In this video, Persia talks about the new gameplay of Battlefield 2042 that was released along with plans to change Falck’s Syrette pistol after feedback from the alpha.
She also covers the Director’s Cut trailer released on September 8th that was edited by Hideo Kojima himself and also discusses Fortnite’s upcoming event Operation: Sky Fire. This event will bring Fortnite Chapter 2 to a close and will be a limited-time event.
Lastly, Persia talks about a very important and very adorable update for Ghosts of Tsushima that adds new charm to its foxes of Ikki Island with heart-melting animations.
Wonder Woman 1984 director, Patty Jenkins, says films released by streaming services look like “fake movies.”
This news comes by way of the LA Times, which reports that during a panel discussion hosted by the publication, Jenkins explained that all of the films streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max put out look fake. She said that releasing movies on streaming services isn’t a working model.
“All of the films that streaming services are putting out, I’m sorry, they look like fake movies to me,” Jenkins said. “I don’t hear about them. I don’t read about them. It’s not working as a model for establishing legendary greatness.”
Jenkins said this in response to Paramount Pictures’ domestic distribution president, Chris Aronson, who said that once a movie is released on TV, no matter what it was originally made for, “it’s a TV film.”
The Wonder Woman 1984 director then explained that she feels Netflix and other streaming services do have a place in the entertainment media industry — the making of movies just isn’t that place.
“I also have a deal to make things for Netflix, because I really believe in limited series and television series,” Jenkins said. “As a filmmaker, there are stories I want to tell…that are longer and don’t fit into the movie format. Streaming is great for massive amounts of content and bingeing TV shows.”
She goes on to say that making movies and making longer-form content such as TV shows and limited series are “two very different skill sets.” She said she sees them succeeding as two very different things — not as formats that intermingle with each other.
“That’s why I think it’s a mistake for the film industry to throw away something so valuable,” Jenkins said. “I think we have to be very clear about the absolute necessity for [theatrical releases]. I’ve talked to many filmmakers about all of us uniting, and if someone does guarantee a theatrical run, we will literally go out of our way and take less fee, all kinds of things, to guarantee that your film has a chance of success in this certain kind of way.”
Labor Day weekend is upon us, and with it comes a huge set of new deals. Tech seems to be the name of the game right now, as we’ve been able to round up dozens of deals on Laptop and Desktop gaming PCs. Newegg, Amazon and Best Buy are also running a ton of deals on fitness equipment, webcams, chairs, and more. We can’t forget our favorite LG 4K TV which is again discounted and comes with a $200 Newegg Gift Card as well.
Lenovo Intel Gamer Days Sale: Save on Legion Gaming Laptops and Desktop PCs
Lenovo’s “Legion” series of gaming PCs and laptops offer the latest and greatest gaming performance at a very reasonable cost. They’re equipped with the newest RTX 30 series video cards, which offer huge speed gains compared to the previous generation’s RTX 20 series cards, along with new technology like DLSS 2.0 (very useful) and ray tracing (not as much). Alongside these new GPUs are your choice of either AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series or Intel’s Rocket Lake/Tiger Lake processors. Lenovo also offers one of the best customer service experiences compared to other prebuilt PC makers, which is especially important if you haven’t built the PC yourself. Lenovo’s sale events can be hard to navigate, so we’ve conveniently rounded up a list of the best Legion deals going on right now.
Intel Gamer Days Deal: CyberpowerPC Intel Core i7 RTX 3080 Gaming PC for $2199
If you play games at 1440p or less, you can get away with an RTX 3060 or 3070, but if you want to game in 4K, then you’re going to want to splurge for the RTX 3080 video card. It’s the first card that really lets you play games at 3840×2160 without worrying about your framerate. This CyberpowerPC is equipped with an RTX 3080 video card, an unlocked Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and both SSD and HDD storage.
Daily Deals for September 3rd 2021
Intel Gamer Days Deal: Dell XPS Intel Core i7 RTX 3060 Ti Gaming PC for $1499
True high end gaming on a budget. There is one of the best deals we’ve seen for an RTX 3060 Ti equipped PC. The RTX 3060 Ti is a very powerful video card; it’s better than the previous generation’s RTX 2080! It’s a big upgrade from the 3060 non-Ti model and the one to get if you’re going to play games at resolutions of 1440p or higher. This is the best Intel Gamer Days deal that Dell is offering so far, but there are a couple of other good deals as well.
Amazon Prime Student Members Get 3 Months of Free Audible Premium Plus
If you’re an Amazon Prime Student member, you get a lot of pretty amazing perks like 6 months of free Amazon Prime membership followed by 50% off your Prime membership for up to 4 years, Amazon Music Unlimited for $0.99/mo, and more. Now, there’s yet another perk exclusive to Amazon Prime Student members; get 3 free months of Audible Premium Plus (normally $14.95/mo). If you’re a current student or faculty, you’re eligible for an Amazon Prime Student membership.
Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene, the creator of PUBG, wants to create the biggest sandbox-style open-world game ever with his new studio.
The PlayerUnknown Twitter account posted a five-minute video today featuring Greene talking directly to the camera about his studio’s aspirations, as reported by Eurogamer.
In it, Greene discusses his fascination with open-world games, how he wants to create games at a scale seldom seen, and more.
“And since [getting lost in the open fields of Chernarus in DayZ], I’ve held this deep fascination with sandbox-style open-world games and the freedoms that they give players, but I always just wished they were a bit bigger,” Greene says in the video. “So that’s our mission as a studio. We want to create realistic sandbox worlds on a scale that’s seldom attempted — worlds hundreds of kilometers across with thousands of players interacting, exploring, and creating.”
Greene says one of the biggest problems with creating a game world at this scale is there simply isn’t “a way to fill these massive spaces with content, assets, game mechanics, locations,” and more. He says the key to making worlds bigger than what humans can currently accomplish is getting machines to help.
His new studio, which does not yet have a public name, has created such a machine and this machine is a neural network that gives his team a way to learn and “generate massive realistic open worlds at runtime, or to put it another way, each and every time you press play.”
“Prologue is meant to serve as a simple introduction to an early iteration of our technology and a chance to look at what we accomplished by leveraging machine learning,” Greene says in the video. “In Prologue, you’ll need to find your way across a runtime-generated wilderness and use found tools, and gather resources, to survive on a journey where harsh weather is your constant foe.”
He says there will be no guidance in Prologue, no path to follow, or anything leading you forward — just a spot on a map to reach and the tools necessary to reach that spot.
“We’ve also decided to release Prologue as a tech demo, rather than a complete game, as a way for you to experience an early iteration of our terrain generation tool,” Greene says.
With Prologue now being released as a tech demo and not a complete game, Greene says players will be able to pay what they want for the demo. There’s no mention of when Prologue will actually be released, though, and it’s unclear if the tech demo will be free, with players having the ability to pay money for it if they’d like, or if there will be a base price.
“Prologue is the first step on a multi-year journey towards creating rich and interactive open worlds,” Greene says as the video nears its end.
This is it, folks—two full days of doing whatever you feel like, local laws permitting. If you’ve chosen (or have been asked) to spend all that time indoors, here are a bunch of expertly curated, discounted games that are well worth your dinero. Have fun, stay very safe, and see you on Monday!
From its scenic landscapes to sharp action, Ghost of Tsushima has plenty of strong selling points. One of its best and most distinctive features, though, is the game’s collection of foxes, wild canines that lead players to Inari shrines and definitely deserve a pat on the head afterward for their hard work.
They’re also even better now, as a new update for Ghost of Tsushima and its Ikki Island expansion has added a lethal amount of charm to foxes inside of the game. As spotted by Twitter’s most important account, Can You Pet The Dog, foxes will now happily tap their feet on the ground in anticipation of a belly rub.
A recent update for Ghost of Tsushima added unique fox animations. Now the foxes happily tap their feet in anticipation of pets, and players can also enjoy brand-new belly rubs. pic.twitter.com/eRTim9gvsd
There are of course other animals that you can pet on Iki Island, but nothing beats the enthusiasm of a fox doing a quick tap dance. In the base game, foxes would lead players to well-hidden shrines that contained various charms which could be collected.
Denis Villeneuve is trying not to think too much about the future. After a gargantuan production process followed by pandemic delays, Dune: Part One is hitting theaters next month (and premiering at Venice Film Festival this week). Its visionary director and co-writer is trying to live in the here and now. But he’s not doing a great job of it, because he’s already thinking about what’s next.
“I think that we were able to bring it to life because we all, me and the team, just did that for three and a half years, full time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we were dreaming about Dune: Part One,” Villeneuve told GameSpot and other journalists during a recent virtual Q&A. “That’s the way I make cinema…I need to be there now and not think too much about the future.”
Yet the director hasn’t been shy about his plans for more Dune. This film covers roughly the first half of Frank Herbert’s first novel, which was released in 1965. Over the course of Herbert’s original six books, the series goes pretty wild, with time jumps thousands of years in the future and an immortal “god-emperor” who’s half human and half sandworm. In contrast, Villeneuve dreams of adapting the first book and its direct sequel, published in 1969, which are concerned mainly with the same set of main characters and take place within a reasonable span of time.
“I envision the adaptation of two books, Dune and Dune: Messiah. I said, ‘OK, as a filmmaker, as a screenwriter, I know how to do this,'” Villeneuve said. “So we decided to split the first novel in two, so now we are at three movies. Those movies are very long to make. So for my mental sanity, I decided to just dream about three movies. After that, because I’m a big fan of all the novels, after that I’ll see where I am, but I will say that I want to focus on the aspect of these three movies right now.”
He added that for now, he’s “focusing on launching Dune: Part One, hoping there will be a Part Two, and that’s enough.”
“Doing the first one was by far the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” the director explained.
Adaptation can be a messy process. Villeneuve says he’s had a copy of Dune on his nightstand for more than three decades. His career has been building toward this; with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, he proved he can make big budget sci-fi like no one else right now.
“When you adapt, necessarily, you transform. The idea was to be as close to the spirit of the book as possible–as close to the poetry,” he said. “The goal was to make a movie that would please the hardcore fans, the people who know Dune by heart, and also my mother, who never read Dune. To find that equilibrium was not easy.”
General audiences will judge for themselves whether he succeeded in making a movie that’s equally accessible for fans and the uninitiated. In our review, we noted that it “throws in-universe terms and proper nouns around with abandon, allowing context clues and visual storytelling to do most of the expository heavy lifting.”
“The tough task here was to introduce the audience to this world, to the cultures, to the different families, the different planets,” Villeneuve said. “Once this is done, it becomes an insane playground…For me, Dune: Part One is like an appetizer. Dune: Part Two is the main meal. As much as Dune: Part One was by far my most exciting project ever, Dune: Part Two is already getting me even more excited.”
So when will we get to see it? Granted, Warner Bros. has not actually greenlit the sequel yet, so it depends at least partially on the success of this movie. But the director is ready to go.
“When you make a movie a movie in two parts, necessarily, when you do the first part, you have to know what you’re going to do in the second part,” he hinted. “I will be fairly ready to go quite quickly…to go quickly on a movie of that size, you still need to make sets, costumes–so we are talking about months. But if there’s enthusiasm and the movie is greenlit sooner than later, I will say that I will be ready to shoot in 2022 for sure. I am ready to go and I will say that I would love to bring it to the screen as soon as possible.”
Adult Swim has finally cast Back to the Future’s Christopher Lloyd as a live-action Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty, bringing the series full circle in a way.
Don’t get too excited, though, because Lloyd only dons Rick’s trademark lab coat for a 15 second Twitter video posted by the official Adult Swim Twitter earlier today.
Nonetheless, it’s still quite satisfying to see Lloyd as Rick, especially considering the character of Rick is based on Lloyd’s Emmett “Doc” Brown in Back to the Future. In fact, the concept of Rick and Morty is based on Doc and Marty McFly from that movie.
Adult Swim went a step further, though, and cast Jaeden Martell (It, Knives Out) as Morty — an excellent choice.
As you can see in the video above, the 15 second Twitter video isn’t anything too wild. It’s actually exactly what you’d expect: Rick and Morty come through a portal, Rick burps and says they’re home, and then Morty says his trademark “aww geez.” For fans of Rick and Morty, though, the video is probably quite satisfying.
Essentially since the show’s start, when it was quite obvious that Rick and Morty were based on Doc and Marty, fans have wanted to see Lloyd in the role of Rick. Now, that’s finally happened.
Sadly, if the video is anything to go off of, there’s not much more to this. There aren’t any further details to go with it, there’s no accompanying release date, or really anything else— it seems to be simply a promotion for Rick and Morty.
The chip shortage currently affecting all parts of gaming is not likely to let up until the end of next year, according to Toshiba.
In a new report from Bloomberg, the publication writes that Toshiba Corp., one of the major companies that creates power-regulating chips found in graphics cards, gaming consoles, and more, says the chip shortage will likely continue through the end of 2022.
IGN previously reported on this chip shortage, citing that Intel believes it could drag on into 2023, and this new Bloomberg report seems to reaffirm this timeline. Toshiba director, Takeshi Kamebuchi, told Bloomberg that “the supply of chips will remain very tight until at least September next year.” Kamebuchi also said that some of Toshiba’s customers won’t be fully served all of the chips they need until 2023.
However, Toshiba doesn’t mention which customers, so perhaps Sony and Microsoft won’t find themselves waiting until 2023 to get the chips they need for their PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles.
Kamebuchi cites material shortages and a demand that’s constantly outpacing chip output as reasons for Toshiba’s inability to fulfill orders. With this chip shortage possibly lasting until 2023, Toshiba is planning to invest $545 million in its production between now and 2024 to boost the output of its power semiconductors, according to Bloomberg.
“We consider which customer faces the most severe situation, such as the risk of the whole production line halting or the business getting obliterated without the supply of chips,” Kamebuchi told Bloomberg. “Game console makers are among the customers making the strongest demands and I’m sincerely sorry for their frustration as none of them have a 100% satisfaction.”
And so the struggle to easily purchase a PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, or new PC graphics card continues.
When Denis Villeneuve signed on to direct a 21st century version of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune, he was no doubt aware of the book’s long and often tortured history in Hollywood. Once thought unfilmable – just ask Jodorowsky – it was finally adapted by David Lynch into a famously off-kilter film in 1984, and then a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries version also got some traction in 2000. But those takes didn’t quite manage to translate the more epic and spiritual qualities of Herbert’s work. Could Villeneuve, who had pulled off the seemingly impossible with his fantastic sequel to Blade Runner, finally do justice to the tale of Paul Atreides? Unfortunately, the answer is… not quite. For all its amazing imagery and A-list stars and very cool interpretations of the nerdier aspects of Herbert’s book, this version of Dune doesn’t fully coalesce.
The director, his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, and producer Legendary Pictures made the seemingly sound decision to divide the sprawling novel into two separate films, so in fact the onscreen title to this installment is actually Dune, Part One. The result of this split is not just a license to let many of the book’s smaller moments or supporting characters breathe more, but also to perhaps be too devoted to Herbert’s work. Heresy, yells the Frank Herbert fan! But we all know that what works in a novel might not work in movie form, and vice versa, and Villeneuve’s biggest misstep with Dune, Part One is how misshapen and plodding it feels in its second half, as if the movie doesn’t quite know how or where to end… before it just suddenly does.
Timothée Chalamet stars as Paul Atreides, scion of the powerful House Atreides in a far-off future where a substance known as the Spice is the most valuable commodity in the known universe. Paul’s father, Duke Leto Atreides (a heavy-with-responsibility Oscar Isaac), is sent by the Emperor to the desert planet Arrakis to take over production of the Spice. And so the whole family packs up and moves house, including the Duke’s military advisors (and Paul’s tutors) Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), and what appears to be every soldier and house servant who works for the Atreides. What awaits them on the planet also known as Dune? An uncertain future to be sure, but the Duke has a plan: Harness “desert power.”
Meanwhile, Chalamet’s Paul – as dreamy, misunderstood, and tortured as you could want the heartthrob to be here, and I mean that as a compliment – is having prophetic dreams of a mysterious girl, one of Arrakis’s native people known as the Fremen. This is Zendaya’s character Chani, who some viewers may be distressed to learn is barely in this movie beyond said dreams. Again, it says Part One in the title, so be patient.
The film opens with Zendaya’s voiceover explaining how beautiful her home planet is, and succinctly summing up the violent history of Arrakis, caught as it is in the middle of bigger galactic concerns due to its natural abundance of the Spice. This sequence is a triumph over the exposition that continuously threatens to bring any adaptation of Dune down, but unfortunately, the filmmakers don’t always succeed on this same front moving forward. Perhaps the tutorial that comes later about stillsuits – the life-saving, water-conserving garb of the Fremen – will be fascinating to the uninitiated, but those who are familiar with the source material may find that these moments gum up the works of Dune, like the sand of Arrakis that plays havoc with the Spice machinery.
And yet, Villeneuve frequently impresses with his ability to take tried and true sci-fi concepts and put some new spin on them. Take the Bene Gesserit – sort of space witches with extra-human mental powers, if you will. Paul’s mother, Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica, is a member of this order, and early on we see her tutoring Paul in the strange ability to mentally coerce others via a modulation of one’s voice. Here, Villeneuve relies on sound design to highlight the weird and offsetting manipulation of Chalamet’s words, but he also shoots the moment as a series of flashing images where time seems to be displaced. It’s off-putting and effective, placing us in the same mindset as the person who the vocal attack is being used upon.
The script also benefits from injecting occasional bits of humor into the universe-shaping events of the film, and the casting of charismatic actors like Momoa and Brolin help to drive those humanizing elements home. Both actors’ characters essentially serve as big brother/uncle figures to Paul, teaching him to fight and helping him ease into the notion that he is the heir apparent to this great family. Ferguson’s Jessica, meanwhile, knows that perhaps something even more heady awaits her son on Arrakis. Indeed, this eventually leads to a painful moment of accusation that Paul directs at his mother, and the look on Ferguson’s face tells us… he may not be wrong?
In fact, the cast is solid across the board, and full of familiar faces, from Javier Bardem as the leader of the Fremen to Charlotte Rampling as the scary Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother to David Dastmalchian, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and more. And then there are the villains. Stellan Skarsgård is effectively grotesque and sinister as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the bane of House Atreides, while his nephew, Dave Bautista’s “Beast” Rabban, is vicious enough that any memory of Drax will be long gone while watching this film.
And Dune is certainly capable of transporting us to its alien landscapes via its many technical achievements in production design, costumes, photography, sound, visual effects, and more. From the breathtaking vistas and strange space- and aircraft, to the enormous, frightening sandworms that will devour a ship as easily as they will a clutch of bad guys (and sometimes good guys), and right on down to the sparkly glimmer of the very Spice itself as it glitters across the surface of Arrakis, there is no detail spared in immersing us in this fantastical world.
Which is to say, there’s so much to love in Dune, but I didn’t come away in love with the movie itself. Villeneuve has proven himself to be a master of the kind of smart and stylish sci-fi that a modern Dune adaptation demands, and the film is a triumph when it comes to its visuals and sound. But there’s a shapelessness to the latter part of the movie that drags it down and distracts from its beauty; it’s a story that ends at Act 2, and it shows. Just as Duke Leto himself would find out, harnessing the power of Dune is no easy task.