Author: Trafficblast

Police cars have been removed from Epic’s hugely popular battle royale game Fortnite, players have noticed following the release of the Chapter 2, Season 3 update.

A source connected to the game told The Wall Street Journal that the removal of the cop cars was in response to the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota. However, the source said Epic Games was not trying to make a “political statement” but was instead attempting to be “sensitive about the issues” going on the world today.

Earlier this year, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney spoke about politics in gaming. “If a game tackles politics (or: weighty social issues), it should come from the heart of designers through the game, and not from marketing departments seeking to profit from division,” he said.

Epic Games has yet to make a formal statement regarding the removal of police cars from Fortnite. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.

Fortnite is not the first game to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd. Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and NHL 21 added splash screens to their games to remind people that racism and bigotry have no place in their communities. Numerous game companies have made donations to Black Live Matter and other organizations that fight racial injustice in the world.

Is there golf on Mars? There is now. Desert Golfing, one of the best mobile games of the last decade, has just received a sequel, and it’s called Golf On Mars. The game is available now, and costs $3 on iOS and Android. It’s also coming to Steam on June 29, if you’d rather play with a mouse.

Developer Captain Games returns for the sequel, which once again serves up literally millions of holes, all pseudo-randomly generated–meaning that while every player will encounter the same holes, they’ve all been designed by the same algorithm.

You play with simple swipe aim controls, and the goal is, essentially, to go as far as you can with as few strokes as possible. Most players will aim to get their average down, but there’s no end goal–you can theoretically keep playing forever. The game is set in the year 2866 when Mars has been 35% terraformed, but don’t expect much of a narrative.

While the previous game was set in an endless desert, this one is set on Mars, complete with pockets of water. According to the game’s Steam page, there are approximately 25,770,000,000 holes to enjoy this time. You can also add spin this time for trickier shots.

Amazingly, Golf on Mars weighs in at just 1.5MB on iPhone. You can purchase and install it now, but don’t expect to ever finish it.

GameSpot has officially kicked off Play For All–a celebration of all things gaming. Join us as we bring you the summer’s hottest news, previews, interviews, features, and videos, as well as raise money for COVID-19 relief efforts and Black Lives Matter with the help of our friends from around the gaming world. Check out the Play For All schedule for more.

In the fifth and final installment of WWE’s docuseries Undertaker: The Last Ride, on WWE Network, Undertaker (real name: Mark Calaway) said that the Boneyard Match he had with AJ Styles at WrestleMania 36 is April, which was a non-traditional fight filmed like a movie, was not only “storytelling at its finest” but also the “perfect ending” to his legendary 30-year plus career.

Though Undertaker isn’t totally ruling out an eventual return to the ring for a traditional final match, he said “If there was ever a perfect ending to a career, that right there was it.”

The booked match between Undertaker and Styles became a pre-filmed, cinematic encounter due to COVID-19 and the official nixing of WrestleMania 36’s giant venue, Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida. The decision was then made to try something new with Undertaker, who was set to square off with AJ Styles. The two filmed for a day on a giant “graveyard” set, in a battle that involved a movie score, druid warriors, magic powers, and Undertaker riding off victorious on a motorcycle as a mix of his Deadman and American Badass personas.

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“If Vince [McMahon] was in a pinch, would I come back? I guess time will only tell there,” Calaway said. “In case of emergency, break glass, you pull out The Undertaker. I would have to consider that. Never say never, but at this point in my life and in my career I have no desire to get back in the ring.”

Of course, here Calaway in emphasizing that he has no interest in getting into a ring. He doesn’t say anything about possibly filming another cinematic match down the line.

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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.

Here at IGN we occasionally like to showcase something from geekdom’s rich history — a pop-culture Time Capsule, if you will, that gives us a peek in to the past, perhaps providing a new appreciation for previous projects.

If you’d like, please check out the past few Time Capsules:

• Watch Tobey Maguire do an R-rated screen test for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man
• Check out a young Hugh Jackman screen testing as Wolverine
• Tom Selleck was almost Indiana Jones and here’s the proof
• Check out the first Star Wars Comic-Con panel in 1976
• The Office: Watch Seth Rogen, Bob Odenkirk, and more audition for famous Dunder Mifflin characters

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No, DC FanDome is not an enclosed barbaric battleground pitting fans against each other. Nor is it a nickname for Dick Grayson’s righteous rear. DC FanDome is a 24-hour immersive virtual fan experience that’s being held on August 22 where DC die-hards will be able to log in and see new announcements and trailers for a variety of upcoming DC movies, TV series, comics, and video games.

With this recent announcement rocking the virtual Con world, our Time Capsule this week whisks us back to San Diego Comic-Con 2013 when Zack Snyder, with a little help from Man of Steel actor Harry Lennix, announced Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Thus, the MCU was born. Er, that’s Martha Cinematic Universe.

Just kidding. It’s the DCEU. Diana Crushes Everything Utterly.

To tease the SDDC crowd into an unbridled frenzy, Snyder handed the mic over to Lennix who read the “I want you to remember, Clark…” lines from the end of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, where Batman is in the midst of handing Superman his Kryptonian keister. “My hand, at your throat. My Labradoodle’s poop, on your lawn. My incessant talking, while you’re trying to watch Outlander.” Yup, the Caped Crusader was opening up a can of “get off my lawn!”

Check it out…

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The video ends with the Batman v Superman logo and the audience going nuts. Clearly the idea of justice being dawned appealed to everyone. As did the notion of a reverse MCU, in which DC would start off with the team ups and then splinter off into solo films. As did the combination of Sriracha and popcorn. That’s unrelated, yes, but it’s a very popular snack item.

Little did everyone in the hall know at the time but Batman v Superman, while still raking in a ton of dough, would be the reason films like Suicide Squad and Justice League would get chopped up and tonally altered. Critics’ mixed reaction to Dawn of Justice had Warner Bros. scrambling to make their movies lighter, to match the vibe of the MCU. It was announced however, just a month ago that the Snyder Cut of Justice League would be completed and debut in 2021 on HBO Max.

The first clip of the Snyder Cut was recently released in fact, revealing Darkseid.

In more DC FanDome news, the event’s virtual panels will feature interviews from the cast and creators of many current and upcoming DC projects – including Wonder Woman 1984, The Batman, The Suicide Squad, Black Adam, the Arrowverse shows, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It will be a who’s who of Zoom screens as fans hear from celebs, check out new footage, learn of casting news, argue about casting news, start a hashtag to change the casting news, and then explode into a ball of smoke that evaporates into the clear blue ether.

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Announced this weekend, Academy Award-nominated director Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral) will start production soon on his highly-anticipated biopic Ferrari and Academy Award-nominee Hugh Jackman (The Greatest Showman, Logan) is in discussions to star as the racing icon Enzo Ferrari.

Mann will direct a script he co-wrote with Troy Kennedy Martin (The Italian Job), based on Brock Yates’ book “Enzo Ferrari – The Man and the Machine.”

Ferrari will be set in the summer of 1957, when all the dynamic forces in Enzo Ferrari’s life collide. The racecar company he and his wife Laura built is going broke. Their tempestuous marriage has already suffered the death of their son, Dino, and Ferrari’s other son, 12-year old Piero, the product of a wartime romance, now wants to know his place in the world. Enzo boldly rolls the dice for all their futures on one race – 1,000 miles across Italy, the brutal and infamous 1957 Mille Miglia.

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Mann was recently an executive producer on James Mangold’s Ford vs Ferrari, starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale. In fact, Bale was originally slated to play Ferrari in Mann’s biopic back when it was supposed to kick off production in 2018, but was then replaced by Jackman after Bale developed health issues while putting on weight for the film. In Ford vs Ferrari, Bale played British racing engineer Ken Miles.

Principal photography for Ferrari is anticipated to start in spring 2021. STX is handling international sales at the upcoming Cannes Virtual Market and will directly distribute the film in the UK and Ireland.

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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.

Introduced earlier this year to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Warzone, the Grau 5.56 assault rifle is one of the most powerful weapons in the game right now, performing well in most situations and capable of holding its own in close-range and long-range scenarios. However, it has been accused of being overpowered, and Infinity Ward is looking to give it a nerf in a future update.

Answering a fan’s question on Twitter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare co-design director of multiplayer Joe Cecot said the development team has several weapon adjustments in the works for a mid-season update. There isn’t a definitive date for when the Grau will receive a nerf, but there will be full patch notes available when it occurs.

Players have been calling for the Grau to be nerfed for months, calling it a more powerful weapon than the similar M4A1 that was capable of ruining the game’s balance. The M4A1 was already one of the strongest guns in Modern Warfare when it launched last year, combining devastating range with a high rate of fire to make it effective in nearly every situation.

As Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone continue to get new content, our eyes are moving toward a potential new Call of Duty: Black Ops game this year. Details are scarce thus far, but reports point to it heading back to the Cold War, and it will still release this year despite the ongoing pandemic affecting games’ development.

The PS5-exclusive Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was announced during Sony’s official console reveal on June 11, and the game is taking advantage of the console’s new hardware features in order to push the series even further. In a developer diary video, creative director Marcus Smith explained just what that will mean for gameplay, including jumping between completely different worlds on the fly.

In the video below, you can see Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart gameplay as Marcus Smith explains why it is only possible on PS5. After a mysterious enemy arrives and accidentally damages the fabric of space-time itself, portals to alternate dimensions begin to appear. Because of the PS5’s ultra-fast solid-state drive, or SSD, our heroes can jump between these worlds almost instantly. You can see them marked in the world with a wavy, cracked portal, and there is no loading screen before you arrive in the new world.

“Long gone are loading screens,” Smith added. “Now, it’s all about bringing exciting new adventures.”

The new DualSense controller has also opened up new gameplay possibilities, specifically with the tension on the triggers. When firing the shotgun-like Enforcer weapon, for instance, a light pull on R2 will fire one round while a harder pull will fire two. This is possible on other systems, but you’ll actually feel the tension on the trigger of the weapon as you pull it down, making it feel like you’re actually holding the Enforcer rather than just ordering Ratchet to use it. With 3D spatial audio, Insomniac Games aims to make everything feel more immersive, too.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart doesn’t have a release date yet, but it isn’t the only game Insomniac has in development. Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a standalone game launching this holiday season, and it should be the highlight of the PS5’s launch lineup.

Mean Girls and Veronica Mars’ Amanda Seyfried, who can currently be seen in the VOD horror flick You Should Have Left with Kevin Bacon (read IGN’s You Should Have Left review here), recently spoke to ComicBook.com about her choice, almost a decade ago, to not go for the Gamora role in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

Many stars were in the running for the Guardians back when James Gunn was casting the film, including Shazam!’s Zachary Levi, and among them was Seyfried, who was reportedly high on Marvel’s radar. But here’s what she said about her decision to ultimately not play one of the daughters of Thanos.

“I think about it often,” she said. “I’m not really a Marvel movie watcher, which is, I think, why I was just like, ‘Ah, I don’t wanna be green. It’s just so much work.’”

“I remember Jennifer Lawrence talking about once, how long it took her to get blue,” Seyfried added. “And I was like, ‘That seems like hell on earth,’ because then you get to set and you’re only there for a couple hours, and then you have to take everything off. And that was literally the reason.”

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Before James Gunn starts up his third, and final, Guardians of the Galaxy film, he’s still got The Suicide Squad coming – the title of which he recently revealed was a joke initially. Gunn has stated that Rocket’s past will play a huge role in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

Gamora, Star-Lord, and the rest of the Guardians made big appearances in Avengers: Endgame, though these MCU characters left Earth’s Mightiest Heroes high and dry during the final battle against Thanos.

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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.