May is officially here, which means the first half of this month’s Games with Gold lineup has arrived. Xbox Live Gold subscribers can now download two new games across Xbox One and Xbox 360, with another pair of freebies set to follow partway through the month.
On the Xbox One side, Gold members can grab the newly released Super Mega Baseball 2 at no charge. Like the first Super Mega Baseball, the game features deep baseball sim mechanics beneath its cartoony visuals, and this time around, players can compete against each other online. This month’s first free 360 title, meanwhile, is the Sega classic Streets of Rage. That game is also playable on Xbox One thanks to backwards compatibility.
Super Mega Baseball 2 will remain free to download throughout the entire month, while Streets of Rage will return to its regular price on May 15. Gold members can also still download one holdover from April’s Games with Gold lineup: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the 2015 stealth-action game set in Victorian London. That likewise returns to its normal price on May 15.
Beginning May 16, Microsoft will offer two more free games for Gold members. Xbox One owners will be able to grab Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the latest mainline installment in the popular stealth franchise. Platinum Games’ cult favorite shooter Vanquish will be the second free 360 title offered this month.
Both Metal Gear Solid V and Vanquish will remain free to download through the end of May, and the latter is also backwards compatible with Microsoft’s newer console, giving Xbox One owners four new freebies to grab this month. You can find the full list of May’s free Games with Gold lineup below.
May 2018 Games With Gold
Xbox One
Super Mega Baseball 2 (May 1-31)
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (May 16-June 15)
Capcom is teaming up with iam8bit to produce a neat collectible for Mega Man’s 30th anniversary. The Mega Man 2 30th Anniversary Cartridge and Mega Man X 30th Anniversary Cartridge are limited editions priced at $100 apiece. They’re expected to ship in September 2018, and pre-orders are now open through iam8bit.com.
Each of the cartridges is a limited run of 8,500 units–7,500 in a standard opaque light blue, and a mere 1,000 in translucent, glow-in-the-dark blue. They’ll be in sealed, unmarked boxes, so whether you get the regular or the ultra-rare copy will be left a mystery until you open it. Plus, each cart is actually playable in your NES or SNES.
The Mega Man 2 cart is a dual-fold box with an instruction booklet with a forward by Mega Man collector and author Salvatore Pane. The Mega Man X cart is a tri-fold with a similar instruction manual forward by Jirard Khalil. Both copies also promise “retro pack-in surprises.”
The announcement kicks off Capcom’s “Mega May,” implying more surprises in store for the Blue Bomber. The character is preparing for a come-back with the release of Mega Man 11 later this year, and with E3 around the corner we’re likely to hear some more about it. So far we’ve seen glimpses of a new art style, but not much else. It’s coming to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch this year.
It’s very easy to dismiss Nintendo’s new line of Labo build-and-play toys as merely cardboard. For adults especially, building the Variety Kit’s five toys–or the Robot Kit’s suit–and playing their simple games might feel like a short-lived novelty. But there’s a surprising amount of depth to what you can do with the kit’s stack of cardboard sheets and cutesy software. It’s a remarkable educational tool and an opportunity to see your creations come to life, and that’s something very special, even if the games themselves don’t stand out.
The Variety Kit comes with five different Toy-Cons to build and then play with: the RC car, the fishing rod, the house, the motorbike, and the piano. In that order, the process of building them gradually increases in difficulty, with the more complicated projects expanding on the concepts introduced in the easier ones. The RC car takes around 10 minutes to build and is effectively a practice run, showing you the importance of precise assembly and how to work with cardboard without bending it in weird places. (The cardboard itself is pretty sturdy if you’re reasonably careful with it.)
After the “make” portion, you move on to “play.” The games are all relatively straightforward; drive the RC car, fish with the fishing rod, play piano using the piano. It’s more rewarding to see how the cardboard translates to the software than it is to play any of the games at length, though they’re deeper than they look at first glance. Even the most basic one, the RC car, has a self-driving function and a multiplayer battle mode; in the motorbike’s game, you can design your own tracks just by moving a Joy-Con through the air. The least interesting, at least from an adult’s perspective, is the house–the game there is to experiment with three insertable parts and see what kinds of rooms and mini-games they can unlock when in different combinations.
The piano is the most impressive component of the Variety Kit, with a regular play mode and a surprisingly deep studio mode. It only has 13 keys, but there’s a lever on the side that changes the octave, giving you access to a wider range of notes. You can layer recordings for more sophisticated songs, change the envelope and reverb of the notes before you record, and insert cards of different shapes into the top of the piano to change the waveform patterns. You can also create drum beats (composed of bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and cymbal sounds) using a kind of punch card that goes in the waveform card slot; the infrared camera in the Joy-Con detects the shape of the card and then uploads the card’s “data” into the studio UI.
Not much of this is apparent when you first start playing the piano, though. A lot of the depth can be found in “discover” mode, where three cheeky characters walk you through the technology behind each Toy-Con, any extra things you can make or do with them, and how the games work. Like with the building process, a lot of the enjoyment comes from learning how each of the Toy-Cons works and understanding why you had to make them a certain way. For kids in particular, there are straightforward explanations of abstract physics concepts that benefit from having the Toy-Cons as hands-on aids. There are also plenty of resources on how to fix the Toy-Cons, including how to repair bent or ripped cardboard (which is good for all ages).
In addition to the Variety Kit, there’s also a separate Robot Kit available. Instead of five different Toy-Cons, you build one large one: a robot “suit.” The basic suit consists of a visor and a backpack with pulley mechanisms for each of your hands and feet that control the in-game robot. The visor part utilizes the left Joy-Con’s gyroscope, while the backpack works using the right Joy-Con’s infrared camera and reflective tape. It’s a complex project that can take three or four hours to build, but the instructions are as easy to follow as they are in the Variety Kit, and it’s broken up into eight steps so you can pace yourself.
The Robot Kit’s games are especially geared toward children’s imaginative play. The main attraction is a destroy-the-city mode, in which you punch buildings to dust and rack up points. In addition to that, there’s a versus mode where two robots can battle and a “studio” mode where you can assign different sounds to the robot’s limbs and step and punch your way to a beat. You can also customize your in-game robot and unlock better abilities in a challenge mode. These games do show the different applications of the Toy-Con you’ve built, but they’re not likely to grab you for very long unless pretending to be a robot is your jam. Like in the Variety Kit, the Robot Kit’s discover mode is the place to learn more.
In both the Variety and Robot Kits, the secret endgame is the Toy-Con Garage, a mode where you can program your own games using if-then statements. You can pick an input, like “if the Joy-Con is face-up,” and connect it to an output, like “vibrate,” by dragging a line between them on the touchscreen. Depending on how many rules you weave into your program, you can make some decently complex games as well as mod the Toy-Cons you already made. It’s both a great learning tool at its most basic level and an opportunity to challenge yourself and apply everything you’ve learned so far.
It’s nice to have something to tinker with long after building the Toy-Cons, and that’s mainly because the official games are more like demos to show you how everything works. The only one likely to keep your attention for any length of time is the piano; everything else is a jumping off point, and you’re limited by how much it inspires you to create. And that’s just what Labo is at the moment: a great tool for creation, rather than for playing.
It’s officially May, which means a new bundle of free PC games will be available soon for Twitch and Amazon Prime members. This month’s offerings include a number of widely respected indie games. To find your freebies, just click the crown-shaped Prime Loot icon next to the search bar on Twitch. That opens a drop-down menu that contains your free games.
One of the biggest games this month is the mind-bending 3D platformer Psychonauts, in which you enter people’s minds and explore physical manifestations of their psyches. Gone Home is a first-person story-driven game. The adventure game I, Hope covers some heavy subject matter, and for those looking for fast-paced action, High Hell is a first-person shooter that encourages speedrunning.
Also free is the challenging first-person game Clustertruck, which has you sprinting across the roofs of semi-trucks as they race through the desert. Touch the ground and you’re toast. Finally, Titan Souls puts you in the shoes of a tiny character with a single arrow and asks you to take down enormous bosses. You don’t need a health bar in this game, because one hit spells death.
Twitch Prime is a perk for members of Amazon Prime. All you have to do to sign up is link your Amazon Prime account to your Twitch account. Once you do, you can download all six games for no cost between May 1 – 31. They’re yours to keep forever, even if you cancel Amazon Prime at some point down the line. The only catch is that you need the Twitch desktop app to install them.
Now the meteor has hit, Fortnite Season 4 is finally with us! Complete with new skins, new emotes, new challenges and a new area on the map, Dusty Divot.
Avengers: Infinity War has been in theaters for less than a week, but the next Marvel movie is only two months from release. Ant-Man and the Wasp is released in July, and following a poster, the new trailer is here.
There has been some speculation about when exactly in the MCU timelineAnt-Man and the Wasp takes place, but this new trailer doesn’t provide any clues; in fact, the only other Marvel movie it references is the first Ant-Man. But it’s a lot of fun, with Paul Rudd back as Scott Lang and Evangeline Lilly getting joint-billing as Hope Pym, aka the Wasp. There’s plenty of outlandish action involving both Ant-Man and Giant-Man (Lang’s other, somewhat taller, identity), while Lilly’s Wasp looks like she will be a great foil to Lang. Check it out above.
In addition, Michael Douglas returns as Hank Pym, while Michael Peña (The Martian, Fury) is back as Lang’s criminal pal Luis. New cast members include Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Randall Park (The Interview, Trainwreck) as SHIELD agent Jimmy Woo.
Ant-Man and The Wasp is directed by Peyton Reed. It hits theaters on July 6 in the US, with the UK release set for August 3. Reed helmed the first film, taking over from Edgar Wright, who had worked on the movie for many years but left shortly before production began. Last year, Wright revealed that he has never seen the final film.
In an interview with Modern Myth Media last year, Reed spoke about his plans for the sequel. “For me, as a comic nerd, I have always thought of Ant-Man and Wasp as a team,” he said. “That’s a lot of what the second movie is really about–how they work together, and what their personal and professional relationships are like.
“To show her finally fully formed in this movie is really exciting. We really get to introduce this character into that universe. To me she’s not a supporting character in this movie. It’s every bit as much her movie as it is Scott Lang’s.”
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