Month: January 2018

Shaun Escayg, the creative director on Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, is leaving Naughty Dog after seven years with the studio.

“Seven years ago I joined the talented team at @Naughty_Dog on a project still in its infancy, The Last Of Us,” wrote Escayg on Twitter. “Well, the rest is history. Left Behind, Uncharted 4 were fleeting and Uncharted The Lost Legacy pushed my creative growth even further — I will miss all my dogs.”

Escayg is potentially moving on to join the team at Crystal Dynamics to work on its upcoming Avengers game, as he recently posted the Avengers logo on Instagram, writing “to new adventures” in the caption. However, Escayg hasn’t confirmed if this is the case.

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Most would argue that it’s always a good thing to meet new people and expand your horizons, but that’s not really true in the world of The Walking Dead. For every noble, self-sacrificing survivor that joins Team Rick, there’s another bloodthirsty psychopath hardened by years of living on the edge. That uncertainty fuels the series’ latest story arc, “New World Order.” Michonne, Eugene and their team have made first contact with a group known as the Commonwealth. The question of whether they’re brokering a critical new alliance or waltzing right into the lion’s den gives this new arc all the weight and urgency it needs.

Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard play that uncertainty to great effect here. On the surface, this is a very straightforward, dialogue-driven chapter of the series. The duo find room for a bit of obligatory zombie carnage, but by and large this is a story about two groups warily coming to terms with one another. Kirkman’s script doesn’t need to rely on overt moments of darkness or foreboding. The simple unfamiliarity of these Commonwealth characters is all we need. Again, there’s no way of knowing if this group is a major piece of the puzzle in terms of restoring civilization or the latest major threat to the survivors at Alexandria.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

The X-Files is back on FOX for a slightly longer season than its brief run back in 2016 – but also a sharper, steeper climb.

This new season faces a few obstacles that Season 10 didn’t. Not only does it not come with the “It’s back!” hoopla from before, but that particular splash, after being off the air for a decade, received mixed reactions. “Hit or miss” seemed to be the resounding takeaway from those six revival episodes. Now the buzz has muted a bit and Season 11’s got more to prove.

The other hurdle to leap here is the series’ new slog against relevance – which may turn out to be its most lethal battle to date. “My Struggle III,” the first of this season’s two major mythology episodes (the other will be the season finale), like Season 10’s bookends, was a muddled, mixed-up race against time that dropped Mulder and Scully into the third act of some dire plot with little grasp onto save for clunky dialogue and overwrought speeches. On top of this, this premiere was also a wipe-clean of “My Struggle II,” clumsily erasing the Spartan Virus outbreak (and UFO cliffhanger) in lieu of an “It was all a dream!” cop out.

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Another month of free games are available for both PlayStation and Xbox owners, but just how much are you saving by downloading these free games — and how good are they?

PS Plus’s free games for subscribers in January includes Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Batman: The Telltale Series, while Xbox’s Games With Gold for the month includes Zombi and Tomb Raider Underworld. Read on for a breakdown of how much each lineup will save subscribers and how critically well regarded each set of games is.

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DOWNLOAD UNLOCKED 327 (Audio version)

On this week’s Xbox show, our Xbox crew rings in the New Year by making a dozen Xbox predictions for 2018. Plus: Microsoft’s apparent PUBG marketing mistake, the last tie to Kinect is severed, and more!

Oh, and Unlocked now has its own snazzy new homepage! Bookmark this: go.ign.com/unlocked

And we’ve got our own YouTube channel too! Subscribe here: youtube.com/ignunlocked

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Warning: The following review contains spoilers for the episode.

Things are looking bleak for Universe 3, but they have one more trick up their sleeve: the mighty Anilaza. While this powerful foe didn’t offer much on his own for the story, Episode 121 still delivered a fun, dramatic episode and featured a great team-up between all our heroes, something that had been sorely missing from the Tournament of Power.

The Tournament of Power has had interesting combatants for the most part. In fact, some of the antagonists like Jiren have been built up to such a great degree that Super would be remiss to not bring them back for future stories. However, Anilaza, the giant fused robot from Universe 3, is anything but interesting. Virtually no background story is given to the character as a whole or its individual robotic components and instead just exists as a giant, powerful threat to force our heroes into working together. The end result might be an interesting fight, but it lacks any depth or significance.

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A bunch of Batman movies, the Godfather Trilogy, One Day at a Time: Season 2, and more! Here’s what’s headed to Netflix in January.

Have you ever wondered what Super Mario 64 would look like from a first-person perspective? Modder Kaze Emanuar released a ROM hack called “First Person Mario 64” recently, and as you can see in the video below (via Kotaku), it changes the way the game looks in serious, significant, and scary ways. It’s not perfect, with some of the game geometry breaking in places, but this makes sense considering the designers never intended for the iconic platforming game to be played this way.

The first-person perspective also gives Super Mario 64 more of a feeling of danger and intensity, in particular at the end in the boss battle against Bowser. He looks even bigger and more imposing than ever.

Emanuar was also behind the Super Mario 64 Online multiplayer mod that Nintendo eventually shut down with a copyright claim. He also made “Portal Mario 64,” which adds Portal‘s mechanic of creating portals warping to them to the famous platformer.

The newest Mario game was Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch. It was a massive success critically and commercially, winning lots of awards and becoming Amazon’s best-selling game of 2017.

Wonder Woman 2 will be a very different movie from the first film, according to director Patty Jenkins.

While speaking to Entertainment Tonight at the Palm Springs Film Festival earlier this week, Jenkins briefly discussed her vision for the anticipated DC movie. The director is treating Wonder Woman 2 more as a completely separate film rather than a sequel. But, Jenkins has reassured fans Wonder Woman 2 will still maintain some of the things people loved from the first movie.

“We’re actually making a totally different film with a lot of the same, similar like things that we love, but it’s its own movie completely, so it’s not ‘two’ to us,” Jenkins said. “It’s an entirely new adventure together that we couldn’t be luckier

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Fans have created an online searchable archive of Miiverse content in the wake of the service shutting down last year.

Twitter user Drastic Actions announced the launch of the website, dubbed Archiverse, which boasts nearly 17 terabytes of searchable Miiverse content, including posts, screenshots, drawings, and user profiles.

Okay, everyone, I have now launched https://t.co/K3Hy7fLwKp, your guide into the Miiverse Archives!

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