Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace released in 1999, and the response has been fascinating–it received mixed reviews and a sour response from older fans, but is now looked back on with a mix of derision and nostalgia. Liam Neeson, who played Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn in the prequel, has now reflected back on the movie–and how one of its other stars was treated by fans.
Talking to SiriusXM show Radio Andy (as picked up on by IndieWire), Neeson talks about Ahmed Best, who played the controversial Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. Neeson recalls thinking that Best could be “the next Eddie Murphy,” and he was upset by how much criticism the actor drew.
“I know a lot of fans and critics didn’t like it, and my lovely friend Ahmed Best, who played Jar Jar Binks, came in for a lot of criticism,” Neeson says. “To the point where it really hurt his career.”
Neeson says that the fans have turned around on Best now, and are more respectful. Best has previously talked about how the reception of Jar Jar Binks took him to a dark place, but he’s set to return to Star Wars soon to host a new Star Wars game show.
Neeson says that he likes the movie, too. “I got to be a Jedi, got to play with those wonderful lightsabers and stuff…I liked the movie. I’m proud of it. I’m proud to have been a part of it.”
Liam Neeson’s Jinn dies in The Phantom Menace, but the actor made a vocal cameo in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.
While the next Star Wars movie is a while away, fans can look forward to The Mandalorian Season 2 starting October 30 on Disney +.
Assemble your Avengers by signing up for a chance to win a copy of Marvel’s Avengers and a PS4 Pro console. In our review of of the game, Phil Hornshaw said that the game’s combat systems showed a lot of depth, and that the multiplayer component provided some “great moments of teamwork that make you feel especially heroic.”
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What excites you about the Marvel’s Avengers game? Let us know in the comments below. Good luck, everyone!
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The upcoming Call of Duty League competitive series has announced a major platform change. For the upcoming season, competition will take place on PC, with one big catch.
Players must use a controller instead of mouse and keyboard controls. “This means that all pro matches will be played on PC and all pro players must use a League-approved controller of their choice,” Activision said in a blog post.
The company said players will have an “expended choice” of controllers, but they must all be approved by the Call of Duty League. Further details about supported peripherals and more details in general regarding controllers will be announced later.
In addition to the platform change, Activision announced that the public competitions series–Call of Duty Challengers–will now support cross-play between console and PC. While there is crossplay, all players must use a controller.
Before this, Activision announced that this year’s Call of Duty League competition featuring Black Ops Cold War will bring back 4v4 matches compared to 5v5 for the previous season.
Black Ops Cold War was recently announced. The campaign takes players to 1981 in a story that is a direct sequel to the 2010 original Black Ops. We recently got to see the multiplayer mode, and you can see some footage of the VIP Escort gametype above.
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The NHL series normally releases in mid-September, but this year is different due to COVID-19. NHL 21 has been delayed to October 16, but to help with the wait, EA has begun to announce the player ratings for this year’s professional ice hockey game.
The developer kicked things off by revealing the rating for cover star Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals. He has a 93 OVR rating, which will surely make him one of the highest-rated players in the game.
EA also released a graphic that shows Ovechkin’s ratings over the years, dating back to the first time he was an NHL cover star with NHL 07. In that year, he had a 95 rating. The lowest rating he’s ever received for the NHL series was a 91 for NHL 08, and 91 being his lowest rating speaks to his consistent and impressive play in the NHL.
It’s not immediately clear when EA will reveal the rest of the player ratings for NHL 21, but that should happen soon given the game is coming up on its October 16 release date.
NHL 21 is coming to PS4 and Xbox One. There won’t be a dedicated version of the game for PS5 and Xbox Series X, but the game will play on those consoles through backwards compatibility.
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The new AMD Radeon RX 6000 has been revealed. If you want a closer look at it, you’ll have to boot up Fortnite. AMD tweeted out a code for Fortnite’s Creative mode, which you can use to visit the official AMD island and see a full render of the graphics card.
Speaking of Fortnite, it’s crossing over with Rocket League – which is going free-to-play next week. Rocket League’s F2P launch is next Wednesday, September 23rd. which is also the launch of Rocket League on the Epic Games Store. These launches are happening alongside a new Fortnite crossover event, called LlamaRama.
Finally, we’ve got a new update on the development of Undertale’s sequel, Deltarune. Toby Fox, lead developer on Undertale, has been hard at work on Chapter 2 of Deltarune, which he says is about 80% complete.
Starting today The Last of Us Part 2 for PS4 is discounted to its lowest price ever. If you own a PS4 and haven’t yet bought this game… now is the time. It’s one of the few games that scored a 10/10 here at IGN. In other deal news, you can score a pair of Apple AirPod Pro noise cancelling truly wireless headphones for under $200, a new 2020 model Dell RTX 2070 gaming laptop for under $1300, or a 5TB portable hard drive for under $100.
The PS5 is out within the year (at least, that’s what we assume) and yet preorder info has been scant. Fortunately for you, we have a preorder guide up with everything we know so far. As soon as we know exactly when preorders go up, we’ll make sure that you’ll have a chance to get your order in.
______________________________ Eric Song is IGN’s deal curator and spends roughly 1/4 of his income on stuff he posts. Check out his latest Daily Deals Article and subscribe to his IGN Deals Newsletter.
A studio comprised of former Witcher, Cyberpunk, and Dying Light developers has announced a new project for PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, and it sounds interesting.
The Invincible is a first-person sci-fi FPS “thriller” from Polish studio Starward Industries that takes place in a retro-future landscape. You play as a space scientist on a hostile planet, and your job is to find the crew of your ship after they go missing. The game is inspired by the 1964 sci-fi novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem.
“You are a scientist onboard an interstellar scientific expedition, suddenly thrown into a life-or-death rescue mission. Landing on a planet Regis III you have to find the missing crew members using some advanced space equipment, whilst relying on your brains and instincts to survive on the planet which quickly occurs to be unwelcoming,” reads a line from the game’s official description. “Soon you’ll discover that Regis III holds terrifying secrets which are uncovered while you’re piecing together the fate of your crew. And as you delve deeper into the mystery, you realise that perhaps you are not alone, and that some places like this planet are better left untouched. But it’s too late to turn back.”
The Invincible promises “immersive gameplay” and a non-linear story that you can affect with personal choices and relationships. The game is built using the Unreal Engine.
The Invincible is scheduled for release on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC in 2021. No gameplay footage has been released yet, but you can see some screenshots above and listen to some of the game’s music in the video here.
Starward Industries is staffed by a number of developers who worked on other games made in Poland such as The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077, and Dying Light. CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is launching in November.
Junji Ito, the acclaimed manga artist and writer whose works include Uzumaki, Gyo, and Tomie, was once attached to Silent Hills, the game that was teased with the PS4 P.T. demo. Silent Hills was being worked on by Metal Gear Solid’s Hideo Kojima, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and actor Norman Reedus before it was tragically cancelled, and now Ito has shed some more light on his tie to the project.
Speaking to Polygon, Ito has spoken about his one meeting with Kojima and del Toro, and the nervousness he experienced during it. “Hideo Kojima-san contacted me about a Silent Hill sequel that he was in the beginning stages of working on, but the project was cancelled before before I got too involved,” he recalls. “Apparently the first person he spoke to was the director Guillermo del Toro, and as the two of them discussed the project, my name came up.”
Ito says that he’s “not too familiar with video games,” but that he had a meeting with the two men. While del Toro discussed his ideas, Ito had never played a Silent Hill game: “I just sat there feeling anxious the entire time,” he recalls.
“At the end of the meeting I took some illustrations of monsters I had drawn before that I had printed out and handed them over to the two directors for reference,” Ito says, noting that the three of them never met again. However, he’s not ruling out a future collaboration. “If Kojima-san contacts me again, I’d love to contribute as much as I’m able to,” he says.
The set-up for Vampire: The Masquerade – Shadows of New York, the second V:TM visual novel following last year’s Coteries of New York, is irresistible. The protagonist, Julia, is a newly turned vampire whose life as a struggling freelance investigative journalist is now thankfully behind her. But instead of living a glamorous, exciting vampire existence, she essentially becomes a glorified immigration officer, overseeing vampire movement in and out of New York. It’s a rather drab existence until her background as a journalist gifts her an opportunity to head up an investigation concerning the locked-room murder of a high-profile vampire, and her future within New York’s vampiric society will depend on whether she’s able to solve the crime.
In practice, Shadows of New York is less exciting than this premise indicates. There’s a murder, yes, and Julia has to solve it. But you, the player, are barely involved. This is a five-hour visual novel that’s very low on meaningful choice and consequence, and while there will be some differences and unique elements to different playthroughs, your impact on the investigation is negligible. But even though it’s light on player input, Shadows of New York is an entertaining visual novel for the most part, with an interesting central character, solid script, and strong presentation.
Shadows of New York is somewhere between a self-contained spin-off and a direct sequel to Coteries of New York. Julia and a few other characters are new, but most of the main cast carries over directly from that first game, including the murder victim. The main thrust of Shadows of New York’s story involves meeting with the four characters who you could choose to serve in the first game’s titular coterie, all of whom have some insight into the case and what happened… kind of. In truth, the investigation into the murder never really coheres into a satisfying whodunnit–you spend most of your time reading text that’s projected over animated backgrounds and character portraits, and occasionally you get to make a choice about what Julie says or does next. However, these don’t lead to meaningful consequences, with most of the major reveals happening right near the end. None of them are particularly surprising either.
But while the murder plot fizzles, Shadows of New York is more successful as a story about a young vampire coming to terms with what she wants for herself. Julie’s an interesting character, a young woman with commitment issues and a short fuse, and a sense of morality and spirituality that clashes awkwardly against her newly undead status. Julie is a relatively complex figure, and while the choices the player can make for her are few, getting to know her better over the course of the game is rewarding. The game’s writing shines best when it’s trying to unpack what is inside Julie’s head, and the script does a good job of balancing Julie’s personality against the choices you can make with her, so that no choice ever feels hugely out of character.
Julie’s vampirism is played down compared to the protagonist in Coteries. Sometimes, the options you’ll be given take her powers into account–vampires in this world have super strength, stealth abilities, and some hypnotic powers–but because the story is mostly set a few months after she’s turned, you don’t see Julie coming to terms with her powers in the same way the first game’s protagonist did. Her powers don’t affect gameplay in a meaningful way very often, either. You can make the decision to feed occasionally, but it’s no longer a mechanic–in the first game, some options would be locked off if you didn’t keep your appetite for blood satiated, but that isn’t the case for Shadows of New York. Julia’s vampirism is more important to her characterisation than it is to the choices you make, but it can still, sometimes, feel like an afterthought.
At various points, you’ll get to choose which side story you go and experience next. These sections are largely inconsequential to the overall murder mystery, but can feature some nice insights into Julie’s life, and the vibe of the New York she inhabits. This does mean that you can’t experience everything in one playthrough, but Shadows doesn’t exactly branch extensively–if you play through the game twice, you can absolutely see everything. There are exactly five choices that really matter to the game’s story, dictating the “traits” Julie possesses, and the ending you get is dependent on the traits that Julie exhibits across those five two-option choices. One ending is much more satisfying than the other, but I ultimately didn’t feel like I’d had any real impact on the game’s events by the end.
Shadows of New York is set in early 2020, and it’s clear that the real-world COVID-19 pandemic affected the game’s writing–characters start referencing it midway through the game, and by the end it’s directly impacting the narrative, as Julie describes empty streets and characters discuss what this means for the city. This real-world accuracy feels slightly out of place in a tale about a vampire detective, and one of the game’s endings contains a brief acknowledgement of the fact that a character’s plan doesn’t really make sense in light of what’s happening, but it’s certainly interesting that the game doesn’t shy away from the very real shadow that has hung over New York (and much of the rest of the world) this year.
This isn’t the only element of the game that makes Shadows of New York feel like it was written over a short space of time, though. While the dialog flows well and feels true to each character, and Julie and some other characters are well-developed through the script, there are a lot of ideas and concepts that are rushed over. Strange details about characters are revealed casually and then immediately dropped, and numerous supernatural elements that are introduced don’t really play out in any interesting way, as though they’ve been forgotten. The in-game dictionary gives you full definitions of all the vampire and lore-specific terms that the characters use in their dialog, which is appreciated, but this also means that the player is bogged down with in-game jargon that needs to be kept in mind to totally understand what’s happening. Shadows of New York is obviously meant to be part of a larger Vampire: The Masquerade world and mythology, and if you’re not familiar with that RPG world, it feels like you’re missing out on some context.
Shadows of New York has dramatically increased the quality of its backgrounds from the first game, with more details and animated elements. They look excellent, and while there’s a lot of repetition (and many returning locations from the previous game), the strong art and great, distinctive character designs help to keep the game engaging. The soundtrack, composed by Polish artist Resina, really stands out, too. It’s equal parts gorgeous and menacing, and the brooding, moody tracks that play under all the game’s beautiful images set the tone beautifully. The music is used to great effect, setting the tone and making it easier to picture actions that are being described in the script but not depicted. Every time I loaded the game up, I’d take a moment to enjoy the tremendous main title theme before starting.
Don’t go into Shadows of New York expecting a choose-your-own-adventure mystery, no matter how much it looks like one. This is a casual dip into another world, a game with big ideas that it doesn’t quite follow through on pursuing, but which remains moderately compelling thanks to some strong writing, interesting characters, and gorgeous art. It’s far from the definitive Vampire: The Masquerade experience, but it’s worth spending at least one long, dark night with.
