The band Avenged Sevenfold have been friends of Call of Duty: Black Ops developer Treyarch for a long time now, and the partnership continues with Black Ops 4.
Avenged Sevenfold singer M. Shadows will be a playable character in an upcoming content release for Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode, Blackout. Actor Danny Trejo is also presumably playable character in the new update. You can see both characters in the image below.
Celebrity appearances in Black Ops are nothing new. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Michael Rooker, Jeff Goldblum, Ron Perlman, and Heather Graham, among many others have appeared in Black Ops Zombies mode. Shadows and Trejo appear to be the first celebrities in Blackout, however.
Avenged Sevenfold has also written original music for the Black Ops series. They wrote the song “Not Ready To Die” for Black Ops 1, and the entire band even features in the credits scene for Black Ops 2 alongside a dancing Hilary Clinton. Avenged Sevenfold also wrote the song “Mad Hatter” for Black Ops 4.
Shadows also confirmed that Avenged Sevenfold music will appear in the updated Blackout mode. The singer said the new Blackout update will make the battle royale mode darker with an increased focus on zombies, it seems.
While you have to wait a while long to play as Shadows in Blackout, Black Ops 4’s new Zombies expansion, Operation Apocalypse Z, is out now on PS4. Get all the details here.
In its final season, FX’s Legion isn’t pulling any punches. To prove it, the X-Men show finally introduced one of the franchise’s most iconic characters in Season 3 Episode 3: Charles Xavier, otherwise known as Professor X. And although the father of the X-Men has been through many iterations, the Charles Xavier we met on Legion was–unsurprisingly–unlike any version of the character that’s come before.
Legion has always been era-agnostic–although the show has a general 1960s aesthetic, its technology is often far beyond what was possible then. With the introduction of time travel in Season 3, Legion’s timeline has become even more muddled. The show places Charles Xavier some time after an era that resembles World War II, but is never referred to in detail as such–an ambiguity that Legion creator and showrunner Noah Hawley said is deliberate.
“When we meet Professor X in this season, he has been a soldier in a war–a war that probably feels a bit like World War II, I guess I would say, though we never commit to what it is,” Hawley told journalists during a recent visit to Legion’s set in Los Angeles. “So there’s something about the timing of it that may not necessarily fit in with the canon.”
But even more significant than the change in setting is the change in actor: Legion’s Professor X is played by Harry Lloyd, perhaps best known for his role as Daenerys Targaryen’s abusive brother Viserys in Season 1 of HBO’s Game of Thrones. On a gut level, the two characters–Viserys Targaryen and Charles Xavier–couldn’t be more different. But the Xavier we met in Legion Season 3, Episode 3 was not the sage, fatherly Professor X portrayed by Patrick Stewart, or James McAvoy’s warm, easygoing version. Lloyd’s Charles is a bit more unhinged–David and Switch find him earlier in his journey, and like every character on Legion, Charles has good and bad qualities.
“One of my favorite things about Legion is that, having watched the X-Men films and seen McAvoy and Stewart on the screen–live-action portrayals of him–and the comics, [you see] things they all had in common,” Lloyd told journalists during the set visit. “But then you look at Legion, and you kind of–it gives you permission to kind of throw that all away, to a certain extent.”
Lloyd said he was offered the part of Professor X back in December 2018, but he didn’t immediately grasp exactly who he’d be playing. “The breakdown was: His name is Charles, he’s a war veteran that believes the good of humanity. I was like, hmmm, sounds about right,” Lloyd said. Later, while chatting with Hawley about the part, the showrunner casually dropped the name “Charles Xavier.”
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“And I pretended that I knew,” Lloyd said. “Of course, I didn’t–I hadn’t pieced it together. But then, obviously, that made it even more exciting.”
He said working on Legion is collaborative, playful, and crazy, with plans and scripts sometimes changing on a dime when a bolt of inspiration strikes. Naturally, Legion’s Professor X couldn’t be the same version we’re used to.
“It’s such an irreverent, ridiculous show, and it’s surreal, so I didn’t feel that I had to be in debt to do the straitlaced Charles that we know,” Lloyd said. “The story that we’re telling doesn’t really allow for him to be always in control and very pope-like. He’s actually a young man, and he’s been thrown into his own story before he’s ready because of what’s happening in the future with David. So he’s actually quite lost for most of it. To play someone who is normally quite grounded and thoughtful and deliberate in his actions, to see him before he gets there, to see him as a young man, confused and doubtful and exploring his own powers…that’s been really fun.”
Better Half
Episode 3 didn’t just introduce us to Professor X–we also met Gabrielle Haller, his wife and David’s mother. When Charles realizes that there’s someone out there with powers similar to his–Amahl Farouk, who will come to be known as the Shadow King, as Legion viewers well know–he leaves Gabrielle and baby David behind, abandoning them to what is ultimately a terrible fate.
“True to the comic style, you see them meet in the hospital, and then they fall in love, and they actually have a really beautiful love story,” Stephanie Corneliussen, who plays Gabrielle, told journalists during the set visit. “It’s very easy to fall in love with Harry Lloyd, I’ll say that much.”
“Professor X is a super important character for the whole universe, whether or not you’re kind of playing with your own alternate version. I mean, it’s Professor X!”
Corneliussen said Legion’s version of Gabrielle is very different from what’s in the source material, which shaped her goals for the character. “In the comic, you see this very strong side of Gabrielle Haller. She’s a powerhouse, she works for the embassy, she’s a lawyer, she’s in human rights,” the actress said. “Here you actually get to see the real, frail version of her, and when I read that that was what we were going at, for me, it was just important to make her a real person…For Marvel and for fans of Legion, I thought it was my job to try and give her real life.”
Corneliussen said they didn’t take the inclusion of these beloved characters lightly. “I feel like Noah [Hawley] made a point of going to depth with carving out these two characters,” she said. “Obviously, Professor X is a super important character for the whole universe, whether or not you’re kind of playing with your own alternate version. I mean, it’s Professor X! And I think they’re actually being done justice, for what it is. It’s a fun season, you know what I mean?”
For his part, Hawley said he was excited by the idea of showing Charles as a younger man than we’re used to seeing.
“I think my goal is to look at Charles Xavier as a father, and a new father at that–someone who falls in love under circumstances that echo his son’s love story, of meeting his love after the war in a sanitarium, and helping her get back to a healthy place,” the showrunner said. “And so the context of the story of Charles Xavier is really through that. It’s very early in his development of discovering his own powers and what he can do with it, and discovering that there are other people out there like him.”
Lauren Shuler Donner, who in addition to being executive producer on all three seasons of Legion has produced all the X-Men movies under Fox, told journalists she’s especially aware of how important the character is to fans. Doing Professor X in a way that fans don’t recognize–or worse, don’t like–could potentially be disastrous.
“I’m cognizant of his legacy,” Donner said. “Personally it’s kind of a thrill for me, because I remember the day on ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ when we had both Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy in the scene that Charles was in, and everybody was thrilled–not just James and Patrick. So, to me, it keeps the legacy going. It is within the canon to show a younger Charles, a young, naïve, just-finding-his-powers Charles. So I think it sort of finishes a story, a Charles Xavier story, at the right time, in that Fox is now moving to Disney and there’ll be a whole new iteration. So [these] universes have synced in a wonderful coincidence.”
Like Father, Like Son
Legion is, of course, centered not around Charles Xavier, but on his son, Dan Stevens’ David Haller. The two characters have plenty in common–not just their strong psychic powers, but also their tendency to act selfishly when presented with hard choices. David never knew his father, but he blames him for his lifelong problems–and not without reason. During the set visit, Stevens teased some of the duo’s future scenes.
“Those scenes that I have with him, you know, David playing opposite his father at a very similar age–it’s trippy stuff, and it’s a nice resolution to that relationship, I think,” Stevens said. “There’s a lot of confusion and hurt, obviously, in that direction, and so, yeah–there’s a few episodes towards the end where we see that sort of harmony and a discussion of that whole thing, which is really lovely.”
“Whenever Legion shows up, things get really weird, really quickly, and a lot of worlds are turned upside-down–sometimes literally.”
Legion has never really felt like an X-Men show. Tonally, aesthetically, and in every other way, it’s very different from the live-action X-Men movies that most fans are used to. Stevens said it’s nice to have Professor X in Legion’s final season, as the beloved character anchors the series to the main franchise in a way that hasn’t been done before.
“The bubble of Legion, I mean even in the comics, is quite tangential to a lot of the main X-Men narrative, and whenever Legion shows up, things get really weird, really quickly, and like, a lot of worlds are turned upside-down–sometimes literally. And we have always been quite comfortable in this sort of odd pocket, in a way,” Stevens said. “But it is nice to finally, in this three-season structure, to have this–I guess a string that ties our crazy balloon to the main raft of the X-men stories. I think that will be satisfying for people who know and love X-men and Legion.
“There are quite a few people who have watched this show who have no knowledge of the Marvel of it all, and hopefully that will make them curious, you know–might cause them to go and watch some other X-Men-y type things,” Stevens continued. “But yeah, I guess having surprised so many people with this sort of unique look and style of the show, to bring it back to that universe is quite fun.”
The fun promises to continue as Legion’s third and final season airs Mondays on FX.
With oodles of Mushroom Kingdom charm and fast-paced gameplay, it’s no surprise Nintendo chose the Dr. Mario series as its next big mobile offering. Like Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp before it, Doctor Mario World is a free-to-play game that does its best to get you hooked before introducing its monetized in-game currency and time-locked progression system. While it’s a decidedly fun little puzzler, Dr. Mario World suffers from aggravating free-to-play barriers and a sometimes overwhelming amount of gameplay variables.
On this week’s Xbox show, we give our hands-on impressions from the first weekend of the Halo Outpost Discovery fan experience, discuss a new Batman release from Rocksteady (not a new game, sadly), talk through the small glimpses we’ve been getting at Playdead’s new post-Inside game, and more!
Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, or grab an MP3 download of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out this month’s episode of IGN Unfiltered, featuring a career-spanning interview with Bethesda creative force Todd Howard, who discusses next-gen consoles, Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout games past and present, and his origins with a Terminator first-person shooter:
Nintendo has announced that Donkey Kong 3 and Wrecking Crew will be added to the Nintendo Switch Online NES library this month alongside a brand new Rewind feature that will be available with the entire collection of NES games.
As for the Rewind feature, which is also releasing on July 17, players will be able to press and hold ZL and ZR to rewind and quickly fix any mistake that may have occurred or simply just replay an awesome section of a level.
Nintendo has announced the latest free NES games for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, along with a brand-new feature for all NES games.
The new titles are Donkey Kong 3 and The Wrecking Crew, which will become available starting July 17. As for the new feature, the “Rewind” feature is exactly what it sounds like. You can hold the ZL + ZR buttons to rewind gameplay for all of the games in the NES library on Switch.
It sounds like how it works in the Forza Horizon series. Bungle a section or just want to try again? You can press the buttons to rewind the gameplay and have another go. It sounds like a handy feature that could be most useful in more challenging titles.
The Rewind feature arrives on July 17 alongside the release of The Wrecking Crew and Donkey Kong 3. Those titles join the 40+ others in the library of freebies for Switch Online members. Classics like The Legend of Zelda and the original Donkey King are also included.
A Nintendo Switch Online membership also provides access to online play and cloud saves, while the battle royale game Tetris 99 is also included with the membership.
Ahead of World of Warcraft Classic’s release in August, Blizzard has now confirmed that there will be local servers for Australia and other parts of the Oceanic region, which is great news.
The Oceanic realms will be available for players in Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of Southeast Asia. The servers are physically located in Australia, and they’ll be available at launch on August 27. The specific names of the servers will be announced soon, coming sometime before character name reservations begin on August 13.
Blizzard has also confirmed that the final stress test for WoW Classic will be held July 26 and 27. The test is global, and the aim is to give Blizzard one more opportunity to test the game at scale before its public release. The version of WoW Classic available in the testing period features a number of fixes and changes; Blizzard says testers have filed some 17,000 bug reports from the closed beta. That closed beta is ending on July 13.
“We agree with the many WoW Classic enthusiasts in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia that it will be a very good thing for players in that part of the world to connect to realms that are hosted in that part of the world,” Blizzard said in a statement. “Planned it all along!”
WoW Classic is just what it sounds like: it’s the base game, in the state it was more than a decade ago before the release of the Burning Crusade expansion. The game operates alongside the regular WoW. Access to WoW Classic is available through the standard $15 USD/month regular WoW subscription price.
There are buddy comedies that work, there are buddy comedies that don’t, and Stuber is one that very much falls into the second category. Some of the most critical elements of a good buddy comedy are connection and chemistry because if you don’t connect with the characters, you don’t really care about them. Bottom line, if the characters don’t have chemistry, whatever else you pack in there isn’t going to work effectively, and the chemistry isn’t there on-screen. Both Dave Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani work with what they’ve got, but that’s not a lot and what they’ve got lacks spark.
Nanjiani plays Stuart (Stu for short), a lovelorn and generally mild-mannered Uber driver who picks up Vic, played by Bautista, a cop on the hunt for the bad guy who killed his partner. Vic can’t drive himself around LA as he’s had Lasik eye surgery earlier that day so can’t see correctly. As a result, Stu is thrust into a pursuit that takes him all over the city, not only putting him in the line of fire but it also means he can’t get to the recently single friend, and new Spin Cycle business partner, he is secretly in love with so they can have sex. On top of that, Stu has to make sure he does an excellent job so that his Uber rating doesn’t drop otherwise he’ll lose his job. It’s like if Speed swapped out the bomb and staying above 50 miles per hour for customer service feedback and a booty call with none of the tension.
