If you’ve wanted to catch up on the Half-Life series in time for Half-Life: Alyx (and haven’t picked the games up during a Steam sale), then Valve has an awesome offer for you. You can play the entire series for free on Steam until April 1. That gives you plenty of time to fill yourself in on the story before Half-Life: Alyx’s release date, which is slated for sometime in March.
The Half-Life series is regarded as one of the all-time greats. It puts you in the role of scientist Gordon Freeman, moments before a horrible catastrophe takes place at the Black Mesa Research Facility. Strange monsters start roaming the hallways, claiming the bodies of Gordon’s co-workers and being general nuisances. It’s your job to escape and get to the bottom of what’s going on.
As for the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx, it’s a virtual-reality exclusive. Thankfully, pretty much anyone with a VR headset that can connect to a PC will be able to play it. The game will be compatible with the Valve Index, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest (with Link), HTC Vive headsets, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. You can pre-order it on Steam for $54 USD.
The Half-Life series
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Though the holiday season has come and gone in the US, that doesn’t mean holiday sales are done just yet. With Lunar New Year festivities commencing this weekend, Microsoft is ringing in the occasion with a massive sale on Xbox One games.
The Lunar New Year sale is live now and coincides with the Artistic Adventure sale, both of which run through January 27 and feature steep discounts on an eclectic variety of both AAA hits and revered indies. Essentially, these sales combine to form one giant sale, which is great for Xbox One owners.
The Lunar New Year sale really hones in on older games, though some 2019 titles are included. Control, one of GameSpot’s 10 favorite games of 2019, is discounted from $60 to $39. The Super Bowl is around the corner, so it makes sense to pick up Madden NFL 20, which drops from $60 to $30. If you’re more of a basketball fan, NBA 2K20 is also $30 during the sale. The excellent Life is Strange 2 is slashed from $40 to $20.
As mentioned, this sale is really appealing if you’re looking for some great games you may have missed over the past few years. Rainbow Six Siege, which remains a popular multiplayer shooter four years after its release, is $10 (was $40). At $30, Red Dead Redemption 2 is available for its lowest price since Black Friday.
Indies are well-represented in the sale, too. Playdead’s brilliant pair of atmospheric platformers, Limbo and Inside, are discounted to $2.49 and $6.59, respectively. The lovely and haunting adventure What Remains of Edith Finch is $10 and the similarly moving Old Man’s Journey is just $5.
Remedy Entertainment’s Control may be the studio’s most interesting game to date, which might explain why Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s co-writer has expressed interest in writing a movie based on the game.
Gary Whitta–writer of After Earth, The Book of Eli, and Rogue One–responded to a fan on Twitter asking what would be the best video game to base a movie on. Without hesitation, Whitta replied that Remedy’s trippy third-person shooter would make a fascinating project–and he would love to write it.
The studio’s communications director, Thomas Puha, said the two should talk. Whitta then told Puha to slide into his DM’s. While nothing is set in stone, it appears some kind of conversations are underway.
Though Whitta is best known as a screenwriter, he has also dipped into game development and television production. Whitta worked on a couple of Telltale games, including original The Walking Dead, its 400 Days DLC expansion, and The Walking Dead: The Final Season. He also wrote four episodes of Star Wars Rebels. Whitta also worked as a games journalist, working for ACE magazine and founding PC Gamer before transitioning to Hollywood.
Control has received numerous awards since its August 2019 launch on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In addition to getting nominated for Game of the Year at a plethora of awards ceremonies, including The Game Awards 2019 and The Game Developers Choice Awards, Control also secured a spot on GameSpot’s Best Games of 2019 list. In our writeup, we said, “Control is amazingly dense and lovingly constructed by a team that knew exactly what it wanted to make.”
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Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, the Apple Original series from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia creators Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day, has been renewed for a second season before its first episodes have released.
The video game studio-set comedy, which is in part produced by Ubisoft’s Film & Television department, will launch its first season in full on February 7. But Apple has already renewed the live-action comedy for a second season, which was announced during the show’s TCA panel (via Deadline).
The announcement did not reveal an episode count for the second season, nor a release date, but it will presumably continue to be an exclusive to Apple TV+.
Co-created by McElhenney, Day, and Megan Ganz, the first season consists of nine episodes following the development team behind the fictional Mythic Quest. McElhenney stars as the game’s creative director Ian Grimm, who works alongside an ensemble cast including F. Murray Abraham, Community’s Danny Pudi, and ever-popular video game voice actor Ashly Burch.
The first set of Cyberpunk 2077 Funko Pops have been revealed and they’ve been given a very familiar release date.
Yes, announced at London Toy Fair, the Cyberpunk 2077 Funko Pops will be available on April 16, 2020. That’s Cyberpunk 2077’s original release date before it got another delay recently, if you didn’t know.
So while you won’t be able to play the game itself in April you could at least bring a little bit of its futuristic world into your life via Funko Pops.
Similar to McFarlane’s Cyberpunk 2077 action figures, the Funko Pops will include both V and Johnny Silverhand, who is the digital ghost that accompanies main character V throughout the game and is played by Keanu Reeves.
Unlike McFarlane’s figures, however, the Funko Pops include both the male and female versions of V, as well as two different Johnny Silverhands. One of them sports sunglasses and dual-wields pistols, while the other is calmly resting on one knee.
Disney+ is set to launch in the UK and several other territories across Western Europe on March 24, which is a whole week earlier than the original release date that was announced.
The House of Mouse recently updated its rollout plans for Europe, confirming that the release date for the streaming service has been brought forward for the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Switzerland, while much of the rest of Europe will gain access to the platform by summer. Pricing has also been confirmed as £5.99/€6.99 per month or £59.99/€69.99 for an annual subscription, per Deadline.
The streaming service is expected to launch with a library of content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic, including plenty of original content such as Star Wars’ live-action series The Mandalorian, the Toy Story short series Forky Asks A Question, the live-action Lady and the Tramp, and The World According to Jeff Goldblum, though certain titles may vary by territory due to regional differences.
The creative director of the latest two Splinter Cell games has returned to Ubisoft after leaving the company in 2019.
VGC reports that Maxime Beland is one of the people who will make up Ubisoft’s newly expanded and restructured editorial team that oversees creative decisions on all its games.
Beland started as a game tester for Ubisoft back in 1998. He worked there for the next 20 years, serving as creative director on Rainbow Six: Vegas, game design director on Assassin’s Creed, and creative director for Splinter Cell: Conviction and Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
Before he left Ubisoft in February 2019 to become a creative director at Epic Games, Beland provided creative direction on Far Cry 4, Far Cry Primal, and Far Cry 5.
Beland left Epic Games in October 2019 and has now reportedly rejoined Ubisoft. Whether that will lead to a resurrection of Splinter Cell is unknown. But there were signs that Ubisoft was gearing up for a new Splinter Cell game in 2018.
In 2019, the creative director tweeted that he was working on the next Splinter Cell game, but then told IGN that he was just joking. No mention of a Splinter Cell game in development has come since.
Ubisoft’s newly restructured editorial team is reportedly an effort to encourage more diversity in Ubisoft’s game lineup after the disappointing sales of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and The Division 2. It was this disappointment that allegedly led to the delay of Watch Dogs Legion, Gods and Monsters, and Rainbow Six Quarantine. An unannounced project that had been in the works for three years at Ubisoft was also cancelled around the same time for the same reason.
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Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
A new job listing posted by Naughty Dog says the developer is looking for someone with a background in PC programming to join the team working on the upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive The Last of Us Part II.
The job listing is for a graphics programmer who will join Naughty Dog’s rendering team to “develop and implement new and existing rendering techniques” for The Last of Us Part II. The successful applicant will need either console or PC programming experience, and have a thorough understanding of current GPU architectures and experience with APIs.
Here’s the full list of requirements and skills:
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience
Strong math skills with an emphasis in 3D math
Strong knowledge of C and C++ programming languages
Thorough understanding of current GPU architectures (AMD GCN, NVIDIA CUDA)
Experience with DirectX12, Vulkan or other modern graphics or compute APIs
Experience with HLSL/GLSL or other equivalent shader languages
Console or PC programming experience
Passion for playing and developing exceptional games
A single job listing isn’t concrete proof of anything, but after Kotaku reported that PS4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn is on its way to PC, it might not be completely outlandish to suggest another Sony-owned developer could release a game on the platform.
If that is the case, don’t expect a PC release anytime soon. For those who own a PS4, The Last of Us Part II is set to launch on May 29.
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X-Men star Patrick Stewart has confirmed that he is unlikely to reprise his role as Professor X in the MCU.
Stewart, who has portrayed Charles Xavier in six movies, recently revealed that he had met with Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige about the possibility of his beloved X-men character returning to the big screen, though it was ultimately decided that his role would not be reprised.
“I met with Kevin Feige a couple of months ago and we had long, long conversations,” Stewart revealed in a conversation with Digital Spy. “And there have been moves and suggestions, which include Charles Xavier.”
The actor explained how his outlook towards the X-Men franchise shifted after Logan was released, as he suggested that the tenth film in the superhero series marked the end of an era for him and Hugh Jackman, who were both highly emotional about letting go of their respective characters.
“Here’s the problem… If we had not made Logan, then yes, I would probably be ready to get into that wheelchair one more time and be Charles Xavier. But Logan changed all that,” Stewart said. “We were moved by the story. We were moved by one another. We were moved by the movie. But we also both made the decision that we were saying goodbye to our characters as well.
“In that sense, it was not just the deaths of those two men in the franchise, but it was also goodbye to our part in them as well.”
In our review of Logan, we commended Stewart’s return as the wheelchair-bound telepath, saying the revered thespian managed to bring “true depth to the character” in a distinctly new way, making his reprisal “one of the hugely satisfying aspects” of the film.
Dust off a fresh Sleeve and get ready to binge because Netflix has finally revealed the release date for Season 2 of Altered Carbon, its mind-bending sci-fi series.
All 8 episodes of Altered Carbon’s second season will be released on Netflix on Thursday, February 27, 2020. Avengers star Anthony Mackie takes over for Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi Kovacs in Season 2, and Chris Conner returns as the highly-evolved A.I. Poe, along with an impressive ensemble of new cast members that you can learn more about in the gallery below:
“Season 2 of the sophisticated and compelling sci-fi drama finds Takeshi Kovacs (Anthony Mackie), the lone surviving soldier of a group of elite interstellar warriors, continuing his centuries-old quest to find his lost love Quellcrist Falconer (Renée Elise Goldsberry). After decades of planet-hopping and searching the galaxy, Kovacs finds himself recruited back to his home planet of Harlan’s World with the promise of finding Quell. Haunted by his past and responsible for investigating a series of brutal murders, Kovacs is stunned to discover his new mission to solve the crime and his pursuit to find Quell are one and the same. With the help of his loyal A.I. Poe (Chris Conner), Kovacs must now partner with new allies to outwit his enemies and find the truth: Who is Quellcrist Falconer?”
Netflix’s adaptation of Altered Carbon is based on the science fiction novels written by Richard K. Morgan. For Season 2, Alison Schapker will serve as showrunner for all 8 episodes. You can check out Season 2’s episode title below:
Ep 201 “Phantom Lady” – written by Laeta Kalogridis, directed by Ciaran Donnelly
Ep 202 “Payment Deferred” – written by Sarah Nicole James, directed by Ciaran Donnelly
Ep 203 “Nightmare Alley” – written by Michael R. Perry, directed by MJ Bassett
Ep 204 “Shadow of a Doubt” – written by Sang Kyu Kim, directed by MJ Bassett
Ep 205 “I Wake up Screaming” – written by Cortney Norris, directed by Jeremy Webb
Ep 206 “Bury Me Dead” – written by Adam Lash & Cori Uchida, directed by Jeremy Webb
Ep 207 “Experiment Perilous” – written by Nevin Densham, directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield
Ep 208 “Broken Angels” – written by Alison Schapker & Elizabeth Padden, directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield
For more on the world of cyberpunk, check out our list of seven games to play while you wait for Cyberpunk 2077 in the video below: