The first trailer for Love Death + Robots Volume 2 has been released. The second season of the animated sci-fi anthology series hits Netflix on May 14.
The series is produced by David Fincher (Mindhunter, Zodiac, Mank) and Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate). As with the first season, this season presents a collection of dark dystopian tales in a variety of animation styles, from traditional 2D to more modern CG. Netflix states that Volume 2 will include “naked giants, Christmas demons, and robots-gone-wild,” and the trailer suggests it will be the equal of the Emmy award-winning first season. Check it out below:
Love Death + Robots Volume 2 will consist of eight episodes. In addition, the show has already been greenlit for Season 3, which will premiere in 2022.
In a recent interview with IGN, Miller stated that he hopes to make as many seasons as Netflix will let him. “Why would we stop doing this as long as they let us continue to do it?” he said. “I love animation, and I love animators. They’re just kind of a unique breed. It’s a real honor to be able to bring these people the project that they never thought they would get. It’s really like a Santa Claus sort of moment in the best possible way.”
Sony will be adding yet another title to its Play at Home lineup, and it’s a big one: Horizon Zero Dawn, first announced as part of the giveaway alongside several other games in March, will be free for all PS4 and PS5 owners tonight, April 19, at 8 PM PT / 11 PM ET. You have until May 14 to claim it.
The freebie features Horizon Zero Dawn’s Complete Edition, which includes the Frozen Wilds expansion and some bonuses like extra outfits, weapons, and resources. That’s on top of the already massive base game that has a sequel coming, Horizon Forbidden West.
The Play at Home giveaway started in 2020 as a goodwill gesture during the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Sony has continued it into this year as well. In March it announced nine games including Rez Infinite, The Witness, and PSVR games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Moss. You only have until this Thursday, April 22, to claim those games.
Horizon Zero Dawn was named one of our best PS4 games of all time. It was also one of the high-profile PlayStation games ported to PC, with a patch in January aimed at improving its initial performance. Its protagonist, Aloy, was recently yet another in Fortnite‘s ever growing roster of game celebrity cameos.
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Breath of the Wild is the game that keeps on giving, with people still finding new things four years later. Luca Jakobi, aka “Limcube,” and Max Blumenthal, aka “RinHara5aki,” specialize in two separate fields of Breath of the Wild and react to interesting new viral Breath of the Wild clips.
Limcube previously has done reacts videos and consistently speedruns Breath of the Wild to this day, even performing runs for Games Done Quick. He optimizes speedruns, as well, to make new routes. RinHara5aki is one of the first to delve into Breath of the Wild combat specifically, and with his videos amassing more than 13 million views, he continues to document and push the game’s evolving combat system.
In the video above, the pair breaks down what’s going on behind the scenes, how difficult the techniques are, and how they’re performed. Complex glitches such as Extended Shield clips, Horse Slides, Spaceships, Shield Block Resets, and others are examined.
As more and more tidbits of information, looks at gameplay, and tease-heavy trailers have been released for Resident Evil Village, the impression that it’s taking major cues from Resident Evil 4 has been growing. With a new in-depth look at the eighth mainline entry into the survival horror series, that’s never been more true.
Where Resident Evil 7 was a first-person horror game that seemed heavily inspired by the original, mansion-exploring Resident Evil from way back in 1996, Village borrows more from the action side of the franchise’s history–although it definitely still looks to pack the scares that made its predecessor so effective.
Capcom recently gave GameSpot a look at about an hour of gameplay footage for Resident Evil Village. We didn’t get to actually play, but we did get a very good sense of what an early portion of the game will be like. Essentially, if you can imagine the first-person intensity of Resident Evil 7, combined with the higher action and feeling of being overwhelmed of Resident Evil 4, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect.
The preview kicks off somewhere after the start of the game, with protagonist Ethan Winters waking up after what appears to be a car accident. He’s lying in the snow near the back of an overturned van; beside him is what looks like a dead soldier. At a guess, this seems like the aftermath of the scene we’ve seen in the Resident Evil Village trailers, where Chris Redfield and some masked goons shoot Ethan’s wife, Mia, and grab Ethan and his daughter. Ethan’s the only one who walks away from the crash, and as he heads out into the darkness, he starts to find his way into a ramshackle wood house with a trail of blood leading through it.
In this early scene, Village leans into the tight, oppressive atmosphere that characterized the Baker house of Resident Evil 7; it’s dark and crowded, and we hear strange banging coming from the floors above, although Ethan never sees anyone. Before long, he gets out of the building as first light starts to creep over the snowy landscape. Ethan follows a forest path until he comes out on a hill looking down into a valley, marked by a small village and a huge, looming castle. He makes his way down into the village, which immediately feels strangely empty and somewhat decrepit; the houses are old and poorly maintained, the yards and streets filled with garbage.
When Ethan slips into a house with an open door, he pushes past a curtain dividing one room from another and is nearly shot by an old man wielding a shotgun. Finally, we get a sense of where everyone is–they’re hiding. A vicious-sounding scream in the distance prompts the old man to shove a pistol into Ethan’s hands. The preview doesn’t show us exactly what happens to the old man, though: after a brief cut, we return to Ethan as he explores a nearby shed. The old man is gone and there’s a huge hole in the wall of his house.
Gee, I wonder what might have happened here.
We get an answer before long as Ethan hears a roar from outside while exploring another house. A werewolf-like creature crashes through the ceiling, slashing at Ethan’s face, but he fights it off with the pistol. Instantly, the whole house is being attacked, with clawed, furry arms reaching through boarded windows. Something’s trying to crash through the front door. They’re seemingly everywhere.
This early moment feels almost exactly like the iconic first encounter in Resident Evil 4, as players discover the European village that served as that game’s early setting and Los Ganados, the murderous townspeople that populate it. Like RE4 protagonist Leon Kenney before him, Ethan is besieged by weapon-wielding villagers, only these are wolf-people. You can make moves to help you survive, however, like pushing furniture in front of doors and windows to block them or shooting explosive barrels to take down multiple enemies at once–more Resident Evil 4 idea brought forward into Village.
Before he’s overwhelmed, Ethan climbs out a back window and makes a run for it, fighting off more creatures along the way. Some of them attack with just their claws; others carry torches or swords. While Village is clearly a bit more action-oriented than its immediate predecessor, Ethan still moves a bit slowly and has to square up to fire his weapon like in RE7, so expect a fair amount of close, intense encounters with enemies. More than once, enemies leaped onto Ethan and clawed away at him before he managed to kick them off. You can mitigate that damage by raising your hands or your weapon to block blows–just like in Resident Evil 7–and you’re unlikely to make many quick getaways in combat, it seems, so blocking to protect yourself is essential.
The fight continues to escalate, and after a while, it seems as though Ethan won’t make it. This becomes especially obvious when a bigger werewolf wielding a huge hammer enters the melee. Before it can finish Ethan off, church bells start to sound. All of the wolves hustle off toward the bells, leaving Ethan alone in the village. It’s another moment that echoes Resident Evil 4 almost exactly.
From there, Ethan continues to investigate the area. He comes across a shotgun, makes his way through more buildings, and smashes a few crates to find various items. In another page taken from RE4, Ethan has to keep an eye on his inventory–how items are placed in your box of goodies matters, and keeping it well-organized makes space for other items. You’ll also have opportunities to craft items from raw materials like in Resident Evil 7, combining items such as herbs and chem fluid to make first-aid medicine, or chem fluid and gunpowder to make ammunition.
Here we also start to see the kinds of puzzles Resident Evil has always been known for. Ethan finds a gate leading toward the castle, but it’s shut and locked. The gate is covered by a relief of a demon and a woman with their faces missing. Not far away in a small church, Ethan finds an altar that holds the Maiden Crest, the first of the two pieces that will complete the relief and open the gate.
The demo starts to hit a big story moment here as well, when Ethan discovers more survivors: a woman and her injured father. Earlier, Ethan heard a radio transmission directing him to the house of Luiza, where other survivors were holed up, so he helps the pair make their way to safety. At first, the villagers at Luiza’s are distrustful of Ethan, but they eventually let him and the others inside. Luiza and the other seem just as confused as Ethan that their village is overrun by monsters. Luiza tells him that someone called Mother Miranda has previously protected the village, but then monsters started to attack them without warning. The survivors say a creepy prayer–you might have heard it in the latest Resident Evil Village trailer–in hopes of regaining Mother Miranda’s protection.
Of course, this momentary bastion of safety quickly crumbles. Ethan escapes, having grabbed a key item–a screwdriver–which allows him to open up a small locked altar outside of the house and claim the second crest for the gate he passed earlier.
Before Ethan gets to the castle, however, he’s accosted by a tall, duster-wearing, bespectacled man. This apparently supernatural guy captures Ethan by slamming him with metal gears and objects, seemingly flinging them through the air with his mind like he’s Magneto. When Ethan comes to, the man is dragging him through a cave-like tunnel.
Here we see Lady Dimitrescu and Mother Miranda for the first time and learn this guy’s name: Heisenberg. He seems to be the big hammer-wielding werewolf that showed up earlier. He and Dimitrescu are subordinates to Mother Miranda, apparently. Miranda leaves Ethan to Heisenberg to deal with, but they don’t execute him. Instead, Ethan is tossed into the tunnels to try to survive as something of a show–but the preview footage doesn’t show us exactly what happens, and when we catch up with Ethan again, he’s back outside and standing in front of the castle’s entrance.
Here we get another big Resident Evil 4 moment when Ethan meets the Duke, a recurring character who serves as the game’s shopkeeper. You’ll find the Duke in multiple locations throughout Village, like RE4’s Merchant, and you can buy items from him in much the same way. He sells first-aid items, ammo, and weapons, as well as gun upgrades. You can also sell things to him, like small crystals Ethan finds throughout the game. As in RE4, there are vases, boxes, and other items to smash through all over Resident Evil Village, and it usually pays to check them to find ammo, items, money, and stuff you can eventually sell.
From here, Ethan enters the castle and we see a lot of the same rooms and locations that appeared in Resident Evil Village’s first demo, Maiden. At first, Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters, the black-clad women from Maiden, don’t seem to know Ethan is there–but it’s not long before they find him. As in Maiden, the daughters are particularly frightening as they chase Ethan around, taunting him before disappearing in a swarm of bugs, only to rematerialize and attack. Where the monsters in the village seemed to be werewolves, Dimitriscu and her daughters seem to be classical vampires, as best we can tell.
Ethan is captured and brought to Dimitrescu by her daughters. Again, they don’t kill him, but instead stab him through with hooks and hang him from the ceiling, departing to get their orders about what to do with him from Mother Miranda. The footage doesn’t show exactly what happens, but once again, Ethan escapes. He starts to explore the castle, and as we saw from the Maiden demo, it’s filled with locked doors that require some weird and esoteric solutions. One door has a relief of a woman missing an eye, which opens when you find a ring housing said eye and place it into the door. Another requires you to find several pieces of statues to replace them.
The castle feels a lot more like Resident Evil 7’s Baker house than the village portion of the preview. For much of the footage, Ethan is creeping around the castle, seemingly trying not to get found out. On more than one occasion, he opens a door or slips through a hole, only to find Lady Dimitrescu leaving through another door on the other side. Unlike moving through the Baker house, though, it doesn’t seem like you have to stealth your way through the castle–it’s more like that, at certain points, you might run into enemies, while most of these near-encounters with Dimitrescu are of the scripted variety.
Moving through the castle is still dangerous, though. Sometimes Ethan is attacked by the daughters, who seem more or less impervious to bullets; other times, Ethan might happen across a lower tier of enemy that’s similar to the werewolf creatures in the village area. At one point in the preview, these monsters even had wings, looking like gargoyles or half-bat creatures. Like the werewolves earlier on, though, they’re tough but killable with your conventional weapons, making them seem a lot like RE4’s Los Ganados.
While he explores a lot of the castle, including the cellar and other regions from Maiden, Ethan eventually runs afoul of Lady Dimitrescu. She’s not just a frightening presence for cutscenes–eventually, you’ll encounter her out in the castle’s foyer and she’ll go after you herself. Like the daughters, Lady Dimitrescu gives chase to Ethan. She threatens him with those huge claws we’ve seen in cutscenes, and she doesn’t seem too bothered by gunfire. Ethan’s advantage is that she’s generally a bit slow, especially because she has to duck low to get through doorways, so it seems you’ll be fleeing from Lady Dimitrescu when you encounter her, just like Jack Baker in RE7 or Mr. X in Resident Evil 2. The castle is laid out in such a way that you can circle back to certain locations through multiple pathways, though, so it’s possible to give Lady Dimitrescu the slip. The demo ended not long after as Ethan made his way to the highest parts of the castle, and we don’t know exactly what might happen between him and Lady Dimitrescu.
As you work through the castle, it seems you’ll be doing a lot of running as you search for Ethan’s daughter and try to find the objects you need to open doors and escape. So from what we’ve seen in about an hour of Resident Evil Village, the game is melding different aspects of the RE experience to put you up against different challenges. In the village area, expect heavy combat and fleeing from overwhelming force, using items like shelves and dressers to block doors–but like in RE4, those barricades are only ever temporary solutions during a fight.
In the castle, the situation seems much more tenuous. Fighting isn’t really on the table in most cases, and you’ll need to run away from enemies you can’t handle and try to find your way out of bad situations. There’s still combat in the castle section, especially once you get out into the courtyard or up into the parapets, and you’ll run into the lycan-like enemies from earlier in the game. But when it comes to Lady Dimitrescu, it feels like Resident Evil Village is channeling its predecessor and the other, more survival-horror-oriented entries in the series.
The most interesting thing about the preview footage, apart from its many obvious callbacks to and elements borrowed from Resident Evil 4, is this mixing of RE influences. It seems like, as you move through different areas in Village, you’ll be encountering different brands of the RE experiences, each with its own different emphasis. To some degree, that was true of RE7 as well, but Village looks to be putting that mixture of RE ideas forward even more in its philosophy. We’ll have to wait a few more weeks to see if that impression is borne out throughout all of Resident Evil Village.
What began as a joke is becoming a real product, as Microsoft is now actually making Xbox mini-fridges after defeating Skittles in a Twitter marketing competition. Xbox marketing boss Aaron Greenberg, who is in charge of this campaign, has now provided an update on how the fridges are coming along. He said on Twitter that Microsoft is making progress on the fridges, recently getting a first look at the design proposals.
“We got first look at design this week and sent some notes back,” Greenberg said, adding the hashtag “#Progress.” He did not share any specifics about the design or his notes, however. We still don’t know anything about the price, release date, or final design.
The Xbox mini-fridge is inspired by the popular meme about the Xbox Series X looking like, well, a refrigerator. Microsoft took this chilling feedback in stride, agreeing that the console does in fact bear a resemblance to the home appliance. Microsoft even created real, working, full-size Xbox refrigerators and sent them to influencers like Snoop Dogg and The Rock, which in turn generated positive buzz for the brand.
To inspire people to vote for Xbox in the Twitter Marketing contest recently, Greenberg promised to make the Xbox mini-fridge a real product if Microsoft won the contest. Xbox ended up defeating Skittles by an incredibly close margin.
The popular British historical drama Downton Abbey’s movie spinoff is getting a sequel, according to Variety. So far only being referred to as Downton Abbey 2–which may not be the final title–the movie is expected to bring back its predecessor’s cast, and has reportedly already started production last week.
The sequel will be written by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, with Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) directing. The series, and both movies, are set in the fictional titular Yorkshire country estate, and through its aristocratic characters and their servants, chronicles events that have an impact on the British social hierarchy.
“After a very challenging year with so many of us separated from family and friends, it is a huge comfort to think that better times are ahead,” said Gareth Neame, whose Carnival Films will co-produce the film. “And, that next Christmas, we will be reunited with the much beloved characters of Downton Abbey.”
The returning marquee cast includes Hugh Bonneville (Paddington, Muppets Most Wanted), Jim Carter (Transformers: The Last Knight, The Good Liar), Michelle Dockery (Hanna, Tuca & Bertie). Elizabeth McGovern (Woman in Gold, War of the Worlds), Hugh Dancy (Hannibal), Laura Haddock (Guardians of the Galaxy), Nathalie Baye (Catch Me if You Can), and Dominic West (The Wire) will be joining for this sequel in, as of this writing, undisclosed roles.
Downton Abbey 2 is due for release on December 22, 2021.
Microsoft’s cloud-based game-streaming service is finally coming to PC and iOS devices. Invitations will go out to “select” Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members starting April 20 as part of a “limited test” that will be available for the newly supported platforms.
This isn’t a perfect or ideal situation for iOS devices, as Xbox Cloud Gaming on iPhones and tablets is available through web browsers as opposed to directly through an app. For iOS, Microsoft has criticized Apple’s policies that have led to this situation.
Starting April 20, those who have been granted access to the beta can visit Xbox.com/play on Safari, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge to play Xbox games over the cloud. “Offering cloud gaming through the browser and having a simplified, universal landing page presents a great opportunity to make cloud gaming approachable to more players in more places over time,” Microsoft said.
More invitations across all 22 supported countries will be made available over the coming months, Microsoft said.
If you’re accepted into the beta, you’ll need a Bluetooth or USB controller to play the cloud games, or you can use touch controls for the 50+ games that currently support them.
Game streaming is currently available only through an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which also grants you access to the Game Pass libraries on PC and Xbox consoles, and bundles in the Xbox Live Gold subscription.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer reacted to the news, saying he’s excited to see Xbox Cloud Gaming continue to grow.
“Great to get to share progress team has made, looking forward to continuing to grow Cloud Gaming with the community. Browsing XGP library, instantly trying a game and either keep playing in browser and/or download to continue on console or PC is a really nice discovery feature,” he said.
The Pikmin mobile game from Pokemon Go developer Niantic has begun testing in Australia. The Pikmin app lets you grow the little googly-eyed plan beings by putting in steps while out with your phone.
The registration page for what is currently simply called The Pikmin App has been open for a while now but new regions are opening progressively. Australia is the second region to open, following the initial pilot test in Singapore. The test is available on both iOS and Android platforms.
Based on the Singapore test impressions via VGC, the app stores Pikmin seedlings in a bag, who then grow based on step energy generated by walking with the app. You can grow a variety of colors of Pikmin, naturally, including specialty variants like winged Pikmin and rock Pikmin. There are also new Decor Pikmin, and you can discover new seedlings and fruit by exploring your environment.
Niantic expects to launch more widely sometime this year. This is one of multiple Nintendo partnerships with Niantic following the success of Pokemon Go.
Meanwhile, Nintendo also recently launched Pikmin 3 Deluxe, a Switch port of the Wii U game. In GameSpot’s review, Kevin Knezevic said that it holds up well and the gameplay tweaks help smooth out some of the rough edges.
“Even three installments in, there is no other series quite like Pikmin,” he wrote, “which helps Pikmin 3 still feel fresh seven years after its original release.”
The first trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has been released. The upcoming Marvel movie stars Simu Liu and Awkwafina, and it hits theaters September 3.
Liu plays Shang-Chi, a seemingly normal man living in San Francisco. But he has a dark family history–his father is Wenwu–and The Mandarin–a mysterious and powerful villain who once had plans for his son to join him in the criminal life. Shang-Chi rejected this, but finds himself coming into conflict with him once more and tapping into amazing powers of his own. Awkwafina plays Shang-Chi’s friend Katy, and the movie looks like a spectacular mix of mystery and wild martial arts-inspired action. Check the trailer out below:
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings also stars veteran Chinese star Tony Leung as Wenwu, Fala Chen as Jiang L, Meng’er Zhang as Xialing, Ronny Chieng as Jon Jon, and Michelle Yeoh as Jiang Nan. It’s directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who previously helmed Short Term 12 and Just Mercy.
The character of Shang-Chi was created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, and first appeared in Marvel comic books in the 1970s to cash in on the popularity of Bruce Lee and the TV show Kung-Fu. However, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Liu explained that it was because the character is relatively unknown that made him so interesting to play.
“The most exciting thing about stepping into this character was that his backstory has never been told before,” he said. “We know so many different versions of Batman’s origin story, how his parents were murdered when he was very young. We know Peter Parker, who was bitten by a radioactive spider, and he loses his uncle. Shang-Chi’s story is very much unknown to most of the world, so we had a lot of freedom and creative liberty to make it the way that we wanted to.”
The first poster for the movie has also been released. Check it out below:
The PlayStation 5’s latest update added compatibility for external hard drives and SSDs. When presented with so many options, which can be costly, it’s important to know which storage method is best for you. Thanks to Digital Foundry, we have a good idea of what storage solution you should use if you’ve filled up your PS5’s measly 667 GB of internal storage.
Before we get into any numbers, it’s important to note that all the games that Digital Foundry tested on the PlayStation 5 are PS4 games. While the PS5’s latest firmware update lets users store and play games on external drives, you can only do so with PS4 titles. PS5 games still require the speed of the PS5’s internal SSD to function properly. That being said, you can still store PS5 games on external drives, and moving them back onto the PS5’s internal storage should be much faster than redownloading them or reinstalling them from a disk.
With that out of the way, it’s easy to determine from Digital Foundry’s analysis of PS5 load times that the best storage option available right now is by way of an external SATA SSD. Digital Foundry used a Samsung 870 QVO hooked up to the PS5 by a Sabrent USB to SATA adapter in its testing. That adapter plays a big role here, as it has a large enough bandwidth to let the PS5 perform at maximum capacity.
In tests across multiple games, load times on the external SATA SSD were almost always faster than any alternative, including in some cases the PS5’s internal SSD and the external NVMe SSD Digital Foundry also tested with. However, there were times when the SATA SSD performed on par with the other SSD storage options.
In Cyberpunk 2077 for instance, which has a 102 GB file size, the internal SSD of the PS5 loaded into the mission The Pickup in 33 seconds. Both the external SATA and NVMe SSDs loaded in a bit faster, at 31 seconds.
Load times in Fallout 4 show just how much faster external storage options can be though. Loading into Diamond City takes the PS4’s internal SSD around 17 seconds. However, the external SATA SSD took just 13 seconds to load the same area. The external NVMe SSD clocked in at around the same time.
As far as storing and playing games on an external HDD go, well, do it if you must. Not only is it slower to transfer data to and from an external hard drive, that performance also carries over to load times. In every single test conducted by Digital Foundry, the external HDD took markedly longer to load any game, with the most egregious time being for The Witcher 3’s Novigrad. The PS5’s internal SSD loads that area in around 47 seconds, as does the external SATA SSD. The NVMe SSD is a tad slower at 49 seconds. Loading this game off of an HDD will have you sitting around for over 10 more seconds though, with a load time near one full minute.
There is a clear oddity in the overall test results though. Using an external NVMe SSD, you won’t find the load times you expect. These high-end drives can read and write data faster than your average SATA SSD, however, that kind of performance may be limited to PCs. The PS5 is a different case, as it apparently has some limit on how fast PS4 titles to load. In this scenario, using an external NVMe SSD would leave performance on the table, whereas using an external SATA SSD, you’re getting pretty much the best bang for your buck.
It’s especially not worth getting an NVMe SSD when you consider the price. If you were to get the same hardware Digital Foundry used in its testing, the Samsung 980 EVO and the ASUS ROG Strix Arion, you could spend up to $300 just on external storage. The Samsung 870 QVO SATA SSD and its adapter on the other hand would cost $150 at the very most.
