Author: Trafficblast

Hugh Returns

Kunai’s premise is a familiar one. Humankind has reached the pinnacle of technological advancement and brought about their own downfall, inviting an army of AI-controlled robots to nearly wipe out all life on earth. A small resistance of remaining humans and conflict-averse droids begin fighting back, but without a miracle, that battle is all but lost lost. Tabby, a cheerfully emoting tablet in ninja robes, is that miracle.

Kunai is both outlandish and endearing, starting squarely with its odd protagonist. Tabby–a dexterous tablet in a world dominated by robots with CRT-like heads and barely any traces of humankind–is on a quest to extinguish an AI uprising and prevent humanity’s extinction. Kunai’s world is fragmented into varied areas, giving you multiple paths to explore in its opening hours, with your growing toolset opening up new avenues to explore as you progress. Kunai features the familiar DNA of action-platformers and Metroidvanias, combining satisfying platforming and engrossing combat to great effect.

You start out with just a sword, and you can use it to quickly carve through the metal exteriors of robot foes and stylishly protect yourself from projectiles with a flurry of swings. You have a generous jump, too, that allows you to attack from above and continuously bounce between enemies after each swipe. Getting into a rhythm of bouncing off one enemy and directly onto the next while not missing an attack in between is both easy to grasp and satisfying to pull off. Kunai’s combat scenarios generally feature only a handful of enemies at a time, too, giving you ample space to feel like a kickass ninja consistently.

Adding to your airborne maneuverability early on are the kunai, a pair of grappling hooks equipped in each hand that let you swing around environments with ease. Augmenting standard movement with the aerial freedom of your kunai injects combat with a captivating sense of flow. It’s effortless to chain together swings to maintain airtime while bouncing between enemies to attack.

A variety of layouts from screen to screen challenge you to use your tools creatively. More open expanses let you freely hop around, but don’t offer many points for you to hook your kunai into. Cramped pathways limit your aerial maneuverability, encouraging you to deflect more projectiles and choose your attacks wisely. Each area throws in unique elements that supplement this–the dense forest features vines that you can use to climb on while mines feature fragile walls that crumble if you swing from them–keeping platforming and combat entertaining throughout.

You’re free to explore the multiple areas of Kunai’s large map as far as your equipment will take you. Each new item you find doubles as both a weapon and a tool to navigate the world in new ways. Your dual machine guns, for example, act as both a powerful medium range attack and a creative means to float over large gaps, since you can use downward fire to sustain your jump for as long as you have bullets to fire. Each new item’s use is also easy to understand from the get-go, calling to mind locked doors or obstructed pathways that can now be cleared with your new abilities, making it easy to decide where to push onto next.

Each new item expands your limited moveset in exciting ways, but navigating to each specific part of the map where they might be useful becomes taxing quickly. Individual segments in Kunai’s areas offer up enough variety in their construction to encourage different combat strategies, but they don’t coalesce in a way that makes navigating the same spaces as interesting on return visits. In some cases coming to the end of a critical path and reaching its respective goal is deflated by the realisation that you need to navigate all the way back to where you started, sometimes without anything new in your arsenal to shake up the return journey. It’s disappointing to brush through an area with a fine comb only to be contacted over radio and redirected without any real narrative progression, especially when there are no fast-travel systems to alleviate the backtracking.

This is exacerbated in some later stages in which it can be unclear where your next objective lies, with all possible paths requiring a tool you don’t yet have. The aimless wandering is especially tiresome because poking around Kunai’s world isn’t incredibly rewarding either, even with optional chests hidden throughout each area for you to uncover. Some contain cosmetic hats for some visual variety while others hold valuable in-game currency for upgrades, but it’s the few featuring parts of a health upgrade that are worth seeking out. The issue is that the majority of the chests lie at the end of passageways hidden entirely from view, only revealing themselves when you accidentally brush close to their entrance and cause the textures obfuscating them to fade away. It’s a disappointingly basic way to hide them, making your discoveries feel more lucky than well deduced.

Although navigating each area multiple times isn’t as fun as it should be, the gorgeous visual shifts between them are a delight. Kunai’s limited color palette is used to accentuate its varied areas with subtlety. Each of the areas features different muted colours for their backdrop, such as the flat greys and dim blues of its opening factory and the bright greens of its AI-infested forests. The variation makes shifting between each area not only clear but visually delightful too. While most colors are muted, bright reds are especially prominent. Not only does it help make enemies and points of importance stand out from the background, it imbues each slash of your sword and subsequent connecting strike with a powerful punch that bathes the screen in sharp, contrasting red hues. It works in tandem with a well-measured screenshake effect that gives Kunai’s combat a stylish look in motion.

This sense of style doesn’t transition, however, to Kunai’s limited story. It sets up an initial premise and gives you an understanding of what you’re fighting for, but doesn’t leave much for you to uncover about its world beyond that. The only avenue for learning more about Kunai’s world is through limited but surprisingly entertaining interactions with other resistance robots. Usually denoted by their chunky CRT monitor heads and calming blue shading, these side characters add some levity to the setting by making light of disastrous events with silly puns and small, humorous anecdotes. Although there are other important named characters that are meant to add more to the narrative, they don’t stand out as much as each brief interaction you have when arriving at a new camp.

It’s disappointing that there isn’t more to dig into when it comes down to Kunai’s set dressing, especially when it’s paired with such a striking visual style and engrossing combat. Kunai’s level design pushes you to keep adapting while affording you the space to finish off a group of enemies with a series of pinpoint grappling hook swings, precise double jumps, and intelligently integrated swings of your sword. Kunai loses some of its momentum far too frequently, but when it hits a balance between its engrossing combat and satisfying platforming, it’s difficult to put down.

We’re now three episodes into Star Trek: Picard, and only now is one of Starfleet’s greatest captains finally getting back to the final frontier. As with the first two episodes, “Remembrance” and “Maps and Legends,” the third episode of the series struggles with pacing and reliance on info dumps–but at least things are starting to pick up as the show finally gets Jean-Luc Picard back where he belongs.

The last episode of Star Trek: Picard concerned Jean-Luc’s continued investigation into what happened to Dahj (Isa Briones) and the people who were hunting her. In the third episode, “The End is the Beginning,” the captain starts to put together a crew to track down Soji (also Briones), Dahj’s sister, before the agents of the Romulan Zhat Vash can find her. Most of the episode has Picard (Patrick Stewart) convincing various people to help him out as he prepares to leave Earth, and honestly, the captain’s return to space can’t happen soon enough.

The upshot of “The End is the Beginning,” despite Star Trek: Picard’s slow-burn approach so far, is that it puts a lot of time into developing the other characters who seem like they’ll be a major part of the show going forward. We get the backstory of the relationship between Picard and Raffi (Michelle Hurd), his former first officer on the USS Verity who lost her career because of Picard’s resignation, and who harbors a lot of resentment because of it. We meet Rios (Santiago Cabrera), the pilot who’ll carry Picard back to the Final Frontier, who has become a brooding loner because of some Starfleet tragedy in his past. We see the fresh-faced Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) as she realizes that she has a chance to continue her life’s work by joining Picard’s team. And we’re re-introduced to Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco), the former Borg drone Picard and the Enterprise crew met during The Next Generation, who has a major role working with Soji on the Borg Cube known as the Artifact.

Up to now, Star Trek: Picard has done some solid work updating Picard’s character with this new take on his story, but the first two episodes were a little thin on development of other characters. We know there’s a Romulan conspiracy that’s targeting Soji, but we have almost no information about the people involved or their motivations. And we know Soji is working with former Borg drones on the Artifact, but not exactly what she’s trying to accomplish there. “The End is the Beginning” puts a lot more effort into adding to the cast beyond Picard himself, and that work in establishing other characters feels like it should start to pay off shortly.

The trouble is, we’re still waiting. Episode 3 is yet another chapter that feels like it’s putting all its effort into setting up the rest of the season’s story arc, without a lot happening in the here and now. The bad guys continue to have menacing but mostly detail-free conversations with each other, while Picard and his allies continue to uncover spare tidbits about what they should be doing next. It’s the same pacing problem that we’ve seen in the first two episodes of Picard, although Episode 3 is a little better about pushing characters into action–eventually.

The problems of the early episodes persist in Episode 3, however. A lengthy scene with Soji provides a little more context about what her job is on the Artifact: She’s specifically attempting to work with Romulans who were freed from their Borg assimilation. The scene expends a lot of effort on more Trek technobabble, though, with Soji saying she’s attempting to study how a “shared mythological framework” might help former Borg recover–whatever that means. The scene’s real function is to add an element of dread to Soji’s character as the Romulan former drones react to her as if she’s some prophesied evil figure, which suggests deeper undertones as to why the Zhat Vash are after her–but the details remain extremely thin, and the scene itself is more confusing than edifying.

In fact, it all remains pretty slow. As an important part of Picard’s history involving the Borg, Hugh is potentially a big addition to the ensemble, but it doesn’t seem like the show has much of a plan for him at the moment. The captain’s meeting with Rios sets up the pilot’s personal angst, but we’ll have to wait for it to come to fruition. Agnes is visited by Starfleet’s Commodore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita), but any seeds that’ll lead Picard and his team to the conclusion that she’s on the wrong side are only just being planted. It seems Narek (Harry Treadaway) might be getting too close to Soji even as he tries to use her to find more androids, but we’ll have to wait to see how it affects him. There’s a lot going on in Picard, but none of it is happening right now. The show is all dramatic tension since we know much more about what’s happening than most of its characters, and unfortunately, we’re spending all of our time waiting for everyone else to catch up.

The good news is that the foundations are laid, the context is in place, the players are in position, and the captain has returned to the bridge. Things are about to start happening in Star Trek: Picard. Too bad we have to wait another week for them.

Filming on The Matrix 4 has begun in San Francisco, and videos and images from the set have emerged that provide the first look at Keanu Reeves in the upcoming action film.

In one scene, Reeves is seen blocking his eyes from the sun as he stares into the distance. A camera moves in before a director calls cut. Check out the video below, and another image further down.

Reeves returns in The Matrix 4 to play Neo once more. He’s joined by Carrie-Anne Moss, who reprises her role as Trinity, and Jada Pinkett Smith as Niobe. Among the new cast members for the movie are Priyanka Chopra, Jonathan Groff, and Neil Patrick Harris.

Hugo Weaving is not going to return as Agent Smith due to a scheduling conflict.

Lana Wachowski returns to direct The Matrix 4. It comes to theatres on May 21, 2021–which is also the release date for another Reeves-starring action sequel, John Wick: Chapter 4.

The first Matrix movie brought in $463.5 million worldwide, and it spawned two sequels: 2003’s Matrix Reloaded–grossing $742.1 million worldwide–and Matrix Revolutions–taking in $427.3 million worldwide. For more, check out The Matrix Sequels’ 34 Dumbest Moments to relive the weirdness.

Online retailer Amazon has rolled out a very good deal on the Xbox One X. The store is currently selling multiple different Xbox One X models for only $350 USD. The system normally retails for $500 USD, so this is a markdown of $150 USD.

The 1TB Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, NBA 2K20, and multiple Gears 5 bundles are available. The Limited Edition Gears 5 bundle comes with a specially designed console featuring the Crimson Omen symbol and a matching controller, as well as copies of Gears 5, Gears of War 4, Gears of War 3, Gears of War 2, and the remastered version of the original Gears of War.

The $350 price point for the Xbox One X is the same as Microsoft’s Black Friday deals, so this is indeed a very deep discount.

Xbox One X Deals — $350 USD

These Xbox One X deals–some of which are also available directly through Microsoft, Target, and Best Buy–arrive ahead of the Xbox Series X launch later this year. That console won’t have exclusive games right away, and it will also work with the Xbox One controllers you may already have.

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