Rachel McCumbers, the mother of a young Fortnite player who submitted a dance for Epic’s Boogie Down competition last year, is now suing the developer for including her son’s dance in the game.
Orange Shirt Kid, as he became known on the internet, didn’t actually win the contest, but placed 23rd in the list of runner-ups. However, his video garnered over one million views and a petition soon popped up requesting that Epic crown him the winner instead.
Epic Games has revealed the patch notes for Fortnite‘s latest update, v7.20. The patch is now live across PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile, bringing back the recently teased glider redeploy mechanic, along with a new weapon and limited-time mode.
Glider redeploy was first tested in Season 6, allowing players to open their gliders again during a match and hang glide if they were at a high enough altitude. This time around, Epic has itemized the ability. Players will now be able to find new items confusingly called Gliders as loot, which add “charges” that allow them to redeploy their glider during a match a set number of times.
“The goal with the item is to provide mobility and utility, but in a form that can be balanced and iterated upon,” Epic explained. “By implementing glider redeploy as an item we can iterate on multiple different levels (i.e. redeploy height, movement speed, drop chance, charge count), including inventory slot tension.”
In addition to glider redeploy, Epic has introduced another new weapon to the game: the Scoped Revolver, a handgun that allows players to fire precision shots. The gun can be found as floor loot or in chests, supply drops, or vending machines. It comes in Epic and Legendary variants and uses medium ammo.
The developer has also kicked off a new LTM: One Shot. In this mode, players only have 50 health, and the only weapons and items available are snipers and bandages. Gravity has also been reduced, as has the Storm wait time for all phases of the match.
Rounding out the update is a number of bug fixes and gameplay adjustments. Most notably, Epic has made a couple of improvements to ziplines, making it easier to change directions while riding one. You can find the full patch notes for the Battle Royale changes below; the full patch notes for other modes are available on Epic’s website.
Summary
There’s low gravity and every player has 50 health. Snipers are the only weapon and Bandages the only healing item. Jump high and aim well!
Mode Details
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
Bug Fixes
Netflix has announced another price hike across its range of plans, marking the largest increase since the company’s streaming service launched. Each plan is going up by one or two dollars, depending on the features.
The AP reports that the basic $8-per-month streaming plan will be raised to $9. The next tier, which offers streaming in higher quality and across more devices–which is the company’s most popular tier–will increase from $11 to $13. The highest-tier plan, which offers 4K Ultra-HD will go from $14 to $16. These prices will roll out to existing subscribers over the next three months, and new subscribers will find them active immediately.
Netflix currently has 58 million US subscribers, and this is the first time a price hike will impact all of them at once. It has another 79 million subscribers outside of the US. The company is reportedly planning to funnel this new cash flow into even more investment in original shows and films, as well as to pay off the debts it has accrued while fighting off competing services.
“We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in great entertainment and improving the overall Netflix experience,” the company said in a statement.
At $13 for the most popular tier, Netflix is now matching the price for Amazon Prime, which also includes free shipping and other special deals from the retailer. This also makes it the slightly pricier option compared to the ad-free version of Hulu, at $12 per month. (The lowest Hulu tier includes ads at $8 per month.) Netflix still comes in under HBO’s streaming price, which is $15 per month.
The added investment in more original programming may be necessary, as more and more companies prepare to launch their own streaming services. NBC just announced its plans for its own streaming service to launch in 2020, and Disney+ is expected to launch this year. That service has already outlined plans for shows featuring Marvel and Star Wars characters like Loki, The Mandalorian, and Cassian Andor.
Vane opens in a storm, as the small child you’re controlling is buffeted by strong winds and must figure out the path forward. Invisible walls stop you from going the wrong way, a lot of the debris flying around is clearly floating up through the floor, and the ambiguities of the scene–you’re not told anything about your character or their situation–make it hard to get invested. Vane doesn’t make a strong first impression.
After this brief opening, you’re thrown into a new sequence where you’re playing as a bird. You take flight and soar through a huge environment, looking for the distant sparkles of windsocks that you need to find and land on so as to meet and unite other birds. This is all communicated wordlessly, and despite the enormity of the environment those sparkles signpost where you need to go and what you need to do. The controls take some getting used to, but it feels great to be let loose on a huge expanse after that earlier, restrained experience. This opening represents the duality of Vane, a game that occasionally feels epic and exciting but which is also burdened by moments of sluggishness, all manner of glitches, and a camera that refuses to behave.
The child you control can, for reasons unexplained, turn into a bird, morphing if you jump off a high ledge. If the bird comes close to the gold dust that appears in several places throughout the game world, it turns back into the kid. This mechanic is used to good effect early on as you fly around various environments switching between the two forms to progress. This is Vane at its best, as you come to grips with the strengths and weaknesses of both forms and figure out the way forward.
But in the game’s back half, the bird form is largely put aside. You spend most of your time in human form, moving slower and exploring your environments on foot. Your ability to interact with the world is limited–you can jump, there’s a seldom-used interact button, and you can use a “call” button to call to other birds or children as you encounter them.
There aren’t really puzzles in Vane, per se–being observant and exploring the environment thoroughly is more important than critical thinking. You’re not given much guidance on where to go next, or what your exact objective is, in most parts of the game–it’s almost entirely devoid of instruction, beyond the very occasional button prompt. This means that figuring out the way forward usually means just reading your environment, but that’s not always easy. The camera in Vane is uncooperative, frequently getting stuck in parts of the environment or not turning as you’d like it to. In bird form, flying close to the ground can make the camera clip through it, which can be very frustrating.
The kid you’re playing as is rendered with little detail, as is much of the world. This is clearly an intentional style choice, and for the most part it works well, with the angular visuals and moody synth soundtrack doing a good job of conveying the inherent weirdness of the world. The simple style works in service of a later game mechanic that allows you to morph the world around you–in one section, for instance, you’re pushing a giant orb through an environment, and the orb will change parts of the environment it gets close to. If there’s a gap between two platforms, the orb might generate a bridge between them.
Unfortunately, this is also the section of the game where I was hit by the most frequent game-breaking glitches–I got stuck in the environment more than once, and at one point the orb disappeared, forcing me to restart at a checkpoint very far back. I was hit by another issue right near the game’s end, encountering a glitch during the game’s trippy finale that sent me on a maddening goose chase; without getting into specifics of how the game ends, a structure that was meant to grow in front of me simply did not, causing me to go in the wrong direction for several minutes until the game unceremoniously reset me to the beginning of the sequence.
These are issues that could be fixed with patches, of course (the first pre-launch patch made substantial improvements to the camera), but there are also fundamental design issues here. Vane is more committed to mood than storytelling, and by the end of the experience it’s difficult to say what, exactly, just happened. There’s room for analysis, of course, and the game conjures up what it’s like to be a scared and lonely child in a few scenes, but it’s all too vague to really feel meaningful. There’s value in being mysterious, but Vane could use more payoff.
It’s all over very soon, too. This is a short game that constantly feels like it’s still gearing up towards something better, a way to tie together all its mechanics. The last sections of the game are quite lackadaisical, simplifying the game’s systems right down while relying on an investment in the game’s thin lore. It’s not just that the game doesn’t give you easy answers–it also gives you little incentive to come up with your own. There are moments where you can see what the game could have been–like when you soar through a valley in bird form, or morph the world around you–but Vane lacks a voice and a strong sense of purpose.
The first trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home is here. The follow-up to Spider-man: Homecoming hits theaters in July, and stars Tom Holland as Peter Parker, plus Jake Gyllenhall as Mysterio, Zendaya as MJ, and Marisa Tomei as May Parker.
As the title suggests, the movie sees Peter and his friends heading to Europe for a vacation. But despite Peter’s assertion that Europe doesn’t need Spider-Man, that proves not to be case. Along the way, the teaser trailer shows he encounters Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), elemental monsters that could be Hydro Man and Molten Man, and Mysterio, who seems to have a more ambiguous role than usual. Check out the trailer above.
In addition to the version released in the US, a slightly different teaser trailer was released internationally. While the substance doesn’t change–it’s only the opening 30 seconds that’s different–it does feature another funny gag. We’ve got a trailer breakdown that also includes Easter eggs if you’re interested in dissecting everything the two trailers have to offer.
The movie is directed by Jon Watts, who also helmed Homecoming. Far From Home’s release date is set for July 5, 2019. It’s the third of three Marvel movies set for release in 2019, following March’s Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame in the July. Some new footage from Captain Marvel was revealed in a “special look” trailer released last week, and this followed the December’s second full trailer.
As for Endgame, so far we’ve had the first trailer. For more check out GameSpot’s guide to what we want to see most in Avengers: Endgame, and 7 crazy but probable theories about the movie.
With BioWare’s next big game, Anthem, almost here, the developer has shared even more details on what to expect from the game. Anthem is a multiplayer-focused title, and the good news for those who don’t have anyone to play with is that there will be matchmaking support for “every activity” in the entire game.
Lead producer Ben Irving said on Twitter that “there is matchmaking for every activity in the game.” Matchmaking is on by default, but players can opt out, Irving clarified. “We think it’s more fun in a full group,” Irving added.
Here are some other things that BioWare confirmed about Anthem recently:
A “VIP” demo for Anthem runs January 25-27, and you need to pre-order Anthem or be a subscriber of either EA Access or Origin Access to get in. Everyone can try Anthem through a demo that launches the following week, running February 1-3.
Looking beyond Anthem, BioWare has teased that it is already working on the future of Mass Effect. A new trailer for the next chapter of Dragon Age was also revealed at 2018’s Game Awards. However, details on both projects are still scarce.
Anthem launches for Xbox One, PS4, and PC on February 22, 2019.
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The latest couch gag for The Simpsons was all about Thanos. The opening sequence of Season 30, Episode 12 that aired on Sunday saw Thanos from The Avengers movie series snap his fingers and turn Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Bart into dust.
Maggie is spared, and she cutely hops up onto the couch and sits peacefully next to Thanos, destroyer of worlds. We also see that the Soul Stone is actually Maggie’s pacifier. The Simpsons family got unlucky here, as four of the five non-animal family members got snapped away when the world average is one in two. Here’s the sequence:
Disney is buying most of Fox’s assets, including The Simpsons, so there probably aren’t any legal issues with Thanos popping up in Springfield.
We’ll see Thanos next in Avengers: Endgame, which comes to theatres in April. It’s expected to close out the current Avengers storyline, and the film should deliver some reveals and surprises given how Avengers: Infinity War wrapped up.
Now that it is officially 2019, speculation about Avengers: Endgame has started to ramp up considerably. The countdown to April is ticking down day by day and the Captain Marvel movie is just around the corner, so the clues are pouring in from all sides–including this interesting detail shared by Samuel L. Jackson as reported by Entertainment Tonight.
When asked about Carol’s position within the MCU’s power hierarchy, he said, “She’s pretty much the strongest character — in terms of someone with powers are able to do things — in the Marvel universe. So, for Carol Danvers to be that person and for Brie to become that person, it’s gonna be a dynamite thing. I mean, [the Avengers] are up against some really, really tough odds right now–we saw throughout Infinity War–so now we know that we need something that’s as powerful as Thanos.” We’ve known Carol’s status as one of–if not the most–powerful heroes in the MCU for some time, but Jackson continued, adding this juicy fact. “And at some point, we’ll find out how powerful she is and all the things that she’s capable of. She’s one of the few people in the Marvel universe that can time travel, so…”
Now that is very interesting. Over in the comics, there’s no real precedent for Carol to have the ability to travel through time–at least, not without some sort of outside force–but time travel has certainly factored into her stories more than once. In fact, at the start of the now iconic Kelly Sue DeConnick run, from which the movie version takes direct inspiration, Carol was sent back in time to her own origin story via a temporal anomaly supercharged by her abilities. So, while she may not literally be able to focus and send herself through the timeline, the energy contained within her has shown that, under the right circumstances, it may have that capacity.
However, there is also the lack of clarity regarding Carol’s MCU origin that must be considered. Her comics counterpart can get away with a lot, considering the bulk of her abilities boil down to the extremely comic book-y handwave of a sci-fi machine exploding and messing with her DNA–or, at least it did, until her origin story was revised yet again late last year. The MCU version seems to be taking yet another angle on the situation, giving Carol a healthy dose of amnesia and stripping away the ambiguously magical explosion in favor of something a little more medical. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be too far a reach to look at the MCU’s version of things with a bit more “realism” anchoring things–making the whole time travel angle a bit of a head scratcher.
It’s certainly possible that Jackson simply misspoke in the interview, or was deliberately planting false information to lead speculators astray. However, giving Carol the ability to time travel would certainly explain why Fury thought to page her at the end of Infinity War in the first place. After all, it’s one thing for Carol to be the most physically powerful hero in the universe, but punching things and shooting energy blasts can only do so much when half of said universe has been disintegrated.
The other logical explanation, assuming that Jackson wasn’t trying to lead fans on a wild goose chase, is that Carol somehow comes into possession of the Time Stone–which may or may not be a bit of a stretch, considering its own set of wildly undefined rules and laws. Is it possible that, somehow, during the events of Infinity War, Doctor Strange sent a copy of the Time Stone back to the 1990s for Carol to find? Or, was the Time Stone in the hands of the Kree Empire at one point or another during Carol’s tenure with them? Maybe Ronan the Accuser’s quest for Thanos started way before Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 1 and the Time Stone has been in play for much longer than we’d all originally thought.
We’ve only got three more months to speculate before Captain Marvel officially hits theaters–so fold up those tinfoil hats and start guessing.
In Red Dead Redemption 2‘s world, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a team of detectives hunting down Arthur Morgan and the rest of the Van der Linde gang, is the main antagonist organisation. Now, the real-life Pinkerton company is taking action against Rockstar Games over the way in which Red Dead Redemption 2 uses its name. For its part, Take-Two is claiming fair use with respect to the Pinkerton name.
Court documents discovered by The Blast reveal that Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations–the real detective agency founded in 1850–has issued a cease and desist letter to Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive in December.
Pinkerton Consulting said Rockstar had a “clear affection” for Pinkerton by using the name in Red Dead Redemption 2. However, the consulting company took issue with its use in the title because it might have led people to believe the real Pinkerton was involved in the game’s development. Pinkerton is demanding that Take-Two pay an unspecified lump sum fee or a share of royalties in the future.
On the other side, Take-Two says in response that its the use of Pinkertons in Red Dead Redemption 2 is protected under the First Amendment in the United States. “Put simply, [Pinkerton] cannot use trademark law to own the past and prevent creators from including historical references to Pinkerton agents in depictions of the American West,” Take-Two said.
Take-Two fully acknowledges borrowing the Pinkerton name for Red Dead Redemption 2, but says it does is just one of the “myriad of ways that Red Dead 2 accurately portrays the historical Nineteenth Century American landscape.”
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was a real group that played a major role in American law enforcement in the Wild West in the late 1800s. The US government hired Pinkerton agents to track down people like Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid. Take-Two also reminded Pinkerton that Red Dead Redemption 2 was not the first piece of new media to reference Pinkerton, as the movie The Long Riders, the TV show Deadwood, and the Elton John song “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun” all reference Pinkertons. In the 2013 game BioShock Infinite, the protagonist is a former Pinkerton agent.
Take-Two also points out that the Pinkertons, while a central part of Red Dead Redemption 2’s story, only appear in 10 of the game’s 106 missions. “The inclusion of Pinkertons in the Red Dead 2 story is neither excessive not exceptional,” Take-Two argues.
“Creative works about the American West are permitted as a matter of law to include such real historical events, figures, and businesses,” the company goes on to say. “Particularly where there is no likelihood that consumers will be confused about the source of the creative work, trademark owners should not be permitted to use trademark law to harass authors, chill speech, and diminish the historical tenor of works like Red Dead 2. Historical fiction–television, movies, plays, books, and games–would suffer greatly if trademark claims like [Pinkerton’s] could even possibly succeed.”
Additionally, Take-Two pointed out that Red Dead Redemption 2 uses Pinkerton’s original name, Pinkerton Detective Agency, and not the company’s current name, Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations Inc.” Further still, Take-Two mentioned that Red Dead Redemption 2 uses Pinkerton’s historical badge, not the current one.
Take-Two said Pinkerton filed its complaint in part because it was trying to profit from Red Dead Redemption 2’s enormous success. Indeed, the game is a huge hit; by Take-Two’s latest count, it had shipped 17 million copies.
Take-Two requests that a judge knock down Pinkerton’s request and deny a trial by jury. What’s more, the video game company wants Pinkerton to pay Take-Two’s legal fees and other expenses related to this case.
Approached for comment, Take-Two told GameSpot, “As a practice, we do not comment on legal matters.” A representative for Pinkerton could not be reached at press time.