Month: July 2020

Actor Asa Butterfield was among those who auditioned for the role of Spider-Man in Sony’s latest reboot series. Butterfield was at one point considered to be the front-runner, but the part ultimately went to Tom Holland. Butterfield has now reflected on the past, saying it all worked out in the end because not getting Spider-Man allowed him to make the uber-popular Netflix show Sex Ed.

“Every so often there’s a part [that you really want] and it’s a script you love, and you kind of put your heart and soul into it, and you don’t get it. And it is tough and it is sh**, but I often find that something even better comes out of it at the end,” Butterfield told Collider. “And so in the case of Spider-Man, I did Sex Ed, because I wouldn’t have been able to do both of those at the same time.”

Butterfield went on to say that his take on Spider-Man was not the one that Sony wanted, and he’s OK with that in the end. The version of Spider-Man that Holland has on-screen is “entirely different” than what Butterfield had in mind.

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Kongregate, the online flash game portal and game publisher, has been hit with layoffs amid a restructure that will bring major changes to the site. This news, announced via the Kongregate forums and picked up on by Gamesindustry.biz, indicates that the site will no longer take new game submissions going forward, and that the site’s forums will close.

“We will be rolling out several changes to the website over the coming days and months, the first of which is that we will no longer be accepting new titles on Kongregate.com as of today,” the forum post reads. “We also will not be adding any more badges to games. You will still be able to play our existing library of over 128,000 amazing games and developers will be able to update their games as normal.”

The site will also be disabling social features over time, including closing all but 20 chat rooms and moving forums to a read-only state.

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A trailer for director David Ayer’s next film has debuted, and it shows off Shia LeBeouf in a particularly intense mode. He stars in The Tax Collector as Creeper, a man working for a crime lord called Wizard, who goes between gangs to collect Wizard’s cut of their money. Naturally, things go wrong, and his partner David (Bobby Soto) ends up having his family kidnapped.

The trailer below shows off LeBeouf’s performance, as well as plenty of action. There’s a clear mythology built up around his character, who is called “the Devil” in the trailer’s first scene. The movie also stars Lana Parrilla, George Lopez, and Jay Reeves.

The film will release on demand from August 7. You can watch the trailer below.

Ayer, who wrote and directed The Tax Collector, has been on a bad run lately. His latest films, Suicide Squad and Bright, earned awful reviews and received plenty of criticism. His earlier End of Watch was better received. LeBeouf previously worked with the director on World War II tank film Fury.

Whether The Tax Collector will reverse his fortunes remains to be seen. The director is also committed to making a sequel to Bright, once again starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton.

In addition to launching the Xbox Series X console this year, Microsoft is rolling out its xCloud streaming service with Game Pass to help reach a bigger audience. The head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, wants to assure people that Microsoft remains committed to the physical console, which really should be no surprise given that Microsoft has plans to make another Xbox console after the Series X.

Speaking during a GameLab fireside chat, Spencer stressed that cloud gaming will not take over and replace consoles anytime soon. The xCloud service is merely another option for people who want it.

“I’ve never tried to position xCloud as a replacement for your gaming PC or for a console,” he said. “I like to sit down in front of the big screen and play on a console. I’m sitting here at my PC rig right now and I like to play here. But I’m not always in front of those two devices and I want to be able to play where I want to go play on the device that I choose.”

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Jurassic World: Dominion, the sixth film in the wider Jurassic series, will bring back three major stars from the first film–and now one of those stars has promised that their roles are major. Sam Neill, who returns as Dr. Alan Grant for Dominion, has spoken about the roles offered to him, Laura Dern (Ellie Satler) and Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm) for this film.

Talking to Yahoo Movies, Neill has promised that these three returning characters are “all the way through the film,” and will not just be making a cameo (as Goldblum did in Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom). He also says that he “probably won’t be running as fast” as he did in the original, filmed 27 years ago.

Dominion is looking to return to production this month, with numerous precautions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Australian actor is looking to join the production soon, although he’ll need to self-quarantine before filming. Neill, who calls Dern and Goldblum his “dear friends,” is excited about the unique way the film is handling the pandemic. “We’re all going to be living in the same joint for three or four months, so that’s going to be fun,” he says.

It’s an interesting set-up, and actor Bryce Dallas Howard has previously said that there has been a lot of communication to make sure the cast and crew feel safe.

The film is directed by Colin Trevorrow, who also directed Jurassic World, and whose career has been on a strange trajectory. Trevorrow was fired from Star Wars Episode IX, which was generally considered a good move after tepid fan responses to Jurassic World and the awful reviews of his film The Book of Henry. However, after The Rise of Skywalker disappointed many critics and fans (here’s our review), details of Trevorrow’s script leaked–and it sounded pretty interesting.

There will be another returning character in Dominion, but with a different actor–the part of Dodgson has been recast. We’ll be able to see all of these returning characters when the movie releases in cinemas on June 11, 2021.

Publisher Annapurna Interactive has unveiled a new first-person puzzle game, and it looks incredible. Maquette is the debut game of studio Graceful Decay, and it’s focused on recursive, nested environments. We were confused by that description at first, but the trailer below clears up everything.

The environments within Maquette seem to be matching concentric areas that scale down. In a simple example in the trailer, an area might contain a block that is too large to move–but if you head into one of the buildings there you’ll find a smaller version of that same building, and moving the block there moves the bigger block, too.

It looks like many of the puzzles will involve manipulating the size of objects and moving smaller versions of large items. The trailer below shows off a few examples, and make the game look very clever.

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Microsoft’s Xbox team has in the past been criticized for a perceived lack of first-party exclusives compared to PlayStation and other competing platforms. But going forward, Xbox boss Phil Spencer doesn’t believe that will be an issue. After acquiring studios like Obsidian, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory, and starting a new studio with the writer of Red Dead Redemption, Microsoft now has 15 Xbox Games Studios teams, all of which are developing content exclusively for Xbox and PC.

These studio acquisitions and formations came at no small expense, of course, and Spencer recently spoke about how this was made possible thanks to the leadership from Microsoft higher-ups believing in Spencer’s vision.

“First-party content is really important to where we’re going,” Spencer said during a recent GameLab event. “It’s important to our hardware platforms, it’s important to things like Game Pass and our overall gaming strategy at Microsoft. As we got in place the new leadership team a few years ago, we started building our strategy and articulating our strategy internally to the company, it was really encouraging to see the support that we were getting from the board and the senior leadership team at the company to go and grow our first-party.”

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