Month: September 2020

Actor Chris Evans, best known for playing Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, found himself trending on social media the other day when he inadvertently posted a snap of his camera roll that included a nude photo. Using that leverage for good, he’s tweeted out a reminder for Americans to get out and vote in this year’s already fraught election.

After the actor accidentally posted the nude photo on his Instagram stories, fans immediately flooded hashtags and searches for his name with unrelated photos in a bid to stop screenshots of the leak from spreading. His co-star Mark Ruffalo also weighed in on the mistake with a “silver lining.”

Now, Evans has created his own silver lining, tweeting out a reminder to vote in a tweet that started with the understatement of “now that I have your attention.”

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After a long period of silence on Microsoft’s next-gen consoles, we’re finally getting to know the Xbox Series S and Series X–some of it officially, some of it through leaks. The latest info to have been revealed is the retail box art for both consoles, which was tweeted out by Wario64, a prominent source of many of the recent Xbox leaks.

The good news is, while the names are easily confused, the box art isn’t. The Xbox Series X comes with classic Xbox green and black styling, while the Series S is predominantly white with just a green stripe at the bottom harking back to Xbox branding.

The X and S denoting the console versions are prominent in the bottom left of the box. The Series S box only seems to be a little smaller than the Series X box, though the discless console is quite a bit smaller than its higher-powered counterpart.

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Earlier this year, a wave of DMCA copyright claims hit Twitch creators who had played copyrighted music in their streams, leading Twitch to recommend streamers not to play copyrighted music at all. Facebook Gaming, the social media giant’s Twitch competitor, has taken a different approach to the issue, announcing that it has worked out licensing agreements with the industry so its streamers can play copyrighted music.

The move is a first in the game streaming industry, and one creators had expected or at least requested from Amazon-owned Twitch. “We’re partnering with the music industry to open up a vast catalogue of popular music for Facebook Gaming Partners to play while livestreaming games,” the Facebook announcement reads. “Our work with music labels, publishers and societies, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Kobalt Music Group, BMG publishing, Merlin and many partners means you’re able to include a vast amount of music across a variety of genres – current pop hits, dance floor beats, hip hop, 80s classics and much more.”

At the moment, the license is only current for Facebook’s streaming partners, though the announcement says it’s working on opening up the program to its Level Up creators, a lower tier similar to Twitch’s affiliate program.

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NBA 2K21‘s upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X edition will cost $70 USD, which is $10 above the normal price of current-generation games. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has now defended the price increase to Protocol, pointing to the ballooning costs of game development. He remarked that he doesn’t expect consumers to care about rising development costs, but outside of that, Zelnick argued that the NBA 2K series has expanded its own value proposition by virtue of making the game more robust and deep.

“The bottom line is that we haven’t seen a front-line price increase for nearly 15 years, and production costs have gone up 200 to 300%,” Zelnick said. “But more to the point since no one really cares what your production costs are, what consumers are able to do with the product has completely changed.”

The newer NBA 2K games are “much, much bigger” in terms of what they offer, Zelnick said. As such, this warrants a price increase, he added. NBA 2K also offers the ability to pay for various microtransactions, but Zelnick said the base game is compelling enough to warrant a more expensive sticker price.

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It looks like Ubisoft changed the name of Gods & Monsters to Immortals Fenyx Rising due to a trademark dispute with Monster Energy.

As detailed in this video from Hoeg Law, the Gods & Monsters trademark faced an opposition filing from the Monster Energy Company in April of 2020, which may have forced Ubisoft’s hand, necessitating the name change to Immortals Fenyx Rising.

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You can see the full timeline of Gods & Monsters attempted patent registration over on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. Ubisoft applied for the patent back in June of 2019, and did not face any issues until January of this year, when Monster Energy applied to oppose the trademark under a belief that its brand would be damaged due to the “likelihood of confusion” between the two entities.

In the notice of opposition the energy drink brand cites its ties to the games industry through sponsorship of professional gamers and esports organizations in support of its many claims. What’s interesting is that in Ubisoft’s May 2020 answer to Monster Energy’s notice of opposition, they deny almost all of the claims. Yet ahead of September’s Ubisoft Forward, the game’s name was officially changed from Gods & Monsters to Immortals Fenyx Rising.

In an interview with VGC last week, associate game director Julien Galloudec said that the name change was not a technical decision, but one related to the evolved “vision” of the game:

So no, the change of name was entirely because of the vision of the game. When you start a game it’s always an adventure and it’s a very iterative process. So you start with a vision that evolves as you craft it with the team and we get feedback and ideas. […] So after that, the game changed a lot, to the point where we felt we needed a new name to be better aligned with that updated vision, so that’s where we decided to change to Immortals Fenyx Rising”.

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We’ve contacted Ubisoft for comment.

Immortals: Fenyx Rising will launch on Google Stadia, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch and PC on December 3, 2020. You can check out our preview here.

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

Remember when making an “edgy” game didn’t mean adding Godsmack to the soundtrack of your swashbuckling 9th century Persian fantasy, or painting Sonic the Hedgehog black and giving him a gun? Hotshot Racing remembers. In this endearingly vibrant and deliberately primitive 3D aesthetic it means octagonal wheels, chunky environments, and plenty of pointy bits and pieces that’ll poke an eye out. As a single-player experience Hotshot Racing definitely runs out of puff a bit faster than I’d expected, but it’s certainly an earnest throwback put together with a huge amount of love for the early 3D racing era.

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Hotshot Racing may be full of sharp lines and low on modern detail, but its blocky cars and chiselled characters burst from the screen with retro appeal. Developers Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital’s stab at an authentically ’90s atmosphere has been a roaring success in that regard.

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Better still, however, is the handling of most of the cars. Arcade racers live and die on their driving dynamics, but Hotshot Racing boasts a very finely-honed handling model. Cars feel planted on the road with a satisfying sense of weight that’s sometimes absent from pure arcade racers, but they’re still snappy and responsive enough to obey your inputs instantly as you hurl them into sweeping bends. The drifting is painless to trigger with a quick dab of brake, and it’s very easy to add or reduce drift angle throughout a slide to balance your speed for a perfect corner exit. Boost is a potent way to catch opponents (although largely useless to shake them), and there’s a surprisingly powerful drafting mechanic that facilitates some furiously fast slingshot manoeuvres.

Informed heavily by its Sega AM2 ancestors and the very finest of the best-in-class British arcade racers that followed in their slipstream – including Burnout and Split/Second – Hotshot Racing is extremely easy to pick and play but demands near-perfection when tackled at Expert difficultly.

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Formula Swift

Each of the eight over-the-top drivers has a garage of four vehicles at their disposal. They’re unlicensed, but it’s not at all hard to make out Hotshot Racing’s nod to the likes of Days of Thunder’s iconic Mellow Yellow Chevy Lumina – hell, it’s even called the Thunder! Likewise, racing veterans should be able to easily identify everything from an off-brand Bugatti to a lookalike Lotus Espirit or a pretend Pennzoil R34 GT-R. There’s a decent amount of customisation options of offer for each, too – from blowers to bobbleheads – though the simple visual style means that not all of these custom bits and bobs necessarily make a big impact on screen.

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Vehicles drive with subtle differences due to nuances with their speed, acceleration, and drifting stats, although I’ve found I can only feel notable dissimilarities when hopping between cars with stat bars that significantly differ from each other. I can’t really detect the smaller variations. Cars with low drifting stats are my least favourite to drive; I’ve found winning Expert races in them much more difficult than in cars with ostensibly worse top speed and/or acceleration but better drift capabilities. For instance, I won all the Expert cups in the Thunder – despite its apparent top-speed handicap – because of its ability to drift around corners like butter sluicing around the curves of a hot frying pan. The cars that are more cumbersome to drift definitely aren’t as fun to use.

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Hotshot Review! Part Deux

Those Expert cups came pretty quickly though; there are four GPs, each featuring four races, and I collected them over a single session. Hotshot Racing attempts to incentivise attacking them over and over again by tying upgrades to achieving specific feats across the entire assortment of vehicles, but the tracks probably lack the zest to make tackling them a dozen times each feel hugely tempting.

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That said, they are quite fabulous to look at and packed with eye-catching, living elements, like spinning carnival rides to animated water displays, and raging dinosaurs to somersaulting sea creatures. But that’s all on the periphery; the track ribbons themselves don’t really linger in the imagination. The circuits are wide and well-suited to this aggressive brand of racing, but they’re also not exactly brimming with memorable strings of weaving esses or cool switchbacks. You don’t want every track to be a punishing barrage of mad bends one after another, but Hotshot Racing probably features too many simple courses versus more complex ones.

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The regular racing is buoyed by the presence of a couple of additional modes – the pursuit-themed ‘Cops N Robbers’ and a Speed-inspired mode called ‘Drive or Explode’ (drop below a certain speed and you’ll blow; you know the drill). Cops N Robbers is a bit more like an infected-style mode (taken down robbers are just converted into cops) and isn’t quite as fun as it sounds playing solo. The secret to success as a robber just seems to be to hang back and let the AI hassle the frontrunners, and the car combat as a cop is fine but a little one-note.

The breakneck Drive or Explode is the better of the two – a hectic battle against both the clock and an ever-increasing minimum speed limit. Collecting checkpoints to fend off the bomb timer, avoiding damage, and keeping your car travelling as fast as possible is a frantic juggling act and some of the better fun I had in Hotshot Racing.

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The best way to have fun, however, is the four-player splitscreen. It doesn’t quite reach the highs of a full-on, four-way combat racer like Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing, but the high-speed hijinks of Hotshot Racing makes for some quality same-couch competition.

There’s a fine line when playing a deliberately awkward game. On one hand, unreliable physics and purposefully clunky controls can yield hilarious results, as the struggle to perform basic actions is delightfully silly. Much like other absurdist “simulation” games such as Goat Simulator and the original Surgeon Simulator, Surgeon Simulator 2’s best moments come from facing a ridiculous scenario while being woefully ill-equipped to deal with it. However, the laughs eventually die down, replaced by exasperated sighs as surgeries become more complex and picking up a scalpel doesn’t get any less cumbersome.

Played from a first-person perspective, Surgeon Simulator 2 is far closer to a wobbly puzzle game than a proper simulation–albeit one with tongue firmly planted in cheek. In addition to performing surgery, you’ll be navigating hospital labyrinths, solving conditional logic puzzles to access medical supplies, and generally trying to prevent the surgical dummy affectionately known as Bob from dying. Surgeon Simulator 2 features a story mode, playable solo or cooperatively with up to four players, where you’re learning on the job using allegedly state-of-the-art simulation technology instead of bothering with stuffy medical school. This takes place over a series of levels, beginning with a tutorial, after which you’ll be attempting your first heart transplant–a completely natural progression for medical practitioners, surely.

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