Month: January 2019

The first trailer for Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego is out, and it introduces us to very different version of the master thief. Acting as an origin story for Carmen, the series reimagines the mysterious villain as a misunderstood anti-hero.

Gina Rodriguez stars in the new series as the voice of Carmen, and she’s joined by Finn Wolfhard who portrays Player, Carmen’s chief accomplice and friend. Carmen Sandiego begins airing on January 18.

Carmen Sandiego was first introduced in an educational video game series as the antagonist that you had to chase around the world while learning about geography. Although she’s the villain, the games have rarely portrayed her as a bad person. Instead, she’s usually just playfully stealing valuables for the sport of it. However, her reasoning behind it has always changed, as Carmen has retold her backstory rather differently throughout the two decades of her games, books, comics, and cartoon. This Netflix series aims to change that, by shifting into the past when Carmen was much younger and telling her origin story.

Interestingly enough, the new trailer reveals that Carmen has never been the villain the games lead players to believe. In actuality, Carmen attended a secret academy as a teen to learn how to become a master criminal, but when she discovered that committing crimes can lead to people being hurt or killed, she gave up on that dream. Instead, she resolved to become a thief of thieves who steals back from the criminals who once trained her so that she can stop the harm they cause innocent people.

Netflix found great success in 2018 with another animated series that was based off of a beloved classic female character, She-Ra, in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Princesses of Power went on to be one of the most popular series on Netflix in 2018, so the streaming service probably hopes to recapture the same audience with Carmen Sandiego this year.

The holiday-themed 14 Days of Fortnite event ended earlier than many players anticipated, as developer Epic Games admitted it shared the wrong end date on its social channels. As an apology, the studio said it would offer a free item for all players who participated in the event, but now it has decided to go one step further and bring the entire event back for a limited time.

“We communicated an incorrect end date for the 14 Days of Fortnite event and did not feel the Equalizer Glider compensation was the right approach,” Epic wrote on its website. “After further discussion, we’ve decided to bring back this event early next week through January 15 at 3 AM ET (0800 UTC). We’ll also be enabling some of the most popular Limited Time Modes that were available during the event.”

As part of 14 Days of Fortnite, Epic offered a new challenge to complete and reward to unlock every day. The developer says all of these will be available for the duration of the event when it returns next week, giving players another chance to unlock the rewards. However, Epic notes that any progress made on partially completed challenges will be reset.

Earlier this week, Epic said it would give all players who completed at least one of the 14 Days of Fortnite challenges the Equalizer glider, which was the 14th reward you could unlock as part of the event. Many players, however, expressed that they would rather the event be extended so they could unlock any rewards they may have missed out on, making this decision welcome news. You can see all of the challenges and rewards from the event in our 14 Days of Fortnite roundup.

In other Fortnite news, Epic recently rolled out the fifth weekly set of challenges of Season 7, which task players with dancing on towers and searching between a giant rock man, a crowned tomato, and an encircled tree, among other things. The developer also introduced a new item to the game: the Boom Box, which can destroy structures.

A new set of Humble Monthly games is on the horizon, but you can get two of the titles–Yakuza 0 and Tom Clancy’s The Division–right now for $12. That’s already a great deal, seeing as buying the games separately on Steam right now would cost you $70. Then, once this month’s cycle ends on February 1, you’ll also get an additional batch of six to eight mystery games. The only catch is that you won’t know what those games are until it’s too late to buy in for the month. So the real question is, are this month’s early-reveal games worth spending $12 on in hopes that the mystery titles are good?

According to our reviews, the answer is almost certainly yes. Yakuza 0 is a prequel to the long-running series set in Japan’s criminal underworld. In GameSpot’s 8/10 Yakuza 0 review, Peter Brown wrote, “You should play Zero because it’s a fascinating game that combines equal parts drama and comedy, and is unlike anything else out there at the moment.”

As for The Division, it’s getting a sequel on March 15, which should give you plenty of time to play this post-apocalyptic, loot-based shooter to see if you’re interested in the series. In GameSpot’s 8/10 The Division review, Scott Butterworth wrote, ” I stopped caring about the game’s flaws after the first few hours and proceeded to lose myself in obsessive stat optimization and cooperative gun battles. The problems (and frustration) never disappeared, but I was more than happy to play through the pain.”

As for the mystery games, you can get a sense of their probable quality by looking at the full contents of previous months’ bundles here. All told, this bundle will likely include eight to 10 titles, spanning an array of genres. The games come in the form of Steam codes, and they’re yours to keep and play forever even if you cancel your subscription.

Other perks include access to all the games in The Trove, 10% off everything in the Humble Store, and access to exclusive deals. Plus, 5% goes to charity. You can join Humble Monthly here for $12 and cancel at any time.

Japan has made game save editors and console modding services illegal. The punishment for breaking this law is pretty severe too, as perpetrators are liable up to a 5 million yen fine (approximately $46,000 USD or £36,000 GBP), five years of prison time, or both.

These laws are a part of Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Act, which was revealed in December 2018. As the name of the act implies, these laws are designed to prevent someone from unfairly turning a profit off of a company’s software or electronic product. However, the wording of the law allows it to extend over what were previously assumed to be harmless actions as well, such as adding new games to the NES, SNES, and PS Classic consoles via mods or using an Action Replay.

The three exact actions that people will be punished for, according to a Siliconera translation, via the act are as follows:

• Distribution of game save data editors and programs
• Distribution, selling, auctioning serial codes and product keys without the software maker’s permission
• Services that offer the editing/hacking of save data, and/or modifying/hacking game consoles

As a result, products like Action Replay and Cyber Save Editor for PS4–both popular in Japan–have been forcibly discontinued. The law also creates a firmer stance in Japan around the act of reselling digital download product keys, which has typically been a rather grey area in the games industry as a whole.