Month: September 2018

The revenge genre might look straightforward, but it’s fundamentally complex. Revenge, in and of itself, is not a “good thing.” Never has been, never will be. But in simplified stories, watching a victim destroy the people who ruined their lives does provide some form of catharsis. The question, then, is whether the movie celebrates the immorality of the protagonist, or goes too far in demonizing the villains, or fails to acknowledge the traumatic reality behind the crime that set these events in motion.

Peppermint tries to navigate this perilous tightrope, and struggles to avoid falling into the pitfalls of the genre. It’s a fiercely directed thriller with a performance from Jennifer Garner that should, by all rights, remind the world that she is a formidable action star. It’s a simplified tale of revenge against drug cartels that shows Garner killing a lot of people of color, but also tries to take the curse off of it by turning her violently loose against corrupt bureaucrats who enable organized crime. And it treats Garner’s protagonist like a tragic individual forced into action, as opposed to a flippant sociopath who falls in love with murder.

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Getting into Two Point Hospital is sort of like meeting someone really charming and funny, then after a while, being pleasantly surprised to find they’re also really smart. The readable, disarming art style and chuckle-worthy fictional diseases that make patients think they’re Freddie Mercury or simply turn into a clown complement a layer of deep, strategic problem-solving.

Each of the 15 hospitals you’re asked to manage across Two Point County offers its own unique objectives and challenges, lending a welcome variety to the routine of diagnosing and curing patients to increase reputation and turn a profit. The layout of a facility has a large impact on the problem-solving, as it’s crucial to fit in diagnostic facilities, wards for long-term care, employee amenities, and specialists required to treat some of the wackier and more severe ailments. And there needs to be enough space left over for patients and staff to navigate between these hotspots. It’s a system that requires plenty of planning and rewards clever use of space.

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In the wake of the horrible tragedy at a Madden 19 tournament in Florida last month, EA announced it would donate $1 million to the families of those affected by the shooting. Another part of EA’s campaign in response to the shooting is the Jacksonville Tribute livestream event. This is a place where people can come together to remember Elijah Clayton and Taylor Robertson, who were killed in the attack.

The livestream will also help to support the survivors of the attack and encourage the community to come together to “share in the healing power of play.” Madden community members Scott Cole, Rico Williams, Adrienne Lawrence, and Dave Grunfeld will host the event.

The Jacksonville Tribute livestream takes place Thursday, September 6, starting at 5 PM ET and running through 6:30 PM ET. You can stream it above or through any of these locations:

Jacksonville Tribute Livestream: Where To Watch

• Twitch – https://www.twitch.tv/eamaddennfl
• YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B96vwpU8Nk4
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/EASPORTSMADDENNFL
• Twitter – https://twitter.com/eamaddennfl
• Mixer – https://mixer.com/madden
• ESPN3 – http://www.espn.com/watch/ (cable subscription required)

More details about the specific programming of the event will be shared soon.

In response to the shooting, EA created the Jacksonville Tribute Fund in partnership with the National Compassion Fund and GoFundeMe. EA itself donated $1 million, and is currently asking for more donations from the wider community. 100 percent of the funds will go to the families of the victims.

The August 26 shooting left three people dead, including the alleged shooter. Further Madden tournaments in the series have been canceled.

Back in 1997, Theme Hospital laughed us all back to health with its acutely tongue-in-cheek approach to hospital management simulation. 21 years later, Two Point Hospital pulls at the same nostalgic heart strings, channeling Theme Hospital’s brand of brash, British humour and mixing it with some surprisingly deep economic management gameplay. Two Point Hospital simultaneously pays homage to its predecessor while surgically carving out its own place in your heart.

Two Point Hospital puts you behind the administrator’s desk and charges you with both the grander and finer aspects of managing your new hospital empire, from designing the internal layout of each building down to hiring staff and researching treatments. You’ll start out small with only a single hospital and a handful of illnesses to worry about treating and slowly build your way up towards managing larger locations with multiple buildings and a vast range of wacky illnesses that require special rooms and equipment to treat. Its goofy style–bright colours and characters with big, bulbous heads–belies the depth of its management simulation, finding a good balance between both aspects. Helpful tutorials in each mission ease you into the concepts behind new objectives at a comfortable pace, and as you complete them, you’ll earn stars to unlock new missions as well as room types.

For your hospital to run smoothly and make lots of money, patients need to be diagnosed and then treated as quickly as possible. For some that means a quick trip to the GP’s office, then a jab in the injection room. But for most, this means long stays and visits between different rooms for tests and eventual treatment. For these patients, as well as your staff, you’ll need to make sure there’s plenty of things around to keep their mood up, placing importance on how you make use of your space. Getting it right can make the difference between having the best reputation in the business, or causing an innumerable number of patient deaths, dropping your reputation and bank balance into the toilet. Helpfully, you’re given lots of colourful graphs and floor charts to work out what needs improvement, so you’re not left out in the cold trying to work out why all your patients are rage-quitting and storming out the hospital doors before being treated.

The tools for drawing out rooms and placing furnishings feel intuitive and robust; rooms are drawn out like blueprints on a floor plan, then once you’re happy with the layout you can place your items like desks, bookshelves and coffee machines. Items help add prestige to a room, and are unlocked using Kudosh, a reward currency that’s awarded for completing objectives. The larger the room and the more you fill it with items, the higher its prestige and happier staff and patients will be when using it, meaning staff work longer and for less money and patients will pay you more. This creates an interesting dichotomy between saving available space for a bigger variety of rooms, or building larger, higher-level rooms and seeing the effects that both have on your staff and patients.

Later missions go out of their way to shake up the established gameplay loop by throwing machine-damaging natural disasters like storms and earthquakes at you. You need to draw on everything you’ve learned up to that point as mission objectives broaden and your funds start to spread thin. You also have to consider the mind-boggling number of different treatment rooms to research and prioritise which to build and which patients to turn away. While some diseases only require a pharmacy to cure, others require their own rooms with expensive equipment, and putting all your money into the wrong treatments could leave your bank account reeling.

Thankfully anything that’s researched in one mission becomes available in all others, so if you get stuck somewhere and don’t have the funds to research what you need, you can always go back to a previous hospital and get them to front the research bill instead. This grander focus across all your hospitals extends to a light multiplayer portion in the form of leaderboards. All of your stats like cure rates, money earned and reputation are saved to online leaderboards, where you can compare your successes and failures against your friends. It’s only good for bragging rights, but it’s a nice addition regardless.

Part of Two Point Hospital’s overwhelming charm is its sense of humor, which permeates every corner of the game, from the fantastically funny radio station–complete with fake ads and feature segments–to the pun-laden disease names like Jest Infection or 8-bitten. Someone suffering Mock Star shuffles about with the look and swagger of Freddie Mercury, requiring a session with the psychiatrist to pull them out of it. Equally funny are the contraptions used to cure some of the rarer conditions. The Extract-a-Pan treats Pandemic and is a giant magnet on the end of a tube that pulls the pan off the top of the patient’s head. The writing throughout is sharp and witty, with the descriptions of various ailments being a particular high point.

But just discovering those diseases and their often darkly funny symptoms, as well as watching your staff and patients go about their day, feels rewarding enough. Everything moves with the look and flow of a cartoon pantomime; patients will die only to come back as ghosts and haunt your hallways until a janitor can come along and suck them up with a vacuum cleaner. At one point my receptionist got up from his desk, vomited in front of patients because he was disgusted by something, then left to pour a coffee in the break room before demanding a pay raise. It nails the Theme Hospital nostalgia and is so good that even the 20th time you hear the announcer ask patients “not to die in the hallways” is hilarious.

Part of Two Point Hospital’s overwhelming charm is its sense of humor, which permeates every corner of the game.

The one area where the game does suffer is in the minor grind of starting a brand-new hospital for each new mission. After spending hours perfecting several locations, going through the early phases of a new hospital starts to feel more like a chore than it should. It’s not a long process, but it quickly becomes a section you want to rush through to get to the things you haven’t seen yet.

It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long for a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital to show up, but now that it’s here, it feels like it’s been well worth the wait. The exaggerated, cartoon look and relaxed approach to management make it inviting enough for most players, while the deeper aspects of its economy are enough to keep seasoned players engaged. Two Point Hospital not only re-works an old formula into something modern and enjoyable, it also iterates on the classic brand of irresistible charm and wit, making something that’s truly wonderful.

After a slight delay, Fortnite‘s 5.40 update has finally arrived on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile. Along with introducing another new item to Battle Royale, the Grappler, the patch marks the start of the High Stakes event, which features a new limited-time mode and its own set of challenges to complete. Here’s what they are the rewards that you can earn.

The aforementioned challenges are tied to the new LTM, Getaway. Unlike a typical game of Battle Royale, this heist-themed mode divides players into teams of four, with the objective being to find one of the four safes scattered around the island, extracting the (appropriately llama-shaped) jewel housed within, and making it safely to the getaway van.

There are three High Stakes challenges in all, which will reward you with XP and new High Stakes cosmetics. Each is fairly straightforward and can be reasonably completed by taking part in enough Getaway matches. You can see the full list of High Stakes challenges, and the rewards they confer, below.

• Play matches of The Getaway (10) — 5,000 XP
• Deal damage to Jewel-carrying opponents (500) — Suited Up spray
• Pick up a Jewel in different matches of The Getaway (5) — Cash Flow skydiving trail cosmetic

If you manage to complete all three of the challenges before the High Stakes event ends next week, you’ll unlock one final reward: an exclusive Crowbar skin for your pickaxe. Additionally, developer Epic offering a new Wildcard skin in the Fortnite store throughout the event, which comes with four interchangeable masks and a Cuff Case back bling.

Epic is also selling a new Ace Pack. It runs for $5 and comes with two similarly heist-themed cosmetics: the Ace Outfit and the Swag Bag back bling, which looks like a duffle bag stuffed with cash. You’ll also receive 600 V-Bucks–Fortnite’s in-game currency–for purchasing the Ace Pack, making it a particularly good value.

As previously mentioned, Fortnite’s 5.40 patch also added a new traversal tool to the game’s arsenal, the Grappler. This gun can be fired at walls and used to launch yourself around the map. Meanwhile, Week 9’s set of challenges are scheduled to go live very soon, on Friday, September 7.

There are so many ways to watch new movies these days that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what’s coming out. The biggest films still debut in the old fashioned-way–in theaters, with home releases still a few months off. But with the rise of streaming and Video on Demand, we are increasingly seeing simultaneous releases for smaller movies, with films getting a limited theatrical release on the same day that they are available to buy and rent digitally.

The rise of Netflix and Amazon as major players in film production has also disrupted standard release patterns. Netflix in particular has attracted some major directors, and their movies will bypass theaters entirely and premiere worldwide on the streaming platform. Over the next few months we can expect major new releases from acclaimed filmmakers such as Paul Greengrass, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jeremy Saulnier, all of which will make their debuts on Netflix.

Of course, movies that did get a theatrical release continue to move to digital platforms after a few months. This is a great way to catch up on movies you might have missed on the big screen–or are keen to rewatch.

This week sees the release of The Nun, which is one of the year’s most anticipated horror movies as well as the latest entry in the Conjuring universe. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom makes its digital debut, Marvel’s Black Panther comes to Netflix, and one of the year’s most acclaimed documentaries is now available to rent. So here’s our look at the best and most interesting new movies in theaters and available to watch at home this week.

New Things To Watch In September 2018

• What’s New To Netflix For September 2018
• Best New Netflix TV Shows / Movies To Watch During September 2018
• New To Netflix (US): Black Panther, Classic Animated Movies, And TV Series You Missed This Week
• New For Hulu This Month (September 2018, US): More Movies, TV Shows, And More
• The Best New Amazon Prime Video Movies And TV Shows To Watch For September 2018 (US)

The Nun

Watch in theaters

Director James Wan already had a number of successful horror movies under his belt (including Saw and Insidious) by the time he directed The Conjuring in 2015, but it proved to be his biggest film to that point. Its success resulted in not only a sequel, but an entire spin-off universe. Following last year’s spooky doll movie Annabelle: Creation, The Nun is the latest entry. It focuses on the investigation into the earlier life (and death) of Valak, the terrifying demon nun from The Conjuring 2. Wan co-wrote the screenplay, and it’s directed by Corin Hardy, who previously helmed the acclaimed low-budget shocker The Hallow. In his review of The Nun, GameSpot’s Michael Rougeau said the movie is “inconsistent, silly, and predictable, [but] also terrifying and atmospheric, with a great monster, phenomenal setting, and likable characters you’ll never stop rooting for.”

Peppermint

Watch in theaters

Jennifer Garner is best known for her kick-ass lead role in J.J. Abrams’ CIA thriller show Alias, and Peppermint sees her make a welcome return to the world of action. It’s directed by Taken‘s Pierre Morel, and it definitely taps into that vein of gritty revenge-filled violence that the likes of Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington, and Keanu Reeves have found big success with over the last decade. Garner plays a woman who wakes from a coma to find her family dead and vengeance very much on her mind. Expect much brutal ass-kicking.

Black Panther

Watch on Netflix

The hugely popular Marvel adventure hits Netflix this week. Black Panther was released theatrically back in February and went on to make a phenomenal $700 million at the US box office. Domestically, it currently stands as the most successful movie in the MCU to date. Disney’s deal with Netflix ends soon so this will be one of the last Marvel movies to hit the service, with future films destined for Disney’s own streaming platform, which is set to launch in 2019. But Netflix subscribers can watch Black Panther right now, and remind themselves why it stands as one of Marvel’s finest movies.

The Most Assassinated Woman in the World

Watch on Netflix

This intriguingly titled Netflix Original combines historical drama with gory horror, and focuses on the life of Paula Maxa, the leading lady of Grand Guignol theater in 1930s Paris. Every night Maxa was brutally murdered on-stage to the delight of audiences, and the movie examines the way it affected her and comments on our continued desire for fictionalised violence, death, and mutilation. After a successful festival run this year, this is definitely one to check out.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Own it digitally

The latest movie in the series of dinosaur thrillers, Fallen Kingdom saw Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard reprise their roles from 2014’s Jurassic World, and featured the welcome return of Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm. Director J.A. Bayona took the action to the island of Isla Nublar and used his previous experience in horror to deliver perhaps the scariest movie in the franchise so far. Back in June, GameSpot’s Michael Rougeau said in his Fallen Kingdom review that the movie was “a hell of a ride, an exciting, terrifying, and funny follow-up that will have you at full attention until it ultimately sags in its third act.”

Cold Skin

Own it digitally

French director Xavier Gens has made a number of memorable horror movies over the last decade, including the brutal Frontiere(s) and the post-apocalyptic chiller The Divide (his video game adaptation Hitman is best forgotten). His latest movie is Cold Skin, and it’s released digitally this week. This is a strange horror fantasy in which a young man chooses a life of isolation in the Antarctic, where he encounters a strange race of amphibious creatures. There are obvious similarities to The Shape of Water here; however Cold Skin’s semi-aquatic monsters are lot less friendly than the one in Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar winner.

Hereditary

Rent it digitally

One of the year’s scariest and most acclaimed horror movies, Hereditary is now available to rent digitally. From the outstanding performances from Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Ann Dowd to the masterful build of terror from first-time director Ari Aster, this is a must-watch for horror fans who didn’t catch it at the theater (and a must-rewatch for those that did). As GameSpot’s review put it: “It’s a gripping, white-knuckled, old school horror that never, over more than two hours, lets you get comfortable for long.”

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

Rent it digitally

Fred Rogers is a TV institution, spending nearly 40 years as the host of the educational kids show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers died in 2003, and back in March the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor premiered on what would have been his 90th birthday. It’s one of the year’s best docs, and with a box office take of $22 million, is now the highest-grossing biographical documentary of all time. It’s a moving, honest exploration of both the man himself and the huge influence he had on several generations of American children.