December 2017 – Page 21

27. December 2017

IGN’s Best RPG of 2017 Winner Is…

The result are in! Find out which role-playing game IGN crowned the best of the year and which won the People’s Choice award.

27. December 2017

Middle-earth: Shadow of War Ithildin Door Poem Solutions

Solve the Shadow of War’s Ithildin Door poems quickly with this guide.

27. December 2017

Fe: 5 Minutes of Gorgeous Gameplay

All month long we’re highlighting cool games that might not be on your radar, as part of IGN First: Games to Watch in 2018.

Today’s game is Fe, a beautiful action-adventure that’s a bit Zelda-ish. In the video above, one of Fe’s developers walks you through five minutes of new gameplay that showcases bonding with animals. Enjoy!

To see all the Games to Watch in 2018 as we roll them out over the month, be sure to head over to our IGN First Hub Page.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.

27. December 2017

A History of Screwups

The game industry never goes without a controversy for long. The latest one concerns Electronic Arts, now in the crosshairs over pay-to-win lootbox features in Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Yet Josef Fares, director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and the upcoming EA-backed A Way Out, offered a modest defense for the EA at the recent Game Awards: “All publishers fuck up.”

He’s right, of course. No major game company has an entirely spotless record. The industry’s most popular names all made mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes spelled doom. Others were just bumps in the road. We packed together the biggest blunders of the biggest game publishers past and present to see just how they bounced back— or didn’t.

27. December 2017

Doomsday Clock #2 Review

Doomsday Clock #1 established that Geoff Johns and Gary Frank are capable of the daunting task that is crafting a sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ legendary Watchmen saga. That issue didn’t, however, offer much indication as to how the DC Universe and its heroes would factor into this story. As Johns himself warned back at NYCC, Doomsday Clock is much more a direct continuation of Watchmen than readers might have been expecting going in. But even though issue #2 maintains the methodical pacing of the first, it also goes a long way to uniting these two diametrically opposed superhero universes and making the scope of the conflict more clear.

Perhaps even more than the first, this issue really highlights the notion that Johns and Frank have nailed down the specific visual language of Watchmen. The creators employ the iconic nine-panel grid to maximum effect throughout the story. That structure ensures that the pacing remains careful and coordinated, while still leaving room for Frank to go big during those pivotal moments and capture the full scope of a scene. Both creators devote careful attention to the interplay between words and images in much the same way Moore and Gibbons did in the original story. There’s often an ironic juxtaposition between what’s printed in a narrative caption and what Frank renders in a given panel. Watchmen stands the test of time in part because it’s a story that makes full use of the medium and doesn’t really translate elsewhere without losing something in translation. Doomsday Clock is a story that recognizes and celebrates that fact.

27. December 2017

Marvel’s Runaways: “Tsunami” Review

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

If there was ever any doubt that the Pride on Runaways had slyly and stealthily stolen the spotlight from the teens, “Tsunami” was here to set the detractors straight. Laced with an assortment of gallows humor antics, this chapter saw the parents scramble to get their collective s*** in order following last week’s shooting of Victor.

By the end, freakin’ Robert Minoru was standing in his underwear, wearing the Fistigon, professing his love for Tina in Japanese while she held aloft the Staff of One. It was a tender moment of remorse and reconciliation blended with really goofy “context is absolutely necessary” imagery and…that kind of sums up this episode, for the most part. I won’t dive into everything that went on here, but all the parents, more or less, treated Jonah like he was their scary overlord. The inner-dynamic of Pride not only revealed itself more, but we also learned how the parents all, respectively, feel about their “boss.” We saw, among them, who felt the most important, who was treated as the most important, and who was deemed least valuable.

27. December 2017

Remembering Star Trek: Phase II

Captain James T. Kirk announces at the head of every episode of the original Star Trek that the Enterprise is on a five-year mission. After three years, however, the show was canceled. We did get an additional two years in 1973 with the airing of Star Trek: The Animated Series, but only the most hardcore of Trekkies consider that show to be fully canonical (even the franchise’s handlers consider it to be “semi-canon”). It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when Star Trek was being run in endless syndication, that the show really began to sink its hooks into the pop culture fabric. Fans began assembling in hotel ballrooms as early as January 1972 to celebrate Star Trek, a practice that was, essentially, the invention of pop-culture conventions as we know them.

27. December 2017

Now’s the Perfect Time for Fantastic 4 to Join the MCU

Comic books are complicated. Superhero movie aren’t much better. They’re an intertwining mess of moving plotlines, changing contracts, and shifting alliances, and that’s just talking about the business dealings behind the scenes. On camera, worlds can end in one film and five-second stingers can blow out into entire universes. Trying to work in a new host of characters and concepts can be a headache.

Lucky for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the cosmos is in sync and the stars are aligning. Disney has purchased Fox, bringing a ton of assets along for the ride. That includes Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four. And there couldn’t be a better time for it to happen. It’s sure to bust up some plans, result in a couple of cancelled flicks that started life under Fox, but the moment is right for this merger to begin.

27. December 2017

GameSpot Universe’s 10 Worst Movies Of 2017

Yes, there were good films this year, but it was also the year of The Emoji Movie. Buddy is here to count down the worst reviewed movies of the year. These are the bottom 10 films of 2017 from Metacritic!

27. December 2017

The Best Marvel Cosplay Of 2017

Marvel cosplay had a strong presence this year at events across the world as fans dressed up as their favorite characters from various Marvel properties. Check out some of the best cosplayers we saw in 2017!

For more Marvel cosplay, check out the outfits we saw at Comic-Con 2017 and SVCC 2017.