter account. The since-deleted tweet contained a link along with the text “Great list of games women gamers are playing–any of your favorites make the cut?”
The article it linked to was called 25 Online Games That Women Enjoy on Parade, and it was an SEO-optimized list of games that “women play,” peppered with quotes from user reviews and market research. Games included Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood, Solitaire, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
The issue here is not that these are lesser or inferior games–the article was extremely prescriptive about the sorts of games that are “for” women, and was clearly produced to produce key word clicks rather than actually presenting recommendations, and included many sterotypes (“Diamond’s are a girl’s best friend,” the Bejeweled Classic entry reads).
The list seems to have been taken down, too, but we would not link to it regardless.
After an outcry, the E3 Twitter account removed the tweet and posted a brief apology.
We messed up. We are taking down the post and apologize for perpetuating a harmful stereotype. We will do better.
The Aegean Sea is a raging inferno. You may have heard tales of a great war between the ancient Greeks and the Trojans, a feud kindled by divine intervention, stoked by love and betrayal, and finally extinguished in an epic siege. In the newest Total War Saga, the Paris-Helen-Menalaus love triangle is the spark that doesn’t just ignite the Trojan War of legend–it turns the entire eastern Mediterranean into a tinderbox.
As a more focused, more specific take on Total War, Troy has an epic tale to tell. But to the benefit of the series’ strategic legacy, Homer’s writings set the scene rather than deliver a script, leaving plenty of room for those of us who haven’t memorised The Iliad to enjoy crashing one enormous army into another and watching the world burn.
At first, Troy seems a bit small. There’s just the one map upon which the campaign is played. But that map is absolutely massive, taking in all of mainland Greece, a hefty slab of the western coast of modern-day Turkey and dozens of islands in between. The diverse geography provides a healthy mix of terrain types across the map, which in turn present different strategic challenges: The densely forested mainland is ideal for ambushes and funnelling armies through its mountainous corridors while the islands in the Aegean may be more exposed but any invading force is likely to have suffered attritional losses making the treacherous journey by sea.
Fortunately, since you’ll be spending most of your time playing Troy scrolling around the campaign map, it looks beautiful, too. Those forests and mountains, those archipelagos ringed by reefs and gorgeous blue water are depicted in exquisite detail. However, the settlements themselves lack distinguishing features and don’t seem to evolve in appearance as they develop. It’s disappointing you can’t actually see the farmlands, quarries, lumbermills, and temples you’ve built spill out onto the map. Still, the way the crumpled parchment fog of war burns away as you chart new territory is lovely, and it echoes the stunning black and red figure paintings that loom over the horizon at all times. If Troy isn’t the best looking Total War yet, it’s certainly the most visually striking.
There are only eight playable factions–split evenly between the Trojans and the Danaans–though each one feels distinct in crucial ways. Faction leaders possess markedly different abilities both on and off the battlefield that, when combined with a clutch of unique units and buildings, allow for contrasting strategic approaches. They even introduce whole new mechanics. I played a lot as Sarpedon of Lycia and was able to take advantage of his ability to interfere in trade deals between other factions, redirecting resources my way or cancelling deals outright. I felt like a Trojan puppetmaster, pulling the strings to bend the region’s politics in my favour.
Even though I only toyed with the other factions and didn’t get to fully appreciate their unique mechanics, it’s clear these mechanics are incredibly powerful–Odysseus, for example, can construct buildings of his own inside an allied settlement while Paris can move Helen around the map and gains huge bonuses and penalties depending on how near or far apart they are. The starting locations add a further dimension–Sarpedon is quite isolated albeit vulnerable to attack from across the sea while Agamemnon is protected by powerful neighbouring allies but as a result doesn’t have much elbow room to expand. Such disparate beginnings prompt a fresh set of priorities when you move from one faction to the next.
Your early turns on the strategic campaign map are an opportunity to scope out the lay of the land and ponder how the new multi-resource system is going to influence your plans for expansion. You have just the one small army initially, and the options to recruit additional troops are basic. To support more troops you need more food, and to recruit better troops you need wood, stone, and bronze to build the various barracks from which they spawn. Each settlement on the map specialises in one of these resources, so marching off to war isn’t necessarily a case of pointing your spearmen in the direction of your nearest neighbour. The war machine can quickly grind to a halt if you’re not producing enough bronze. Properly scouting the land to identify valuable and complementary resource deposits is important, and it’s immensely satisfying when you finally conquer a target and the goodies start rolling in.
Once you’ve secured yourself a handful of provinces, managing your empire’s economy can feel a little rote. When it came to selecting which buildings to build and which ones to upgrade, I rarely felt like I was making tough choices. Much of the time, in fact, it felt like it didn’t really matter whether I opted for the farmland or the granary or the hunter’s lodge since they all basically do the same thing to varying degrees. Do you want a bunch of stone per turn or do you want a slightly larger bunch of stone per turn and a slight hit to your province’s happiness? Does it really matter?
Indeed, there’s a consistent sense that plenty of the choices you’re making are trivial, as if a whole lot of tiny decisions are adding up to not very much at all. I levelled up one of my spies 24 times over the course of the campaign and I really couldn’t tell you whether that time I opted for an 8% boost to his movement made any difference whatsoever to his performance. He did manage to assassinate a Spartan general when he had only a 17% chance of succeeding, so I dunno, maybe I made a smart choice somewhere along the line.
The effects of your decisions are far more apparent on the battlefield, assuming you prefer to fight them yourself rather than auto-resolving. Troy is simply a terrific demonstration of the Total War battle system. Here, the granularity and accumulation of small differences are genuinely meaningful. Mostly, it’s in the make-up of the army rosters and your ability as a general to bend subtle statistical variations to your will. It’s about recognising that your opponent’s slingers have slightly better range than yours, but if you can send your nible light chariots down the flank they can hit the slingers from behind and force them back into range. There isn’t a huge range of unit types, but there is a seemingly endless variation. Even the nods towards Greek myths with the presence of harpies, centaurs, and so on are in fact simply twists on the standard archetypes. The centaur, for instance, is merely one of the few cavalry units–just a dude riding a horse, albeit a really quick one who serves as a useful scout and irritating flanking force.
Sometimes the granularity is too fine and things can become hard to read in the heat of battle. I would find myself pausing the action now and again to double-check an enemy unit. It’s not always immediately obvious that these guys with an axe and shield also have a ranged attack, or that these chaps with the spears are better armoured than those other chaps with the spears. This lack of clarity, and resulting reliance on stat comparisons mid-battle, isn’t too much of an issue though since you’ll want to be pausing things anyway to tweak your instructions and better coordinate the next phase of your assault. Indeed, the only real negative when it comes to Troy’s combat suite is the tedium of the special siege battles. Whether you’re encamped for multiple turns outside the castle gate on the campaign map or waiting for your battering rams to slowly do their thing, there’s an awful lot of not doing very much during a siege. What should be climactic encounters rarely generate the level of excitement or tactical ingenuity found when fighting in the open.
Despite its smaller, more intimate focus, Troy is unable to shake some of the annoyances that plague the Total War series. There are too many battles to fight. As enjoyable and accomplished as the battle system most certainly is, it can be exhausting to fight this many of them. The option to auto-resolve any battle goes some way to alleviating combat fatigue, but the AI is a poor substitute for your tactical leadership–if you want to avoid unnecessary losses, you have to fight them yourself. There’s also too much diplomacy. Like the battles, the diplomacy system is deep and dynamic, affording you considerable opportunity to barter, trade, and form all sorts of alliances, but the AI is too eager to engage you in it. Every turn you find yourself bombarded with diplomatic offers–Want some bronze for this stone? How about a non-aggression pact?–that you’re never in a million years going to accept. It slows down a game that is already slow enough to process the AI turns and contributes nothing other than forcing you to manually decline each offer. There’s a fine line between wanting the game world to feel alive with other factions pursuing their own interest and not wanting the player to feel overwhelmed with notifications, and sometimes Troy falls on the wrong side.
Perennial issues aside, with Thrones of Britannia and now Troy, the spin-off Saga series has proved adept at delivering a kind of Total War that is more focused, flavourful, and even experimental than the mainline series. In the specific case of Troy, it’s not always an unmitigated success; for every dose of granular detail that reveals more strategic options there’s another element of graininess that obscures. At its best, though, Troy is a pretty epic series of bloody enjoyable battles that is just about as good as the series has delivered.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe was released for consoles back in 2018, and the expanded version of the metatextual, odd comedy game was expected to arrive for PC and consoles this year. It’s now been delayed into 2021, and publisher Crows Crows Crows announced this in a way that sent games news writers around the world scrambling to double-check something.
The game’s delay was announced across three tweets, two of which were just delay notices from other recent games with some details changed. The first tweet below is from the announcement of Halo Infinite’s delay, while the second is from Deathloop, which was recently pushed back to 2021.
The third tweet is designed–until you stop and read the text–to look like an edited release announcing the delay of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. That game has, in fact, not been delayed and is still releasing in 2020. Phew.
It’s that third tweet that probably contains the most actual insight into why the game was delayed–and as with many games delayed in 2020, COVID-19 and work-from-home arrangements are responsible.
The Stanley Parable received a 9/10 in GameSpot’s 2013 review. “The Stanley Parable is both a richly stimulating commentary on the nature of choice in games (and in other systems, too, like our workplaces and our families) and a game that offers some of the most enjoyable, surprising, and rewarding choices I’ve ever been confronted with in a game,” wrote reviewer Carolyn Petit. “Going the wrong way has never felt so right.”
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With the release of PGA Tour 2K21 coming up very soon, 2K Sports has released a new commercial for the game featuring a lot of celebrity talent, including Christopher McDonald, the actor who played the evil golfer Shooter McGavin in the Adam Sandler movie Happy Gilmore.
Cover star Justin Thomas is also featured in the ad, alongside wrestler The Miz and hip-hop artist Schoolboy Q. They are all competing in a round of golf, and, you guessed it, McDonald has the worst time and ends up throwing a fit like his Happy Gilmore character. Check out the spot:
Marvel’s upcoming horror-superhero film New Mutants has released a new 60-second featurette. The clip features the cast, which includes Alice Braga Morales (The Suicide Squad), Blu Hunt (The Originals), Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones), and others joyfully distilling down the complicated plot in under a minute. Check it out below.
Fans and skeptics alike could be forgiven for not feeling certain about New Mutants arriving in theaters. Long before COVID, the movie was originally scheduled to be released in theaters April 13, 2018.
The official movie synopsis says that New Mutants is “an original horror thriller set in an isolated hospital where a group of young mutants is being held for psychiatric monitoring. When strange occurrences begin to take place, both their new mutant abilities and their friendships will be tested as they battle to try and make it out alive.”
New Mutants is directed by Josh Boone (Stuck in Love, The Fault in Our Stars). The screenplay was written by Booen and Knate Lee (Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa).
