Author: Trafficblast

Socks are the classic bad holiday gift, but what if they were also prohibitively expensive? Enter the Puma Active Gaming Footwear sock, an absurd example of capitalism run amok that you can wear on your feet. Next time you ask “where we droppin’ boys?” your feet could be swaddled in luxury.

That luxury costs about £80 through the Puma store, or about $100 USD–though they aren’t available to purchase in the USA, where we appreciate our rugged foot freedom. These monuments to excess promise a “knitted upper” for comfort and breathability, a “low rubber outsole for grip,” and a custom fit. All of these features suggest Puma believes video gaming involves a lot of athletic foot movement, so we’re not entirely sure what they think gaming actually is.

Pictured: A sock.

But wait, there’s more! It also features three “modes,” by which they mean features. Sock features. Those include a medial wrap-up grip (“SEEK mode”), lateral wrap-up support (“ATTACK mode”), and heel wrap-up stability (“CRUISE and DEFENSE mode”). So basically, these are just different weaves to support different foot parts.

If you happen to live in the UK or Australia, you can order the socks now with free express shipping. And if you do, and then you rocket to the top-tier of Fortnite competitive play and win millions of dollars, make sure to thank your socks in the acceptance speech to teach us a lesson.

Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper’s new movie, Cats, is out in theatres this weekend. Reviews have begun to appear online ahead of the premiere, and the movie sounds like an unsettling CGI nightmare.

The film–which features unsettling CGI-cat versions of actors like Ian McKellan, James Corden, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, and Taylor Swift–currently has a 31 percent rating on GameSpot sister site Metacritic. We’ve collected some quick-hit highlights of the movie’s critical reception below.

Cats is based on the iconic Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical of the same name. It’s Hooper’s second musical movie, following 2012’s Les Miserables. It also stars Jason Derulo, Jennifer Hudson, Rebel Wilson, and Francesca Hayward. It hits theatres on December 20, which is the same day that the divisive Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hits screens.

What The Reviewers Are Saying About Cats

i09’s Cats movie review went with the headline, “I Have Seen Sights No Human Should See.” Reviewer Alex Cranz elaborated, “You will witness things no eyes should see and things nobody should be able to do, and you will be in awe. And that’s more than enough.”

The Chicago Tribune used the headline, “Wrong Animal. It’s A Dog” for their Cats review. “Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019?” reviewer Michael Phillips said. “Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: Cats cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-Springtime for Hitler’-in-The Producers stupefaction.”

Lena Wilson of The Playlist said of Cats, “Tom Hooper’s Adaptation Of A Broadway Classic Is A CGI Nightmare.”

“Once Hooper’s 110 minutes of Cats are over, theater is dead,” Wilson said. “One lucky Jellicle cat is dead. And we unchosen ones are left, tragically, to continue living.”

The Los Angeles Times writer Justin Chang wrote: “For the most part, Cats is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws–ahem, pause–to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.”

USA Today’s Brian Truitt described the movie in this way: “A furry Taylor Swift sprinkles the contents of a bedazzled can of catnip to create a fog of intoxicating magical dust, and that’s not even in the top five truly insane things that happen in Cats.”

Collider’s review of Cats said, “You can never get swept up in Catsbecause it’s so abrasively weird and anti-narrative that you needed some kind of fearless auteur like a Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin) who would lean into those sensibilities rather than flail desperately at making it palatable for audiences.”

For more on the critical reaction to Cats, go to Metacritic.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

2020 is almost here, so we’ve asked GameSpot’s staff to share which games they’re looking forward to most in the new year. New consoles are going to dominate the headlines, but at the end of the day it’s all about the games, and there are a ton of exciting ones to look forward to. When you’re done reading this entry, follow along with all of our other end-of-the-year coverage collected in our Best of 2019 hub and our Most Anticipated of 2020 hub.

The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of the decade, and back in 2013, I probably would have told you it had the perfect ending. I wouldn’t have thought it needed a sequel, or that I particularly wanted one. But the more I see of The Last of Us Part II, the more I remember how much I loved those characters–and I desperately want to see more of Ellie and her story.

Part II takes place a few years after the events of the first game, and from what we’ve seen of Ellie so far, she looks different. Hardened. Mad. The bits of gameplay Naughty Dog has shown portray a ruthless fighter; she moves fluidly from one action to the next, though she’s still pretty scrappy. If I didn’t know for certain the combat we saw at E3 2018 was all real-time and player-driven, I would have assumed some of it was scripted, given how natural it all looks.

Writer/director Neil Druckmann said that, along with an overhauled engine, new combat mechanics, and a new stealth system, the team “revamped [their] animation system to fully express Ellie’s desperation, resourcefulness, and unique agility.” I’m interested to see how the combat has evolved mechanically since 2013, but more than that, I’m excited to see exactly how Ellie has changed and how her personality and emotional state are expressed through her movements.

Games have the unique potential to portray traditional narrative beats–story, characters, themes–through actions you take as the player, and this is one of my favorite things about the medium. The Last of Us did an excellent job of it already, and I can’t wait to see if Part II ends up taking it further. I’m also personally so excited to play as Ellie in general; I identify with her much more than I did Joel, and I want to see how that affects my experience in this world, if at all.

Most recently, we learned that The Last of Us Part II has been delayed from February to May 2020. Some people take game delays as a bad sign, but I often see them as positives for both the final version of the game and the people working on it. If a game needs more time, it needs more time. And The Last of Us Part II is a game I’m willing to wait for–even if I also really want to play it right now.

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