It’s been a week, that’s for sure. But now the week is behind us, and let us never speak of it again. Instead, why not take a look at the dozens of new Nintendo designs we just added to the IGN Store?
Zelda, Animal Crossing, Mario and More Shirt Designs
Pokemon Sword / Shield — Kevin Knezevic, Associate Editor
The Switch has no shortage of great titles to engross yourself in when cooped up at home, but Pokemon Sword and Shield are among the best. What makes Pokemon games–and Sword and Shield in particular–such compelling timesinks is the depth hidden beneath their surface. Even if you’ve already conquered the Pokemon League and cleared the main storyline, there are still a variety of different activities to do. You can take on an endless procession of AI opponents in the Battle Tower, scour the Wild Area for any elusive Pokemon you may have missed, hunt for incredibly rare Shiny monsters, or even try to discover every recipe in the Curry Dex.
The true draw of the games, however, is trying to assemble a competitive team. While you can easily run through every opponent you encounter during the main adventure with any old Pokemon you’ve caught, you’ll need to put much more time and thought into your party if you hope to fare well in online battles. This entails breeding Pokemon with the right natures and base stats, EV training them to improve their stats, and devising the right movesets and strategies for your team. It’s time-consuming but incredibly rewarding, and Sword and Shield have made some smart tweaks to streamline this whole process, making competitive battling more accessible than ever before. (We also have a great series of videos to help you get into competitive Pokemon battling if this all sounds daunting.)
Even if the competitive aspect of the series doesn’t appeal to you, Sword and Shield are great games to play with friends thanks to the new Max Raids–cooperative battles in which you team up with three other trainers to take on Dynamaxed Pokemon. The monsters you encounter in these battles often have a few perfect base stats and their Hidden Ability (which can’t otherwise be obtained in the games), and you get a ton of enticing rewards for winning like Exp. Candy and TRs, so it’s always fun to take part in Max Raids.
Moreover, these raids are the only way to encounter Gigantamax Pokemon, which are rare and just plain cool. I’ve spent dozens of hours jumping into Max Raids with my friends, and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon so long as Game Freak continues to regularly offer new Max Raid events. The Pokemon series has long lacked a good cooperative mode to complement its competitive hooks, but Sword and Shield have finally remedied that, making them a great way to occupy any idle downtime.
As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues, major conventions are being canceled or postponed and a growing number of movie and TV projects are being suspended. With this, many folks who are now practicing “social distancing” might be looking for things to watch while they remain indoors. And director James Gunn, whose latest film, The Suicide Squad, managed to wrap production before the outbreak reached global status, has some recommendations.
Gunn took to Twitter to list 10 of his favorite “underrated/little known” films for people to watch, and to encourage others to list theirs.
You can check out Gunn’s full Twitter thread below, where he recommends everything from South Korean New Wave (from directors like Bong Joon-ho and Jung Byung-gil) to an old Preston Sturges comedy to Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant “non-sequel” starring Nic Cage. Check it out.
10 GREAT MOVIES YOU LIKELY HAVEN’T SEEN TO STREAM WHILE YOU SELF-QUARANTINE. It’s important for the health of our world to practice social distancing as much as possible. In the service of you doing this & in the hopes you will, I’ve come up with this list. #QuarantineAndChill
Did you have a list of cult classics or underrated gems, like James Gunn, that you’d like to share? Let everyone know in the comments below@
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
Variety film reporter Justin Kroll states that a source close to Warner Bros. says the studio’s films The Batman, Matrix 4, and King Richard (starring Will Smith) are still in production. Here’s Kroll’s tweet…
Source close to WB saying BATMAN, MATRIX and KING RICHARD shoots will continue. SQUAD, LITTLE THINGS and REMINISCE are all in post, BLACK ADAM doesn’t start till august, AQUAMAN in 2021
In Kroll’s chain, he also mentions that Fantastic Beasts 3 is still set to start filming on Monday.
Also mentioned, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, The Little Things (starring Denzel Washington), and Reminisce (starring Hugh Jackman, written directed by Westworld’s Lisa Joy) have all finished filming and are now in post-production. DC films Black Adam and Aqauaman 2 haven’t started production yet, and won’t for a little while.
Obviously, productions could come to a halt if Warner Bros. changes its mind.
The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz, began filming in the U.K. at the end of January. The film’s take on the Batmobile has many influences, from the comics to the original TV series.
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
Netflix has announced that it’s temporarily shutting down production for its original movies and shows to reduce the spread of coronavirus.
All of the streaming giant’s scripted television and film projects in the United States and Canada will go on hiatus for two weeks. Included in these productions is Stranger Things, which was in the midst of filming its fourth season.
The Warner Bros. Television Group released a statement regarding the situation:
“With the rapidly changing events related to COVID-19, and out of an abundance of caution, Warner Bros. Television Group is halting production on some of our 70-plus series and pilots currently filming or about to begin. There have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 on any of our productions, but the health and safety of our employees, casts and crews remains our top priority. During this time, we will continue to follow the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control as well as local officials and public health professionals in each city where our productions are based.”
AMC has also stopped production on Fear the Walking Dead Season 6, until at least the week of April 13, while pre-production on Season 11 of The Walking Dead has also been delayed for a month, although the writers’ room is still active and working on scripts.
Keep it locked into IGN for all the latest news from the entertainment world regarding COVID-19.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
In an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus, AMC Theaters announced that it’s reducing capacity in each of its auditoriums by at least 50%, from Saturday, March 14 through April 30.
AMC will cap ticket sales for each showtime in each of its theatre’s auditoriums to half of the normal capacity. In auditoriums with more than 500 seats, AMC will further cap ticket sales to a maximum of 250.
Per Deadline, AMC is the first theater chain to address the COVID-19 pandemic and, as the largest theater chain in the country, is also actively complying with “all local authorities’ directives on social gathering and is further reducing the availability of tickets to comply with any current or future federal, state or local governmental order.”
Each theaters’ health and safety cleaning protocols have also been enhanced “to ensure that at least once per hour within an AMC building, the theatre team is cleaning high touch point areas, including kiosks, counter tops, restroom areas, glass, handrails and doorknobs.”
Keep it locked into IGN for all the latest news from the entertainment world regarding COVID-19.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
Universal Pictures halted production on Jurassic World: Dominion on Friday due to the ongoing novel coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19).
Jurassic World: Dominion, the third entry in the new trilogy that continues the saga of 1993’s Jurassic Park, had been filming in London since February.
The movie — directed and co-written by Colin Trevorrow — unites the casts of the Jurassic World and Jurassic Park films, including Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Omar Sy, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum.
Universal also stopped production on two other live-action films, the Ice Cube sports film Flint Strong and the Billy Eichner film formerly known as Bros.
Universal and Blumhouse Productions’ action-thriller-satire The Hunt has been the subject of its fair share of controversy dating back to last summer. That’s when, in the wake of the tragic mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, the film’s “liberals hunt conservatives” premise led the studio to bump its release date by some six months. The film was subsequently the target of much debate in the media, with even President Trump apparently getting in on the act (although he never specifically referred to the film by name in his comments).
But now that the film is out, it is clear that The Hunt is satirizing the very us vs. them mindset that helped to ignite the controversy over it in the first place. The Hunt’s Red State conservatives and Blue State liberals are mostly extreme caricatures, a trollbot’s idea of what our political divide looks like. Produced by Jason Blum, directed by Craig Zobel, and written by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, The Hunt holds a ghastly mirror up to us and asks, what if?
Of course, coming as it does in part from Lindelof — who is riding high these days on the recent success of his HBO Watchmen series — it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that there’s more to this hunt than at first meets the eye. We spoke to Lindelof about the surprises laced in the film’s script, what he and the team were hoping to say with The Hunt, and much more.
The Janet Leigh Trick, a.k.a. Who’s Our Main Character Anyway?
The Hunt starts off with a fun bit of cinematic legerdemain where we just don’t know who our main character is for the first 20 minutes of the film or so. As the hunted (regular Joe conservatives) awaken in the secluded zone that the hunters (rich, elite liberals) have set up, we jump from character to character, trying to latch on to somebody we can follow as our identifying character in this insane situation… only to have each potential player shot or blown up or otherwise dispatched.
“It’s now familiar territory to do what they did in Psycho — the Janet Lee, trick as it were, where the hero that you think you are watching gets killed in fairly short order,” says Lindelof, referring to the presumed main character and biggest star of the Alfred Hitchcock classic who surprised audiences at the time by being killed off halfway through the movie. “[Now] we’re now post-Scream, which satirized that very idea. And so it felt like the next version of that twist or storytelling technique was to just do it again.
“Then it was like, ‘Well, O.K., so once Emma [Roberts’ character] dies, well, she’s dead. But now Justin Hartley has got to be the star of this movie. He wouldn’t just come down and do one day [of filming]. … He just exploded. There’s Ike Barinholtz, he looks familiar. I love that guy. He was great in Neighbors. Like, it’s going to be him [who will be our main character]!’ And then he buys it in the gas station. And so I think that the intention was to create a feeling in the audience, the same emotional experience that those hunted had, which is anybody can go at any time. And I’m not going to basically get too attached to any of these people. Because this is a movie where the hero can die.”
Lindelof says that when the filmmakers were trying to find the “sweet spot” of satire, they came to realize they needed to go over the top for this kind of material. Getting too close to the world that we live in was always a danger, and so depicting a group of (mostly) stereotypes — characters who were also caricatures — became essential. But not all of the characters would fall into that category, and that’s where the player who eventually does wind up being our main character comes in.
“The real key is that you have to find a center, if you’re going to go over the top, and for us the answer was Crystal,” says Lindelof, referring to the character played by Betty Gilpin (GLOW), a kickass ex-military who starts out as one of the hunted but turns the tables on her captors. “Betty Gilpin is just such an amazing actor because she’s taking what’s happening to her very seriously. But at the same time, she has kind of a cynical sense of humor about it.
“She’s incredibly fun to watch, but she’s almost got this attitude of like, ‘I do not want to be in this movie, but now that you’ve put me in the movie, I guess I’m just going to have to kill everybody.’ And so I think that she created that balance between the absurdity of a movie that’s first kill is by a high-heeled shoe and then ends with a 20-minute-long fight sequence in a Nancy Meyer kitchen. But I think that Betty found a way to prevent the movie from floating off into the highest levels of Absurd Town.”
The interesting thing about the Crystal character is that we eventually find out that she apparently was mistakenly chosen for the hunt; she happens to share the name of someone with more extreme political views. And in the end, she is triumphant against those who hunted her, including Hilary Swank’s character, an ex-highflying corporate type who is the ringleader of the hunters. But Crystal is the one character in The Hunt whose political leanings we never really get a sense of.
“It’s possible that she is not a political character,” explains Lindelof. “She clearly identifies as someone who doesn’t want to talk about politics. And that is indicative of a vast number of people who live in this country. We live in a bubble. We consume the media that we consume. And for some of us on both sides, by the way, the political situation in the country is almost all we talk about. But for many, many others, they just don’t care. They care more about feeding their families or keeping their jobs or having to renew their license at the DMV. And the idea of what’s happening in Washington is just not of their concern. And I think that Crystal is a character that speaks for those people, who’s like, ‘Why do I have to pick a team? I’m on team me.’”
Sort of working as the flipside of the Crystal character is Swank’s Athena. We eventually learn that she didn’t start off as the crazed leader of a human hunting party, but rather saw her life and career ruined by a dumb, joking text message thread with her friends that went public. Whereas Crystal is apparently apolitical, Athena it seems is forced to take sides (very, very extreme sides, yes) due to the pressures of the sharply divided world around her. In so doing, she enters into a downward spiral and becomes the very thing people accused her of being when that text message thread went viral in the first place.
“The question that we were asking is, what happens to someone who gets accused of being a monster,” says Lindelof. “And not just accused of it but it’s believed about them. At a certain point do they just throw up their arms and say, ‘O.K., you want me to be a monster, then that is what I’ll be. If you believe that about me anyway, I might as well just do it.’ And does that speak to [the fact] that there was always a part of them that was already a monster? I think that’s the scariest part of humanity. We have this idea of people are born evil or they’re not born evil. When I find that, moving through life, people make good choices and they make bad choices. But the innate nature of their character is not something that’s predetermined.”
But the problem, according to Lindelof, is that people go on the defensive when they are accused of things, and it becomes very hard to be your best self in that moment.
“In Athena’s case, that becomes a justification for some very, very bad choices,” he says.
Considering the real MLB has recently delayed its 2020 season, MLB The Show 20 literally is the closest you’ll get to real pro baseball for a while. So it’s a good thing it’s great, as usual! That said, this is an annual franchise, and this year’s version isn’t as much of an improvement over last year’s impressive MLB The Show 19 as we’ve seen in big years in the past. But it finally adds some much-desired variety in ways to progress through the excellent Diamond Dynasty card collection mode, expanded customization for its addictive Franchise mode, and further gameplay tweaks to improve what was already one of the best, most dynamic baseball simulations we’ve seen to date.
One of the best gameplay tweaks this year is that perfect contact and perfect timing on batter hits leads to hard-earned ‘Perfect-Perfect’ hits, which let batters get more involved by rewarding you with higher-quality content that will lead to more home runs, line drives, or hot-shot grounders (a higher BABIP, basically). That makes the Plate Coverage Indicator a potentially deadly weapon during at-bats, because you can use your own skill in combination with your batter’s skill to make those precision home runs. Just as in MLB The Show 19, you can customize your PCI in any way you’d like, making it truly your own for the best results.
Where last year’s outfielding improvements made playing the outfield way more dynamic and enjoyable with features like a ball path indicator for top-ranked outfielders, the simulation still needed work, especially when the CPU was in control. MLB The Show 20 takes another necessary step forward here: Outfielders have been dialed in more, and now react more accurately than ever. Your skilled fielders will get a good first-step jump to catch a fly ball, while poor defenders risk fumbling it at the critical moment when closing in on a high-risk catch attempt. This adds to the realism of MLB The Show 20, and it also reinforces the need to keep your hits away from the opposite team’s best field defense.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Your%20skilled%20fielders%20will%20get%20a%20good%20first-step%20jump%20to%20catch%20a%20fly%20ball.”]Graphics and animations look just a bit sharper this year, but it’s definitely beginning to feel like Sony San Diego is pushing the upper limit of what the PS4 and even the PS4 Pro are capable of. Even on “Faster” mode on PS4 Pro, which claims a ‘stable’ 1080p image, you may experience infrequent frame drops in moments when a lot of players are on the screen at once. Whenever I watched a team take their victory lap in the rain, for instance, my PS4 Pro began to sound like a jet engine on a runway. With options for native output to 4K HDR, and some of the most detail ever put into individual scans of real-world player likenesses, equipment, and animations, MLB The Show 20 feels like it’s just begging to be played on a PlayStation 5.
Franchise mode, where you run your own team just the way you want, is still one of the highlights of this series, so it’s disappointing so little has changed this year. As always, you can micromanage how your team operates, or you can simply let the computer do it all for you while you focus on playing baseball. However, there’s at least one improvement: For the first time, MLB The Show 20 carries over the team customization system from Diamond Dynasty for its Franchise mode, which is a great idea. That said, it’s unfortunate that it isn’t necessarily as well-implemented as it could be. For one, it’s still hard to make a team logo that looks great in its overly complex and unintuitive logo maker tool, but worse, you still have to adopt a real team’s home stadium as your own instead of being able to create your own. Even your season goals are tied to a template based on a real team. As a result, my custom team never felt fully my own.
At this point, many longtime fans have been yearning for the ability to craft their own stadiums for Franchise mode, and rightfully so. With the amount of depth given to the character creator, and even the team management simulation itself, it seems odd that Franchise mode still doesn’t give you the ability to design a personalized stadium that shows off your team’s true colors.
This can be forgiven though, because something else that has been sorely missing from past iterations of MLB The Show is finally here: Minor League rosters are in full effect now, carrying in what must be hundreds of real players and their likenesses from double-A and triple-A teams into circulation. It’s now far less common to run into made-up players on the field. This is fantastic news for hardcore MLB fans who want that pure fantasy baseball experience and who pay attention to real MiLB players that may actually reach MLB positions at some point in the coming seasons.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=It%E2%80%99s%20now%20far%20less%20common%20to%20run%20into%20made-up%20players%20on%20the%20field.”]It sucks that there’s no such thing as a multiplayer Franchise mode, and the highly anticipated Custom Leagues mode doesn’t deliver anywhere near the same amount of depth or nuance. It’s true that this mode introduces a way for you and your friends to join a league and compete online as your favorite teams, which is good. You can still select the number of teams per league, select which teams you and your friends play as, and you can even change a few of the house rules. The problem is the options for customization and micromanagement here are ironically much less fleshed-out than in other established modes, such as the Franchise mode that it’ll be heavily compared against. In other words, if you value customization you can safely ignore this one and challenge your friends in Diamond Dynasty mode instead.
Sadly, there isn’t much to talk about regarding MLB The Show 20’s version of Road to the Show because so little is different. You can bring last year’s save file on through, but you probably won’t find that enough’s changed to justify going through all of it again. There are a few changes to the user interface, including the addition of markers that indicate when your plays on the field impact your relationships with teammates, but it’s still fundamentally the same exact game as it was last year. One cool new thing about MLB The Show 20 is the ability to pick an ‘affinity’ team when you first log in, which gives you a unique reward progression track as you play and nearly ensures that you’ll be drafted into that team at the beginning of your Road to the Show career path.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Many%20of%20the%20rewards%20you%20earn%20can%20be%20taken%20with%20you%20to%20other%20modes.”]Over in Diamond Dynasty mode, it’s great that many of the rewards you earn, such as experience points and equipment, can also be taken with you to other modes. This isn’t anything new, but now there are more ways to play and earn said rewards by doing virtually anything in MLB The Show 20 that constitutes regular gameplay. Moments, Conquests, and Events are back, and it’s enjoyable that progression in each of those modes still contributes to your Live Series Collections, Team Affinity, and XP Reward Path.
There’s also an entirely new mode within Diamond Dynasty:. tThe brand-new Showdown mode, which is instantly one of the best parts of MLB The Show 20, especially because you don’t need to progress into the regular Diamond Dynasty mode to get the most out of it. Here’s how it works: as you take on a brand-new squad outside of your regular Diamond Dynasty rotation, you get to complete a series of bite-sized challenges. For example, ‘Take the lead in the 9th inning’ or ‘Hit a home run before making X amount of outs’. Likewise, the ‘boss battles’ against legendary MLB pitchers, like Al Leiter, and even ‘mini-boss’ encounters with up-and-comers like Walker Buehler, are challenging and tense.
Finally, March to October, which sorely needed some love before, now has a new Momentum system to heat things up if you’re winning a lot, which affects your win rate between key moments. Likewise, losing matches can kill your momentum or even send you on a losing streak. Incredibly sharp casting from Matt Vasgersian and the like pinpoint key moments in those turnaround games, making it enthralling to turn a losing streak into a winning streak and regain positive momentum once more. This system definitely adds a new layer of emotional investment to March to October mode, compelling you to make it all the way to the postseason. Also new to MLB The Show 20, you can now call-up new and trade your players throughout the season, and it’s particularly cool that you can focus on improving the performance of one player by successfully completing a special challenge match.
