Since we haven’t seen Game of Thrones Season 8, episode 3 yet, this review is in progress and will be posted as soon as we’re done. To refresh your memory of where we left off, check out our Season 8, episode 2 review, and check out our predictions about who lived and died in the Battle of Winterfell to see if our guesses were right.
Netflix has canceled another one of its shows. The streaming network recently announced that Santa Clarita Diet, which stars Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, will not receive a fourth season.
In Santa Clarita Diet, Barrymore’s character is unhappy in her life as a real estate agent. She starts eating people and her life improves in many ways. She doesn’t want to go back to the way things were, so, along with her family, she finds people to kill and eat, all while concealing her true identity as some kind of zombie/cannibal person.
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix said Santa Clarita Diet was the first “zom-com,” and that the network is thankful for creator Victor Fresco for bringing the show to Netflix.
Fresco and executive producer Tracy Katsky said in their own statement that they’ll miss the show but are proud of what they accomplished.
“Netflix took a chance on this odd show and for that we will always be grateful. They were supportive, ever positive, and appreciative of our work. Until about noon today,” Fresco and Katsky said in a joint statement. “Still, they were just one phone call away from being a perfect studio. Not bad. Everything ends. This was a thing. And so it ended. We’ll miss it but are proud of the work we did and will always appreciate the love and enthusiasm we felt from our audience.”
Olyphant added, “I loved working on this show. I’m going to continue coming in and doing scenes. If they don’t want to film it, that’s up to them.”
Santa Clarita Diet premiered in 2017; the third season debuted in late March this year, and all of the episodes remain available on Netflix.
Madden NFL 18 introduced the story-focused single-player mode Longshot, which focused on two aspiring football players, Devin Wade and Colt Cruise. It even featured a performance by Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. The story continued with Madden NFL 19, and it added Rob Schneider and Joey King from the Netflix movie The Kissing Booth.
It appears the story is over.
Madden NFL 20 was announced last week with no mention of Longshot. Instead, EA focused on a new career mode called Face of the Franchise: QB1. It appears this new mode is replacing Longshot.
Game Informer’s extensive interview feature with creative director Mike Young is worded as if QB1 is replacing Longshot. GameSpot has followed up with EA Sports in an attempt to get more details.
For the new QB1 mode, players will take on the role of a backup QB at a big-time college school who has to step up in the biggest spot: in the College Football Playoff. College football is featured in Madden NFL 20, and that’s a big deal because it’s been away for so long due to various lawsuits and other issues. There are 10 colleges featured in Madden NFL 20, including powerhouses like Clemson and Oklahoma.
Go to Game Informer to read their extensive and in-depth preview of Madden NFL 20’s exciting-sounding career mode.
In addition to the new QB1 mode, Madden NFL 20 introduces “Superstar X-Factor,” which is a progression-based system that lets players perform jaw-dropping abilities with skilled players. It also “modernizes” the offensive playbooks, adds a new Urban Symphony soundtrack featuring traditional sports music like marching bands, and new player celebrations, among other things. Kansas City Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes is on the cover.
Madden NFL 20 launches on August 2, but you can play early by pre-ordering one of the game’s premium editions. Here’s a breakdown of all the pre-order bonuses and how to play early.
20 years ago this month, the original Super Smash Bros. launched for Nintendo 64 in North America. It hardly needs to be stated how important that game would prove to be for Nintendo’s fortunes. The mascot brawler would eventually grow into one of the company’s most beloved and lavish franchises, selling millions of copies and inspiring a string of imitators on other platforms in its wake. But despite all of the marquee characters attached to the game, it was also a big risk for Nintendo, a curious experiment within a genre it had little familiarity with, and its eventual success was far from assured.
By the time Super Smash Bros. arrived in 1999, Nintendo was already well-versed in spinning its mascots off into seemingly incongruous genres. The company’s dungareed workhorse, Mario, had by that point starred in even more off-shoot games than he had platformers, running the gamut from puzzlers to racers, and he certainly wasn’t the only one; the lovable puffball Kirby had a similar predilection for genre-hopping, appearing in his own interpretations of pinball, Breakout, and even minigolf, while the Pokemon series would go on to inspire a raft of its own off-shoot games following its explosive debut.
N64’s Super Smash Bros., however, differed from other spin-offs in one significant way: it marked the first time these disparate characters appeared together in the same game. While its roster may seem quaint by today’s standards, at the time it was a veritable all-star cast of Nintendo mascots. Mario, of course, featured prominently in advertisements and on the game’s box, but now he shared the spotlight with Link, Pikachu, Donkey Kong, Yoshi, and even a couple of relatively obscure characters like EarthBound’s Ness and F-Zero’s Captain Falcon, representing a cross-section of the company’s biggest franchises.
Few other games at the time attempted to bring this many properties together under one banner, giving Super Smash Bros. the air of a blockbuster crossover event. However, it wasn’t always envisioned as such. The game initially began life under the codename “Kakuto-Geemu Ryuoh,” a side project that Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai and then-HAL programmer (and future Nintendo president), the late Satoru Iwata, collaborated on in their spare time. From its inception, Sakurai wanted the project to offer a different type of experience than other fighting games on the market, emphasizing four-player free-for-alls and easy-to-learn controls.
When it came time to replace the game’s generic stand-in fighters with an actual cast, Sakurai asked to use characters from Nintendo’s vast stable of mascots, but the idea was initially met with some reluctance. “Nowadays, we take it for granted, but at the time, people had reservations about mobilizing an all-star cast of characters,” Iwata recalled during a 2008 interview with Sakurai. “I guess fans were upset by the prospect of pitting characters like Mario, Link, and Pikachu against one another. We had a hard time convincing them the fun and depth that were so obviously present in the Smash Bros. trademark fighting style.”
Despite this hesitance, Sakurai’s instincts proved to be correct, and Super Smash Bros. would go on to become one of the N64’s best-selling releases thanks in large part to its star-studded roster. The diverse cast of fighters gave the game a crossover appeal that many of Nintendo’s other spin-offs lacked. While Mario’s sports outings inherently drew in those who were already fans of the plumber, Super Smash Bros. appealed to anyone who had ever played a Nintendo game, be it Zelda, Donkey Kong, or Pokemon. Moreover, it allowed for some hilarious, never-before-possible confrontations, further adding to the novelty. Here was an official Nintendo game in which players could shoot Pikachu in the face using a ray gun or smack Yoshi with a hammer and send him flying into the background.
It certainly helped that the title was easy to pick up and play as well. Sakurai’s work as a game designer had long been characterized by its accessibility, and with Smash Bros., he applied that same sensibility to what was traditionally an inaccessible genre. Where most contemporary fighting games required players to memorize complex strings of inputs to pull off combos, Smash emphasized simplicity, tying each character’s full repertoire of attacks to two buttons and directional tilts. This setup still afforded enough nuance for advanced play, but even those who had never proven to be particularly adept at fighting games were able to pick the title up and join the fray with relative ease. The stages on which these bouts were contested also contributed to the unpredictability, as each featured its own unique hazards that players needed to carefully navigate while fighting.
Super Smash Bros. would go on to sell more than five million copies worldwide. While it wasn’t enough to reverse the N64’s fortunes against Sony’s insurgent PlayStation, it helped solidify the system’s reputation as a party machine. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for even greater things to come. While the original game was a commercial success in its own right, the series wouldn’t truly explode in popularity until its sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee, arrived two years later on the freshly launched GameCube. And the franchise only continued to grow from there, each successive installment introducing more fighters, gameplay modes, music, and other content until each game became a spectacle unto itself.
All of these advances would eventually culminate in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for Switch, which is far and away the largest installment in the series to date, dwarfing the original’s humble 12-character roster with more than 70 playable fighters. Despite only launching this past December, Ultimate has already become the best-selling game in the franchise, moving more than 13 million copies in four months–a testament to the series’ enduring appeal even two decades after its debut. While the original Super Smash Bros. may seem antiquated compared to the games that would follow, it’ll always be remembered for kickstarting one of Nintendo’s most beloved and lucrative franchises, and it wouldn’t have been possible if two visionary designers hadn’t worked on a weird little experiment in their spare time 20 years ago.