Category: Games

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The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Episode 2, “The Star-Spangled Man” began streaming on Disney+ today, and with it came another hour’s worth of information about not only the new Captain America, but also the landscape of the post-Blip world. Turns out when half the population of the planet disappears for five years and then suddenly comes back, things get really, really messy.

But first, we have to deal with the elephant in the room. John Walker is the new Captain America, handpicked by the military for his impressive resume of medals and achievements. Comics readers will recognize the name as the man who is currently US Agent and formerly Super-Patriot, who briefly stepped in as Cap when Steve temporarily gave up the gig. We spent a considerable amount of time during this episode getting to know how Walker works–and frankly? He seems like kind of a jerk. A well-intentioned jerk, sure, but a jerk nonetheless.

The show went out of its way to draw some parallels between Walker’s early days as Cap and Steve’s time spent on the USO circuit back during World War II, while also subverting those parallels by giving Walker the sort of power and authority Steve never had back in the ’40s. It’s easy to get suckered into feeling sympathetic for someone like Walker who, by his own admission, just wants to “do the job” and be the best Captain America he can be, but time and time again across this episode he can be seen using his status and position as a cudgel to get what he wants–especially as he, Sam, and Bucky begin to clash. Steve’s earliest years as Captain America were spent breaking the rules set by his superiors rather than enforcing them.

Walker also has his own partner in the mix, a man named Lemar Hoskins, AKA Battlestar, who is an incredibly obvious corollary to both Sam and Bucky’s relationship with Steve. That said, it is important to note that neither Walker nor Hoskins is enhanced in any way–they’re both just regular, very athletic guys, not super soldiers or cyborgs and they’re not outfitted with any cutting edge tech (beyond the shield, of course).

This is important because it relates to the plans of the Flag-Smashers, the terrorist group we first learned about last week from Sam’s friend Joaquin Torres. It turns out the Flag-Smashers are juicing themselves somehow with what looks like a version of the super soldier serum that created Steve and was famously lost back in The First Avenger when Dr. Erskine was killed. Remember, that’s why Steve was stuck as a USO performer for so long in the first place–the military didn’t want to risk their only super soldier.

But now there are plenty of super soldiers running around in secret–and their mission is still mostly unknown. The Flag-Smashers are rallying against an organization called the GRC, or the Global Repatriation Council, which was apparently formed in the wake of the Blip being reversed to help deal with people who suddenly found themselves completely displaced. As it turns out, vanishing from existence for five years really screws up your life. Who could have guessed? This has resulted in refugee camps of displaced returned people cropping up all over the world and the Flag-Smashers are, apparently, trying to help them while the GRC fails them. The mission they execute this week involves stealing vaccines–and someone, though we can’t be sure who, is less than thrilled with their meddling.

Honestly, the Flag-Smashers might be a little violent, but you have to admit it does seem like their hearts are in the right place. But that doesn’t answer the question about where they’re getting their super serum juice–a concern Bucky has some ideas about.

Episode 2’s biggest reveal was a major Easter egg for Marvel comics fans–the introduction of Isaiah Bradley, the Black Captain America, to the MCU. It turns out that Bucky, during his time spent as the Winter Soldier, had been sent on a mission for the Korean War, which led him to encounter Bradley in action. Bradley, a Black soldier who had been forcibly experimented on in the name of trying to recreate the super soldier serum after Steve’s “death” in the ’40s, was used as a secret super soldier during the war and kept out of the public eye–then, when the war was over, Bradley was promptly disavowed by the government and imprisoned despite being a hero.

Isaiah comes from a limited comics series called Truth: Red, White, and Black where it was revealed that 300 Black Americans were forcibly experimented on in the name of creating the super soldier serum and only Isaiah ultimately survived, but was placed in jail and erased from history for his trouble. It seems that story is being mostly adapted here as Isaiah explains that not only was he jailed after the Korean War, he was subjected to even more experimentation by both the military and HYDRA–which likely explains the origins of the Flag-Smashers’ serum.

Of course, there are still more variables on the table to consider here–and Bucky realizes that the only way to know exactly what happened to that version of the serum is to go to the only man left alive with in-depth knowledge of HYDRA’s machinations: Zemo.

Some key things to remember about this episode:

• Bucky reveals that his concern about Sam letting go of the shield revolves around a fear that maybe Steve was wrong to trust both of them.
• Isaiah’s grandson isn’t named in the episode, but is in fact Eli Bradley, another Marvel Comics character who goes on to become Patriot, a Young Avenger.
• Redwing, Sam’s robotic drone side-kick, was regrettably killed in action.
• Walker and Hoskins explain that the government is able to track Sam’s actions through his tech and that it’s not technically “hacking” because Sam’s tech is government property.
• Walker and Hoskins both feel pressure to perform but have been repeatedly out-classed by super soldiers. Expect to see one or both of them tracking down the super soldier serum for their own purposes soon.
• Sharon Carter received a namedrop for the first time since Civil War, where it was revealed she was branded an enemy of the state for helping Steve betray the government. Her status is currently unknown.

Death’s Door is understandably pretty dark, given that the game focuses on death. But there’s a little bit of humor injected into the game too.

“If we’ve done our job right, there should be a few laugh out loud [moments],” programmer, writer, and animator Mark Foster told me. “That’s the idea–it’s a dry humor, but also a very British thing in that we find humor in misery. We like the comparison of that: something could be funny just because it’s in this grim situation.”

First revealed during the ID@Xbox Showcase, this offbeat fantasy action-adventure puts you into the webbed feet of a crow that must collect the souls of the dead. You’re basically this world’s version of a grim reaper, working in a reality where it’s your job to kill people when it’s their time. Of course, not everyone is ready to go, so they won’t just go quietly into the night without a fight–that’s what your sword and bow and arrow are for.

All of that is the grim situation. The humor comes in with how the whole thing is framed. In this world, being a grim reaper is just a job. You clock into work, report to a supervisor, walk up to your coworker’s desk to hear a terrible joke about how the early bird gets the worm–it’s all rather absurd. But the writing–at least of what we’ve seen so far–is really good.

“As someone who was pretty hands-off with the script, it’s pretty funny,” producer, designer, composer, and sound designer David Fenn told me. “I like it because Mark wrote the script, and he doesn’t really play as many games as me, and I feel like that benefits us in a way. I find [Death’s Door] to be funnier than most games that tried to be funny. I’m not sure what the direct reason is, but it’s probably from taking more inspiration from other forms of media.”

One of those other forms of media is anime–specifically, Studio Ghibli’s movies. “We wanted [Death’s Door] to have dark vibes, themes that are all about death and stuff, so the world has that element in it,” Fenn said. “But then at the same time, we’ve got your main character, a crow, and the other characters in the world depicted as quite cute and endearing, and they kind of have a bit of a Ghibli vibe that we were aiming for as well.”

You can really see this in a few of the enemy designs. For example, one of the levels, Inner Furnace, sees you battle your way through a dank-looking area, with blobs of sludge popping out of pipes to attack you. The concept of being attacked by sewer sludge is disgusting, but the enemies are actually these cute little blob-like creatures with giant adorable eyes and goofy-looking grins of terrifying teeth. They very much look like something from a Ghibli movie.

This art style and humorous story all frame the core-gameplay loop of Death’s Door, which is an adventure to collect the Giant Souls from certain bosses. As you travel through the world, you’ll stumble onto doors that lead back to your hub area, The Hall of Doors. In this way, you can regularly return to your office space to speak to coworkers, invest in upgrades, and unpack more of the story. There’s plenty of story to discover out in the world though too, as well as new abilities to uncover. And much like a Legend of Zelda game, you can backtrack to certain locations to use those new abilities in order to reach previously inaccessible areas. Doing so can net you several different kinds of rewards, such as additional upgrades or hidden pieces of lore.

Going off the beaten path is entirely optional, though. “The core story of the game is presented to you through the characters that you meet along the way,” Foster said. “Like, for example, who the bosses are; in fact, some of the bosses are characters that you befriend and talk to along your journey in storylines that eventually build up to a fight. But there’s also these shiny things that you can collect which have some lore on them, so you can read them and they expand the story. The deeper you dive into exploring and finding these things and finding little nuggets of lore, you can expand your knowledge of what the situation is.”

“But even if you just do a straight run of the game, you will still be told a satisfying tale,” Fenn added. “The story isn’t all lore in the background for people who are interested in it. We’ve made sure that the story is all told through dialogue, which is all punchy, short interactions rather than long paragraphs to read through.”

Death’s Door looks right up my alley. I’ve been a longtime fan of games that deal with topics of death and grief, and the quick, combo-focused combat (and, honestly, business-like setting for its hub) remind me a lot of Hades, which is still my personal Game of the Year for 2020. If Death’s Door looks to be something that interests you, it will launch for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC this summer.

Nobody Saves The World really hit its stride the first time my character, currently a birthday magician, unleashed a swarm of cute white bunnies to ravage his enemies.

Just partway into my 30-minute hands-on demo for Drinkbox Studios’ new game, I had used a magic wand imbued with shape-shifting power to transform from a blank, dumpy, plain white cartoon character into a somewhat dodgy magician better suited to entertaining children than crawling dungeons. Chief among the magician’s abilities is summoning rabbits–you know, like out of a hat–to fight on my behalf. But since my magician abilities were somewhat untrustworthy, occasionally the rabbit I pulled out of the hat would be something else, like a giant, much more intimidating white tiger.

The short look at Nobody Saves The World took me through two of its procedurally generated dungeons, trying out three of the “forms,” or classes, you can unlock as you play. Like Drinkbox’s Guacamelee! games before it, Nobody Saves The World is a goofy, humorous take on an assortment of inspirations. This time, Drinkbox turns its sights on the action-RPG genre with a top-down dungeon crawler that feels like it takes pages from games like The Legend of Zelda and Diablo. Your job is mostly to fight your way through dungeons, collecting magic crystals, as you fight a gross gooey infection called the Calamity that grips your world, filling it with monsters.

You play Nobody, a blank and boring character. You wake up with no idea who you are, with only the suggestion that you’re supposed to seek out a powerful wizard called Nostra Magus, who’s set to apprentice you. When you arrive, though, you find Nostar Magus is missing and wind up snagging a magic wand from him that allows you to transform Nobody into a number of different kinds of characters with more interesting traits.

Figuring out how best to use the magician was just a part of the demo. I also played as the fast-moving rat, which left its enemies poisoned and then, with an ability I earned a bit later, could cause those poisoned enemies to explode and take out their friends. And I tried out the ranger, which could fire arrows that penetrate through multiple enemies with sniper-like precision or unload a hoard of projectiles as if firing a machine gun. Each form has its own unique uses, and you play each one a little differently based on its abilities and their cooldown timers.

All the forms have a health and a mana bar, and certain abilities require mana to use. Your fastest base attack will restore mana, while generally, your second mana-using attack will restore health, requiring you to balance the two in order to keep yourself alive. The poison bomb attack mentioned above was a third attack unlocked by leveling up the rat form.

Each form has its own various attack abilities, as well as passive perks that you earn as you level up your character. The thing is, those abilities and perks can be mixed and matched between different forms as you unlock them, allowing you to customize each form to suit your situation or create unique synergies.

For instance, perks from the necromancer form that increase the health of summoned creatures can be placed on the magician to boost his rabbits. You could also borrow a “sacrifice” ability from the necromancer, allowing you to kill off one of your rabbits to gain a damage boost for yourself. Exploring the opportunities to make new builds and synergies is core to Nobody Saves The World–in areas like dungeons, the game is less about rapidly changing forms on the fly, which can leave you vulnerable to attack, and more about tweaking your build to maximize your effectiveness.

Which forms and abilities you bring into dungeons is going to be important, though, Drinkbox co-founder Graham Smith told GameSpot during the preview session. That’s because the tougher ones you need to clear to progress the story, called legendary dungeons, will include enemies with “wards.” These are shields that are weak to specific types of attacks, requiring you to make sure you’re using the correct type of damage, like Sharp, Blunt, Dark, and so on, to destroy them.

There’s one more reason you’ll want to constantly tune your build and pay attention to which forms you’re using: quests. Unlike in other RPGs, you don’t gain experience points for your forms as you kill enemies. Rather, forms are constantly taking on quests, which are side objectives you need to complete that level you up. In the story, some quests are required to advance–some quests reward you with stars, and the doors to tougher dungeons require a certain number of stars to open them, like you might see in a Mario game. The quests specific to each form, though, act both to strengthen that form and to teach you more about it and how you can alter and empower it.

“The initial quest for a form and the ones you were doing are pretty simple,” Smith said. “They’re just kind of training you how to use the base form, which is important because you need to learn how to use the base form before you start experimenting with them. But then the second half of each form’s quests are all about customizing. So, for example, some forms don’t have any ranged abilities, like the guard. It has a sword attack, so you might get a quest that’s like, kill enemies with ranged abilities. So we start to encourage customization through the quests.”

There are currently around 18 forms in Nobody Saves The World. They include some traditional Dungeons & Dragons-like classes, such as the ranger, as well as more out-there ideas–you can also play as a zombie, an egg, a horse, a mermaid, a robot, a bodybuilder, a turtle, a ghost, and a slug, to name a few. The team has a “wishlist” for more they might add as well, Smith said.

All those weird and goofy classes fit with the overall comedy aesthetic of Nobody Saves The World, which is similar to what’s found in the Guacamelee! games. The first dungeon we ventured through in the demo, for instance, was a giant rotting pumpkin; the other option was a crashed UFO.

“Those are the weird things that we’re trying to do,” Smith explained. “We’re trying to break the mold a little bit–one of the dungeons is the interior of a dead dragon, and another one’s a gingerbread house. And so we’re trying to keep things fresh and trying to avoid the typical fantasy tropes as much as we can in a lot of these dungeons.”

More than anything, the demo we played of Nobody Saves The World suggests a lot more beneath the game’s surface. From its weird genre-bending locations to its highly customizable gameplay and its funny, strange story, it looks like Drinkbox has succeeded in unifying a variety of different ideas for its take on the action-RPG genre. Look for Nobody Saves The World later this year on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Developer Chikon Club has announced its debut title: Soup Pot, an upcoming game first revealed during the latest ID@Xbox Showcase. The game looks extremely on-brand for a terrible cook like me, someone who fantasizes about making good-looking food but is scared of doing a terrible job (Cooking Mama’s strict upbringing scarred me deeply). Soup Pot doesn’t have a traditional fail state.

“With Soup Pot, the team wanted to capture the sense of experimentation and improvisation that comes with home cooking, moving the focus away from failure states and ‘game overs’ in favor of rewarding cooks who try new things,” Chikon Club writes in a press release.

Soup Pot encompasses a wide variety of ingredients, stylized in 3D renders. The game will launch with over 100 different dishes to make, all based on Southeast Asian cuisine. Many of Chikon Club’s developers are based in the Philippines and they pulled from their culture in designing Soup Pot’s recipes.

To ensure players don’t outright fail, you’re not limited to following each recipe exactly. They’re more like guidelines. So if you want to change up the ingredients to try something that you think might end up tasting better or simply need to come up with a clever way to cover for your mistake, it’s encouraged. Chikon Club wants folks to have fun with it.

“Every step features fun interactions, and there’s a charming sense of playfulness throughout,” the developer writes. “Ingredients call out their names when they’re added, dough reacts with a squeal when you poke it, and other touches remind you that–above all else–cooking is a lot of fun.”

Soup Pot is scheduled to launch for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC in August.

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It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to party–at least in Fortnite, where it’s safe to do so. DJ Kaskade will be bringing the jams to Party Royale tonight, and Epic Games has shared a few images to show you what to expect.

Only a few more Miles To Go before @Kaskade takes the Main Stage in Party Royale tonight at 8 PM ET
While we get ready for the show, check out these behind the scenes photos of his performance 👀 pic.twitter.com/010UKvx9J5

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) March 26, 2021

These images don’t share Kaskade turned into a video game character like we’ve seen from some other performances, but there are enormous and colorful sets in the images. The tweet above makes reference to “Miles to Go,” a song he recorded with Ella Vos. Kaskade’s other collaborations include Meghan Trainor, Skylar Grey, Deadmau5, Neon Trees, and Skrillex.

During his set, Kaskade will perform his new EP called Reset as well as other songs. The show kicks off at 5 PM PT / 8 PM ET, so make sure you’re online and ready to go in order to catch the whole thing. You’ll need to get into Party Royale and head to the main stage, which is located near the southeastern edge of the map. If you prefer to keep playing, you can also view the show in picture-in-picture mode while playing a different mode.

As a special bonus, there will be a sneak preview of Rocket League Season 3 at the end of the show. Epic Games and Psyonix recently announced the game will expand with a spin-off on mobile devices later this year, switching to a 2.5D view to better suit smaller screens.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.