As the coronavirus crisis continues and movie theaters are imperiled as a result, Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins has held firm that her new movie will still open in theaters rather than streaming services. Speaking with Reuters, Jenkins talks about her film being delayed three times due to COVID-19 and how important it is to not let moviegoing become extinct.
“I don’t think any of us want to live in a world where the only option is to take your kids to watch a movie in your own living room, and not have a place to go for a date,” Jenkins said. “I really hope that we are able to be one of the very first [films] to come back and bring that into everyone’s life.”
Director Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated Tenet tried to plant a similar flag after many, many delays–buttime-bending marvelhas in hindsight not proven to be much of a litmus test for whether theaters are back since releasing September 3.Varietyrecently clocked Tenet as netting $250 million globally, but characterized its performance in the US as “stalling.”
Jenkins sees these numbers as a natural reaction to the pandemic and theaters struggling to get into lockstep over safety procedures–and still being in denial over how seismic 2020 has been in thinking about the movie business. Instead, Jenkins says she can see a near-future where streaming will be the home for less expensive films and theaters being the home for big-budget action movies.
“If we shut this down, this will not be a reversible process,” Jenkins warned. “We could lose movie theater-going forever.”
Wonder Woman 1984 is slated for a Christmas Day release this year.
With just a few weeks to go until the November 19 launch of Cyberpunk 2077, developer CD Projekt Red has announced that the fourth episode in its Night City Wire series will be broadcast soon. The new episode will be streamed on October 15 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET and the primary focus will be on the looks, sounds, and driving specs of the vehicles that you’ll be able to get behind the wheel of while exploring Night City’s various districts.
You’ll be able to tune into Night City Wire episode 4 through the official CD Projekt Red Twitch channel or you can visit the developer’s YouTube channel.
Numerous vehicles have been glimpsed in Cyberpunk 2077’s trailers and gameplay footage so far, such as cars that V will be able to summon to their position, motorcycles with an Akira anime influence, and more modest pickup truck options.
Previous Night City Wire episodes revealed more details on Cyberpunk 2077’s districts as well as the Braindance gameplay mechanic, the various high-tech weapons that players will be able to wield, and the gangs you’ll deal with in your adventure.
Cyberpunk 2077 has gone gold, with development continuing on the game’s post-launch patches and updates. The downside to this has been that workers at CD Projekt Red are being forced to undergo crunch as the game nears release, with a mandatory 6-day work week.
The humble Slinky–the metal spring toy–is getting the Hollywood star treatment. Variety is reporting that director Tamra Davis (Billy Madison, Half Baked) will be helming an upcoming film all about the Slinky, and the movie will be eschewing a Toy Story-like whimsical approach to instead focus on its inception and creation.
The Slinky was co-invented in the 1940s by couple Betty and Dick James. Said Davis in a statement: “I am so thrilled to have the opportunity to tell the story of Betty James; a female inventor, business woman and dedicated mother who with her husband Dick James invented the Slinky… Betty James’ life is a moment in American history where women proved they could not only survive in the face of despair but flourish when the opportunity presented itself.”
The film is co-written by Chris Sivertson (Wash Me in the River), Ann Carli (Trapped in the Closet: Chapters 1-12), and Cristina Curbelo (Fast Food Nation). Joanne Rubino (Hollywood Divas) will produce, and principal photography is expected to begin sometime in 2021.
The Slinky movie, which might seem a tad WTF? at first glance, is actually part of a well-established trend of films based on popular toys–admittedly with mixed results historically. There’s been 2012’s forgettable Battleship, 2014’s smash hit The Lego Movie (and its 2019 sequel), and a number of G.I. Joe movies including the upcoming Snake Eyes. And who could forget the Monopoly movie, which was first announced in 2015, and is supposedly still in the works.
The highly anticipated Bugsnax is launching alongside the PlayStation 5. It releases on PS5, PS4, and PC on November 12, and if you want to play it on PC, you can preorder Bugsnax on the Epic Games Store with a 15% discount right now. That brings its $25 price tag down to $21.24–it’s not a huge discount, but it’s better than paying full price at launch. Bugsnax is not yet available to preorder on PS4 or PS5.
Bugsnax puts you in the shoes of a reporter who learns of Snaktooth Island after receiving word from explorer Elizabert Megafig. Snaktooth is home to creatures called Bugsnax, which are bug-snack hybrids that move around like creepy-crawlies and taste like food. You travel to the island to document the island and creatures, but after arriving, you discover that Megafig has gone missing.
Bugsnax is a first-person adventure game that’ll have you exploring Snaktooth Island, taking photos of Bugsnax, and trapping the creatures. All of the humanoid characters you’ll be helping are monsters, much like the kind you’d find on Sesame Street. It’s unclear exactly where the story will go, but the latest gameplay trailer hinted at a darker undertone lying beneath the happy-go-lucky, cheerful atmosphere.
The voice cast portraying Snaktooth Island’s residents is a star-studded one. Prominent voice actors like Yuri Lowenthal (Marvel’s Spider-Man), Fryda Wolff (Apex Legends), and Max Mittelman (Persona 5) are featured as are Debra Wilson (Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order), Roger Craig Smith (Resident Evil 5), and Fred Tatasciore (Overwatch). Bugsnax creative director Kevin Zuhn said that developer Young Horses was able to get all of the voice actors in a room for ensemble recordings. This isn’t common for most games, but Zuhn says “seeing them all play off of each other’s energy was wonderful.”
Bugsnax is exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC, and while most exclusives have come to Steam after a year, it’s unclear if Bugsnax has a similar deal. At the moment, you can snag a preorder for Bugsnax at the reduced price of $21.24. After launch, that price goes back up to $25, so if you know you’ll be playing Bugsnax, you can save yourself a few bucks.
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I expected Bugnsax to be lighthearted and funny. Its reveal trailer sprays cute into the atmosphere; it radiates cute like some kind of cuteness bomb. What I didn’t expect was its underlying narrative drive, or the potentially darker bits of media its developers counts among their inspirations–the likes of Lost, Apocalypse Now, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. But, despite the unexpectedly dark inspirations, and I can’t emphasize this enough–Bugsnax is still extremely cute, lighthearted, and funny.
Bugsnax is much more story-driven than it might appear to be at first blush. We got a chance to try about an hour of the game, which introduces the narrative and outlines what the hell Bugsnax is all about pretty well. You play a journalist who previously covered the famed, eccentric, possibly prone-to-exaggeration Elizabert Megafig, an explorer and cryptozoologist. Elizabeth invites you to the island where she and her colleagues discovered a species of insect called bugsnax, and after some convincing, your editor lets you go to try and get the scoop–despite the fact that your last story about an Elizabert Megafig discovery turned out to be a hoax.
As you journey to the island, disaster strikes. You fall off your airship on arrival and, as you start to explore, the place is plagued by earthquakes. You soon discover Filbo, one of the inhabitants of Elizabert’s town of Snaxburg, lying on the ground and injured, asking for food. He introduces you to what you’ll be doing for the rest of your time on the island: seeking out and capturing elusive bugsnax.
It quickly becomes apparent that Bugsnax is something of a role-playing game, as you receive quests from various inhabitants of the island (a furry, Muppet-like species called Grumpuses, of which you are also one), and a puzzle game. The puzzle part comes from interacting with the bugs on the island, of which there are 100 varieties. If you want to catch one to feed to one of the grumpuses you meet, you’ll need to figure out its behaviors, something you can do with a scanner that gives you information about each bug species. The first snack you encounter is a strawberry-flavored strabby, which walks a preset circular path but flees into a bush when you approach. To grab it, you need to leave behind a trap and trigger it from somewhere out of sight. Then you bring it back to Filbo and feed it to him, pepping him up (while also transforming one of the grumpus’s limbs into a strawberry, at least temporarily).
That’s the core of Bugsnax: meet grumpuses, find out their deals, help them catch bugsnax. It’s easy to recognize gameplay inspirations that include Pokemon Snap, Viva Pinata, and Animal Crossing. You quickly find out from Filbo that Elizabert has disappeared into the wilderness of the island, and as a result, the community she’s built on the island, Snaxburg, has pretty much disintegrated. Everyone has wandered off on their own and nobody is working together anymore (or gathering bugsnax to feed everyone). In order to find Elizabert, your job becomes meeting each of the grumpuses, of which there are 14 in total, and solving their problems in order to convince them to return to Snaxburg. Eventually, you’ll get to interview each of them and try to piece together the story of what’s going on with Elizabert, the island, and the bugsnax. It turns out, the game is much more driven by narrative than it might have seemed at first blush.
“I feel like we kind of did the same thing with Octodad, where people initially thought it was just a physics toy sort of thing, or just a slapstick comedy thing, and then we hit with the launch trailer that has some more, heavy story stuff,” Young Horses president Phil Tibitoski said in an interview with GameSpot. “I think at Young Horses, our whole thing is world-building and storytelling. We do the mechanics thing and we do the weird thing, but a lot of it is about our games having heart and being relatable.”
There’s also a lot of complexity in Bugsnax that’s not immediately apparent, as well. Sometimes you’ll have to use the behavior of one bug to trap another. In one puzzle situation, I used ketchup packets growing on a bush and a slingshot to convince the hamburger-like bunger to slam into a bush, scaring out a shishkabug so I could catch it. At another point, I sent a strabby in a hamster ball into a burrow to flush out an orange peelbug, then lured it back to its pen by covering the ball in chocolate with my slingshot.
The island has several different biomes where you’ll find different kinds of bugs, as well as a day-night cycle that affects when you see bugs and grumpuses and what they’re up to at that time. At one point, I finished a grumpus’s quest and sent him back to Snaxburg. When I returned to the town, I watched him have a conversation with another grumpus, sit around a campfire, and eventually head off to bed–before then wandering around town for a few hours, sleepwalking. It gave Bugsnax a very Skyrim vibe, suggesting that each of the characters is doing more than just standing around, waiting to provide a quest prompt.
“We kind of accidentally made an RPG, without fully intending to do that at the start,” Tibitoski said.
Over the course of an hour or so playing the game, I interacted with several grumpuses and got a sense of some of the interpersonal relationships that are at the core of the Bugsnax story. Some characters, like Filbo, are trying and failing to hold the community together. Others are going their own way on the island and only looking out for themselves.
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The First 31 MInutes Of Bugsnax Gameplay
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Throughout my time with it, the tone of Bugsnax remained light, bright, and funny. But there also is an inkling of darker or more adult ideas at play, it seems. Wambus, a seemingly grumpy grumpus, had been left by his wife, another resident of Snaxburg, as Filbo explained. I ran into Gramble, a grumpus who had befriended bugsnax and didn’t want to see them eaten, while another, Wiggle, serenaded him with romantic overtures, seemingly in an attempt to convince him to offer up his bugsnax pals as snacks–or to let his guard down.
And Snaxburg itself has a bit of a cultish vibe to it. After all, it’s an idyllic community far from the rest of civilization, created by a charismatic leader and the people who upended their lives to follow her. Even though it’s a light, comedic game, Tibitoski mentioned a few interesting, darker inspirations for Bugsnax, and likened the approach to the one Pixar takes with its movies.
“I can say that inspiration-wise to varying degrees, we’ve taken from all sorts of different media and sources, things like Adventure Time, or [on] the other end, Apocalypse Now. Also things like Island of Dr. Moreau [and] Ferngully,” he explained. “But I think something that a lot of people on our team enjoy about Pixar films is that you could watch them, whether you’re a younger kid or if you’re an adult and find something to like and enjoy about them at like both levels and everywhere in between. And we try to kind of hit that same varied accessible mark.”
Though the preview didn’t show nearly everything Bugsnax has to offer–Tibitoski said completing it will probably take the average player about eight hours–the impression the beginning of the game presented was that Bugsnax is likely to stay pretty light in its tone. But that doesn’t mean the game won’t deal with heavier concepts. Tibitoski explained that he thinks that, when presented in the right way, kids are able to understand complex themes in media, and that media that’s geared toward kids doesn’t have to be simplistic.
There seem to be complex themes to explore, like a group of people’s ecological relationship with an island full of edible bugs, and the interpersonal struggles of creating a community.
“We were definitely drawing inspiration from real-life insects and bugs and arachnids and all sorts of things,” Tibitoski said. “But also the theme of exploration in this and of, I don’t know if you’d call it Gonzo journalism, of believing in something, having no one else in your immediate vicinity believe in that too. And then having to try and either prove it or find a new group of people to relate to and be associated with.”
It turns out, there are some mysteries to solve while you’re talkin’ ’bout Bugsnax. The game is set to release on November 12 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC on the Epic Games Store.
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When Bugsnax debuted during the Sony PS5 reveal event, we had lots of questions. What are these little edible creatures? What’s happening on this island? Why is the theme song so damn catchy?
We don’t have all the answers yet, but we did get some hands-on time with the game, and it might be darker than its cute look suggests. Tony and Phil discuss this in the video above, talking about the game’s influences, voice talent, and more.
Bugsnax releases for PS5, PS4, and PC on November 12. It joins the growing list of confirmed PS5 launch games.
Bugsnax is a bright, colorful game about bugs that are also snacks. But with our first hands-on preview of the game, we discovered that it’s also a pretty involved, narrative-driven game, and that understanding and capturing each of the 100 bugsnax scattered throughout the game’s island is going to take some brainpower.
Check out the first 31 minutes of Bugsnax in the video above, with a little light commentary from Wild Horses president Philip Tibitoski and GameSpot’s Phil Hornshaw as he plays the game on PC. The opening portion shows how you’ll venture to the island of Bugsnax, encounter other grumpses, the Muppet-like people of Bugsnax’s world, and help them solve problems. Those problems tend to involve catching and eating bugsnax, but to do that, you’ll have to observe the behavior of each variety and learn how to catch them.
It’s all in service of a larger story in which you meet Bugsnax’s 14 inhabitants, learn their stories, and help them with their problems. But your ultimate goal is to solve the mystery of what happened to their leader, Elizabert Megafig, and uncover the full story of the island.
Bugsnax, the weird first-person adventure about an island full of half-bug-half-snack creatures, is launching on November 12 on PS5, PS4, and PC (via the Epic Games Store). Chicago-based studio Young Horse also revealed the cast of voice actors who will be playing some of the strange Bugsnax and Grumpus characters.
The cast includes a number of notable names including Yuri Lowenthal who played Spider-Man in the recent Insomniac-developed adventure, Overwatch’s Soldier 76 voice actor Fred Tatasciore, and the blue hedgehog himself, Sonic voice actor Roger Craig Smith. Young Horse was able to record dialogue for the game with all actors present before the pandemic. Here’s a complete list of all the actors voicing various Grumpus characters:
Wambus Troubleham – Fred Tatasciore (Overwatch)
Wiggle Bigglebottom – Kenna Ramsey (Background Vocals – David Foster’s live band)
Chandlo Funkbun – Yuri Lowenthal (Spider-Man PS4)
Filbo Fiddlepie – Max Mittelman (Saitama in One-Punch man)
Gramble Gigglefunny – Sam Riegel (Critical Role)
Shelda Smellywag – Debra Wilson (Jedi: Fallen Order)
Floofty Fizzlebean – Casey Mongillo (Evangelion)
Eggabell Batternugget – Fryda Wolff (Loba in Apex Legends)
Beffica Winklesnoot – Cassandra Lee Morris (Persona 5)
Snorpy Fizzlebean – Roger Craig Smith (Sonic the Hedgehog)
Cromdo Face – Rick Zieff (Terminator 3)
Clumby Clumbernut – Barbara Goodson (Rita Repulsa)
Elizabert Megafig- Helen Sadler (Battlefront)
Triffany Lottablog- Haviland Stillwell (Devil May Cry 5)
Bugsnax is a first-person adventure where you’ll be observing and documenting over 100 different types of snack-like creatures. While you will have to figure out how they behave and what areas of the island they occupy, there is also a mystery waiting in the games’s setting: Snaktooth Island.
Players take the role of a journalist invited to the island by a friend named Megafig, who has mysteriously disappeared. As teased near the end of the reveal trailer, not everything is as whimsical as it seems on the island, and it’s up to you to uncover its less-savory aspects. Many fans have started to hope that Bugsnax is some sort of horror game hidden underneath the surreal charm shown off in Bugsnax trailers. You can read all about it in our new Bugsnax preview.
Bugsnax made waves online after debuting at the PlayStation 5 reveal event back in June, with many players enamored by the game’s odd style and concept. Young Horse also released an incredibly catchy theme song, sung by Kero Kero Bonito, after the initial reveal. Bugsnax preorders are now live, with a discount available on PC.
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Three more games have joined the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. You can download them now, completing the full slate of games we know about for early October.
As previously announced, the service has added the racer Forza Motorsport 7, the Xbox 360 Double Fine game Brutal Legend, and the retro tactical RPG Ikenfell. Brutal Legend is the one game only available on Xbox One through its 360 backwards compatibility. The other two are also available on PC, with Forza playable through the game streaming on Android devices as well.
Microsoft hasn’t detailed the rest of the slate for October, though it usually splits a month into two announcements.
Several games are set to leave Game Pass next week as well. You can check that list below, and play them while you get a chance. If you want to keep them, you can purchase them now with a discount if you’re a Game Pass subscriber.
The appearance of Final Fantasy XVI during last month’s PlayStation 5 showcase might have come as a surprise, especially considering how much in-game footage was shown off of the new mainline entry. It seems progress on the project is potentially much further than you might expect, too, with Square Enix saying basic development has completed.
In a new recruitment page for Final Fantasy XVI, Square Enix mentions that basic development and scenario production for the sequel have wrapped up, with the team now seeking recruits to ramp up large-scale resources and specific set-pieces.
“We have already completed basic development and scenario production, and are continuing to create large-scale resources and build boss battles while expanding our various development tools,” the page reads. “Also, most of our staff are carrying out their work remotely.”
With no real standardized way of talking about game development, it’s difficult to determine exactly what “basic development” means in the context of Square Enix’s process. What can be concluded is that the basic outline of what Final Fantasy XVI will become has been settled, letting the development team presumably focus on all the details to bring that vision to life in the months to come.
Final Fantasy XVI will launch exclusively on PlayStation 5, with a timed-exclusivity deal between Sony and Square Enix. The reveal trailer initially mentioned PC as a release platform too, before it was removed shortly after. This is similar to the deal with this year’s Final Fantasy VII Remake, which will apparently come to other platforms once the deal has expired.
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