Epic Games has released patch 6.1 for Fortnite and, alongside it, the full patch notes detailing everything new and everything that has been changed. While not as significant as the last patch, which kicked off Season 6, this update does add in a new item called the Chiller. “Don’t get cold feet! Freeze your foes and slide around for a quick getaway,” reads the official description. The Chiller is a large trap that encases an enemy player’s feet in ice on contact, causing them to slide around. Check out the video below to see it in action.
[Update] Epic has confirmed that the Soaring 50s limited time mode will be available “shortly” as it is currently fixing a small issue discovered during testing.
The other big addition is custom Playground options which allow you to tweak settings such as health, time of day, gravity, and more. Take a look at the full patch notes below, which details the new additions, as well as the other tweaks to gameplay and performance. You can also see how the patch changes Fortnite’s Save The World mode here.
Limited Time Mode: Playground
Playground Custom Options
Added more options to Playground. Allowing you to change settings such as starting health, time of day, gravity, and more!
Weapons + Items
Chiller added.
Common Trap.
Can be placed on floors, walls, or ceilings.
Drops in stacks of 3 in Treasure Chests, Supply Drops, Vending Machines, Supply Llamas, and floor loot.
Applies icy feet to friends or foes, causing them to slide around with low friction.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue that could cause vehicles to become uncontrollable.
Gameplay
Made improvements to the motion controls for the Switch to make it feel more accurate and responsive.
Bug Fixes
Pets are now hidden along with your character when the camera is too close to you.
Toys now respect the streamer mode setting for player names in minigame messages.
Slightly increased the hitbox size on the Fancy Tomato to match its visual size.
Audio
The following adjustments have been made to Glider audio tells:
Muffled the audio if there isn’t a clear line of sight between you other gliding players.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue where incorrect audio would play when a teammate was eliminated.
UI
Bug Fixes
Added star ratings to the UI elements of all trap items.
Mobile
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue where players occasionally couldn’t interact with items.
Fortnite Season 6 began on September 27 and, at the same time, the floating island that rose from Loot Lake began moving around the map. It is leaving strange craters in its wake and, as of yet, we’re not sure what this means, though fans are speculating it could be building up to a new event. Epic also added new cosmetics to unlock, which you can see in our Fortnite Season 6 Battle Pass rewards gallery. You can also find tips for all the latest challenges in our Season 6 challenge roundup.
A professional sports team apparently has a strict “No Fortnite” rule on road trips. Bo Horvat, one of the star players of the Vancouver Canucks in the NHL, says Fortnite is “definitely a no-go” for road trips. He told TSN 1040 that he would rather him and his teammates spend time together enjoying their road trips out in the real world.
“Yeah, that’s definitely a no-go on the road,” he said, via The Province. “No more Fortnite. No more bringing your video games on the road. It’s strictly team meals, team dinners, and hanging out with the guys. So we’ll have to put an end to that.”
“In my opinion … there’s better ways to spend time on the road, whether it’s hanging with the guys in the room or going to a movie with the guys,” he added. “Doing stuff outside your room. There’s a lot of cool cities we go and visit and to be cooped up in your room all night and not doing anything, playing Fortnite, is a waste of your time.”
Horvat added that he hopes his message reaches parents. “Hopefully a lot of parents and little kids are listening right now. I don’t play [Fortnite]. Nor will I ever,” he said.
The Canucks announced today that they will not have a single captain this year, following the retirement of star Henrik Sedin last year. Instead, there will be four rotating alternate captains, including Horvat, Alexander Edler, Brandon Sutter, and Chris Taney.
The Canucks are not the first professional sports team to have a Fortnite problem. Members of the MLB’s Boston Red Sox play Fortnite so much that they have to stop to remember to eat. The Red Sox ended the regular season with the best record in baseball, so their time spent playing the game doesn’t seem to have taken away from their on-field abilities.
Fortnite is one of the most popular games on Earth right now, so it’s no surprise that it’s also popular among professional athletes. And it’s understandable that some might see it as a distraction, but it will be interesting to see how Horvat’s mandate goes down with his teammates.
In what we think may be one of the more absurd and unexpected partnerships between a celebrity and a video game–and there have been many–Russian NHL superstar Alexander Ovechkin is coming to World of Warships.
You can use him as a commander for US or Soviet ships, while you can also use him as the game’s first dual-nation commander that lets you switch between countries in the game while keeping the same leader. And Ovechkin himself did the voicework.
No matter which of the four new ships you use, they each include enhancements for its targeting and “survivability.”
“I wanted people to understand that in any competitive field, you must inspire players to never give up,” Ovechkin said in a statement. “Video games are just like sport–play more, train more.
“When I started the game for the first time, I realized I am not a very good ship commander… But, like on the ice, I will continue to play and build my game skills until I am the best!”
There is also a new ship camo, as well as hockey-themed patches, coming to World of Warships with the upcoming update that adds Ovechkin to the game. This update also introduces submarines, which changes things up significantly, as you’d imagine. Check out the images in the galleries in this post to get a closer look at the Ovechkin content.
Ovechkin, who is one of the best ice hockey players in the history of the sport, helped the Washington Capitals win their first-ever Stanley Cup earlier this year. Ovechkin and his teammates will try to defend their title as the 2018-2019 NHL season kicks off this week, even if EA’s NHL 19 simulation of the season thinks that won’t happen.
World of Warships, a free-to-play game for PC, is developed by Saint Petersburg, Russia-based Lesta Studios.
The new romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians proved to be incredibly popular at the box office, so much so that Warner Bros. apparently greenlit the sequel as the first movie was still in theatres. Now it’s become even more clear how much of a commercial success the movie was. As Quartz noticed, Crazy Rich Asians recently passed The Proposal to become the highest grossing romantic comedy of the past 10 years in the United States.
Data from Box Office Mojo shows that Crazy Rich Asians has now made $165.95 million in the US, surpassing The Proposal’s $163.4 million from 2009. The highest-grossing romantic comedy ever in the US is My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which brought in more than $240 million back in 2002. Other top performers include What Women Want ($182.8 million), Hitch ($179.5 million), Pretty Woman ($178.4 million), and There’s Something About Mary ($176.5 million).
Globally, Crazy Rich Asians has pulled in $217.8 million. With a reported budget of only $30 million, it appears to have been a massive commercial success, which probably explains why news about the sequel came to light so early.
Crazy Rich Asians could have been a Netflix movie. Author Kevin Kwan turned down a massive offer from Netflix for the film, instead opting to go with Warner Bros. because he wanted it to be an “old-fashioned cinematic experience.”
“We needed this to be an old-fashioned cinematic experience, not for fans to sit in front of a TV and just press a button,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I could have moved to an island and never worked another day.”
Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu is expected to return for the sequel. Casting and story details for the sequel are unavailable, but it’s likely the sequel may be an adaptation of Kwan’s 2015 book China Rich Girlfriend.
This is a spoiler-free review of Ruben Fleischer’s Venom, starring Tom Hardy.
The best description of Venom as a movie is provided by a quote from the titular antihero itself: “An armless, legless, faceless thing… rolling down the street like a turd in the wind.”
In this Ruben Fleischer-directed monstrosity that rewrites the character’s origin to omit its foundational relationship to Spider-Man (who Sony has rented out to Marvel for the moment) slimy alien Symbiotes are brought to Earth and must merge with a perfectly matched human host in order to survive, otherwise the body rejects them, killing the host and potentially the Symbiote as well.
Making a Venom movie without Spider-Man is a unique challenge. But many of Venom’s issues have nothing to do with Spidey’s absence.
For example: Early in Venom, the Symbiote that will later be revealed as Riot escapes the Life Foundation’s custody and infects a woman in a marketplace in Malaysia, with the explicit goal of reaching San Francisco. The movie’s main story then begins: Eddie Brock makes some poor decisions, loses his job and his girlfriend (Michelle Williams’ Anne Weying), and hits rock bottom. Cue a six month time jump–and our friend Riot, still inhabiting the old woman from the marketplace, has finally made it–to the airport?
What was Riot doing for the six months between then and now? Did it go on a killing spree across Malaysia? Was it dormant or hibernating–something the movie never gives any hint that Symbiotes might be capable of? Was it biding its time pretending to be someone’s grandma? That blatant plot hole has nothing to do with Venom’s general 1990s cheesiness as a character, or the considerable challenge of trying to make a Venom movie without a single reference to Spider-Man. It’s just good, old fashioned, avoidable sloppiness.
Don’t get me wrong: The lack of Spider-Man does cause problems. Specifically, the entire premise–that Venom chooses to stick around on Earth, attach itself permanently to Eddie Brock, and betray its entire species–doesn’t really work in this movie. In the books, Venom’s obsession with Spider-Man gives it common purpose with Eddie, and cutting Spidey out of the equation necessitates something take his place as their end goal. The movie tries to get around that by clumsily painting Eddie and Venom as Breakfast Club style lovable “losers” (actual, direct quote: “On my planet, I am kind of a loser, like you”). It’s nonsensical, implausible, under-explained, and tonally weird; that line is easily the movie’s biggest laugh, but not in a good way.
Venom is surprisingly funny, mostly in the verbal abuse the Symbiote whispers directly into Eddie’s brain, usually after Tom Hardy’s character does something Venom considers cowardly or embarrassing. When Eddie holds his hands up in surrender to law enforcement, Venom laments that he’s “making us look bad;” when Eddie opts to take the elevator rather than jumping from a skyscraper, Venom calls him a “pussy.” These moments are deliberately played for laughs, and they land well enough. The bigger problem is why an alien parasite from space talks like a frat bro, or, extrapolating further, why it needs eyes and teeth if its main form is a shapeless, pulsing black goo. These essential curiosities of Venom as a character are never so much as acknowledged, much less explained.
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Venom – ‘To Protect And Sever’ Official Clip
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On the plus side, Venom and the other Symbiotes look pretty good in this movie. The CG work is somewhat inconsistent, and it definitely goes through ups and downs when it comes to raw fidelity. But unlike in his other live action incarnations (looking at you, Spider-Man 3), Venom actually looks like Venom here. The alien comes off as both lithe and powerful; it leaps around gracefully, but its hulking form also exudes menace and strength. The visual effect of Venom’s vicious visage wrapping itself over Eddie’s head is creatively executed, and Symbiote-on-Symbiote fight scenes play out in unexpected ways, with human hosts and alien parasites struggling to remain linked while trying to rip and tear their opponents apart.
Hardy is as baffling in this role as the movie’s trailers have suggested he’d be. As a New York transplant living in San Francisco, he’s doing something like a caricature of an NYC cab driver’s accent, mixed with frequent slurred mutterings–and that’s before he encounters the Symbiote and his behavior becomes understandably erratic. Besides Hardy’s strange performance, Brock himself is not a likeable or relatable character. He thoughtlessly uses his girlfriend in a half-baked gotcha journalism scheme that gets them both fired, and it literally never occurs to him to so much as apologize to her, until Venom for some unknowable reason nudges him in the right direction later in the film. Brock lacks the depth of character to carry this movie, and Hardy lacks the charm to make up for the character’s shallowness.
Michelle Williams does just fine as Anne, although her attachment to Eddie is really inexplicable, as the two have zero chemistry. Even weirder is the willingness of her new doctor boyfriend (Reid Scott) to administer Eddie multiple MRI screenings, even after Eddie interrupts their fancy lunch date by climbing into a lobster tank–the Symbiote affects him in some truly strange ways.
Riz Ahmed does a great job as the megalomaniacal head of the Life Foundation, totally selling his character’s belief that humans will have to mutate themselves using alien parasites if we want to survive climate change. That said, it’s a pretty thin motivation, and Dr. Carlton Drake is an utterly one note villain. To be honest, the only character who actually experiences any kind of growth or change is the scientist played by comedian and actress Jenny Slate, who is terrific in this movie–and, unfortunately, underused.
Venom has all the ingredients of a decent superhero movie–10 or 15 years ago. With spotty CGI, poorly drawn characters, tonal inconsistency including forced “edginess” and awkward humor, sidelined female characters, and even cringeworthy licensed musical cues, it feels like a relic from the distant, pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe past. That may in part be attributed to the fact that it’s been in production in one form or another since at least 2008. But its problems go way past simply being “old school,” and ultimately, Venom lacks the charm, clarity, and ambition superhero fans have come to expect.
But now, it appears that Toys R Us and its related brands may live on in some fashion. The same hedge fund groups that control Toys R Us, and decided to cancel a reorganisation that led to the major changes, have now apparently decided to cancel the bankruptcy and attempt to revive Toys R Us and its brands.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Toys R Us said in court documents this week that it received bids for the Toys R Us, Babies R Us, and Geoffrey the Giraffe brand names, but it decided that the bids would not be able to “yield a superior alternative…”
Instead, the new Toys R Us owners are looking to create a new “branding company” that “maintains existing global license agreements and can invest in and create new, domestic, retail operating businesses.”
As for the employees who were laid off, WSJ reports that two of Toys R Us’ private equity funders, Bain Capital and KKR & Co., plan to create a $20 million fund to give affected employees severance.
Hollywood will try to turn anything that is popular into a movie, and the latest evidence of this is today’s announcement that a film based on Dance Dance Revolution is in development.
According to its official description, the DDR movie has incredibly high takes. “The project will explore a world on the brink of destruction where the only hope is to unite through the universal language of dance,” according to Variety.
Konami, which owns the DDR IP, is working with film company Stampede on the film.
DDR, which utilises a physical dance pad, launched in Japanese arcades in the late ’90s before coming to North America in the early 2000s. The game was a massive success, and Konami would go on to partner with companies like Nintendo on versions of the game, including DDR: Mario Mix.
There are no further details at this stage about the DDR movie, so we don’t know when it’ll enter production or any of the talent behind it. It seems like very early days for the project.
