Month: July 2020

Those looking to sink their teeth into another year of the highs and lows of football management are going to need to wait a bit longer. Developer Sports Interactive has confirmed that Football Manager 2021 has been delayed due to the disruptive impact of COVID-19.

“What I can confirm today is that, despite all the problems going on in the world, there will be new Football Manager games released later this year,” Studio director Miles Jacobson said in a recent statement. “They will be delivered a little later than we’d originally planned, but they’ll have exceptionally strong feature sets… albeit different to those we thought we’d settled on back in January when I completed my ‘dream feature set’.”

Considering the last five entries in the series have all launched in November, it’s a safe bet to assume that this was the original plan before the current situation put paid to that.

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EA has revealed more of the 50 new Superstar X-Factor abilities in Madden NFL 21. After detailing Quarterback abilities yesterday, the latest update focuses on the offensive side of the ball with wide receivers and tight ends like George Kittle, Julio Jones, Tyreek Hill, and more.

Superstar X-Factors are powerful abilities designed to mimic the real-life talent and characteristics of some of the NFL’s best players. By completing specific milestones with an X-Factor player, their special ability will trigger as they enter the zone and only end after certain Knockout conditions are met, such as a dropped catch or consecutive non-targets.

Here is the latest X-Factor reveals:

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With another weekend of pandemic lockdown ahead of us, you might be wondering what games or movies you’ll distract and entertain yourself with this time. Let me introduce you to your weekend plans: The Lord of the Rings extended edition trilogy is discounted to a great price right now on Amazon Prime Video, which is available for all Prime members. Normally $17 each, you can currently own each LOTR film in digital HD for just $7 each. Considering the Blu-ray extended edition box set is currently selling for $55 on Amazon, this is an excellent deal if you’ve been in the mood for a rewatch.

It’s not clear how long this deal will be available, so it’s worth taking advantage of ASAP. You can see the discounts on The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King on Prime Video below and add the movies to your Prime Video account now.

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If you’re a fan of Hideo Kojima’s work–from the famed Metal Gear Solid series to the divisive Death Stranding–you likely know that he’s had an interesting career path over the years, particularly when he parted ways with his longtime employer Konami in 2015. However, what you probably don’t know is that he held several interesting jobs as a student prior to joining Konami in 1986.

According to a recent tweet from Kojima Productions, Kojima worked as a wedding photographer while in university, as well as a live-in gardener during holidays. Kojima says this gig in particular was quite hazardous, as he once got stung by “at least” 10 bees at once, and he came down with a case of lacquer poisoning due to his work there.

When he worked as a gardener, Kojima’s boss instructed him never to decline any offer of food or drink from a client, because it would be rude. In one case, Kojima fell from a tree after drinking beer that he was offered, and another time he had to throw away his packed lunch when the client insisted on serving him lunch. Kojima concludes the interview by saying that these student jobs helped him learn the Japanese spirit of hospitality, known as “omotenashi”–which involves prioritizing a guest’s needs above your own in every possible situation–which in turn prepared him for his career in games.

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This article contains some spoilers for The Witcher novels and Netflix show.

While HBO is trying to recapture the magic of Game of Thrones by developing a prequel spinoff series, Netflix is looking to capitalize on the popularity of its own blockbuster fantasy show The Witcher in the exact same way. The streaming service announced Monday that series showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Declan de Barra, who wrote The Witcher episode ”Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials,” are developing a six-part live-action prequel show called The Witcher: Blood Origin.

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What Is The Witcher: Blood Origin About?

The series will depict the origins of the first Witcher and explore what the Elven world was like before humans arrived and largely wiped out their civilizations. Blood Origin is set 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher, a period of time that hasn’t been explored in any real depth in the novels and short stories by Andrzej Sapkowski that inspired both the Netflix show and The Witcher video games. But there are plenty of hints in those written works that might give viewers an idea of what to expect from Blood Origin.

The unnamed world of The Witcher is part of a multiverse similar to the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology or the planes of Dungeons & Dragons. Both elves and dwarves are said to have arrived in the world of The Witcher from somewhere else, and a different world of elves inspired in part by the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is referenced in both The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and the novel The Lady in the Lake. Since the Netflix series is not holding anything in the games as canon, only lore from The Witcher books is likely to be relevant in the prequel series.

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When Does The Witcher: Blood Origin Take Place?

When it comes to The Witcher timeline, Blood Origin will be set around the time of the Conjunction of Spheres, a cataclysmic event when many of the different realms collided. This destroyed some worlds, created new ones, and caused others to merge. In the world of The Witcher, it led to the arrival of many of the monsters that Witchers fight as well as that most persistent monster of all, humans.

Expect the tone of this series to land somewhere between Syfy’s Krypton and the most recent Planet of the Apes film series, as it tells the story of a civilization doomed to fall. By the time Geralt of Rivia is born, all nonhuman races have been relegated to second-class citizens viewed with hatred and suspicion by the humans who rule the world. Humans have built their greatest cities, like Cintra, on the ruins of the wonders the elves constructed. Some elves destroyed their own works rather than see them fall into the hands of the conquerors.

The elves underestimated the threat that humans posed since the new arrivals seemed primitive by comparison, but humans had two big advantages. The first is that while elves are very long-lived, they are only fertile while they are relatively young. Young elves don’t have the best impulse control and they are the most likely to start fights with humans, meaning their casualties also reduced the species’ future fertility while humans continued to outbreed them.

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The second big edge is magic. The Conjunction of the Spheres brought with it an influx in Chaos, the kind of magic harnessed to great effect by mages like Yennefer and Triss Merigold. Humans proved better able to harness its dangerous power than elves. The elves focused their magical efforts on a breeding program meant to produce children who would be particularly capable mages. Unfortunately, that didn’t go quite as they planned.

The Witcher: Blood Origin Story and the Conjunction of the Spheres

Blood Origin’s name is likely a reference to the origin of the elder blood, the magical bloodline that produced the exceptional abilities demonstrated by Ciri and her mother Pavetta, who are called Sources. The last elven carrier of the bloodline was the sorceress Lara Dorren, but she fell in love with the human mage Cregennan of Lod and they had a half-elf child. Lara died shortly after giving birth, ending the full elven version of the line.

While that romance takes place well after the Conjunction of the Spheres, the fact that both human mages and elves live for a very long time makes it a topic rife with potential for the series to focus on. Neither civilization approved of the relationship between Lara and Cregennan, so it also makes for a perfect way to tell the tragic story through the lens of two people who wished to see their species come together rather than fight. Thankfully, Netflix has promised that all of the action will be taking place in a single timeline for this series, so their story should be easier to follow than Season 1 of The Witcher was, even if it does span the centuries.

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Genetics also played a role in the creation of the first witchers, with human mages inventing a mutagenic mixture dubbed the Trial of the Grasses to instil warriors with the power to better fight monsters. The secret to making the formula is closely guarded by the mages in order to control the witchers, who are sterile and hence can’t pass the traits down normally.

This is a whole lot of mythology to cram into six episodes, so hopefully the show’s writers will find a way to do it more elegantly than they did in the often confusing main series. There’s no release date set yet for The Witcher: Blood Origin, so it will likely be some time before we find out.

Microsoft announced a bunch of games headed to Xbox Series X during the Xbox Games Showcase event. Here is every game that we know of so far that will arrive on the next-gen console.