Valve has recently put the Steam page for its Dota 2 card game, Artifact, ‘Under Construction’ and says there will be more news about the digital card game after the launch of Half-Life: Alyx next week.
Even a video game company like Valve makes mistakes. Probably the most public of the company’s errors was the Dota 2-themed card game called Artifact. So much so that even Valve founder Gabe Newell called it a “giant disappointment” when IGN visited Valve headquarters recently.
But Valve hasn’t given up on Artifact just yet, and there are reports that the changes to the game are so massive the overhaul is internally being called “Artifact 2” according to the latest Edge Magazine.
Artifact was released in 2018, and despite some initial interest the card game’s player count soon cratered. The community criticized Artifact’s monetization model and progression difficulties. Valve soon announced that small updates would not be able to fix the game’s core problems and announced it would be working on large-scale overhauls.
“Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome,” Valve wrote in a blog post announcing the re-development.
The Spanish dystopian sci-fi satire The Platform has been set for a Netflix release for a while. The streaming giant bought the distribution rights when the movie made its US premiere at Fantastic Fest in September 2019, and the plan was always to release it sometime in 2020. But at that stage no one could have predicted how horribly apt the release of a movie in which isolation and food shortage play a key part of the plot would be in March 2020.
Like many of the best dystopian sci-fi movies–from Planet of the Apes to Escape from New York–The Platform takes modern life to a chilling extreme. At some point in the future, prisoners are placed into a narrow skyscraper-like construction consisting of hundreds of levels, known amongst the inmates as the pit. Each level is occupied by two people, with a gap in the center through which a large platform passes daily. At the start of each day, the platform is loaded with an incredible array of food–slowly it descends through the pit, giving the inhabitants at each stage a few minutes to grab what they can. The further the platform descends, the less food there will be for those on the lower levels. Each inmate duo starts every month randomly assigned to a new level–it could be one of the higher levels, where food is plentiful, or down below with only a few scraps.
The Platform is not a subtle movie, and its influences are obvious. The 1997 cult sci-fi favorite Cube is an obvious comparison, with its protagonists trapped in a room in a mysterious futuristic building, as is Snowpiercer, with its inventive take on class and social divisions. Surreal Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel is another; this 1962 classic focuses on a group of upper-class dinner guests who find they cannot leave the room and descend into a primal state. And there are also shades of groundbreaking writers JG Ballard and Samuel Beckett, and their dark dystopian visions and absurdist comedy respectively.
Thankfully, the film is far more than the sum of its influences. It focuses on an average man named Goreng, who unlike most of the other criminal inmates, has willingly submitted himself to the pit–or the “Vertical Self-Management Center,” to give the structure its official name. We see Goreng signing up for the process with a non-nonsense beaurocrat–the deal is that if he stays eight months, he will gain an important academic qualification. It’s a smart move from writers David Desola and Pedro Rivero and director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, because while the other characters that Goreng encounters are, by turns, funny, scary, strange, and sad, none of them are–unsurprisingly–particularly sympathetic.
The longer Goreng stays in the pit–sometimes near the top, other times towards the bottom–the more he realizes that there is a chance for everyone. “Eat your share and prepare two similar ones for the next level” becomes his mantra–if everyone takes just enough food for themselves then there will be enough for everyone. But this is not how desperate humans work, and soon he begins to devise a plan to close down the whole system.
The first part of the movie focuses on Goreng’s time with Trimagasi, an elderly man with a particular affection for his knife, with whom he develops an unlikely friendship. The movie adopts a heightened and darkly humorous tone from the start, and much of Goreng and Trimagasi’s interaction is very funny. Until it all heads into a very unpleasant place, that is. Ultimately, all anyone is really interested in is their own survival, and when people get hungry, they are driven to desperate behavior. So be warned, at times The Platform is as much a grueling horror movie as it is a sci-fi thriller or black comedy, with some deeply unsettling moments.
Unlike many movies that use (or reuse) a single setting, The Platform never feels overly theatrical or constrained by a lack of budget. Azegiñe Urigoitia’s brilliant production design and Gaztelu-Urrutia’s inventive direction create a claustrophobic and believable self-contained environment that stretches thousands of feet in either direction. Viewers expecting to learn more about the world beyond the pit might be disappointed–this isn’t Westworld. The focus is purely on the poor people who have to exist within this appalling situation, and the way human nature reacts to the most extreme of circumstances.
While the movie is never boring, Gaztelu-Urrutia’s does push the concept to its limits–after 90 minutes you’ll be as desperate to leave the pit as its inhabitants. But that’s really the point, and it’s impressive how well he juggles humor, gore, thrills, and social commentary without letting any one aspect overwhelm the other. This might be either the best time or the worst time to watch a movie like The Platform, but if you do venture down into the pit, it’s a journey you won’t quickly forget.
Come one, come all! Navigate the Super Gore Nest in Doom Eternal‘s fifth mission! This game really is something else with location names as wonderfully over-the-top as this. Regardless, after your first big boss fight against the Doom Hunter during the fourth mission, it should please you to know this mission is more navigation and battle arena heavy. So get ready!
Go through the train carriage, hang a right, and jump on the train hanging over the ledge to reach the next platform. Enter the combat arena and take out the Zombies and Imps before testing out your newly acquired Ballista on the approaching Mancubus. The Ballista’s powerful single shot is useful for taking out larger enemies.
This area has multiple levels, so keep moving and utilise its verticality to take care of the rest of the enemies that show up. Once everything’s dead, a door will open up with a Pinky behind it, so dispatch it and head inside. Drop down the gap in the path and use the walls on either side to climb up. Keep going and you’ll eventually be met by a Dread Knight. This Demon is essentially a souped up version of the Hell Knight and comes equipped with two powerful Energy Blades. Your best bet is to keep moving and shooting at the same time, making sure to Dash out of harm’s way when it performs its deadly leaping attack.
After you’ve defeated the rest of the enemies, use the poles in the center of the room to swing towards the upper platform. There’s a Buff Totem in the next combat arena, so focus on killing enemies and staying alive until the green portals begin to appear at the center of the room. Keep travelling through each portal, killing enemies as you go, until you’re eventually teleported to the Buff Totem and can destroy it. Now you just have to use the final portal to grab the Yellow Gore Key.
Go back into the previous room and open the yellow door to progress. You’ll now be in a large combat arena filled with Mancubuses, Revenants, and so on. Use your full arsenal to damage their weak points, and make use of the large gap in the middle of the arena to jump across and create seperation. With everything dead, you’re free to insert the Yellow Gore Key in front of the Super Gore Nest.
Head through the doors that have now opened up and drop down the elevator shaft. There are a few enemies to deal with as you navigate through the next few corridors, including a Spectre (which is just an invisible Pinky). The Spectre’s growl and fiery breath give it away, so double jump over its head and blast away at its tail to finish it off. Keep going until you need to jump down another elevator shaft and come across the heart of the nest. Take a right and fight through to an area shrouded in radiated green goo. Grab the Rad Suit on the other side of the green river and quickly navigate through the radiation, using the spinning poles in the next room to reach and break through a weak wall.
Jump to the right in the next room and use the climbable walls to reach the top where you can grab the Red Gore Key. Go back the way you came and use the key to pick up the Chaingun. After falling through the floor, you can use your newly found weapon to rip the incoming Dread Knight to shreds. Keep going and use the green teleporter to return to the heart of the nest where you can now use the Red Gore Key to access the room. Follow the waypoint through the left hand door and pull the switch.
Exit the room and go left, using your Plasma Rifle to defeat the shielded Soldiers. Follow the corridor down and defeat the enemies in the next room before pressing the switch behind the closed mouth to reveal another green portal. Head through and quickly rush past the enemies in the next area. You’ll want to destroy the Buff Totem before dealing with them, so run forward and jump to the broken road winding around to the left. Follow this and hop into the hole before Dashing across to the platform on the other side. Use the jump pad and you’ll find the Buff Totem sitting on a slab of concrete in the middle of the lava.
With that destroyed, you can now clear out the rest of the enemies in this area. Look towards the waypoint and use one of the poles floating in mid-air to swing over to the climbable wall and onto the upper platform. Melee the block up here and use that to reach the next set of platforms surrounded by spinning chains. Dodge these, head inside the building, and fight your way through until you reach another radiated river of goo. Hit the switch in the goo to open the next door, then carry, using the climbable walls to navigate towards the waypoint.
Kill the enemies in the next corridor and hang a right to break through the wall and pick up the Blue Gore Key. Turn back around and open the next door, then dodge the fireball traps and drop into another irradiated river. Travel through here and you’ll eventually find yourself back in the large combat arena from before. Defeat the new onslaught of Demons and pop the Red and Blue Gore Keys into the slots next to the yellow one you inserted earlier.
Keep going down until you reach another lever to pull. Use the main console to destroy the heart and then quickly follow the waypoint to escape the area before the timer runs out. You can kill enemies along the way or simply Dash past them to save time. And with that, the Super Gore Nest is no more.
Though circumstances have forced us to change what we originally planned for Nintendo Voice Chat 500 Live, we’re still planning on something special! Please join us from 3pm PT to 4pm PT on Friday, March 20 on the Nintendo Voice Chat YouTube channel or on our Twitch channel for a special, casual Mega Question Block Live Stream!
Casey, Zach, Brian, Peer, and Tom will be available to answer all of your questions and chat about Animal Crossing: New Horizons and all things Nintendo with you. And, remember all of those questions you submitted to “someone at Nintendo?” You’ll get to see Nintendo’s Bill Trinen answer them during the stream! We’ll also reveal the two lucky winners of Animal Crossing: New Horizons codes, reveal a very cool special NVC 500 shirt design and probably show you our Animal Crossing islands.
Please join us for some lighthearted fun on Friday so you can get the thing! P.S. Our other special guest panel and originally planned show will be saved for an in-person live audience show at a later date, hopefully, this year all things considered.
Valve’s first big VR game, Half-Life: Alyx, will be available for all at 10AM Pacific time on Monday, March 23. If you haven’t been keeping track, it’s been 13 years since the last actual Half-Life game, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, came out in 2007. So it’s kind of a big deal. Make sure to come back on Monday and find out what I think of it!
In the meantime, we’ve got tons and tons Half-Life: Alyx preview content for you to check out, courtesy of this month’s IGN First.
Streaming TV is the future made reality, and Sling is one of the better services out there. It works like cable, for all intents and purposes, but it’s just delivered through your internet connection rather than through a cable signal. Right now Sling has some awesome deals to entice you into signing up, including an offer for a free Amazon FireTV Stick with 2-month prepay.
Sling Orange and Blue offer live TV services with networks you’re actually interested in, like Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, TNT, TBS, SyFy and more (depending on which package you choose).
The Fire TV Stick is free when you prepay for 2 months of service to either Sling Orange or Sling Blue, so it’s an even better deal right now.
If you’d rather not pay anything, Sling has expanded its free TV services to include 24 hour live news from ABC News, as well as “thousands of movies and shows suitable for kids and families.”
The Sonic the Hedgehog movie is getting an early digital release after many theaters have closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Paramount Pictures tweeted that Sonic will be available on-demand starting on March 31. This marks just 46 days since it opened in theaters on February 14.
Sonic the Hedgehog will become available on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD May 19.
If you’ve found yourself scrolling endlessly through your streaming services without settling on anything you’re excited to watch, maybe a new streaming service is in order. Right now you have a choice of deals on Starz. One of them gets you a three-month membership $5 per month. The other asks you to buy in for six months up front for $24.99, but the total cost is a little less per month than the first deal. It’s your choice!
Starz may not quite have the reputation of an HBO or Showtime, but it has amassed a good number of original series over the years, and it always has great movies available to stream.
Right now, for instance, you can stream popular movies like Venom, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Men In Black International, and The Equalizer 2 on Starz. And in case you thought Disney movies were locked on Disney+, that’s not the case. Starz also has movies like Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and more for kids and adults alike.
On the original series front, you’ll get instant access to shows like the American Gods, Black Sails, Ash vs. Evil Dead, Party Down, and Outlander, which is currently in the middle of its fifth season.
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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
The Call of Duty: Warzone beta takes a vastly different approach than most other battle royales. Death is an inconvenience rather than the end, top-tier weapons are consistently easy to come by, and skill will only get you so far when there are no more armor plates to loot. While that means it excels at being accessible and easy to pick up, it pays a high cost where depth is concerned. Solos manage to get all of the good without very much of the bad from these trade offs, but the same can’t be said when you squad up. Still, the impressive 150 player count, tried and tested arsenal from Modern Warfare, and well-crafted, massive map consistently deliver excellent firefights even if they sometimes lack the genre’s high stakes and endless variety.
World of Warzone
Like Blackout before it, Warzone’s Verdansk battle royale map mashes up several familiar locations from Call of Duty’s past, albeit on a much larger scale. Verdansk is massive, dwarfing its predecessor and then some. And for a space this vast with a 150-player capacity, Warzone’s performance on PC impressed me as I rarely experienced frame drops or connectivity problems, which feels like a triumph in this context. I did have some trouble with mantling onto ledges in certain areas and the ping system just stops working if you try to use it at too long a range, not to mention that it isn’t nearly as intuitive or robust as the one found in Apex Legends. But these annoyances are very much the exception rather than the rule. You’ll be hard pressed to find an area devoid of well-crafted explorable structures brimming with weapons, supplies, and cash which can be redeemed at randomly placed buy stations for things like killstreaks, armor plates, or weaponry in loadout drops
Like the name suggests, the loadout drop lets you equip the guns, gadgets, and perks of your custom Modern Warfare multiplayer loadouts in the middle of a Warzone match. And when I say middle, I really mean beginning. Acquiring the requisite $6,000 to purchase a drop can be done within the first minute of the round if all three players in a squad chip in. While you’ll still need to come by ammo and armor elsewhere, using a loadout drop to scratch two weapons, throwables, and perks off your shopping list in the first 60 seconds of a match is just too easy to make hunting for the randomly placed guns feel worth it.
As a result, the stellar weapon variety that fuels other battle royales’ replayability, creates exciting asymmetrical firefights, and incentivizes combat isn’t really a part of Warzone’s main squad-based battle royale mode. I never jumped with joy when scoring a rare gun from a chest or slain enemy since I knew my prefered kit was only moments away, if not already in hand. I also didn’t see the appeal of straying away from the Overkill perk or my favorite weapons from Modern Warfare’s multiplayer (like the M4 and HDR sniper rifle with a thermal optic), especially since trying something new would have effectively meant spending several hours unlocking attachments I didn’t already have – and I’m evidently not the only one who feels this way since the aforementioned combination (or some similar variation) are ubiquitous in Warzone.
Being an offshoot of Modern Warfare, every weapon in the arsenal feels sublime, so it’s a shame that I wasn’t tempted to use more of them. I loved that Modern Warfare’s Gunfight mode exposed me to a wide variety of weapons thanks to its randomized loadouts and I had hoped Warzone would scratch that same itch. But even the high rarity weapons found in special orange chests around Verdansk and come pre-equipped with several attachments are a distant second to the guns I have literally dozens of hours of experience with. Loadout drops are a messy solution to a problem that didn’t exist in the first place, but they are less of an issue in solo battle royale where gathering the necessary cash is harder and the risk of calling in a conspicuous package at a hotly contested buy station is more perilous.
The prospect of earning cash itself is at least a fun one thanks to contracts visible on the minimap that task your squad with scavenging supplies, capturing a zone-revealing recon station, or hunting a specific player. The bounty hunt contract reveals the enemy’s approximate location but doesn’t feel unfair since the prey are given ample warning and receive a cash bonus if the hunter fails to seal the deal in the allotted time. These novel mini-missions did a great job of breaking up duller moments and incentivizing movement.
On the subject of looting, Warzone does away with the inventory entirely. Instead each player has a resource bar they can pull up to drop things like ammo, armor plates that effectively act as extra hit points, and cash for their teammates. Not having to manage an inventory in the middle of a firefight is nice, and automatically picking up any ammo you come across is even better. This system is a much better fit for the ease-of-use and fast pace synonymous with Call of Duty than Blackout’s somewhat clumsy inventory. The only place where it felt a little fidgety was looting specific equipment from dead players as their gear can sometimes explode around them in such a way that makes it hard to pick up any single item.
Battle Casuale
Warzone is teeming with new ideas, taking the default squad-based battle royale mode in a more casual direction than Black Ops 4’s Blackout. A large factor that contributes to this less than punishing change of pace is just how easy it is to respawn after dying in what is ultimately a last-man-standing mode. When you perish in battle your teammates can simply buy you back in at a buy station. This can occur as many times as their wallet allows, but it still feels fair since it gets harder to do as the round progresses, the respawning player is marked via a red flare, and, most importantly, it is a deliberate action that someone still in the game has to execute. None of the same can be said for the gulag.
The gulag is where you go when you die for the first time – not to the menu to queue for a new match, but rather to the shower room of a prison to take part in a gladiatorial scrap with another dead player for a shot at reincarnation. The weapons are randomized and you only get one chance to redeploy via the gulag. If it sounds fun, that’s because it absolutely is. Even better, while you’re waiting for your turn to fight for your life, you can hurl stones at the current combatants or feed your incarcerated teammate realtime information about their gulag opponent’s location. That last part is pretty scummy, but hey… that’s prison.
While the gulag itself is a blast, I’m definitely not a fan of the effect it has on the battle royale taking place outside. You never really know when, where, or if a player has been respawned via the gulag, so getting killed or even just damaged by an enemy that drops on top of you feels terrible, even more so if you were the one that killed them in the first place. On one occasion I died during a teamfight, won my gulag match, and respawned directly over the same firefight just in time to spoil what should have been a clear victory for the opposing squad. While that may have been epic from my perspective, being on the receiving end of such a comeback feels utterly unfair because you’re never sure whether enemies are gone for good or just on their way back in. As a result, kills are neither particularly gratifying or assuring in the squad-based battle royale. The good news is that Warzone’s solo mode completely skirts around this problem by deploying victorious gulag players far away from the location of their death – I wish the default team-based mode followed suit with every respawning player, not just fully-wiped squads.
My first win in Warzone came as a result of getting lucky as the gas ring closed directly onto a well-fortified hilltop that my squad and I were defending. It was a hollow victory though since I usually prefer to be aggressive in battle royales, but the more I played the more I realized Warzone’s mid-to-late game just doesn’t reward that behavior, which is disappointing. Unlike Blackout and Apex Legends, which guarantee that slain players drop at least some armor, Warzone has no problem leaving you on death’s door after successfully eliminating multiple squads. That’s because enemies only drop what they have on them, and armor plates and buy stations are naturally harder to come by as the round progresses. In a game like Call of Duty, it doesn’t feel good to walk away from a victorious firefight wishing you had avoided it all together.
Stockpiling armor for the end of the match isn’t an option either since you can only hold five armor plates in reserve and it takes three to effectively heal back to full. That means that if a single encounter towards the end of the game doesn’t yield armor plates you’re in trouble. As a result, aggressive players or those forced to fight their way into the circle are punished while campers and opportunistic third parties are rewarded, which just isn’t any fun.
Plunder
Aside from the squad and solo battle royale modes, Verdansk also plays host to the Plunder mode, which sees about thirty teams of three players competing to collect the most cash in an allotted time. Unlike battle royale there is no circle, you spawn with your full multiplayer loadout, and upon dying you redeploy after a short delay. The goal is to earn cash by scavenging, competing contracts, and killing other squads and then bank it in a helicopter or cash-deposit balloon. I really like the idea of a more freeform objective-based mode on such a large scale, but in practice Plunder does absolutely nothing for me. The fast respawns mean that firefights with the same squad can drag on much longer than they should, and in one match where I was the top contributor on the winning team I hardly fought or came across anyone else. There are some cool concepts here, but in my experience they didn’t translate into fun gameplay.
Paramount Pictures’ Sonic the Hedgehog will become available to purchase very soon. The film production company announced that the family-friendly adventure movie can be bought on digital storefronts on March 31, while those waiting for the 4K UHD, Blu-ray, or DVD physical releases can grab the film on May 19.
The digital, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray releases all come packed with a bunch of extras, including commentary from director Jeff Fowler and Sonic voice actor Ben Schwarz, bloopers and deleted scenes, a Dr. Robotnik character breakdown by actor Jim Carrey, and more. You can check the full list of bonus features below.
On top of all of this, the 4K UHD digital and physical releases of Sonic the Hedgehog come with Dolby Vision, a format that “brings entertainment to life through ultra-vivid picture quality with spectacular colors, highlights that are up to 40 times brighter, and blacks that are 10 times darker,” according to a press release. Further, these two versions also pack in a Dolby Atmos soundtrack “remixed specifically for the home to place audio anywhere in the room, including overhead.”
Sonic the Hedgehog’s imminent home and digital releases featuring a few more goodies, including a new animated short that show the blue blur’s “next adventure around the world,” a printed limited edition comic book found in the 4K UHD and Blu-ray combo pack, and more. Check out your pre-order options and the special features below.
We gave the film an 8/10 in our Sonic the Hedgehog review, calling it “a light, funny movie, and while it definitely skews young, longtime Sonic fans should have just as much fun finally seeing the Blue Blur on the big screen.”
Pre-order Sonic the Hedgehog on Digital (March 31)
Digital HD – $20
Digital 4K UHD — $25
Pre-order Sonic the Hedgehog on Blu-ray (May 19)
Sonic the Hedgehog Bonus Features (Digital, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray)
Commentary by director Jeff Fowler and the voice of Sonic, Ben Schwarz.
Around the World in 80 Seconds–See Sonic’s next adventure!
Deleted Scenes–Director Jeff Fowler introduces deleted scenes.
Bloopers–Laung along with Jim Carrey and the cast.
“Speed Me Up” music video.
For the Love of Sonic–Jim Carrey and the cast discuss what Sonic the Hedgehog means to them.
Building Robotnik with Jim Carrey–See Jim Carrey bring the supervillain Dr. Robotnik to life.
The Blue Blur: Origins of Sonic–Explore the origins of the legendary Blue Blur.
Sonic on Set–Visit the set with the voice of Sonic, Ben Schwartz.
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