GoldenEye 007 is one of the best first-person shooters and licensed video games of all time, but because of a complex licensing situation that required several partners–including Nintendo–to come together, we never saw a remaster of the original game. Instead, we got a remake for the Wii several years later, but footage of a canceled Xbox 360 remaster of the 1997 version has appeared online.
Posted by the YouTube channel Graslu00 and spotted by VGC, the GoldenEye 007 remaster footage shows off the entire campaign as well as some multiplayer content. It looks like the game was essentially complete before the plug was pulled, and Xbox chief Phil Spencer said Xbox has “always given up” on trying to get the rights-holders working together to publish the remaster. Rare developed the game, and the studio is now a subsidiary of Microsoft. But Nintendo published the game, and the remake was later published by Activision.
What we see in the video is likely what fans wanted more than Activision’s remake. The remake still had some of the same themes and characters from the first version, but it changed enough to feel like a different game.
The levels in the remaster, by contrast, are exactly as you remember them, but with an added coat of paint to cover up some of the ugliness that is common on so many Nintendo 64 games. The tremendously cheesy sound effects remain the same, adding to the nostalgia. In the introduction of the video, you can also see just how big the upgrades were, with characters switching from their blocky original versions to the more-detailed models.
Very few James Bond games have come close to matching the quality of GoldenEye. We’ll see if the franchise’s newest developer IO Interactive can do so with its upcoming origin story game. The studio just released Hitman 3 to rave reviews, and the new partnership seems like a match made in heaven.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused huge disruption across the entertainment industry in 2020, with theaters closed,movies delayed, and production halted. The only real success story was streaming, with record subscription numbers for both the huge established platforms and niche services. And if there’s one genre that has thrived on streaming over the past year, it’s horror.
Horror has a long history as a popular home entertainment format. In the ’80s, genre favorites such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Fly, Hellraiser, and Evil Dead II were big hits on VHS, and a whole generation of horror fans grew up watching scary movies at home. Even before the pandemic, many of the best horror movies went straight to streaming, but last year a lack of bigger films has meant that some smaller horror movies have reached audiences they might not have previously.
One of the biggest streaming successes has been AMC’s horror service Shudder. In the summer, it released the zoom-based found footage movie Host, which became one of the summer’s most talked about films, and since then has released a steady stream of new horror exclusives. And of course, Netflix continues to deliver original movies every week, and there have been some great scary releases over the past few months.
Ori developer Moon Studios alongside publishers iam8bit and Skybound Games pledged to donate five percent of the proceeds from every Nintendo Switch sale of Ori and the Will of the Wisps from December 8-13 to the Rainforest Trust. This included all versions of the game, from downloads on the eShop to collectors’ editions sold on the iam8bit site. Originally, there was a $25,000 guarantee, but now the companies will be donating over $58,000 in proceeds from this period to the charity.
The Rainforest Trust is a charity that works toward the conservation of rainforests around the world by establishing protected areas in partnership with local organizations and communities. They have already protected 33 million acres and are working towards securing 50 million more. Thanks to the donation from Moon Studios, Skybound Games, and iam8bit, the Trust will be able to secure another 29,000 acres, which is about the size of Manhattan.
Iam8bit co-owner Jon Gibson explained the companies’ reasoning for the donation in a video posted back in December. Because of the stories they tell, the companies felt it was imperative they do their part to protect our own environment. The Ori franchise, for instance, is about a spirit that watches over a forest and its varied inhabitants, looking to keep them safe. According to Gibson, this decision to partner with the Rainforest Trust came from a desire to use Ori’s marketing budget to try to make some positive change.
“As its publisher, we had to make the critical decision of how to spend the game’s marketing budget,” Gibson said in the video. “We decided to shake things up and try to make a difference with that money, so we’re trying something bold in hopes of activating players just like you around the world.”
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IGN Prime has partnered with developer HumaNature Studios to offer all IGN Prime members a free steam key for ToeJam and Earl: Back in the Groove!
ToeJam & Earl’s new major update titled ‘STILL in the Groove’ is now live on Steam and contains tons of fan requested tweaks and improvements. This biggest improvement is the all new Fixed Mode with much larger and difficult to navigate maps, all handcrafted by the original designer of the series Greg Johnson!
4-player Co-op funky roguelike gameplay!
Procedurally generated maps!
Online and offline play!
Groovy soundtrack!
ALIENS!
If you’re an IGN Prime member click here to grab your key redeemable on Steam for a completely free copy of the game. Keys are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
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Meal subscription boxes are all over the Internet these days, but only one of them will allow you to order Justice League-inspired junk food packaged inside a replica Mother Box.
Warner Bros. is teaming with Wonderland Restaurants to launch Wonderland At Home, a service where hardcore fans with deep pockets can order themed meal kits inspired by various WarnerMedia titles. Naturally, Zack Snyder’s Justice League will be the first movie to get a meal kit. Dubbed “The Mother Box,” this kit is priced at $130 for a two-person box and $260 for a four-person box. Think of it as a highbrow version of a Happy Meal tie-in.
Each box will include several pre-prepared, refrigerated food courses and multiple drink options, all inspired by different Justice League characters or restaurants from the DC Universe. Here’s a breakdown of everything you get:
Ocean Trench (fish and chips)
Big Belly Burger (pretty self-explanatory)
Resurrection (some sort of corn-based dish)
Ancient Themysciran Fire (???)
Snacks & Extras
Kool Brau Beer
Jitters Coffee (canned cold brew coffee)
The Wonderland at Home site indicates these boxes will ship to most locations within the US and UK. The program is expected to launch in April or May of 2021. Unfortunately, with The Snyder Cut confirmed for a March 18 debut on HBO Max, you may have to hold off watching it if you’re intent on getting the full experience.
Immortals Fenyx Rising‘s first major DLC, A New God, feels like it’s calling a bluff. Ubisoft’s open-world template has gotten flack over the years for turning its sprawling worlds into a sea of icons that push you to beeline it to the next objective. If that’s gotten stale, why not cut out the “open world” part? That’s more or less what A New God does: It abandons any pretense about these games being about discovery and traversal in favor of a set checklist of challenges. The idea works in concept; the self-contained puzzles were some of my favorite parts of Immortals, so this DLC is in some ways exactly what I wanted. It, unfortunately, doesn’t work as well in practice. Although it introduces some clever ideas to tease your brain, the way these ideas are implemented are extremely hit-or-miss, as agonizingly inconsistent and frustrating as it is clever.
A New God doesn’t spend much time getting you up to speed with its story or gameplay, so you should probably finish the base game before you jump in. After the events of Immortals, Fenyx is ready to ascend into the pantheon of gods they’d helped free from Typhon–as soon as they prove themselves worthy by completing a number of puzzle and combat trials designed by said gods in Olympos.
I’m surprised by how little I miss the parts of Immortals that A New God trims. You don’t explore Olympos much, since it’s more of a hub than a world. Immortals’ eye-rolling humor (which still can’t land a punchline most of the time) is also thankfully easier to ignore than it is in the base game, as it’s delivered almost entirely through quips from the gods trying to amuse you or impart advice as you play.
Instead, A New God’s trials quickly throw some new tools at your disposal, like magnetic beams, portals, spheres that instantly replenish stamina, and the ability to swap places with a statue of yourself. These ideas build on the tools you already have, and putting them together in the same puzzle makes for some fun brainteasers; one trial might have you using portals and switches to move a couple of spheres around a maze, while another has you running an obstacle course while also shifting moving platforms around to make sure the ball you launched at the start can follow you. A lot of them are conceptually clever and fun to execute, but once I grokked each tool’s general purpose, these puzzles didn’t push me outside my comfort zone much. I didn’t get stuck all that often, but I also didn’t have too many of those magical a-ha moments that made me feel like a genius, either.
The bigger problem is that many of the new puzzles rely on Immortals’ unwieldy physics to a fault. Several trials have you whacking objects with your hammer or chucking large metal cubes around. These puzzles are wildly inconsistent; standing next to a metal ball and charging up your hammer might thwack it straight up and over a wall (exactly what you were hoping), while scooting just hair backward might chuck it into the abyss at a 45-degree angle (not at all what you wanted). Throwing a giant wooden block over a gap and onto a platform has a good chance of breaking it altogether based on the angle it lands–something you can’t control all that well, and which is immensely frustrating when the game is all but telling you to throw that block.
These bouts of random trial and error are compounded by how elaborate some of the puzzles can be, and a broken cube can often mean having to move all the pieces again so you can try that throw again and cross your fingers. At its worst, solving these puzzles felt like rolling a heavy boulder up a steep hill, only for a gust of wind to somehow knock the thing into the ocean. It often took far too long after I’d solved a puzzle in my head to put that solution in action, and I had to hope that when I implemented it, the physics would work in my favor.
Oddly enough, I was able to just skip a few puzzles outright with some lateral thinking. A New God gives you an additional jump and a boost to your stamina; since most areas where trials take place are isolated islands that aren’t usually walled off, sometimes the path of least resistance is literally jumping over a puzzle.
A few of the trials also involve fighting your way through waves of monsters, but they’re largely filler. Potions are considered cheating in Olympos, so you can’t just fill up on them and brute-force fights, which is a nice change of pace that forced me to think more critically during fights. Unfortunately, only a few of these fights offer anything meaningfully different from the base game. Considering all the new tools I had at my disposal, it’s disappointing that most fights didn’t take advantage of them or introduce twists of their own.
The structure and new ideas in A New God are promising: Despite my frequent frustrations with its physics and many of the puzzles, I had a decent time barreling through all these puzzles without having to discover them on a huge map. But it’s hard to ignore how haphazard it felt, the trepidation I experienced trying a solution I knew would work only to have it go wrong for reasons out of my control.
Some new Warframe content is coming to all platforms this February and sometime in or after March, including two new Frames, a Valentine’s Day event, and permanent cosmetics, developer Digital Extremes revealed.
Starting things off in February is Nightwave: Intermission 3. It goes live on February 1 and brings about new acts, reintroduces some past rewards, duplicates protection, and more. Digital Extremes didn’t go into much detail about Intermission 3 during the livestream.
The series of Warframe content continues with the Star Days event, which goes live from February 11-24. The event is centered around debt collector Ticker, whose store will get a variety of themed items such as glyphs, floofs, and other cosmetics. On top of this event, Digital Extremes will enable wings as a permanent cosmetic for all Frames. They are customizable, from wing style to feather color, and ephemeral, meaning they will become transparent to ensure they don’t obstruct viewing angles when players aim down sights.
A new Lunar Renewal event also kicks off in mid-February, with various Year of the Ox content. An exact start date has not been announced, but players can expect various cosmetics to unlock and quests to embark on. Meanwhile, players can unlock Octavia Prime starting on February 23 who comes with her signature weapons and a playable shawzin with harp sounds.
Coming sometime in or after March is Update 30, which Digital Extremes is calling Call of the Tempestarii. The update introduces Savagoth (previously known as Wraithe), a new necromancer Frame that can conjure apparitions and ephemeral area-of-effect attacks, as well as a quest based around Savagoth and some possible changes to Zephyr. There’s also a new ready-to-go melee weapon called the ghoul saw that kind of looks like a giant Lancer from Gears of War (minus the gun component), but Digital Extreme has not nailed down a date for when it will drop. The team’s also investigating how players can somehow ride the weapon.
In other Warframe news, Digital Extremes was picked up by Tencent when the Chinese mega-conglomerate acquired the developer’s parent company, Leyou, in December 2020. The Warframe developer said it will remain “creatively independent” despite the acquisition, saying players should “expect no changes to Warframe or how our studio operates” going forward.
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Apple’s AirPods Max are now available at Amazon in three different colors: silver, sky blue, and space gray. Unlike their namesakes, AirPods Max are not earbuds. Instead, they are full-sized, high quality wireless headphones. The quality is reflected in the price; these headphones retail for $549.
While AirPods Max are shipping out at various points in the future at other retailers, all three colors are available to ship out at Amazon either immediately or in on to two days. (At least they are at the time of this writing.)
Apple says AirPods Max were designed to offer high-fidelity audio, active noise cancellation, comfort, and quality. They feature spatial audio (with head tracking), so sounds can appear to be coming from all around you as you watch movies and shows. They also have a transparency mode that lets you listen in on the outside world with the touch of a button. They’re designed to be extremely comfortable to wear, even during long sessions.
The canopy, or the top part of the AirPods Max that rests on your head, is made of a knit mesh material that Apple says distributes the weight evenly to ease the pressure you might feel while wearing other headphones. The frame is stainless steel, and the cups are anodized aluminum, with memory foam pads that feel comfortable around your ears while also blocking out sound.
On top of one of the cups, you’ll find the controls. There’s a button to change the listening mode, and there’s an Apple Watch-like digital crown (or knob) that lets you control the volume, skip tracks, answer the phone, and activate Siri.
To power the active noise cancellation feature, AirPods Max have six external microphones that listen for the noise around you. Then they deploy an equal-but-opposite “anti-noise” inside the earcups that effectively nullifies the sounds of the outside world.
AirPods Max can detect when you take them off your head, and they’ll pause whatever music or podcast you’re listening to. When you store them in the Smart Case they come with, they automatically enter an ultra-low-power mode to conserve battery life. Speaking of battery life, Apple says AirPods Max last 20 hours between charges.
And like other AirPod models, they’re easy to pair with any other Apple products you have. They have a one-tap setup mode that automatically pops up when you place your AirPods Max near your iPhone or iPad for the first time. They also offer seamless switching as you go from your iPhone to iPad to MacBook.
They also have two internal microphones to monitor the sound you’re hearing, and additional microphones to capture your voice for phone calls.
Of course, all those features and all that Apple-style design come at a cost. AirPods Max definitely cost more than many other wireless headphones on the market. But then again, audiophiles know you can spend a lot more on headphones than this.
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Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
