Hearthstone Battlegrounds patch 16.4 brings the biggest beasts of them all to the game: Dragons. Dragon minions and heroes are being added into the battleground with the all new Descent of Dragons card pack.
This new pack brings 18 new minions to the fold, with 12 of these minions falling into the new Dragon minion type. Galakrong, and Reno Jackson (or Renegos) will be available as Heroes alongside the five original Dragon Aspects.
You can get a free Descent of Dragons card pack on Twitch from February 26 at 11 AM PT to February 29 at 5 PM PT, after watching three hours of any Hearthstone stream. Watch for 6 hours to get a second pack. These hours can be non-consecutive in case you don’t have 9 hours to just watch streams online.
There were also a number of balance changes and bug fixes implemented in the patch. The full details can be found on the official Hearthstone blog.
The new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, is looking like it might be the longest entry in the history of the 58-year-old franchise. The Regal Cinemas website (via ScreenRant) shows that No Time To Die will run for 163 minutes, or 2 hours and 43 minutes.
If this is true, that would make it the longest entry in the 007 series by far.
2015’s Spectre currently holds the length record, at 148 minutes, or 2 hours and 28 minutes. The shortest Bond movie ever was Quantum of Solace, which was only 106 minutes long, or 1 hour and 46 minutes.
As ScreenRant points out, listings by cinemas are not always accurate. Theatres listed 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker at 155 minutes, but it was actually only 142 minutes. Sony Pictures, the producers of the Bond franchise, have yet to announce an official runtime for No Time To Die.
No Time To Die is the final 007 movie with Daniel Craig in the lead role. Director Cary Fukunaga recently teased in a behind-the-scenes video that No Time To Die will tie up loose ends, of which there are many after Craig’s four previous Bond movies, and this may help explain the longer runtime.
“No Time To Die is the culmination of all that Bond has become,” Fukunaga said. “With all that he’s seen, the trauma, the loss, what is that mission that would be his most challenging and his most difficult? That was our target. Everything that was left unsaid, will finally be said.”
Insurgency: Sandstorm finally has a console release date, over a year after the game’s initial, fairly buggy PC release. The game, which focuses on realism and teamwork, stripping the UI back to the essentials, will release for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on August 25, 2020.
You can see the console release date announcement trailer below, which shows off the gritty combat. It’s a primarily competitive game, featuring multiple online modes where you fight against other players. There’s also a co-op mode, Checkpoint, where players team up to fight AI and complete objectives.
The game has been praised for its audio design, which aims for heightened realism and more intense battle noises.
The game is playable at PAX East over the weekend of February 28 to March 2, if you’re in Boston. This is good news, since The Last of Us Part II demo won’t be there and companies like CD Projekt Red and PUBG Corporation have also pulled out over fears sparked by the coronavirus.
If you’re after a different shooter to kill time until Insurgency: Sandstorm releases on consoles, here’s our list of the best shooters of 2019.
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Actor Josh Brolin will star in a new series called Outer Range, which follows the story of a Wyoming rancher named Royal Abbot who “discovers an unfathomable mystery” on his property, according to Collider.
Brolin in Deadpool 2
Brolin, the Oscar-nominated actor who also played Thanos in the Avengers films, will be an executive producer on Outer Range. Oscar-winner Brad Pitt will also produce the movie through his Plan B Entertainment division.
This is a big deal for Brolin, as it’s his first major TV role since he starred in the ’80s show The Young Riders. Brolin is better known for his numerous film credits, including The Goonies, No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, True Grit, Gangster Squad, and Milk, for which he earned an Oscar nomination. He also played Cable in Deadpool 2 opposite Ryan Reynolds.
There is no word yet on who else will star in Outer Range or when it will premiere.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons | Nintendo | Switch | March 20, 2020
The next entry in Nintendo’s iconic life-sim series is almost here with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We’ve seen quite a bit of the game up to this point with a previous hands-on preview and a dedicated Nintendo Direct livestream, but at PAX East 2020, we’ll get another look at parts of the game we haven’t seen yet.
New Horizons takes you on a getaway to Tom Nook’s vacation island, and there are plenty of familiar activities to take on: there are villagers to befriend, a home to build and design, and a town to explore and live in. However, New Horizons isn’t just more of the same. You’ll have plenty of customization options for your villager, such as their hairstyles, hair color, nose, eyes, and more. You’ll also have landscaping capabilities to essentially edit the terrain of your island, which is an all-new mechanic for Animal Crossing. There’ll be a crafting system, too, which seems to coincide with the tradition of collecting and curating items. You can catch up with the game in our breakdown of 19 things we learned from the Animal Crossing: New Horizons direct, and by staying tuned to what we see at PAX East.
We need your help determining the best video game character of all time. To do that, we are trying a new fun thing: The Power Ranking Face-Off! Every week on Power Ranking we ask you, the IGN audience, to help us answer some of pop culture’s toughest questions. Whether it’s finding out what the best Star Wars game is or what the best anime series is, you all have determined what the best of the best is. But this time, the topic’s so big, we need your help all month long.
Here’s how it will all work: We have over 300+ entrants, and your Face-Off votes will be used to crowdsource the top 64. From this list of 64 best characters, we’ll make a bracket and use that to run our Power Ranking tournament. The bracket will use Power Ranking polls that we’ll be posting on IGN.com, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat. Help us decide, once and for all who the best video game character is!
Voting will officially close on March 6 and we will reveal the top 64 on March 9. Vote now through the Face-Off above and stay tuned for more Power Ranking polls throughout March. For more information on Face-Off, check out the explanation below.
How we will determine the winner?
After the final FaceOff results have come in, we will be taking the top 64 video game characters as ranked by your FaceOff voting to seed into a tournament bracket. From this bracket, the top 64 will be divided into groups of four which will be polled on multiple platforms: IGN.com, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat. We will total the votes across all platforms to determine which characters move on to the next round. The winning characters of each round will be revealed on Power Ranking every Tuesday at 3pm PT starting on March 17th to April 14th.
What is a FaceOff?
Like the name suggests, a FaceOff is pitting two things together and you decide which one is the winner. In this case, you are voting to determine which of the two is better suited to be the best video game character of all time. It’s possible to see certain characters multiple times so keep voting for your favorites to ensure they get ranked higher than the rest. There are over 300 video game characters here that get randomly paired up each time you pick a winner.
How do I know when I’ve clicked through everything?
It’s difficult to know when you’ve seen every video game character included since they are matched randomly and there are so many possible match-ups. Playing till you vote for all your favorite characters or ensuring that certain characters don’t get in the winner’s circle are different options you can take with Face-Off. By deciding the winner throughout all these matchups, you’re ensuring that your favorite video game characters will have a fighting chance to make it through to the finals.
Which video game characters have you included?
The list of video game characters has been decided by the staff in addition to suggestions from the IGN audience via social media. There are so many video game characters so we ensured that we had a good variety of characters across all the different types of games ever made.
How is this tracked?
Every time a winner is decided between the pairs, those winners tally a win improving their overall win-loss record. When the Face-Off results are in, the video game characters with the better win-loss records will move on to the next stage of the competition. So if you continue to keep voting for your top video game characters, they’ll have a better chance of making it to top cut. You can vote as many times as you want till the Face-Off closes.
The over-the-top and wacky mini golf game, Golf With Your Friends, is expanding beyond PC. Publisher Team 17 has announced that the multiplayer golf game will release on PS4, Xbox One, and Switch in 2020.
Available on Steam Early Access since 2016, Golf With Your Friends is a zany multiplayer golf game that supports up to 12 players at once. Far from a traditional golf game, Golf With Your Friends features 10 “unique” courses, including a haunted house and outer space, as well as power-ups like the ability to toss honey onto the course to slow down the ball or turn your opponent’s ball into a square.
There are also multiple game modes, including one that adds a basketball hoop or hockey goal to the course. Golf With Your Friends also includes extra stuff to unlock, including new skins and golf ball trails.
Golf With Your Friends was developed by Blacklight Interactive. Lead developer Kailan Clark said in a statement, “We are thrilled to announce Golf With Your Friends is making its way onto consoles.”
Golf With Your Friends costs about $10 USD on Steam, but there is no word yet on pricing for the console edition. The PC version has a level editor, but it’s unclear if this will also be available on console. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.
Rainbow Six Siege is testing out a major change for one of its operators with the latest test server patch. Ying, an operator introduced back in Year 2, is ditching her frag grenades in favor of a claymore.
The notes for this patch on Reddit explain the rationale behind this decision: “We still feel we want to emphasize her teamwork, and are making a few adjustments while she’s on the TS to gather some more data.” There’s no guarantee that this change will make its way over into the game proper, but if it tests well, it just might.
Significant reworks that change weapons are rare in Rainbow Six Siege, although recently the developers announced that Tachanka would be ditching the turret in favor of a grenade launcher. Obviously Ubisoft is doing something right, because the game is more popular than ever.
There are plenty of other changes and adjustments in this patch. Here’s the full notes.
BUG FIXES
OPERATORS
FIXED – Clash Exploit.
FIXED – Only 1 Shot is recharged when picking up Twitch’s shock drone after using all shots.
FIXED – Iana can be killed after the end of the round if she is still in her hologram.
FIXED – Oryx sometimes unable to climb the hatch if player gripped it from max distance.
FIXED – If Oryx dashes at a doorframe next to a soft wall at an angle, he can sometimes dash through and break the wall instead of going through the door.
FIXED – Missing sound in first person when using Oryx to dash through barbed wire.
FIXED – Jackal can sometimes still scan if he is at the edge of Mute’s Jammer AOE.
FIXED – Glaz fire rate is lower on PvE compared to PvP.
FIXED – LMG clips through the reinforced wall if it is mounted before the wall is reinforced.
FIXED – Nomad’s full reload animation with the AK-74 can be interrupted by holding the fire key.
FIXED – The magazines of the ARX200 clips through the weapon’s mag-well when reloading in first person POV.
LEVEL DESIGN
FIXED – Attackers can plant the defuser inside the hand truck at B Arsenal Room of Clubhouse.
FIXED – Various minor fixes on Oregon.
FIXED – Various LOD issues on maps.
UX
FIXED – Killcam sometimes goes OOW at the end-of-round replay.
FIXED – On some accounts, Iana’s “Exit Replicator” is hardbound to the middle mouse button regardless of set key-bindings.
FIXED – Various cosmetic and Menu/HUB fixes.
KNOWN ISSUES
Missing drone sounds for other players in the match.
Iana’s hologram deployment VFX is sometimes visible through walls.
Sprint SFX can be broken when running close to a wall (related to the duplicate footsteps issue).
We already knew that the Xbox Series X will feature a “quick resume” feature that allows players to resume multiple games from a suspended state without loading back in from the start. But Xbox’s Larry Hryb said on his podcast–embedded below–that this also works when you’ve rebooted the console.
Hryb has had an Xbox Series X at home for months now. He said on his podcast that his console had a system update and he expected to have to re-load his game once it was finished. But no. Hryb said he was able to boot directly back into the game. “So it survives a reboot,” he said.
Xbox director Jason Ronald–a 15-year Xbox veteran–is also featured on the podcast, and he revealed that the Xbox Series X will feature audio ray-tracing, which is seemingly a brand-new technology. Ronald said this is a spatial audio feature that is enabled by the Xbox Series X’s new accelerated ray-tracing technology. Ronald didn’t reveal much about this, but more details may come during the Game Developers Conference where Microsoft will hold a panel for spatial audio.
The entire podcast is very in-depth and fascinating, as Ronald goes over the key points of Microsoft’s announcements earlier this week. The system, which is 8X more powerful than the original Xbox One, is powered by 12 teraflops of performance.
“Teraflops is an easy way to describe the overall power of the system and the GPU. But in reality, we actually view power much more expansively than just teraflops itself,” Ronald said. “We put a lot of innovation in the Xbox Series X. The real magic is going to be the integration between hardware and software. To not only use the raw capabilities of the box, but also to use it in the most efficient way possible to make your games even better.”
The Xbox Series X will also feature “variable rate shading,” which allows developers to add more “precision and detail” to a game’s important scenes whether that be character detail or action. “Allows the developer to be that much more efficient,” Ronald said.
And on the subject of ray-tracing, Ronald said, “We’re able to enable a whole new set of scenarios, whether that’s more realistic lighting, better reflections. We can even use it for things like spatial audio.”
Check out the full podcast in the embed where Ronald and Major Nelson also speak about the Xbox Series X’s other new features, like the cross-buy system Smart Delivery, and more.
The Xbox Series X releases this holiday with Halo Infinite as a launch title. It faces off against another next-generation console, the PlayStation 5, which is also slated for release this holiday.
Here are some comparisons between the original and the new version of Mewtwo Strikes Back.
The newly re-animated version of the original Pokemon movie, dubbed Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution, hits Netflix on Friday, February 27–known among fans as Pokemon Day, since it’s the anniversary of the original Pokemon games’ release date in Japan.
This CG version of the first Pokemon movie seems to follow the same plot as the original, according to Netflix’s synopsis:
“When researchers discover and exploit a fossil of the Mythical Pokémon Mew, they unleash a creation that goes against the very laws of nature: Mewtwo, a Legendary Pokémon intended for use as a tool of destruction. But as Mewtwo becomes aware of its own dubious origin, it begins to resent its human creators and seeks revenge–and Ash, Pikachu, and their friends find themselves at the center of its rampage! With the future of the Pokémon world at stake, will our heroes be able to overcome Mewtwo’s challenge…and will Mewtwo be able to find a new meaning for its life?”
Yup, that pretty much sounds like the original. That said, this clearly isn’t a shot-for-shot remake. Netflix sent us some new screenshots, and we’ve done our best to find comparable moments from the original Mewtwo movie in order to check out the new and old versions side-by-side.
In the original version, Ash battles this trainer before receiving the invitation from Mewtwo.
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It looks like the new CG version will keep this fight intact.
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This shot is recreated almost exactly in the new version, as you can see below:
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Pikachu is looking a little bit fluffier, but mostly the same overall.
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In the original, Brock is cooking some “lazy boy no-chew stew” for his friends.
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Looks like Brock is the de facto chef in the new version as well.
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Misty gets this hero shot in the new version.
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In the original, there’s no standalone shot of Misty appearing by herself, so here’s a screenshot of her and Brock toward the beginning for comparison.
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This shot when Dragonite arrives with Mewtwo’s invitation is recreated almost exactly in the CG remake, as you can see below:
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The only real difference is that Brock’s Vulpix and Misty’s Psyduck are also present now.
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Ash, Misty, and Brock stare curiously at the holographic message from Mewtwo.
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In the new version, the hologram is bright pink, and Brock’s adoration of the messenger is much more animated.
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This shot from the remake appears to be from near the beginning of the film.
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In the original, the group don’t take off running until it starts raining.
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The image below is similar to this shot of Mewtwo using his psychic powers, creating a blue aura around him.
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This may be the beginning of the shield Mewtwo uses to block Gyarados’s attack.
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Mewtwo effortlessly deflects Gyarados’s attack in the original.
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In the new version, Mewtwo’s clones of Charizard, Venusaur, and Blastoise appear to be present during this moment.
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In the original, the clones aren’t introduced until later–you can see them above.
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Disclosure: ViacomCBS is GameSpot’s parent company
