Month: July 2020

After announcing all the player ratings for Madden NFL 21, EA Sports will reveal the first of the new X-Factor super-abilities for the professional football game on Monday, July 27.

The Madden NFL 21 Twitter account revealed the news with a nice-looking poster made by illustrator/concept artist Conrad Javier. The poster teases, “New abilities unleashed,” while a graphic in the top-left corner seems to suggest that the X-Factor reveals will happen over the course of the week, wrapping up on July 31.

Introduced in Madden NFL 20, X-Factor abilities are special abilities that some of the highest-rated players in the game that players unlock during gameplay by completing certain objectives.

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If you’re an aspiring horror writer with an established Reddit account, the tale of “My Wife And I Bought A Ranch” is a dream-come-true. Deadline is reporting that Netflix has won the rights to a short story posted to the No Sleep subreddit. You can see the post here, although the full story is divided across six parts.

The story, about an ex-marine and his wife who purchase a ranch and soon find out that there’s a malevolent force at work there, was written by Matt Query. It’s well-regarded among the No Sleep community, and has received 3000 upvotes since the first part was posted five months ago.

The rights to the story were bought for a figure in the low seven-figure range, likely meaning between $1-5 million.

The script will be handled by his brother, Harrison Query, who is already working on a Three Musketeers project for the streaming service. Scott Glassgold and Ground Control Entertainment are producing, but talks are underway with potential co-producers, including Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen at 21 Laps (Stranger Things) and Aquaman-director James Wan’s Atomic Monster.

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Tannenberg, from M2H Game Studio, is available now on PS4 and Xbox One. The game is the second installment in the WWI Game Series, following 2015’s Verdun, and features 40-player matches across maps based on real battlefields. Unlike Verdun, this port was handled entirely in-house by the original developer.

The game, which released on Steam Early Access in February 2019, comes to consoles with all the updates the game has received since its initial launch, including a new map (Przemyśl) that has also been added to the PC release. Players can fight over control points using time-authentic weapons, including gas barrages and mounted machine guns.

While there’s no single-player campaign, you can play with up to 20 bots, or add them to a multiplayer match. You can play as troops from Russia, Romania, Latvia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria.

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Writer-director Taika Waititi has shared some new insight on the next Thor movie, Love and Thunder, calling it “insane” and “romantic.”

Speaking to the BBC, Waititi said he and his team has been working sporadically on the script for more than a year already. It might not be a surprise given the title Love and Thunder, but Waititi said he is incorporating some romantic elements, and he’s excited about that because it’s out of his wheelhouse.

“We’ve been writing the script off and on for over a year, and this week I’m doing another pass on it. It is so insane. It’s also very romantic. I’m into romances now,” he said. “I just want to make a romance. I want to make something I’ve never done or never cared for. I would like to attack something like that.”

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The Fugitive, the hit 1993 film starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, is being reborn as a Quibi series, and the first trailer is now available. As with all Quibi shows, the episodes will be short, and some big stars are attached to the series.

Kiefer Sutherland plays Detective Clay Bryce, while the titular fugitive is Mike Ferro, played by Boyd Holbrook (Narcos). Ferro is a recently released former inmate, falsely accused of orchestrating an explosion in an LA subway station, and must go on the run when Bryce declares him the only suspect, with a “shoot on sight” directive.

You can watch the trailer below. Like all Quibi shows, the episodes will be short (10 minutes or under). It looks like this one will have a sub-plot about irresponsible journalists, too.

According to a synopsis provided to Deadline, Mike Ferro is worried about the well-being of his wife and daughter, who were on a train at the time of the explosion. Whether or not this means we’ll get a version of the iconic “I didn’t kill my wife” scene from the film remains to be seen, as they both appear to be alive in the trailer.

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One of Netflix’s popular original movie franchises, The Kissing Booth, recently returned with a sequel that debuted on July 24. That won’t be the last entry in the series, however, as it’s been confirmed that a third Kissing Booth movie was filmed in secret alongside the sequel.

Deadline reports that The Kissing Booth 3 was secretly filmed concurrently with Kissing Booth 2 in South Africa. Filming is finished, and all that’s left is post-production. The Kissing Booth 3 is expected to come to Netflix sometime in 2021, and bring back the stars of the original movies, Joey King, Jacob Elordi, and Joel Courtney. Additionally, director Vince Marcello, who directed the first two movies, came back.

The entire Kissing Booth series is based on the novels by Beth Reekles, the first of which she wrote when she was just 15 years old. Reekles said on Twitter, “It’s been tough keeping this secret from you all but thank you for all the lovely messages.”

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Ghost of Tsushima, the recently released PS4 exclusive, relies heavily on sound to guide players and flesh out its 13th century Japanese setting. As you might expect, getting the sound just right took a lot of work and tools–and the sound is even more important than you might realize while playing.

Over at A Sound Effect, the game’s audio director Rev. Dr. Bradley D. Meyer and its senior sound designer Josh Lord have delved into the game’s sound design, and how they captured the sounds of the era. They also explained how sound is used to guide the player through the open world.

Meyer reveals that the sound of the wind, which guides players, is even more intricate than it might seem. “We built a system where the sound travels on three splines pointing towards the player’s current objective, one centered over the player and one on either side spaced about 5 meters away,” he says. “These wind gusts are all reactive to the current environment the player is in. So if you’re skirting a grassland on one side and a bamboo forest on the other, the wind will sound like tall grass rustling on your one side and clacking bamboo on the other. This directionality helps players key into where they should be headed as they traverse the island.”

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Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD was recently announced for a 2021 release on Nintendo Switch and PS4. The game, which is a remaster of the PS2 RPG first released in Japan back in 2003, debuted a quick trailer during July’s Nintendo Direct Mini. But now, thanks to a new stream, we have much more footage of the game to see how its art style holds up.

In a July 23 livestream, Atlus showed off the game at length, and while all of the discussion is in Japanese (without subtitles) there’s a whole heap of footage to dig into. From 40:35 onwards in the video below, the focus shifts from the series at large to the upcoming HD remaster. As the discussion continues on, footage from the remaster plays in the background.

This gives us a better look at how the game’s style has translated, and the work that is going into the remaster. It looks like the new game’s visual style won’t be so different from the original, but it has held up pretty well.

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