Author: Trafficblast

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The third season of Cobra Kai is streaming now on Netflix, which prompted an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon by star Ralph Macchio. While he was there to promote the new episodes of the series, he also dropped an interesting bombshell about the movie that started it all, The Karate Kid. Did you know that wasn’t the film’s original title?

While playing a game with Fallon, Macchio admitted that he originally hated the title The Karate Kid, thinking it was too hokey. But it’s worlds better than what the movie was originally going to be called. According to Macchio, director John G. Avildsen told him initially that the film was to be called East Meets West in West.

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and the movie was renamed The Karate Kid, leading to the franchise we all know and love. Honestly, how would that title have worked for the sequels? Who is going to watch The Next East Meets West in West?

That wasn’t the only bit of trivia Macchio revealed in the segment, which you can watch above. Additionally, he revealed that in some international territories, the movie was titled The Moment of Truth. Meanwhile, Macchio said that other actors considered for his role of Daniel LaRusso were Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr., and Nicolas Cage. Sit for a second and imagine The Karate Kid with Nicolas Cage. Someone should make that movie now.

To wrap up his appearance, Macchio played lawyer to present his case for why the iconic crane kick from the first Karate Kid film was a legal maneuver. We’re not going to argue with him.

The third season of Cobra Kai is streaming on Netflix now. After you watch it, check out our interviews with the producers about what’s next for Kreese, Johnny, and Daniel in Season 4.

Every aspect of Super Meat Boy Forever is frustrating in some way or another. It’s a runner, so you have to time your jumps and don’t have the liberty of setting yourself up perfectly before taking on a puzzle. And despite putting you on a treadmill, its levels demand incredible nuance and precision, which you’ll hone through failure after failure after failure. Super Meat Boy Forever will kick you in the teeth and expect you to stand back up, flash a bloody grin, and go after it again. And that’s exactly what happens. Though the jumps may be challenging, Forever’s incredibly precise controls give you all the tools you need to stick the landing. The runner format is different, but it opens the door for new and interesting types of complex puzzles that spawn new, captivating varieties of spectacular yell-and-throw-your-controller platforming.

Like in the real world, time has passed in the Meat Boy universe. Meat Boy and Bandage Girl, whom he saved in the original, have settled down and had a baby, Nugget. In Forever, Nugget is kidnapped, so Meat Boy and Bandage Girl go after her. (You can play as either one from the very beginning.) The story has no material effect on your gameplay, but the short cartoon cutscenes find ways to grab your attention all the same with a webtoony out-of-left-field story chock-full of references to video game canon, adorable woodland creatures, cuddly animals, and the adorable little Nugget, who often proves too adorable for even her captor to ignore.

The cutscenes are thus an entertaining reward for hard-earned progress. Following in the original Super Meat Boy’s footsteps, Forever lays out levels sprinkled with bottomless pits and buzzsaws that require quick thinking and quicker reflexes to escape. At the same time, it’s a very different game. Meat Boy or Bandage Girl constantly runs forward, and you simply control when they jump, slide, or punch. By necessity, the levels take on longer, more horizontally oriented shapes to accommodate the new system. Despite those changes, Forever still retains the essence of Super Meat Boy. Though automated movement theoretically seems like it would make the platforming less satisfying, since you aren’t in complete control, Forever’s challenge is just as captivating.

Forever’s finely tuned controls give you precise control and a wide range of motion even with only a couple of inputs. Even though you control all three moves with just one button and the left analog stick, there is incredible nuance to each one. Holding down the button will get you different sized jumps. You have to slide to hit enemies without jumping. Punching in mid-air extends your jump, and landing a punch in the air lets you do it again. It is not enough to press the right button at the right time; you have to be able to feel how far you’re going to jump based on how long you press. Exploring and internalizing your controls so that they’re second nature is a telltale sign of mastery in most platformers, but it’s a prerequisite in Forever.

You don’t need to push an analog stick to the right, but somehow that seems to make every little bit of the game less forgiving. Forcing you to move and react at the game’s pace rather than your own makes hopping simple gaps and traps requires precise timing. More complex combinations of obstacles feel like puzzles and, unlike in Super Meat Boy, you now have to solve them on the fly… or after dying a few dozen times. (Luckily, Forever only needs a second to reload after each death.) Make no mistake: Though levels generally operate from left to right, the path is not always straight through. Many levels have sections where you’ll need to jump back off a wall and double back within a room to find your way through the nightmare maze in front of you.

Forever’s worlds feature familiar themes, like a clear-cut forest and a broken-down hospital, each world has its own unique quirks–enemies and obstacles that add new complications to your path. For example, in the hospital you’ll find ghosts, which you’ll need to punch mid-jump three times, often consecutively. The ghosts are a problem–you can’t jump past one if you don’t hit it–but they also create opportunity. Since punching an enemy launches you forward and landing a punch resets the attack, the ghosts allow you to leap across long gaps or bypass traps. Every enemy and many of the traps feature some kind of “close a door, open a window” set of mechanics that encourage adaptation and make every hop feel like a calculated decision.

The precise pathing and tight puzzles feel all the more impressive when you take into account that the levels are procedurally generated on a playthrough-by-playthrough basis. Even after checking out multiple variations of the first world, I can’t say how the levels are remixed from save to save, but puzzles and pathways flow from one area to another without seams. The precision involved, particularly when you consider how demanding these levels can be, goes well beyond what I’ve come to expect from procedural level design in most games.

The design is not without its hangups, however. In a couple of spots, I found that certain enemy mechanics were not so intuitive, making it hard for me to find the way forward. Without a specific, bespoke moment to demonstrate how they worked, the runner mechanic became a serious puzzle-solving liability. Though you’re frequently confronted with areas where you aren’t exactly sure exactly what buttons to push, the path from point A to point B is pretty clear. But when the signal isn’t clear, you can face a truly confounding moment, where it seems as if your constantly running character has run out of road. That can taint the competitive frustration that builds in you over the tough gameplay with anxious anger, and sour the whole game. These moments are few and far between–it happened twice in my playthrough–but the procedural element means it could happen to you more, or not at all.

If you can navigate through those less-than-stellar confusing bits, the vast majority of Super Meat Boy Forever feels like clear sailing. Upholding the spirit of Super Meat Boy, it is pure platforming at its most demanding and most thrilling. Forever feels simple because of its controls, but its tough-as-nails levels are perfectly complex, pulling you through and knocking you down with clever challenges. Like Meat Boy himself, the fun, frustration, and motivation never really stop. It builds and pushes you through until you press every button perfectly. You just keep playing and trying and dying until you’ve had enough. And when you’re finally finished, if you’ve really put everything you had into the game, you might even feel a little runner’s high.

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In Star Trek Discovery Season 3, Episode 12, Osyraa stages a fake attack on the Discovery as it approaches Federation HQ so that Starfleet will let them in without use of comms. It works, and Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) doesn’t realize it until it’s too late. As shields go down to let Discovery in, Book and Burnham crash their way into Discovery’s shuttle bay. They devise a plan to have Burnham search for Stamets undetected.

Meanwhile, the Discovery’s bridge crew and Ryn are being held captive in the ready room. Zareh returns after being left to survive in the ice back in episode 2. Book gets captured by Zareh and is placed with the bridge crew and Ryn, and together they must figure out a way to take back the ship and its operating system. Osyraa enlists Aurellio (Kenneth Mitchell), one of the greatest scientists in three sectors, to figure out how the Spore Drive works on Discovery.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

While Arkane Lyon is busy working on the PC and PlayStation 5 title Deathloop, Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith has his hands on a separate unannounced project at Arkane Austin.

Smith said in an interview with the Spanish site Vandal that, after moving back to Austin, Texas following the conclusion of Dishonored 2‘s development at Lyon, he started working on something else. Though he didn’t name the project, Smith confirmed he’s not involved with Deathloop and instead collaborating with developers that worked on both Dishonored and Prey.

“At the end of Dishonored 2 I went back to Austin,” Smith told Vandal. “I’m not on Deathloop, I’m on another [project], working with those who made Dishonored and Prey.”

Smith didn’t clarify what his new project is or how long it’s been in development for. He also didn’t specify when it will be made public or if it’s connected to the Dishonored franchise. In either case, it will be published by Microsoft, which acquired Arkane’s parent company Bethesda in late 2020 for $7.5 billion. Smith believes Microsoft is is a perfect fit for Bethesda.

“I would say there has been no change at Arkane so far, but if I were to imagine the ideal partner, thinking of all the publishers and the people I know who work for them, it would be very very difficult to find a better partner for Bethesda than Microsoft,” Smith said. “They fit perfectly.”

Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda Softworks came by way of its purchase of ZeniMax Media. The deal meant Microsoft nabbed all of Bethesda’s subsidiaries, including Arkane Studios, Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, Tango Gameworks, and ZeniMax Online Studios.

Slay the Spire, the popular indie card-battler roguelike, is getting a board game in 2021. Contention Games, which is known for another board game called Imperium, is developing the game for four players.

Contention Games’ website has next to no information on what its version of Slay the Spire will include. It does say that it’ll be designed for players age 12 and up and will have rounds that will last around 45 minutes. That’s roughly how long it takes to climb all three spires in a normal run of Slay the Spire.

Slay the Spire is a roguelike where players build a deck of random cards as they win turn-based battles and climb the in-game spire. The game launched in 2017 in early access and then officially in 2019. It came to PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and iOS. An Android version is currently in development.

Contention Games’ is launching a Kickstarter sometime in the near future. You can sign up to receive a newsletter and receive a notification when the campaign is live.

“While it’s still disappointing to fail before reaching the end, more often than not that failure can be traced back to a specific decision or series of decisions–be it an ill-advised card acquisition, the choice to upgrade a card rather than heal, or something else,” said GameSpot’s Chris Pereira in his Slay the Spire review. “You never know what the next layer of the spire will bring, but the next delightful quandary to tackle is always right around the corner.”

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