As Golden Week kicks off in Japan, marking a week-long vacation for many Japanese workers, the rest of us can enjoy a huge wave of deals that celebrate the long history of iconic Japanese-made games. If you’re a PlayStation owner, be sure to hit up PSN’s Golden Week sale, which has more than 500 PS4, PS3, PS Vita, and PSP games and DLC discounted until May 7. While Microsoft hasn’t posted a Golden Week sale, PC gamers are in luck, as Steam just launched its own sale on thousands of PC games and DLC, which ends May 6 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET.
A ton of classic Japanese-developed series are represented in Steam’s Golden Week sale, from Dark Souls and Devil May Cry to Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, and Resident Evil. Some great games are discounted, including Resident Evil 2 for $39.59, Nier: Automata for $30, Nioh: Complete Edition for $25, and Dark Souls III‘s Deluxe Edition for just over $21. Quite a few fighting games are discounted–Dragon Ball FighterZ is down to just $15, Jump Force is available for $36, and Street Fighter V is only $8.
CBS is renewing Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone for a second season. A CBS All Access exclusive, The Twilight Zone is a modern reimagining of the TV series of the same name that began airing in 1958.
“Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg’s reimagining of The Twilight Zone is off to an amazing start on CBS All Access, driving the most viewers on its premiere day for an original series to date,” CBS All Access executive vice president of original content Julie McNamara said in a blog post. “Jordan, Simon, the creative team and cast have done a phenomenal job translating the series’ legacy of socially conscious storytelling for modern-day audiences. They are master storytellers, and we look forward to bringing fans further into The Twilight Zone with a second season.”
Though many of the episodes in Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone are brand-new stories, a few are reimagined variations of episodes from the original series. One of the first episodes, for example, Nightmare at 30,000 Feet is a modern retelling of the original series’ Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. However, even in the brand-new stories, there are plenty of references and call backs to the original The Twilight Zone.
Not only does The Twilight Zone come from the mind of Jordan Peele, the Get Out and US director serves as the shows’ mysterious host and narrator. His production company, Monkeypaw, produces the series. The Twilight Zone cast includes several big name actors, including Ike Barinholtz, John Cho, Lucinda Dryzek, Taissa Farmiga, Greg Kinnear, Luke Kirby, Sanaa Lathan, Rhea Seehorn, Alison Tolman, Jacob Tremblay, Jefferson White, Jonathan Whitesell, Jessica Williams, DeWanda Wise, and Steven Yeun.
For a deeper dive into the first few episodes of The Twilight Zone, check out our breakdowns that are listed below.
The Twilight Zone Episode Breakdowns
New episodes of The Twilight Zone air on CBS All Access on Thursdays. Disclosure: GameSpot is owned by CBS.
Avengers: Endgame had an amazing opening weekend, shattering box office records, as expected–anticipation for the movie was at a boiling point. More than likely, you’ve already seen the movie once–or even twice–by now, and you probably have some burning questions about the plot or the characters within the Marvel film.
Warning: There are Endgame spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, maybe take a minute to check out our spoiler-free review and learn when the best times are to use the bathroom during this three hour long movie.
While we loved Endgame, thinking back about the latest MCU movie, there were things that either didn’t sit well with us or that we wanted to learn more about. It’s time to open up some of the discussion when it comes to time travel, the missing five years, and how everyone got to that final battle so quickly. If you have questions of your own, please let us know.
Five years have passed between the devastating end of Infinity War and the moment during the climax of Endgame, where Banner snaps his fingers and reverses Thanos’s initial snap. All those who turned to dust are returned, and as Peter explains to Tony, it seems that for them no time has passed at all. This means that those who remained are now five years older than their friends who did not–many will have moved on with their lives. The following movies probably won’t spend a whole lot of time exploring this, but it’s worth remembering that it’s now 2023 in the world of the MCU.
(There’s some extra confusion, because it seems from trailers for the upcoming Spider-Man: Far From Home that Peter’s friends are all still the same age as him, as opposed to the young adults they would be if they had survived the first Snap. Did they all vanish? Is Far From Home set before Infinity War? We’ll find out in July!)
Avengers: Endgame has the nearly impossible task of bringing plot threads established, expanded, and twisted across 21 different movies to a satisfying conclusion. All the stuff that’s been set up, hinted at, or teased across the last decade is supposed to be leading to this one place–and not only does Endgame have to deal with all that plot, it also has to work on resolving a variety of years-long character arcs. With all that in mind, it’s no wonder Endgame clocks in at three hours long.
Like any massive undertaking of this scope, some elements of Endgame are more successful than others, as Senior Entertainment Editor Mike Rougeau pointed out in his review. The story ultimately belongs to Tony Stark, and it is successful in bringing to a close what Iron Man started 11 years ago. But Endgame isn’t nearly as well balanced as other Avengers movies, despite Thanos’s many lectures about the importance of evening the scales, and several of its main characters are short-changed throughout the proceedings.
The character who gets mistreated the worst is, easily, Black Widow. The decision to sacrifice Black Widow for the Soul Stone is a messy and frustrating one on a lot of levels. First and foremost, Widow has more character development than just about anybody in Endgame, despite being more or less silent through the course of Infinity War. After the time skip in the post-Thanos world, it’s not Captain America or Tony Stark holding the Avengers together to safeguard the world–it’s Black Widow.
Natasha Romanoff has come a long way through the course of the MCU, from aloof spy at Nick Fury’s beck and call to finding her calling as a full-fledged Avenger, and now, literally leading the cause. When everyone else wandered off into their respective lives–Tony starting a family, Steve processing his grief, Thor falling into depression, Hulk embracing his celebrity–Black Widow kept the lights on.
What’s more, she’s the character most obviously burdened by the aftermath of Thanos. Five years on and Nat can barely deal with what has happened to the world on her watch (a weight that, frankly, should have been borne by Captain America, given his past character development). Nat talks in Endgame about how important the Avengers have been to her, and how the opportunity to become a superhero allowed her to make up for her darker spy history. The team means more to Nat, seemingly, than anyone else, and their loss to Thanos devastates her.
Especially painful for Nat is what the failure to stop Thanos has done to Clint “Hawkeye” Barton, who, after losing his family, has gone full-on psychopathic vigilante. Clint is out there dealing with his loss by racking up a major body count. Nat owes Clint a great deal, as established in The Avengers: Though it’s only discussed and alluded to, we know that it was Clint who brought Nat over to the side of the good guys years ago, when he could have killed her instead. A big part of Nat’s story in The Avengers is that she feels indebted to Hawkeye and bent on saving him from Loki. She clearly feels responsible for what he has become in Endgame.
All that builds to a Black Widow who occupies a place at the heart of the Avengers in Endgame, but who never gets to fulfill that role in a movie that constantly overlooks her. In just a few scenes, it’s clear she has the most skin in the game against Thanos, and that’s where some of the most interesting potential conflict and emotion in the movie resides. But then the movie sends Nat to Vormir with Barton, where they replay Thanos’s sacrifice of Gamora, but, like, friendlier.
Chucking Black Widow over a cliff on Vormir is a complete waste of her character and a frustrating end to her arc throughout the MCU (Clint, on the other hand, makes more sense for the sacrifice given what he’s done as Ronin, even if offing him there would be completely predictable). Black Widow has her own standalone movie coming, which you might think makes up a bit for her death in Endgame, but it actually makes the choice to use her in this way all the more baffling. The stories of women in the MCU are finally getting told, and one of the most important ones is finally getting the spotlight–why cut off her future when you’re about to flesh out her character?
And not just that–killing Black Widow in the middle of the movie is also a really bad look for a studio that has struggled with perceived sexism throughout this franchise (Marvel infamously made toys of all the heroes except Black Widow back when The Avengers came out). The next scene after Black Widow’s death throws into sharp relief the fact that the movie just disposed of its most major female character: We cut back to all the remaining Avengers having feelings about the loss of Nat–and they’re all dudes. Twice, the MCU sacrificed important women for a magic rock in order to give surviving men their feels.
And while Tony gets a hero’s sendoff and a funeral attended by a ridiculous number of big names–including some characters who appear in the movie only for that purpose–Natasha Romanoff, a character central to the MCU since Iron Man 2, gets a momentary mention from Barton, and she has to share it with Wanda lumping in Vision.
Avengers, Assemble (Around Iron Man)
Endgame’s handling of Natasha is its biggest problem, but far from its only one. Rocket, Nebula, War Machine, Ant-Man–they have next to nothing going on in terms of character development and are mostly warm bodies waiting to serve functions in the plot. If they’re lucky, they get a few jokes.
Hulk is flubbed even more than those others. Like most of the Avengers, Hulk has zero arc in Endgame; he mostly exists to push buttons on a console and say time travely things. It’s worse than just a misuse of one of the main cast of Avengers, though. The driving force of Bruce Banner’s story, the motivation at his core, is the conflict between Banner and Hulk. Banner is constantly afraid he’ll lose control, and lose his very sense of self, by becoming Hulk, while hurting innocent people in the process. Through his life with the Avengers, Banner has found a use for Hulk, and in Infinity War, their dynamic changed. Banner could no longer use Hulk as his battering ram when danger reared up, and as Thor: Ragnarok established, Hulk was more than just a raging monster–he was a person unto himself.
Endgame deals with these evolving ideas about Hulk’s dichotomy by resolving all his issues off-screen. During the five-year time skip, Bruce just figures out how to mix his own personality together with Hulk’s. In the post-Thanos world, Bruce is doing pretty great! He gets to be huge and strong while maintaining his intellect and personality, all his personal demons have been exorcized, and he finally has love and acceptance from the people, rather than their fear and resentment–another core driver of his character throughout the MCU. Banner didn’t resolve his troubles by learning or growing or doing anything; Endgame just handwaved them away and moved on.
And then there’s Captain America, whose wrap-up in Endgame Meg Downey already addressed. The Avengers’ through-line since the very beginning has been an ideological schism between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers that speaks to the fundamental nature of their characters. Tony will give up a lot for safety and protection, and is often looking for the preemptive solution to a problem. Steve has, tragically, lost everything and has no ties to the present world, but given the chance to get back some of what he’s lost, he’s willing to gamble everything. These things are why Steve would fight his Avengers pals to try to save Bucky; they’re what blinded Tony to what he was risking in creating Ultron. They’re why the two of them clashed in Captain America: Civil War. The wounds from that movie never healed and its conflicts were never resolved. Endgame seems ready to deal with them all, especially early on, when Tony, half-dead from starvation, took Cap to task for failing to be there to fight Thanos together as a result of their schism.
Endgame is perfectly suited to pit these two characters and their ideologies against one another. When Cap gets a time travel solution to undo Thanos’ snap, Tony is stuck worrying about the family he’s gained in the five years since. Cap is willing to die to retrieve what he lost; Tony is willing to die to protect what he has. It’s a great setup for conflict and, eventually, resolution between the two men.
Instead, the movie conveniently just puts an end to the longstanding feud between Cap and Tony in one conversation, where both basically say, “Eh, let’s move on.” Meanwhile, Cap winds up with no character arc at all. He executes some time travel shenanigans and he hits Thanos in the face, and the real character stuff gets handed off to Tony. Pointedly, Steve and Tony never exchange words in the scene before Tony’s death.
Endgame completely wastes plot threads set up over multiple movies that have informed the core plotlines of what makes the Avengers interesting. It’s not that Endgame couldn’t or shouldn’t be Tony Stark’s movie–it’s fitting to focus on him as a bookend to how the MCU started–but a focus on Tony doesn’t necessarily require the exclusion of the other Avengers. So much of Tony’s development as a character has come through his interactions and disagreements with Cap, so why not bring those disagreements to a thorough conclusion that allows them both to grow? Why call the movie “Avengers” if all the Avengers aren’t going to have equal importance in the story?
The thing that made the Marvel Cinematic Universe exciting was its ability and willingness to pay off investment, to build character arcs over multiple stories, making interactions between superheroes that go beyond punching people to deal with deeper emotional conflicts, scars, and baggage. Telling what is more or less one story over more than 20 disparate films has been an incredible achievement–and something that made being an MCU fan worth the time and money it requires. There are a ton of these movies, but tuning in for all of them allowed you to enjoy and understand each one in more ways than is usually possible with film franchises.
Emotionally, Endgame hits a lot of the right notes to pay off all that MCU work. There’s a reason it’s breaking box office records–it’s a fun, exciting movie that works with the broad strokes of the MCU. As epic conclusions go, it’s pretty damn epic. And the conclusion of Tony Stark’s story is legitimately well-executed, thoughtful, and powerful. Despite its problems, at the top level, there’s a lot of payoff for MCU fans to be had in Endgame.
But from a more granular, close-up perspective, the conclusion of that story and the MCU experiment, Avengers: Endgame is something of failure. Tony Stark’s story gets the wrap-up it deserves, and a few other characters (Thor, most notably) get an emotional and involved journey that uses the best elements of the MCU to its advantage. But Endgame drops the ball on what has made the MCU movies, and the Avengers films in particular, worth showing up for over the last few years. In trying to wrap up everything neatly, Endgame fails to be the satisfying conclusion the Avengers deserved.
Treyarch has released a new Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 trailer for the game’s upcoming content drop, titled Operation Spectre Rising. The new Operation introduces a brand-new Specialist, as well as new features in Black Ops 4’s different multiplayer modes.
The new Specialist is called Spectre. Armed with a sharp katana, Spectre is able to approach groups of enemies and quickly leap between them to deliver devastating slashes. They can also see the outlines of enemies through their smoke grenades, allowing them to get the drop on targets. Spectre will also be added to Blackout as a new skin for your character.
Strike from the shadows. Operation Spectre Rising introduces Spectre as the latest Multiplayer Specialist and Blackout character. Drop into the Wetworks Map Update, unlock new weapons, take on new Zombies Gauntlets, and much more. #BlackOps4pic.twitter.com/XVXwAh27iQ
Three new maps drop in Operation Spectre Rising as well. Artifact is a collection of narrow paths that weave between a collection of rocks and cliffs. You can stay hidden down below, but have the chance of running into an enemy hiding behind a corner, or take the high ground at the cost of exposing yourself. Masquerade is a new metropolitan map that intermixes back alleys with large open spaces that are populated by festival decorations you can use as cover. Finally, WMD comes to Black Ops 4 in the new Operation as well, which is a remaster of the map of the same name from the original Black Ops.
The Blackout map receives a huge update in Operation Spectre Rising. Much like how Fortnite‘s map transforms over time, the original map in Call of Duty’s battle royale mode is undergoing a change, nicknamed Wetworks. The dam that marked the top of Blackout will be destroyed, allowing all the water behind it to flood into the rest of the map. This sees all of the shipping containers at shipyard get washed out to sea, and for many of the areas at lower elevations to become flooded. This provides greater utility to boats and helicopters in Blackout, as many pathways on the map can now only be traversed by going through or over water.
Operation Spectre Rising also adds new characters to play as in Blackout battle royale, new game modes (Bounty Hunter, Prop Hunt, and Zombie Gauntlets), and new weapons (Ballistic Knife, Tigershark LMG, Nifo’oti Club), outfits, and weapon charms and camos. The Operation goes live on April 30 on PS4, and follows on Xbox One and PC at a later date.
Contrary to what many were theorizing, Cersei’s selfish gamble paid off beautifully. The Night King did not sack King’s Landing. She has not suffered, thus far, for betraying her promise to Tyrion, and now, she will reap the rewards. She has a massive army, plus reinforcements from the Golden Company, to hold her position in King’s Landing.
Ellaria Sand pointed out in Season 7 that Daenerys had enough forces to sack King’s Landing and take the Iron Throne outright; she didn’t, out of concern for the innocent people who would die. Now, with all the Dothraki dead and the Unsullied severely diminished, she may not even have the firepower for a worst case scenario. Two dragons may not be enough; King’s Landing will probably have one of those giant crossbows set up on every tower.
And therein may be the ultimate subverted expectation: There will be no final, epic battle for the Iron Throne. Instead, it will be a more subtle, intellectual game of chess, filled with conversations and maneuvering. Political prowess, rather than brute force, may determine the winner at the end of the day.
Think infiltration and strategy, rather than a big dumb attack to the front. These last three episodes will be more up Tyrion and Varys’s alley than Euron Greyjoy’s. Tyrion, in particular, has been taking a back seat recently and has been wrong more than right. Don’t expect that to last for much longer.
Fortnite is appearing to continue teasing the arrival of Season 9, with a few new world events that may be connected. First, the fourth in a series of mysterious runes has slotted into place in the vault underneath Loot Lake. Shortly after, the island’s volcano has started to emit plumes of smoke, suggesting an eruption may be imminent.
Users on the Fortnite subreddit have captured both in action. The fourth rune is the latest to slot into place as they’ve been approaching one-by-one over the last several days. The volcanic smoke was confused as a “tornado” but appears to be heralding something destructive.
All of this appears to be laying the groundwork for the next big world event, which will accompany the seasonal changeover. The next season should be coming within a few weeks, so now is the time to start teasing the event. Fortnite tends to accompany its season changes with world events that disrupt the map and add new gameplay elements. A volcanic eruption would certainly fit the bill, but the game has been known to throw a curveball and have events trigger something unexpected.
Meanwhile, a limited-time mode has been added to celebrate the release of Avengers: Endgame, the latest MCU blockbuster. You can equip the Infinity Gauntlet and several pieces of iconic Avengers gear, and complete challenges that will grant you special themed rewards. The mode won’t last forever, though, so if you want to try it out or earn some of those snazzy rewards, you should get right on it.
Fortnite has become known for offering frequent updates, both with special LTMs like the Avengers event and with large-scale seasonal changeovers. Epic Games has reportedly adopted a crunch culture to rapidly iterate on the massive game, which means that all these events comes at a cost.
We are in the endgame, but Avengers: Endgame is not the end. At least, not technically.
All your favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe actors have huge new projects on the horizon, in film and television, whether or not their characters actually survived the events of the latest Avengers epic.
Let’s take a look at all their upcoming roles, and gaze into the future of cinema itself!
NOTE: Every film and television project listed below is subject to change, so stay tuned to IGN for future updates.
