Bandai Namco has shared a new trailer for Dragon Ball FighterZ. This one focuses exclusively on the game’s story campaign, shedding more light on the mysterious mode.
As previously revealed, the story mode in Dragon Ball FighterZ takes players through an original tale that is comprised of three story arcs. It begins when a “troop of clones” mysteriously appears; around the same time, the Z-Fighters coincidentally lose consciousness one by one. When Goku awakens, he is “linked” with the player, allowing them to control and battle as the powerful Saiyan.
A central figure in the story mode is the brand-new character Android 21, who we also got a closer look at in the trailer. Android 21 is a brilliant researcher whose intellect is said to be on par with Dr. Gero. She has some sort of ties to the Red Ribbon army and appears to be behind Android 16’s resurrection; at one point in the trailer, she can be seen with the Namekian Eternal Dragon, Porunga, presumably making a wish to bring Android 16 back to life.
In addition to Goku, the story mode will link players with several other characters for its different arcs; one revolves around Frieza, while the other puts players in control of Android 18. Players can develop bonds with the characters they’re linked to as they defeat enemies, which in turn can potentially unlock special conversations that show a different side of that character.
Even in the wake of Super Mario Odyssey’s debut, the Nintendo Switch continues to see many new releases, including Mario’s Olympic rival, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Nine games are coming to the Switch between today, November 2, and next Wednesday, November 8. Check out the releases in the gallery below, as well as a full list.
Morphite — Nov. 2
Sparkle 2 EVO — Nov. 2
Super Beat Sports — Nov. 2
Wheels of Aurelia — Nov. 2
Perception — Nov. 2
ACA NeoGeo Art of Fighting 3 — Nov. 2
Farming Simulator Nintendo Switch Edition — Nov. 7
The question of what happens after we die has plagued humanity since the first apes started hitting each other over the head with pointy rocks. It’s been tackled endlessly in literature, film, and television, and it’s starting to get stale. But Pixar’s latest, the Mexican Day of the Dead-inspired Coco, threatens to liven things up.
Coco stars new actor Anthony Gonzalez as Miguel Rivera, a young boy who wants to follow in the footsteps of his musical idol, the great Ernesto De La Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). But Miguel’s family, devoted shoemakers, hates music, and he has to play guitar in secret. The movie is set during the Mexican Dia de los Muertos festival–the Day of the Dead–and Pixar went to great lengths to make sure it’s respectful of Mexican culture.
But they hit a wall when it came time to send Miguel to the world of the dead partway through the film. There’s a problem with the Mexican version of the afterlife: There isn’t one, the filmmakers discovered.
“In all of our research and all of the people that we spent time with and families we spent time with down in Mexico, we would often ask them what their vision was of an afterlife, and pretty consistently, people would just say ‘I don’t know,'” Coco co-director Lee Unkrich, whose previous directing credits include Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and Toy Story 2 and 3, told press during a visit to Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, Calif. “There wasn’t like, some set vision of an afterlife tied to Dia de los Muertos. So we found that we were pretty much left on our our own to figure that out.”
We don’t want to reveal too much, but Coco‘s afterlife draws from a number of inspirations, from Pedro Linares’s iconic, colorful alebrijes to the traditions of the holiday itself, where a path of marigold petals leads loved ones back to the land of the living for a single night.
“We definitely looked at everything. We looked at every movie we could think of that had some depiction of an afterlife or heaven. And in most cases it kind of showed me what I didn’t want to do,” Unkrich said. “We tried to forge our own path and do something kind of unique and different than what anyone had ever done. We tried to keep it grounded in a reality, rather than going for just a completely crazy, anything goes kind of environment. We tried to have a logic to our land of the dead.”
In Coco‘s spirit world, you can’t get back across the marigold bridge unless your descendants remembered to include your portrait on the ofrenda–each family’s Dia de los Muerto altar. Once there, Miguel is greeted by previous generations of his family, who have their own problems to deal with–chief among them reaching the Riveras’ ofrenda.
“If you think of the Day of the Dead from the point of view of the dead, this is the one day of the year where they go back and see their family and check in with how they’ve grown and how the family has expanded,” said Coco‘s other co-director, Adrian Molina. “It really lent itself to creating excitement and an energy that you would feel throughout this land for the whole night.”
In Coco‘s land of the dead, life basically goes on, and whatever job you had in real life is what you keep on doing when you die–although you’re now a skeleton and can only enjoy food again on one night of the year: the Day of the Dead.
“That might be great for some people,” Unkrich said. “It might suck for some people to keep doing what they do. But we just wanted to have some ground rules so that there was some structure to the society–and especially because we wanted the Riveras to still be making shoes, even in the afterlife, so that Miguel really didn’t have anything to look forward to.”
That may sound grim, but it’s also what pushes Miguel to keep seeking Ernesto De La Cruz–even into the afterlife.
The Harry Potter series ended in 2012, but the success of last year’s spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has ensured that there’s plenty more movies in the Potter universe on the way. The currently untitled Fantastic Beasts sequel is currently shooting, and a new image has been released via the movie’s official Instagram account.
Like the first Fantastic Beasts sequel image revealed last month, it doesn’t actually show any of the cast. However, it does suggest that the movie will feature the launch party for the book that the first film was named after–the legendary monster guide written by lead character Newt Scamander. Check it out below:
The Fantastic Beasts sequel will star Eddie Redmayne as Newt, with Katherine Waterston, Zoe Kravitz, and Ezra Miller all returning from the first movie. Johnny Depp will play the villainous Grindelwald, with Jude Law as young Dumbledore. Other cast members include Claudia Kim (Avengers: Age Of Ultron) and Ingvar Sigurdsson (The Oath), and David Yates directs once more.
An official synopsis for Fantastic Beastswas released in July. It reads, “As he promised he would, Grindelwald has made a dramatic escape and has been gathering more followers to his cause–elevating wizards above all non-magical beings. The only one who might be able to stop him is the wizard he once called his dearest friend, Albus Dumbledore.
“But Dumbledore will need help from the wizard who had thwarted Grindelwald once before, his former student Newt Scamander. The adventure reunites Newt with Tina, Queenie, and Jacob, but his mission will also test their loyalties as they face new perils in an increasingly dangerous and divided wizarding world. The film expands the wizarding world, moving from New York to London and on to Paris.”
The Fantastic Beasts sequel is set for a November 16, 2018 release, and according to Potter creator JK Rowling, it will be the second of five movies. The first movie made more than $814 million at the worldwide box office.
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Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene has had quite the year. He launched his survival shooter, Battlegrounds, in Early Access on Steam, and it has gone on to become the breakout success of 2017, setting concurrent player records on Steam, taking over Twitch, and dominating discussions around gaming.
At E3, Greene announced that his game would make its console debut on Xbox One and, at Paris Games Week, the developer announced a release date for the console version. And as part of promoting the game, he’s traveled around the world to various events. We caught up with him at Paris Games Week and decided to ask him about his whirlwind year, as well as a few other questions that’d help us understand the man behind the game.
GameSpot: Hello, Brendan, how’s it going?
PlayerUnknown: Pretty good! It’s been a busy few days, we finally let loose the release date for Xbox One and we’re really excited about that.
Yes, so you’ve got a console version coming and last month you broke records on Steam. How did that feel, Brendan?
It was amazing. The number of people that are playing is unreal, I never imagined that in my wildest dreams. It’s been great. Everything seems to be coming together now, since we have the Steam 1.0 release coming at the end of the year and the Xbox Preview Program version. It feels like the last year and a half is coming to a head. It’s really starting to come together.
With over a million players now, Brendan, at what point do you stop calling yourself PlayerUnknown?
[Laughs] I would sooner change to PlayerLeaveMeTheF**kAlone. No, but really, that’s my handle. It’s a bit ironic now given the success of the game but…
I think you should change it to Brendan’s Battlegrounds. It has a nice, kid playing war in the garden vibe.
Oh nooooo. If we renamed it you wouldn’t have the cool PUBG moniker.
You’re introducing a bunch of new features, most notably vaulting. It must be so stressful to mess with something as popular as PUBG is now.
It is quite stressful. We want to improve how the blue zone works, we want to add vaulting and balance the core gameplay and gunplay mechanics. Of course, with a big player base, that’s a risky thing to do and it’s something we have to do carefully–almost in baby steps–to make sure that people are informed about what we’re doing and we’re communicating it well. For us it’s about making a great game, and sometimes you have to change stuff to make them better. Some players don’t like change–a lot of people in the world don’t like change–but sometimes in order to make the game better you have to do these things. We constantly listen to the community anyway, so if we make changes they really don’t like, we have rolled them back before and we will do in the future. This is a community effort and while we have a clear vision for what we want we still have to make sure players are happy with what we’re doing.
Do you worry that PUBG could lose its popularity as quickly as it gained it?
Of course that’s a concern. But it’s not something we’re too focused on since we’ve never really focused on our player numbers. We’re more focused on making a good game. It’s been my belief since making Arma 2 mods that it’s not about the fame or concurrent users, it’s about making a good game. All the way through my mod career, I was just focused on polishing the game, and it’s the same with PUBG because we want to continue this over five, 10, 20 years. We want to continually upgrade and improve.
So let’s say you had to pack it in a … Fortnite … from now…
Very subtle [Laughs].
Thanks. What would you do next?
Make another game. If it dies, what can we do? But we hope that because we have new maps coming, environments coming, and we want to keep adding to the game to give more interesting battlegrounds to keep fighting on.
[Laughs] I like realistic shooters. I don’t mind fun, but shooters are just my bag. I don’t get time to play unfortunately. I would want to play it with friends and I don’t get time to play with friends. Maybe when I get time off in a few years…
This is making me sad, Brendan.
No don’t worry, I get to work on my dream. I work long hours and I travel a lot, I don’t get to see my friends very often, I have a daughter back in Ireland that I get to see infrequently–I Facetime with her a lot–but it’s ok because I’m doing something that’ll last quite some time and it’s worth putting in the time now. I’m willing to sacrifice some things because I’m getting to live my dream.
I really should. I’ll get a controller and see what happens.
PUBG is currently dealing with server issues, lag, and cheating. What are you doing to combat this and what would you say to people who have become disheartened by it? Streamers, for example, are starting to look for experiences elsewhere now.
We always expected that; it’s just the nature of streaming. But for us, we’re committed to solving these problems. The server issues are just because of our exponential growth–we wrote the system to deal with a million concurrent users. We thought we’d never reach that, so it was a good ceiling to put on our system. Now we’re reaching 2.3 million. We ran out of cloud servers in Asia because there were no physical servers left for us. It’s just growth pains, essentially.
With cheating, it’s the same. We’re expanding quite rapidly in China and there’s quite a large section of cheat providers that are very smart there. I mean, they’re going in via the Windows kernel to attack the game. But we’re rolling out new systems and updating the game with more server-side fixes. We’re committed, but we’re only seven months into live development, and it takes time to write these systems. We’ve been banning up to 20,000 cheaters a day and we’re now able to build profiles on what a cheater looks like [in-game]. We’ll be using that–a lot more statistical analysis–to really beef up our anti-cheat measures and catch people that do manage to bypass them.
As I said, this is a long-term project for us. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. So my message to players that get disheartened is, “Bear with us, we’re not abandoning the game, this is not a pump and dump by any means.” We have a plan to keep going until this is honestly the best version of the game it can be.
Have you tried throwing money at it?
[Laughs] As per player suggestions, we have tried throwing money at servers but it doesn’t seem to fix them.
Why don’t you talk about the mobile version of the game? The players there seem to be very neglected.
Mobile version? We don’t have a mobile version.
None of these are PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
What? But I got Ultimate Fortnite Battle Royale-Grand Battleground from the Google Play Store and…
[Laughs] That’s not us.
What about Players Unknown Battle Grand?
[Laughs] Nope.
Grand Battle Royale?
Sorry, no.
BATTLE GAME ROYALE?
No.
Oh, I am very confused.
We haven’t made a mobile version of the game. Man, there’s so many [clones]. I had some friends say, “Oh my god your game is on my phone,” and I am like, “We don’t have a game on the phone right now…”
How do you feel about seeing so many clones and also not being able to stop that from happening? They could impact your reputation, right?
It’s to be expected. Look at any movie that comes out, you just get a bunch of knock-off games. I want this genre to grow; it’s a new, fledgling genre in gaming and one that I helped father, so I want to see it grow. All that I ask from developers is to put your own spin on it. That makes it more interesting, the genre grows. If everyone is just copying there’s no growth and it’s just the same thing over and over. That’s boring and a bit lazy. I want to see more Battle Royale games, but let’s try and put some unique spins on them and not the same thing over and over again.
Where does Fortnite fall within that thinking? Does it put enough of a spin on the formula?
Not really, no. So many of the mechanics in the game are similar to the stuff I concepted way back in Arma 3. Even the UI is a little bit similar to ours. And it’s not really the case that we’re annoyed with Fornite, it’s because of conflicts of interest with Epic and that was our point to the press, it wasn’t really communicated well. I just feel that Fortnite: Battle Royale is a bit lazy to me. They could have had a great game because Fortnite is amazing and they could have put some unique, interesting building [systems] in there, almost like a tower defense Battle Royale, but they just didn’t.
But what can you do? It’s going to happen. It’s the nature of business I guess.
Is the Blue Zone a metaphor for life in that failure is always closing in on you and you’ve just got to hope it gets everyone else around you first?
[Laughs] I look at Battle Royale the game type as a metaphor for life: It’s really f**king hard and you’re going to get f**ked nine times out of ten, so yes, that is a good way to look at it.
For a lot of people, their knowledge of weapons comes from games. I learned about M4s and P90s through Counter-Strike. So with that in mind, do you think you’re setting unrealistic expectations for what a frying pan is capable of?
Oh my god. [Laughs] Yes, I think I am.
Is that something you feel a responsibility to address?
No, the frying pan will always be the frying pan.
We do want to add new features to it like bullet penetration, for example, so you might start seeing holes in that frying pan. Some of those videos of 50 people shooting at one frying pan and it’s protecting them are … [Laughs]
Would you like to take this opportunity to put out a PSA about frying pans in real life?
Yes. Frying pans should only be used in self-defense.
Thank you, I think that’s sensible. Have you thought about introducing a vegetarian alternative to “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner”?
I can guarantee you that our virtual chicken contains almost no meat.
It seems like it’d be pretty easy to just have an option for “Winner, Winner, Salad Spinner.”
[Laughs] That is a very nice idea. That could be very good for the veg-eating audience.
I think they’d appreciate it.
You’re right.
So you went outside for a smoke earlier…
Yeah.
That new fog effect? It’s actually PlayerUnknown’s vape.
Do you vape?
Yes.
Really?
Of course I do.
What you vaping?
At the moment, it’s Lemon Frosted Doughnut.
That sounds amazing.
It’s very nice.
What PG/VG ratio are we talking?
Usually more VG, so 60/40.
Nicotine?
Trying to go zero. I’m trying to ween myself off smoking, so vaping and then having a cigarette now and then.
How’s that going?
Y’know, I’m getting there.
That’s great. The creator of one of the most popular video games in the world right now vapes. So maybe people should lay off the vapers a bit?
Vape Naysh.
Vape Naysh, Brendan.
Seriously though, as a Vaper, I hate those f**king idiots that are always filling the room with a cloud. It’s like, “Chill the f**k out.”
I agree. Whenever I go to my local store to get a bit of liquid there’s always a guy trying to start a smoke tornado with his hands and he looks like a right knob.
[Laughs]
Have you actually seen Battle Royale?
Of course! It’s one of my favourite movies. I just love the idea of starting with nothing and having to fight for survival. It becomes a human interest story, a real look into how people react and behave in unusual situations.
Do you like anime?
I liked Akira.
I like you.
[Laughs]
You should check out Hunter X Hunter. I think you might be into it, given your love of survival. It has similar themes to PUBG.
I’ll check it out. I also read Lone Wolf and Cub, which was wonderful. It’s f**king amazing.
LA Noire is coming to Nintendo Switch in just a few days, but you may have some difficulty in playing the game if you don’t own an SD card. The Eshop version of LA Noire for Switch comes in at 29 GB, making it too big to fit on the console’s internal memory.
The Switch contains 32 GB of storage built in, but Nintendo states “6.2 GB of internal memory is reserved for use by the system.” That means you’ll need to buy extra storage if you want to download the 1940s detective game to your Switch.
For comparison, Bethesda told Rolling Stone that Doom’s upcoming Switch port has a campaign and arcade mode that “fit on a 16 GB cartridge,” though the multiplayer mode is a separate 9 GB download. We don’t yet know how big the total game will be if you were to purchase it from the Eshop.
