PlayStation Plus is a necessity for many PS4 gamers as the annual membership grants access to online multiplayer as well as even bigger discounts on PS4 games. The subscription also nets members two free PS4 games every month (June’s freebies are quite good), as well as early access to certain demos and beta periods for games, exclusive content, and more. The 12-month membership generally sells for $60 a year, but right now, you can get a year of PS Plus for only $40 using promo code EMCTBVT44 at Newegg, a full 33% off the normal price. The membership is already discounted to $50, and the promo code will slash another $10 off.
After entering the promo code at checkout and purchasing, you’ll receive the membership code via email. The great thing is that you can stack PS Plus memberships, so even if you already renewed recently or don’t need to renew for a while, you can still take advantage of this deal, and the additional 12 months will just be added to your account.
Lots of people have played Pokemon Go, developer Niantic’s pop culture phenomenon of an augmented reality mobile game. Three years later, Harry Potter: Wizard Unite serves as something of a follow-up, bringing a lot of Pokemon Go’s sensibilities into the Wizarding World. But Wizards Unite is a bigger and more robust game than Pokemon Go was at its launch, with a lot more things to keep straight. That said, the underlying ideas–walking around your real neighborhood to locate virtual people, creatures, and objects and interact with them–are the same between the two AR games. If you’ve played Pokemon Go, you’ll catch on to Wizards Unite. (And if you need more tips, tricks, and coverage, be sure to check out our Harry Potter: Wizards Unite hub page.)
The thing about Wizards Unite is that there is a whole lot to know and learn about the game as you play it. You’ll be constantly inundated with tutorials to teach you about Traces, potions, battles, fortresses, Foundables, and more. There’s more to keep you engaged, but it’s not nearly as straightforward as Pokemon’s “catch creatures, battle creatures” underlying premise.
Fortunately, we’ve got a quick guide to help get you started. We’ve gathered all the information you’ll need, whether you’re a big fan of Pokemon Go or new to Niantic’s AR games. Read on for a quick explanation of all the game’s terminology and systems, along with how they all work, to support your quest to help Harry Potter and his pals save the world one more time.
It’s almost time. The third season of Stranger Things is out July 4 on Netflix, making way for the perfect holiday binge. Still, even with the new episodes of the Netflix original series coming so soon, it’s simply not soon enough. It’s been nearly two years since viewers last visited the Upside Down with Eleven, Mike, and the rest of the gang.
To help pass the time, I revisited the first two seasons of the show and worked my way through all 17 super-creepy episodes of the series to get ready for the arrival of Stranger Things 3. Along the way, it was clear that while there are so many good installments of this show, there’s also a few that don’t quite live up to the hype.
Naturally, there was no other choice but to rank every single episode of the show, from the pilot to the Season 2 finale, from every Demogorgon sighting to every time Eleven did something wild with her superpowers. It’s easy to see just how special Stranger Things is as a whole, but there are some truly rough bumps along the way. How rough? Take a look at the rankings and find out for yourself.
Apex Legends has been one of 2019’s biggest successes, and developer Respawn Entertainment is looking to keep its success going with Season 2. During EA Play at E3 2019, the creators revealed what’s to come for its battle royale spin-off from the Titanfall franchise, and how much the team learned following the runaway success after its surprise February debut. In addition to a significantly revised battle pass–lessening the grind and offering better rewards–we also learned of some buffs coming to characters like Mirage, along with everyone’s favorite gun–the Mozambique.
But the biggest news to come from EA Play was the reveal of Wattson, the game’s upcoming new legend. During EA Play, we spent some time talking with Apex Legends project lead Drew McCoy and lead product manager Lee Horn–along with a surprise special delivery from Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella. In our talk, they reflected on the fast and unexpected success of the game, and the big lessons they learned following the game’s debut.
For more info on Apex Legends, including what weapons will change and why dragons have suddenly appeared on the map, be sure to check back with us for updates on this evolving game.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and readability.
First off, can you talk about what it was like seeing Apex Legends become such a hit after launch?
Lee Horn: Yeah, I mean, the first couple weeks was just us watching twitch being like “Oh my god, I can’t believe this is happening.” No one here expected to find such a rabid fan base so quickly, and to find fans that were just excited about our game. This was great for the team, everyone was like “Yeah, we put a lot of time into this and it’s great to have that payoff.” But it’s also a learning experience for us.
Drew McCoy: It was crazy. Nothing can prepare you for that. You realize what’s happening as it’s happening. You don’t get much premunition to it, and so it’s just kind of washing over you.
Horn: On the first day, I think we were watching the meters fill up and it’s like, “I can’t believe we have that many players already.” Everyone was cheering, it was a very surreal experience.
McCoy: Yeah, we smashed our 7-8 week expectations on the first day. So it’s like “Oh no, what’s going to happen?” There’s a little strip mall next to the office. At lunch, we went over to get some food, but because everything was just continually growing, I actually brought my laptop and logged into work so we can watch the graphs while we ate–in case something started breaking. I was with a lot of the server engineers and that was our life for a while.
Horn: Now we can sort of take a breath.
McCoy: Yeah, time to get back to work.
Lee: Yeah, get back to work.
Following that success, it seems like there was a number of paths you could have taken with the game. What did you think was important to focus on first?
Horn: We definitely wanted more variety. We want you to sort of tackle a bunch of different things with challenges, but we’re not trying to go crazy yet. Again, a lot of people play the core of the game. We want to shake it up, but nothing too crazy. There’s a fine line and we’ll keep dancing on that. We’re also trying to come up with more game modes. We now have the Elite Queue, and that sort of gives players, especially the hardcore, a new way to play. Then the evolution of that is, with Season 2, we’ll have ranked. It’s not a temporary one, that’s more of a full feature game mode for Apex Legends.
With that in mind, what were some of the lessons learned from the last version of the Battle Pass, and how that informed what was to come with Season 2?
Horn: We spent a lot of time reading Reddit, going through Reddit, getting the community feedback. A lot of it was like we talked about, the game came out, it was like “Oh, crap we’ve got to work fast, we got to add more.” The players were asking for a Battle Pass so we kind of had to do the best we could do given that we had a five to six-week timeline to work with.
So with this season, we’ve heard all the feedback. A big thing for us this season is challenges, which will keep the gameplay fresh as you’re leveling up. The total time to get to max level is reduced considerably, and even casual players will feel a nice ramp-up to the battle pass. We’re putting crafting metals in, that was a big community request, and you will be able to get the legendary of your choice. We added three other legendaries to the track, so that’s Caustic, Octane, and then the Spitfire weapon skin. We’re also adding three new content types that will replace the voice lines, badges, and the stat trackers. We’re leaving other things as a surprise for when season two launches, but there will be completely new categories that you’ve never seen before content.
Another change that a lot of people are happy about is for Mozambique, a gun that’s somewhat notorious for being unreliable in most combat encounters. Can you talk about the general reception it’s had since launch, and how you wanted to change it?
Horn: So, I think we’re leaving that one for a surprise, but our hope is that we’ll have some late-game potential for it. If you find it, you’ll consider it as a real choice versus a sort of temporary measure. But I mean, we enjoy a good meme, and it’s exciting to see people responded so strongly to it. That’s sort of why we added like a joke throw away animation. Now, when you replace Mozambique, you like just throw it down.
So yeah, we embrace it but we also–at the same time–are trying to come up with ways to be viable and things like that. So a lot of the changes you’ll see for weapons are sort of trying to give the underplayed weapons situations when they’re good.
Is there a worry there that a slight buff to one gun–even the Mozambique–could seriously disrupt the flow?
Horn: Yeah, most of the time we try to stick with hop ups [gun attachments that alter weapons] so that way it sort of makes it late-game, because you have to find component A and component B and put them together. So the Mozambique’s still the early game, better than a kick–or arguably better than a kick, but it’s still worse to some people. So yeah, we’re trying to do it through ways that will make it not better early-game necessarily. We’re buffing some damage here and there, and some small tweaks to just sort of make it not feel like a wet noodle gun. But we are trying to make it so that it’ll be worthwhile when trying to progress to the next weapon. That is a goal, and hopefully the hop ups we’ll add as well can make it exciting and open up new gameplay.
The new Legend coming to the game is Wattson, who has some cool tactics that relate to locking areas down. Have there been any cool tricks or skills that you’ve seen players pull off from your playtests?
McCoy: Well, I’m a mostly simple player, so Wattson’s like really complex for me. You have to plan, have an idea, and try to execute on it. So I’m part of the wrong one to ask about her. I don’t know if you’ve had any really good experience with her?
Horn: We’ve seen some cool things so far. Like when there are multiple teams in Skull Town with Wattsons, and they essentially just lock it down with her fences. They basically turn it into this crazy prison city.
McCoy: I was actually in a final circle once where Caustic and Wattson were hunkered down in a building during the final circle, and it was like impenetrable. We got just destroyed because it was their house and we were not welcome.
Lee Horn: (Laughs) Yeah so they’ll have a great trade-off of being really strong, or that duo will be really strong in buildings obviously, but if they get caught out in the open and they didn’t have time to set up. So it’s a lot of like anticipation gameplay and sort of thinking about where the fight will be versus reacting to the fight right now.
Can you talk a little about the process of making a new legend?
McCoy: Generally, a legend can take a year and a half to make–so we came up with our main roster really far in advance. We have a bunch of them that we prototype and iterate on, and they all have kind of like different stages they go through in development. We have to make sure that they’re fun enough, they’ve got a good personality, their assets are looking good, and that they have a silhouette that gives off their personality.
It just takes a long time. We’ve got stuff that we haven’t shown yet that we’ve been working on for more than a year and a half. That’s the tricky part about game development, the live service world. People expect satisfaction immediately and they don’t realize how long it takes to make content. So we have to use our crystal ball and think; what are people going to like a year from now? And start working on that while looking at what the game’s doing and it’s adjusting along the way. It’s kind of a dark art.
I’d imagine that you all must agonize over how new legends will play with others.
Horn: We play test the game twice a day, which can be up to three or four hours if you participate in all of it. That’s usually where we get that kind of insight. We’ll lock all characters but say the four or five we’re working on, and just play those so we can get a lot of reps on them. That’s where we feel out the balance changes. We also have periodically brought in streamers to give feedback. Not for marketing purposes but just to play the game, tell us what’s working. If they have a crystal ball, what do they see happening with this character if it was to come out as it is? That’s been really helpful as well.
Editor’s Note: At this point, Respawn Entertainment Co-Founder Vince Zampella arrived with lunchtime fajitas for the devs, proudly asking McCoy and Horn “would you like some fajitas?” He stuck around for the remainder of the interview.
Since you’re here, what are your overall thoughts on just how successful Apex Legends has been?
Vince Zampella: Yeah, holy shit, right? (Laughs) It just went way past our expectations. I think Lee and Drew already spoke this, but you know, it creates its own set of problems too right? We weren’t prepared for it, I mean even like just on the hardware side. It’s a great problem to have, don’t get me wrong, right? But it’s still like, I think Drew was walking around in a zombie-like state for about two months. It’s created a lot of work, but it’s amazing to see. I don’t think we would change it if we could. It took us all by surprise.
Did the sudden success of the game force you to reevaluate certain features or shift your perspective of what the game can be?
McCoy: Not necessarily what it could be, but like a really practical example of what we wanted to focus on was anti-cheat. Cheaters go to games that are popular. Not that we were expecting the game to fail, but we weren’t expecting it to be as popular as it was. So we thought our anti-cheat would be sufficient–it turned out it wasn’t. So we had to divert a bunch of resources away from other things, and start working on cheaters, spammers and stuff like that. That’s just one of the things we knew we were going to have to do if the game got big enough. We just happen to do it in the first month, rather than it be twelve months down the road.
Horn: A lot of the features we wanted on day one was going to be hard to deliver, regardless of how much time we had. But now that frenzy at launch has died down, we can now sort of take a breath, and then get back to work.
Coming to the WWE Network this Sunday, June 23, is the latest PPV, Stomping Grounds. It has nothing to do with the WWE Network original series Breaking Ground, though we wish it did. WWE superstars will battle each other at the event, and GameSpot, per usual, will be covering and reviewing the show live.
As previously mentioned, Stomping Grounds takes place on Sunday, June 23. Depending on where you live on this planet, you’ll have to tune in at different times if you want to watch live. Check out the times for Stomping Grounds below. Keep in mind, that the Kickoff Show starts one prior to the main card.
4 PM PT
6 PM C
7 PM ET
12 AM BST (June 24)
9 AM AET (June 24)
Below, you’ll find the full match card for the show, which consists of nine bouts over the course of the evening, seven of which will be for WWE championship titles.
Stomping Grounds Match Card:
Seth Rollins (c) vs. Baron Corbin (Universal Championship)
Kofi Kingston (c) vs. Dolph Ziggler (Steel Cage Match for the WWE Championship)
Becky Lynch (c) vs. Lacey Evans (Raw Women’s Championship)
Bayley (c) vs. Alexa Bliss (Smackdown Women’s Championship)
Daniel Bryan & Rowan (c) vs. Heavy Machinery (Smackdown Tag Team Championships)
Roman Reigns vs. Drew McIntyre
Samoa Joe (c) vs. Ricochet (United States Championship)
Big E & Xavier Woods vs. Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn
Tony Nese (c) vs. Akira Tozawa vs. Drew Gulak (Cruiserweight Championship)
Like most people on the internet, GameSpot has some opinions about which way we think these matches will go, and one half of the Wrestle Buddies, Mat Elfring, is chiming in with his rude and quite possibly crude opinions–they’re not crude. Check out all the matches below and our predictions for the show.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the new mobile game from Warner Bros. and Pokemon Go developer Niantic, is now live a little early in the US and UK. Since its announcement, Wizards Unite has drawn frequent comparisons to Pokemon Go, and not without reason; not only are both titles developed by the same studio, they share many similar gameplay elements. Now that we’ve gotten our hands on the full game, how exactly do the two titles compare? Read on as we break down their similarities and differences, or check out more in-depth guide to Wizards Unite for Pokemon Go players.
The general thrust of Wizards Unite is very similar to Pokemon Go, albeit with a Harry Potter spin. Just as in the Pokemon mobile game, gameplay primarily revolves around exploring the real world in search of collectibles. Rather than catching Pokemon, however, you’ll be hunting for “Foundables”–people, creatures, and artifacts from the Wizarding World that have begun appearing in the Muggle world.
Not only is the basic premise of Wizards Unite similar, many of its elements have analogs in Pokemon Go. The game’s equivalent of Gyms are called Fortresses, and just as in Pokemon Go, these will host Raid-like “Wizarding Challenges” that will require players to team up in-person to tackle. Instead of a Pokedex, you have a Registry that gradually fills out as you collect Foundables. Inns serve the same function as Pokestops, while Portkeys are similar to Eggs; after you’ve used either a Gold or Silver Key (Wizard Unite’s version of Incubators), you’ll need to log a certain number of steps and the Portkey will take you to a Wizarding World location.
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While the games’ foundations are very similar, however, Wizards Unite differs from Pokemon Go in some significant ways. The most obvious is the sheer amount of content it has from the outset; right from the start, Wizards Unite features a variety of quest objectives to complete. The game also places a bigger emphasis on story, with fully voiced dialogue and a clear–if not entirely comprehensible–plot running through the experience.
Wizards Unite also employs more traditional RPG-like elements than Pokemon Go does. Once you’ve reached level six in the game, you’ll be able to choose a Profession, which will allow you to unlock abilities in skill trees. The game also features a potion-brewing system.
The screenshots look similar to Kingdom Hearts in aesthetic, but with a darker, grittier palette. They show iconic characters Aeris, Barret, Cloud, Tifa, and Sephiroth, all rendered in typical Testuya Nomura fashion. Some are stills from combat encounters with bits of the HUD visible, while others are likely from explorative gameplay sections. There also seem to be a handful of shots from possible in-game cutscenes, including an epic back-to-back shot of Cloud and Tifa. You can check out the new screens below.
We discussed the modernization of Final Fantasy VII Remake in a feature article, with managing editor Peter Brown saying he “[fell] in love with the world and characters all over again” after going hands-on with the game on the E3 2019 show floor. “It would be far too premature to claim that the final product will be as amazing as my demo, but at the risk of sounding naive once again, I’m given hope as I recall the experience I had when I first played the original PlayStation demo in 1996, and how that experienced carried over to the full game,” Brown wrote of the demo.
Final Fantasy VII Remake will launch exclusively for PlayStation 4 on March 3, 2020. Square also confirmed that the hotly-anticipated RPG will be playable on PlayStation 5 and will span two discs worth of gameplay content.
Nintendo Switch games are notoriously expensive, but there are a few reliable ways to save yourself some cash. The Nintendo Eshop regularly has sales, and the company began offering a pair of game vouchers for $100 to players with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription that you can then redeem on two games, saving yourself up to $20. But on top of these deals, there’s another way to make your money go even further that fewer people consider: gift card discounts.
Currently, at Newegg, you can save 10% on a $50 Nintendo Eshop gift card by using promo code EMCTBVT49 at checkout. That translates into getting a $50 gift card for only $45, which may not seem like a huge price cut, but why stop there? You can then turn around and use that gift card on already discounted games, saving yourself even more money.
An even sneakier way to use discounted gift cards is to buy a pair of $50 gift cards and use those to buy two game vouchers at Nintendo for $100, assuming you have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. (Reminder: You can get a year of Switch Online for free through Amazon Prime.) Not only are you saving $20 on two full-price games with the vouchers, but you’re saving an additional $10 with the gift card deal, getting you $120 in value for only $90. That translates to getting two new $60 Nintendo games for only $45 each. Plus, you’ll get 500 My Nintendo Gold Points from the voucher purchase, which equals another $5 in Eshop credit. The eligible list of games for Nintendo’s vouchers includes upcoming releases like Pokemon Sword and Shield, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Super Mario Maker 2, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and more.
This particular Newegg gift card deal is only running for a few more days, but gift card discounts do pop up often in case you miss this one. Xbox One and PS4 gift cards also get marked down by $5 or $10 regularly, so you can save money when shopping for those platforms as well. For example, BJ’s members can currently get a $25 PlayStation Store gift card for only $20, which can be used to save even more money on some of the great PS4 games on sale right now.
Microsoft exclusive Gears 5, which unveiled a haunting cinematic trailer during the company’s E3 2019 presentation, is only a few months away. Details about the upcoming third-person shooter continue to emerge with its September release right around the corner, and a new post on the Gears 5 official website provides some enticing information, including free content and the lack of a season pass.
The news post outlines a bunch of the game’s details. We get a cinematic glimpse at new Gear Fahz Chutani (played by Rahul Kohli, Rage 2‘s Garcia the Gregarious). The post also goes over the game’s new 3-player co-op mode Escape, which you can check out 10-minutes of gameplay footage above. But the biggest piece of news centers around additional content.
Developer The Coalition touts a “player-first experience,” stating some of the game’s additional content will be free. According to the post, Gears 5 will feature no season pass, no loot boxes, and free DLC maps for matchmaking and private play. The maps sound similar to Gears of War 4, but where that game required you own the map to play them in private matches after they left the playlist, this game doesn’t seem to have that limitation. Though Gears 5 will have microtransactions, the post confirms that “all store purchases are direct,” meaning no RNG (random number generator) will play in a role in what you get. An IGN report reveals that Gears 5 will feature seven different types of cosmetics that can be purchased will real money: costumes, weapon skins, banners (emblems with more surface area), expressions (emotes), executions, blood sprays, and marks (to mark targets). “The only random kind of chance you have is that there’s a type of content that we essentially give to the player for free just for playing,” The Coalition boss Rod Fergusson told IGN during E3 2019.
Gears 5 follows Kat Diaz (played by Laura Bailey, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End‘s Nadine Ross) as she searches to uncover the truth behind her heritage and her connection to the Locust. Xbox boss Phil Spencer said Gears 5 was ” looking great” when he visited the Vancouver-based studio in March 2019.
Gears 5 will release on September 10 for PC and Xbox One. A versus technical test is scheduled for Friday, July 19, with Horde Mode getting its own test sometime this August.
