Forza Horizon 4’s first expansion may lack the unbridled madness of the previous game’s Hot Wheels expansion, and it’s not as immediately divergent as Blizzard Mountain was (which brought winter conditions and snow for the first time), but Forza Horizon 4: Fortune Island is a great add-on that features some of the most brilliant and fun stretches of road in the series to date.
Set on a fictional, high-latitude island far off the coast of Britain, Fortune Island is more of a driving purist’s playground than Forza Horizon 3’s more experimental DLC. The star attraction is the Needle Climb, a several-mile stretch of sealed switchbacks that winds up Fortune Island’s highest peak. The Forza Horizon series has been begging for a ribbon of road like this since the beginning, and the Needle Climb doesn’t disappoint.
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Bumblebee, the new prequel to the live-action Transformers movies, is chock full of 1980s Easter eggs and references to the ’80s era it’s set in, including simplified robot designs in line with their look from the original Generation 1 toy line.
But Bumblebee’s biggest callback to the franchise’s ’80s origins is the Easter egg that Transformers fans have waited for the longest.
During a scene where human protagonist Charlie (played by Hailee Steinfeld) tries to muster the courage to dive off a cliffside into the Pacific Ocean to impress some local kids, her VW bug (in reality, the Autobot Bumblebee in disguise) starts blaring a song on its radio to motivate her.
Full SPOILERS ahead for the ending of Aquaman! You’ve been warned …
Aquaman, like a tidal wave, has crashed into theaters, telling the story of Arthur Curry’s battle for the throne of Atlantis. The film’s mid-credit scene provides an ominous glimpse at what threats Arthur may be facing in the sequel. We’re going to break down what those threats are, but before we dive in, know that we’re going to be wading into spoilery waters, so consider yourself warned.
The mid-credits scene opens on a coastal shack belonging to Randall Park’s Doctor Stephen Shin, a marine biologist who appears throughout the film on TV news programs arguing that the kingdom of Atlantis actually exists because apparently, Aquaman’s fame post-Justice League wasn’t good enough to convince people. Before long, it’s revealed that Shin has a house guest: Black Manta, who we assume was rescued by Doctor Shin after being defeated by Arthur in Sicily. Manta wakes up and Doctor Shin immediately peppers him with questions about his encounters with Aquaman and Mera. The two strike a bargain – a squid pro quo if you will – for Manta to lead Shin to Atlantis in return for Shin’s help killing Aquaman.
Season 7 of Fortnite rolls on with a new set of challenges to complete on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile devices. As usual, if you manage to finish all of the tasks from a given week, you’ll complete a corresponding Snowfall challenge–this season’s equivalent of the Hunting Party challenges from Season 6. In turn, you’ll unlock a special loading screen, which not only features a cool piece of artwork, but also a subtle clue pointing to a free item hidden somewhere in the game.
Just as in Season 6, the item in question is either a free Battle Star (which levels your Battle Pass up by one tier) or a Banner (which you can use as a profile icon) depending on how many weekly sets of challenges you’ve completed. If you’ve finished three weeks’ challenges, you’ll be rewarded with the loading screen pictured below. It depicts a group of characters standing in the hangar of Frosty Flights, one of the new areas introduced to Fortnite’s map at the beginning of the season.
If you look closely at the furthest hangar, just to the right of Sgt. Winter, you’ll be able to make out the faint silhouette of the Battle Star atop a stack of boxes, giving you a clear indication of where you need to go. Head to Frosty Flights at the beginning of a match, find the easternmost hangar, and the Battle Star will appear inside. Collect it as you would any other item to level your Battle Pass up by one tier, putting you one step closer to unlocking the new Ice King skin.
As is the case with other free Battle Stars, the usual caveats apply. You won’t be able to find the item unless you’ve completed three weeks’ sets of challenges and unlocked the aforementioned loading screen. The Battle Star won’t appear on the map if you haven’t first finished all of the necessary steps, so you won’t simply be able to go to the right location and collect it unless you’ve done the required work.
Developer Epic Games recently rolled out Season 7’s Week 3 challenges. This particular batch of tasks is fairly straightforward, although the one that may give you the most trouble if you aren’t familiar with Fortnite’s map asks you to search between three ski lodges. You can find all of our tips and guides in our complete Season 7 challenge roundup. You can also find our guides on this season’s free Battle Stars and Banners below.
This review contains spoilers for the series finale of Timeless, titled “The Miracle of Christmas.”
Turning any television show into a movie is an enormous undertaking, especially when that series is as complicated as Timeless. “The Miracle of Christmas Part I & II” manages to offer viewers a reminder of just how many lives the Time Team has lived together, and how unbreakable their bond is, in a way that should prove immensely satisfying for longtime fans.
This is particularly evident in the moment when Lucy (Abigail Spencer) flips through in her journal to revisit beloved memorabilia from their past missions: a theater ticket, a pamphlet from their time with the suffragettes in 1919, and a little something from the trip to Hollywoodland where the show’s central ship, Lyatt, set sail.
While Bumblebee may not have a proper post credits sequence, it does tack on an extra little bit of story before the credits actually roll, rounding out the plot and setting up for sequels–maybe? Bumblebee’s stinger (pun intended) doesn’t have a lot of meat to it, but it does start treading some strangely murky water when you actually look at it in the scope of the whole live action Transformers franchise, which Bumblebee appears to have rebooted–emphasis on “appears to.”
Needless to say, spoilers to follow–not just from Bumblebee, but from whole swaths of the Transformers franchise.
Bumblebee highlights the first major Earth-based interaction of Bumblebee the Autobot, and a human girl named Charlie who finds him as a VW Beetle in a junkyard. The whole story is set in the 1980s, not long after the “fall” of Cybertron to the Decepticon army. Charlie and Bee are chased around Earth for a while by two new Decepticons, Shatter and Dropkick, as well as John Cena, before eventually saving the day and–tragically–going their separate ways. Charlie gets a new car–a refurbished classic Camaro she and her late dad had been working on–and Bee, having effectively blown his VW Bug cover, takes a new alternate form of a black and yellow modern Camaro.
Then, following their bittersweet goodbye, we see Bee rendezvousing with a recently arrived Optimus Prime, who hopefully directs his attention to the sky where around seven Cybertronian crafts can be seen entering the atmosphere. It’s all very obviously working to set up the next movie in the sequence–though it seems to simultaneously be working to slot itself into the groundwork laid by the first Michael Bay movie back in 2007. It was that first movie in which Bumblebee chose a modern Camaro as his alt-mode, after all, and the place where the whole idea of Bee using his radio to talk was first introduced. If this movie does anything, it’s provide Bee a worthy origin story expressly for that 2007 debut, filling in all the gaps that any fan would ever want filled as charmingly as possible.
However, filling those gaps and answering those questions also creates new ones. The Bay arm of the Transformers franchise began getting seriously off the rails with its own history right off the bat by establishing the presence of the “AllSpark” (a mythological Cybertronian artifact) on Earth as early as the 1800s in the first film. Later, in the most recent installment of the Bay movies, Transformers: The Last Knight, it was implied that Cybertronians had reached Earth back in the days of Arthurian legend. Prior to that, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen raised the idea that Cybertronians had been aware of Earth since antiquity and even been involved in the rise of Ancient Egypt.
But Bumblebee gives us a look at not only the fall of Cybertron itself–happening, apparently, in relative real time to the mid ’80s on Earth–but also explicitly tells us that this moment was actually the first time Optimus Prime had ever scanned for or sent anyone to Earth at all, making Bumblebee the first Cybertronian to set foot on the planet. This later seems to be supported by the arrival of the movie’s main antagonists, Decepticons Dropkick and Shatter, who make the whole “first contact” schtick an ongoing gag.
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Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that future installments in the post-Bumblebee Transformers franchise are going to have to work from the ground up. Everything regarding the timeline is just vague enough that, with a little narrative hopscotching, it’s possible to slot stories into the mix that justify the temporal strangeness. After all, if we’re to assume that the AllSpark just hasn’t been “activated” yet in the ’80s, it’s completely possible than the Transformers arrived on the planet and were none the wiser, left, and then came back when it was. The characters that would, in theory, be duplicates of robots who have already shown up in the Bay movies–like Starscream and Ravage–could easily just be seen here in older alt-modes or less advanced forms. There’s no real limit to the amount of hand waving that can happen in a universe like this.
Or, more likely, future Transformers movies are just going to cherry pick exactly what they want from the established canon and easily forego the rest. Bumblebee may not represent a direct, hard reboot of the entire franchise, but it’s certainly a major departure in tone and direction–while it may be making a vague attempt to at least loosely hold things together, it’s absolutely not beholden to weave the entire shared universe into one cohesive thing. And to be honest, that’s probably for the best.
