Welcome back to Game Scoop!, IGN’s weekly video game talk show. This week we’re discussing open-world games, recent PS4 recommendations, Darkest Dungeon 2, and more. Watch the video above or download the podcast below.
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If you’re looking for something to watch on Netflix, then you’re in luck, as the month of March starts this week, and that means a whole slew of new content is coming to the streaming service. From movies to TV series to Netflix originals, there is plenty for you to binge in your free time.
While February is coming to a close, there are still a few more releases to keep your eye on. On February 27, the 2018 A&E series Unsolved: Tupac & Biggie hits Netflix. The 10 episode season is a true crime series that recounted the murder investigations of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Then on February 28, a new collection of Jeopardy episodes hits the service, and you and your friends can watch the game show and discuss Alex Trebek’s mustache, which we all greatly miss.
Friday, March 1, is when Netflix drops a ton of new content. There are eight Netflix originals and series dropping, but nothing with a lot of hype behind it. However, there are a few movies you’ll want to check out. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange hits the service, where you can get your fill of ultra-violence. Additionally, Wet Hot American Summer comes to Netflix as well, which is a bit confusing, as the service has an original series spin-off of this movie. When did Wet Hot American Summer leave Netflix to begin with?
Anyway, below, you can find everything coming to Netflix this week. Mark our calendars for the ones that excite you, and you can check out everything coming to the service for March.
Trials Rising is a sequel to a franchise that has a lot of things figured out. After multiple entries that have helped refine gameplay that was already good to start off with, Rising doesn’t veer too far off the track. It still has a wonderfully diverse set of destinations to visit, each with their own over-the-top track design and goofy finish line antics. Each course still encourages you to repeat it nearly obsessively in the pursuit of that next perfect run to show off online. Trials Rising has the same engrossing gameplay the series is known for, but it offers no new surprises.
Trials Rising is no more complicated to pick up and play than any of its predecessors. You only need to worry about your throttle, brakes, and the pitch of your motorcycle as you race across Rising’s many 2D tracks, set in anything from a Russian missile silo to a tomato festival in the Italian countryside. This simplicity in control is complemented by a deep learning curve, challenging you to understand how Trials’ physics work. They’re not realistic by any stretch, but they do adhere to a set of rules that you’ll need to become comfortable with to beat its most challenging courses.
The balance of your motorcycle is the first hurdle. Although you’re only given access to three during the lengthy campaign (more can be unlocked using either in-game currency or real money), each of them handles in very different ways. One gives you more thrust from a stationary start but limits your rotational speed in the air, while another has a frame so light that you need to be cautious of applying too much throttle on a straight and having your front wheel fly into the air above you. Trials Rising gives you suggestions on which motorcycles are best for certain courses, and it is fun moving from one extreme to the other in between events and learning to adjust accordingly.
Controlling your motorcycle consists of shifting weight either backwards or forwards, determining whether you’re going to gently roll over a hill at the end of a steep climb or see your wheels bounce away from the platform before you hurtle towards failure. It doesn’t take long for basic maneuvers to start feeling like second nature. Small actions–such as leaning back to embrace a landing or shifting forward to go down a steep ascent–start blending together to create a tangible flow to Rising’s earlier courses.
These levels are less challenging and more instructive, giving you ample room to experiment with Rising’s mechanics while also rewarding you well for less-than-perfect finishes. Later courses start increasing the difficulty significantly. Tracks require careful consideration over throttle control and feature more gruelling skills tests, which punish even the slightest miscalculation. You have a large number of events between these two extremes, though, which makes each new challenge feel like an appropriate test of your skills rather than a jarring spike in difficulty.
However, even the most carefully executed runs through a course can become undone by obstacles that rely on seemingly random outcomes instead of skill to overcome. Catapults, exploding platforms, and more add an unpredictable nature to later courses that often feels more frustrating than exciting. A small variation on where you stop on a catapult before it fires you into the air can lead to wildly different outcomes, for example. It’s one thing to fail a course and identify where you can get better, but it’s another to be having the best run yet only to fail right at the end and not understand how you could’ve avoided it.
Rising has an incredibly useful training school that has new courses unlock as you progress through the campaign. These events teach you new techniques that give you a deeper understanding of how to control your motorcycle while also providing challenging proving grounds to test how much you’ve learned. These provide some of the toughest challenges Rising has to offer, but without the stress of needing to finish first in a race or worry about how many times you fail.
New to Rising are contract objectives from in-game “sponsors,” which offer an additional level of challenge and extra rewards. With sponsors, courses you’ve already participated in can be replayed with some additional objectives. Anything from pulling off flips to limiting the number of faults you can have is on the table, tasking you with reprogramming your muscle memory and coming up with new routines on familiar tracks. Some of the most difficult sponsors will require you to finish first across several events; make a mistake along the way and you might as well start over. These are the least interesting of the bunch by virtue of feeling too unforgiving (even by Trials standards), but they’re thankfully not required to unlock new events.
Rising’s more stunt-focused events are less rewarding. If the rest of Trials Rising only has one toe dipped into a pool of absurdity, these events have the whole leg. You can use the ragdoll physics of your rider to steer balls into a basketball hoop or aim for exploding barrels to try and bounce yourself along a never-ending track. None of these events really test your understanding of Trials’ main mechanics and are instead just positioned as quick palate cleansers for in-between events. None of them are precise in the way that other events are, making them less engaging to learn and a slog to play.
All events in Rising contribute to an overall player level, which you increase in order to access to events and unlock gear to customize both your rider and their motorcycles. Customization items are obfuscated in crates that randomly spit out three items at a time, with duplicates becoming a frequent occurrence just a few hours in. Frustratingly, these duplicates aren’t immediately turned into in-game currency to save you the effort, instead forcing you to dive into multiple menus for each category of gear and sell them individually. The gear itself isn’t varied or visually appealing enough to justify this headache, and it was easy to forget about it entirely after just a few minutes of wrestling with it.
Trials Rising also features a suite of multiplayer options, ranging from public and private multiplayer matches to more intimate–and hilarious–local multiplayer modes. Online multiplayer is straightforward; you join lobbies with up to seven other racers and compete across three courses, with points awarded based on your finishes. Trials plays better in a local multiplayer setting, and Rising’s Party mode lets you organize up to eight courses into a single playlist with custom rules that up to four players can compete in. A new tandem motorcycle makes things even sillier. Two players control a single motorcycle through a course, making smooth course runs nigh impossible as you struggle to maintain control. It’s a fun distraction that can be played for brief laughs.
Trials Rising isn’t a reinvention of the franchise–it’s an invitation to lose more hours to new exhilarating, technical, and ridiculous Trials courses.
Rising still lets you create brand-new courses from scratch, and race on any that other players have uploaded, but its tools for construction are still ridiculously complicated to grasp. The course editor has no tutorials on how to get up and running and no templates which you can build upon to make editing slightly quicker. The confusing menus, overwhelming taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and unintuitive movement within the editor make trying to create even just a simple track a needlessly difficult chore.
Trials Rising maintains the engrossing, challenging, and occasionally slapstick gameplay from past entries in the series, building upon it in small ways with a smartly implemented school to teach fundamental skills and modifiers to make events worth revisiting. But it also doesn’t fix issues from the past, either. Its track editor remains uninviting to learn, and the more outrageous stunt events and course obstacles frustratingly lean more into random luck than calculated skill. Trials Rising isn’t a reinvention of the franchise–it’s an invitation to lose more hours to new exhilarating, technical, and ridiculous Trials courses.
Pokemon Go‘s new AR photo mode is now live for all players level 5 and above, and it comes with an added surprise: a new Pokemon. By using the feature, players will have their first chance of encountering the elusive Gen 2 Pokemon Smeargle in Niantic’s mobile game.
According to Pokemon fansite Serebii, Smeargle may appear in photos you take using the Go Snapshot feature. If the Painter Pokemon does show up in one of your pictures, it will be waiting in the wild after you exit out of the mode, giving you an opportunity to capture it.
It’s unclear if there’s a way to ensure that Smeargle will appear in your photos, but if you do manage to encounter one, it will have the same moves as the Pokemon it photobombed. You’ll also receive a new Photo Bomb medal after you find one.
Smeargle is unique among Pokemon in the mainline series due to the fact that it can only learn one move, Sketch, every 10 levels. This move will permanently copy the last move the opponent Pokemon used, effectively giving Smeargle the ability to learn any attack.
Once you’ve hit the requisite level, you’ll be able to use the Go Snapshot feature any time by selecting the Camera in your item bag. The mode allows you to position one of the Pokemon in your collection around the screen and take photos of it. These pictures will be automatically saved to your device, allowing you to easily share them with friends and on social media.
In other Pokemon Go news, Niantic has brought back the Gen 3 Legendary Pokemon Latias for a limited time as part of a special Raid event. The developer is also introducing a new item to the game this week called the Team Medallion, which will give players the ability to switch teams.
Finally, to celebrate the Pokemon series’ anniversary, Niantic is holding a special Pokemon Day event this week from February 26-28. During the event, players will have a chance of encountering special versions of Pikachu and Eevee wearing floral crowns, as well as Shiny variants of Pidgey and Rattata.
True Detective’s Season 3 finale was an oppressively strange episode of television, even by True Detective’s standards. The entire hour and 20 minutes rode a tense, haunting score that had me holding my breath between every scene, waiting for some awful, final other shoe to drop. Even as Wayne’s discoveries turned happy–or, at least, as happy as this show is capable of getting–the tone remained oddly ominous. And then, it was over–just like that, no final revelations or satisfying last note. True Detective Season 3 ended with a sigh, and it felt utterly flat.
The reasons for that aren’t hard to discern. Series creator Nic Pizzolatto has been open about wanting to make Season 3 more straightforward; he said at a press conference before the season began airing that he wanted to have “no tricks up his sleeve.”
“Because 2015 and 1990 are happening at the same time as 1980, you’re sort of constantly being told what is going to happen,” Pizzolatto 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.”
In this, he definitely succeeded. It just wasn’t a great idea to begin with. The mystery genre is dependent on withholding information from the audience until it’s time to make the big reveal, but True Detective Season 3 took a different tact. Instead of a shocking twist, Season 3’s mystery–the missing kids–unfolded gradually throughout the entire season. There wasn’t a final reveal, but a series of smaller, successive realizations that built throughout all eight episodes. As a result, the finale held no surprises for anyone who was paying attention. From the one-eyed man’s magical exposition dump to the ultimate role Mike Ardoin played, every “reveal” in the final 80 minutes was clearly telegraphed and easily predicted. While that may have done the characters justice, it wasn’t exactly an exciting high note on which to end.
The whole season felt deliberately written to throw off the armchair sleuths on Reddit who dissect every frame of each new episode. There were red herrings everywhere, giving rise to more outlandish new theories week after week: Was Amelia really the killer, getting close to Wayne and writing true crime books to hide in plain sight? Did the Hoyt family run a pedophilia ring to which Lucy Purcell was pimping out her kids? Were Tom and Roland secretly lovers? Had Roland actually betrayed Wayne years ago, and Wayne simply forgot because of his increasing dementia?
Turns out, nope. Amelia simply fell in love with Wayne, there was no pedophilia ring, Roland was always on Wayne’s side, and Hoyt knew that Wayne had had something to do with Harris’s disappearance because–unsurprisingly–security cameras caught the detectives tailing Hoyt’s head of security. Like a deeply unsatisfying Occam’s Razor, the answer to every question during True Detective Season 3 was simpler than fans guessed. And the whole season felt designed to guide us onto false trails.
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Westworld Finale Breakdown: Season 2 Episode 10 The Passenger
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Compare this all to another HBO show with an unsatisfying recent arc: Westworld Season 2. The latest season of the sci-fi cowboy caper was unbelievably convoluted, with timelines, characters, and twist after twist all muddled together until viewers could hardly tell what was going on. It was the exact opposite of True Detective Season 3’s problems, but it felt like it came from the same point of origin: a desire on the creators’ parts to befuddle theorizing fans on the internet.
This, in turn, feels like an indictment of said fans–and nobody enjoys being admonished, especially by the creators of something we love. In True Detective Season 3, the documentary interviewer in the 2015 timeline can be read as a stand-in for us. And she’s not meant to be a sympathetic character. She pries at every small crack in Wayne’s story, poking and prodding in an attempt to learn truths that, at that point in the story, Wayne himself hadn’t even discovered. Wayne grudgingly submits to this questioning, despite wanting to keep his secrets to himself, and he weathers the onslaught like a righteous rock facing an annoying tempest. To top it off, the interviewer is also probably sleeping with Wayne’s married son, Henry–a pointless detail that just makes her that much more villainous.
True Detective Season 3 wasn’t all bad by any stretch. Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff’s portrayals of the two detectives throughout their lives were incredibly nuanced, and those impressive performances alone might warrant re-watching the show again in the future. But when the thing you’re “reversing,” as Pizzolatto put it, is fans’ expectation that the show’s central mysteries will conclude with a satisfying payoff, it’s understandable that True Detective’s Season 3 finale felt flat.
Marvel’s Spider-Man launched as a PS4 exclusive last September for $60, but if you’ve been waiting for that price to drop, today might be your best chance to snag this Insomniac Games hit title. Earlier this month, Insomniac Games announced Spider-Man has had a permanent price drop from $60 to $40, and you can snag the game for even cheaper right now at Newegg, where the standard edition is being sold for $35 (with free shipping!) through Thursday.
The game is also a few dollars off at Amazon, selling for $37 with free two-day shipping if you’re a Prime member.
Spider-Man made GameSpot’s list of the top 10 games of 2018 for its strong narrative, exciting combat, and impressive physics of wall-crawling and web-slinging around Manhattan. “It’s exhilarating to step off a skyscraper and hear the orchestral score begin to swell, only to crescendo and level out as you start swinging towards your next objective,” wrote associate editor Jordan Ramee. “There’s never a moment in the game’s 20-hour run-time where you don’t want to be flying through the air.”
And the best part about jumping into Spider-Man this late in the game is that all three chapters of the post-launch DLC, “The City That Never Sleeps,” are available to play now as well, giving you hours of extra content to enjoy once you finish the main story. There’s no better way to step into Spider-Man’s shoes (and dozens of fantastic suits) and experience what it’s like to be everyone’s friendly neighborhood superhero.
Early on, viewers derided Season 3 as a retread of Season 1–the abducted children, the mysterious cult, the conspiracy of local politicians covering for bigger ones. Season 3 leaned into these suspicions at first, with the creepy straw dolls, Will’s prayer hands, and the imagery of the “pink castle,” which appeared to complement the “Yellow King” from Season 1.
But it turns out the opposite was true. There was no deliberate murder, only an accident. There was no pedophile ring, only an unstable mother with a hole in her heart. And old man Hoyt was no secret society mastermind; he was a sad old drunk, primarily interested in protecting the reputation of his daughter and what remained of his crumbling family’s legacy.
It seems obvious now, looking back, that these were red herrings all along. The documentarian, who references Rusty and Martin, is supposed to represent us, the obsessive fans who convene online to concoct massive conspiracy schemes. The truth was much more pathetic, sad, and simple, and we should have seen that coming.
Ubisoft has hosted a couple of private betas for The Division 2, but this weekend, the publisher is giving all players across PS4, Xbox One, and PC a chance to try out the upcoming shooter with its first open beta. Ahead of the test, Ubisoft has shared a new trailer showing off some of the content players will be able to experience.
The Division 2 open beta will run on all three platforms from March 1-4. During that time, players will be able to embark on three main missions on Normal and Hard modes. Two of these, Grand Washington Hotel and Jefferson Trade Center, were previously featured during the game’s private betas, while Viewpoint Museum is new for this test.
The open beta will differ from the private tests in a few other ways. First, Ubisoft is raising the level cap to 8. There will also be an additional Skirmish PvP map (Capitol Ruins), as well as another Skill, Chem Launcher, which has two variants: Riot Foam and Explosive Vapor. Finally, Ubisoft is adding two additional Settlement Projects.
On top of that, players will be able to try out five side missions during the open beta, as well as a slice of The Division 2’s endgame content. Once players complete Jefferson Trade Center, they’ll unlock an endgame mission and three level 30 characters. The endgame mission will then begin when players log in as one of the unlocked characters.
Ubisoft has shared more details about this weekend’s open beta on the game’s official website. The Division 2 launches for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on March 15. In the meantime, you can read more about the title in our roundup of everything we know about The Division 2 and our favorite new features.
It’s hard to argue that the Stan Lee cameo fans saw in the Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of the comic book legends best yet. That the film’s release came so soon after Lee’s death gave the appearance even more impact for fans. However, what fans don’t realize is that Lee is in almost every scene of the movie.
While it was previously revealed that Lee also popped up as a passenger on a train, thanks to a tweet shared by Sony animator Nick Kondo, it turns out that’s only the tip of the iceberg. “He was a model that every animator wanted to use in the New York scene, so he often appeared quickly or briefly in a number of shots throughout the movie,” producer Chris Miller revealed at an event celebrating the release of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on digital and Blu-ray. “Almost anytime there is a train going by, Stan’s in it.”
As it turns out, though, Lee isn’t just in train scenes. “There’s a scene when Miles and Peter land on the sidewalk and he says, ‘Thanks New York’ and the person walking over him is Stan on the phone, not noticing,” Miller continues. “And there are many, many others, just tiny little bits because every animator wanted so desperately to be the one that animated Stan.”
Of course, for sticklers who want to believe that each of the cameos is the same character popping up again and again, it creates a pretty insane day for Lee. As co-director Rodney Rothman joked, “The story of Stan’s character in the movie if you were to lay it out is, he goes to work at his merch shop, he goes home [and] gets his dog, walks his dog, goes home, and then rides a train for 35 straight hours.”
While Lee was animated into a number of scenes throughout the movie, he only provides his voice for the moment in which his character sells Miles Morales a Spider-Man costume. Recording that dialogue was a very special event for Rothman and his co-directors Bob Persichetti and Peter Ramsey, though.
“He was a sweetheart! He was kind of a sweet, little old man,” Ramsey told GameSpot. “When we recorded him at his office, his health already wasn’t the greatest and his eyesight wasn’t very good. But, he was jovial, joking around, stiff upper lip. Not an unpleasant second in that whole experience.”
As Persichetti explained, the role allowed Lee to, “Pass the torch in a very real way, which he was really down to do, and it meant a lot to us that he even knew our movie existed and clearly supported it and understood.” He continued, “The spirit behind what he created is very much present in Miles, even though it is expressed differently and it meant a lot to us that he was part of our project.”
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is out on digital on Tuesday, February 26. The Blu-ray release follows on March 19.
Despite what he says in this newly published video promoting Warner Bros.’ upcoming Detective Pikachu movie, Ryan Reynolds isn’t actually known for disappearing into his roles–unless you count putting on the Deadpool mask as disappearing. But it seems the actor is giving it his all to truly become the electric yellow mouse at the heart of Detective Pikachu.
In the video, Reynolds contends he did everything he could to lose himself in the role of Pikachu. He stopped picking his daughters up from school, practiced living at Pikachu height by lying flat on public sidewalks, and attempted to lose 182 pounds to match the character’s weight. The video even features a special guest to weigh in on the toll the actor’s exhaustive dedication has taken–but you’ll have to watch the video to find out the rest.
Detective Pikachu is the live-action adaptation of the strangely conceived game of the same name, in which Pikachu takes on a human voice and solves mysteries. Here’s the official plot synopsis from Warner Bros.:
The story begins when ace detective Harry Goodman goes mysteriously missing, prompting his 21-year-old son Tim to find out what happened. Aiding in the investigation is Harry’s former Pokémon partner, Detective Pikachu: a hilariously wise-cracking, adorable super-sleuth who is a puzzlement even to himself. Finding that they are uniquely equipped to work together, as Tim is the only human who can talk with Pikachu, they join forces on a thrilling adventure to unravel the tangled mystery. Chasing clues together through the neon-lit streets of Ryme City–a sprawling, modern metropolis where humans and Pokémon live side by side in a hyper-realistic live-action world–they encounter a diverse cast of Pokémon characters and uncover a shocking plot that could destroy this peaceful co-existence and threaten the whole Pokémon universe.
It’s a weird idea, but honestly, that sounds kind of incredible. And based on the movie’s trailers, Detective Pikachu might actually be the live-action Pokemon movie we always wanted. Check out our Detective Pikachu hub if you want to dig deep and find out everything we know about this weirdly compelling film, and check it out in theaters May 10.