Category: Games

In a year like 2020 it’s no surprise to hear of events being cancelled, postponed, and moved around, but this one still might come as a disappointment to Bostonian wrestling fans. According to a statement posted on WWE’s website, SummerSlam 2020, scheduled for August 23, will no longer be held in Boston.

“In coordination with our local partners, government officials, and TD Garden, WWE’s SummerSlam and related events will no longer take place in Boston,” the statement on the website reads. “Refunds are available at the original point of purchase. We are grateful to the city of Boston for their longstanding partnership and look forward to holding WWE events at TD Garden in the future.”

Under Boston’s re-opening plan, large-scale indoor events like SumerSlam aren’t allowed to take place until phase 4 of re-opening, which isn’t likely to trigger until a COVID-19 vaccine or effective treatment becomes available. The city is in phase 3 as of early July.

The SummerSlam event will still stream on the WWE Network with no change to its original schedule, on Sunday August 23, at 7 PM ET. WWE is looking for a new location to hold the live event.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, WWE recently added a free subscription tier to its network, offering a lot of its content to non-paying viewers for the first time.

For more of a deep dive into the wrestling world, check out GameSpot’s weekly Wrestle Buddies podcast with Mat Elfring and Chris E. Hayner.

While most of 2020’s anticipated big releases–including Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Disney’s live action Mulan–no longer have a confirmed release window, AMC is hoping to re-open its theatres in mid to late August as the costs of being shuttered mount. According to a Business Wire report, the date reflects the expected eventual release dates of some of the delayed films.

While theaters were initially expected to begin re-opening in July, re-opening dates have continually been pushed back in line with rolling delays to film release dates. In the latest move, Warner Bros removed Tenet completely from the schedule for the time being, leading a number of other upcoming films to follow suit.

While cinemas in some markets would be relatively safe to re-open, with AMC now planning to institute a compulsory mask-wearing policy, the theater chains don’t want to open too soon before they have new films to show. Around one third of AMC’s theaters outside of the United States have already re-opened.

With cinemas closed for four months now, the National Association of Theater Owners has begged the big studios to stop withholding films, even if it means the blockbusters don’t get the simultaneous worldwide drops they’re used to.

“We need their movies,” the association’s president John Fithian told Fortune. “Distributors who want to play movies theatrically, they can’t wait until 100% of markets are allowed open because that’s not going to happen until there’s a vaccine widely available in the world. The old distribution models of big blockbusters need to be rethought.”

Rock of Ages 3: Make or Break is a carefree hop, skip, and jump through world history, art, and absurdist meme culture. One moment it’s 800 BC and the set is dressed in the myths of ancient Greece, the next it’s 1500 AD and the sun god gazes down on Tenochtitlan, then a bit later it’s the very beginning of time and everything is spaghetti and meatballs. It never dwells, never stops to make sense of it all. Historical figures pop their cartoonish heads into view for a brief visual gag before disappearing, bit players tossed aside in a bygone round of whack-a-mole.

Fittingly, Rock of Ages 3 is best enjoyed with the same restless approach in mind. Structured as a series of discrete challenges, each hectic bout of arcade action lasting no more than a couple of frantic minutes, it feels designed to be experienced in short, sharp bursts. Don’t linger. Dip in and, when you feel the frustration levels rising, dip out, move on to a new challenge, or simply come back later.

The core conceit revolves around the idea that all war, throughout all history, is essentially fought by lobbing rocks at each other. The Rock of Ages series has so far focused on one very specific interpretation of this idea: You have to roll a rock through a trap-laden obstacle course to attack the enemy castle at the end. Controlling the roll takes some adjustment. The initial temptation is to embrace the top speed of your chosen boulder and should be resisted. Move too fast and you won’t have the handling to steer through the crowded tracks, let alone slow down in time to make the next corner. Rocks don’t have brakes as such, and it took me some time to get used to easing off the accelerator when required and knowing when my built-up momentum was optimal to negotiate what lay ahead.

A couple dozen playable rocks are unlocked via the story mode, each sporting slightly different characteristics. Most are conventional variants–one’s a bit heavier but accelerates slower, another is faster but more easily damaged, and so on. But some opt for more novel traits, like being a ball composed entirely of sheep, its uneven surface adding some extra rock to your roll. To be honest, though, as charmingly silly as it is to unlock a new rock that is literally a giant stone cube, I found the default option (he’s a real all-rounder) the most suitable in almost every situation.

Courses are treacherous, too. Battering rams will bash you off the track, springboard traps will fling you sideways, cannons and catapults and tanks and trebuchets all launch their payloads in your direction, and various cows, bulls, elephants, and even people will do their best to impede your progress. Though you can destroy many of these obstacles by crashing into them at the right angle and with enough speed, you’ll sustain damage in doing so and run the risk of not being able to complete the circuit.

Instead, all obstacles are best avoided by charting a nimble passage between, around, or occasionally over the top of whatever’s in your way. Running the gauntlet through a particularly dangerous section of track and emerging unscathed feels exhilarating, as if you’ve pulled off an instinctual stunt-driving masterclass full of death-defying near-misses and escapes by the seat of your pants.

Screw up your run and that exhilaration can turn to frustration. It can be funny to round a corner and run straight into a large frog that bounces you back the way you came, or crash through a wall only to trigger a springboard trap that throws you off the track. Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh. However, I found such gallows humour would swiftly give way to bitterness. Grievances pile up as a seemingly unavoidable chain reaction of catastrophe interrupts your flow–that frog bounces you back into an exploding barrel, the bull does its jump attack to immobilise you, and now you’re an easy target for the cannon–and your entire run lies in ruins. The game’s turned against you and soon every little bump is a grave annoyance, exemplary of an unjust world.

It’s not that these things are capricious or arbitrary. The injustice isn’t a result of a random roll. Hit that bump at the wrong angle and you know it’s going to end poorly. Enter that series of S-bends too fast and you’ve only got yourself to blame when the sticky cows take you out. It’s more that the courses are so chaotic, so congested with angles and projectiles that it’s nigh impossible to calculate the correct trajectories and evasive manoeuvres on the fly. Get it right and it’s thrilling, even if at times you’ll marvel at how you managed it. Get it wrong–always the more likely scenario–and it’s exhausting.

Not helping matters is the maddening inconsistency of the respawn placement of your rock after a fall. The paths you follow are typically narrow and always edged by sheer drops–fall off and ideally you are reset close to where you exited the track. Sometimes it feels fair, returning you just before the corner that messed you up. Other times it drops you too far back, punishing you further by having to repeat a large section of the course against the clock. Yet other times it returns you too close to the jump you missed, and you find yourself having to slowly reverse in order to gain the longer run-up required. I ended up quitting out of countless challenges because I felt the respawn had robbed me in some fashion.

Rolling your rock, in all its alternately thrilling and aggravating glory, is the primary concern of the “Break” part of the Rock of Ages 3 equation. The story mode found here serves up six variations of your central gate-crashing objective that are just different enough from each other to alleviate any pent-up frustration. Keep failing at one and it does feel like a clean slate when you switch over to a new challenge.

The Time Trial mode makes a virtue of its stop-start nature. To beat the times necessary to earn a gold medal, you have to learn the courses inside out, a knowledge gained only through countless restarts. The skill ceiling here is towering, demanding precision control of your chosen rock as well as both the audacity to identify preposterous shortcuts and the thumbstick dexterity to pull off the moves necessary to traverse them.

I was able to secure a bronze medal on every course on the first or second time, but the silver remained out of reach on many, and the gold medal times still often look like witchcraft. Gradually I found I could shave seconds off my time by taking this line through those sections, by performing risky jumps to cut corners, or by clipping these pillars to help me change direction without having to reduce my speed. Mining the track for further secrets threw up several daring shortcuts I would never have noticed during a normal run, though I’m still honing my ability to execute them seamlessly. Even in the pre-release period, where the time trial leaderboards were populated only by a handful of developers, testers and reviewers, it remained thoroughly rewarding to see my new best time inch its way into the top 10.

In the main War challenge variant, you are also tasked with laying traps to prevent enemy rocks from reaching your castle. The field presents two identical courses: on one you’ll be rolling to avoid the enemy’s traps, and on the other the enemy will be rolling to avoid yours. Viewing the track from a bird’s-eye perspective, you get a couple of minutes to lay down your traps before you and the enemy are allowed to start rolling. Three runs are usually necessary to completely destroy the enemy’s castle, and so in between each round you get another chance to lay down some more traps to hinder your opponent’s run.

It’s a neat idea. The base course is the same for you and the enemy, so when you’re on your first run you can take note of the best–or rather, worst–spots to lay traps. When you hit a snag somewhere, it’s painful but also provides useful intelligence. Immediately you start thinking about how much worse you could make it for your opponent with a few cunning additions. Further, you are limited in the type and amount of traps you can lay, and there’s a genuine tactical element at play here as you survey the track and make interesting choices about which finite resources you’re going to deploy and where.

The War challenge can also be incredibly tense. The rounds aren’t strictly defined–you have to wait for a cooldown before you can start your next run, but you don’t start it automatically–so there’s a clever push and pull over whether to start your run now and get ahead of your opponent, or delay it a little longer while you keep laying down traps. There’s even a great siren sound effect to alert you to when your opponent begins their run, and a little picture-in-picture window showing you exactly where they are. Being able to witness the enemy roll into your carefully laid trap, or just completely mess up some innocuous jump, as you overtake them through the same section of the track is a joy that never grows stale.

More throwaway are the Obstacle Course and Skee Boulder challenges. The former has you race side-by-side with an AI rock through a course pre-populated with traps for both of you while the latter is a cleaner course littered only with points targets for you to hit and the chance of a bonus multiplier if you reach the finish line first. Neither possesses the depth of the time trials or the War challenge, and tend to expose the limitations of the AI’s rolling ability. The Break mode is rounded out with two even more underwhelming challenges. The Unit Challenge is a stripped-down version of War, limiting your options of one or two prescribed traps and rushing you through its planning and rolling phases in an unsatisfying hurry. And, finally, Avalanche presents just the trap-laying aspect, and asks you to prevent a dozen or so enemy rocks from breaching your castle. The more leisurely pace is a welcome change, but it’s simply too easy to beat, especially once you’ve clocked that the AI struggles to navigate certain traps more than others.

Away from the story mode of Break, Rock of Ages 3 also lets you “Make” in a comprehensive challenge editing tool. Here you can create your own course and, once you’ve proved it can be completed, upload it to the Rock of Ages 3 server to share with other players. It’s basically Rock of Ages Maker.

The scope of the terrain editor is impressive. You can click and drag to carve out a track, while another click and drag allows you to widen, narrow, raise, or lower it at any point. You can even assign nodes that make it easy to branch the track in multiple directions. There are different sets based on the eras depicted in the story mode with all the environmental objects, traps and obstacles are available for you to drop in wherever you like. It’s great that all these props are readily available, but it does mean the courses you build will look a lot like the ones in the base game.

Despite some fiddliness with selecting things amongst terrain of varying heights–an issue that also plagues the trap-laying aspects of the Break mode–it’s a powerful tool that makes it surprisingly easy and fast to build a course. I built my first, and admittedly slightly barebones, course in about five minutes. I was able to jump in and test it at the click of a button and it was actually a blast to play, even if I do say so myself.

The Make servers are already brimming with courses to sample, drawn I assume from the beta tests run earlier this year and likely the developers themselves. While I downloaded a few courses that were clearly someone’s first test level, I did play quite a few that were easily on par with anything in the story mode, though these did tend to be significantly more challenging. The only real downside of the Make tools are that they’re limited to relying on the same challenge types found in the Break mode–you can’t customise the parameters of the challenge or stretch the rules of rolling a big rock in more adventurous ways.

Together, Make and Break showcase the strengths and weaknesses of Rock of Ages 3 overall. At its best, it’s a thrilling and often hilarious ride through an imaginative and surreal landscape. At its worst, its formula is too rigid, its challenges too rote, and it can feel like your frustration with its idiosyncrasies could boil over at any moment. Thankfully, in such times, the bite-size structure comes to the rescue, and you can roll into something new.

After facing a lengthy production delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jurassic World: Dominion is back to set–with a record number of animatronic dinosaurs. Speaking on Collider’s Comic-Con@Home Directors on Directing panel, director Colin Trevorrow has said that Dominion is going heavier on the practical effects than either of the past two films in the franchise have.

“We’ve actually gone more practical with every Jurassic movie we’ve made since the first one, and we’ve made more animatronics in this one than we have in the previous two,” Trevorrow said on the panel. After taking a break from the franchise, with J.A. Bayona directing 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Trevorrow is back in the director’s chair for Dominion, and apparently borrowing from his predecessor’s work.

“J.A. Bayona really, he found the value in creating really photo-real, just beautiful lighting references that could be articulated just slightly,” Trevorrow said. “Just a head and a jaw that could move, but painted beautifully, hand-painted. We do it for all of the dinosaurs now, so when we put it into a space, you can see how the light reacts to the skin. Even if they ultimately do make that a digital animal, there was always something there reacting to the light in that environment.”

It sounds like a simple, low-tech way to improve the overall quality of the visuals–though more advanced technology is also helping the Dominion team use more animatronics on set.

“We finally reached a point where… digital extensions on animatronics will be able to match the texture and the level of fidelity that, on film, an animatronic is going to be able to bring. And you didn’t use to be able to really mix them. You could really see the seams. And so that part of it is very exciting for me.”

For more on Jurassic World: Dominion, check out our guide to everything we know so far about the film. Dominion is currently scheduled to release on June 11, 2021, with filming now back in motion in the UK.

For many people in my generation, Spy Kids was a formative work of early 2000s entertainment–but it was also groundbreaking in its representation of a Latinx family. Director Robert Rodriguez has recently discussed how difficult it was for him to see that vision through, in a chat on Collider’s Comic-Con@Home Directors on Directing panel.

The casting of a Latinx family was more than just Rodriguez’s vision–it was personal, with each main character named after a member of his own family. Carmen was his sister, Juni his brother, and Gregorio and Felix both uncles.

“For me, it was a big victory, and it was an important one for things to follow, to have the kids in Spy Kids be a Latin family,” Rodriguez said in the panel. “The studio was like, ‘Why are you making them Latin, though? Why don’t you just make them American?’ And I was like, ‘They are American, it’s based on my family.'”

The story was partially inspired by his uncle Gregorio, the basis for Antonio Banderas’s character, who was the only FBI agent to ever bring down two different top ten most wanted criminals. “I wanted to make a movie about my family, cause I grew up in a family of 10 kids, a big Latin family,” Rodriguez explained. “But I thought, ‘Well, I should make them spies so it’s more interesting for people. So it’s not just about my family.'”

But the director still faced a fight over casting, with the studio questioning whether diverse casting would make the film’s audience smaller. “People think only Latins will go see it,” Rodriguez explained. “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so, I mean they’re only gonna speak Spanish as a kind of code when it’s cool. And they are American, they’re just Latin.”

“It wasn’t really convincing. I finally had to come up with a good argument,” he added. “Finally, I said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to be British to enjoy James Bond. By being so specific, it becomes more universal.’ So they went with it.”

As we now know, the films were a huge success that ended up spawning three sequels, and a recent CGI animated reboot called Spy Kids: Mission Critical. Rodriguez has been back in the spotlight lately for his work directing last year’s Battle Angel Alita adaptation.

This Save State focuses on all things from the Xbox Game Showcase. The livestream kicked off with our first look at Halo Infinite gameplay. A cinematic opening fit for Master Chief began with a crash landing and took us into a mission on a massive map. Halo Infinite is confirmed to be larger than previous titles and Microsoft already spoke on brand new mechanics being added to the series. Multiplayer will be revealed in the coming months but other features like sprinting and the rumored grappling hook were shown in the gameplay.

There were also a variety of first and third-party games announced, like a brand new Fable, State of Decay 3, and Outer Worlds DLC. Fable’s announcement closed out the show but gameplay or a release date were not provided.

Other announcements gave us more information on games like Hellblade 2: Senua’s Sacrifice and Everwild, with new trailers and deeper looks into their worlds. And we also got confirmation that Destiny 2 will be making its way to next-gen through Game Pass.

There was even more details revealed during the Xbox Games Showcase and you can check it all out on GameSpot.com. While you’re there, stop by our store to purchase Play For All merch, the proceeds of which are donated to Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 Relief.

This is your Save State for Thursday, July 23rd.