Much of Ghost of Tsushima‘s content is typically marked explicitly on the map. Things like quests, side quests, and activities are mainly laid out for you. However, in the game’s Iki Island expansion, there’s a handful of secret quests called Unwritten Tales you can find that aren’t highlighted on your map. These unique side quests aren’t essential to complete, but they feed into acquiring the game’s Common Courtesy trophy. Below, we detail how to find and complete the Unwritten Tale centered around saving a beekeeper.
This Unwritten Tale is east of the Shattered Cliffs on the west side of Iki Island. Look for a house in the area; you’ll know you’re in the right place when you see a distressed man calling for you. Speak to him to find out he’s a beekeeper and that, unfortunately, there are quite a few Mongols on the way to wreak some havoc.
A few waves of Mongol soldiers will swarm the area, but so long as you have your wits about you (and properly switch between your sword styles), you should be fine. Once the Mongols have been dealt with, talk to the beekeeper to complete this Unwritten Tale.
In Ghost of Tsushima‘s Iki Island expansion, there are various secret quests called Unwritten Tales you can find that aren’t highlighted on your map. These unique side quests aren’t essential to complete, but they offer some fun bite-sized story moments. They also feed into acquiring the game’s Common Courtesy trophy. Below, we detail how to find and complete the Unwritten Tale focused on helping a mysterious spirit that haunts Jin by holding him accountable for his past.
This Unwritten Tale is unexpectedly surreal. It’s located north of Senjo Gorge at a derelict house. There, you’ll find a tree stump and Sakai clan banner that you can investigate. You’re welcome to look at the tree stump for some flavor text, but examining the banner will trigger a cutscene where you talk to a mysterious spirit known as a Kodama.
After chatting for a brief moment, the Kodama will then lead you toward a neighboring forest where you’ll battle a group of Mongols. Make quick work of them, and then return to the derelict house to find a note and some supplies sitting on the tree stump. Collect the note to finish this Unwritten Tale.
Publisher EA has confirmed that the beloved Skate franchise will debut on PC for the first time with the rebooted “Skate 4” currently in development.
The official Skate Twitter account posted an 11-second video, announcing that Skate is coming to PC. Though short, the video is solid: Some unidentified skateboarder lands a buttery 360 flip before kickflipping over an old monitor. After landing both tricks, the monitor flicks on to show “Skate.”
Otherwise, things have been all quiet on this skateboarding front.
Skate 4 (not the real name of the game, just what that internet has dubbed it) was announced at EA Play Live 2020; everyone on the internet, celebrities and fans alike, collectively lost their minds over the news. Sadly, there’s still no release date or confirmed platforms–other than PC for now.
Still, It’s been a great two years for skateboarding game fans–myself included. We’ve seen the console releases of Skate competitors Crea-ture Studios’ Session and Easy Day Studios’ Skater XL, a stealth drop for the PC minimalist skateboarding game The Ramp, and a bit more of OlliOlli World.
Bungie has been on a tear lately with Destiny’s story telling. The developer has expanded its past seasonal stories in a cohesive and evolving manner and fans were eagerly anticipating the reveal for Destiny’s next large expansion, The Witch Queen. The reveal is here–and it’s juicy. Bungie officially dropped tons of info about the new expansion and its story premise, finally giving us a look into the brand new antagonist, Savathun.
Savathun will be our largest threat yet, and is able to grant the gift of the Light to her brood. That’s right, weak Hive knights, wizards, and other Hive enemies are now essentially Guardians who can wield the Light’s power against us, which is really saying something. The campaign and new story will have us traveling to Savathun’s throne world, where we will challenge her Lucent Brood and attempt to get to the heart of it all and pierce through her lies and facades.
There’s a ton of new content coming to The Witch Queen, which we detail in the video, such as the brand new raid that will take place in a sunken Pyramid ship. We also delve into weapon crafting, a first for the game, and break down the Glaive, a first-of-its-kind melee weapon. Additionally, there are new seasonal activities, and more content to look forward to when the new expansion finally drops.
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen is slated for release in February 2022, and will be available on Xbox One, Xbox Series S|X, PS4, PS5, PC, and Google Stadia. There will be a standard edition with just the expansion, and a deluxe edition that includes a season pass with plenty of end game content like brand new dungeons and raids in future seasons. Hardcore fans can up the ante with the physical collectors edition, which costs a good chunk of change but comes with really cool limited edition goodies like a Hive Ghost. Be sure to subscribe to GameSpot for more Destiny content!
Turn-based JRPG fans, rejoice. Bravely Default 2, previously confined only to the Nintendo Switch since its release earlier this year, is coming to PC via Steam very, very soon. It’s coming on September 2, 2021.
This makes Bravely Default 2 the first main Bravely game to venture outside of Nintendo consoles, with both Bravely Default and Bravely Second staying on the Nintendo 3DS.
There have been a few spin-offs, such as a browser-based sequel to the first game called Praying Brage and mobile game Bravely Archive, as well as an upcoming new mobile game called Bravely Default: Brilliant Lights. None of the spin-offs have made it West so far, however.
Bravely Default 2, despite its numeration, is not a direct sequel to either Bravely Default or Bravely Second. It’s a standalone story following four new “Warriors of Light” who must recover four elemental crystals that were stolen from their homeland and restore balance to the world. It’s a turn-based JRPG in every classical sense but adds on the “Brave” and “Default” systems allowing players to bank turns while defending from attacks, then use those saved turns at strategic moments for high-damage turns.
In Ted Lasso Season 2 Episode 5, “Rainbow,” the eponymous coach tries to cheer up the losing AFC Richmond team by describing the philosophy of “Rom-communism.” You have to trust, Ted tells his squad, that things will work out, like they always do in romantic comedies–maybe not the way you want, maybe not the way you expect, but they will, in fact, work out.
At the time, it struck me as a weird thing for the coach of a losing soccer club to tell his struggling team. I get what Ted was going for–it’s a philosophy of avoiding frustration and hopelessness about things outside of your control, and trusting that this, too, shall pass. For a guy whose big central tenet is “Believe,” outwardly, it’s an idea that tracks.
But something about the whole speech felt wrong, somehow. Ted’s job is to motivate players to win, and his philosophy of believing in people is an active approach, pushing them to do better, to achieve more. Rom-communism is a passive ideal, and poorly suited to a situation in which the team is struggling. “Don’t sweat the losses” is good advice–“trust that everything will handle itself,” though? That’s not coaching, that’s wishful thinking, and it seems like something that doesn’t jive with what we’ve previously seen of Ted’s personality.
In fact, a lot about Ted has felt “off” this season, and not just in its latest episode. The season has been criticized by some as hitting a “sophomore slump,” largely because there doesn’t seem to be much overarching conflict going on, and because some of the humor is weaker than in the much-loved first season. Most episodes, including “Rainbow,” seem to wrap up interpersonal conflicts with a nice bow in the space of 40 or so minutes. Despite Richmond’s struggles, everyone seems to be doing well on a personal level. The characters are happy, or getting there, and they’re helping each other, or trying to. Things at AFC Richmond seem generally pretty easygoing, outside of the constant losing.
Ted’s interactions with Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, in particular, have seemed desperate.
It’s possible that Ted Lasso really is just suffering from a downturn after a hit debut, but I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, the changes between Season 1 and Season 2–the more contained episodes, the neatly solved problems, the generally cheery cast of characters–belie the real turmoil of Season 2. That’s because the overarching conflict has been, so far, almost completely subtextual. Everyone else might be doing pretty well, but Ted is falling apart.
While we saw outward signs of Ted’s struggles in Season 1, including the difficulty of dealing with his divorce and a full-on panic attack, the signs have been much more subtle in Season 2. As mentioned above, Ted just seems a little different. It’s something that’s playing through his interactions with people, and gets highlighted in the progressively increasing desperation of his “Ted-isms.”
Good example: Ted was walking out to the pitch ahead of the game at the end of “Rainbow,” when Dr. Sharon Fieldstone called out his name as she came out of her office behind him. Ted whipped around and responded by calling back to the doctor, then just shouting random words, naming the things he could see around him–“ceiling, floor, trash can.” In the moment, it was weird. Ted throws out his folksy jokes all the time, but he knows when someone is trying to get his attention, and shouting random words back at them almost came off as rude. What’s more, it wasn’t especially funny, and part of what made Ted Lasso a standout in Season 1 was how often the unexpected, pop culture reference-laden banter from Ted stirred up laughs.
That’s an underlying thread of the season as well. While other characters have stepped up with a lot of humor–looking at you, Roy Kent–the jokes delivered by Ted have been strained. Where he dropped gags and made references as a breezy matter of relating to people in Season 1, in Season 2, the punchlines take more setup and leave less impact. Ted was funny in Season 1. In Season 2 he’s kind of annoying.
Ted’s strained jokes with Roy highlight the fact that his jokes feel a bit “off” in Season 2.
We saw that when Ted chased down Roy at his favorite kebab place in “Rainbow.” Ted pops up, and when Roy offhandedly makes a comment about the restaurant being “like my church,” Ted runs with the gag throughout the whole encounter. “Who knew transubstantiation could happen with a pita?” he jokes, a gag that only plays because of Roy’s ever-annoyed reaction, and not because of the strength of the line itself. Even Ted’s appeal to get his former player to join the coaching staff feels half-hearted.
In general, so many of Ted’s interactions this season seem forced. His jokes come hard and fast, and he’s often almost speaking too quickly to be understood. Moments like the hallway interaction with Dr. Fieldstone are strained, as if Ted is playing the role of himself, but many of his other one-liners leave the other characters bewildered, until he finally explains the punchline. Though he’s always smiling, that smile appears plastered on. There’s strain in his eyes.
It’s a testament to the talent of Jason Sudeikis that it’s possible to pick up on these subtle differences in Ted, but it is possible to pick up on them. Ted in Season 2 seems like he’s barely holding on, fighting extremely hard simply to maintain his own personality. In a real sense, it’s all he has, but being himself, exuding the Ted Lasso personality, has stopped happening naturally. His charged, hyper interaction with Fieldstone when she first appeared in the office–an amped-up version of the way he first met and endeared himself to Rebecca–wasn’t the lighthearted means of establishing friendship and common ground with someone new, but seemed fueled by desperation. A lot of the time in Season 2, Ted being Ted looks like work.
In my view, he’s struggling to cope. This is a guy whose life was torn apart in the first season, and who hasn’t really dealt with so much personal trauma before now. His family is both physically and emotionally distant, and he’s unmoored. And in a big way, his positive influence on the people around him has had a negative influence on Ted himself. More runtime each episode is dedicated to the rest of the ensemble cast, which is good–they’re great. But as in “Rainbow” or in the Christmas episode, “Carol of Bells,” we’re spending more time with everyone else and less time with Ted. When Nate has a problem in “Rainbow,” he goes to Rebecca and Keeley, who help him solve it. Ted has helped engender a community where the people around him are positive and excited to lift one another up, but we’re seeing a feedback loop where Ted has started to make himself obsolete. It furthers his isolation.
Ted has, somewhat surprisingly, seemed to miss Nate’s inner turmoil altogether.
And we’re seeing that isolation more and more. Ted’s intention during “Carol of Bells” was to spend Christmas alone, committing to several rewatches of It’s a Wonderful Life, an uplifting movie that also carries darker tones and concerns suicide. As mentioned, he seems distracted and unconcerned about Richmond’s struggles in general. He’s altogether clueless about Nate’s apprehension about Roy joining the coaching staff, and earlier in the episode, openly laughs at Nate when the younger coach suggests that he’s the “big dog” who should talk to Isaac about his attitude as captain. Ted realizes belatedly that Nate was serious, and that laughing might have hurt his feelings, and we watch Coach Beard affirm that he picked up what Nate was putting down–but Ted, ever in tune with how everyone else is feeling, missed it.
And then there’s Ted’s general aversion to therapy and seeming mistrust of Fieldstone. His interactions with her are especially tense, and she causes his mask to slip a few times–when they first meet and she shuts down his meet-and-greet please-like-me routine, and again in “Rainbow,” when he quotes the lyrics of “Under Pressure” to explain himself to her, but which sound just a little too pointed to be driving the eventual joke about stress. “I’m just terrified from knowing what this world is about,” Ted says, the ever-present smile fading a bit.
Yes, eventually, Ted will wind up in therapy with Dr. Fieldstone; it’s a plot point that’s inevitable. How he gets there, though, is an open question, and it seems like things are going to get a lot worse for Ted before they get better. His effervescent personality, his constant need to attend to and help others, and his inability to face how he really feels, even as far back as Season 1, are building to a boil.
Those things about Ted are, so far, preventing the people around him from realizing how bad things are for him. But we’re starting to see cracks in the facade. Coach Beard seems to be taking notice of what’s going on with Ted, and Dr. Fieldstone is definitely aware that something is up with him. But Ted is clearly closed off, to his friends and to his feelings, about what has happened in his life. And that’s the conflict of this season, subverting everything built up in the first. Season 2 isn’t about some big villain that Ted must use his unflinching kindness to stand against. It’s about the internal struggle of living for others, dealing with trauma, and the ways that depression can alter life in all aspects. It’s about how pain can hide behind a smile, how difficult it can be to ask for help, and how feeling like you have an inability to lift yourself out of that pain can amplify it. Ted Lasso is building to a climax, and the fact that it’s not obvious is the point–we don’t always know when someone close to us is suffering.
Even the best horror movies of all time can be dragged through the dirt by a poor sequel. We all love the original Halloween movie, but by the time it got to the Cult of Thorn, the franchise had obviously lost its way. Freddy Krueger was a menacing killer in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he eventually evolved into a bad stand-up comedian delivering jokes about using a Nintendo Power Glove while taunting teenagers.
Bad sequels are one of the biggest tropes of the horror genre. It’s simple to understand why. After all, horror movies are usually pretty cheap to make. If one is a big office hit, studios want to pump out as many as possible, as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the installments that follow have a hard time living up to the original–even if the original wasn’t very good.
We took a trip through horror history to find the 11 absolute worst horror movie sequels of all time. Narrowing it down to 11 was hard, but there is practically nothing to love about these movies. Yet, still, chances are you’ve seen most of them. Who among us hasn’t watched Jason Takes Manhattan or Jaws 3D, if only to laugh at how comically bad it is?
Take a look at the 11 worst horror movie sequels below, then sound off in the comments with the ones you love to hate.
Nintendo has announced the Pokemon TV App for Nintendo Switch and it’s available now for free. The Pokemon TV App features full episodes of the animated show, highlights from competitive matches of both the video games and the Pokemon trading card game, and “junior content” for younger Pokemon fans.
Announced by Nintendo of America on Twitter, the Pokemon TV App features tons of content, including hundreds of episodes of the animated show for free, with content rotating regularly. With no official Netflix app available on the Nintendo Switch, the Pokemon TV App might be the best way to stream the animated show on the console.
The “junior content” includes videos with sing-alongs and popular nursery rhymes themed around Pokemon. The app also includes highlights from championship competitions for Pokemon and the Pokemon Trading Card game.
The man himself, played by Simu Liu. Shang-Chi debuted in the comics back in the 1970s as the “Master of Kung Fu,” was a human boy trained from birth by his father, Fu Manchu, in martial arts. In the MCU, however, Shang-Chi is actually the son of a man named Wenwu, who is the true Mandarin–a character we last saw played by an “actor” in Iron Man 3.
In the movie, Shang-Chi has attempted to leave his father’s legacy behind and is living in San Francisco, working as a valet. He’s still got all his training to fall back on, though–and he’s definitely going to need to use it when his father’s army comes looking for him.
Bernard Rose’s 1992 supernatural Clive Barker adaptation Candyman was not a huge commercial success, and while it inspired two sequels that decade, they were mediocre low-budget films that felt more like quick cash-ins than any meaningful attempt to extend its legacy. But in the 30 years since Rose’s film hit theaters, the masterful, haunting mix of social criticism and gory scares has helped the film retain its power in a way that many other horror movies of the ’90s have not. Director Nia DaCosta and producer/co-writer Jordan Peele have now gone back to the source to make a sequel that attempts to both honor the original and apply the mythology of Candyman to modern America.
The movie’s setting is Calibri, the Chicago community that stands in the same location as the original film’s Calibri Green. Back in the ’90s, this notorious housing project provided a compelling backdrop for the movie’s dissection of class and race, as white student Helen Lyle ventured into the poor Black neighborhood to investigate the legend of Candyman, a former slave turned vengeful hook-handed, bee-conjuring spirit. Today, Calibri is a wealthy and gentrified area, with expensive townhouses in place of the dilapidated apartments. It’s here that the movie’s main character, artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), now lives with his girlfriend, art curator Brianna (Teyonah Parris).
Anthony is struggling to find a subject for an upcoming show, but when he starts investigating the history of Calibri, and in particular the legend of Candyman, he finds new inspiration. Unfortunately, that also means doing the one thing any horror fan will tell you never to do–say Candyman’s name five times into a mirror–and soon people around him are dropping dead in gruesome ways.
With his two directorial credits to date–Get Out and Us–Peele has shown himself to be skilled at exploring issues of social justice through the conventions of horror. DaCosta is new to the genre, but her acclaimed 2018 debut Little Woods proved her ability as a sensitive, character-focused filmmaker. Aptly, their take on Candyman holds up a mirror to the first movie. That was the work of a white British filmmaker exploring racial injustice and social divide from the point of view of an outsider. Conversely, DaCosta and Peele take us further inside the experience of Calibri’s residents–both middle-class newcomers such as Anthony and old-timers like William (Colman Domingo), who grew up in the old housing project.
Candyman is not exactly subtle in the way it establishes its themes, and some of the early scenes feel a little heavy-handed in the discussion of gentrification or Anthony’s struggle to represent the Black experience through his art. But the efficiency and ambition of the film are impressive–it only runs 91 minutes, but for the most part, DaCosta, Peele, and co-writer Win Rosenfeld find the right balance between the social and the scary. Political and topical horror movies–from Night of the Living Dead to Invasion of the Body Snatchers–rarely have time for subtle satire, preferring instead to keep the messages surface level and have the horror add to the overall impact. Candyman is no exception.
DaCosta brings a distinct visual style to the movie. Throughout the film, she plays with the motifs of glass and reflections–some of the opening credits are even mirrored–and the way she shoots and frames the horror set-pieces, as Candyman picks off his victims, is often highly inventive. One stunningly realized sequence is filmed at a distance through the windows of a luxury apartment block, while another is glimpsed in the reflection of a dropped hand-mirror. She also uses the striking shadowy puppetry of Kara Walker to explain the backstory of various characters. One of the movie’s main themes is the nature of storytelling, particularly the way urban legends morph and shift over time, and using shadow puppets is an ingenious way to both represent this and avoid clichéd exposition and flashback scenes.
Abdul-Mateen II is superb as the artist who finds recognition and inspiration only when people around him start dying. Anthony’s frightening decline–both mentally and physically–is well handled, and there are standout supporting performances from WandaVision star Parris (who DaCosta will next direct in the MCU movie The Marvels), Domingo, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Brianna’s brother Troy. There are also appearances from Vanessa Estelle Williams, reprising her role as Anne-Marie McCoy from the first film, and, of course, Tony Todd as Candyman himself (briefly).
The film, unfortunately, stumbles toward the end. The last 15 minutes are packed with dark revelations, surprise villains, and baffling character decisions which seemingly only occur to move the plot forward rather than make any logical sense. For the first time, the blend of biting topical commentary and traditional horror feels confused and awkward, diminishing the movie’s overall effect. While a brisk running time is often a good thing for a horror movie to maintain tension, a slower build towards the climax might have helped deliver an ending as effective as the rest of the movie.
While iconic horror and slasher villains are often one-dimensional figures, Candyman remains one of horror’s most fascinating and complex characters, a tragic figure birthed through prejudice and rage. This latest movie shows that there’s plenty more that can be done with the character, and despite the fumbled climax, it does hint at where the subsequent films could take the series. Candyman 2021 might not hit the heights of the original movie, but it’s very likely we’ll be saying his name again soon.
