Author: Trafficblast

Online subscriptions are some of the best last-minute gift ideas you can get for the gamers on your shopping list. If you’re searching for the perfect gift for the PS4 owner in your life, you can save on PlayStation Plus right now at Newegg. Normally $60, 12-month PS Plus subscriptions are discounted to $45 with promo code EMCUVUB23.

The subscription code is delivered via email, so you’ll probably want to print it out to place in a holiday card.

PlayStation Plus is practically essential for any PS4 owner. Without a PS Plus subscription, you cannot play online multiplayer, which is a big component in modern gaming. PS Plus memberships can also be stacked, so you can extend your membership early and save yourself money longterm.

Memberships also come with a couple of awesome perks. Each month, Sony gives PS Plus members two digital games that you can continue playing as long as you’re a current subscriber. Members also gain access to cloud storage to backup save files.

December’s free PS Plus games are Titanfall 2–one of the best first-person shooters ever made–and Monster Energy Supercross. These freebies will still be active until Tuesday, January 7, so if you’re buying this as a gift, they’ll have two free games to download on Christmas morning.

If you’ve never shopped at Newegg and would prefer going with a retailer you’re more familiar with, Sony’s last-minute holiday deals include $45 12-month PlayStation Plus subscriptions as well. The deal runs from December 20 to January 17 and should be available at all major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target.

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One of that weirdest mashups in Hollywood history is looking less and less likely. It was back in January 2018 when it was reported that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino was interested in helming a big screen Star Trek film. Now, following the home release of his latest film, Tarantino is reevaluating where his career goes next.

Over the years, the man behind movies like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Django Unchained has repeatedly stated that he plans to retire after making 10 films. With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood being his ninth to date, the director still claims that’s his plan, which may not leave room for Star Trek.

“I think I’m steering away from Star Trek, but I haven’t had an official conversation with those guys yet,” he admitted during an interview with Consequences of Sound. “In a strange way, it seems like this movie, [Once Upon a Time in Hollywood], would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement.”

Instead, Tarantino has no idea of what the story of his next–and potentially final–movie will be. He does, however, think it will be smaller in scale that some of his previous titles. “If the idea that all the films are a boxcar and it’s all one train, they’re all telling one story,” he explained. “Well, [Once Upon a Time] is the climax, so I can actually see now my 10th movie probably being a little smaller.”

Of course, with no current plan in mind, that could all change. “Look, I might come up with a really big idea,” Tarantino said. “But right now, the idea of a smaller audience almost all the way around is appealing to me.”

Still, while he may be currently steering away from Star Trek and looking to plot out his exit from filmmaking, things could always change. So perhaps we haven’t heard the last about his potential involvement in a Star Trek film franchise.

If you’ve spent the past few years collecting and playing a vast library of titles on Xbox One, then don’t worry–that collection is all coming with you if you choose to upgrade to Xbox Series X (the official name of Project Scarlett). Xbox Series X will support backwards compatibility for all Xbox One games the day the next-gen console launches.

“We wanted to make sure we had that, day one, we could deliver on the compatibility promise, and so I’ve been playing quite a few [Xbox 360] games on my [Xbox Series X] and Xbox One games on the [Xbox Series X] and that’s just to ensure that we can be there day one,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer told GameSpot.

“We have thousands of games that run on Xbox One today,” Xbox partner director of program management Jason Ronald told GameSpot. “We want those games to be able to come forward with you but we also want your services to come with you. We want your gaming legacy to come with you, whether that’s your Gamerscore, whether that’s your friends list, all your Achievements, your game saves, all of that should come forward so there are no barriers for you as you think about moving forward.”

The process of ensuring three previous console generations of games all play on Xbox Series X has been a lot of work. “There is work in ensuring [backwards] compatibility across those generations,” Spencer said. “So, as you might remember, we slowed down and paused our backwards compatibility program for [Xbox 360] on Xbox One.”

“[It takes a lot of work] even for Xbox One games, because one of the biggest challenges is console games are usually hyper-optimized to the unique hardware capabilities of the device, and this is a new generation of hardware,” Ronald added. “It is a new chip architecture. At the same time, we did design the silicon with [backwards] compatibility in mind, so we did make certain decisions to try to lessen that work, but I don’t want to trivialize how much work the team’s actually doing because there is a tremendous amount of work.”

With the Xbox Series X officially revealed, our comparison between it and Sony’s PlayStation 5 has become a little more concrete. If you need a little refresher on the console, we’ve compiled everything we know about Xbox Series X–from its announcement as Project Scarlett to its The Game Awards reveal.

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[Spoiler warning] HBO’s Watchmen has wrapped up with the airing of Episode 9, “See How They Fly,” and the season finale’s ending resolved many of the questions that viewers have had. What was Lady Trieu up to? Would Doctor Manhattan allow the 7th Kavalry’s plan to succeed? Why was Veidt so lax on Europa? But it didn’t find the screentime to answer one particular and truly important question: Who the hell was Lube Man? The question has persisted since his brief appearance in Episode 4, when he creepily slipped into a sewer grate and out of our lives.

While we sadly may never get to see any characters’ reactions to it, we do have some positive news: We know who Lube Man is. HBO has been filling in details on the periphery with Peteypedia, a section of the Watchmen website consisting of FBI documents and files collected by Laurie’s chosen assistant, Dale Petey. And it’s in the most recent Peteypedia file (PDF link), a memo written by FBI deputy director Farragut, that we learn who Lube Man was: Petey himself.

A previous entry had suggested that Petey might be the one under the mask and oil, but the memo makes it far more certain. It states that Petey has been fired from the FBI, and in the process of his office being cleaned out, “a jug of what appears to be some kind of canola oil” was found. Quite subtly, the reference to canola oil links out to the image you see below–a wanted poster for our slippery friend.

Lube Man’s wanted poster

The memo goes on to state that Petey is now missing and presumed to be continuing his own investigation, despite the FBI closing the case. “It’s clear now from his memos that Petey (Hero Enthusiast-Obsessive/ Solipsist on the Werthem Spectrum) is at risk for vigilante behavior, and most likely, always was,” Farragut writes. “Perhaps sooner or later, this task force will be investigating him.”

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