Barack and Michelle Obama are working with Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo on a new Netflix movie featuring Star Wars actor Riz Ahmed.
The movie is called Exit West, and it’s going to be produced by the Russo brothers, with Yann Demange (’71, Top Boy) directing, according to reports today from Collider and The Hollywood Reporter.
The Russo brothers acquired the rights to Moshin Hamid’s book, Exit West, in 2017. The story focuses on the couple Saeed and Nadia who flee from their home in the Middle East after Saeed’s mother is killed during a conflict between the local government and guerrilla soldiers.
There are magical doors that can take them to places that are safe for emigrants, including Mykonos, London, and Marin County, California. Everywhere they go they face new struggles. “The allegorical tale shows the contrast between the migrants’ tenuous daily reality and that of the privileged native population who’d prefer that they disappear,” reads a line from Collider’s description.
The Obamas signed with Netflix in 2018 to help create new TV shows and movies for the streaming network. Barack Obama named Exit West as one of his favorite books of 2017.
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Releasing later this month, the next Total War: Three Kingdoms DLC–A World Betrayed–will focus on adding new factions, story events, missions, and units.
The story kicks off following the assassination of Dong Zhou by Lu Bu, his own subordinate. Meanwhile Sun Ce is beginning his conquest of Jiangdong and Liu Bei has succeeded Tao Qian. Those who have played Total War: Three Kingdoms will understand just how much these changes can affect the story line, with the DLC intending to create all new friction between different characters and factions.
Sun Ce’s faction will begin as a vassal like in the base game, but can be turned rebel during the story. Sun gains bonuses from ticking off his personal ambitions, which understandably includes avenging his late father. Both have new story events and unit types unique to their faction.
Lu Bu’s faction will be added as a playable in the DLC, replacing Cao Cao’s army. Lu Bu gains power from defeating enemies himself, earning big bonuses from taking down legendary warriors of the era.
Total War: Three Kingdoms A World Betrayed releases on PC March 19. A patch will also be released alongside the DLC, with various fixes and quality of life updates being implemented across the game. More information on this patch has yet to be announced.
In our Total War: Three Kingdoms review, Ginny Woo awarded the game an 8/10, describing it as a breath of fresh air. By hearkening back to the intricacies of older titles and builds on some of the foundations laid by Thrones of Britannia, it offers a distinctly contemporary and thorough experience. Three Kingdoms feels like the rightful evolution of the series, pulling from its roots in historical military tactics to come up with an engrossing modern strategy game that is always a delight, even in its less well-oiled moments
Playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX is, in many ways, exactly like saying its full name aloud: It starts off strong with the Pokémon you know and love, then quickly devolves into something very strange that goes on for far too long. Granted, there are plenty of reasons to adore developer Spike Chunsoft’s remake of the Gameboy Advance’s Red Rescue Team and Blue Rescue Team from 2005, like its memorable characters and unique premise for example. But the guts of this roguelike dungeon crawler are sometimes hard to bear.
With monotonous dungeon crawling, predictable combat encounters, and a grind that can put you to sleep faster than a blast to the face from Butterfree’s sleep powder, it could’ve used more modern retouches to punch things up a little. Rather than serving as a nostalgic remake that heightens your love for your favorite pocket monsters, Rescue Team DX tests the limits of your commitment to the series with an outdated, tiresome slog.
Rescue Team DX is a routine roguelike where you take your favorite Pokémon into procedurally generated dungeons filled with loot, traps, violent wild Pokémon, and lost souls in need of rescue. You also recruit new Pokémon to your cause by defeating them in battle or earning their respect by completing missions, which is a huge motivator to continue the grind even when it’s at its most irritating. In between dungeon delving, you’ll interact with vendors in Pokémon Square, manage and improve your Pokémon roster, and talk to Pokémon Rescue Team’s likeable cast of characters, which makes up some of the adventure’s most memorable moments.TKTK
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=This%20facelift%20does%20little%20to%20address%20Rescue%20Team%20DX%E2%80%99s%20biggest%20issue.”]That doesn’t mean that there’s been no evolution at all – quite the opposite. Compared to the original Rescue Team’s low-res, rudimentary roguelike structure, Rescue Team DX is a vast improvement. The art style, for example, has been completely reimagined to look like an awesome, Pokémon-filled oil painting, which is without a doubt the most notable upgrade. Even on the big screen in the Switch’s docked mode, roaming around Pokémon Square and going dungeon delving rarely looks like something meant for a portable device. Other quality-of-life changes, like autosaving, auto-mode for exploration, expanding your maximum team size from four to eight, and incorporating mega evolutions and shinies make the journey through the often-dull business of dungeon exploration much more interesting this time.
The problem is this facelift does little to address Rescue Team DX’s biggest issue: the things you spend most of your time doing just aren’t that fun. Despite being procedurally generated, each dungeon is basically a carbon copy of the last, with tight hallways connecting to boxy rooms and enemies stalking each area. After the first hour, you’ll have experienced more or less all that these tedious treks have to offer but will still be subjected to dozens of hours more, practically uninterrupted.
Combat while exploring these dungeons is a common and lifeless affair. Inspired by the mainline Pokémon series’ turn-based fights, each Pokémon has four moves and similarly take turns smacking one another around. But that familiar system has been greatly simplified and now feels decidedly low stakes. While you could decide which move to use one-by-one, slowing combat down to a crawl, the much easier option is to simply hold down the A button and let your Pokémon automatically choose the best move for you. After a couple seconds, enemies die and you continue exploring. The good news is that means combat is almost always brief, and getting through dungeons can be accomplished fairly quickly if you’re efficiently trying to complete quests and find the exit as soon as possible – and with so much tedium and so little reason to explore otherwise, that will likely be your goal.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Simply%20hold%20down%20the%20A%20button%20and%20let%20your%20Pok%C3%A9mon%20automatically%20choose%20the%20best%20move.”]Boss fights, while a refreshing increase in challenge compared to the rest of the campaign, only serve to highlight the combat system’s flaws with their lengthier battles. A big, angry Pokémon will charge into battle to tense music only to enter into a prolonged battle of attrition where you mostly just tap A repeatedly and hope the boss dies before you run out of healing items. This exposes another flaw in the combat system: a complete lack of enemy health bars, which deprives you of the knowledge that you might be moments away from winning or miles off and are just throwing away healing items on a fruitless effort. These encounters are also extremely frustrating when you lose one, as it often requires you go through all or part of the dungeon again from the beginning.
There isn’t really a whole lot else to do in between each dungeon either. You’ll turn in quests to net rewards and level up your rescue team’s level, curate and customize your roster of Pokémon that can be converted into allies after defeating them in a dungeon, sign up for a rescue mission to save a fellow player from a dungeon they’ve been defeated in, and visit vendors throughout Pokémon Square to stock up on equipment and unlock new camps for your Pokémon to settle in, but these things usually only take a few seconds each before it’s right back to a variation of the same dungeon you just left. Training your Pokémon at the dojo is an easy way to level up your squad and make yourself more lethal in dungeons, but guess what? The dojo is just another dungeon where the Pokémon being trained is given less than a minute to kill as many enemies as possible to boost their XP – enjoy holding A more.
Thankfully there is a worthwhile payoff for grinding your way through Rescue Team DX’s featureless hallways and zombie-like Poké-adversaries: its characters and story are genuinely great. As a clueless human who has been transformed into a Pokémon through unknown means and for a mysterious purpose, you’ll meet a memorable cast of talkative Poke-friends, like Gengar, who plays the incompetent heel, and an all-knowing Alakazam who serves as mentor to your fledgling rescue team. While the plot does make some odd turns and often takes far too long to get where it’s going, reaching each milestone manages to make the worst aspects of combat and exploration a lot more tolerable – even if large sections of story are interrupted with dungeon-crawling padding for no real reason except to make you wait for the next story beat to arbitrarily develop
Another bright spot is the endgame, as much of the best content is locked behind the elusive credits. Evolution of Pokémon, adding legendary Pokémon to your roster, more challenging dungeons, and more mysteries. But, of course, experiencing those surprises requires even more dungeon crawling, which does nothing to improve post-credits.
Year three of the Overwatch League is underway and a large part of keeping this season new and exciting is the addition of Hero Pools. These Hero Pools are an alternative to how hero bans usually go down in tournaments, with players and coaches picking characters to ban at the start of each match. In Overwatch Competitive Season 21, four different heroes will be banned each week.
The most important part of this update is that these heroes aren’t just banned in the Overwatch League, but across all competitive play. This includes Competitive Play mode, which is available to any player in Overwatch, regardless of platform. Game modes like Quick Play and Arcade are not affected by the bans.
This week Hanzo, Mei, Orisa, and Baptiste are all banned. This follows the two DPS, one tank, and one support hero formula, which the Hero Pool system will stick to every week. Each week four heroes will be picked from those roles, with no hero being banned for more than two weeks in a row.
The goal of the system is to allow the meta to change weekly and encourage more hero diversity in matches. Blizzard is desperate to avoid another GOAT meta situation, in which every team played the same heroes in every match. GOATs ran for months on end in the Overwatch League, with fans becoming agitated by the drawn out fights and lack of diversity in matches.
Blizzard wants to avoid another Go All Tanks Supports (GOAT) meta situation, in which the same heroes were played in a majority of matches. GOAT ran for months on end in the Overwatch League, with fans becoming agitated by the drawn-out fights and lack of diversity in matches.
The most commonly picked GOAT line up was D.Va, Reinhardt, Zarya, Brigitte, Zenyatta, and Lúcio.
To combat any possibility of this kind of meta reemerging, Blizzard has made various alterations to how characters work, along with the Hero Pools. Here’s hoping that this change new life to the game to keep us engaged until the launch of Overwatch 2.
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Devs is centered around Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno), a software engineer at a silicon valley tech company called Amaya. Lily investigates the mysterious Devs division of Amaya, which she believes is behind the murder of her boyfriend. Devs also stars Nick Offerman as Forest, the CEO of Amaya, and Alison Pill as Katie, Forest’s second in command.
This sci-fi thriller is created, written, and directed by Alex Garland, who also wrote and directed the films Annihilation and Ex Machina, and wrote the screenplays for 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd, among others. We spoke with Garland to learn more about the new limited series. Garland explains what Amaya and the Devs division are working on, the characters and their motivations, what scientific research went into writing the show, the unique set design, and why Dark Souls made an appearance in the show. Devs is streaming now on FX on Hulu.
Reports say that Higher Ground Productions, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, is in talks to produce a Netflix adaptation of the bestselling novel, Exit West.
The film rights for Mohsin Hamid’s novel were acquired by Joe and Anthony Russo in 2017, and Collider reported that the Russo brothers will produce the film alongside Higher Ground Productions.
Riz Ahmed is currently set to star in the adaptation. The actor recently starred in Venom as Carlton Drake, and in Rogue One as Bodhi Rook. Ahmed also recently won the Critics Award at the Berlin Film Festival for co-writing Mogul Mowgli.
Ahmed would play Saeed, a young man who has to flee his home after a civil war breaks out. Exit West begins in an unnamed country in the Middle East, and it discusses issues surrounding the global refugee crisis. Saeed and his partner Nadia flee using magic doors that lead to different places all over the world.
The production companies are reportedly pursuing Yann Demange, director of White Boy Rick and ’71, to direct the project.
This isn’t the only new Netflix project we’ve recently heard about. Taika Waititi is making a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory series for Netflix, as well as a wholly original series about the Oompa-Loompas.
Logan Plant is a news writer for IGN, and the Production Assistant for Nintendo Voice Chat, IGN’s weekly Nintendo show. You can find him on Twitter at @LoganJPlant.
No Time To Die, the 25th James Bond movie, was recently delayed from its original April 2020 release date into November in response to lower global cinema attendance due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). With cinemas shut across China and other parts of the world encouraging citizens to stay indoors, delaying the film made sense for MGM, even though tickets had recently gone on sale.
Sources have told The Hollywood Reporter that this delay will ultimately cost between $30-50 million, as so much has already been spent on promoting the film for an April release. However, releasing the film in April likely would have dropped the film’s box office total by 30 percent.
Considering the box office potential for the Bond franchise, the losses will, MGM hopes, be offset by higher attendance. The last time Daniel Craig returned to the series after a lengthy break between films with Skyfall, it made over $1.1 billion worldwide.
As the report points out, MGM spent $4.5 million on a Superbowl spot, and the stars of the film have been on an extensive press tour. Furthermore, Billie Eilish’s Bond theme is extremely popular right now–it remains to be seen if it will endure on the charts until November, however.
No Time To Die will release in UK cinemas on November 12, and then in the US two weeks later on November 25.
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When the original pair of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games were released in 2006, they were received as the ugly Duckletts of Pokemon spin-offs. Now, almost 15 years later, it is clear how wrong we were to write off Spike Chunsoft’s ambitious take on the titanic series: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX for Switch is wondrous to play and, in a way, boasts a substantially more resonant fable than most other recent Pokemon games.
You wake up one morning and everything seems pretty ordinary, at least until you realize that you’re not a human anymore. Instead, you’ve magically and mysteriously metamorphosed into a Pokemon–which exact species is determined by a fun little personality quiz you take at the beginning of the game. Before long you make a new best friend, who is also a Pokemon, and you decide to form a rescue team together. Why? To save foolish Pokemon who have ventured into dangerous dungeons stricken by environmental disasters, even though they’re totally aware of said environmental disasters. Over the course of the game, you embark on arduous odysseys to the many dungeons scattered sporadically across the world of Pokemon, each of which contains several ‘mons in desperate need of help and lots of others who are a bit aggravated by the daily earthquakes.
What’s important about Mystery Dungeon carving itself out a new home on Switch is that DX isn’t just some sort of lazy rehash. Perhaps the most striking thing about this reworked spin-off, at least at first, is its revised color palette. It’s pretty different to the old Mystery Dungeon games, sporting a warm painterly style to replace the originals’ GBA-era pixel art. The revamped rescue base you get about halfway through the game is especially gorgeous, while the relentlessly upbeat soundtrack is capable of both intensifying the charming tone of the art and flipping even the tensest moments on their head. This is an essential part of the game’s overall appeal, as it goes hand in hand with the fact that Mystery Dungeon is ultimately about overcoming adversity with a smile on your face. One second it seems as if you’re on the verge of the inevitable apocalypse, the next you’re bobbing along, beaming for no reason, ready to hurtle headlong into a procedurally generated dungeon to save some ‘mons and make some money.
As you might expect, dungeon-crawling is the game’s core component. The stylish art design extends to the dungeons, which range from molten caverns buried deep beneath the earth’s crust to airborne towers suspended high above the clouds. But on top of that, their mechanical design works well in moment-to-moment gameplay. Area traversal in dungeons is tile-based, which might seem a little rudimentary at first but complements Mystery Dungeon’s combat system, the core building block for some of the game’s most impressive elements.
Each Pokemon can learn up to four moves, just like in the mainline series. How these moves function is determined by the tile-based map layouts–for example, Water Pulse covers four tiles, whereas Aqua Tail can only connect with enemies who are directly adjacent to you. Moves like Brick Break don’t work around corners, but ranged moves like Water Gun and Razor Leaf do–it’s unclear whether they bend around them or simply go over them, but a lot of moves that would logically require your opponent to be within arm’s length fail unless those conditions are met, which is just one fold to the overall strategy.
You’ve got to be extra careful with your battle tactics–the juxtaposition of tile-based movements with turn-based combat means that simply walking constitutes an entire turn. It’s like a board game, where you can either move one space, use an item, or launch an attack. And, given that you can have between three and eight members on your squad at any given time, you’re constantly monitoring turns and tiles for a variety of Pokemon simultaneously. It has the potential to be complex if you want it to be, but because you have multiple lives, it never gets so difficult that you’ll find yourself stuck in a rut. As a result, combat is both intuitive and engrossing, and the tile-based component adds a nice bit of nuance to the familiar four-move, elemental effectiveness formula we’ve grown to know and love over the years.
There is one downside to combat, though: There are still no health bars in Mystery Dungeon. In general, most enemies in a given dungeon will have roughly the same health, so if you pay attention to how much damage you deal, it’s pretty easy to estimate your opponents’ HP and plan your moves and item use accordingly. Boss battles are a different beast–there is no way to know how much of their massive HP bar has been depleted. This results in a lot of expensive item wasting and moments where you go, “One more hit and Rayquaza’s finished,” after which Rayquaza takes a Thunderbolt on the chin and Hyper Beams you back to the last checkpoint.
You lose all your money and items when you faint, so it can be pretty annoying to repeat a boss fight with even fewer resources, but every major dungeon has a checkpoint just a couple of levels shy of the boss fight. What’s more, it seems the boss’ HP doesn’t regenerate–when I went back into Rayquaza after it sent us packing, myself (Squirtle), Geralt (Bulbasaur), and Absol (Absol, he’s too cool for nicknames) managed to take it down in just a few hits. The short boss runs and lack of health regeneration does, in a sense, make up for the lack of a health bar because it removes almost all elements of stress that could potentially stem from that.
There have been several other new quality-of-life improvements made to combat–for example, certain Pokemon now possess “rare qualities,” which can really help you out while you’re dungeon-crawling. Sales Pitch allows you to make extra money from the miserly Kecleon, who hunts for free items in dungeons and then sells them at stupidly inflated prices, whereas Squad Up means that the more Pokemon you currently have in your posse, the more likely defeated foes are to join the crew. Also–and this is particularly handy–simply pressing A automatically selects the best move to use against your opponent at any given time, which means you’ll never have to spend too long trying to figure out the optimal move if you don’t want to.
One of the things that was most heavily criticized about the original Mystery Dungeon was how long and repetitive dungeons were. They can still be a tad annoying at times in the remake, but they’re substantially less time-consuming than before, and they genuinely feel as if they’re worth exploring. On several occasions I was lucky enough to spawn directly next to the stairs to the following floor, but every single time I eschewed quick progression for a thorough exploration of my current surroundings. “Maybe I’ll find a few Oran Berries that could come in handy during the boss fight,” I would muse to myself. “Or perhaps an All Dodge Orb that will ensure Groudon’s Lava Plume goes in the completely wrong direction.”
The average dungeon-completion times complement the story’s pacing. At the beginning, you can storm the likes of Tiny Woods and Thunderwave Cave in under four minutes–but by the time you reach the late game, you’re talking 34 floors, most of which are affected by weather conditions like Hail or Sandstorm, and a grueling fight against a boss to top it all off. Naturally, this dungeon takes quite a bit longer, but that’s to be expected–as you approach the endgame, things get tougher and, by extension, far more tense and gripping. It’s also worth noting that the Pokemon you encounter in each dungeon seem to be substantially more varied than before, with fan favourites like Houndoom and Scyther appearing fairly early on. If there’s anything capable of diluting the slight tedium of the original Mystery Dungeon, it’s allowing you to recruit some of the cooler ‘mons earlier.
The story itself is unchanged, but it’s far better than I remember. I was concerned nostalgia would make or break my experience with Mystery Dungeon DX (I was 10 when I played the originals), but I was pleasantly surprised to find it has one of the most emotionally resonant Pokemon stories in years–and that’s largely because the Pokemon are anthropomorphized. They have personalities, ambitions, quirks, and dreams. Tyranitar isn’t just the monster you keep in your squad to unleash devastating Earthquakes, he’s a goofy celebrity who makes terrible jokes and genuinely wishes the best for you. Charizard is a lovable idiot. Alakazam is the bee’s knees, the cool kid on the block, the Pokemon who carries his spoons around with him even when he’s just popping over to Pokemon Square to chat with his mates. And whomever you choose as your buddy Pokemon… let’s just say I might have told my brother I had something in my eye when he came down to grab a glass of water at 2 AM. Giving Pokemon proper, three-dimensional personalities changes the lens you view them through for the better, and, as a result, playing through Mystery Dungeon will inevitably have a positive impact on how I relate to the Pokemon series as a whole.
Whether or not you’re an old-school Mystery Dungeon aficionado or a total newcomer to the long-derelict spin-off series doesn’t necessarily matter: Mystery Dungeon on Switch improves upon the originals with some valuable quality-of-life tweaks, making it a worthwhile play regardless of your familiarity with the series. It features a distinct combat system that provides an intriguing alternative to the mainline Pokemon formula with tile-based strategizing, humanizes the Pokemon you’ve fallen in love with over the years, tells a riveting and emotional story that will make you view the franchise in a totally different light, and does so with a stylish suite of visuals and music.
