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Director Neill Blomkamp has announced on Twitter that a District 10 screenplay is being co-written by himself, Sharlto Copley, and Terri Tatchell. The trio have previously collaborated on 2015’s Chappie and this upcoming film’s predecessor, 2009’s District 9.

Beyond this terse, although incredibly exciting and highly anticipated bit of information, literally nothing else is yet known about the film–which makes sense, since it obviously hasn’t been written yet. District 9, which was an adaptation from Blomkamp’s 2006 short film Alive in Joburg, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and was widely praised by fans and critics alike for its nuanced exploration of humanity, xenophobia, and social segregation. In 2009, District 9 took in roughly $210.8 million at the box office.

For those who might have missed it at the time, District 9’s official synopsis is as follows: “Violence ensues after an extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth finds a kindred spirit in a government agent exposed to their biotechnology.” In 2021, the notion of a foreign contaminant causing a national health crisis takes on a greater significance for audiences and creators alike, so in a way it makes sense this news is coming out after the coronavirus has had such an impact.

Demonic, an upcoming supernatural horror film written and directed by Blomkamp, will be the director’s next released project. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Demonic will have its virtual premiere at the 71st Berlin International Film Festival in March.

Popular preschool animated series Peppa Pig will be getting its own dedicated theme park within Legoland Florida sometime in 2022, according to Hasbro, which acquired the show and its parent company Entertainment One in 2019. Hasbro shared the news on Twitter.

According to Yahoo! Entertainment, the park “will feature multiple rides, interactive attractions, themed playscapes, water play areas and fun live daily shows for Peppa Pig fans and their parents. Kids will have the opportunity to play in Peppa Pig’s favorite ‘muddy puddles’ as well.” While the United States continues to recover and navigate a path back to normalcy from the coronavirus, Legoland Florida Resort is currently open for guests with “enhanced health and safety precautions.” As of this writing, the resort is operating at reduced capacity.

A quick fun fact about this upcoming theme park: It is not the series’ first foray into such an attraction. In 2011, Peppa Pig World opened in the United Kingdom. This decade-old forerunner has nine rides including George’s Dinosaur Adventure and Grampy Rabbit’s Sailing Club. That year also saw the release of the Peppa Pig: Theme Park Fun video game.

Since debuting in 2004, Peppa Pig has been broadcast in over 180 countries and has spanned six seasons, 316 episodes, and one film. It also spawned a series of tie-in books.

(Photo credit: Hasbro)

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The Pokemon Company showed a brand-new Pokemon game, Pokemon Legends Arceus, during its latest Pokemon Presents presentation, and it takes place in the Sinnoh region from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. It’s unclear how the game will play, but its visuals appear to be more in line with Pokemon Sword and Shield.

Pokemon Legends Arceus features some of the classic characters from previous games, including Cyndaquil, Rowlet, and Oshawott. The environments appear to be more tranquil and quiet than the other games, but it’s unclear if it’s going to be using the same format as traditional Pokemon games. Your goal is to make Sinnoh’s first Pokedex, so it could be a little more mysterious than other Pokemon games, too.

The game takes place in the “Sinnoh of old,” with Pokemon living wildly and a harsher environment from the games set in more modern times. Arceus will, naturally, be the Legendary Pokemon, and you will be able to both catch and battle with Pokemon using a traditional move-based style. However, there will also be new “action and RPG elements” according to the official site. It appears there won’t be a Pokemon League and possibly not other trainers, either, due to the time in which it takes place.

Longtime Pokemon studio Game Freak is developing the game, aiming to “break new ground” for the Pokemon series. The game will launch worldwide in early 2022. Another two games, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, are also on the way, and these are more faithful remakes of the original DS games. The next game we’ll likely get to play is New Pokemon Snap, which is arriving in just two months.

Are There Two Versions?

Only Pokemon Legends Arceus was announced during this part of the Pokemon Presents event, but there was one thing that made us think there could be a second Legends game. A tweet from the official Pokemon account mentioned “pre-makes.” That’s plural, suggesting another game could be in the works, but it hasn’t confirmed this yet.

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Following 2019’s Creature in the Well, a dungeon crawler that utilizes pinball mechanics to inform its hack-‘n-slash combat, developer Flight School Studio is now making Stonefly. If I had to come up with an elevator pitch for the upcoming game, it would be Studio Ghibli’s The Secret World of Arrietty meets Neon Genesis Evangelion.

In Stonefly, you play as Annika Stonefly, a girl who lives on a planet where the human-like people are incredibly small. To survive and overcome the much larger insects that also live on the planet, folks pilot mechs.

“There’s a combination of inspiration for the mech designs–a lot of them are [styled after] bugs, but then they have the giant robot anime look too, Evangelion and Gundam are mixed in there for sure,” Flight School Studio creative director Adam Volker said.

The mechs behave a lot like their insect inspirations, nimbly jumping into the air and sprouting wings that allow them to momentarily hover or glide. They aren’t armed with traditional weapons, though. Since you’ll be going up against insects, the mechs possess weapons that cast lights that can distract or create gusts of wind that can shove away. Flight School Studio compares Stonefly’s combat to Super Smash Bros.–you’re not trying to kill enemies, you’re trying to utilize your mech’s tools to push them off the environment.

I got to see a short demo of Stonefly in action, in which Annika takes one of her father’s mechs on a joyride, loses it, vows to reclaim it, and falls into joining a caravan-looking group called the Acorn Corps. There wasn’t an opportunity to go hands-on with the game, but what I saw of the combat looks almost rhythmic. That’s about the only similarity I can spot when it comes to comparing the game to Creature in the Well, another game that encouraged players to fall into a regular rhythm-like flow to overcome its challenges. Stonefly is very different, however, in that its gameplay loop seems geared more towards exploration than combat.

“Although the game has a lot of kinetic, fun action gameplay, quite a bit of the game is very exploration-focused and very chill, listening to [Natureboy Flako’s] soundtrack with a beautiful landscape,” Volker said.

This exploration focus becomes apparent right away. Annika begins the game inheriting a run-down mech from the Acorn Corps, which you can slowly augment with upgrades over time. From a hub, you set out on missions–the game gives you a choice of completing new chapters in the story, exploring optional areas in search of resources, or pursuing challenging time-sensitive hunts. Instead of encouraging you to jump from area to area and complete each one once, Flight School Studios wants you to repeatedly return to previously traveled-to locations and utilize your expanded arsenal of abilities to explore further.

“And most of the encounters are all random,” Flight School Studios game director Bohdon Sayre added. “There are hand-made ones, like the boss encounters, and a couple moments during missions that we call ‘closed’ or ‘main’ encounters that have some hand-made sequencing. But there’s a lot of variety that you have if you’re playing the same area multiple times–you’ll encounter different combinations of things and that makes it fun to go back through.”

Like Creature in the Well, Stonefly seems to be very hands-off in teaching you how to play. I did see tutorial messages that inform the player how to perform basic actions like jumping, shoving, and gliding. But there’s no direction for how Stonefly’s systems interact with each other. That seems to be up for the player to figure out.

“We really wanted to make something that was much more of a sandbox–other references we have are incredible games like [The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild] and [Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain],” Sayre said. “I think what those games do really well is create sandboxes that you can play in. A lot of the bugs [in Stonefly] interact with each other–the bugs that dash really fast can stun other bugs for you if you can bait them into running into each other, interacting in interesting ways. So there’s a lot of bug-on-bug interactions.”

As I noted in GameSpot’s Creature in the Well review, this lack of explicit directions can be annoying when it comes to information that’s crucial for progression–it’s a lesson that Flight School Studios has seemingly taken to heart in Stonefly.

“We learned from [Creature in the Well] to make sure that we have enough time for players to learn what we’re trying to tell them,” Sayre said. “Our games are, as far as we know, very weird and unique and out there, and it’s important for us that we lay down some familiar and stable groundwork for players to latch onto as they journey into this unknown territory and try to figure out ‘What the heck am I doing here? What’s this weird mech thing that flies and doesn’t land and pushes bugs and stuff?’ So [Creature in the Well] definitely taught us a lot about pacing and how we space things out and how we can be efficient with what we’re creating, testing, and iterating.”

And that’s where I think I’m most intrigued by Stonefly. Like Sayre said, Flight School Studios makes weird games. Creature in the Well was so difficult to define that folks christened it a “pinbrawler,” a new genre that combines elements of pinball, dungeon crawling, and brawler hack-‘n-slash games. Stonefly is similarly difficult to pin down, and that’s intriguing. I haven’t really seen a game like it before, even if the pieces are all familiar–like Creature in the Well, Stonefly has a lot of The Legend of Zelda influences, for example.

“The uprooting of a bug, stunning it and flipping it over, is definitely inspired by [The Legend of Zelda games], like when you use [the Magic Hammer] to smash and flip over [Turtles],” Sayre said. “The whole game from the start was really centered around this concept of wind and the elements. Creature in the Well was all about electricity, and this game is intended to be all about wind. And there’s kind of a metaphor there as well. We liken the gameplay and mechanics to metaphorically represent the story; wind has this transience and this air of letting the past go and moving forward that’s really nice about it.”

Near the end of the Q&A, I asked Flight School Studios about accessibility, to which Sayre said, “There are a few options. Outside of the accessibility settings that Unreal has built in, there are a couple of gameplay things, ranging from a couple of minor stat tweaks that make life a little bit easier all the way to invincibility for if you just want to play through the game on basically story mode and don’t want to take damage and just have fun. We’re trying to make sure that a variety of different people can play the game if they want to get through the whole thing.”

We don’t have to wait long to check out Stonefly–the game is currently set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Switch, and PC in Summer 2021. Flight School Studios estimates the campaign will likely take about 10 hours, a bit longer than Creature in the Well. I, for one, will be checking it out. I enjoyed Creature in the Well, and Stonefly’s delightfully strange set-up intrigues me–though I do hope that I won’t have to contend with any monstrously large arachnids.

The PlayStation 5’s currently unused internal storage expansion slot will reportedly be enabled this summer. Its use will allow players to add additional space to a console that quickly fills up due to massive game sizes and updates.

According to Bloomberg, a firmware update will enable use of the M.2 SSD expansion slot by allowing the internal fans to run at a higher speed. Overheating concerns were a factor in not enabling the slot at launch, and you cannot play or store PS5 games on an external drive. These more-traditional external drives can be used for storing and playing PS4 games, but users (including me) have seen issues with the console hard-crashing with the drives plugged in.

You’ll want to wait until Sony releases a list of officially approved NVMe SSD units before you make a purchase, as they’re still quite expensive, and not every model will work. They need to be able to run as quickly as the permanent drive installed in the system, which is how the PS5 is able to load games so quickly, and they also need to physically fit in the slot. The Xbox Series X|S uses a similar drive, but it also comes with a proprietary expansion slot that was enabled on launch day.

Game file sizes are certainly becoming more of an issue, as they continue to rise while storage capacity on consoles has stayed relatively stagnant. The PS5 comes with an 825GB SSD, but only about 667GB are usable. If you have a 500GB model PS4, for instance, you may no longer be able to have fully updated versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Warzone with Modern Warfare on the system at the same time.

PlayStation has revealed next month’s freebies for PlayStation Plus subscribers. A whopping four games are featured in March 2021’s PS Plus lineup: Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Remnant: From the Ashes, Maquette, and Farpoint. All of the new freebies will be available to claim starting March 2. Subscribers can also claim one of February’s freebies, Destruction AllStars, on PS5 throughout March.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake will be playable on PS4 and PS5 thanks to backwards compatibility. However, the PS Plus version of the excellent 2020 action-RPG won’t be eligible for a free upgrade to the newly announced PS5 version. You’ll have to purchase it to upgrade to Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Intergrade. If you already know you’re going to want to play it on PS5, Amazon is currently selling FF7 Remake for $30. It was one of our favorite games of 2020 and earned a rare 10/10 in our Final Fantasy 7 Remake review.

Published by Annapurna Interactive, Maquette launches on March 2 and will be free for subscribers only on PS5. The first-person puzzle game is set in a recursive simulation where everything appears to be both small and large. Players manipulate objects in the world to solve puzzles.

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Remnant: From the Ashes is a co-op focused survival action game set in a post-apocalypse. While the story is rather bland, the challenging combat is a thrill thanks to great enemy design and well-designed bosses. Over the course of the adventure, you obtain new loot to upgrade your gear. Remnant supports three-player co-op, and it’s definitely designed to be played with friends. It’s playable on both PS4 and PS5.

It’s been a while since PSVR owners have received a new PlayStation Plus freebie. Farpoint, a first-person shooter set on an alien planet, will be free all throughout March. It features a single-player campaign and online multiplayer. Though Farpoint can be played with a DualShock 4 gamepad, it really hits its stride with the Aim controller.

March 2021 PS Plus Free Games

Available March 2 to April 5

• Final Fantasy 7 Remake
• Maquette (PS5 only)
• Remnant: From the Ashes
• Farpoint (PSVR only)