Welcome to IGN’s Daily Deals, your source for the best deals on the stuff you actually want to buy. If you buy something through this post, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.
Like me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter to get the latest deals.
The NFL’s JJ Watt is not the only professional athlete talking about Fortnite these days. Josh Hart, a guard for the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, is apparently a big fan of the Battle Royale game. He’s such a big fan that he had Fortnite-inspired shoes commissioned and wore them on the court this weekend.
Los Angeles based artist Salvador Amezcua, who goes by the name Kickstrodamis, created a custom pair of Nike Kobe shoes for Hart. They are pretty slick-looking, with a purple and green colour combination and Hart’s name featured on them. There is also an image of Hart if he were Fortnite character and a line that says “Eliminated By JoshHartNova.” Nice.
Hart wore his cool new Fortnite shoes during at least the warmup of the Lakers’ February 24 matchup against the Sacramento Kings. It’s not clear if he actually wore the shoes during the game itself, as NBA rules might not allow it, but either way, he scored 10 points in the game.
Fortnite: Battle Royale is free to download and play on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, while the Save the World mode is currently still in paid early access. In other news, the game recently kicked off Season 3 and you can buy a Season 3 Battle Pass with 76 items for around $10.
Publisher Starbreeze Studios has said it’s waiting on Nintendo to be able to use the company’s companion VOIP app for Payday 2.
Kotaku reports Payday 2, which relies heavily on communication due to its cooperative nature, will eventually use the Nintendo Switch Online App to facilitate voice chat-in game, pending Nintendo’s permission.
“We are waiting to be able to participate in Nintendo’s VOIP app solution,” Starbreeze Studios told Kotaku “As soon as we are given the go-ahead, this is definitely on our list to look into to update.”
Nintendo consoles have famously not included any means of voice chat between players while in-game. The Switch is no different on its own but does work with the Nintendo Switch Online App, which came out last July, to use voice chat for compatible games.
An excellent 10 minute film based on Lucas Pope’s powerful 2013 game Papers, Please is out now.
The film, which is free to watch on YouTube and Steam, does a wonderful job at capturing the bleak tone of Lucas Pope’s frantic puzzler and the moral quandaries suffered by his border crossing immigration officer in the made-up state of Arstotzka.
In our review, we called Papers, Please “a simulation of that moment that a cog in the machine’s heart finally stops beating, or a kind of hidden object game where what you’re mostly looking for is a glimmer of hope.”
Black Panther continues to dominate the box office. The superhero movie made $108 million during its second week at the US and Canadian box office, with a further $83.8 million coming from international markets this weekend. So far, the movie has made $704 million in total globally ($400 million domestically and $304 million internationally) since its release earlier this month.
Black Panther becomes just the fourth movie in history to make more than $100 million in its second weekend, the others being Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($149.2 million), Jurassic World ($106.6 million), and The Avengers ($103 million).
Movies typically see a massive dropoff in box office results from the first week to the second, but Black Panther’s US haul only dropped 47 percent from the $218 million it made during its opening weekend. That figure represented a record for a February release. This weekend, the Ryan Coogler-directed movie bested three other notable newcomers–Game Night, Annihilation, and Every Day.
What probably helped Black Panther succeed in its second week was its pretty much perfect A-Plus Cinemascore rating. This is derived from audience reviews, so a second week of strong results was probably fuelled by positive word of mouth.
“Black Panther is a top tier Marvel movie with all the humor, style, action, passion, and fun that the MCU has come to embody,” GameSpot’s Michael Rougeau said in his review. “Black Panther is a cultural event that’s going to be hard for Marvel to top, no matter how many worlds Thanos conquers later this year in Infinity War.”
Below you can see the full US/Canadian box office report for the February 23-25 weekend, as compiled by Entertainment Weekly.
Black Panther had stellar second weekend at the domestic box office, holding strong in first place with an estimated $108 million.
The Chadwick Boseman-led Marvel movie had the second-largest second weekend ever, outpacing the second weekend hauls of both The Avengers and Jurassic World. Black Panther’s second weekend is only behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which made $149.2 million in 2015.
Having now grossed $400 million in North America, director Ryan Coogler’s record-breaking MCU film is not only the third-fastest movie to reach the milestone—reaching $400M in just 10 days—it’s on pace to soon eclipse Captain America: Civil War and Iron Man 3’s domestic hauls of $408.1 million and $409 million, respectively.