Skullgirls Mobile is celebrating over 5 million downloads with a new character, a sword-wielding actor with some wild combos. The character is Annie of the Stars, who has been introduced in a stylish new trailer–and they’re coming to Skullgirls: 2nd Encore too.
You can check out the character in action below, and see how they’ll perform in both games. There’s a focus on the character’s personality and their work as an actor, but we’re more interested in their combos, their short sword, and their sci-fi inspired attacks.
You can check out Annie below.
The trailer contains the question “when’s Annie?”, which is, strangely, a reference to the season two finale of Twin Peaks–we’re not sure if that will have any bearing on anything, though.
Skullgirls: 2nd Encore released in 2015, while the Mobile game has been around since 2017. This will be the first new character for 2nd Encore in some time.
Skullgirls developer Lab Zero Games released Indivisible last year. It’s due to receive a TV adaptation for NBC streaming service Peacock.
After a rough launch in 2016 and many years of updates, Dead by Daylight has evolved into one of the best horror games you can play today. When everything works there’s literally no game like it–where else can you play as iconic film and TV characters like Ash Williams or Nancy Wheeler as you run away from villains like Ghost Face, Freddy Krueger, or Michael Myers? The premise might seem silly, but Dead by Daylight turns it into one of the most thrilling multiplayer experiences around, pitting one terrifying Killer against four hapless Survivors as they scramble to escape the map alive.
As the Killer, your job is to sacrifice the four Survivors to the Entity, the malevolent god in charge of the nonstop forced competition that is each “trial” in the game. And while you’re outnumbered, the odds are heavily lopsided in your favour. You move faster, you have access to more immediate information, and, most importantly, you’re the only one capable of dealing any damage. The Survivors can’t do anything to harm you–at best, they can slow you down–while you’re equipped with a wide array of offensive abilities.
With twenty different Killers to choose from (so far), there’s no shortage of entertaining and diverse playstyles. The Hillbilly charges around the map with his chainsaw, the revving of the limb-lopping tool acting as a terrifying warning of what’s to come. The Trapper discreetly leaves bear traps on the ground, catching any Survivors who aren’t watching where they’re going in a crippling vice of metal teeth. Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head leaves a trail of horrible barbed wire anywhere he drags his giant blade, and he can send anyone who steps in it to his own special sacrifice areas.
Killers find themselves holding most of the cards when it comes to playing, and that’s the way the game likes it. Being a huge threat is a real treat, and it’s how Dead by Daylight creates the tense atmosphere it needs to succeed–Survivors know they’re outgunned (literally, if the Deathslinger is in the trial) but they do their best to live anyway.
To survive in Dead by Daylight, the four players without murderous intentions need to escape the trial. The exit gates are locked and unpowered, and to open them you and your team need to repair five generators littered around the randomly-generated map. The only thing complicating this is the Killer, who really doesn’t want you to leave.
Repairing generators is easier said than done, of course. There’s a risk associated with it, and there’s a tension created by needing to pass skill checks–timing-based events where a dial spins around a circle and you need to hit a button when it reaches the right spot (think Active Reloads from Gears of War, except the target area moves every time). If you fail it, a loud bang will directly alert the killer to your location. Successfully turning the generator on will also alert the Killer, as will dropping a pallet (which slows the Killer down as they lumber towards you), climbing through a window too fast, and helping other Survivors who have been indisposed–there are a lot of ways in which the Killer will know where you are.
On the upside, you’ll have an idea of where the Killer is too. Survivors play in third person, as opposed to the first-person perspective of the Killer, affording them a great deal of extra visual information. And when the Killer nears, their Terror Radius kicks in and a thumping heartbeat warns Survivors of their impending arrival, to great effect. It combines with the game’s dynamic metal soundtrack to quicken the pace of your own heart, your awareness of your imminent doom growing alongside the volume of the heartbeat.
If the Killer catches you, they’ll likely dump you on a sacrificial hook and leave you to dangle while you bleed out. Your teammates will be forced to agonize over risking the wrath of the Killer to save you or to leave you there to die while they work on the generators. And as you hang, helpless, you’ll have a bird’s eye view of exactly how bad things are going.
It is extremely unlikely that you’ll escape as a Survivor, and that’s part of what makes Dead by Daylight so exciting. The way it fills you with dread while still making you unable to look away is the sort of dynamic only the masters of horror ever really nail. Too often the genre leans into other tricks to get by–excessive gore, jump scares, titillation–but the classics all focus on that perfect moment where the viewer clasps their hands over their eyes to find some brief respite–only to split their fingers apart so they can see what happens next.
The thumping heartbeat, the staccato soundtrack, and the knowledge that the odds are terrible engulf you in an impending sense of doom, but the tantalising idea that you might be able to get away compels you to keep playing just one more game.
From 2016 To 2020
When I first reviewed Dead by Daylight in 2016, the one-versus-four multiplayer game was lacking in a lot of ways, but it’s come unbelievably far since. Behaviour Interactive took its fair game and worked hard to turn it into something that is now played by millions. Games that were player-hosted and often laggy messes–especially when you were matched against Killers half the world away–now run beautifully on dedicated servers. The player population is up thanks to cross-play. And where you once had to randomly queue to try and join a game alongside your friends, Dead by Daylight now allows party matchmaking by default.
That said, Surviving With Friends (as partying up is known) is highly controversial and highlights the inherent wrinkles in a game like Dead by Daylight. This is supposed to be a lopsided affair, a tense showdown between a solitary Killer and four crafty Survivors where both sides know one thing to be true–the Killer is almost certainly going to get their prey. It’s the thrill of gambling at a casino, except instead of a dealer hitting you with a King on double sixes, it’s a lady with a decapitated pig as a facemask hitting you with the reverse bear trap from Saw. Either way, the house is always supposed to win.
Outside of a couple of largely meaningless gestures, Survivors can’t communicate with one another in-game, and that’s what partying up changes. Once Survivors are able to communicate (through external voice chat programs like Discord), the ability for the Killer to divide and conquer becomes significantly more complicated, and it can negate a huge portion of the atmosphere the game is built upon.
However, Dead by Daylight has managed to survive as long as it has over the years because it cleverly leans into being lopsided. The more time you spend with the dozens of different Killers, Survivors, and maps, the more you get the feeling that it’s not supposed to be balanced at all. Instead, by featuring 20 Killers, all with a wide variety of playstyles and management techniques, the sentiment of the game in 2020 is to just have fun with it. Enjoyment is more important than victory.
That doesn’t mean that the game isn’t constantly being improved, however. Even beyond the quality-of-life improvements, Dead by Daylight has introduced a wide array of gameplay fixes and tweaks to make things more fun for both sides. One of the more common issues that cropped up were “infinite loops.” Killers move around 15% faster than Survivors (not accounting for sprint burst perks and the like) which means that, over a long enough distance, they’ll always catch a survivor. But early into the game’s life cycle, players found a way to change those odds. By using window ledges and pallets, Survivors were able to find areas where Killers wouldn’t ever be able to catch them.
Behaviour did a good job of removing them as best they could–changing the map layout logic where necessary and implementing Killer Perks to readjust the odds in other areas. And when those solutions don’t work, there’s another on the cards. The Entity simply blocks the window in question to force the survivor to go elsewhere. Problems still crop up sometimes, but when they do, they’re best solved by a community of players who understand a key element of what makes Dead by Daylight fun–the game is better when both sides are having a good time.
A bit of role-playing makes these fantasy scenarios infinitely more interesting than just playing efficiently and killing everyone on sight. Dead by Daylight capitalises on this dynamic by incentivising those actions through the scoring system. Killers who eliminate all the Survivors the first time they find them will walk away with a large chunk of points, certainly. But those who toy with Survivors–who perform a variety of actions like targeting more than one Survivor at once, chasing them around the map, chopping someone down only to put them on a hook and then leave (allowing them to be rescued)–will find they’re able to rack up even larger scores. And they’ll do it without even necessarily killing all the Survivors.
The same goes for the other side. It’s obviously a cinch for a coordinated group of survivors to constantly bait a Killer into long chases while those not being pursued repair generators to escape, and it’s a quick way to knock out some games. Or you could take a bunch of solo-focused anti-slug perks (being downed causes a player to slither on the ground like a slug, and being left in this state is called being slugged) and a Skeleton Key and wait for enough teammates to die so you can make a quick escape through the Hatch. But the game is more thrilling and tangibly rewarding if you play into the theme of the game instead. If you take perks that help your teammates when they’re in trouble, or if you lead the Killer on nail-bitingly close races through the map, you’ll also find that you earn more points. Dead by Daylight directly rewards traits like Boldness and Altruism, and just as it’s possible to earn a ‘success’ without landing a kill as the Killer, a Survivor can die and still come out ahead points-wise.
Those points can be used to level up your characters, unlocking new perks and items to take into games. The more you play a particular Killer or Survivor, the more you unlock for them. Eventually you reach a point where you can unlock perks to make them available for other Killers or Survivors, encouraging you to step outside of your comfort zone if you want to build out characters in different ways.
As the game currently stands, these points also feed into a ranking system which defines the quality of player you’re up against. Behaviour Interactive flirted with changing this system while I was writing this review–introducing skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) briefly before removing it again. And while its implementation was a bit premature, SBMM seems like a system that would benefit the game in the long run. Dead by Daylight gains nothing by showing players their rank as it does currently, and it actually incentivises overly-competitive behaviours in players who find themselves chasing ‘pips’–the system used to define progression in the ranking system itself.
Something it hasn’t really improved since launch is the tutorial, and that’s another area where the community around the game can help point in the right direction. While the current tutorial teaches players the absolute basics, concepts like loops and the points system, which quickly become crucial to success in the game, are left for players to figure out on their own or to learn from other sources. And by outsourcing this opportunity to emphasise the pageantry at the heart of Dead by Daylight, there’s a missed opportunity to foster the attitude required to get the most out of the game.
At launch, Dead by Daylight suffered because of its reliance on peer-to-peer hosting and absent social features, but over time it rectified these issues. And while a brief and premature tussle with skill-based matchmaking turned the new player experience into a bit of a horror show (a problem which is now fixed), thanks to its community of players Dead by Daylight is without peer in the asymmetrical competitive multiplayer arena, and has grown into one of the most robust horror experiences around.
One of the new modes in Madden NFL 21 is The Yard, which is an arcade-style football offering where players can perform trick plays and have a generally less serious experience.
The 6v6 games will be played on special fields, and EA Sports has now begun to announce these through posts on social media. One of them, F.O.B. Nico, is set on a military base, while another one is set in the parking lot at Lambeau Field. Another field is The Port, which is an oceanside shipping center. Football is most popular in America, but the NFL has been trying to expand its reach to international markets, and that’s reflected in The Yard’s Brandenburg field in Germany.
You can see all of these fields in the videos below.
The Yard will feature new trick play animations never before seen in Madden. It will feature its own career with your customized avatar, letting you collect Rep to build rank and Cred to unlock gear. That gear includes jerseys with rarity statuses ranging from Common to Legendary.
The Yard will link up with The Yard: Underground on mobile. You’ll have a shared inventory and progress between the two, so you can keep earning Rep and Cred while you’re away from your console or PC.
Madden NFL 21’s introduction of a more casual, arcade-style mode is interesting given the timing. Starting in 2021, rival 2K Sports will begin developing arcade-style football games, though EA Sports will remain the exclusive developer of simulation-style football games.
Madden NFL 21 is coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC on August 28, with the Xbox Series X, PS5, and Stadia versions launching at a later date. For more details, check out our Madden NFL 21 pre-order guide.
There are a lot of streaming services now, and to keep up with all the content out there, you now need Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, Apple TV+, Shudder, HBO Max, Peacock, Quibi–the list goes on. Ryan Reynolds feels your pain, it seems, as his new joke streaming service shows.
Reynolds, a longtime ambassador for Mint Mobile, has just launched Mint Mobile Plus, the company’s premium streaming service. But it’s extremely tongue-in-cheek, as the whole service just has one movie–Reynolds’ 2003 heist movie Foolproof, a movie that just barely exists in the public consciousness.
Every tech company needs a streaming service. So… introducing Mint Mobile +. The world’s most affordable streaming service! pic.twitter.com/lSMzeurKp8
The site, which bases its design on Netflix, lists Foolproof in every category and in every spot of its Top 10, with different poster designs made to mimic posters for every sort of genre. It’s true commitment to the bit.
Foolproof, from Canadian director William Phillips, is about a group of friends that simulate heist plans in their spare time–until one of their plans gets stolen by an actual thief, who commits the crime and blackmails them. You can watch it now on Mint Mobile Plus, streaming at pristine standard definition quality.
Moments after the launch of the service, Reynolds hinted on Twitter that it would not last long. “Two minutes after launch and our crack data team has already determined Mint Mobile + should probably be shut down by the weekend,” he said. As of right now, though, it’s still up.
Ryan Reynolds has quite a few projects on the horizon, but we’re most excited for Free Guy, where he plays a video game NPC gone rogue.
Halo 3: ODST is the next game coming to PC through Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and it’s nearly ready for release. Developer 343 Industries announced in a blog post that it is expanding the game’s beta testing program this week, with more players getting invited in.
The initial tests led to the discovery of bugs and other issues, and 343 has fixed more than 80 bugs so far, the studio said. The newest wave of the beta test is scheduled to begin this week “barring any new major issues.” To get in, you need to be in the Halo Insider program, and you can sign up for it here.
Halo 3: ODST for PC has been tested more heavily than planned, and due to this, 343 is expanding the scope of the beta test. The previous plan was to launch the beta test with Halo 3: ODST and then roll out the planned Halo 3 changes later, but these will now be bundled together from the start. “As it stands right now, we have resolved all blocking bugs as of today across the entirety of the content. We are so close to getting this into your hands,” 343 said.
Halo 3: ODST is already on Xbox One, but there will be an Xbox beta as well to test some of the new changes and improvements. You can visit the Xbox Insider Hub on your console to sign up for a chance to play in the beta.
The Halo 3 changes are substantial. The game is getting weapon skins and new guns, some 13 years after the game was originally released in 2007. After Halo 3: ODST, 343 will add Halo 4 to The Master Chief Collection at some point later, thus completing the package.
Lazlow Jones, the voice of DJ Lazlow from Grand Theft Auto III onwards, has left Rockstar Games. Jones worked as a producer, director, and writer across the Grand Theft Auto series, as well as other Rockstar games, including Red Dead Redemption 2. Jones served at the studio for 19 years.
The news comes via Jones’ LinkedIn page, and was picked up on by Gtamen, then reported by Kotaku. It seems that Jones left the company in April 2020, after serving as the co-chair of the Rockstar Games Production department. He left the company two months after company founder Dan Houser also left the developer.
Jones’ LinkedIn page makes it clear how wide-reaching his work for the studio was. “My teams have produced video game trailers, gameplay videos, commercials, live Twitch streams, location recording- including facial capture technology, motion capture shoots, and in-game radio and TV content, including original animated shows,” he wrote. “During this time I wrote dialogue, composed songs and spoof jingles, curated music and directed musicians. I have directed thousands of voiceover sessions for video games, radio and cartoons.”
Prior to working at Rockstar, Jones was, in fact, a radio host–The Lazlow Show was a real radio program before it was in GTA III.
Jones has moved on to new projects, although his LinkedIn does not get too specific about it. “I am currently working on several projects, including development of shows for Disney and Netflix, consulting for a video game company and collaborating with a writer/director from Comedy Central and an Emmy winning producer and director formerly of Dreamworks,” he writes.
We have reached out to Rockstar for comment and will update if we receive any further details.
Grand Theft Auto V, along with Grand Theft Auto Online, is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X in 2021. Lazlow features as a character within the single-player campaign, as well as in GTA Online following the casino update.
In a post on Twitter, community manager John Junyszek said 343 understands that people have questions, but the studio is not quite ready to answer them. He promised that 343 will share more details at some point, but right now, the team is busy figuring out the best way to move forward.
“We know there are lots of questions out there, especially in regards to Halo Infinite, but please hold tight for now. There’s a lot to work through, including communication plans, but please know we’ll share more when ready.”
FYI: There will not be a Community Update this week. We know there are lots of questions out there, especially in regards to Halo Infinite, but please hold tight for now. There’s a lot to work through, including communication plans, but please know we’ll share more when ready 👊
Due in part to the complications related to working from home, Microsoft recently announced that Halo Infinite will miss the launch of the Xbox Series X and release in 2021 instead. It’s a big blow for the launch of the Xbox Series X, as it would have been the first time since 2001 that a Halo game released as a launch title for Xbox hardware. Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently said Microsoft considered releasing a part of Halo Infinite earlier, but the studio decided against this.
Halo Infinite is now slated for release in 2021, but 343 did not provide any clarity regarding what point in the year the game may release. It’s been a long time coming, as the last mainline release–Halo 5: Guardians–launched in October 2015.
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The death of Princess Diana was huge news in many parts of the world, and her figure looms large even today. With this in mind, her casting for the final seasons of Netflix’s The Crown is big news–and a very talented actor has been chosen for the part.
The Twitter account for The Crown has announced that Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki will play the Princess of Wales in the show’s final two seasons, 5 and 6. Debicki, who also stars in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, will be covering Diana’s later years before her untimely death in 1997.
“Princess Diana’s spirit, her words, and her actions live in the hearts of so many,” Debicki wrote in a statement included in the tweet. “It is my true privilege and honor to be joining this masterful series.”
The show is set to continue on beyond Diana’s death, which we would expect to be a major plotline for the show. The show is yet to air Season 4, although it is expected to launch on Netflix this year. In that season, Diana will be played by Emma Corrin.
The Crown Season 5 will not air until 2022. If you want to see Debicki at her best, make sure to watch Steve McQueen’s underseen masterpiece Widows–she’s incredible in it.
Make yourself some popcorn and get a good book if you plan on updating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare or Warzone on Xbox One. Despite the recent patch fixing only a few issues, it takes up more than 60GB of space on Microsoft’s console.
As we mentioned in our previous story on the latest Call of Duty patch notes, a weapon texture glitch was finally fixed in an update this weekend. That update was a max of 2GB on the PC and just over 1GB on PS4. Because of a problem with the patch delivery process on Xbox One, however, that platform must re-download files. It put the Xbox One file size at 66GB, though it also replaced certain files to keep the total size from ballooning any more.
With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Xbox One now weighing in at nearly 200GB, it raises concerns about the next-gen systems’ storage space. Xbox Series X will include a 1TB SSD, while PS5’s will be about 825GB. That will only take a few games of this size to fill up, and with increased visual fidelity and resolution, that will likely only increase.
Call of Duty: Warzone players are currently uncovering secrets from a teaser site that point to bunkers and hidden clues in the battle royale game. We’ll likely learn more about the new Call of Duty 2020 game soon, but it looks to be a Cold War game set in the Black Ops universe, much like the original game.
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It took more than two years, but legendary creep and martial artist extraordinaire Master Roshi has finally arrived to Dragon Ball FighterZ. He joins a roster that continues to expand, primarily with different variants of Goku, and can finally prove why you don’t need Saiyan blood to dominate on the battlefield.
Arriving next month, Master Roshi will be available as the latest fighter in the FighterZ Pass 3. Despite his small stature and the fact that he’s hundreds of years old, Master Roshi is lightning-quick and his Evil Containment Wave ability is sure to mess up his opponents. He’s suitably goofy, as well. As Dragon Ball Z progressed, Roshi mostly had to stay on the sidelines while more powerful heroes like Goku and Piccolo did the actual fighting. However, his training was invaluable in the series’ early years.
Bandai Namco’s announcement also included a trailer, which you can watch above. He follows Kefla and Ultra Instinct Goku in the FighterZ Pass 3, and there are still two characters remaining for the pass. We don’t yet have time windows for when those will arrive.
Dragon Ball FighterZ is available on Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Counting fusion characters, it features seven different versions of Goku and one imposter who looks like Goku. There are also five Vegeta variants. That is too many.
