Shudder’s reboot show of Stephen King and George Romero’s much-loved ’80s horror anthology movie Creepshow has proved to be one of the biggest hits for the streaming service. Although Season 2 has been delayed until next year, an animated Halloween special was released last month. It’s now been announced that a Creepshow Chrismas special will be released in December.
The special is titled A Creepshow Holiday Special, and it hits Shudder on December 18. It will consist of a single hour-long Christmas-themed episode, titled “Shapeshifters Anonymous.” The special is written and directed by showrunner Greg Nicotero, based on a story by J.A. Konrath. It stars Anna Camp (Pitch Perfect) and Adam Pally (The Mindy Project). Shudder has released a short synopsis for the Holiday Special, which reads, “Fearing he is a murderer, an anxious man searches for answers for his ‘unique condition’ from an unusual support group.”
In a statement, Nicotero said, “The Spirit of Christmas is alive and well in true Creepshow fashion. Reimagining how we look at the holidays and Santa Claus with an outrageous ensemble cast, a myriad of creepy crawlies and a few thrills and chills shouldn’t be missed.”
A Creepshow Holiday Special isn’t the only seasonal treat heading to Shudder next month either. Legendary host Joe Bob Briggs is back with another episode of the Last Drive-In, which will be a double-bill of holiday horror movies. The service will also add other scary Christmas films like Rare Exports and Sheitan.
Fall Guys is getting another special skin soon. You’ll be able to dress your bean as the goose from House House’s Untitled Goose Game.
The skin will be available on November 13. It comes in two parts and will most likely cost 10 crowns, similar to most other legendary skins. This is the latest crossover skin to come to the game show battle royale. Fall Guys has also had skins from Godzilla, The Messenger,Gris, and other games and movies pop up recently.
Mediatonic showcased the skin on Twitch
Fall Guys also received a midseason update this week. It includes variations on current levels and a new level that’s made up of nothing but fans. The update also includes a number of quality-of-life features and fixes that developer Mediatonic has included in its new issue tracker.
Perfect Match, the mini-game that pushes you to keep track of tiles with pictures of giant fruit on them, is also getting a makeover with the update. A giant beam now spins across the floor, forcing beans to jump and dodge it, which should make it a lot harder to qualify and get to the next round.
Fortnite’s Season 4 is starting to wind down. We’re now past the initial 10 week period and are getting into an extra four weeks of Marvel-focused challenges. A season-ending event should be happening soon, but Epic Games hasn’t given us any hints about what it will include. Players have begun to come up with their own ideas.
One player created a scene of the helicarrier, which serves as a pre-game lobby, falling towards Risky Reels. They made a 3D render of the scene–complete with Iron Man using his suit to prevent the aircraft from crashing–and shared it to the Fortnite subreddit. It’s one theory of how Season 4 will end.
Galactus, a cosmic entity that consumes planets in the Marvel universe, can be seen heading towards the Fortnite island. He’s slowly gotten closer over the course of Season 4. Tony Stark’s named location, Stark Industries, has been changing over the course of season 4 as well. Multiple battle buses, the vehicle that players jump from at the beginning of every match, can be found in his warehouse. Players believe that they’ll somehow be used in the event.
“It seems that Tony Stark is creating 4 Black Hole Battle Buses,” wrote Redditor TheDarkFabledSaber. “It looks like he is on the 2nd one, working on it in the garage workshop. Maybe it will be similar to The End event, but instead of opening a rift the buses will make a large black hole to consume Galactus.”
Galactus Can Be Seen In The Distance
Dozens of players have come up with theories about how the event will change the map. They believe that locations like The Ruins, Coral Castle, Catty Corner, and the Fortilla will be destroyed during the event to pave the way for something new. Epic Games has said that the Season 4 event will be the “biggest one ever” and it will change the future of the game. Troy Baker is rumored to have recorded lines for the event; he previously voiced a character in The Device event.
While Epic Games has said that “everything is connected” in the Fortnite universe, the game is made up of a lot of nonsensical themes and characters. The “different realities” storyline that brought Marvel characters into the game lets the studio do almost anything it wants with the battle royale. The ever-changing nature of the game is one of the reasons it’s been so successful.
There are still three weeks left in the season so we probably won’t see the in-game event until the end of the month, but players are getting tired of Season 4. They hope that this event will bring some change to the map.
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Here’s what we know about The Expanse Season 5’s release date and more.
The Expanse has proven it’s a show that will persevere. It may have a comfy home on Amazon now, but after its original network, Syfy, canceled it following Season 3, its future was much less certain. Thankfully, Season 4 streamed on Amazon Prime last year, and Season 5 is about to arrive.
The Expanse tells the story of a human society hundreds of years in the future who have expanded into outer space–further and further out, thanks to the events of the series, which sees various characters and factions fighting for survival as technology and humanity are gradually altered by an alien “protomolecule.”
That’s the most barebones description we could come up with for the series as a whole. If you haven’t watched it, we definitely recommend catching up–and meanwhile, here’s everything we know about The Expanse Season 5.
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The Expanse Season 5 Release date
The first three episodes of The Expanse Season 5 are hitting Amazon Prime December 16. After that, Amazon will release new episodes weekly until February 3, 2021. That’s right, they’re adopting the same model as The Boys Season 2–because although some fans didn’t enjoy having to wait a week in between new episodes, The Boys is one of Amazon’s most successful shows, and this release model succeeded in creating week-to-week buzz.
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How many episodes?
The Expanse Season 5 will be told across ten episodes. We also know their titles:
Episode 1: Exodus
Episode 2: Churn
Episode 3: Mother
Episode 4: Guagamela
Episode 5: Down and out
Episode 6: Tribes
Episode 7: Oyedeng
Episode 8: Hard Vacuum
Episode 9: Winnipesaukee
Episode 10: Nemesis Games
We’ll leave it to the commenters to try and glean any info from those.
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Is there a trailer?
Amazon released a trailer for The Expanse Season 5 in October 2020. It has plenty of hints for the upcoming episodes, including indications that the main characters will spend much of the season off on separate missions. Frankly, the trailer is also a banger, and has our hype levels through the roof.
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Plot
Here’s the official plot synopsis from Amazon:
“Season 5 of the series picks up as multitudes of humans leave the solar system in search of new homes and vast fortunes on the earth-like worlds beyond the alien Ring, and a heavy price for centuries of exploitation of the Belt finally comes due and a reckoning is at hand. For the crew of the Rocinante and the leaders of the Inner Planets and the Belt, the past and present converge, bringing forth personal challenges that have wide-reaching repercussions throughout the Solar System.”
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Separate storylines
As we’ve noted already, the main characters have individual journeys in Season 5. Amazon shared some of the details in a recent press release: Amos will return to Earth to confront his past, Naomi will reach out to her son and try to save him from his father’s influence, Bobbie and Alex confront the collapse of Mars and chase a shadowy cabal of terrorists and criminals, Holden will deal with the protomolecule, including the aliens who built it and the mystery of what killed them, Drummer will get a new crew and try to escape her past, and Avasarala will fight to prevent a terrorist attack, despite losing her bid for reelection in Season 4.
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On which books will Season 5 be based?
The Expanse is based on the series Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, a pseudonym for collaborative authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Season 5 will certainly include plot from Nemesis Games, and fans have speculated that it will dip into the following novel, Babylon’s Ashes, as well.
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Returning characters
As a show, The Expanse is always good about including its full cast of characters, even when some are less prominently featured in the book or books on which a given season happens to be based. As such, you should expect to see all the same familiar faces in Season 5: Steven Strait as Jim Holden, Cas Anvar as Alex Kamal, Dominique Tipper as Naomi Nagata, Wes Chatham as Amos Burton, Shohreh Aghdashloo as Chrisjen Avasarala, Frankie Adams as Bobbie Draper, Cara Gee as Drummer, Chad Coleman as Fred Johnson, and more.
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What about Naomi’s son?
Season 4’s finale featured one particularly chilling scene that surely indicates Naomi’s son will play a big role going forward, so you should expect to see both Jasai Chase Owens as Filip Inaros, as well as his father, Keon Alexander as Marco Inaros, returning in Season 5.
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Will Thomas Jane return?
Given the way his storyline ended in Season 4, it seems unlikely that Thomas Jane’s character Miller will appear again on the show, at least not in the same capacity as the protomolecule’s avatar. That said, Jane’s presence may still be felt on the show, since he’s directing an episode in Season 5. Good, because things just aren’t the same without Miller.
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What about Season 6?
There’s already at least one report floating around on the internet that Amazon has greenlit The Expanse Season 6 internally, although that report cites no concrete sources, and the company hasn’t announced anything publicly yet. Even if that’s the case, it’s unclear when production might commence, since the COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting all aspects of the entertainment industry.
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Disclosure: ViacomCBS is GameSpot’s parent company
With the Beyond Light expansion out now on all platforms, some Destiny 2 players are experiencing connectivity issues when attempting to load into the looter-shooter.
Developer Bungie said it’s investigating the server issues while clarifying that improvements are being made to server connectivity. The studio is asking players to “stay tuned for updates” as it works on ironing out the problem. There’s no confirmation on why the servers crashed.
DownDectotor reports that 78% of people have reported server connection issues while 20% say they are having trouble logging into Destiny 2. 1% report issues with the game’s website.
We are still continuing to investigate various error codes and connectivity issues affecting players on all platforms.
These server issues come not long after Beyond Light launched on November 10 for PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One. The expansion, along with the base Destiny 2 game, will hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S / Series X on December 8 as a free next-gen upgrade.
Destiny 2’s massive Update 3.0 has also arrived at the same time as the Beyond Light expansion. The patch overhauls the economy, rebalances weapons, and removes gambit prime.
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Nintendo’s special edition Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch hits store shelves later this week, but there appears to be a minor issue with the handheld. Nintendo has confirmed that there’s a language error related to the “Mario Drawing” song that plays over the device’s digital clock.
As detailed on the company’s support website, the handheld will display the song’s lyrics in the wrong language if you select German, French, Italian, or Spanish from the title screen. Nintendo notes that the error only affects these specific languages; English, Dutch, and Japanese will display the lyrics correctly, while the song itself is only vocalized in English.
We would like to inform you about a language error with the ‘Mario Drawing’ song in the Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. system’s digital clock. Please see https://t.co/qJ0BFsz4UK to find out more.
Nintendo also confirms that the song lyrics are the only aspect of the handheld that makes use of the language setting, so the error is isolated to this particular circumstance. Players can also change the language at any time while the song is playing.
The Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch launches on Friday, November 13. The device retails for $50 USD and is designed to resemble a classic Game & Watch handheld. It comes loaded with three games: the original Super Mario Bros., its original sequel (which is known in the West as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels), and the classic Game & Watch game Ball featuring Mario. You can learn more in our Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch preorder guide.
The Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch is one of several products and games Nintendo is releasing to celebrate the Super Mario series’ 35th anniversary. Much like Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. 35, however, the handheld is a limited-time item; it will only be on sale until March 31, 2021.
If you’re currently having some trouble signing into Xbox Live on your brand-new Xbox Series X|Series S (or on any Xbox platform in general), Microsoft is aware of the problem. The Xbox team is working on a fix.
“We’re aware that users are currently unable to sign into Xbox Live on various platforms,” Xbox Support posted on Twitter. “The right teams are looking into the issue and working on a fix.” You can follow the account to get updates on the issue at hand, or stay tuned to the Xbox Live Status page.
Microsoft has officially transitioned into the next console generation following the release of Xbox Series X|S. If you’re thinking of picking up either console but aren’t sure which to go for, editor Michael Higham has you covered with reviews for both. They’re listed below.
Xbox Series X|S Reviews
While you wait for Xbox Live to come back on, you can think about which of the new Xbox Game Pass titles you want to download next. Xbox is adding over 10 titles to Xbox Game Pass this month, including Tetris Effect: Connected, River City Girls, and Destiny 2: Beyond Light.
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Sony’s PS5 promotions appear to focus primarily on the US market and has noticeably pivoted away from Japan. Anonymous Sony employees who spoke to Bloomberg cite PS4’s relatively poor performance in Japan as the reason behind the shift.
Bloomberg’s article lays the math out: While Japan produces 10% of the PS4’s earnings, the US generates 35%, according to Macquarie Group Ltd. analyst Damian Thong. The PS4 also sold less than 10 million units in Japan, as stated by Famitsu, and performed more poorly than the PS3.
Sony disavows that it’s shifting marketing focus. Spokeswoman Natsumi Atarashi stated “our home market remains of utmost importance” and pointed out that PS5 is actually launching in Japan first.
However, company staff on the Japanese side have felt sidelined in PS5’s promotions and said they were “left awaiting for instructions from California.” An unnamed senior employee at PlayStation’s headquarters told Bloomberg they were “frustrated by the failure of the Japan marketing team to sell as many PlayStation 4 units as expected.”
Other signs also point to Sony’s shift in attention from the Japanese market: Reduction in Japan-based developer support teams, online promotional events that lacked Japanese subtitles at times, and a relatively small PS5 stock provided to Japanese sellers. Retailers have stated they’ve received only a few more units than they did of the PlayStation 3.
“It’s analyst consensus that PlayStation no longer sees the Japan market as important,” Morningstar Research analyst Kazunori Ito said. “If you want to know their take on the Japanese market, you need to ask about it because otherwise Sony wouldn’t talk about it.”
Sony’s marketing strategy for the PS5 looks like it will pay off. CFO Hiroki Totoki commented that the company could sell more than 7.6 million PlayStation 5 units in the first five months. Sony’s eventual goal for the PS5 is to match PS4’s lifetime sales and reach 100 million sales.
Check out our PS5 review if you want a first look on what you can expect from the next-gen console.
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There’s a narrative reason for why this game is called The Pathless, but the name is also a reference to how it’s supposed to be played. It’s an open-world puzzle game with emphases on exploration and skilled traversal, and you are meant to wander and experience its world as you find it, rather than as a series of checklist objectives. The Pathless’ vast, puzzle-filled nature creates a nice, quiet space for running through the woods, lining up some tricky shots with your bow, and losing yourself in the moment.
In The Pathless, you are a woman simply known as the Hunter. You’ve come to liberate a ruined land, empty of all human life save for a masked villain called the Godslayer. The land’s protector deities, known as The Tall Ones, have transformed into villainous beasts that roam the wilderness. With the help of your eagle, an avatar of the eldest god, you must free the spirits and save the land. The plot is limited–aside from a few sparring exchanges between the Hunter and The Godslayer, the general tenor is simply, “keep going.”
The Pathless on PS5
To free the Tall Ones, you must collect their seals and reactivate monuments scattered around their domains. Each of the four regions is a beautiful, sprawling wilderness, with sweeping plains, peaceful rivers, and high rocky peaks. Hills and valleys are sparsely dotted with signs of life, past and present–friendly animals, ruins, and giant skeletons. There are just enough setpieces in each area so that there’s always a new objective on the horizon, without making the world feel crowded or even populated. When you’re running from place to place, you feel like you’re in nature–not a wasteland or a ruin, but somewhere untouched. It feels quite serene to run through.
Despite having very little plot, the world feels rich and textured, thanks to a highly specific architectural style and descriptive notes you’ll find with insight into the land’s history, as well as the Godslayer’s. That specificity makes the world feel more cohesive and lived-in, which in turn makes it more interesting to explore.
You don’t have to scour aimlessly, though: You have a headband, which gives you a special vision mode that highlights areas of interest as well as puzzles you’ve already solved. Even without it, signs of civilization generally lead to some kind of activity. With or without the vision mode, chasing after the glowing red puzzle spots still feels like a sort of directed wandering; you never know what puzzles you’ll stumble across along the way, nor do you know whether a puzzle will reward you with a seal or something else.
And sometimes, your wandering gets interrupted. As you search for seals to save the Tall Ones, they’re hunting you down. A giant red cloud roves around the map, more or less randomly. If you’re caught up in it, you’re forced into a stealth sequence where you must avoid the corrupted god and reach your downed eagle, which is injured by the storm. While it’s a good idea, in theory, to create some conflict, these sequences are more of a nuisance than anything. I always went in impatient, and found that I just wanted to return to exploring or figuring out the puzzle I was on.
Despite her title, the Hunter never kills anyone, and there’s barely any combat in The Pathless. The Hunter has a bow, but it’s mostly used as a traversal and puzzle-solving tool. All around the world, there are floating eye icons, which you can shoot to partially refill your stamina meter and boost your momentum. If you find a rhythm with running, sliding, jumping, and timing your shots well, you can sprint across the world with superhuman speed. It’s an intuitive system, though it takes time to learn how to pick targets and time shots so that you can keep running indefinitely. But, when you do, it almost feels like flying.
Gallery
Your other means of conveyance is your eagle friend. After a jump, you can press jump again to have the eagle grab your arm and help you glide across large gaps. If you press jump again, the eagle has a flap ability that will launch you straight into the air, extending your glide. When they don’t lead to seals, most puzzles reward you with golden orbs, which eventually power up the flap to give you additional jumps. A skilled player can basically fly; if you jump from a high point on the map, time your flaps well, and shoot eye symbols to build momentum, you can cover an incredible distance. And surveying the massive world from the air is breathtaking.
When you arrive at a puzzle, the bow and eagle also become your primary puzzle-solving tools. Though there are dozens of puzzles in each zone, they all fall into a few categories. There are a few kinds of trick-shot puzzles. Sometimes you need to line up an arrow to go through a flame to light a set of torches; in others, you need to line up a series of stone rings so you can shoot through them and hit a target. There are switch puzzles, which mostly involve using the eagle to pick up stone weights from afar and placing them as needed. Sometimes you’ll enter an area where a dark aura incapacitates your eagle, forcing you to scale a building without gliding or flapping. Though there are a limited number of puzzle archetypes, they consistently require you to be mindful, which makes them interesting to solve. And there’s something very satisfying about quickly firing off a shot that bounces across five torches, even though there isn’t much skill to it on your part.
And yes, on occasion, you do have to use the bow to fight. Each area gets capped off with a multi-phase boss battle with a glowing, red corrupted beast-god. Though you dodge projectiles and shoot weak points, they feel more like puzzles than boss encounters from more combat-heavy games. Not all the phases play out as combat–one has multiple hide-and-seek sections where you need to stay in cover to avoid getting burnt by fire breath–and the ones that do are pure pattern recognition.
The Pathless on PS5
These fights hit some incredible highs and some sore lows. Each one opens with a chase sequence where you have to chain symbol shots to run, catch up with your prey, and then shoot its weak points. Imbuing the traversal with more purpose than merely moving fast really elevates those mechanics, showing how graceful you can be and how fluidly the traversal flows.
On the other hand, the closer the game comes to offering a traditional combat scenario, the more toothless the encounter becomes. You can’t really lose–when you get hit, you lose some stamina and the phase silently resets–so those phases lack teeth. You can make it halfway through one of these sequences four or five times and it just feels like you’re in limbo.
There are only a handful of those moments in the game, though. Most of The Pathless plays to its mechanical strengths, free-form exploration, satisfying movement, and methodical puzzle-solving. At times, that lowers the stakes a little too much, but it maximizes the kind of gameplay the game is named for. For a player like me, who bee-lines for an objective every time, it’s refreshing to simply take things as they come. The Pathless is the rare game that gives you more by not asking too much, and that makes it special.
Nintendo will soon be rolling out another update for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The company announced via Twitter that it’s releasing a 9.0.2 update for the game “in the near future,” and it appears the patch will make another swathe of adjustments to various characters.
Nintendo hasn’t yet specified when the 9.0.2 update will go live, but according to the tweet, the patch “will include fighter adjustments.” Nintendo also warns to convert your replay data ahead of the update, as it will be incompatible once the 9.0.2 version is live.
Ver. 9.0.2 of #SmashBrosUltimate will arrive in the near future! This update will include fighter adjustments, meaning replay data from previous versions will be incompatible. Convert your replays by going to Vault -> Replays -> Replay Data -> Convert to Video, before updating. pic.twitter.com/GVE8xjZ0iO
Steve is the second DLC character to arrive as part of Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Fighters Pass Vol. 2, following Min Min from Arms. Four more DLC characters are still on the way, although Nintendo has not yet revealed their identities. The Fighters Pass Vol. 2 runs for $30 USD. Each DLC fighter can also be purchased individually for $6 USD.
In other Smash Bros. news, Nintendo is still offering a freebie for the game. Nintendo Switch Online subscribers can claim the free Vault Shopper Set 2 item bundle from the eShop. The bundle includes 3,000 Gold and five Classic Tickets, the latter of which can be wagered before a run in Classic Mode for a chance to earn additional rewards.
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