From executive producers Jordan Peele, J.J. Abrams and Misha Green comes HBO’s new drama Lovecraft Country, premiering on August 16th. The new show follows Atticus Black and his friend Letitia on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America in search of his missing father. The series stars Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, Courtney B. Vance & Michael Kenneth Williams.
Meg and Ryan break down the new trailer and clip for Lovecraft Country from the Comic-Con @Home 2020 virtual panel, and talk about what they hope to see in the show.
The Juggernaut Royale Quads mode returns to the mix this week. As in the past, the Juggernaut suit will drop onto the Warzone map and players will duke it out to claim it to gain the upper-hand. Activision said it recommends using LMGs and launchers to fight against the Juggernaut.
Warzone also welcomes back the Blood Money Trios mode this week, alongside the regular playlists that are staying in rotation: Solos, Duos, Trios, and Quads.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Modern Warfare is getting a pair of new multiplayer playlists this week, including Deathmatch Domination and Drop Zone. Deathmatch Domination is team deathmatch mixed with an objective-based twist, so you need to capture and hold locations and get kills to earn points.
The Drop Zone mode, meanwhile, is a deathmatch-style mode where killstreaks are only available if playing are holding the objective.
Additionally, the popular maps Shoot House and Shipment are getting their own dedicated 24/7 playlists this week.
New Bundles
Activision is also offering new microtransaction bundles this week, the first of which is “Zane: Golden Idol.” This bundle includes various gold-colored cosmetic items–there are 10 in all–for the operator Zane. The bundle includes two Legendary blueprints, too–the King’s Highway assault rifle and the High Plains Drifter handgun.
The new Icon cosmetic items
Another bundle is called Spectrum, and it comes with the Ghostly Recollection weapon blueprint and the Interstellar Dreams calling card. It also includes the Worlds Apart animated emblem.
Double XP
Modern Warfare and Warzone will offer double XP, double weapon XP, and double Battle Pass XP this week. This double XP event begins July 31 at 10 AM PT and runs through August 3 at the same time.
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Halo 3 recently came to PC for the first time through the Master Chief Collection, and it brought with it some upgrades and change. One temporary addition is a new unlockable skull that adds an incredible new power to the game–but there’s only two days left to unlock it.
The Acrophobia Skull lets Master Chief fly his way through the campaign, regardless of whether he has access to a Ghost or Banshee. The skull lets you fly by holding down the jump button, rising perpetually, taking to the skies to see each level of the campaign from a new perspective. The skull can also be used inside other games in the Master Chief Collection.
The skull can be used in single-player or co-op, but you’ll need to work fast and hard to unlock it. You’ll need to defeat 343 flying enemies (such as Banshees, Buggers, Phantoms, or Sentinels) before the end of July 29, 2020. You’ll need to be playing on Normal or harder.
It’s the kind of old-school cheat that games so rarely have these days, and it puts a fun new spin on the game, so you don’t want to miss it. The best way to do it is to play through a mission will a lot of Bugger enemies–like The Storm–and reload checkpoints when possible. It’ll take a while, but it’s worth doing.
If you’re enjoying Halo 3’s return to the spotlight as much as we are, check out editor Eddie Makuch’s story of how the game changed the lives of its own developers.
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NBA 2K21 is coming to all the major current and upcoming systems–PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. Eyes will be on the new console versions to see what advantages they offer, and with a new soundtrack announcement, 2K has made one benefit clear.
The soundtrack for NBA 2K21 on current systems has been announced, and most of it is now available on Spotify (embedded below). It contains songs from The Weeknd, Stormzy, The Strokes, Tarik, and more. The final soundtrack will consist of 52 songs…but if you buy the game on PS5 or Xbox Series X, you’ll get 202 songs instead.
What’s more, the next-gen soundtrack will be updated after launch with more songs, but it sounds like the other versions will miss out on these new songs.
The final game will also contain two tracks from cover star Damian Lillard, performing under the name “Dame D.O.L.L.A.” Lillard appears on the cover of the standard edition for current-gen systems.
In a statement sent to press, Lillard expressed his enthusiasm at being a part of the game’s soundtrack. “To be on the cover alone is a big deal to me, but to be on the cover and also have my music be a part of the game is a huge accomplishment as well,” he said.
“Personally, I’ve been introduced to new artists, songs and genres that I might hear on the radio, but I heard it first on NBA 2K,” he continued.
A preview of one of his songs has appeared on TikTok, and you can listen below.
A video teaser of 2K21 on PS5 was recently revealed, showcasing some stunning visuals–albeit without showing us any typical gameplay. Improved load times were also touted for the next-gen version of the game.
A new TV show based on the mob is coming to the TV network Showtime, and it’s assembled some big-name writing and producing talent to make it happen.
Deadline reports that the untitled show is written by Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, and it’s inspired by Nicholas Pileggi’s writing about organized crime. Pileggi wrote the books that Martin Scorsese would later adapt into Goodfellas and Casino. He also produced Scorsese’s new mobster movie, The Irishman, which was a big success at Netflix.
As for Winter, he also wrote and produced the HBO show The Sopranos, while he earned an Oscar nomination for his Wolf of Wall Street script. Winter is also writing the new Batman TV show coming to HBO Max.
Veteran Hollywood producer Brian Grazer is also involved in the new Showtime drama. Grazer may be best known for Arrested Development and 24, but he also has a history with organized crime productions, having produced the Ridley Scott movie American Gangster.
It sounds like it’s still very early days for the new mobster show, so there is no word yet on who may star in it, when it might film, or when it could debut.
I love two types of sci-fi stories: the ones that are very dark and heavy with themes about humanity’s failures, and the ones that are corny and feel like the product of someone who thinks space is a playground for fun. Destroy All Humans is firmly in the second category, embracing its cheesy story and dialogue, creating an entertaining sandbox for destruction that’s still satisfying 15 years after its first release, even if it’s bogged down by poor audio quality and shallow stealth mechanics.
The story plays out as a B-grade sci-fi movie set in the late ’50s/early ’60s. Over the six hours of campaign missions you’ll laugh (or groan) at the majority of jokes and bad one-liners, making for an overall enjoyable experience. The premise of two aliens completely taking over America because humans are wildly incompetent is too ridiculous to take seriously, and the game embraces the absurdity well.
The voice work from the original release helps up the camp level, but the reused dialogue raises a few issues. The audio quality is flat-out bad by modern standards; its low-fidelity really sticks out when paired with the updated graphics. The characters don’t have very many lines, either, resulting in annoying repetition very early on. Be prepared to hear about communists hundreds of times before you’re done.
Most of the cutscenes and dialogue are between alien protagonists Crypto and Orthopox, both of whom give strong performances, even if they feel at odds with each other. Crypto is played as a C-tier action hero, with bad one-liners that feel delivered by an uninterested actor, which is probably intentional. That clashes with the over-the-top Invader Zim-style performance given for Orthopox, which feels like he didn’t get the direction for campiness that everyone else did. The clashing performances play out comedically for the most part but create some tonal whiplash whenever only one of them has a more serious moment and the other continues trying to riff.
The game’s main campaign is split into missions across six maps, although one of them, Turnipseed Farms, is only used for the tutorial. Campaign missions consist of two types of gameplay: stealth and action. The stealth sections are fairly one-note, with you taking on a human disguise that needs to be occasionally refueled by brain zapping more humans. Additional obstacles, like EMP devices and Majestic Agents, force you to avoid staying in their range for too long, but don’t provide much more challenge beyond zig-zagging to your objective.
The rest of the main missions involve going loud and, well, destroying all humans. Crypto is armed with four weapons and Psychokinesis, which allows you to zap, disintegrate, probe, and throw people and vehicles. A satisfying traversal ability called SKATE lets you glide around the world, and it feels very fluid. It allows you to go into a skateboard-type movement after dashing, letting you move quickly around the environment with precise steering. You can easily make quick turns and jump over objects while continuing to glide. The third-person shooting automatically locks on to enemies, allowing you to dynamically move and fire, smoothly dodging into cover or out of the way of missiles between each shot. All of the weapons have varying ammo capacities and damage levels and the weapon wheel allows for easy switching, so utilizing all of your tools during a firefight feels natural.
As more powerful enemies are introduced, you also begin to unlock more abilities and upgrades, which ensure you remain more powerful than the humans, but not to the point of being overpowered. The enemies shout silly lines about being burned or attacked and vehicles always explode when defeated, embracing the power fantasy. As you cause more destruction, your notoriety increases, leading to larger and more powerful responses from the humans. Causing mayhem and destruction is incredibly fun and when the game is at its best.
In other missions, you’re instead in Crypto’s saucer. Its weapons lack the variety of Crypto’s own arsenal, but wrecking a town’s worth of buildings still feels great. Not only do some of the weapons produce fiery leftovers, but the buildings explode into tons of pieces, which is satisfying every time. There’s a lack of variety in the human enemies though, who are limited to police officers, soldiers, Majestic agents, and mutated Majestic agents. The vehicles run into a similar issue, with the only offensive vehicles being tanks and robot mechs, which, like the human enemies, rely primarily on guns. There are a fairly limited number of character models in the game and as a result, it makes the otherwise enjoyable combat encounters feel repetitive.
The campaign missions also feel disconnected. Most of them abruptly end when the objective is met, even if you’re in the middle of a firefight. Not every mission ends in a cutscene either, so you may simply get kicked back to the mission select, which is jarring. Each campaign mission has anywhere from one to four optional objectives, which can involve not getting detected, killing enemies in a certain way, or destroying specific vehicles. These optional objectives add an extra twist to the combat encounters and, if missed, can easily be replayed. However, most campaign missions aren’t unique enough from the rest of the game to warrant a second runthrough.
The game has three boss fights, two of which are back-to-back at the end of the campaign. These bosses go against the game’s ethos of overpowered carnage seen in the rest of the game–each boss has a large health bar that needs to be drained three times to be defeated, and they take a while to get through. None of the fights are particularly challenging either–each boss only has a handful of attacks, all of which are heavily telegraphed and easily dodgeable–which makes these encounters tedious more than anything.
After playing through all of the missions available in each area, you unlock the ability to free-roam through the maps, letting you return to complete some challenges. There are four types of challenges: Armageddon, Race, Abduction, and Rampage, with one of each challenge in every map. All four of the challenges are enjoyable in their own ways, with Rampage and Armageddon tasking you with bringing destruction either on the ground or in the area using Crypto’s saucer. Abduction tasks you with throwing specific objects or people into an abduction beam, which results in frantic action. Lastly, the Race challenges involve using the SKATE ability and your jetpack to quickly traverse the terrain, which shows off how well the overhauled movement system works by having you jump, jetpack, and glide behind a drone, all of which feels precise.
None of the challenges are particularly difficult, especially when you have the majority of the upgrades unlocked, which feeds into the game’s power fantasy of superior beings annihilating the human race. With only 24 challenges total, the game offers just enough to experience the mayhem without feeling like a slog to finish.
Destroy All Humans certainly shows its age in places. The stealth missions are rudimentary, the boss fights are tedious, and some poor audio work won’t let you forget that this is a game from 15 years ago. However, its core loop of causing destruction and mayhem, laying waste to humans and cities, still feels satisfying. Destroy All Humans often feels like the PS2 game it is, but a fresh coat of paint and updated controls definitely make this remake enjoyable to play through today.
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The Medium is an Xbox Series X exclusive horror game, where you play across two different realities at once. The game, from Layer of Fear developer Bloober Team, is one of a few games announced for Series X that is not coming to Xbox One–but it nearly made it to an earlier Xbox console.
As Nintendo Life recalls, back in 2012 many game sites reported getting a mysterious phone call, which played a pre-recorded message: “Do you know about Medium? If not, you will.”
It was discovered, at the time, that Bloober Team had registered a domain for the game, and that they intended to release it on modern systems at the time–PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PS Vita, and mobile.
It’s hard not to wonder what the Wii U version would have looked like, as the system’s two screens would have lent themselves to the game’s concept. At the same time, if the game was being designed with the Vita and mobile in mind, it must have been very different in scope.
Bloober Team has previously said that the game is skipping Xbox One because developing it for a current system would have meant making compromises. This leads some credence to this idea–evidently, the game wouldn’t work on earlier generation consoles.
A new biopic about the late legendary country singer Merle Haggard is in the works at Amazon Studios, and Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell is reportedly in talks to play the lead role.
Deadline first reported the news, adding that Rockwell will do his own singing. The film is said to take place in the 1960s as Haggard rose to fame. Haggard died in 2016.
The film will be directed by Robin Bissell, who produced Seabiscuit and The Hunger Games. It’s based on Haggard’s memoir, Sing Me Back Home, and Haggard’s wife Theresa will be a producer.
Haggard has a movie story-like life. After his father died and his mom abandoned him, Haggard hopped trains around America and stole cars. He escaped from juvenile detention centers on numerous occasions, and was eventually locked up for three years in the infamous San Quentin prison. It was there that he attended Johnny Cash’s first prison performance. After getting out of prison he attempted to reform his life and moved on from the past, and this journey will likely be part of the story.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for the drama and controversy surrounding Haggard’s life leading up to his music-making days that put him on the map and shaped the country music scene forever.
As for Rockwell, he won the Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
As Kotaku reports, one of the early designs that has leaked for the game shows off a different co-pilot line-up. One of them is a human woman, and her hair is incredible. We don’t know much else about her, but considering the absence of humans across the rest of the Star Fox series, it’s certainly interesting to see one here.
The woman is Black, too, which is significant as Nintendo has historically had few Black characters. It was only the most recent Animal Crossing, for example, that started to allow you to choose Black skin for your villager. On the SNES, she would have been even rarer.
Unfortunately the game’s lead designer, Dylan Cuthbert, does not remember this character. “This is all very early on prototype stuff, we switched around a ton of stuff,” he said on Twitter. Unfortunately we’ll probably never know more about this character, although we’re glad to know that, at one point, she existed in the game.
Star Fox 2 is available now through Nintendo Switch Online. Unfortunately, this character does not appear in it. The game received a 5/10 in GameSpot’s review, as it has not aged well. “Framerate issues and tech that wasn’t suited for this style of game prevent Star Fox 2’s vision from being fully realized, but it’s an important piece of gaming history kept alive with an official release,” wrote reviewer Michael Higham.
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RIDE 4 is back on the race track this October, with a new gameplay trailer ready to show off all the new details that are lurking under its hood. In a new press release, developer Milestone says that the latest footage features an in-engine look at several new motorcycle models, with each two-wheeler revealing “incredible bike details that have been perfectly reproduced from their real-life counterparts.”
“All bike models in RIDE 4 have been created from the ground up using the most advanced technologies and the original CAD and 3D scans of real models, to bring to life authentic and lifelike replicas of the most iconic motorcycles, even the rarest and most exclusive ones.”
RIDE 4 will also feature a redesigned career mode that will eventually lead players to challenge the best that two-wheeled motorsports have to offer in the ultimate championships. If players are seeking an even greater challenge, they can also attempt to outlast the competition in the new Endurance mode, which Milestone describes as “the hardest challenge that only the best virtual riders can face,” and also features “level of realism and authenticity with dynamic lighting and weather conditions, and Pit Stops for tires and fuel management.”
Our last run on Milestone circuit was back in 2017’s RIDE 2, which didn’t exactly leave critic John Robertson yearning for more of the studio’s flavor of motorcycle racing.
“On paper, then, Ride 2 is an exciting proposition that bundles the promises of aspirational game design with the raw power and fun associated with motorbikes,” Robertson wrote in GameSpot’s Ride 2 review.
RIDE 4 will be out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on 8 October 2020.
