Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare series has now spanned over a decade. In this time, fan-favorite maps have been re-used and remastered into other games and game modes. Developer Infinity Ward has done a great job of re-purposing these maps from their award-winning single player missions over the years. Not all of them are obvious, and take some digging and boundary-breaking to find. Let’s take a look back at some of these memorable maps and their history in the Modern Warfare series.
First up is Crash from Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This map has not only been used across multiple Modern Warfare titles, it’s also had 24/7 playlists and a special winter time version called “Winter Crash”. This version replaces character deaths with boxes of presents and even has a Santa Claus Easter egg. Next is the “Invasion” map, which debuted in 2009’s Modern Warfare 2. This one is a little tricky to find as it’s hidden within the Euphrates Bridge map from 2019’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. While it’s more of an unfinished outline, the memories from MW2’s multiplayer still come rolling in.
The iconic map “Rust” from Modern Warfare 2 has made its way into four of Infinity Ward’s titles. Sadly, one of them is an unplayable Easter egg within Advanced Warfare’s map “Cargo”. Also from Modern Warfare 2 is “Scrapyard”. This small airplane graveyard map has been reused across nearly every game mode within 2019’s Modern Warfare. Next up is “Vacant” from Call Of Duty 4. This fan-favorite map stems from the iconic “All Ghillied Up” mission and has been reused and remastered in nearly every Modern Warfare title. “Broadcast” from Call of Duty 4 was a DLC map that made a surprising comeback into 2019’s Modern Warfare and even Warzone. Last but certainly not least is the Gulag. Despite its popularity and infamy in Warzone, this small map got its start in Modern Warfare 2 in the mission “The Gulag”. The memorable mission called for players to rescue prisoner 627 aka Captain Price himself.
The new edition includes the 4K Blu-ray, HD Blu-ray and digital edition, as well as new cover art and special features on the disc: “Accessing Section 9: 25 Years into the Future” and “Landscapes & Dreamscapes: The Art and Architecture of Ghost in the Shell.”
Here’s where you can preorder the 4K Blu-ray release of Ghost in the Shell
With both PS5 and Xbox Series X offering 4K Blu-ray compatible models coming up, there’s no reason why you can’t claim yourself a copy of this anime classic now if you plan on getting one of the new consoles later.
Sometimes, video games help you to lose yourself in their worlds and stories, using the power of interactivity to bring you into the life of a character and to provide you with the opportunity to experience at least some version of their emotions. And sometimes, you get “Press F to Pay Respects.”
If you’re somehow not familiar with a video game joke that became a pretty widespread meme, the “Press F” moment came about in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Early in the story, tragedy strikes, and the protagonist character attends a friend’s funeral. As the scene plays out, Advanced Warfare throws some interactivity your way to add some gravitas, prompting you to hit a button to enable your character to express their grief. If you’re playing on PC, the default key for honoring the dead in this case is “F.”
It’s not even Call of Duty’s fault–lots of games have had very similar moments with very similar prompts, or have allowed you to do dumb video game things at the exact wrong times–but the instance in Advanced Warfare just feels particularly goofy, probably because it appears in such a high-profile game. Here you are at a digital funeral for a fictional character in what the game hopes is an emotional, poignant moment, but a passing attempt at adding some interactivity to the scene actually works to completely undermine it. “Press F to Pay Respects” does nothing but scream at you that you’re playing a video game, and that the video game is ham-fistedly trying to get you involved in something so quintessentially human as mourning, and failing at it. It’s a glaring reminder that a lot of AAA games just don’t have a good idea of how to make it feel natural to interact with the world in a way that’s not about killing stuff.
Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima and its take on pressing F to pay respects.
Ghost of Tsushima is pretty emotional, for an open-world game about sneaking up on and stabbing the soldiers of an invading army. Its themes include sacrifice, what you owe to others and to yourself, and failing to live up to the expectations of those closest to you. It spends a lot of time building relationships between Jin and various characters, and then explores how much it can hurt to lose those relationships, whether through tragedy or through the characters’ own actions.
It’s a surprisingly introspective and contemplative game, and that’s reflected in several moments in which Jin visits graves. When dropping by, say, the grave of Jin’s father, you get Tsushima’s brand of “Press F to Pay Respects,” but it’s more than just hitting a button to trigger a momentary somber animation. Instead, Jin sits quietly before the grave for a moment and takes in the scene around him. A second later, you’re spurred to engage with one of the more interesting ideas of Ghost of Tsushima, and write a haiku.
Before we go any further, more than one person has criticized the implementation of Ghost of Tsushima’s haiku mechanic and the quality of the haiku it allows you to construct, and those criticisms are right. (Our own Kevin Knezevic breaks down everything that’s wrong with Tsushima’s haiku pretty comprehensively, in fact.)
Yes, haiku is historically anachronistic for the period the game is covering, which makes them feel, at least intellectually, like the idea of an element of Japanese culture rather than a more deft use of it. And Tsushima does not help you write particularly good haiku, it must be said. The system gives you a prompt (such as “Reflect on loss”) and then lets you pan the camera across the landscape around you, where you can pick one of three lines. You repeat the process until you create a little 5-7-5 poem out of the nine total options. As it was described by Austin Walker on an episode of Waypoint Radio, it’s essentially Mad Libs, and as Kevin wrote in his piece, all the poems are pretty much meaningless.
Considering all that as read, Tsushima still gets a lot right in deploying its haiku idea for these emotional moments–it’s less about the haiku you produce and more that you’re spending time producing one at all. When you visit the grave of Jin’s father, you actually visit his grave. You sit there for a while. You look around the scene and take it in. You reflect on their relationship and what it means to Jin, something that has been built into his character development. You take a second out from the sneaking and sword fighting to just sit and think. And you write a bad poem.
In trying to find a way to add interactivity to a personal, human moment, developer Sucker Punch actually landed on a pretty good idea, or at the very least, a creative solution to the problem. The haiku system is still pretty damn video gamey, but at least it actually does kind of feel like paying respects–more than hitting a key to advance a cutscene does, anyway.
Tsushima is an action game that’s willing to slow down and put its players in quieter, more introspective moments to serve its story. If games are going to continue to try to make these moments interactive in a meaningful way, you could do worse than cobbling together a bit of dumb verse to honor your dead in-game dad.
The Hargreeves family just can’t seem to catch a break. This season saw them thrown from one apocalyptic event right into another–this time back in the 1960s. If you’re wondering exactly how they got there, you may want to check out our Season 1 refresher (don’t worry, we only covered the absolute need-to-know points, like the time travel). Hopefully if you’re here, however, you’re already up to speed on the first season and, ideally, finished with Season 2, but left wondering what any of this means.
We’re going to try and make sense of that ending cliffhanger–but first, this ought to go without saying, but there are massive spoilers from all of Umbrella Academy from here on out. Proceed with caution, because unlike Five you won’t have the ability to blink back in time to a point where you haven’t spoiled the show for yourself.
For ease and convenience we’ll break it down in pieces, since the overlapping plots can get a little difficult to keep track of all at once. Here we go.
The Kennedy Assassination
For the early part of the season, handling the Kennedy Assassination is priority number one for most of the Hargreeves family. For Diego, that meant a relentless (and delusional) effort to try and save his life, while for Five, it meant trying to stop Diego from screwing up the timeline by saving his life. For everyone else, it meant something somewhere in between those two extremes.
Eventually, Five and Diego’s combined efforts revealed that their adoptive father, Reginald, and a clandestine secret society actually had put the assassination plans into motion–but that was the least of their problems. It turned out that stopping Kennedy’s assassination was actually what triggered the new apocalyptic future Five had been made privy to–though it wasn’t Diego’s interference that did it. The Cold War meltdown was caused by Vanya, who lost control of her powers and caused an explosion while the president’s motorcade traveled by. Kennedy survived, but the explosion was seen as an act of war by Russian forces.
To prevent that from happening, the siblings had to make sure that Vanya couldn’t blow up the building. This was made trickier by the fact that Vanya had unwittingly found herself in FBI custody as a suspected Russian spy. Her powers began melting down as she was tortured for information, but the catastrophe was circumvented thanks to Ben, who was able to possess her body and reign her abilities in. The process, unfortunately, used up the last bits of Ben’s ghostly energy and finally allowed him to pass on.
Though they may have prevented the explosion from triggering all out nuclear war, the whole debacle put every member of the Hargreeves family very much in the spotlight, and they were promptly proclaimed enemies of the state and put on most-wanted lists. Not exactly an ideal solution, though one that was certainly preferable to the literal apocalypse.
But, before they could deal with their Most Wanted status, Vanya had another issue to deal with.
Vanya and Harlan
While the other Hargreeves kids dealt with their new lives in the 60s with varying degrees of success, Vanya settled down as an amnesiac live-in nanny to a family with an autistic son named Harlan. Harlan’s mother, Sissy, and Vanya began a secret love affair, prompting the fury of Harlan’s deadbeat dad. The stress and upheaval, along with Vanya’s slowly recovering memories, caused Harlan to panic and attempt to run away. He nearly drowned in a retention pond, but was saved by Vanya, who used her powers to revive him.
The process inadvertently transferred some of Vanya’s powers into Harlan, who could not control them. In dealing with the aftermath of the Kennedy debacle, Vanya began to experience flashes of Harlan losing control and knew she had to help. Her siblings didn’t immediately jump to her aid, first opting to stay focused on the task at hand in mitigating the Kennedy fallout, but they eventually came to Vanya’s aid. The entire Hargreeves crew traveled to Sissy’s farm where Harlan’s abilities were manifesting at an alarming rate.
That’s when things started to get really, really messy because…
Five, The Handler, And The Commission
Throughout the season, Five worked tirelessly trying to not only figure out a way to solve this new apocalypse but get his family back home to 2019–but this, unfortunately, forced him back into a partnership with some familiar villainous faces from Season 1.
The Handler, who had survived her gunshot wound to the head but had been ousted from her position of power in the Commission during her recovery, offered Five a deal. If he could infiltrate and kill the Commission’s board of directors, clearing a path for the Handler to regain control, she could provide him with a time-traveling briefcase which would allow the Hargreeves siblings to get home. Meanwhile, the acting board has sent a trio of Sweedish assassin brothers (known only as the Swedes) to try and eliminate the Hargreeves siblings entirely, so they keep cropping up to make trouble while Five works out his plan.
With no other real options on the table, Five accepted, murdered the board, and plunged the Commission into chaos. But, unsurprisingly, the Handler then allowed the other shoe to drop–she had set Five up for failure, giving him an impossible deadline to use the briefcase to get home, and then declared he and his siblings enemies of the Commission who needed to be eliminated.
This all culminated into a final showdown at Sissy’s farm, interrupting Vanya’s attempt to talk Harlan’s new powers down. Thankfully, the combined efforts of all the Hargreeves siblings were able to stop the Commission assassins set to kill them–but the Handler had one final ace up her sleeve. Lila, her own adoptive daughter who had spent the season undercover as Diego’s new friend (or girlfriend, in her own words), turned out not only to be a highly trained fighter but have superpowers of her own. It was revealed that Lila was actually one of the other children who were mysteriously born on October 1, 1989, but she’d been scooped up secretly by the Handler rather than bought by Reginald as a baby.
As you can probably imagine, this revelation prompted its fair share of drama but ultimately Lila was swayed to join forces with the Hargreeves family and help take out her maniacal mother. Hopefully for good this time.
With the Handler gone, the remainder of the Commission in complete disarray, and the Kennedy assassination debacle dealt with, the Hargreeves kids (minus Lila who escaped with a Commission briefcase and could be anywhere) were finally able to return home to 2019 using the Commission’s now abandoned time-travel technology.
It was all well and good, until…
The new 2019
It turned out that the future the Hargreeves siblings returned to was not the 2019 they remembered, despite their initial impressions. They arrived back at the Umbrella Academy mansion to find it rebranded, by a very much alive Reginald Hargreeves, as the Sparrow Academy. And that’s not all–it turns out that in this reality, Ben never died. Now, alive, and an adult, Ben doesn’t recognize his siblings at all, and apparently leads the Sparrow Academy team.
Unfortunately, that’s about as much as we get before the season ends. The good news is that both apocalyptic events have, apparently, been successfully avoided and Ben isn’t dead anymore–the bad news is that there’s absolutely no way to tell what went wrong in the timeline to have caused this change, or how it’s going to affect everyone.
We also get a glimpse back into the 1960s where we see that Harlan’s powers are very much still a thing–there’s even the implication that Harlan may have something to do with an alien or UFO incident in Roswell, New Mexico. The last surviving Swede joins the remainder of Klaus’s free-love cult, Destiny’s Children, who continue to exist despite Klaus vanishing from their lives. Oh, and Reginald briefly revealed himself to be an alien–though none of the Hargreeves kids were ever made privy to that information. We suspect that, now in this new timeline with Reginald still alive, that might come up.
All told, Umbrella Academy Season 2 poses more questions than it answers–which is pretty much par for the course for the show as a whole at this point. These sort of things happen when you send a bunch of severely underqualified, traumatized superpowered siblings through time without any real rules or supervision, we guess. It’s safe to say there is plenty to dig into should the show return for a Season 3.
Courteney Cox is reportedly set to return to the Scream movie universe.
Cox will reprise her role as reporter Gale Weathers, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She was last seen in that role in 2011’s Scream 4. This news comes two months after it was announced that David Arquette is set to reprise his role as Sheriff Dewey Riley in the fifth Scream movie. As for what Cox’s involvement in the story will be, not much more is known. Considering that her role throughout the series has been to investigate the murders of Ghostface, it’s easy to imagine that she’ll probably be picking back up on the killer’s trail.
The news of a fifth Scream movie came earlier this year when it was reported that Spyglass Media Group would produce the film. The movie will be directed by Ready or Not’s Matthew Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. As for what to expect, it’s still unclear if this is a soft reboot with a continuation of the previous Scream movies or a hard reboot with no connection to what’s come before.
Betinelli-Olpin, Gillette, and Chad Villela are collectively known as horror film group, Radio Silence. This trio is responsible for last year’s Ready or Not, which saw Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett direct and Villela produce. We gave Ready or Not a 7.6 out of 10 in our review.
Lantern Entertainment acquired the rights to Scream after the company took control of film and TV Scream assets following a Weinstein Co. bankruptcy sale in 2018. Scream 5’s production will shoot in Wilmington, North Carolina and casting is currently underway, according to THR.
The first Scream — directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson — was released in 1996. It starred Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Cox, and Matthew Lillard, among others. The slasher “GhostFace” wore a mask inspired by Edvard Munch painting, The Scream, while preying on Campbell’s character. The film made over $100 million at the domestic box office and spawned a number of sequels as well as an MTV television series.
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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.
Heads up, monster movie fans: right now you can grab a Blu-ray copy of Shin Godzilla for just $5 on Amazon. It includes a DVD and digital copy of the film as well. That’s quite a deal, but it’s unclear how long it will last. That means you should probably grab it before the price goes back up.
The movie, from the Japanese studio Toho, came out in 2016 and acts as a kind of reboot for the franchise, paying homage to the original 1954 Godzilla film along the way.
If you’re on the fence about dropping a fiver on the film, check out our 8.5/10 Shin Godzilla review.
From the review: “Shin Godzilla provides a new origin for the legendary kaiju, establishing its own unique style while taking inspiration from the classics in all the right ways. Some fans might be disappointed by the monster’s lack of screentime or confused by the complex bureaucracies at the film’s center, but it all comes together by the end.”
Again, it’s unclear how long the deal will last, so pick up a copy before the discount goes away.
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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
August is almost here, and one of the first August events that Pokemon Go players have to look forward to is August’s Community Day. This month’s event takes place next Saturday, August 8, and as usual, it’ll give players everywhere a chance to catch a Shiny Pokemon, learn a special event-exclusive move, and more. To help you prepare, we’ve rounded up everything you need to know about August’s Community Day below.
August’s Featured Pokemon: Magikarp
The majestic Magikarp
This month’s featured Pokemon is an unexpected choice: Magikarp, the notoriously useless fish Pokemon. All throughout August’s Community Day, Magikarp will appear in the wild much more often than normal, and you’ll have a greater chance to encounter a Shiny Magikarp during the event.
Although Magikarp itself isn’t particularly exciting, August’s Community Day is a good opportunity to stock up on Magikarp Candy. You’ll need to have a lot of those on hand if you want a Gyarados, as it takes a whopping 400 Magikarp Candy to evolve the Pokemon, so take advantage of the increased Magikarp spawns while you can.
August’s Community Day Move: Aqua Tail
If you manage to collect enough Candy to evolve Magikarp into Gyarados, it’ll learn the exclusive Community Day move Aqua Tail. Gyarados cannot normally learn this attack in Pokemon Go, making this your only chance to get it.
In order for your Gyarados to learn Aqua Tail, you’ll need to evolve Magikarp up to two hours after the Community Day ends. Any Magikarp you evolve during this time frame will know Aqua Tail when they become Gyarados, even if you caught them prior to the event.
August Community Day Hours
Just as the past few Community Days, August’s event will run for six hours instead of the traditional three, from 11 AM to 5 PM local time. This means you’ll have until 7 PM local time to evolve Magikarp and obtain a Gyarados that knows Aqua Tail.
Community Day Special Research
Niantic will offer an event-exclusive Special Research story called “Making a Splash” during August’s Community Day. To access it, you’ll need to purchase a ticket from Pokemon Go’s in-game shop for $1 USD. There will also be event-exclusive Field Research tasks. These will be available to all players and will net you additional Magikarp Candy, helping you stock up on enough to get Gyarados.
Other Bonuses
In addition to increased Magikarp spawns, Niantic will offer a couple of other bonuses during August’s Community Day. This time, you’ll earn triple the usual amount of Stardust for catching Pokemon. On top of that, any Incense you use during the event will remain active for three hours rather than the usual 30 minutes. Finally, Niantic will be selling a special Community Day box that contains the following items:
Those looking to sink their teeth into another year of the highs and lows of football management are going to need to wait a bit longer. Developer Sports Interactive has confirmed that Football Manager 2021 has been delayed due to the disruptive impact of COVID-19.
“What I can confirm today is that, despite all the problems going on in the world, there will be new Football Manager games released later this year,” Studio director Miles Jacobson said in a recent statement. “They will be delivered a little later than we’d originally planned, but they’ll have exceptionally strong feature sets… albeit different to those we thought we’d settled on back in January when I completed my ‘dream feature set’.”
Considering the last five entries in the series have all launched in November, it’s a safe bet to assume that this was the original plan before the current situation put paid to that.
“It has taken a monumental effort to make this possible,” Jacobson said. “The flexibility the team have shown through this period has been incredible; we’ve been changing scope, both upwards and downwards, on an almost weekly basis (and often as a result of changes in people’s personal circumstances). I firmly believe you’ll all appreciate the improvements and new features this year–and for us to have created the games that we’re going to deliver later this year during a global pandemic is something else I’m very proud of.”
It’s not all bad news either. Sports Interactive remains financially healthy despite the issues posed by COVID-19. Rather than being forced to lay off employees, the studio has accelerated its hiring programme over the last few months and added more than 20 new staff members since lockdown began.
It also allowed people to play Football Manager 2020 for free for a fortnight back in March (as more and more people found themselves quarantined at home), and the studio has taken part in numerous charity initiatives recently, such as the UKIE-managed Games for Carers programme and the Humble Black Lives Matter bundle.
“Our games will be on more platforms and available on more stores than ever before when they’re released later this year but, with regards to features and release dates, it’s a little too early for us to talk about the specifics right now,” Jacobson continues. “Please cut us a little bit of slack and rest assured that we will once again deliver a set of games that provide hundreds of hours of entertainment and remain the best value for money on the market–and something to help you escape from the real world at the moment, at least for a while.”
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EA has revealed more of the 50 new Superstar X-Factor abilities in Madden NFL 21. After detailing Quarterback abilities yesterday, the latest update focuses on the offensive side of the ball with wide receivers and tight ends like George Kittle, Julio Jones, Tyreek Hill, and more.
Superstar X-Factors are powerful abilities designed to mimic the real-life talent and characteristics of some of the NFL’s best players. By completing specific milestones with an X-Factor player, their special ability will trigger as they enter the zone and only end after certain Knockout conditions are met, such as a dropped catch or consecutive non-targets.
Here is the latest X-Factor reveals:
San Francisco’s star tight end.
George Kittle: Yac’em Up–Making house calls.
Zone: Increased chance to break the first post-catch tackle.
Trigger: Three 20+ yard receptions.
Knockout: One drop, incompletion, or three consecutive non-targets.
Stefon Diggs and Tyreek Hill: Rac’em Up–Runner after the catch.
Zone: Wins RAC catches versus single coverage.
Trigger: Three receptions of 20+ Yards.
Knockout: One drop, incompletion, or three consecutive non-targets.
Amari Cooper, Keenan Allen, and Michael Thomas: Max Security–Surehanded receivers.
Zone: High success rate on possession catches.
Trigger: Four consecutive completions.
Knockout: One drop, incompletion, or three consecutive non-targets.
Adam Thielen, Davante Adams, DeAndre Hopkins, Julio Jones, Mike Evans, and Travis Kelce: Double Me–A jump-ball pro.
Zone: Wins aggressive catches versus single coverage.
Trigger: Two receptions of 20+ yards in air.
Knockout: One drop, incompletion, or three consecutive non-targets.
Madden NFL 21 launches on August 28 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. EA is also offering Dual Entitlement, allowing players who purchase a next-gen PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X the option to upgrade their copy of Madden NFL 21 from the current generation consoles at no additional cost. For more details, check out our Madden NFL 21 pre-order guide.
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BioWare continues to update, support, and evolve Anthem, the 2019 online looter-shooter published by EA. BioWare Austin studio director Christian Dailey posted a new blog post today that covers the changes coming to Anthem’s loot and equipment systems–and they sound quite significant.
For loot, Dailey acknowledged that BioWare “fell short” in creating a loot system for Anthem that was deep and engaging enough. In response, BioWare recognized it needed to basically start over and build a new system “from the ground up.”
The new loot system in Anthem aims to “respect your time,” “embrace choice,” “create a rewarding loot experience,” and “keep it accessible and immediate,” among others.
In the future, Anthem players can expect a higher frequency of loot drops that contain items that are better across the board. Additionally, BioWare is planing to give players the ability to seek out specific loot instead of relying on randomness. There will be specific quests and specialized vendors that players can engage with to find the loot they want.
Additionally, BioWare is shaping the new Anthem loot experience to make the drops feel more exciting and notable, while the developer is adding “rare enemies” that drop a lot of rare loot at once. The new loot system is also aiming to give players the ability to see and equip the loot right away. Additionally, a new “equipment sheet” will be added that shows what you have equipped.
BioWare is also planning for the new Anthem loot system to “scale for the future.” The revised loot system will scale when the power cap rises, BioWare said.
All of these changes are a work in progress and they are subject to change as development continues. BioWare said it’s still “early days,” and the studio plans to continue to test these changes and experiment with them “over the coming months.”
BioWare is also making changes to Anthem’s gunplay. The changes will make the game feel “more responsive,” BioWare said, adding that enemies will react to hits “near instantly” thanks to advancements made to the client side.
“We are looking into the role of melee items and builds, and of course, being able to spend skill points to unlock new types of equipment and synergies,” Dailey said. “One of the things I am most excited about is seeing all the awesome new weaponry concepts based on our factions.”
Finally, Dailey reminded players that these are substantial changes that won’t be rolled out immediately. “I want to set expectations that there is a lot of work behind each of these and in some cases a rather large tech undertaking–this is not an ‘easy fix’ and will take time,” Dailey said.
