Author: Trafficblast

US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced he is introducing a bill that would potentially bar the sale of loot boxes in certain video games. If enacted, Hawley’s bill, called The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act, would ban loot boxes and “pay-to-win” microtransactions in titles targeted at or popular among minors, likening the business model to addiction.

“Social media and video games prey on user addiction, siphoning our kids’ attention from the real world and extracting profits from fostering compulsive habits,” Senator Hawley said in a statement. “No matter this business model’s advantages to the tech industry, one thing is clear: there is no excuse for exploiting children through such practices. When a game is designed for kids, game developers shouldn’t be allowed to monetize addiction. Game developers who knowingly exploit children should face legal consequences.”

Hawley cites the popular mobile title Candy Crush Saga as an example, as it allows players to purchase a $150 “Luscious Bundle” to make the game easier, though it is certainly far from the only title to offer these kinds of spending options. A large number of mobile games are designed to encourage microtransactions, and many of today’s most popular PC and console games, including PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Rocket League, and Overwatch, give players the option to purchase loot boxes that contain a randomized assortment of cosmetic items.

Hawley’s bill will first need to pass the Senate and then the House of Representatives before potentially becoming a law, but this isn’t the first time US lawmakers have taken aim at the practice. Last February, Hawaii state representative Chris Lee put forward a bill seeking to limit the sale of video games with “gambling-like mechanisms” to people under the age of 21. Other countries have also undertaken investigations into whether or not loot boxes constituted gambling.

Follow Hawley’s announcement, the Entertainment Software Association released a statement in response to the proposed legislation. “Numerous countries, including Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, determined that loot boxes do not constitute gambling. We look forward to sharing with the senator the tools and information the industry already provides that keeps the control of in-game spending in parents’ hands. Parents already have the ability to limit or prohibit in-game purchases with easy to use parental controls.”

Loot boxes have been a point of controversy in the industry for many years. 2017’s Star Wars Battlefront II, for instance, garnered a lot of criticism and backlash for the way it initially incorporated microtransactions, effectively tying them to your progression. In response, publisher EA removed all loot boxes from the game just prior to launch, but that didn’t help stem the push for anti-loot box legislation.

Thomas Was Alone and Volume developer Mike Bithell has announced his studio Bithell Games’ next game, and it’s a “fast-paced, action-oriented” strategy game based on the John Wick movie series. John Wick Hex is coming to unspecified consoles as well as PC; it’ll be exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC and Mac at launch.

John Wick Hex is described as “fight-choreographed chess brought to life as a video game.” The game, which was developed in cooperation with the minds behind the film series, aims to “captur[e] the series’ signature gun-fu style while expanding its story universe.”

Here is more from the game’s official description: “Players must choose every action and attack they make, while considering their immediate cost and consequences. Every move in John Wick Hex feels like a scene from the movies, and every fight contributes to your progress on the job and requires precise strategic thinking.”

Hex features an original story separate from the film series. As players progress they will unlock more weapons, as well as new suits for John Wick and more locations to explore. Regarding the gunplay, a press release mentions that players will need to strategically consider the weapon they use for the specific battle in front of them. Not only that, “ammo is finite and realistically simulated, so time your reloads and make the most of weapons you scavenge on the job,” the developers say.

Regarding the art style, Hex aims to offer a “unique graphic noir art design.” The game also features the voices of John Wick actors Ian McShane and Lance Reddick; more cast members will be announced later. It’s unclear if Keanu Reeves, who plays Wick in the movies, will be involved.

Check out the Hex announcement trailer embedded above to see the first gameplay and more. No release date was announced.

The announcement of Hex comes just days before the third John Wick movie, John Wick: Parabellum, comes to theatres on May 15. This is not the first John Wick game, as a VR game–John Wick Chronicles–was released last year. It also doesn’t mark the only expansion of the universe, as we know a John Wick TV series is in the works, with Reeves onboard as executive producer.

Mortal Kombat 11 released just a couple of weeks ago on April 23, and while it’s becoming increasingly common for new games to go on sale in a matter of weeks, we were particularly shook by the speed of MK11’s price cuts. Amazon has been selling Mortal Kombat 11 for $10 off ($50) since release day, and multiple other retailers have offered the game at a discount at some point. Now, we’re seeing the game at its lowest price yet, and PC gamers who have been holding off may want to jump on this particular deal.

For the next week (or while supplies last), Newegg is offering a Steam key for Mortal Kombat 11 for $44. When you add the game to your cart, you’ll be able to see the price; the discount is applied automatically. If you’re interested in the Premium edition, that version is also marked down to $75 (generally sells for $100) and you’ll also receive a Steam key when you buy. The Premium edition includes the base game and the Kombat Pack, which gives you access to six new DLC playable characters, a week of early access to DLC characters, exclusive character skins, and exclusive sets of gear.

Get Mortal Kombat 11 standard edition for $44 »

Get Mortal Kombat 11 Premium edition for $75 »

The game earned a 9/10 in GameSpot’s Mortal Kombat 11 review for its deep, accessible combat system, cinematic story, diverse character roster, and rewarding new single-player mode, the Towers of Time.

“MK11 isn’t just a sequel for series fans and NetherRealm devotees, it’s a gateway into the realm of fighting games for anyone who has a passing interest in watching ruthless warriors beat each other silly,” wrote critic Edmond Tran. “Streamlined mechanics keep the act of fighting furiously exciting no matter what your skill level, and comprehensive tutorials encourage you to dig into the nitty-gritty. There’s a diverse roster of interesting characters and playstyles, and the story mode is an entertaining romp.”

If you’re picking up the game, brush up on our best tips for fighting well in Mortal Kombat 11 and see all the changes and improvements rolled out in MK11’s latest update.

Niantic has been slowly introducing Gen 4 Pokemon to Pokemon Go over the past few months, but two that remain conspicuously missing from the game are Glaceon and Leafeon, the Ice- and Grass-type evolutions of Eevee. However, a new leak suggests the two Eeveelutions may be on the way to the game soon.

Dataminer Chrales, who has a long track record of leaking new Pokemon Go features before they’re officially announced, discovered text for three new types of Lure Modules. The Glacial Lure, according to the text, attracts Pokemon “that love the cold;” the Mossy Lure has the same effect on Pokemon that “love mossy scents;” and the Magnetic Lure draws in those that “possess a magnetic field.”

Each of the three new Lure Modules also reportedly cause some Pokemon to evolve, which suggests this is how players will be able to obtain Glaceon and Leafeon in Go. In the mainline Pokemon games, Eevee would only evolve into one of those two forms if it leveled up while near the Ice or Moss Rock. Similarly, Magneton and Nosepass would only evolve into their respective final forms, Magnezone and Probopass, if leveled up in a magnetic field. The three new Lure Modules appear to be Niantic’s way of replicating that process in Pokemon Go.

Niantic has yet to officially confirm the new Lure Modules, so it remains to be seen when they’ll arrive and how players will be able to obtain them. In the meantime, new Gen 4 Legendary Pokemon are available in Raid Battles. The Legendary lake trio, Azelf, Mesprit, and Uxie, are appearing in Gyms until May 27; however, each one is currently only available in a specific region.

Pokemon Go’s next Community Day is also just around the corner. The monthly event returns next Sunday, May 19. The featured Pokemon this time will be Torchic, one of the three starters from Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. A Detective Pikachu event is also underway until May 17. During that time, you’ll be able to find increased spawns of Bulbasaur, Jigglypuff, Snubble, and other Pokemon that appear in the movie, and you may even come across a Shiny Aipom or a Pikachu wearing a detective’s hat.

Avengers: Endgame, the biggest movie of the year–and one of the largest of all time–will be hitting the upcoming streaming service, Disney+ this fall. It will not be available on launch day for the new service, but it will be hitting one month after Disney+ is available to consumers.

During an investors call, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that Endgame will be coming to the Disney+ streaming service on December 11. This is one month after the service debuts, on November 12. Many expected Endgame to be on the service on Day One, but Disney has stated that there will only be four Marvel movies available on launch: Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Iron Man 3, and Thor: Dark World. However, there will be a ton of Star Wars content available at launch.

Alongside the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, Disney+ will be debuting original content featuring familiar faces from the MCU. Aside from previously revealed series featuring Loki, Falcon and Winter Soldier, and Vision and Scarlet Witch, there is a Hawkeye show going into production which will feature Clint Barton passing on the torch to Kate Bishop. If these Marvel shows have the same high production value as Mandalorian–which we got to see some footage of at Star Wars Celebration–then these Marvel shows will have nearly the same production value and quality as the Marvel movies.

The new service will be major competition for the streaming giant Netflix, as Disney+ will cost $7 a month or $70 for a yearly subscription. Is it a Netflix killer? That remains to be seen, but Disney+ will undoubtedly cut into Netflix’s hold on the streaming market.

As what can only be called tradition at this point, one of Ubisoft’s next games has leaked. Called Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the game is a direct sequel to Ghost Recon: Wildlands and is scheduled to release on October 4 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

According to post on Reset Era, the leak came from a retail listing which was shared in a since-removed post in the Ghost Recon subreddit. Breakpoint will feature Major Cole D. Walker, a character both voiced and stylized after actor Jonathan Bernthal, as the game’s villain. Cole is the focus of the new story content that went live in Wildlands as part of Operation Oracle.

Breakpoint will be a “story-driven four-player experience,” which is a very similar description to 2017’s Wildlands. Cole has gone rogue, seemingly killing Holt, Midas, and (possibly) Weaver, and he’s got an army of weaponized drones at his disposal.

The retail listing is specifically for the Wolves Collector’s Edition of the upcoming Ghost Recon game. The edition comes with the game, a map, artwork, a Year 1 Pass, the Ultimate Pack (which contains extra missions, vehicles, and cosmetics), three day early access, and a statue of Cole–now disguised with a hooded cloak and mask.

Ubisoft has already announced a world premiere event in concern for a new Ghost Recon game. Scheduled for May 9 at 11:30 AM PT / 2:30 PM ET (you can watch it here), the event is most likely going to be the official reveal of Breakpoint, as well as confirmation for the information revealed in the leak. The leak implies the event will showcase alpha footage of Breakpoint’s gameplay, including traversing a jungle, mud mechanics, and clearing an outpost.

In our Ghost Recon: Wildlands review, Miguel Concepcion wrote, “As only the second open world game in the Clancyverse, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a middlingly safe tactical shooter and a slightly wasted opportunity given the ambitious scope of its seemingly boundless map. While its main strength is its mission diversity, it doesn’t take long to lose the motivation after reaching El Sueno’s doorstep. Even with a foursome of highly trained friends, Wildlands eventually reveals its diminishing returns. The feeling of positive immediacy and dopamine hits begin to wane sooner than you expected from a game with such a large and diverse world.”

Regardless if you loved or hated Captain America’s Endgame finale, or if you prescribe to the writers’ or the director’s explanation of what actually happened in that scene, one fact remains: a version of Steve Rogers now exists (or existed) through the 1950s in America. Sure, maybe it was an alternate 1950s we’ll never see on screen and can’t reference in our history books, but it’s still the post-war era in America, no matter how the quantum physics shake out.

This left us wondering: Do the comics leave any clues as to how something like that would actually shake out for our favorite Star Spangled Man With A Plan?

The answer is a completely bizarre yes and no.

Understanding The Real Life History Of Cap

The first thing you need to understand about Captain America comics is how the whole “frozen and woken up in the modern era” thing we all tend to take for granted as Steve Rogers’ defacto origin story was actually an invention of the 1960s, 20 years after Steve was introduced in the comics, not the original game plan for the character. In fact, just about every part of Steve Rogers’ origin story is a somewhat modern invention. Just like the other heroes of the ’30s and ’40s, Captain America was introduced with only the most cursory background. The idea of skinny Steve Rogers being empowered by a super serum wouldn’t come for another couple decades.

Captain America comics were published through the end of World War II, despite the character’s waning post-war popularity. The idea that he “died” in the late ’40s? Like skinny Steve, that wasn’t a thing yet. Cap was shuffled around a bunch of different titles as his publisher, Timely, hopped him from one team to the next through the 1950s. In 1946, he lead the All Winners Squadron; in 1948, Bucky was shot and taken out of action to be replaced as a sidekick by Cap’s girlfriend, Betsy Ross (no, really) aka Golden Girl; and by 1953, he’d undergone a bit of a re-brand for a headline role in Young Men Comics. Welcome to the age of Captain America: Commie Smasher.

As you might imagine, commie smashin’ Cap didn’t really do all that well in terms of sales. This was the pre-Marvel era where the concepts of things like superhero shared universes were in their infancy and without a consistent story or team–and with post-war paranoia ramping up daily–the idea of a propagandistic children’s character rapidly lost its appeal. By 1954, Captain America had been completely shelved–not killed off, just no longer under mainstream publication.

And then a little publishing phenomena we know as Marvel Comics happened. In the early 1960s, superhero comics found their footing again as legendary creators Jack Kirby and Stan Lee began inventing teams like the Fantastic Four and The Avengers. Kirby, who had co-created Captain America back in the ’40s, used his new publishing platform to do a “soft” revival of the character, bringing him into a Fantastic Four story in 1963, which ultimately culminated in the reveal that the man behind the mask was an impostor, not Steve Rogers.

Lee, however, took the idea of a modern day Cap and ran with it, positing a complete revision of the last decade or so’s worth of Captain America comics for one shocking reveal: Steve Rogers had actually been frozen at the end of World War II and could now be literally revived as a Marvel Comics character proper and member of the Avengers. One year later in Avengers #4, Captain America was back.

But there was a problem.

People still remembered all of those post-War Captain America comics, no matter how unpopular they may have been. Suddenly, Lee and Kirby were positing that Captain America had been completely out of action since 1945, leaving readers and fans to wonder, if that were the case, who had they been reading comics about for the last ten years?

Enter William Burnside

The answer to that question would take another decade to resolve. The official answer to “what about the Captain America who existed after 1945?” was “that’s not Marvel canon” until the early 1970s when a story called Secret Empire broke across Captain America comics.

Centering around the machinations of an evil, Illuminati-style organization called–you guessed it–the Secret Empire, the story involved a highly complicated plan to destroy the public image of Captain America by unleashing an impostor. At the time, Steve still had a secret identity, so the complication of another person showing up in the Captain America costume claiming to be him wasn’t easily resolved.

Rather than just plucking someone off the street to fill the role, the Secret Empire enlist the help of a man named William Burnside who was eventually revealed to, retroactively, be the person behind the mask throughout the late ’40s and ’50s. In this revision, Steve Rogers had “disappeared” in 1945, but the government refused to accept that their greatest propaganda tool had been taken off the board. In light of that, they crafted a secret project to covertly “replace” Captain America with a new hero, but their plan was only partially successful. Burnside was selected out of a roster of potential candidates and given the same enhancing treatment Steve had been, but the calculations were off, and the radiation of the process slowly left Burnside unhinged.

Burnside’s madness was largely tolerated, however. He was used as a symbol throughout the Korean War and as a zealotus anti-Communist force through the Cold War. He even had his own Bucky–a kid named Jack Monroe who, like Burnside, was recruited for the project and indoctrinated to their new lifestyle and gas-lit into accepting that he actually was Bucky Barnes. Burnside went as far to have his face surgically reconstructed to be identical to Steve Rogers after Rogers’ personal records were made available to him.

In short, things were pretty dark, and extremely disturbing, but they were also a not-so-subtle commentary on the place and the responsibility of a character like Captain America during that specific chunk of American history. It was an idea that helped form the modern conception of Steve Rogers in a major way, shifting him from what many readers in the 1970s believed to be a dated, regressive token of vintage Americana into a modern, multifaceted paragon who stood for more than just blind loyalty to the flag. By setting up a story in which Steve was able to literally face down his own past–even after that past had been transposed onto someone else–Secret Empire helped pave the way to the Captain America we all know and love today.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to see any similar commentary–or any commentary at all–in the live action incarnation. Chris Evans is officially done with his MCU contract and, contentious and unsatisfying as it may be, the end for Steve Rogers in the live action movies is just that: The end. It may be fun to imagine a time-and/or-dimensionally displaced Steve Rogers tearing his way through the 50s in revolutionary style to provide a poignant commentary on things like nationalism and xenophobic paranoia as a direct response to the legacy of William Burnside, but the sad truth of the matter is that’s not something we’ll ever get to see in theaters.