Fortnite fans will no doubt want to start 2019 off on the right foot by securing themselves a healthy helping of Battle Stars, and it just so happens that there’s another batch of challenges now available for them to complete. We’re in Week 5 of Season 7 now, so you should know how this goes, but if you’re new to it all here’s a quick breakdown.
Challenges come in two varieties, with the first free to everyone playing Fortnite’s battle royale mode, and the second available exclusively to those that spend V-Bucks to get a premium Battle Pass. By completing challenges you are rewarded with Battle Stars, which in turn upgrade your Battle Pass and make cosmetic unlocks available. If you’ve got a premium pass, you get the option of doing more challenges and thus can earn more Battle Stars and get new unlocks faster.
In the free category, Week 5’s challenges involve dealing damage to an opponent’s structures, eliminating an enemy player from a specific distance, and completing a multi-stage challenge that begins with dancing on top of a water tower.
For those with a premium Battle Pass, you’ll need to search a location that can be found between a giant rock man, a crowned tomato, and an encircled tree. There’s also a challenge that asks you to get three elims with a silenced weapon, along with another that requires you to search chests in Wailing Woods and Paradise Palms. The final challenge in this section is another multi-stager that is activated by landing at Polar Peak. Take a look at the full list of challenges below.
Free
Stage 1: Land at Polar Peak (1) — 1 Battle Stars
Deal damage to opponent’s structures (5000) — 5 Battle Star
Stage 1: Dance on top of a Water Tower (1) — 1 Battle Stars
Search chests at Wailing Woods or Paradise Palms (7) — 5 Battle Star
Search between a giant rock man, a crowned tomato, and an encircled tree (1) — 10 Battle Stars
Eliminate an opponent from closer than 5m away (3) — 10 Battle Stars
If you haven’t been keeping up with challenges thus far, we’ve got a very handy Fortnite Season 7 challenge guide that keeps track of all the weekly challenges and provides links to guides for the more difficult ones. Use that to get any outstanding challenges completed and you’ll have the unlocks you want in no time.
Fortnite developer Epic Games released a new update for the game on January 2. Along with various tweaks, it introduced the Boom Box, which is an item that does significant damage to built structures. This item is very handy for removing barriers between you and any enemies you may be gunning for. If you’re on the receiving end of its destructive power, you can counter by shooting the Boom Box. Check out the full Fortnite update 7.10.2 patch notes for more on the item and the other changes and tweaks.
Lego: The Lord of the Rings and Lego: The Hobbit have been removed from a number of digital storefronts on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. You can no longer buy the games digitally, and their removal could be tied to the expiration of a licensing deal.
Lego: The Lord of the Rings (2012) and Lego: The Hobbit (2014) seemingly require numerous licenses, from the films, Lego toys, and other rights-holders, so it’s not a total surprise to see them leave digital stores. Other Lord of the Rings games, like Middle-earth: Shadow of War, remain available to buy, however.
Reddit user SuperMoonky, who first reported the removal of the games, reckons the Lego games might have been removed because they feature dialogue and music that came straight from the movies, while Shadow of War does not do this.
Outside of games, Amazon is producing a very expensive Lord of the Rings TV show that is set long before the events of the movies. Additionally, a movie about author J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith Bratt is in the works with Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins.
True Detective Season 3’s release date is drawing ever closer–the series returns to HBO for its Season 3 premiere on January 13. For True Detective fans, that comes with some trepidation, as the general consensus is that the show’s second season in 2015 did not live up to the high bar set by Season 1. But there’s some hope: True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto said during a recent press conference that he didn’t shy away from the backlash against Season 2.
“I understood that there was a lot of stuff in Season 2 that people hadn’t really wanted to see, based on Season 1 of True Detective, but I’m very proud of the work everybody did,” he told a room of journalists. “I just try to keep getting better at what I do, and move forward, and I think substantive criticism is a big part of that, so I try not to shut myself off from any of it, and really just try to get better.”
He added that for True Detective Season 3, he wanted to “narrow the focus” of what they’re trying to do, and he emphasized that creating the show is “a big team effort.”
True Detective Season 3 focuses on Wayne Hays, a detective played by Mahershala Ali, and a single investigation that spans three separate time periods: 1980, 1990, and 2015. Hays remains the focus in all three settings, which made for unique challenges in every aspect of this season’s creation, from the writing to Ali’s multi-faceted performance of the same character at three very different points in his life.
Pizzolatto said he started with the character, Wayne Hays, “and the desire to tell a man’s life story in the form of a detective story.” In the most recent setting, Hays is beginning to suffer from dementia, and he struggles to recall aspects of the case. “If he’s losing his life story near the end of his life, then who he is becomes a mystery to himself, in a way,” Pizzolatto said.
With those ideas and themes in place, Pizzolatto began to conceive of the case itself, in which two children go missing in the Arkansas Ozarks. “I wanted a case that it was possible could be revisited over these three separate timelines, so there would have to be an element that was unresolved in each of those timelines,” he said. “And I also wanted something that was–even though there is that murder, something that was less sensationalistically violent and perhaps more closely tied to the idea of family, because so much of the case would ultimately impact this character’s family and haunt the family in its own way…It kind of haunted me the more I thought about it.”
Comparisons with True Detective’s beloved Season 1 will be inevitable, but Pizzolatto said Season 3 is vastly different–both structurally and thematically–from the original eight episodes, which aired all the way back in 2014.
“It’s a much, much more complicated structural thing we all tried to do this year than existed in Season 1,” he said. “I feel like this one has a lot more light in it than previous seasons, and maybe reaches for hope a bit more. I’m not even sure this is properly ‘noir,’ given where it goes.”
Ali, who was also present during the press conference, added that he thinks the anthology show’s treatment of its settings provides a through line between seasons. “Your setting is always a character in the story in a very real way,” the actor said, turning to address Pizzolatto. “Even looking for the children, as the mystery unfolds, we were really with a camera crew hiking 30 minutes to start work, with gear, and finding our location, and then beginning our day’s shooting. So to really be in that space, I really can’t put words to it, but I will say that I’m confident that it feeds you with something, as an actor, to be in the environment of the real mountains or the caves in which this mystery started.”
Season 3’s structure seems inherently at odds with its genre, as a mystery is generally dependant on withholding some information from viewers until it’s time to make the reveals. With Hays revisiting the case in later time periods, how can the events of earlier ones remains mysterious? How do you keep viewers engaged when huge chunks of the show are set decades after the initial case?
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“It was the most challenging thing I’d ever tried to do,” Pizzolatto admitted. “When I originally had this idea, I was like, ‘Yeah, but how would you even do that?’ It’s like some impossible math problem, how you keep a mystery going and have these reversals and revelations without cheating the audience and going, ‘Well, I could have shown you this, but I just didn’t show you.'”
He said one of his goals this season was to have “no tricks up his sleeve”–in other words, not to mislead viewers simply to keep the mystery going. “Because 2015 and 1990 are happening at the same time as 1980, you’re sort of constantly being told what is going to happen,” he said. “It’s telling you everything that’s going to happen before it happens. I wanted to be able to do that–to not play any cheap games with the viewer, to respect their attention and their time, but still reward them with revelation and reversal.”
With that goal in mind, it seems possible that True Detective Season 3 will swing too far in the other direction. But Pizzolatto said he’d love if viewers restarted Season 3 from the beginning after watching the finale, to pick up on things they missed the first time around.
“I’d love it if they did that, but I don’t know,” he said, clearly humbled: “I mean, they might get to the end and be like, ‘I never want to watch this again.'”
Let’s hope, when True Detective Season 3 premieres on HBO on January 13, that isn’t the case.
Disney had a monster year in 2018 at the box office. Its movies collectively made $3.092 billion in the United States and $7.325 billion globally, according to a box office roundup by Entertainment Weekly. The domestic box office performance is a new all-time record, while the global result is the second-highest ever, only behind the $7.605 billion that Disney movies collectively made in 2016.
Marvel movies helped Disney’s performance substantially in 2018. Avengers: Infinity War raked in $2.049 billion globally, while Black Panther made $1.347 billion worldwide. The Disney Pixar movie Incredibles 2 pulled in $1.24 billion globally, while Ant-Man and the Wasp took in a mighty $623.1 million. New releases Ralph Breaks the Internet and Mary Poppins Returns are also expected to be big-time money-makers.
Disney movies were not guaranteed box office smashes in 2018, however, as Solo: A Star Wars Story took in $393.6 million worldwide–the worst result in the history of the Star Wars series. The Oprah-starring A Wrinkle in Time, meanwhile, only made $132.9 million worldwide.
Disney is expected to have another massive year in 2019 thanks to major new releases like Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame from Marvel, along with new live-action versions of Aladdin, Dumbo, and The Lion King. Disney also has Toy Story 4 coming up this year from Pixar, while the long-awaited Frozen 2 hits theatres just before Thanksgiving, and it’s expected to be a huge success. On top of those, the final entry in the new Star Wars trilogy, Episode IX, comes to theaters in December 2019.
What’s more, Disney is buying many of competitor Fox’s assets, including Deadpool and X-Men, so even bigger box office returns in the future are expected.
It’s possible the upcoming Pokemon Movie, Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution, will be a CGI remake of the original Pokemon film which first released in 1998 in Japan.
Furthermore, almost all of the brief footage in the clip is CGI, leaving fans to speculate that perhaps this movie will be the first of its kind entirely animated using these graphics.
It turns out Netflix’s new interactive Black Mirror movie, Bandersnatch, has some endings so hidden that even the people who made it can’t find them.
According to the The Hollywood Reporter, Bandersnatch director David Slade has revealed that some endings are so secret and difficult to get that they may never be viewed by audiences.
“There are scenes that some people just will never see and we had to make sure that we were OK with that,” explained Slade, adding “We actually shot a scene that we can’t access.”
In a update posted on the game’s Kickstarter page, developer Koji Igarashi said the studio made the “tough decision” to cancel the Mac and Linux editions “due to challenges of supporting middleware and online feature support and making sure we deliver on the rest of the scope for the game.”
People who backed the game looking for a Mac or Linux version will be given the opportunity to change platforms; you can send an email to request a platform change; be sure to submit the request with the email address association with your pledge.
“We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we hope for your understanding,” the developer said.
It’s unclear if refunds will be available or if the only option is to switch platforms.
Also in the blog post, Igarashi said development on Ritual of the Night has “reached its peak,” which sounds like it’s nearly finished.
“We are currently checking the performance of Bloodstained on each platform. Overall, we are done with enemy placement and entering the adjustment phase. But there are still many progression-blocking bugs that must be taken care of,” he said.
Igarashi worked at Konami for a long time, and there he worked on games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Ritual of the Night is said to be a spiritual successor to that game.
Ritual of the Night is due out sometime in 2019 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC. The game raised more than $5.5 million from its crowdfunding campaign back in 2015.
There’s an exchange in this issue of The Walking Dead where Rick and Michonne reflect on how the current Commonwealth conflict feels bigger and more out of control than anything they’ve faced in the past. That sentiment isn’t anywhere close to being supported by the past year or so’s worth of issues, unfortunately. It’s been a long, repetitive grind during that stretch. And even with issue #186 going a long way toward reinvigorating a struggling series, this follow-up makes it clear how much work remains.
This is a case where the dramatic cover doesn’t translate into the story itself. That image suggests a major rift between Rick and Michonne in the aftermath of Dwight’s tragic death. But while their relationship is obviously strained at this point, the end result is nowhere near as serious as one would expect. Strangely, writer Robert Kirkman seems to go out of his way to deflate the tension between the two and smooth over this sudden rough patch. That’s a pretty disappointing way to capitalize on one of this series’ more compelling cliffhangers in recent memory. It’s entirely possible their friendship will crack further as the Commonwealth situation escalates further, but why not take advantage of the dramatic potential available right here and now?
