Square Enix has joined the growing number of publishers offering free games to pass the time while we practice social distancing. From now until March 24, you can grab a pair of Tomb Raider games–the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot and Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris–completely free of charge on Steam, and they are yours to keep.
Tomb Raider (2013) reinvigorated the classic action-adventure series, offering a new origin story that chronicles Lara’s turn from an academic to a burgeoning explorer. Often compared to the Uncharted series in terms of style and gameplay, Tomb Raider features a stellar campaign with excellent combat mechanics and plenty of secrets to uncover. If you somehow haven’t played it yet, now’s the perfect time. Both Tomb Raider sequels are also steeply discounted on Steam. Rise of the Tomb Raider is down to $9 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is $19.58.
The 2014 Tomb Raider spin-off Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris is a different kind of adventure. Whereas Tomb Raider offers an engrossing single-player campaign, Temple of Osiris leans into arcade co-op action and is lighter on story. Played from an isometric perspective just like its predecessor Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, Temple of Osiris sees you and up to three friends exploring Egyptian tombs filled with gods and monsters to vanquish. You can play drop-in-drop-out with friends and family either online or locally.
These Tomb Raider games are just two of the many free games available to download right now, including four others that are available on Steam: Goat of Duty, Headsnatchers, Drawful 2, and Deiland. We’ve been keeping a running list of every free game you can snag across all platforms, so hopefully some of these games will make your time spent at home as enjoyable as possible.
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes place on your very own deserted island, and as such, you have to work for some of the things you want. Luckily, the game gives you most of the tools you need right away. However, the shovel is notably absent from the start. Here’s how to get it.
First, you’re going to need a fishing rod or a net. Catch five different bugs and/or fish and give them to Tom Nook at Resident Services; he’ll call up his friend Blathers the museum curator, and Blathers will show up on your the next day. There’s nothing you can do to accelerate this part, so you’ll just have to go to wait.
Once Blathers has set up his tent, go talk to him–he’ll give you the DIY schematics for the shovel. You’ll need hardwood to make it, so take a flimsy axe to some trees to get wood (don’t worry, it won’t chop down the tree). Once you have enough, you can craft a shovel at any DIY bench.
The first season of Beastars arrived on US Netflix on March 13, and it’s the anime that everybody should be watching. Combining the holy powers of both horniness and genuine thoughtfulness about identity, sexuality, and society, Beastars lays out both a cerebral and emotional treat over the course of 12 episodes.
But first: Yes, Beastars is that series openly embraced by furries across the internet, and Netflix acknowledged it as so by calling furries to the frontlines for the US release of Beastars. If you’re a furry or a curious individual, anthropomorphic animals do have sex in the show. Not graphically, but it’s a thing. For the extreme perverts among us, a chicken enjoys watching a wolf eat a sandwich made with her eggs. Make of that what you will!
Beastars is an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Paru Itagaki. It’s set in a civilized anthropomorphic society where herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores coexist without getting eaten or eating each other. As you can imagine, that’s pretty hard to do when you have rabbits and wolves in close contact.
So Beastar’s premise is like an experiment: What happens when you do try to get herbivores and carnivores under one metaphorical social roof? What happens when one subset of the population has an extreme physical advantage over the other? Cleverly, Beastars doesn’t try to answer that complicated question all at once. It instead drops us into a relatively controlled environment, the boarding school called Cherryton Academy, and focuses on one subset of students in particular: the drama club.
This focus group gets complicated enough, even though it’s just a handful of characters. We get a closeup of each student’s thoughts and frustrations about speciesism, predator versus prey complexes, and sexism. Legosi, a timid but huge grey wolf, is our protagonist. He’s a wolf torn over being a predator, who feels uncomfortable with his violent instincts. Legosi is also struggling with romantic feelings for a white dwarf rabbit, Haru.
But Legosi is not the only character with issues over identity and relationships to other species. Being a predator or prey is the source of many characters’ deep insecurities. Louis, the red deer who’s the seemingly untouchable president of the drama club, refuses to show any weakness and clashes with Legosi over the wolf’s willingness to always avoid conflict. The deer views it as a personal insult that somebody like a wolf would want to be weak. Haru takes issues with always being considered cute and weak, and uses her sexuality as a coping mechanism. She considers slut-shaming and ostracization the lesser evil compared to being wrongly perceived.
The real charm of Beastars lies with the time it devotes to each of the characters’ depth, and the relationships between the students. The members of the main cast are young and complex, navigating the path of defining themselves, but finding that there is truly no easy answer. No one’s a trope, as much as the students, and even we the viewers, try to stuff them into boxes based on their animal attributes. Legosi says it best when he thinks about Haru: She’s not just what the disdainful rumors say she is. His personal experience in her company shows him otherwise. And as much as the buck is perceived as a regal creature, Louis perhaps hides the grittiest, most violent tendencies of all the students.
The relationship between Legosi and Haru, a wolf and rabbit, is nuanced and works well as the anchor of the story in Season 1. They’re unlikely partners–a shy wolf and an assertive rabbit–but their burgeoning relationship challenges each character to grow and sets the stage for them to think about who they are and are not as a wolf and rabbit. Legosi does almost kill her in the beginning of the show, and Haru’s near-death experience isn’t downplayed.
Death is a legitimate risk if they get together, and Legosi and Haru respond to that by thinking carefully about the responsibility they have toward each other. Their romance feels important to both students’ growth and internal shifts, rather than a romance for romance’s sake. On the romance note, Legosi’s other love interest, Juno, also doesn’t fall in a neat tidy box. You think she’s going to go the conniving love rival route, but Juno’s more complex than that. It’s a 180 when it’s revealed her goals are probably more about dethroning Louis than attaining Legosi. But there’s a caveat: Although the female characters are refreshing in construct and like, actually multifaceted, Beastars fails the Bechdel test.
As for how good the on-screen adaptation of Beastars is, the CGI animation is relatively decent and doesn’t feel too jarring, as some CGI shows can be. The creators also add in stylistic 2D animation to depict flashbacks and dreams, and those scenes really give the show the dynamism that the CGI scenes lack. However, for the anthropomorphic animal characters, a lot of their movements seem to be missing animal-specific characteristics. A wolf doesn’t move the same as a smaller animal, and yet they pretty much do in the show. It’s disappointing, but doesn’t detract too much from the overall story.
Beastars is one of the most interesting manga to come out in the last few years. Beastars isn’t interested in a tidy equality message per se–it’s more concerned with exploring what the characters think equality is, unpacking that, dumping it on the floor, and watching them slip and slide in the mess. It’s a glorious and complicated examination of power (both physical and via capital resources) and social relationships through the lens of an anthropomorphic society.
Beastars is a show to watch for furries and non-furries alike, and good news: Season 2 is already in production.
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As a kid, I would sometimes play a little game with myself. I grew up in the suburbs, where nothing was ever particularly exciting or dangerous, and so to give myself a thrill while walking home, I’d pretend as if I were being chased by a murderer. Despite being a figment of my imagination, the thought of the pursuer nipping at my heels would send me into a frenzied dash for home. My chest would feel tight, my palms would sweat. I wouldn’t dare turn around, because to do so would be to confront certain death.
This is precisely what it’s like to play Doom Eternal on higher difficulties, only this frightening experience eventually leads to a different type of relief. It’s not that of escape as you safely make it inside your front door, but the type of relief you get by eviscerating a ton of demons in the most brutal way possible.
I loved 2016’s Doom, but I would always make a plea to anyone I recommended it to: Give it a real chance on a harder difficulty, specifically Ultra-Violence. I’m not the sort of person who thinks you never really played Halo if you didn’t beat it on Legendary, but harder difficulties in Doom emphasized the frantic combat and constant movement that distinguished it from most other shooters. You were never safe and had to keep moving to survive, carefully picking your spots to engage or pull off a Glory Kill to restore your health.
Doom Eternal very much doubles down on that style of action, and once again, choosing to play on at least Ultra-Violence will ensure you aren’t able to play this like your typical shooter. While you were always on the move in Doom, you didn’t have a ton of tools for doing so. Eternal changes that, peppering its combat arenas with monkey bars and jump pads and giving you a hookshot to pull yourself toward enemies and a dodge that can be used both defensively and aggressively. In effect, it provides you with options, both fun and useful, to encourage you to move through the environment at all times.
And you will need to move. Eternal’s enemies are relentless and deadly; on Ultra-Violence, full armor and health can be erased in the blink of an eye if you aren’t playing intelligently. If you’re foolish enough to stand toe to toe with any but the weakest of enemies, you’re likely to find yourself dead in a matter of moments. (Fortunately, at least on Xbox One X, load times are mercifully short.) Trying to hold a position or dancing back and forth in a small area is a strategy bound to result in you being flanked and killed. Invariably, when I die and reflect on what I did wrong, I realize it’s because I fell back into old FPS habits, trying to use cover while fighting off too large or tough of a group instead of moving through the entire area.
Particularly when it’s accompanied by another pulse-raising soundtrack from Mick Gordon, it’s undeniably exhilarating to rush around the arena with a nigh-unkillable demon chasing you. But if the thought of running in circles, firing at whatever’s in front of you sounds like it would become monotonous, that’s not the case. That’s thanks in large part to the thoughtful aspect of the game that Phil talks about in our Doom Eternal review in progress. Resources are scant, but some demons have weaknesses to a particular weapon type, and you have several abilities–Glory Kills, a flamethrower, and a chainsaw–to refill your health, armor, and ammo, respectively. Because of this, your sprints around the arena aren’t mindless journeys of firing at anything in your sight with whatever weapon you feel like, but challenging mental exercises in determining how to survive for just a few more seconds.
So do yourself a favor, and give Eternal a shot on Ultra-Violence. You might find it to be too intense and that a lower difficulty setting better provides the experience you’re looking for. But it’s a game that deserves to be played on whatever difficulty pushes you to the extreme, never letting you feel comfortable or safe while demons are on the prowl. In Eternal, if you’re not always on the verge of dying, then you’re not really living.
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There’s a new bug in Destiny 2 that’s already messing up some players’ weekends. The Trials of Osiris tournament has started up again, but an issue with the game means some aren’t getting their loot rewards as they work through Destiny’s toughest PvP challenge.
Bungie tweeted that it’s aware of the problem and investigating the issue, but we haven’t heard any details about when it might be fixed, or what that fix might entail. The GameSpot Trials team ran some matches on a card earlier today and confirmed the loot drop bug.
We are investigating an issue where some players are not receiving powerful rewards from their 3rd, 5th, or 7th Trials of Osiris win.
The Trials of Osiris is a multiplayer challenge in which teams of three take on intense PvP matches with the goal of winning seven games in a row. As you work through your “Trials card,” which tracks your wins and losses, you get rewards at three, five, and seven wins–so even if you don’t have a “flawless” Trials run, you still get loot if you manage to chalk up a bunch of wins before you hit three total losses and have to start over.
The bug means the rewards, which are Trials-specific guns and armor, aren’t appearing, which pretty much removes the incentive for diving into the super-tough battles of Trials. What’s unclear right now is whether Bungie will be able to retroactively give players the rewards they should have earned for their runs once the bug is fixed. If not, this weekend’s event might be a wash for many Trials competitors.
We’ll update this story as more information becomes available.
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The Wrap claims to have heard that the upcoming DC Comics movie sequel, currently slated to open June 5, might forego a traditional theatrical release in favor of a straight-to-digital debut due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and worldwide closure of theaters.
The site reports that the preliminary discussions happened among the highest levels of Warner Bros.’ top brass and that not even director Patty Jenkins and producer Charles Roven were privy to the discussions.
However, in The Wrap’s own report, Warner President of Domestic Distribution Jeff Goldstein shot down the notion of a streaming-only release: “We’re looking to release the movie theatrically, that’s our plan.”
Likewise, a source close to the studio confirmed to IGN that Warner Bros. remains fully committed to releasing Wonder Woman 1984 theatrically.
“It’s ludicrous if you consider how big a movie this is,” WW84 producer Charles Roven told The Wrap. “Everybody recognizes that, as interesting as streaming might be, if you want a huge, global worldwide box office, you’ve got to release it in a movie theater.”
While it’s entirely likely that Warners brass have spit-balled such ideas — these are obviously unprecedented times for the film industry — our sources were adamant that Wonder Woman 1984 will make its debut as intended in movie theaters.
This news is so exciting because we know so little about Ahsoka’s story after the events of Star Wars Rebels. With that in mind, let’s explore what we do know and how The Mandalorian can build on a story that fans have been following for years in the animated series and novels.
While we’ve previously done a deep dive into Ahsoka’s history, here are the basics. Ahsoka made her debut in the 2008 animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars and quickly became a major player in the animated series of the same name. That series explores Ahsoka’s coming-of-age story as Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan and eventual exile from the Jedi Order.
Even though The Clone Wars is only just now getting its belated final season on Disney+, Star Wars Rebels (which takes place after Revenge of the Sith) already revealed that Ahsoka survived Order 66 and eventually joined the Rebel Alliance. The novel Star Wars: Ahsoka helps bridge the vast gap between the two shows, revealing how she escaped the devastation of the Siege of Mandalore and eventually became a Rebel spy.
Ahsoka plays a crucial role in Rebels Season 2, which culminates in a battle with her former master Darth Vader on the Sith world of Malachor. For a while, Ahsoka’s fate was uncertain, as the Season 2 finale is intentionally vague as to whether Ahsoka survives that battle. However, the final season of Rebels reveals she was rescued by her ally and fellow Jedi Knight Ezra Bridger. Ezra was able to reach through time and pull Ahsoka to safety, though the two were quickly separated again.
That’s where Ahsoka’s story begins to get murky. She only has two other canonical appearances in the Star Wars saga after that point. She appears in a flash-forward epilogue in the Rebels series finale (which is set a little while after the events of Return of the Jedi), where she reunites with the surviving members of the Ghost crew to search for the lost Ezra. Ahsoka’s voice can also be heard in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, one of many Jedi who lend their support to Rey in her battle with Emperor Palpatine. This has led many fans to assume Ahsoka is dead by the time of Episode IX, though Lucasfilm’s Dave Filoni has hinted otherwise.
How Ahsoka Tano Fits Into The Mandalorian: Season 2 Time Frame
The Mandalorian is set roughly five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, a time when the Empire is mostly vanquished but before the New Republic has been able to restore order to the galaxy. Because of this, we’re not expecting Season 2 to settle the question of whether Ahsoka is dead in The Rise of Skywalker. There is the chance she could die in The Mandalorian, but it would seem like an awfully big waste to go through the trouble of introducing live-action Ahsoka only to then immediately kill her off.
Plus. it’s not as though Ahsoka will be a senior citizen in The Mandalorian. Ahsoka is a young teenager at the start of The Clone Wars. There’s about 30 years of time between then and the era of The Mandalorian, putting her in her early to mid-40s in Season 2.
Even if Ahsoka’s sequel trilogy fate is off the table, the series could easily tie into the open-ended finale of Rebels. As we saw in the Rebels finale, Ezra and Grand Admiral Thrawn were both trapped aboard a runaway Star Destroyer as it jumped to the far edge of the galaxy. Ahsoka, Hera Syndulla and Sabine Wren set out to track Ezra down and bring him home. Conveniently, The Mandalorian is also set on the fringes of the galaxy, a lawless place where where bounty hunters like Din Djarin make a living. We could easily see Din crossing paths with Ahsoka as she continues her search for Ezra. Perhaps she would even enlist his services as a skilled tracker to pick up a trail that’s gone cold.
Granted, there are several years separating the Rebels epilogue and The Mandalorian, so it could be that Ahsoka has already completed her mission by this point. If so, she may be like Cara Dune, simply drifting through the Outer Rim and keeping a low profile now that there are no more wars left to fight. Encountering the Mandalorian could give Ahsoka the purpose she’s been searching for.
The Mandalorian has already been forging a connection to The Clone Wars with the reveal that Din’s nemesis Moff Gideon is now wielding the Darksaber. This ancient lightsaber is one of the most important relics of Mandalore. The owner of that saber is recognized as the rightful ruler of Mandalore. So the fact that it’s currently in the hands of an Imperial warlord suggests Mandalore is in a pretty bad place post-Return of the Jedi.
With news of Ahsoka’s role, we’re anticipating Season 2 will shed much more light on the current state of Mandalore. When Rebels ended, Sabine willingly ceded the Darksaber to Bo-Katan Kryze and joined her friends on the hunt for Ezra. We can assume Bo-Katan’s reign was short and tragic, with the Empire returning to decimate the world and its people all over again. Ahsoka may feel a certain sense of guilt over pulling Sabine away from her homeworld when it needed her most. With that in mind, Ahsoka’s role in The Mandalorian: Season 2 may involve teaming up with Din Djarin and other surviving Mandalorians to liberate Mandalore (or at least avenge it). Fingers crossed Sabine is still around to help.
Gideon actor Giancarlo Esposito has already teased a major lightsaber battle in Season 2, along with a complicated history between Gideon and Din Djarin. Could he have been foreshadowing a big showdown between Gideon with the Darksaber and Ahsoka her two white lightsabers? If so, we don’t fancy his chances of survival.
It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that Grand Admiral Thrawn could reemerge in Season 2 or a future season. As in the classic Expanded Universe novels, Thrawn may be the one to rally the fractured remnants of the Empire in this chaotic period.
Not only that, we have to assume Ahsoka’s return will tie into the ongoing mystery of The Child aka Baby Yoda. Din is a capable bodyguard, but he’s ignorant in the ways of the Force. It may fall on Ahsoka to train Baby Yoda, share what she knows about his species based on what she learned about Jedi Master Yoda during her years of training, and maybe even help Din track down Baby Yoda’s hidden homeworld.
Call of Duty: Warzone continues to reach a huge number of players, with the free-to-play battle royale hitting 30 million players in its first 10 days of release.
By choosing to support cross-platform play between Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, more people have been able to play together regardless of their platform.
Police in countries like Spain and China are using drones to stop people from going outside during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Spain’s government announced that the country was in a state of emergency Friday, March 13, and the next day, everyone in the country was ordered to remain indoors, as reported by Business Insider. Days later, police were using drones equipped with speakers to yell at people breaking the rules.
It’s very Black Mirror-esque, but it does provide a way for police to ensure people remain indoors without having to risk person-to-person interactions themselves. You can check it out in action in the tweet below from BBC News.
Police in Spain have been using drones to check the streets for anyone ignoring Spanish orders to stay home during the coronavirus outbreak
China is doing the same with its own drones, warning residents to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary to leave the quarantine, as reported by Global News.
All six seasons of Justified are currently available to stream on Hulu, as part of the streaming service’s FX on Hulu section.
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Welcome to IGN’s new recommendation series, Binge It! Movies, TV shows, books, comics, music – if you can binge it, we’re here to talk about it. In each installment of Binge It!, we’ll discuss a piece of content we’re passionate about, and why you should check it out.
If you’re a fan of great TV, chances are you already know about Justified, Graham Yost’s stylish, verbose adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,” which ran for six seasons on FX between 2010 and 2015. But whether you missed it the first time around, or you’re an early adopter and just want to revisit a whip-smart, action-packed classic with some of the best dialogue you can hope to find outside of Leonard’s pages, Justified hits the target every time.
The quick-witted (and even quicker-draw) modern-day western stars a devilishly languid Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, an old fashioned, Miami-based lawman whose itchy trigger finger gets him into trouble with his bosses and finds him essentially banished back to Kentucky, where he grew up.
Within Raylan’s new jurisdiction is his hometown of Harlan County, a bustling hive of scum and villainy populated by an enviable rogues gallery of criminals that would put any superhero to shame – and, even better, most of them still have an ax to grind against Raylan from the prodigal lawman’s misspent youth.
Watch the delightfully retro first season trailer for Justified below:
While a big part of Justified’s appeal is Raylan’s sardonic wit and endlessly tangled web of interpersonal relationships (he’s seemingly never met a woman who doesn’t want to shoot him shortly thereafter – and, in true Elmore Leonard fashion, the women of Justified are every bit as complex and fascinating as the men), the show’s real strength lies in its baddies. From one-off crooks of the week to slippery recurring players and season- or series-long foes, every single one is written with the same depth, humor, and instant specificity as the main characters. This is a show that has no compunction about exploring the moral ambiguity of its heroes as well as its villains, gleefully interrogating the many shades of grey that make “justice” such a loaded concept.
The series also demonstrates a deft balance between standalone episodes and serialized arcs, so that even those self-contained cases feel engaging and vital, often expanding on the backstories of Raylan’s supporting cast – who are every bit as messed up as he is. This helps each tightly-plotted 13-episode season feel focused and maintain a sense of momentum, making it an easy and surprisingly addictive binge.
Justified boasts a spectacular roster of character actors as both allies and antagonists, and every season is buoyed by the strength of its villains, from Margo Martindale’s imposing crime matriarch Mags Bennett, to Jere Burns’ capricious mobster Wynn Duffy, to the charismatic but deadly Boyd Crowder (a show-stealing Walton Goggins), who is undoubtedly the Joker to Raylan’s Batman.
The ongoing rivalry between Raylan and Boyd fuels most of the series, complicated by old wounds, familial resentments, and, most frustratingly for them both, an undeniable (despite the fact that they’d both deny it) affection for each other based on their childhood friendship. There’s something truly Shakespearean about the duo’s conflicting trajectories, which grow more tumultuous as the show progresses, but perhaps the best recommendation for Justified is that it manages to thread the needle and deliver a truly satisfying series finale, ending on its own terms in a way that doesn’t leave you hanging. Even five years after Justified left our screens, you won’t regret a return visit to Harlan.
