The Design Director of Perfect Dark studio The Initiative has announced that he is leaving the project.
The Initiative’s Drew Murray revealed the news on Twitter (as spotted by VGC). Murray previously worked on Resistance, Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive at Insomniac Games before leaving in 2018 to help kickstart the Microsoft first-party studio. He is leaving to focus on his “life outside of work” and tweeted that the goodbye felt bittersweet after working with “such a talented and experienced team.”
“The team has the vision and talent to knock the game and franchise out of the park,” Murray tweeted in regards to the future of the project, noting that the reveal trailer still gives him goosebumps. Interestingly, Murray points out that, when he joined The Initiative, he wasn’t aware that the team would be working on a Perfect Dark game.
Murray says that the silver lining of this is that he will get to experience Perfect Dark as a fan on launch day. The Perfect Dark reboot project was announced in December of 2020 during The Game Awards and is promising to deliver an “eco sci-fi” first-person shooter. You can learn more about the game in our coverage of its reveal.
Sega and developer RGG Studio announced that they are re-releasing Judgment–the Yakuza series spinoff that first launched in 2019 as a PlayStation 4 exclusive–for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Stadia. The game will be remastered with “refined visuals” and will run at 60 fps to take advantage of the new hardware. You also won’t have to wait long; this new version is set to launch on April 23 this year for $39.99 USD.
Judgment takes place in the same universe as the Yakuza franchise but tells an entirely separate story from the mainline games. While it uses the familiar setting of Kamurocho and incorporates a few recognizable elements, such as the Tojo Clan and crime drama, you won’t need an extensive Yakuza background to enjoy it. You play as a Takayuki Yagami, a disgraced lawyer turned private detective who uncovers a much larger conspiracy–it’s a gripping story with a different tone from the Yakuza games but still has the same storytelling qualities.
The game plays much like previous Yakuza games with action brawler combat, however Yagami is a lot more acrobatic and it influences the way he fights. And Kamurocho is again a lively open city full of side quests and minigames to fill out the world. You’ll do detective work as well, investigating environments to find clues and questioning key witnesses and suspects to advance the plot.
This is the latest in Sega’s and RGG Studio’s effort to bring the broader Yakuza franchise to more platforms with visual and performance improvements. Just last week, the Yakuza Remastered Collection came out on PC and Xbox platforms (also via Game Pass), and I covered why Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 are important games that everyone should eventually play.
Note that you can also play the original PS4 version of the game on PS5, but without next-gen improvements–Sega has said that there will not be cross-buy between PS4 and PS5 versions of the game. Although Yakuza games have been made available on PC recently, Judgment will not be getting a PC version at the moment.
Commissioner Gordon is at odds with Batman as often as he is allied with him in the comics. Now, in a new comedic podcast, Commissioner Gordon is Batman. Actor Jeffrey Wright, who plays Gordon in the upcoming Matt Reeves Batman film, will step into the Dark Knight’s ninja boots in Batman: The Audio Adventures, THR reports.
Details on the podcast are sparse, but we know that this will be a comedic take on the usually dour character. Former SNL writer Dennis McNicholas wrote and directed the series, which will release sometime this year.
The cast list for the audio show is bursting at the seams with big names in comedy, much like the cast of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn, which has also found success putting a comedic spin on the world of Gotham City.
Apart from Wright himself, the cast includes Chris Parnell, Melissa Villaseñor, Seth Meyers, Brent Spiner, John Leguizamo, Ike Barinholtz, Bobby Moynihan, Kenan Thompson, Rosario Dawson, Jason Sudeikis, Alan Tudyk, Heidi Gardner, Brooke Shields, Paul Scheer, Tim Meadows, Fred Armisen, Ray Wise, Ben Rodgers, Katie Rich, Pete Schultz, Paula Pell, Toby Huss, and writer Dennis McNicholas.
Interestingly, Alan Tudyk has roles in both Harley Quinn and Batman: The Audio Adventures. The casting announcement did not include any roles beyond Wright’s Batman, so we don’t know if Tudyk will reprise his roles as the Joker or Clayface from Harley Quinn, but we’d love to see it.
In addition to Batman: The Audio Adventures, DC has a separate multi-year deal with Spotify to produce DC-related podcasts, including Batman Unburied from Dark Knight writer David Goyer. McNicholas is producing the project along with Angela Petrella, and Jon Berg is executive producing.
This is the second time in the last week that an actor from The Batman has popped up in another DC production, with actor Jay Lycurgo, who plays a gang member in The Batman, taking on the role of Tim Drake in HBO Max’s Titans Season 3.
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If you’ve never seen a film or TV show directed by Sion Sono, titles like The Virgin Psychics or Tokyo Vampire Hotel should clue you in on his brand of genre exploitation. Prisoners of the Ghostland — starring, among others, Nicolas Cage and Sofia Boutella — feels right at home alongside other energetic Sono romps like Tokyo Tribe, the Japanese virtuoso’s 2015 post-apocalyptic gangland hip-hop martial arts musical. Ghostland brings together just as many genres and inspirations, which might make your average moviegoer perform a cartoonish spit-take when they’re listed back-to-back.
The film is many things, from zany, post-apocalypse nightmare fuel, to a stylized mash-up of Western and Samurai cinema. It even occupies that specifically modern Nic Cage space born from unhinged commitment and debts to the IRS, riding a fine line between serious and tongue-in-cheek (Cage plays an imprisoned bank robber fitted with ball-threatening explosives and tasked with rescuing a young girl in a nuclear wasteland). And yet, none of these descriptors do justice to what the movie really feels like. If you’re in it for inventive action, there’s just enough of it to satisfy — though not nearly enough to blow you away — but Sono also made the film shortly after a life-threatening heart attack, which he claims killed him for 60 seconds and sent him hurtling through outer space. As fun as Prisoners of the Ghostland is, it’s also a dreamlike meditation on time.
One of the first images we see is a gumball machine in the corner of a pristine, high-security Japanese bank. After a robbery gone wrong — Cage, simply referred to as “hero,” bursts in guns-a-blazing alongside sadistic partner “Psycho” (an unrecognizable Nick Cassavetes) — the gumballs spill to the floor in a chaotic mixture of glass and blood. It’s a mission statement of sorts, a prelude to the film’s candy-colored violence and cartoonish bloodshed. Soon after, the camera takes a trip through Samurai Town, a narrow locale with heightened artifice, whose saloon-harems are fitted with swinging wooden doors and traditional Japanese hanging lanterns. The town’s residents — some white, some Japanese, some belonging to other ethnicities — sport outfits either out of the Old West or feudal Japan. Whether a given character speaks English or Japanese feels randomly assigned, and the music cues sound like Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western leitmotifs played on Japanese bamboo flutes.
When fearsome warlord The Governor (Bill Mosely, Repo! The Genetic Opera) arrives in search of Cage’s “hero,” the town gathers around him, welcoming him with coordinated chants. With handsome, katana-wielding right-hand man Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi) by his side, The Governor conscripts Cage into a rescue mission to find his missing granddaughter Bernice (Boutella) in exchange for his freedom, but the mission comes with some caveats in the form of Cage’s attire. He’s made to don intimidating black leather reminiscent of a bike gang — The Governor, standing in for Sono, dresses him this way because he likes the aesthetic — but the outfit is fitted with explosives on his arms, neck and testicles, which can be set off by the mere impulses to be violent or sexual in the presence of young women. It’s a means to protect Bernice from the one man capable of saving her, and it places Cage in an uncomfortable narrative predicament; the devices are bound to come into play, and bound to paint this “hero” in a rather untoward light. After all, Hollywood’s leading men are often defined by violence and sexuality (the latter was a key focus before Marvel subsumed the action blockbuster), so the blinking red lights on Cage’s neck and genitals pose a particular problem, in a film ostensibly about Hollywood imagery itself.
The film, after setting itself up as a rescue adventure, takes a couple of sudden left turns early on. It turns out finding Bernice isn’t a problem at all! Getting her to return willingly, however, ends up being the issue. In the meantime, she’s taken up residence — or been forced to; it’s left ambiguous — in an area called the Ghostland, a Mad Max-inspired dystopian desert township built around a clock tower, whose hands the residents lasso and desperately stop from moving forward. Bernice is encased, perhaps willingly, within the remnants of a mannequin, in a place where time is forced to stand still. Men who build engines and other devices used to move forward — like the delightful “Rat Man” and his rat clan — are considered outcasts.
Nick Cassavetes and Nicolas Cage in Prisoners of the Ghostland.(Photo: RLJE Films)
The film is steeped in dream logic (or illogic) when it comes to spatial and emotional reasoning. The Ghostland isn’t so much its own township as it is a realm of specific cinematic influence, not unlike Samurai Town. The two places don’t seem to have any physical relationship to one another; whenever characters set out to travel between them, their view is subsumed by phantasmagorical images of a zombie prison bus and robotic samurai backed by an enormous mushroom cloud (no conversation about the history of America and Japan’s cyclical cultural influence is complete without the spectre of nuclear power). Instead, the connection between the two towns is a temporal one. Sono has long been influenced by eastern and western genre pictures, and Westerns and Samurai films have impacted each other’s plots and aesthetics for decades. Samurai Town, therefore, is a symbol of a lawless past (complemented by Cage’s haunted flashbacks of people he’s killed). The Ghostland, similarly, is a symbol of a hopeless future, and a place rife with Greek choruses who push the plot forward through call-and-response. The two places are on a collision course, but not for any reasons grounded in waking reality. They simply feel like extensions of Sono’s aesthetic fixations; it’s his dream about cinema, in a way.
Cage absorbs each new idea or piece of poetic dialogue with something halfway between wide-eyed fascination and mischievous acceptance. “The hero” knows what kind of movie he’s in, but he’s not really the hero of this story. He merely fits the aesthetic mold of a traditional hero, standing where a hero would stand, dressing how he would dress, rejecting and accepting the call to heroism in places where Joseph Campbell might take notice. If the story has a real “hero,” it’s Yasujiro, a relatively understated character with a more subtle moral and physical arc, but it’s hardly surprising to see Cage unhinge his jaw and swallow the picture whole. (His particular enunciation of the word “testicles” is worth the price of admission).
Judgment, the Yakuza spin-off, is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and Stadia on April 23.
Originally a PS4 exclusive, the action game will come to new platforms with all of its DLC, “refined” visuals, 60 FPS performance, and improved loading times. It will be released at a $39.99 price point (UK and AU prices not available at time of writing).
Sega confirmed to IGN that cross-buy will not be supported for PS4 and PS5, and we could not get an answer on whether progress can be carried over from the PS4 version to the PS5 version. Furthermore, RGG Studios says it does not have plans to release Judgement for PC at this time.
Set in the same world as Yakuza, and in its familiar Kamurocho district, Judgment tells a very different story, with an almost entirely new cast of characters. Centred on lawyer-turned-private detective Takayuki Yagami, the game follows a muder mystery, alongside the Yakuza series’ usual bizarre sidequests and activities.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Although she hadn’t been seen since Thor: The Dark World, WandaVision episode four brought back the sarcastic Darcy Lewis, once again played by Kat Dennings, who has graduated to being a scientist in her own right in the ensuing years.
But with filming on Thor: Love and Thunder now underway in Australia, what are the chances that Dennings will reprise her role in the MCU franchise that introduced Darcy?
IGN’s Jesse Gill posed that very question to Kat Dennings today during an interview to promote the latest episode of Marvel’s WandaVision.
According to Dennings, the chances of Darcy hanging out with her old pals Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in Love and Thunder appear highly unlikely.
“Well, I have not gotten a call so I kind of doubt it since they’re shooting it right now so probably not,” Dennings told IGN, adding, “but anything Marvel ever asks of me the answer’s always yes.”
While Dennings’ Darcy may not return for the fourth Thor movie, plenty of other MCU veterans are, such as Thor and Thor: The Dark World’s Jaime Alexander as the warrior Sif.
When Capcom debuted the villain of Resident Evil Village, a downright towering vampire woman by the name of Lady Alcina Dimitrescu, they had to have known how, uh…eager the RE fanbase would be to know more about her, right? With her WNBA-shattering height and dominant personality, Lady Dimitrescu quickly became an internet phenomenon, and fans were most excited to learn exactly how tall she is.
Resident Evil fans finally have their answer. RE Village art director Tomonori Tanako released a statement thanking fans for their interest in Village and shed some light on the matter.
“Most recently, Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters have received a fair amount of attention, far more than we anticipated” Tanako said. “It’s great that they’re able to take the spotlight as icons of Resident Evil Village. Lady Dimitrescu, especially, has received much fanfare both domestically and overseas, which has made all of us in the development team extremely happy. I hear her height is something of interest….”
“If you include her hat and high heels,” Tanako continued, “[Lady Dimitrescu is] 2.9 meters (approximately 9’6”) tall.”
So there you have it. Capcom has finally released fans from horny jail and subsequently thrown them into the horny wine cellar. We look forward to repeatedly being captured by Resident Evil’s big lady.
Just for the record, here are some things that Lady Dimitrescu is taller than: A Christmas tree, Andre the Giant, Shaq, a king size bed standing vertically, or most importantly, the actual tallest man or woman ever recorded.
Resident Evil Village is out on May 7, 2021. You can check out our Resident Evil Village pre-order guide to make sure you get the best possible deal on all the fancy collectibles.
Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/human wine cask for IGN.
If you could get paid to watch everything that comes to Netflix each week, you wouldn’t just have a full-time job, you’d be working overtime. A whole pile of content comes to the service this week with a few hits standing out from the rest.
Firefly Lane Season 1 hits Netflix on February 3. Starring Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) and Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy), Firefly Lane tells the story of Tully and Kate, two friends who meet in 1974. The show, based on the novel by Kristin Hannah, follows their friendship over the years as they grow up. Netflix lists the show as “Sentimental, Heartfelt, Intimate,” so get your tissues ready.
February 5 brings us the first season of Brazilian television show Invisible City, in which a cop discovers that beings of myth and legend walk the streets of Rio, and investigates the connection between those beings and his wife’s death. This is the first live action work from director Carlos Saldanha, who also directed the Rio and Ice Age films.
The latest show to escape cancelation on another network comes on February 6 with The Sinner Season 3. The show follows in the footsteps of shows like Cobra Kai, Designated Survivor, and Lucifer. It began life on the USA Network before continuing on Netflix, and stars Bill Pullman.
That’s just a preview of the entire list, though, which follows below:
February is officially here, which means some new bugs, fish, and sea creatures are appearing in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As was the case in January, players with Northern Hemisphere islands will find very few new critters this month, but those with Southern Hemisphere islands will be able to catch a couple of new insects and fish.
You can see all the new fish, bugs, and sea creatures that are available in February below. Be sure to also check out our dedicated fish guide, bug guide, and sea creatures guide for more details on all the critters in the game as well as tips to help you catch them and complete your collections.
Now that February is underway, a few new seasonal items are available in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, including a couple for Valentine’s Day. Nook’s Cranny and the Able Sisters are also selling special furniture and clothing right now for the Festivale event, which was added as part of the game’s free January update. That event falls on February 15 and is hosted by Pave, the dancing peacock. Animal Crossing’s next big update is slated for March and will add some Mario-themed furniture.
February Fish, Bugs, And Sea Creatures In Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Northern Hemisphere
Fish
No new fish are appearing in Northern Hemisphere islands this month, but a few are disappearing soon. The bitterling, football fish, sea butterfly, stringfish, and sturgeon are all leaving the game in March, so you’ll want to use this chance to catch them while they’re still available.
Bugs
New February Bugs
Price
Location
Time
Tiger Beetle
1,500
On the ground
All day
Only one new bug is appearing in Northern Hemisphere islands this month: the returning Tiger Beetle, which will be available through October. As far as bugs go, it’s decently valuable: you can sell it for 1,500 bells at Nook’s Cranny.
Sea Creatures
As was the case with fish, no new sea creatures are appearing this month in Northern Hemisphere islands.
Southern Hemisphere
Fish
New February Fish
Price
Location / Size
Time
Moray Eel
2,000
Sea / Narrow
All day
Ray
3,000
Sea / 5
4 AM – 9 PM
Soft-shelled Turtle
3,750
River / 4
4 PM – 9 AM
Only three new “fish” (of sorts) are appearing this month in Southern Hemisphere islands, and they’re all worth a nice chunk of change. The moray eel and ray can both be found in the ocean, while the soft-shelled turtle can be fished up out of the river.
Bugs
New February Bugs
Price
Location
Time
Rice Grasshopper
160
On the ground
8 AM – 7 PM
Walker Cicada
400
On trees
8 AM – 4 PM
Two new bugs are available this month: the rice grasshopper and the walker cicada. Both, however, are only worth a few hundred bells, so they’re hardly worth catching unless you’ve yet to donate them to your museum.
Sea Creatures
New February Sea Creatures
Price
Time
Flatworm
700
4 PM – 9 AM
Only a single new sea creature is appearing around Southern Hemisphere islands in February: the flatworm. It’s only worth 700 bells, so there isn’t much incentive to seek it out unless you’re looking to complete your collection. As with other sea creatures, you’ll need to have a wetsuit to go diving for the flatworm.
