Production on Netflix‘s live-action adaptation of the hugely popular anime series Cowboy Bebop had already been suspended prior to the COVID pandemic, following an injury sustained by star John Cho late last year. But the series has finally resumed shooting, and several new actors have joined the cast.
As reported by Deadline, the show has added six new cast members. They are Geoff Stults (12 Strong) as Chalmers, Tamara Tunie (Better Call Saul) as Ana, Mason Alexander Park (Acting for a Cause) as Gren, Rachel House (Thor Ragnarok) as Mao, Ann Truong (Romper Stomper) as Shin, and Hoa Xuande (Top of the Lake) as Lin.
Cowboy Bebop stars Cho as bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, who leads a team on various intergalactic adventures in the ship of the title. The other previously-announced cast members include Alex Hassell as Vicious, Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, and Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black. The showrunners are André Nemec and Jeff Pinkner, while Thor: The Dark World writer Christopher Yost is executively producing and has written the first episodes of the 10-episode first season.
The Cowboy Bebop series was first announced in November 2018 and started shooting in September 2019. A behind-the-scenes video was released in December, shortly before Cho’s on-set knee injury shut down production entirely. At the time, it was reported that the production shutdown would last “seven to nine months,” so it’s possible it might not have started until now in any case.
The anime series Cowboy Bebop was released in Japan in 1998 and ran for 26 episodes. It was followed by an animated movie in 2003, as well as a manga series and a video game. It became one of the key anime properties to break through to a western audience and was screened on Adult Swim in the US.
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Hitman developer IO Interactive has announced Project 007, a new James Bond game.
Announced in a teaser trailer today, IO describes the game as a “wholly original Bond story” in which “players will step into the shows of the world’s favorite Secret Agent to earn their 00 status in the very first Bond origin story.”
In active development for consoles and PC, Project 007 (a working title) will be created on IO’s own Glacier engine, which was used for the recent Hitman games. It’s not clear exactly what kind of game Project 007 will be, but given IO’s history with stealth and espionage games, the studio’s Hitman model seems like a potentially close fit.
The point about this being the first James Bond origin story is slightly confusing, given that Casino Royale features Bond earning 00 status, and there has been a series of Young Bond books by writer Charlie Higson. We’ve asked for clarification on that.
The game is being made in collaboration with Bond movie studios MGM and Eon Productions. No release date or actors have been announced at time of writing.
“It’s true that once in a while, the stars do align in our industry,” said IO CEO Hakan Abrakin a press release, “Creating an original Bond game is a monumental undertaking and I truly believe that IO Interactive, working closely with our creative partners at EON and MGM, can deliver something extremely special for our players and communities. Our passionate team is excited to unleash their creativity into the iconic James Bond universe and craft the most ambitious game in the history of our studio.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
GeForce has announced that its cloud streaming system, GeForce Now, is coming to iOS, and that it has partnered with Epic Games to bring a touch-controlled version of Fortnite to the platform. This will essentially bring Fortnite back to iOS, without the need for an App Store listing.
GeForce Now is Nvidia’s platform that allows users to play compatible PC games that they own via the cloud. The system is already available via bespoke apps for PC, Mac, and Android, but the new iOS version for iPhone and iPad is accessed via the Safari browser by visiting the GeForce Now website. The service goes live in beta form today.
Because GeForce Now streams ‘proper’ PC games, you’ll need a controller linked to your iPad or iPhone, such as the Razer Kishi or a compatible bluetooth controller to play (keyboard and mouse-only games are not supported). However, in order to act as a true replacement for the iOS version that was pulled as part of Epic and Apple’s legal battle, Fortnite will be provided with touch controls. Because of the work needed for this feature, Fortnite will not be available when the service launches today, and will be added in the “near future.”
If you’ve not heard of GeForce Now before, Nvidia’s system allows you to play PC games in the cloud, powered by Nvidia’s tech, rather than on your gaming PC. This means you can use a phone or underpowered laptop to play games at 1080p, 60 FPS, with ray tracing turned on and at highest settings. You do need to own the games, but GeForce Now imports your existing Steam/Origin/Epic/Ubisoft libraries, rather than you buying them specifically from Nvidia. The service can be used for free with some limitations, or with more features for a $4.99 monthly subscription.
By using GeForce Now on iOS, you’re effectively playing games using Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics card technology, including ray tracing and DLSS, without needing to buy an expensive GPU. Hopefully your data plan is up to the job, though; it might bring Fortnite back to iPhones, but it is a streaming system rather than installed game, and so will need a good network connection and enough data to eat.
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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.
The PlayStation 5 has sold 118,085 units in its first four days in Japan, beating the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles, which sold a combined total of 20,534 units during the first six days they went on sale in that territory. As reported by Famitsu, sales of the PS5 heavily favored the more traditional console model that includes a disc drive and costs more than the PS5 Digital Edition.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the best-selling PS5 game in Japan so far, moving 18,640 copies and narrowly beating Demon’s Souls. The latter, developed by Bluepoint Games, wasn’t far behind Insomniac’s latest effort and sold 18,607 units in the same four-day period.
Sony’s next-gen start may be impressive but constrained supply and a global pandemic likely meant that it couldn’t boast the same numbers that the PlayStation 4 enjoyed when it first launched in Japan, where that console sold 322,000 units in 2013.
Outsold at a rate of more than five-to-one by the PS5, it’s worth noting that stock of the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles were also extremely limited and that the console is currently sold out in Japan. Retailers had to conduct lottery sales for consumers, suggesting that demand for Microsoft’s new consoles were greater than expected.
In the UK, the Xbox Series X/S also performed well, selling 155,000 units in its first two days on the market.
PS5s are expected to be sold out in Japan until the end of the year, while getting hold of the console in the rest of the world has also been a challenge. If you’re looking to see when and where you can find a PS5 for yourself, check out our PS5 order guide to see when it will be back in stock.
Hitman’s Agent 47 is a ruthless assassin with a knack for disguises and creative kills, but he isn’t exactly suave. The studio is digging into a famous franchise for another take on the secret agent, as it’s currently developing a new James Bond 007 game.
Announced with an extremely short teaser on November 19, “Project 007” will be developed and published by IO Interactive with the full support of Eon Productions and MGM. On the game’s official website, IO says it will feature a “wholly original Bond story” and will be an origin game–the first we’ve seen for Bond.
It appears to be very early in production, as the developer is still recruiting developers across several departments. Vacant positions include technical director, senior producer, senior concept artist, and senior multiplayer network programmer. Yes, it appears Project 007 will feature multiplayer in some form or another.
IO Interactive’s Hitman 3 is still in development and planned to launch on January 20, 2021 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC, Stadia, and Nintendo Switch, with the Switch being supported only via cloud streaming. It will also feature full first-person VR support for the PlayStation 4 version.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons released near the start of the global coronavirus pandemic, and the online mode has allowed players to stay connected and interact despite quarantining in their homes. It has also led to several businesses and organizations using the game in creative ways to promote services, but Nintendo appears to be limiting what is actually allowed.
“While our services and products are generally for personal use only, we understand there may be situations in which businesses and organizations would like to use or reference the game in relation to their business,” Nintendo said. “As such, we would like to share a few guidelines with those businesses, organizations, and anyone representing them, to preserve the experience for the millions of people enjoying the game recreationally.”
Approved activities include inviting others to your island, providing custom designs or Dream Addresses you have made, or uploading your screenshots and footage to “family-friendly” websites and social networks. However, there are several activities Nintendo does not allow:
Bringing politics into the game
Sharing false information
Using the game as a marketing platform that directs people to campaigns or activities outside of the game
Selling custom designs or earning advertising revenue from the game
The mention of politics and direction players to a campaign outside the game seems to forbid things like Joe Biden’s Animal Crossing island. It had a website address listed for voting, meaning the Biden campaign team likely wouldn’t be able to do the same thing in 2024 should New Horizons still be popular.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was recently nominated in several categories for The Game Awards 2020, including Game of the Year. The ceremony will take place on December 10.
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The Hannibal star said he’s “waiting for that phone call,” and can only reference what’s being reported in the press. He might know more than he’s letting on, for but now, that’s all Mikkelsen could say.
“Oh, that is on the rumor basis as we speak,” Mikkelsen said. “So I know as much as you do from the newspapers. So I’m waiting for that phone call.”
Fantastic Beasts 3 is expected to hit theaters in summer 2022, following a delay related to Depp’s exit and the search for a replacement. The film will see the returns of Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander and Jude Law as Albus Dumbledore.
With hardboiled rally enthusiasts and sim junkies currently well-served by the stern and serious spin-off Dirt Rally 2.0, Codemasters has swerved to reshape its main off-road series into a sort of Driveclub on dirt; Dirt 5 is an accessible and rowdy racer that’s easy on the eye and fun to pick up and play, even if it’s ultimately a shade on the shallow side relative to what I’ve come to expect from these games.
For a series with its own long and firmly established history, that Driveclub comparison I just threw at you may come as a slight curveball. However, it makes a lot more sense when you consider Dirt 5 was developed by Codemasters Cheshire – the studio formerly known as Evolution, which made Driveclub before being cut loose from Sony and scooped up by Codemasters in 2016. Like Driveclub, Dirt 5 is a mix of doorhandle-to-doorhandle arcade pack racing and bleeding-edge visuals. This game handles night lighting and extreme weather with particular panache.
That said, Driveclub is far from the single influence on Dirt 5. There’s a heavy handful of Dirt 2’s brashness, a dash of Dirt 3’s gymkhana mode, and a limited sprinkle of MotorStorm’s rough-and-ready brand of fender bending (Dirt 5 even features racing in Monument Valley, the location of the original MotorStorm). There’s even a touch of Trackmania’s custom track builder and some subtle hints of SEGA Rally Revo, RalliSport Challenge, and Gravel to boot. This cocktail of influences combines for a well-executed racer, albeit one that seems content to iterate rather than innovate. It’s solid but lacks exciting novelty.
Land Rush Hour
Ironically enough, one key game Dirt 5 roundly ignores is Dirt 4. Built on the bones of Codemasters Cheshire’s Onrush, Dirt 5 actually doesn’t feel anything like its direct predecessor, ditching its two-pronged “simulation” versus “gamer” approach to handling options for a single, easy-to-grasp driving model. There are certainly differences in the way a custom-built buggy tackles terrain compared to, say, a rear-wheel drive retro rally car (and there are also some subtle variations in grip across the different surface types – especially ice) but overall it’s a bit more basic and I found the handling quickly tameable.
Gone, too, is Dirt 4’s custom rally stage generator tool, and with it, any regular point-to-point rallying at all, actually. With Dirt Rally 2.0 competently overseeing that department nowadays, Dirt 5’s career mode is now an arcade-oriented mosaic of mostly pack racing events across tracks in 10 global locations, including New York, Arizona, China, Norway, Brazil, Greece, South Africa, Morocco, Italy, and Nepal. There’s even a light story woven throughout the career which unfolds exclusively in a series of in-game podcast snippets sprinkled between events as you progress. Hosted by Donut Media presenters James Pumphrey and Nolan Sykes, it’s a low-fi approach – no character models, no cutscenes – but even though the segments are entirely inessential I have to admit I bought into the silly back-and-forth and listened to every one of them. It was particularly entertaining hearing the highly-recognisable voices of video game VO veterans Troy Baker and Nolan North regularly sniping at each other in the guise of two rival races.
My key criticism of the career mode is that the variety it appears to offer doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. I’ve been playing Dirt 5 for a week and there are still event types I can’t really tell the difference between. Land Rush and Stampede in particular both blur into one for me, and Rally Raid doesn’t feel much different to those either.
Path Finder events are a handful of hill climb time-attacks in a specialty rock bouncer but, while these courses are the steepest and narrowest, they don’t really require a particularly finessed approach so I didn’t find them as interesting to tackle as I thought I would. Sprint racing? Well, it feels like it’s in the wrong game.
The ice racing is probably my highlight – not only are they generally the best showcase for Dirt 5’s impressive lighting and weather effects, but ice is perhaps unsurprisingly the most satisfying drifting surface. These ice racing events require the most car control and, as such, I found them the most rewarding.
However, while Dirt 4’s custom stage generator may have got the chop, Dirt 5 comes with its own custom content solution: a stunt track editor Codemasters has dubbed Playgrounds. When career mode ran out of sizzle for me, I found myself in Playgrounds – and right now I suspect it’s here I’ll stay. It’s perhaps best described through a modern lens as a Dirt-flavoured slice of Trackmania-style madness, but more pertinently Playgrounds might be as close to a modern-day version of the 1990 MS-DOS cult classic Stunts (or 4D Sports Driving) as I’ve ever played. You may be unfamiliar with this 30-year-old relic but at one point as a kid I basically lived in it.
Whether you’re placing stacks of crushed cars or enormous corkscrews, Playgrounds’ editing tools are all quite straightforward – although I’m yet to build something I’m truly happy with. In the interim, I’m having plenty of fun attacking the user-created tracks already available.
In some ways Playgrounds feels a bit like it comes from a completely different game, but it’s an excellent addition to the Dirt 5 package – especially in conjunction with four-player splitscreen multiplayer.
Electronic Arts has become the latest giant gaming company to start charging $10 more for next-gen games. As part of a wider next-gen reveal for Madden NFL 21, the publisher announced a “NXT LVL” edition of the game for PS5 and Xbox Series X, and it will cost $70 USD.
This version also includes “additional high value” content for the popular card-based online mode, Madden Ultimate Team. However, the full contents were not announced.
To be clear, the NXT LVL edition is a standalone version of Madden 21 for PS5 and Xbox Series X. Anyone who bought the game for PS4 and Xbox One can receive the next-gen improvements, of which there are many, at no extra cost. The only catch is that you need to complete the upgrade by the time Madden NFL 22 launches in 2021.
The $70 NXT LVL edition is aimed at people who are buying Madden 21 for the first time on a new-generation console.
Madden NFL 21 launches for PS5 and Xbox Series X on December 4. That’s the same day that FIFA 21 releases on next-gen consoles, but it’s not clear if there will also be a standalone edition of that game for PS5 and Xbox Series X or if it will cost $10 more.
Earlier in November, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen alluded to price increases for its next-gen games, saying that a higher price point might be necessary to make up for the increases in development costs.
“We’ve always said games are getting more expensive. The experience is getting deeper. The time that people are playing games is getting longer. One might argue that that might require a higher price point over time, but we’ll address that as we get closer to more games coming into the next-gen console transition,” Jorgensen said earlier in November, before the PS5 and Xbox Series X released.
Jorgensen is not the first gaming executive to point out that the cost of game development has increased, and thus a price increase for the consumer might be in order. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick defended NBA 2K21’s $70 price point by saying, “The bottom line is that we haven’t seen a front-line price increase for nearly 15 years, and production costs have gone up 200 to 300%.”
Before that, former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden remarked that the cost of developing games has increased by 10 times, and all the while, the price of new games has stayed steady at $60 USD. “If you don’t have elasticity on the price-point, but you have huge volatility on the cost line, the model becomes more difficult. I think this generation is going to see those two imperatives collide,” Layden said of the new generation of consoles.
More recently, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan defended the $70 price point for the PS5 launch game Demon’s Souls. Asked if $70 was a fair price, Ryan said, “Yes, yes, I do. If you measure the hours of entertainment provided by a video game, such as Demon’s Souls compared to any other form of entertainment, I think that’s a very straightforward comparison to draw.”
Update: Warner Bros. has confirmed that Wonder Woman 1984 will, in fact, be available in theaters and to HBO Max streaming service subscribers on December 25. In a press release, Chair and CEO of WarnerMedia Studios and Networks Group Ann Sarnoff said, “As we navigate these unprecedented times, we’ve had to be innovative in keeping our businesses moving forward while continuing to super-serve our fans. This is an amazing film that really comes to life on the big screen and, working with our partners in the exhibition community, we will provide that option to consumers in the U.S. where theaters are open. We realize that a lot of consumers can’t go back to the movies due to the pandemic, so we also want to give them the option to see Wonder Woman 1984 via our HBO Max platform.”
You can read the original story below.
It’s been something many have speculated would happen. It looks like Wonder Woman 1984, the next DC universe film, will be premiering on the HBO Max streaming service on December 25, 2020. However, it will also be available in movie theaters that are open during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The news was first reported in a tweet from user Wario64, who stumbled upon a trailer for the movie on YouTube, which reveals the HBO Max release. The video is now listed as private on YouTube, though GameSpot has reached out to Warner Bros for confirmation. The report has since been confirmed Warner Bros, which said the film will be available for HBO Max subscribers for a month.
The release of Wonder Woman 1984 has been something fans of the character played by Gal Gadot have been excited about for quite a while, only for delays to set the movie back. Originally, the film was supposed to hit theaters in 2019. However, it was delayed until June 5, before moving again to August 14 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It then shifted to October 2, before settling on the current December 25 release date. However, with many theaters not open, there was speculation it would be pushed even further into sometime in 2021.
Instead, it seems like Warner Bros. is using a similar tactic as Disney did with the digital release of Mulan. Unlike the Mulan release, though, it’s worth noting that the alleged release date title card says the film will be available at no extra cost to HBO Max subscribers. To watch Mulan, Disney+ subscribers had to pay an extra $30 for access to the film.
As it stands, the move to offer Wonder Woman both in theaters and on HBO Max has not been officially announced by Warner Bros. Regardless, the release date for the film, at the moment, remains December 25.