Month: October 2019

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Japanese gaming giant Nintendo has announced that Nintendo Switch sales have climbed to an impressive 41.67 million units, with 6.93 million units shipped in the latest quarter. These are big numbers, but how do they compare to other consoles?

Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad shared a helpful graph on Twitter that shows the cumulative global console shipments for most of the major systems. Looking at the numbers, after 31 months on sale, the Switch is on a similar growth trajectory as the PS4 and PS2, which are some of the best-selling systems of all time. Only the Wii got off to a faster start.

Helping improve Switch sales was the recent introduction of the Switch Lite. It sold nearly 2 million units in its first 11 days to get off to a very good start for Nintendo.

The graph doesn’t include Xbox One, and that’s because Microsoft no longer announces sales numbers for its consoles.

Looking at Nintendo consoles alone, the Switch is selling about as well as the original DS over its first few years. Ahmad notes that it “will be tough” for the Switch to match pace with the DS in 2020. DS sales picked up with the introduction of the DS Lite in 2006.

In other news about console sales, Sony announced recently that PS4 sales have climbed to 102.8 million units, which surpasses the Wii (101.63 million) to become the second best-selling system in history. The PS2, with its 150 million units shipped, remains the best-selling console in history.

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HBO’s Watchmen is full of all sorts of nods and references to the original comic book series–what else would you expect from the creator of Lost adapting one of the most famously dense graphic novels of all time?

The show certainly doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to playing in the Watchmen sandbox, which can be a little intimidating–but don’t panic. That’s why we’re here. Whether you’re still on the fence about diving into each episode or you simply want a refresher of the comics, we’re going to break down the Watchmen mythology for you piece by piece. First up? Ozymandias, giant squids, and the end of the Watchmen story in the comics.

Obviously, major comics spoilers from here on out, and some minor spoilers for the first two episodes of HBO’s Watchmen. Please proceed with caution!

In the show, there are squids everywhere in Tulsa, and presumably, the rest of the world, if the headlines about “interdimensional attacks” and “hoaxes” on newspapers like The New Frontiersmen are any indication. They occasionally rain down from the sky. Kids learn about them in school. So, what’s the deal?

It all relates back to Ozymandias’s grand scheme to avoid nuclear annihilation and end the Cold War back in the 1980s. In a twist on the typical supervillain tropes of the superhero genre, Adrien Veidt, one of the smartest people in the Watchmen world, had concocted a plan that would, in his mind, be the only real way to prevent the Doomsday Clock from actually ticking down to midnight. By way of careful manipulation and liberal use of his public persona as a billionaire genius and former superhero, he set up what essentially amounted to a long con. He would stage a massive “alien invasion” with the help of experimental tech developed in secret by his company, in New York City. The “alien” creature–a giant squid-like monster–would teleport in, seemingly from another dimension or planet, and kill thousands upon thousands of people, both from the sudden destruction caused by its body appearing in the middle of Manhattan and because of a “psychic blast” it would emit that would fry onlookers’ brains up to miles away.

In reality, the creature wasn’t an alien, or even from another dimension at all, but a genetic mutation Veidt himself had developed in a lab. The teleportation wasn’t a gateway to another world or an attack, but teleportation tech Veidt had invented that would move objects from point A to point B, in this case with “point A” being one of Veidt’s secret labs and “point B” being New York City. The psychic blast, however, was real–the creature Vedit designed did very much have the ability to fry people’s brains, and it did. The resulting loss of life numbered in the millions.

The goal of the squid was, for all its frills, pretty simple: The “attack” would functionally force every major government superpower in the world to stop looking at one another as enemies and immediately pivot their attention to this looming extraterrestrial threat. By Veidt’s calculation, humans are simply not designed to be peaceful; they can only have their aggressions redirected and refocused on things that aren’t one another–in this case, an enemy that they will never actually be able to find, much less fight or kill, because it doesn’t actually exist. In that way, the squid attack had to be completely and 100% believable–the sort of wild goose chase that would keep every country in the world so distracted and fixated that the idea of blowing each other up wouldn’t even be on anyone’s radar anymore.

Sure, the whole thing cost millions of innocent lives, but better that than a full-on nuclear holocaust, right?

Of course, the graphic novel ends almost immediately after the attack. We get to see the dust beginning to settle, and it seems that Veidt was correct. Almost instantly, Russia and the United States come to a peace agreement, characters comment on the community’s abrupt mood swing from anxiety and fear to peace and love, etc. But what we learn in the TV show is that things aren’t that simple. For one, Rorschach–one of the only people to fully uncover Veidt’s plan–did indeed have his journals published by the New Frontiersman. Unfortunately, Rorschach was also a known sociopath with a criminal record and a reputation for psychotic delusions, so the details he was able to lay out about Vedit and the attack were never widely accepted.

In fact, rather than debunking the squid, the publication of Rorschach’s journals really only managed to galvanize radical groups like the white supremacist organization The 7th Kavalry in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and provide dogma for conspiracy theorists.

Interestingly enough, somewhere in the 30-year time jump between the end of the Watchmen comics and the start of the Watchmen TV show, someone involved in Veidt’s plan–or perhaps Veidt himself–apparently engineered some sort of failsafe. Tiny squids rain down harmlessly from the sky in “transdimensional attacks,” presumably meant to keep everyone on their toes–but where they’re coming from or how they’re happening remains a mystery. Veidt himself is missing and has recently been declared dead, but knowing what we know about his hoax, it’s safe to assume that these squid rains are not random and certainly not actually coming from another dimension. Someone must be pulling the trigger somewhere.

The question is who? And what would happen if, 30 years later, Veidt’s carefully stacked house of cards were to come crumbling down? Would the peace he sacrificed so many to earn survive the collapse? Was it ever really peace at all?

With any luck, these questions and more will be answered on the show in the future. HBO’s Watchmen airs Sunday nights at 9PM.

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Vampires, zombies, ghosts, and masked psychos are all terrifying staples of horror, but there’s something familiar and almost comforting about these old-fashioned villains. And there’s one scary protagonist that remains consistently terrifying, and that’s children. The innocence of children, and the fact that adults are supposed to protect them, rather than run away screaming, has ensured a wide variety of creepy kids over the years.

Of course, horror movie kids can be scary for a variety of reasons. Some are just plain evil and are driven to carry out terrible and murderous acts. What marks these children out is that they are often working insidiously within the family unit, using the fact that no one would believe that their angelic offspring could in fact be a deranged psychopath.

There are also those children under the control of some malevolent force. The Exorcist’s Regan is the most famous example of this, but there are other plenty of others too, innocent kids who are possessed by a demon, ghost, or evil spirit. These children often evoke audience sympathy as much as fear and skilled horror directors know how to manipulate the emotions of their audience for maximum effect.

The third distinctive group of scary kid are ghosts. Japanese horror in the ’90s and ’00s in particular featured ghost children prominently, often with tragic backstories that caused them to die tragically young. But in all cases, there’s no doubt that the creepy kid is a popular trope that filmmakers will return to again and again. So with Halloween upon us, here’s our look at the scariest children in horror….