Author: Trafficblast

Madden NFL 21 is a tale of two games, really. It introduces The Yard, the best new Madden game mode in more than a decade, situating itself nicely alongside the breezy and fun Superstar KO mode that arrived last year. But outside of these exciting inclusions that are well-suited for short sessions, Madden NFL 21 feels all too familiar, even for an annual sports sim. The tentpole modes that require a deep investment haven’t received meaningful updates, and the on-the-field gameplay doesn’t do much to move the series forward and is hampered by surprising technical issues.

EA Sports has done well as of late with recognizing that not every player wants to sink a dizzying number of hours into Franchise or Ultimate Team. With Madden NFL 20, EA added Superstar KO, a sudden death overtime mode where each player gets one possession. It returns in Madden NFL 21 largely unchanged, retaining its excellent high-stakes matches. With Madden NFL 21, EA has added a second casual game mode that is even better than Superstar KO.

The Yard is easily the most over-the-top game mode to ever appear in Madden. Inspired by backyard football, teams of six compete on an 80-yard field, getting three possessions each to try and score. You can play against the computer, team up with one or two friends, or see how you stack up online against other players. While it doesn’t feature NFL Blitz-esque hits, you can get really imaginative with the stripped-down playbooks. You’re allowed to throw unlimited forward passes behind the line of scrimmage, and many of the plays are set up to encourage this. Adding to this mechanic is the ability to snap the ball to any of your teammates. The Yard hinges on extravagant plays, as it requires you to move the ball 20 yards for a first down. Due to the limited number of blockers, there’s a delay before the defense can pass the line of scrimmage.

Where things really get interesting is the scoring system. After scoring a touchdown, you can choose to go for one-, two-, or three-point conversions, which require you to score from different yard lines. There’s a risk-reward element in play here, as you can lose by a decent margin even if you score three touchdowns. Bonus points are rewarded for passing the ball multiple times on a scoring play. The basic setup and chaotic variables in play create some of the most thrilling Madden moments I’ve ever experienced, and games typically only last around 20 minutes or less. It’s both brief and delightful, making it the antithesis of Madden’s long-running Ultimate Team mode.

Unfortunately, Madden NFL 21 begins to show its blemishes in the familiar modes. Franchise, once again, hasn’t received any noticeable improvements. It still gives you the opportunity to manage every aspect of your team over the course of many NFL seasons, but it’s essentially the same loop that’s been in place for the past few years, giving little reason to upgrade if you primarily play Franchise. This is particularly disappointing because The Yard and Superstar KO show that it’s possible to rework the best aspects of Madden to create an experience that’s fresh and exciting again.

Face of the Franchise: Rise to Fame, the single-player story mode, is the worst part of the package by far. EA Sports hit its stride with Madden NFL 18’s Longshot, thanks to a surprisingly moving cinematic story. Since then, the story mode has been altered significantly to give players more time on the sticks and less time watching cutscenes. This year’s iteration of Face of the Franchise attempts to reintroduce more narrative after last year’s lackluster Face of the Franchise: QB1.

It doesn’t work–at all. Rise to Fame is set up as flashbacks told to a reporter back at the high school where your legendary journey began. Of course, there’s a stereotypical brash starting QB named Tommy who gives you a hard time. Quickly, it’s revealed that the starter has a health condition that he’s been hiding, which thrusts you into the limelight in the second half of a game.

After playing a few games in high school, you pick to play at one of 10 NCAA programs, and your rival-turned-wide-receiver joins you. It flashes forward to your junior year when you’re told by the coach that you’ll split time as quarterback with your frenemy–yes, he wants to play QB again–in the upcoming season. The problem here is that your play on the field really doesn’t matter at all. Despite winning in blowout fashion in the two collegiate games I started, all of the cutscenes mentioned how the team was struggling. Even after winning the College Football Playoff semifinal in dominant fashion, I was benched in the first half of the National Title game for Tommy. The story only gets more ridiculous from there, but quickly leads you to the NFL, where it starts to play out more in the fashion of the traditional Franchise mode.

It’s nice that Madden has continued its focus on narrative modes that mirror offerings in NBA 2K and MLB The Show, but Rise to Fame entirely misses the mark. Unless you really want to guide a player with your name to the Hall of Fame, it’s not worth checking out–you’re far better off jumping straight into the normal Franchise mode. Groan-inducing writing, stiff animations, and a disjointed story arc make Rise to Fame every bit as lackluster as last year. Since there’s more of it here, it’s actually even more disenchanting.

The card-collecting Ultimate Team mode doesn’t fare any better than Franchise when it comes to new features. At this point, EA has added so many superfluous details that half the time it feels like you’re playing a tedious management sim rather than a football game. It also doesn’t help that Ultimate Team remains steadfastly committed to microtransactions, which puts players who don’t feel like spending money on digital cards at a disadvantage.

Though Ultimate Team has a long list of solo challenges that introduce you to the basics, they’re all relatively bland. Rather than emphasizing the mostly solid on-the-field simulation gameplay, Ultimate Team demands that you spend an inordinate amount of time in the menus micromanaging a growing collection of players with attributes that are often quite lower than reality. To get them closer to their real-life counterparts, you have to sink a dizzying number of hours into the mode, much of it spent completing mundane tasks and playing online against those who sometimes buy their way to a good team.

While there’s much to do in Ultimate Team whether you play solo against the CPU or online, nothing here moves MUT in a positive direction. Assembling and modifying your team is a monotonous task that forces you to examine a slew of different attributes in addition to a player’s overall rating to compose the best team possible. It’s certainly deep and filled with customization, but now more than ever, the dullness of it all is much more apparent.

Despite its shortcomings in the most prominent game modes, Madden NFL 21 still offers better on-the-field gameplay than in previous years–most of the time. The biggest change I noticed came with run defense. Last year, the run game was far too challenging to stop, but this time CPU defenders smartly fill gaps and notice ball carriers more often while engaged with offensive linemen. Tackling in the open field also received noticeable improvements, including new animations and fewer (unrealistic) broken tackles.

On the offensive side of the ball, the main improvement comes with your evasive moves, which can now be utilized with the right stick. Making cuts in the open field to evade defenders feels far more intuitive than before. Two new moves, a side hurdle and dead leg, add to the number of ways you can make the defender miss. Since hesitation running is big in football, it’s nice to see the dead leg added. Directional hurdles–called jurdles–let you jump left and right rather than just forward, which comes in handy when you’re running along the sidelines. All told, ball carrier moves are more dynamic, giving you new ways to catch defenders off guard.

Quarterback play is a tad more in-step with the real thing, as there’s more nuance to throws made with defenders breathing down your neck. While QBs can now hasten their release, the accuracy of passes when under pressure can vary wildly depending on the player. This also means that attempting throws with a backup QB in the same fashion as you would with, say, Patrick Mahomes can lead to some big misses. And new Superstar and X-Factor abilities further emphasize the disparity between the stars and role players, including numerous new receiver abilities that give those with hot hands high-percentage opportunities to nab anything thrown in their direction.

When Madden NFL 21 is running without a hitch, the football gameplay is quite good, even if it’s only incrementally better than last year. Sadly, in its current state, Madden NFL 21 has some real issues, especially in regard to kicking. On more than half of my kickoffs, field goals, and punts, there was some fairly extreme lag with the kicking meter, which led to laughably errant kicks. More than usual, receivers simply do not turn back to look at the ball at all, even when it hits them directly in the back of the head.

There are also bigger-picture issues with the overall experience. Sometimes the field didn’t fully render, forcing me to quit and reload. Other times the game got stuck in a loading loop after finishing a contest. Lagging animations aren’t super common, but I encountered one or two every few games. While I assume these issues will get patched with the planned day-one update, they add up to create an inconsistent and sometimes frustrating experience.

As the PS5 and Xbox Series X loom–PS4 and Xbox One editions come with free upgrades to next-gen–Madden has reached a crossroads. One side of the road is freshly paved and inspired thanks to the shenanigans featured in The Yard, while the other is beaten down and filled with potholes. With far more technical issues than normal and large chunks of recycled content, Madden NFL 21 feels more like an update than a brand-new game.

Note: This post spoils some of the story points of Control’s AWE DLC. If you’d rather experience those moments in the DLC, hold off on reading this until after you’re done.

The folks at Remedy Entertainment have been pretty clear over the years that they would really like to continue the story of 2010’s Alan Wake. Despite two DLC additions and a smaller, combat-focused pseudo-sequel, there’s been no resolution to the story of the titular writer, who ended the original game trapped by an evil supernatural entity called the Dark Presence.

There are connections to Alan Wake in other Remedy games, but up until now, we’ve only gotten them as Easter eggs and hints. But Control’s final DLC addition, AWE, is very focused on tying the world of Alan Wake to the world of Control. And the end of the DLC makes it very clear: We’re headed back to Bright Falls in the future to continue Alan Wake’s story.

The AWE DLC sees Wake using his ability to alter reality through his writing to send a message to Control protagonist Jesse Faden, which directs her to the previously sealed and unknown Investigations Sector. There, we see the conclusion of one of the hanging story threads of Alan Wake–the fate of Dr. Emil Hartman, the psychiatrist who tried to understand and utilize the reality-bending powers of Cauldron Lake and artists including Wake, the Anderson brothers, and Thomas Zane. In Alan Wake, Hartman gets nabbed by the Dark Presence, but apparently survived the run-in. What happened to him after that was a bit hazy, and Control fills it in: He became a big gross monster and got locked in the Oldest House.

Jesse’s big goal is hunting down Hartman before he can get loose and murder everyone in the Federal Bureau of Control, and along the way, she uncovers a bunch of lore tidbits about him, Alan, and Alice Wake, Alan’s wife. Unlike the rest of Control, there’s not really much to spoil there, even at the end of the DLC. The final moments of the story of AWE are more of a teaser for the future than a conclusion of what we’ve seen so far.

After removing Hartman, Jesse and Langdon, the guy in charge of the FBC’s Panopticon area that contains and monitors all its supernaturally alive Altered Items, receive a message in the Investigations Sector. It suggests that there’s some kind of new Altered World Event occurring in Bright Falls, Washington–the setting of Alan Wake. Bright Falls is the location of at least two different past AWEs, with one in the 1970s and another in 2010, which is the story of Alan Wake. As a result, the FBC has had a monitoring station in the town for years. The message is coming from that station, but here’s the weird thing: The signal says the event is happening years in the future. And because of the lockdown, the Bureau shouldn’t be able to receive a signal at all.

There’s also some telling dialogue from Wake himself, which suggests an explanation for what this whole Hartman hunt is really about. Wake gets in touch with Jesse because he “needs a hero.” The implication is that AWE is a try-out for Jesse and that Wake is planning to write her into the story that will finally save him from the Dark Place 10 years after the events of Alan Wake put him there. The last dialogue he has sounds like Wake’s next step will be to write Jesse into his story.

We also get some implication in all this that the events of Control are actually Wake’s creation–he’s using his ability to alter reality through his writing to create the world of Control, specifically to then create a way to save himself. Whether that means Jesse is a creation of Wake, just being driven by him, or just intersecting with his story now, however, is unclear.

Altogether, the signal mentioning a Bright Falls event happening a couple years in the future really sounds like Remedy pointedly saying Alan Wake 2, or some variation thereof, is on its way, probably dropping in or around 2022. It might also be that Control 2 and Alan Wake 2 are one and the same. But we know from a blog post from Remedy creative director Sam Lake that AWE is only the beginning and that the studio is working on another game in the shared universe. It really sounds like the end of AWE has just confirmed what we can expect: the conclusion, or at least continuation, of Alan Wake’s story, more than 10 years later.

Now Playing: Control | Best Games Of 2019

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Fox is developing an animated comedy version of its hit series X-Files, according to Variety. Details are extremely sparse still, but creator Chris Carter will be executive producing, and Rocky Russo (Paradise PD) and Jeremy Sosenko (Brickleberry) are attached to write and executive produce.

The show, currently titled The X-Files: Albuquerque, will “revolve around an office full of misfit agents who investigate X-Files cases too wacky, ridiculous, or downright dopey for Mulder and Scully to bother with. They’re essentially the X-Files’ B-team.”

In other words, it sounds like a series similar to CBS’ Star Trek: Lower Decks, another animated series expanding on another already-popular series–also about a band of second-stringers who live within but operate in the deeper margins of a pre-existing world and lore.

The X-Files ran for nine seasons on Fox through to 2002 before it was revived for another two in 2016 (and also expanded into two movies). Based on what has been announced so far, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson do not look to be involved in this new animated show.

The Nintendo Switch eShop has some fantastic sales running this week, but the latest crop of deals discounts some of the Switch’s best indie games. The Annapurna Interactive publisher sale kicked off alongside Gamescom 2020 and brings markdowns on eight great games, including Florence, Sayonara Wild Hearts, and Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition. The sale runs from now until September 10 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET.

Annapurna has quietly been publishing some of the most thought-provoking indie games in recent years, and the new sale is a great opportunity to snag some of these gems for cheap. What Remains of Edith Finch, a first-person exploration game about a family repeatedly struck by tragedy, is down to just $8 in the sale. Last year’s Telling Lies, a mystery game featuring live-action footage, is down to just $14, while Kentucky Route Zero’s TV Edition, which packages the point-and-click episodic adventure in one complete bundle, is just $17.49. The gorgeous rhythm game Sayonara Wild Hearts ($7.79) is another must-play, along with Florence ($3), an interactive novel that’ll resonate with anyone who’s experienced a painful breakup.

Annapurna Interactive Switch sale:

While you’re looking for a new Switch game to play this weekend, check out the “Share the Fun” sale, which includes Luigi’s Mansion 3 for just $42 until August 30. You’ll also find markdowns on Ubisoft games, including Rayman Legends and Assassin’s Creed: The Rebel Collection, along with Mega Man 11 and the Mega Man Legacy Collections.

Alan Wake had a problem. He’d been teased as being a big part of the final DLC expansion of Control, dubbed AWE, and with that came expectations. Fans of Remedy Entertainment’s 2010 psychological horror/thriller shooter had been waiting about a decade for the next phase of his tale. Wake worked furiously to make himself part of the AWE story, appearing in twisted cutscenes that captured his fractured mental state. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. Though his writing had the power to alter the very nature of reality, not even Wake could make AWE more than an unsatisfying addition to both his story and that of the game he’d invaded.

Control’s AWE expansion ultimately is an underwhelming addition and a thin follow-up to the Remedy cult hit it’s invoking. Especially following The Foundation, a DLC drop that added a lot of variety to Control with new powers and a new location that felt very different from everything else in the game, AWE comes off as more of a slightly tweaked rehash of the vanilla Control. AWE tries to tap into some of Alan Wake’s spooky suspense underpinnings, and while it sometimes succeeds, it can’t quite maintain them for very long.

It’s a bit of a whimper for a great game to go out on, as AWE feels more like a teaser for another game you’ll have to buy at a later date, rather than a satisfying expansion of (or conclusion to) what we’ve seen in Control so far.

AWE represents Remedy elevating Easter eggs found in Control and its other games (namely Quantum Break) to shared-universe territory. Alan Wake is a character in Control’s universe, and what’s more, he’s now directly impacting on protagonist Jesse Faden’s story. A spectral Alan guides Jesse to the Investigations section of the Oldest House, the living office building where Control is set. The Investigations section was sealed two years earlier after a huge horrific monster rampaged through it and killed a whole bunch of people. Wake’s messages send Jesse to investigate, and unsealing the section gives the monster the opportunity to escape–so it becomes Jesse’s job to hunt it down and kill it before it can get into the rest of the Federal Bureau of Control and start munching on the survivors.

So most of AWE is about Jesse wandering through the Investigations section, hunting the creature. The twist is that the monster is Emil Hartman, a character from Alan Wake (the game, not the guy). The Darkness, the evil force in that game, has turned Hartman into a monster, and the interference of Control’s Hiss has made him even worse. Merging the two games lets Remedy add Alan Wake mechanics to Control’s combat to create a new wrinkle: Hartman is invincible in the dark but afraid of the light.

That creates some of AWE’s best moments, where you pursue or are pursued by Hartman in heart-pounding, deadly interactions. Again and again, you’ll face Hartman in situations where you either have to run from light source to light source to avoid a distorted, 15-foot-tall, teleporting killing machine, or you have to flip switches and maneuver power sources to blast that killing machine with light and drive it away. The entire DLC campaign is a series of encounters with a creature that’s genuinely scary, and in its coolest parts, AWE taps into Alan Wake’s horror and filters it through Control’s superpowered lens.

It doesn’t always work, though. All of these encounters with Hartman aren’t really fights, since you can’t hurt Hartman while he’s in the dark. They’re more like a series of fast-paced puzzle encounters, and some of them–like a chase where you have to blow down walls in order to reach the next pool of light before you’re snagged in the creature’s huge, gnarled arms–are more exciting than others.

The evil Darkness in AWE mirrors that of Alan Wake: In the 2010 game, standing in a pool of light would heal you of wounds you received out in the black. In AWE, standing in the dark saps you of your ability energy, quickly limiting the superpowers you can use, while getting under a light restores them. That means that when you’re sprinting from light to light, you’re slowly losing the ability to effectively sprint from light to light.

On paper, that sounds like it would create a lot of tension, but in practice it just adds a limitation to your combat capabilities that can compound frustration. Control already can be a slog at times thanks to its health system, which requires you to hurt and kill enemies to restore yourself. The game is built to give you powers like super-speedy dodging and telekinetic shields to help you save yourself when you get hurt too badly. But fighting enemies in the dark also robs you of your superpowers. It helps create situations in which you’re not only struggling to keep your health up, but also scrambling to move to or stay in locations that strengthen your powers. In a few fights, like one where you slowly dismantle your light sources in order to power a much bigger one, this quickly puts you into situations where if you take too much damage you’ve pretty much got no chance to heal yourself, and need to start over.

The pendulum swings between fun, tense, scary fights and frustrating fights would be more forgivable if AWE felt like it delivered on the promise of its title, though. In Control, AWEs are Altered World Events, situations in which the supernatural bleeds into the real world. Exploring the area where the Bureau investigates those events feels like it should mean this DLC is overflowing with weird, inventive stuff–but it isn’t. There are only a small handful of side-quests and Control’s extra-cool altered items to encounter, and they’re extremely underwhelming, mostly consisting of momentary busywork. One is a train car where you need to interact with items in a certain order to piece together the story of how it derailed, which reveals next to nothing. The other is an encounter with a sentient NASA space suit that you only interact with through a door and never actually see in person. As a follow-up to encounters with items like a sentient rubber ducky and a refrigerator that murders people in the main game, or a movie camera that puts you in a Hollywood-style chase scene in The Foundation DLC, these AWE ideas are pretty lackluster.

The more interesting part is all the story AWE teases, although most of it presents cool possibilities for things that don’t actually appear in the game. Wake himself is around, and we get a little info on what’s going on with him, which suggests there’s more to find. There are other threads with Alan Wake characters, including his wife, Alice. And we learn about a very potentially cool aspect of the FBC’s mandate: dealing with “paracriminals,” people who try to use supernatural Altered Items and Objects of Power for crimes, or who try to actually create Altered World Events. A game about dealing with those people sounds like it’d be pretty compelling, and AWE gives the sense that that might be the direction Control goes, as a franchise, in the future.

But for now, you’re mostly just solving puzzles in Investigations so you can turn on lights to chase Hartman. You continue to fight the Hiss, but even with the introduction of a new flying enemy, it’s pretty much business as usual. There are some new power upgrades for Jesse’s arsenal–specifically, the ability to telekinetically throw three objects at a time instead of one–and the new Surge grenade launcher gun, which fires sticky bombs you can remotely detonate, give you opportunities to create new combat strategies. They combine well with what’s already on offer in Control, but none offer inventive new ways to address combat situations or exploration the way The Foundation’s additions do.

AWE is the story of expectations not quite meeting reality. It’s exciting to see Alan Wake become a full-fledged addition to the Control universe and to catch up on different aspects of Remedy’s growing universe. But this feels much more like a taste of what might come in future games than a strong addition to what’s been built in Control. AWE is a missed opportunity for Remedy to really embrace Control’s deep weirdness, and it’s a missed opportunity for it to really expand on the story of Alan Wake after so much waiting. It’s the unfortunate side effect of the idea of a shared universe–in teasing the next installment in the growing story, AWE doesn’t do much to serve the story it’s already in.

There aren’t many movies in recent memory with as much release date baggage as The New Mutants. The delays sparked all kinds of speculation, everything from total genre shifts to major reshoots, though director Josh Boone has since set the record straight that neither happened. Now, with major studio tentpoles like Mulan being shifted to a digital release, New Mutants only feels like more of an anomaly–for whatever reason, the film did not get the video-on-demand treatment and instead opted for a semi-normal launch in what few theaters are actually open around the world. In the case of Los Angeles, California, that means an ad hoc drive-in, crafted in one of the Rose Bowl’s parking lots.

It’s not the most traditional moviegoing experience, but for a movie with such a non-traditional path, it feels appropriate. Bizarre release and delivery method aside, New Mutants is hardly a novelty–it’s not the worst entry into the X-Men franchise you’ve ever seen, but it’s not likely to be a very memorable one, either.

The story of a group of teenage mutants who are trapped against their will in an all-but-abandoned mental institution run by an adult mutant named Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), New Mutants hopes to thread the needle between heartfelt ’80s coming-of-age dramas like The Breakfast Club and the horror classics of the era like Nightmare On Elm Street, all rolled up in the trappings of a superhero story. It mostly succeeds–with a strong emphasis on “mostly.” It’s not that New Mutants fails to nail down the hallmarks of any of its target genres–they’re all there, sometimes spelled out so blatantly that they all but hit you over the head–but it fails to do anything memorable with them.

Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a mutant with newly manifested powers, wakes up to find herself the new girl in an already established crew of misfits. There’s the good Catholic girl, Rahne (Maisie Williams); the sweet-but-simple coal miner, Sam (Charlie Heaton); the preppy rich boy, Roberto (Henry Zaga); and the HBIC with anger issues, Illyana (Ana Taylor Joy). Each of them have their own mutant abilities–but because Dani’s the only new face in the clique, none of them really dive too far into exactly how their mutant powers work on a technical level. This will probably prove a little annoying for anyone coming to New Mutants as a fan of any of these characters’ comic book incarnations–the subtleties of someone like Illyana’s dimension-hopping “magical” abilities or the finer points of Roberto’s light-based mutation are thrown out the window. Instead, we get a rudimentary bullet-points style primer for each character–they’re mutants, they’re sad because their powers hurt people. Roberto is the fire guy. Illyana has a cool sword for some reason

If the core heroes are thinly characterized, the “villain,” Dr. Reyes, is entirely two-dimensional. She’s the only adult in the movie, and apparently the only employee of the entire institution. She spends half her screen time established as a tough-but-sincere caretaker who really, genuinely, wants what’s best for these kids and the other half being foisted into the role of brutal evil-doer. She has no real story or background of her own and no motivation beyond working for or with a vaguely defined directive to keep these mutants out of the world. In a better movie–or a better franchise–she likely could have fit into a bigger picture or made a real impact, but as it stands, her only purpose is to ignite some conflict and then step aside for the CGI monsters to start terrorizing the place.

New Mutants feels less like an X-Men story and more like the premise for a young adult-oriented TV show you’d find on the CW, or sent directly to Netflix as a limited series–a problem made exponentially worse by its tight 94-minute runtime. It’s not that New Mutants should have been longer as a movie, but the whole thing feels cobbled together, like swaths of exposition–perhaps ones that would have linked it more explicitly to the now DOA X-Men franchise at Fox–were peeled away in favor of the most pared down version of events possible.

It’s not bad, per se. The story is mostly easy to follow, if only because the plot is something you’ve definitely seen before, or read in a young adult fiction novel, but it lacks any sort of meaningful style or substance. It doesn’t feel particularly interested in making sure you care about or become invested in any of these characters beyond their big, painted-on archetypes–which, sure, makes sense. It’s not likely we’ll be seeing any of them again any time soon.

That said, the actual experience of watching New Mutants isn’t terrible. It’s campy–three of the five teens are doing cartoonishly overblown character accents and there are not one but two direct shoutouts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer–but the visual effects are all totally serviceable and the action isn’t boring. There’s even a fun little attempt at inverting some classic ’80s teen romance tropes by centering the love story on Rahne and Dani, whose scenes together are far and away the most enjoyable and engaging parts of the entire movie.

Williams and Hunt’s chemistry anchors the bulk of the movie. They’re charming and believable together–which is no small task considering how truncated every character arc was made to fit in an hour-and-a-half runtime. If anything, the fact that the two of them are so good together, and that this officially marks the first centralized queer relationship in a Marvel movie, kind of salts the wound. There’s the sense that, maybe in a different reality–one where the Disney/Fox merger didn’t interfere and the X-Men franchise had been left in more capable hands from the start–New Mutants could have really been something special. Instead, it’s a movie that will probably never outgrow the meme status it earned after three years in distribution hell, and definitely won’t be making waves in any of the genres it tries to dabble in.

Still, in a summer where the blockbuster has all but gone extinct, New Mutants isn’t an unwelcome reprieve–assuming, of course, you are able to go see it responsibly. It’s not going to blow your mind, but you’re not going to walk (or drive) out feeling like you wasted your time. And hey, sometimes that’s enough.

A clever modder has taken one of Nintendo’s most successful systems of all time and shrunk it down to the size of another of Nintendo’s most successful systems of all time. The WiiBoy Color is a modded Wii that fits into a case that’s roughly the size and shape of a Game Boy Color.

A video from modder GingerOfMods showed the process. They say that removing the disc drive actually leaves circuitry that doesn’t take up too much physical space, allowing for almost the entire hardware to fit into the much smaller space. They made custom circuit boards and a 3D-printed case, but also borrowed pieces like the screen from a car backup camera, and pieces of a GameCube controller.

The result is about the same max dimensions as a GBC, not counting the triggers on the back for full controller functionality. It also has custom settings to replicate some of the Wii motion functions that are missing from the hacked GameCube controller functionality, like shaking the Wii remote. Altogether it’s a very impressive build.

The system realizes the goal of making portable Wii games, as well as GameCube games through the system’s backward compatibility. That means games like Super Mario Galaxy are playable in portable form. Nintendo may be planning to deliver on that promise itself with rumored Super Mario remasters for Nintendo Switch, but no plans have been announced.

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