The Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster and Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age will both headed to the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One this April.
Announced by Square Enix alongside a piece of new artwork by character designer Akihiko Yoshida, Final Fantasy X / X-2 will arrive on April 16, 2019, while Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age will be released on April 30, 2019.
It was another big week for the comic book industry. Marvel relaunched Captain Marvel’s monthly series with a new creative team and debuted Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. DC kicked off the new Wonder Comics imprint with Young Justice #1 and delivered a dark new chapter of Batman.
Scroll down to check out our new reviews and thinkpieces, and be sure to let us know your favorite books of the week in the comments below.
An eagle-eyed player has discovered a delightful Stan Lee tribute following the latest World of Warcraft patch.
When patch 8.1.5 went live on the World of Warcraft public test servers, players were expecting more allies, shiny new battlegrounds textures and a tonne of other fixes and updates. However, when walking through the streets of Stormwind Keep, Twitter user Bas Schouten (via Eurogamer) also noticed that a familiar face had been added.
Excelsior! @TerranGregory @TaliesinEvitel pic.twitter.com/9jplxvgEff
It’s no secret that the latest Fallout game got off to a rocky start when it launched in November–just read our Fallout 76 review for an overview of its issues. But developer Bethesda has promised to make it up to players. One way the company is doing that is by giving a copy of the Fallout Classic Collection on PC to anyone who played the full version of Fallout 76 on any platform in 2018.
So whether you dropped into the apocalyptic wasteland on PS4, Xbox One, or PC, you’re now eligible for free copies of Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel on PC. The collection is currently selling for $20 on Steam, so that’s not a bad freebie (provided you have a Windows PC capable of running the games).
To access the collection, you’ll first have to download the Bethesda Launcher for PC. Then open it and sign into your Bethesda.net account. Head to the Games menu, and you’ll find your freebies in your account, ready to be installed.
The first Fallout is a turn-based RPG developed by Interplay that launched in 1997. The sequel, made by Black Isle Studios, landed the following year. The franchise didn’t see another release until 2001’s Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, which was developed by Micro Forté. All three games were well received at the time of release; you can read GameSpot’s reviews below.
Fallout 76 is in the process of getting its first patch of the new year. Rolling out on PC on January 10 at 9 AM ET (6 AM PT, 2 PM GMT) and next week on PS4 and Xbox One, the patch contains over “150 fixes.” Bethesda said the update will “address many issues raised by the community as well as continue focus on improving performance and stability.”
We’re now in Week 6 of Fortnite Season 7, which means there’s another batch of those oh-so-precious Battle Stars to unlock. The best way to do that is to complete challenges, which in turn will net you them and level up your Battle Pass, thus bringing you one step closer to unlocking new cosmetics.
If you’re new to this, firstly, hello, how’s it going? What have you been up to? Secondly, let’s get you up to speed on how it all works. Challenge are split into two categories, with the first being available to any and all Fortnite players, while the second is exclusive to players that have spent V-Bucks to get the premium version of the pass. Naturally, you’ll still be able to get a few Battle Stars by doing the free challenges, but if you really want to get those cosmetic unlocks faster, the premium pass is the way to go.
In the free section this week, players will need to search seven ammo boxes in different named locations (which you should be very used to doing now), hunt down seven Chilly Gnomes, and take out enemies in either Lucky Landing or Tilted Towers.
Meanwhile, in the paid Battle Pass section, first up is a multi-stage challenge that begins with you visiting Polar Peaks and Tilted Towers in a single match. With that done, you’ll get two more locations to visit in the second stage, and then again in the third.
After that you’ll need to get yourself the Ice Puck emote (unlocked at Tier 28 in the Battle Pass), find an icy surface, and use the emote to send that bad boy off into the distance. There’s also another multi-stager that involves doing damage using SMGs and, after that’s done, you’ll find two further stages that task you with dishing out pain using specific weapons.
The final challenge in the paid Battle Pass category is another one that’ll put your shooting chops to the test. It asks you to deal damage with five different weapons in a single match. Take a look at the full list of Fortnite Season 7, Week 6’s challenges below.
Free
If you’ve got any outstanding challenges from previous weeks, take a look at our Fortnite Season 7 challenge guide, in which we keep track of all the weekly challenges and provide links to guides for the more difficult ones. Using that you’ll be able to wrap up any remaining challenges from the season so far and get those Battle Stars.
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Memories are notoriously unreliable. We frequently forget things that have happened or embellish our experiences with new details that never actually occurred. The conceit of The Eternal Castle is that it’s a remaster of a long-lost classic from the late 1980s. The developers claim, with a nod and a wink, that they wished to preserve the “feel” of the original and keep its memory alive. When I first heard about it there was a moment when I thought, “This looks vaguely familiar. I think maybe I played it on my old 286?”
I should have known better than to trust my memory. The Eternal Castle isn’t a remaster at all. There was no game with that name released in 1987–nor, indeed, in any other year of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Instead, The Eternal Castle, as a brand new game in 2019, is a retro throwback that’s at once deeply indebted to the likes of Flashback and Another World while at the same time recognizant of how much game design has evolved over the past 30 years. The result is a cinematic platformer that doesn’t quite play as those games actually did but rather feels like our hazy, unreliable memory of them. Cinematic platformers have come a long way since the ’80s, but the genre’s core tenets of prioritizing animation over input (that is, when you commit to pressing the jump button you have to wait for the complete jump animation to play out before you input another action) and populating its levels with novel set-pieces can be seen running through games as otherwise diverse as the original Prince of Persia in 1989 right up to Limbo, Deadlight and Inside.
The Eternal Castle sees you play as the pilot of a crashlanded spacecraft, exploring a strange planet to recover the items required to fix your ship. The three levels that comprise the meat of the game–there’s a fourth and final level unlocked later–transition through some remarkably varied scenarios. One moment you’ll be sneaking past horrible creatures in a cemetery as flashes of lightning illuminate the night, the next you’ll be climbing up and down the tattered framework of a bombed-out skyscraper. Each of the three levels has a broad theme linking one area to the next, but they don’t rigidly adhere to any one setting. Indeed, one of the drawcards is the thrill of discovering what outlandish or perhaps utterly mundane (which I usually found even more memorable) situation you encounter next.
On a mechanical level, these stages are distinguished in terms of the type of experience they offer. One promises “low ammo” while another warns of “poor visibility,” thus giving you some idea of what to expect and, crucially, what gear you might need to take with you. You can only carry two weapons at once, ammo is scarce, and clips can’t be refilled. Deplete the six-bullet clip on your pistol and you’ll have to swap it out for the next weapon you find, and if that’s a shotgun with two shells then that’s going to have to do the job. Every bullet counts.
This isn’t a run-and-gun shooter, but in its weaker moments it can turn into a bit of a mash-heavy brawler. Some areas, and at least one boss fight, favor use of close-range melee weapons like the club, hand-axe or sword. Your moves are limited to a regular attack, block and charge and further constrained by a stamina meter, thus theoretically offering some sort of considered nuance to the combat. But in any instance where I was fighting more than one enemy I found it easiest to simply mash attack until everyone was dead.
However, there were the odd occasions where my progress was blocked by a particularly tricky section, always combat-related whether it was being outnumbered by a group of thugs in a nightclub or being mowed down by some persistent gunners as I attempted to charge across the no man’s land of a battlefield. Here I took advantage of the game’s structure and backed out of the level to return to the hub and try one of the other two levels. This is effective because throughout the three levels are permanent gear upgrades–a backpack, for example, that allows you to carry more ammo or a bandana that somehow increases your strength and ups melee damage–so you may well find the assistance you need is in another castle.
Indeed, the game’s structure is a good example of how this is very much a modern cinematic platformer. Not only can you choose which level to play, thus reducing the likelihood of getting stuck, but your loadout carries over from level to level and any major items you collect stay with you regardless of how many times you die or restart. Of course, if you return to a previously visited level you do have to start from its beginning, but there are convenient checkpoints throughout and you’ll rarely lose more than a couple of screens’ progress when you die as long as you stay in the level. Similar games of the ’80s and ’90s could be extremely punitive, forcing you to replay entire levels over and over until you nailed the perfect run. All of that frustration is completely alleviated here, thankfully, and if you’re after a stern challenge then the New Game+ mode will provide it in spades.
Part of the reason for my initial confusion over whether I had in fact played the “original” Eternal Castle is that this “remaster” apes the visual aesthetic of a late ’80s PC game so well. Every scene is depicted in no more than four colors (black, white and just two others, typically a variation of blue and red) and each character or object within is composed of a collection of chunky pixels, mostly seen only in silhouette. It’s not an exact match with the capabilities of CGA at the time–while plenty of games allowed you to boot up into one of the various four-colour modes I certainly don’t recall any that switched palettes in-game and from scene-to-scene. And the quality of animation here is inarguably superior, in terms of the number of frames, than even something as revered as Prince of Persia. But the overall effect is uncanny. I felt like I had been transported back in time to a simpler, noticeably more cyan and magenta world.
The Eternal Castle is more than a mere nostalgia trip for aging gamers still hanging on to their 5.25-inch floppy drives. In many ways, it’s just as modern as it is retro and more than capable of holding its own against its more illustrious contemporary peers. Luckily it’s just my memory that isn’t as good as it used to be.
M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, Glass, hits theatres soon, and ahead of its release, reviews have started to appear online. The film is getting a mixed reaction from critics.
GameSpot’s Michael Rougeau said in his review that Glass has elements that fans will enjoy, but overall, the movie focuses too much on “all the wrong things.”
“Like most of Shyamalan’s movies, Glass is well directed and scored, and there are moments of brilliance and tension throughout,” Rougeau wrote. “But when the twist is literally that the climax won’t actually be as exciting as you’ve been led to believe, it’s impossible not to feel disappointed.”
Glass brings together characters from Shyamalan’s previous movies, Unbreakable and Split. It was confirmed at the end of Split that it’s set in the same universe as Unbreakable.
You can see a rundown of Glass reviews below, while more information on the film’s critical reception can be found on GameSpot sister site Metacritic.
“Glass isn’t the movie it should have been. There are hints of it early on, before the film takes a left turn and spends the rest of its stay focusing on all the wrong things. Like most of Shyamalan’s movies, Glass is well directed and scored, and there are moments of brilliance and tension throughout. But when the twist is literally that the climax won’t actually be as exciting as you’ve been led to believe, it’s impossible not to feel disappointed.” — Michael Rougeau [Full review]
M. Night Shyamalan is a gifted artist, but like most of the characters in the Glass series, he seems to have multiple identities, both good and bad, and you never know which one is going to show up. In the case of Glass, it’s the latter. When Unbreakable came out, it felt truly revolutionary. Given the visual and intellectual sophistication in the superhero movies Hollywood now churns out at a regular clip, Glass just doesn’t cut it.” — Matt Singer [Full review]
“Is Glass the least satisfying chapter of an often enjoyable, conceptually intriguing trilogy? Or is it an attempt to launch a broader Shyamalaniverse, in which ordinary men and women throughout Philadelphia and its suburbs will discover their own inspiring abilities? Marketplace realities make the latter more likely. Here’s hoping the former is the case.” — John DeFore [Full review]
“It’s good to see Shyamalan back (to a degree) in form, to the extent that he’s recovered his basic mojo as a yarn spinner. But Glass occupies us without haunting us; it’s more busy than it is stirring or exciting.” — Owen Gleiberman [Full review]
“If Unbreakable and Split are some of the strongest works in Shyamalan’s filmography, Glass holds a place somewhere in the middle between those and the titles that turned off so many moviegoers. But don’t count out Shyamalan just yet. There is enough experimentation–such as the stirring POV shots during the fight scenes–that shows a director still pushing his craft to bring his viewers something new. He’s not done surprising us.” — Monica Castillo [Full review]