Month: January 2018

Gaten Matarazzo, who plays the pudding-loving Dustin on Netflix’s Stranger Things, is a great singer. Remember when we heard him sing the national anthem at a MLB game? He crushed it. He’s also in a band called Work in Progress, and they performed recently on the Jersey Shore at the Stone Pony near where Matarazzo grew up.

He sang on a number of songs, including covers of Foo Fighter’s “Everlong” and “Porch” by Pearl Jam. YouTube user vivalavix was there and recorded Matarazzo and company performing the covers. Also on the setlist was Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar We’re Going Down,” which Matarazzo sang alongside his sister. You can watch that video here on YouTube from user BeccaRaptor94.

Stranger Things Season 2 premiered just before Halloween last year, and it was a huge hit. Incredibly, around one third of the the streamer’s US subscribers watched it. So it’s no surprise that Netflix greenlit a third season, though we don’t know when it’ll premiere or what the story will be.

For more on Season 2, check out GameSpot’s hub for the show to find reviews, theories, and everything else you need to know. In other news, a drummer rips the show’s main theme with this killer cover.

Fox has released several new photos from the upcoming X-Men film, Dark Phoenix.

The photos, which you can view in the image gallery below, feature returning characters Professor Xavier (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner). The photos also feature Jessica Chastain’s mysterious character, a shapeshifter who goes by the name Smith.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix, directed by Simon Kinberg, takes place around 10 years after X-Men: Apocalypse. After a space rescue mission goes awry, a solar flare awakens Jean Grey’s dark inner force, the Phoenix. Dark Phoenix promises to be the most somber entry in the series.

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Microsoft has confirmed to Polygon that it has ended production of the Kinect Adapter – the USB accessory required to connect the motion sensor to the Xbox One S, Xbox One X, and Windows devices – stating that it is refocusing attention on “higher fan-requested gaming accessories”.

Back in October 2017, Microsoft announced it had ended production of the core Kinect accessory. At the time, Microsoft stated it would continue to support Kinect users but it would appear that support is also beginning to wind down.

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Pokemon Go has finally been confirmed to launch in China. John Hanke, the CEO of developer Niantic, told Financial Times that the game is coming to the gamer-rich country, though he did not give any indication as to when it would be released. Niantic is working with NetEase to launch Pokemon Go in China. NetEase is a Chinese games company that has also worked with Activision Blizzard to bring World of Warcraft and Overwatch to China.

“We absolutely intend to bring our existing games into China,” Hanke said. “Beyond that, there are opportunities to build games in China, both for China and for the world.”

In addition to Pokemon Go, Niantic continues to operate and support its AR game Ingress. One of its biggest upcoming titles is Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which is also an AR title.

A year ago this month, Reuters reported that Pokemon Go, and other unspecified augmented reality games, are “unlikely to be rolled out in China anytime soon,” due in part to concerns about information security and safety. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television has decided to work with other branches of the country’s government to “evaluate the game’s risks,” the report said. This decision was motivated by a “high level of responsibility to national security and the safety of people’s lives and property,” the group said.

Specifically, China’s Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association said Pokemon Go’s risks include a “threat to geographical information security and the threat to transport and the personal safety of consumers.”

It appears whatever issues China had with Pokemon Go have been addressed or resolved. It remains to be seen how the Chinese version of Pokemon Go may differ from the western edition; we’ll report back with more information as it’s made available.

Pokemon Go has been linked to car crashes around the world, some of them fatal. The game leverages Google Maps to track your location, which makes some people–and governments apparently–uneasy.

China is a massive market for gaming. In 2014, research firm EEDAR reported that the number of gamers in China surpasses the total number of citizens in the United States.

Don’t get your hopes up: this Star Wars space shooter is never going to exist.

So says Travis Baldree, co-founder of Double Damage (and of his previous studio, Torchlight developer Runic Games). This five-minute demonstration was “cobbled together” in 2016 from bits of other Star Wars games and Double Damage’s own Rebel Galaxy (read the review) to show EA what a potential game might look like, with some flashy results. Unfortunately, the project wasn’t approved for development – which means it doesn’t qualify for any future list of “canceled Star Wars games.”

While it appears far less complex as the Star Wars: X-Wing games that inspired it, there’s a lot to like about this unnamed game. We see the original-trilogy-era Millennium Falcon and an X-wing engage in dogfights from both third and first-person perspective, blasting away at TIE Fighters, TIE Interceptors, a Star Destroyer, and even Boba Fett’s Slave-1. The concept included the ability to freely switch between ships and hyperspace-jump between areas. You can see the shared DNA with Rebel Galaxy in the interface, including the menu, the shield and radar display in the lower left, and the throttle control in the upper right. There’s definitely some vertical movement, though it’s not clear how much.

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Not that anyone was doubting it would be, but Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a massive hit. The sci-fi epic has now made $531.5 million in the United States, passing another Disney movie, the live-action Beauty and the Beast, to become the top-grossing release domestically this year. The Last Jedi has made $523.3 million from international markets, boosting the film’s total global box office haul to an astonishing $1.054 billion after just a few weeks, according to box office numbers posted on Box Office Mojo.

While critics were generally impressed by The Last Jedi, fans reacted in a more mixed manner, at least in some places. The audience rating on the mega movie site Rotten Tomatoes is just 50 percent after more than 165,000 votes.

The Last Jedi opens in China, its final market, on January 5, so the film’s box office haul stands to grow much further still before all is said and done.

In addition to The Last Jedi, three other films have surpassed $1 billion worldwide this year, according to Variety, including Beauty and the Beast ($1.26 billion), The Fate of the Furious ($1.24 billion), and Despicable Me 3 ($1.03 billion).

The Last Jedi will surely surpass the $1.056 billion that Rogue One made, though it is not expected to catch up to the hugely successful The Force Awakens ($2.068 billion).

Whatever figure The Last Jedi ends its theatrical run with is just the beginning, as the movie will make even more money from DVD/Blu-ray/digital sales further down the line.