Spider-Man: Miles Morales Actor Provides Sneak Peek Of PS5 Adventure

Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ motion capture actor has shared a brief behind-the-scenes glimpse at the motion capture process for the upcoming PlayStation 5 game, which will feature the young hero following in the footsteps of 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man. “To become a character so impactful means the world to me,” tweeted Nadji Jeter.

“The story of Miles is what this generation & the next need! I just thank the heavens above for blessing me with the opportunity & responsibility to bring him to Life!! “

In the images, Jeter can be seen donning a motion capture suit, with dozens of extra markers applied to his face so that every nuance of his acting can be captured by developer Insomniac Games. Due for release at the end of the year, Spider-Man: Miles Morales will feature both a quality and a performance mode, with the latter allowing players to web-sling across New York City at a a stable 60 fps at 4K resolution.

While Spider-Man: Miles Morales won’t be a fully-fledged sequel to Marvel’s Spider-Man, it will feature a new campaign starring Peter Parker’s protege as he defends Manhattan in an adventure that is comparable to previous PlayStation 4 standalone games such as Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

Now Playing: Spider-Man: Miles Morales Announcement Trailer | Sony PS5 Reveal Event

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Star Wars: The High Republic Will Reveal the Ancestor Of One Of The Original Trilogy’s Biggest Scoundrels

Star Wars is expanding once again, but this time into an age where the Jedi are at the peak of their power and influence within the galaxy. Announced back in February, Star Wars: The High Republic is set 200 years before the events of The Phantom Menace but will also feature a familial connection to the original Star Wars film trilogy era that novelist Justina Ireland discussed in an hour-long panel at Disney-Lucasfilm Publishing’s Comic-Con at Home panel via THR.

According to Ireland, that link to the future will be seen in Avon Starros, an ancestor of Sana Starros whose first appearance came in Marvel’s 2015 Star Wars comic book series.

“If fans are familiar with Sana Starros,” Ireland said, “we know she’s the best scoundrel to ever have scoundreled, she has no shame, she’s out there to get what she needs to get, and she’s kinda ruthless. “She’s literally my favorite.” “But The High Republic takes place many hundreds of years earlier before she exists, and so who we’re going to meet instead of Sina is her great, great, many-times-great ancestor — there won’t be a direct relation there because genetics are murky in the Star Wars galaxy.”

Avon Starros will be one of the co-leads of Ireland’s Young Adult novel The High Republic: A Test of Courage, who Ireland described as a scientist who is fascinated with uncovering a more logical explanation for how The Force functions.

“Avon is a 12-year-old girl, she has been sent to the edge of the galaxy by her mother who’s a republic senator because she’s just trouble,” Ireland explained. “She is a scientist and the only things she wants to know are the answers to the questions that drive her. So, ‘How does the Force work, from a scientific perspective?’ That might be something a scientist would want to know. ‘What happens if you take a khyber crystal out of a lightsaber, what does that look like?’”

Ireland’s YA novel will be but the first of many new books and comics when it arrives in January 2021, with writers such as Charles Soule, Claudia Gray and Daniel José Older all contributing to a new storytelling initiative that will cover “a more hopeful, optimistic time,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said during the debut announcement for The High Republic.

Robert Kirkman’s Invincible TV Show Casts Most Of The Walking Dead

While The Walking Dead TV series has become its own universe, with three different shows, it’s all based on the amazing comic book series written by Robert Kirkman with art by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard. However, there is another adaptation of Kirkman’s comic books coming to the small screen, and that’s Invincible. During the Robert Kirkman at Home panel for Comic-Con@Home, the creator revealed a slew of people who have been cast on the show.

The upcoming Amazon Prime animated series will obviously feature the Guardians of the Globe, the superhero team. And there are some Walking Dead actors who will make the jump to this new series that were announced during the Kirkman panel. This includes Khary Payton (Ezekiel) as Black Samson, Sonequa Martin-Green (Sasha) as Green Ghost, Lauren Cohan (Maggie) as War Woman, Chad Coleman (Tyreese) as Martian Man, Michael Cudlitz (Abraham) as Red Rush, Lennie James (Morgan) as Darkwing, and Ross Marquand (Aaron) as The Immortal & Aquarius.

They’ll join the central cast of the Grayson family, which you can see below.

Current Invincible cast:

  • Steven Yeun – Mark Grayson
  • J.K. Simmons – Nolan Grayson
  • Sandra Oh – Debbie Grayson
  • Khary Payton – Black Samson
  • Zachary Quinto – Robot
  • Lauren Cohan – War Woman
  • Chad Coleman – Martian Man
  • Michael Cudlitz – Red Rush
  • Lennie James – Darkwing
  • Ross Marquand – The Immortal & Aquarius
  • Sonequa Martin-Green – Green Ghost

Additionally, Kirkman said that the TV series will move faster than the comic book, but he won’t say specifically what the first season will cover. “I will say we will be starting at the beginning,” Kirkman explained. “So there’s not any kind of time jumps. We’re not gonna start in the middle of the series or anything like that. But we’ll be going from there. We will be moving at a faster clip than the comic book did. So at the end of the eight episode, we will be–I would say–long past the eighth comic book issue.

The Invincible comic ran for 144 issues kicking off in 2003 and running to 2018. The series followed a teenager named Mark Grayson who is the son of Omni-Man–the world’s greatest superhero. Mark quickly learns he has superpowers of his own and takes on the moniker of Invincible. From there, the story goes to incredible places with lots of twists and turns, which we will not spoil here–because you should read it.

While the book was known as a breath of fresh air to the superhero genre–as it’s a mature series and doesn’t pull its punches–one of the things it’s best known for is the art, from Cory Walker for one arc and Ryan Ottley for the rest of the series. The art is violent, bloody, and one of the few superhero comics around that isn’t afraid to get into the brutality of battle, as you won’t see someone’s intestines getting pulled from their body in a Marvel or DC comic book.

At this time, Amazon Prime’s Invincible animated series does not have a release date.

Carrion Review – My Wayward Son

As you’re slinking around air ducts and planning a surprise attack on a helpless scientist, it’s difficult not to feel empowered by Carrion‘s approach to horror. Here you aren’t the one slowly peeking around each corner to make sure you’re safe–you’re the one doing the hunting, leaving a gory trail of devastation as you pick apart an underground laboratory one department at a time. When Carrion gives you the tools to be the best betentacled killing machine you can be, it’s a satisfying monster simulator with engaging puzzles and clever combat, but it falters in moments where you don’t feel as in control as you should be.

Carrion’s star is undoubtedly the gooey red monster you play as. Simply moving around is immensely satisfying. It feels as though you’re constantly floating, with extending appendages latching onto surfaces around you to feed into the illusion of chaotic but calculated traversal. By making movement effortless, Carrion lets you appreciate how good it looks in motion, from squeezing your red mass into a narrow air duct to transforming into a school of parasitic worms to swim through grates. There are a handful of instances where your size makes orienting yourself slightly challenging, but they’re small teething issues as you learn to navigate around.

When you consume humans, you gain life and grow, while the reverse happens when you take damage. As you progress through each level, you unlock new abilities which are directly tied to your current size. When you’re at your largest, you can cause devastating damage by sending a flurry of tentacles forward and viciously pulling anything in their way towards you. At a medium size, you can encase yourself in spikes and roll around a room dealing damage in all directions, while your smallest sizes offer more utility-style abilities like stealth and a handy stun attack. Tying abilities to your size makes combat dynamic, where you’re constantly watching the damage you take and adjusting your strategy as you go. It takes a bit to get comfortable with the sudden ability shifts in the heat of the moment, but getting access to movesets that let you dominate or flee a fight when you need them feels great.

These skills aren’t just integral to combat, but also to Carrion’s puzzle-filled stages. They make full use of your abilities in varied ways: to flip out-of-reach door switches or find and control the mind of a nearby enemy, for example; in another instance, an otherwise lethal bomb can be used to clear debris blocking a path if you can withstand its blast. These puzzles require specific abilities to solve rather than quick reflexes or intricate movements, which means you’ll sometimes be backtracking through a level to find a spot where you can deposit some of your biomass and shrink accordingly to access the abilities you require. The other side of the coin is more punishing, and I was forced to exit a level entirely on a few occasions to hunt down humans so that I could grow to the size a puzzle required.

No Caption Provided

The entrance to each level is contained within an overarching hub world, which contains its own puzzles to solve. Navigating the hub world is an annoying chore. You have no map to guide you, and thanks to many routes that involve one-way paths, backtracking to a previous stage is a frustrating endeavor. And if you happen to forget where a previously locked route was after obtaining the right skill to bypass it, you can find yourself doing circles around this area just looking for a way to continue.

While levels are filled with hapless humans to feast on, Carrion features a varied roster of enemies that provide an ample threat to your progress. As powerful as you are, enemies can quickly tear you to shreds with handguns, flamethrowers, and massive mechs with gatling guns. Flamethrowers will damage you over time and force you to find a pool of water to extinguish yourself, while the high rate of fire from a gatling gun will take you from your most powerful to dead in a handful of seconds. Enemies will also defend themselves convincingly from your attacks, turning to face you and using energy shields to repel attacks from head on. It’s difficult to use your size to simply overwhelm a room full of armed soldiers, encouraging you to tackle each one with a formulated strategy.

Most combat encounters force you to think carefully about picking off enemies individually, using parts of the level that let you flank them from all directions. Levels give you the freedom to choose multiple ways to achieve this; pipe systems let you quickly move from beneath enemies to directly above them, for example, letting you break through glass skylights and yank them inside the vents you’re hiding in. If you get exposed in the open, you also have numerous ways to flee, like by forcibly squeezing yourself into small gaps in the walls or breaking open grates on the floor to make a hurried getaway. It feels empowering to scurry around the edges of a room and pick apart a platoon of soldiers with calculated efficiency, but also comforting to know that when you overcommit you have options to correct your misjudgment. Finding creative solutions isn’t only encouraged, but it works well towards the horror fantasy Carrion strives for.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

Executing your coldly calculated plans sometimes requires an exactness that is frustratingly not afforded by Carrion’s control scheme, however. Moving a single tentacle using a thumbstick is simple enough, as is pressing the trigger to grab and let go of switches, doors, and enemies. But when combined with movement, it’s difficult to parse which of your tentacles are part of your movement and which single one is under your control for actions. This isn’t an issue when you’re given the time to solve puzzles or dispatch enemies one at a time, but in the many instances where you’re thrust into bursting combat arenas with danger coming from all angles, it’s often easier to flail around while grabbing things indiscriminately rather than trying to direct attacks accurately. Wiping out a room isn’t as satisfying when you don’t feel wholly responsible for its execution.

Some infrequent flashback sequences where you play as a human scientist instead of the far more interesting monster also hamper some of Carrion’s pacing, while not adding much to its sparse story in the moment. These sections don’t feature interesting puzzles, and sport slower and slightly unresponsive platforming and odd issues with ladders, resulting in far less satisfying movement when compared to that of the monster. The way these moments eventually tie into the surprising ending that comes full circle with the game’s opening almost makes them worth it, but it’s only once the credits are rolling that you’ll likely find a reason to forgive their inclusion at all.

When it’s letting you live out its proposed reverse-horror fantasy, Carrion is at its best. It excels at making you feel empowered as an evolving lab experiment gone wrong, giving you ample opportunities to flex your death-dealing tentacles and tear enemies limb from limb. While giving you numerous tools to wreak havoc, it also uses them in smart ways to find a good balance between its gory combat and problem-solving. Carrion falters when it requires too much fine precision from you with a control scheme that doesn’t allow for it, and is at its lowest when you’re not playing as its headlining monster at all. These are disappointing distractions, but Carrion’s main event is still a bloody great time.

Now Playing: Carrion Video Review

SDCC: A New Trailer For HBO’s Lovecraft Country Has Arrived

We still have a bit of a wait for the Comic-Con@Home panel for HBO’s new show, Lovecraft Country, which is scheduled for July 25 at 4PM PT / 7PM ET, but a new trailer has been released to make time pass just a little bit faster.

The show, which has been developed for TV by Misha Green (Underground) and will be produced by J.J. Abrams and Jordan Peele, is based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff. It focuses on Atticus (Jonathan Majors), a Korean war veteran trying to navigate segregated 1950s America in search of a family legacy and his missing father, Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams). Check out the trailer now.

Joining Atticus is Letitia (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), who follow him through an escalating horrific road trip to the heart of “Lovecraft country,” the real life area in New England that was fictionalized and used by H.P. Lovecraft as the setting of many of his novels. It’s roughly around Essex County Massachusetts on an actual map, but in Lovecraft stories, you’ll recognize it from names and locations like Arkham and Miskatonic University.

The trailer takes an extended look at some of the nightmares Atticus and his companions face, from racist police and white supremacist secret societies to genuine eldrich monstrosities that chase them through the woods. Suffice it to say, it’s actually difficult to tell which is more of a threat as the trailer escalates–the shotgun toasting sheriff, or the Cthulhu-like creature trying to flip their car.

Lovecraft Country premieres on HBO August 26.

Carrion Review – My Wayward Son

As you’re slinking around air ducts and planning a surprise attack on a helpless scientist, it’s difficult not to feel empowered by Carrion‘s approach to horror. Here you aren’t the one slowly peeking around each corner to make sure you’re safe–you’re the one doing the hunting, leaving a gory trail of devastation as you pick apart an underground laboratory one department at a time. When Carrion gives you the tools to be the best betentacled killing machine you can be, it’s a satisfying monster simulator with engaging puzzles and clever combat, but it falters in moments where you don’t feel as in control as you should be.

Carrion’s star is undoubtedly the gooey red monster you play as. Simply moving around is immensely satisfying. It feels as though you’re constantly floating, with extending appendages latching onto surfaces around you to feed into the illusion of chaotic but calculated traversal. By making movement effortless, Carrion lets you appreciate how good it looks in motion, from squeezing your red mass into a narrow air duct to transforming into a school of parasitic worms to swim through grates. There are a handful of instances where your size makes orienting yourself slightly challenging, but they’re small teething issues as you learn to navigate around.

When you consume humans, you gain life and grow, while the reverse happens when you take damage. As you progress through each level, you unlock new abilities which are directly tied to your current size. When you’re at your largest, you can cause devastating damage by sending a flurry of tentacles forward and viciously pulling anything in their way towards you. At a medium size, you can encase yourself in spikes and roll around a room dealing damage in all directions, while your smallest sizes offer more utility-style abilities like stealth and a handy stun attack. Tying abilities to your size makes combat dynamic, where you’re constantly watching the damage you take and adjusting your strategy as you go. It takes a bit to get comfortable with the sudden ability shifts in the heat of the moment, but getting access to movesets that let you dominate or flee a fight when you need them feels great.

These skills aren’t just integral to combat, but also to Carrion’s puzzle-filled stages. They make full use of your abilities in varied ways: to flip out-of-reach door switches or find and control the mind of a nearby enemy, for example; in another instance, an otherwise lethal bomb can be used to clear debris blocking a path if you can withstand its blast. These puzzles require specific abilities to solve rather than quick reflexes or intricate movements, which means you’ll sometimes be backtracking through a level to find a spot where you can deposit some of your biomass and shrink accordingly to access the abilities you require. The other side of the coin is more punishing, and I was forced to exit a level entirely on a few occasions to hunt down humans so that I could grow to the size a puzzle required.

No Caption Provided

The entrance to each level is contained within an overarching hub world, which contains its own puzzles to solve. Navigating the hub world is an annoying chore. You have no map to guide you, and thanks to many routes that involve one-way paths, backtracking to a previous stage is a frustrating endeavor. And if you happen to forget where a previously locked route was after obtaining the right skill to bypass it, you can find yourself doing circles around this area just looking for a way to continue.

While levels are filled with hapless humans to feast on, Carrion features a varied roster of enemies that provide an ample threat to your progress. As powerful as you are, enemies can quickly tear you to shreds with handguns, flamethrowers, and massive mechs with gatling guns. Flamethrowers will damage you over time and force you to find a pool of water to extinguish yourself, while the high rate of fire from a gatling gun will take you from your most powerful to dead in a handful of seconds. Enemies will also defend themselves convincingly from your attacks, turning to face you and using energy shields to repel attacks from head on. It’s difficult to use your size to simply overwhelm a room full of armed soldiers, encouraging you to tackle each one with a formulated strategy.

Most combat encounters force you to think carefully about picking off enemies individually, using parts of the level that let you flank them from all directions. Levels give you the freedom to choose multiple ways to achieve this; pipe systems let you quickly move from beneath enemies to directly above them, for example, letting you break through glass skylights and yank them inside the vents you’re hiding in. If you get exposed in the open, you also have numerous ways to flee, like by forcibly squeezing yourself into small gaps in the walls or breaking open grates on the floor to make a hurried getaway. It feels empowering to scurry around the edges of a room and pick apart a platoon of soldiers with calculated efficiency, but also comforting to know that when you overcommit you have options to correct your misjudgment. Finding creative solutions isn’t only encouraged, but it works well towards the horror fantasy Carrion strives for.

No Caption Provided
Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

Executing your coldly calculated plans sometimes requires an exactness that is frustratingly not afforded by Carrion’s control scheme, however. Moving a single tentacle using a thumbstick is simple enough, as is pressing the trigger to grab and let go of switches, doors, and enemies. But when combined with movement, it’s difficult to parse which of your tentacles are part of your movement and which single one is under your control for actions. This isn’t an issue when you’re given the time to solve puzzles or dispatch enemies one at a time, but in the many instances where you’re thrust into bursting combat arenas with danger coming from all angles, it’s often easier to flail around while grabbing things indiscriminately rather than trying to direct attacks accurately. Wiping out a room isn’t as satisfying when you don’t feel wholly responsible for its execution.

Some infrequent flashback sequences where you play as a human scientist instead of the far more interesting monster also hamper some of Carrion’s pacing, while not adding much to its sparse story in the moment. These sections don’t feature interesting puzzles, and sport slower and slightly unresponsive platforming and odd issues with ladders, resulting in far less satisfying movement when compared to that of the monster. The way these moments eventually tie into the surprising ending that comes full circle with the game’s opening almost makes them worth it, but it’s only once the credits are rolling that you’ll likely find a reason to forgive their inclusion at all.

When it’s letting you live out its proposed reverse-horror fantasy, Carrion is at its best. It excels at making you feel empowered as an evolving lab experiment gone wrong, giving you ample opportunities to flex your death-dealing tentacles and tear enemies limb from limb. While giving you numerous tools to wreak havoc, it also uses them in smart ways to find a good balance between its gory combat and problem-solving. Carrion falters when it requires too much fine precision from you with a control scheme that doesn’t allow for it, and is at its lowest when you’re not playing as its headlining monster at all. These are disappointing distractions, but Carrion’s main event is still a bloody great time.

Now Playing: Carrion Video Review

How Real-Life Graffiti Mirrors Video Games’ Environmental Storytelling

Mark Twain never played a video game. But he did, more than a century ago, succinctly summarize the difficulty game developers continue to have as they attempt to craft believable worlds.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” Twain wrote in 1897. “But it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

As it turns out, there is little fiction that video game critics are more skeptical of than the graffiti developers dream up to emblazon their virtual walls. Back in 2013, Kotaku published a piece titled “Cool It With The Dumb Video-Game Graffiti” that chronicled the medium’s history of on-the-nose wall writing. And, until recently, it was easy to agree with the argument presented in that piece: that game developers spend so much time constructing living, breathing worlds, filling them with meticulous detail. Why ruin them with un-subtle graffiti? And besides, what’s the rationale? Wouldn’t people in the midst of a crisis have more important things to do than writing obvious graffiti messages to be discovered by some late-arriving player character? Would they really spend their precious time scrawling their discontent? Would the residents of The Last of Us’ quarantine zones really steal a can of spray paint to write “Stop feeding us lies! Give us our rations!” on a wall?

But then the last few months happened. The COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the United States, leaving more than 130,000 dead. The national unemployment rate was 11.1% in June.

“Extreme moments in history such as elections, wars, etc., cause the public to take to the streets and write their feelings and thoughts,” said Alan Ket, co-founder of The Museum of Graffiti in Miami, Fla., in an email. “The COVID-19 pandemic is having the same effect on people.”

And in the midst of the pandemic, protests broke out in all 50 states following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed by the Minneapolis police in late May. In this time of national unrest, graffiti keeps popping up. If you’ve criticized video game graffiti in the past, it may surprise you that the art and messages graffiti writers are spraying on walls look an awful lot like the kind you would find in a video game. It’s un-subtle. It’s pointed. It’s made by people in the midst of a crisis, spending their precious time writing messages on a wall.

No Caption Provided

Basically, video games got it right. But what is the purpose of graffiti anyway, in games and in the real world? How is it used by developers and artists? And how do the purposes of IRL wall art and scribbles on virtual walls compare to each other?

IRL

Back in March, Gone Home and Tacoma developer Steve Gaynor shared a picture from a neighborhood’s NextDoor post in which someone had painted “Plague” across the street in large white letters. That bit of real-life environmental storytelling was just one way reality was beginning to resemble a video game.

“It was so funny,” Gaynor said in an interview with GameSpot, laughing. “It was the first weekend after the first real stay-at-home, shelter-in-place orders had come out and we went on a walk in our neighborhood and just kept our distance from everybody. My wife and I were walking around and… there was a little kid who ran by who was pretend-running away from his friend just screaming, ‘You’ve got the ‘rona, you’ve got the ‘rona!’ And then some ladies biked past and they were talking about how they weren’t going to get to leave their houses for forever long. And it was like: all of this is dialogue you would hear from NPCs that were in a city that was on a pandemic lockdown. But I guess this is just actually how it is when you’re in a situation like this.”

Of course, graffiti with a socio-political message isn’t unique to times of extraordinary crisis. Since 2015, the Tumblr blog Radical Graffiti has curated a collection of spraypainted “anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, and anti-colonial graffiti from around the world.” From March of this year on, many of these posts have captured COVID-related messages. “Capitalism is the Virus” is a common refrain. Calls for a rent strike have also become common in the past few months. In the midst of the worldwide uprisings following George Floyd’s death, the COVID graffiti has often been infused with anti-police rhetoric. One throw-up reads “COPS = COVID.” A message in Berlin, when translated from German, reads “Quarantine the Cops.”

By linking these distinct, but connected, societal issues, graffiti helps to reveal the roots of the protest movement which it accompanies. John Lennon, associate professor of English at the University of South Florida, has studied this kind of street art for his upcoming book Conflict Graffiti: From Revolution to Gentrification, the Politics of Writing on Walls. Lennon advocates understanding conflict graffiti as a phenomenon that comes in three waves. We’re currently in the middle of the second or third, depending on where you look.

In the first wave, writers (that is, graffiti artists), who are already actively involved in the street art subculture, create art. But in the second wave, folks who have never picked up a can of spray paint before begin to take to the streets, expressing their discontent on walls. In the third wave, some of the graffiti is sanctioned and, as a result, co-opted by official channels. Radical messages demanding concrete action are replaced with calls for love and unity. Artists behind these messages may have good intentions, but in practice, they serve to undermine the protest movement. Lennon says that graffiti is indeed part of the protest movement; a distinct but connected form of direct action.

When you’ve got the opportunity to say something like that, I think you really can’t pull your punches, because people who disagree with you definitely won’t.”

“What graffiti is right now during these movements is one tool of many tools that people use,” Lennon explained. “I personally believe that writing on the walls is one tool that is connected to staying in the streets, as well. Both are types of bodily protest. They’re very different, but they are intermingled and they do play off of each other in important ways…. So someone who writes graffiti is disembodied. We only see the message. But that is connected to hundreds and thousands of people on the streets.”

According to Susan Phillips, Pitzer College professor and author of The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti, graffiti as a political tool has existed roughly as long as graffiti itself.

“Political writing has a long history that does indeed date back to the ancient world,” Phillips said. “Political graffiti tends to emerge when change is possible, when systems are being challenged, as people are seeking to create new narratives. Graffiti works in concert with other aspects of social movements to create change. Did people writing ‘Defund Police’ in the streets influence Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s decision to consider funding cuts to the LAPD during the Black Lives Matter protesting here? It’s hard to say that it did directly, but messaging like that has definitely helped to amplify that demand, as well as many of the demands [from] Black Lives Matter. Political graffiti has always played an important role in change movements.”

No Caption Provided

To Express A Message

Umurangi Generation, released on PC in May, nails the use of graffiti as political expression as explained by Lennon. A photography game set in a dystopian alternate present, the game follows a group of friends through a series of urban spaces. Most of these levels are littered with graffiti, created either by street youths like the protagonists or the underworked soldiers tasked with guarding the country against a mysterious threat.

“I guess the kind of conclusion around the whole thing can be seen as a bit of a political statement from me. The game itself is essentially about looking at how neoliberalism handles the problems it creates,” said developer Tali Faulkner, a Māori of Ngāi Te Rangi descent, living in Australia.

“The example from when I made it, being here in Australia, these bushfires just decimated everything. The system that allowed that to happen was totally unequipped to handle it. And the idea was that, with the situation we’re in at the moment with COVID-19, here we go again. It’s, for me, kind of the idea that the characters are going through the same thing that I as a Millennial feel at the moment and also that I as an indigenous person feel at the moment. And I think… when you’ve got the opportunity to say something like that, I think you really can’t pull your punches, because people who disagree with you definitely won’t.”

Graffiti is not a book. Graffiti is not something that is going to walk you through all the different points. It’s there to sort of just jar you awake.”

The graffiti in Faulkner’s game, similarly, pulls no punches. But the people who have hired your character to photograph it attempt to undermine its message just the same. For example, in the game’s “Walled City” level, a piece of graffiti states bluntly, “Cops Come Here to Kill Us.” But the player’s instructions task them with capturing the word “Cops.” The product you create, then, is entirely divorced from its anti-police context. As the player, you play an active role in transforming a “Wave 2” expression of anti-authoritarian sentiment into a “Wave 3” piece of aesthetic propaganda.

Sometimes, in games, the crisis is simply within the character’s mind. The world of BioShock, for example, provides plenty of reason for paranoia. The underwater city of Rapture was founded on the objectivist ideals of Andrew Ryan (whose name is a clear nod to Ayn Rand, the philosophy’s real-life proponent). It’s a philosophy built on the idea that it is morally good to act in one’s own self-interest, and the people of Rapture have, by and large, bought in. Inflated egos rule the city, and its denizens experiment with superpower-granting Plasmids and become addicted to the ADAM from which Plasmids are composed.

No Caption Provided

In BioShock 2’s Minerva’s Den expansion, we meet Reed Wahl, who meets both criteria. Driven mad from ADAM overuse, the engineer imagines himself as embattled, under siege by his one-time colleague, the brilliant Charles Milton Porter. Wahl paints “Traitor” in stark white paint across Porter’s portrait. He covers the floors with unhinged messages in a blood-red scrawl. Conflict doesn’t need to be real to feel real.

Sometimes, though, the crisis is real. And the graffiti can guide us through.

To Teach

You can’t talk about video game graffiti without talking about “Cut off their limbs!”

Back in 2008’s Dead Space, hero Isaac Clarke arrived on the USG Ishimura, a massive spaceship designed to function as a “planet-cracker”–transforming celestial bodies into usable raw materials and energy. As Isaac and his team arrived, they found no signs of life–except, of course, for the Necromorphs who had overrun the ship.

As he ventured in, Isaac found the message above scrawled in blood (and accompanied by a pair of bloody handprints for good measure) above the 211-V Plasma Cutter, a weapon that would allow Clarke to follow those sanguine instructions. It’s a controversial piece of environmental storytelling. Some players found it effective. Some imagined a fatally injured person dabbing at their mortal wounds like a painter at an easel and rolled their eyes. But zeroing in on whether it’s believable or not misses another function that this in-game graffiti fulfills.

“Well, obviously [cutting off the Necromorphs’ limbs] was our major mechanic in the game and when we first started testing, people weren’t picking it up,” Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield said. “And this was in early testing… as we’re starting to put more storytelling into the game, [and] we’re realizing that people aren’t cutting off the limbs. They’re still doing what they would normally do in a video game. Even though the weapons were cutters, they were still shooting [Necromorphs] in the bodies, trying to shoot them in the head. And I remember saying, ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’ and so we just said, ‘Well, we’re writing things in the world already. Let’s put that in there.’ And yeah, it was pretty memorable when we put it in there because, boom, right away, people just started shooting off the limbs. It was great. It was a real cool way of promoting our major mechanic.”

No Caption Provided

When tutorializing players, developers have plenty of tools at their disposal. They can present the game’s rules via text box. They can transport players to training rooms where they can practice a move until they can consistently execute it, as id Software has done in its recent games, such as Doom Eternal. They can build the tutorial into the game’s story–think Alyx Vance teaching Gordon Freeman to use the gravity gun during a game of catch with Dog. But, ultimately, one size doesn’t fit all.

The same is true of environmental storytelling, more generally. When key members of the team behind BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den, including Gaynor, left 2K to found their own studio, The Fullbright Company, they had to find new ways to tell a story. What worked for Rapture–an underwater city founded on Randian principals and populated by Big Daddy-sized egos– wouldn’t necessarily work for the domestic setting the team was working with in Gone Home.

“When you’re just in a normal family’s house, it’s like, none of them have gone crazy,” Gaynor said, referring to the setting of Gone Home, which is littered with notes and other objects left behind by a family. “Not a lot of bloody writing on the walls. But you also get to rely on [other] things. I don’t need to put a sign that says ‘attic this way’ because people know that the attic is upstairs.”

“Some of the challenges with this kind of narrative design is that it’s not one-size-fits-all. So there will almost certainly be other great solutions for how to get story across ambiently, or as part of exploration that will feel very appropriate to the game that they’re in. Such as, for instance, the narrator in The Stanley Parable. That’s a whole narrative mechanical concept that’s all about The Stanley Parable and you can’t just drop that narrator into another game. But there will be more quote-unquote ‘Stanley Parables’ that have their own really cool [system] that you may not be able to rubber-stamp everywhere and hope that it’ll work just as well.”

No Caption Provided

To Build A World

That’s true for graffiti, too. The art form’s usage in games is almost as diverse as its usage in the real world. The graffiti that Carl Johnson sprays over gang tags in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas serves a very different function than “Stop feeding us lies! Give us our rations!” emblazoned on the wall of a quarantine zone in The Last of Us. And bearing witness to wall writing in Umurangi Generation is not the same as throwing up your own tags in May’s Sludge Life.

But the words that developers choose to display on their walls matter. They give us context. They tell stories. They build a world.

“The platonic ideal of environmental storytelling, I think, in a lot of people’s heads, is being able to get some idea or some part of the story across without any words, and with just seeing this object and this object and it’s in this environment, and now I know this whole story. And what I would say is that the bandwidth for the kind of story you can tell in that way is pretty narrow,” Gaynor said.

“But that said, in an ideal world, the language that goes along with it is supplementary to that. So you might put [multiple objects] in this environment and then there’s one word up on the wall and that ties all the stuff you saw together.”

At its best, graffiti in our world can play a similar role.

“Graffiti is not a book. Graffiti is not something that is going to walk you through all the different points,” Lennon said. “It’s there to sort of just jar you awake.”

One word on the wall may make everything make sense.

Netflix Renews The Dragon Prince for Four More Seasons

This story originally appeared on GameSpot sister site TV Guide.

Get ready to head back to Xadia! The Dragon Prince has officially been renewed through Season 7. The Dragon Prince creators Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond surprised the cast with the renewal news during the show’s Comic-Con@Home, “Zoom Into Xadia”, on Friday. TV Guide has learned that Seasons 4 through 7 will each consist of nine episodes, meaning there’s a whole lot more story to tell!

“We feel, obviously, amazingly grateful, incredibly grateful to the fans and the community who have been so passionate,” Ehasz said. “And honestly, after Season 3, the swell of passion and love around the show, the amount of art and talk online and people, by the way, really politely telling Netflix how badly they wanted this story to continue was so inspiring, and it worked!”

Fans will be delighted to hear this good news, considering they’ve been waiting for news about the fate of this show since Season 3 dropped in November of 2019. When we left off, Callum (Jack De Sena), Rayla (Paula Burrows), and Ezrin (Sasha Rojen) had finally accomplished their mission to return Zym to his mother in Xadia. Not only that, they fought off Viren’s (Jason Simpson) attack with the help of humans and elves fighting together. It would have been the perfect happy ending if the final moments of the season finale hadn’t revealed that Claudia (Racquel Belmonte) used dark magic to bring her father back to life and the evil Aaravos (Erik Dellums) was clearly plotting an escape from his magical prison.

Right now, it’s hard to say when Season 4 will be headed our way. The cast obviously hasn’t recorded anything from the new season since they’ve only just found out the series was renewed, and COVID-19 is still slowing down production on many TV projects, including animated ones. So long as we know the story will continue though, we’re happy to wait for the next installment!

The first three seasons of The Dragon Prince are currently streaming on Netflix.

Fans will be delighted to hear this good news, considering they’ve been waiting for news about the fate of this show since Season 3 dropped in November of 2019. When we left off, Callum (Jack De Sena), Rayla (Paula Burrows), and Ezrin (Sasha Rojen) had finally accomplished their mission to return Zym to his mother in Xadia. Not only that, they fought off Viren’s (Jason Simpson) attack with the help of humans and elves fighting together. It would have been the perfect happy ending if the final moments of the season finale hadn’t revealed that Claudia (Racquel Belmonte) used dark magic to bring her father back to life and the evil Aaravos (Erik Dellums) was clearly plotting an escape from his magical prison.

Right now, it’s hard to say when Season 4 will be headed our way. The cast obviously hasn’t recorded anything from the new season since they’ve only just found out the series was renewed, and COVID-19 is still slowing down production on many TV projects, including animated ones. So long as we know the story will continue though, we’re happy to wait for the next installment!

The first three seasons of The Dragon Prince are currently streaming on Netflix.

SDCC: Check Out The New Trailer For Marvel’s Helstrom

A new trailer for Hulu’s upcoming Marvel show, Helstrom, has debuted during the show’s Comic-Con@Home panel.

The trailer gives fans a closer look at the dysfunctional Helstrom family, highlighting Daimon (Tom Austen), his sister Ana (Sydney Lemmon), and their mother Victoria (Elizabeth Marvel). The show will be standalone and independent from the MCU stories that exist both in theaters and on Disney+.

Showrunner Paul Zbsyzewski explained on the panel that Helstrom is a “really bad dad” story, and joked about the source material comics’ full title, “Helstrom: Son of Satan.” But he continued, saying that it’s also a “nature vs. nurture” story that examines the “values we’re imprinted with as we grow older, about the stuff we’re born with, and about the stuff we carry with us.”

In addition to childhood trauma and terrible father, the show is (naturally) also about demons and monsters–which is fortunate because the cast was quick to reveal that they’re all definite believers in the supernatural.

The hospital scenes were filmed on location, which cast members Victoria Lemmon and Elizabeth Marvel assure fans is “totally haunted.” Lemmon explained that she experienced all sorts of “spooky signs” from just the “energy of the place” to even seeing things written in dust on the floor during filming. And speaking of off-camera chills, Marvel explained that when she slips into her character Victoria Helstrom’s “crazy voice,” showcased in the trailer, some members of the crew were so freaked out they thought she was a “bear that somehow got onto the set” and even called security to check it out.