Month: January 2021

Nintendo is holding a new Spirit Board event in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate this week. The event kicks off tomorrow, January 7, and it introduces a handful of new Spirits based on the recent Zelda spin-off, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.

Three new Age of Calamity Spirits are making their debut as part of the event: Age of Calamity Impa, Master Kohga, and the Diminutive Guardian. All three will be appearing randomly throughout the event, and defeating them will net you extra gold as well as unlocking them for your own use.

The Age of Calamity Spirit event begins at 10 PM PT on January 7 and runs until the same time on January 12.

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Director Robert Rodriguez has been keeping busy recently, with his action-packed Mandalorian episode, co-showrunner duties on the upcoming Boba Fett spin-off series, and his hit Netflix kids movie We Can be Heroes. The filmmaker has also found time to oversee a 4K UHD version of his iconic ’90s collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn

The vampire action movie was released in 1996, with Rodriguez directing Tarantino’s script. The movie co-starred Tarantino alongside George Clooney, Salma Hayek, Harvey Keitel, and Juliette Lewis. In a new interview with Forbes, Rodriguez revealed the 4K version will be released for the movie’s 25th anniversary this year.

“I actually just finished a color correction for a 4K version,” he said. “It looks gorgeous. It was cool to see. I can’t wait for that to come out to celebrate the anniversary.”

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If you have been playing Monster Hunter World: Iceborne lately and have been running into issues with a bugged delivery quest, we have good news for you! Iceborne version 15.11’s patch update is now live and will squash those bugs.

In the previous version of Iceborne, 15.10, delivery quests would disappear from the list at the Resource Center when playing on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in offline mode. This bug made it impossible to complete these quests, which was a pretty significant drag on the Monster Hunter experience. If you play in online mode, those quests should reappear anyway, but with the 15.11 update, even players who want to remain offline will no longer see delivery quests up and vanish on them.

The bug was originally discovered by Twitter user JalBagel, a Monster Hunter speedrunner, during a charity stream back in early December. He noticed that while playing with an offline mod on Steam, the delivery quests were disappearing. This was noticeably strange since JalBagel knew that prior to the game’s Movie Event Quest update, delivery quests were not going missing.

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The Sundance Film Festival has canceled all of its 2021 drive-in screenings in Southern California as the region continues to see a record-breaking surge in COVID-19 cases. In December, the festival reacted to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic by announcing the typically Salt Lake City-based event would instead go virtual with “satellite screens” at drive-ins and independent theaters across the country.

“The safety and well-being of our audiences, community, and staff is the most important thing to Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival,” the festival said in a statement provided to Variety. “In consideration of the overall public health situation in the Los Angeles area and the trajectory of the spread of the virus there, the health guidelines, and crisis the hospital systems are facing we will be pivoting our planned drive-in screenings to our online platform.”

In a separate letter distributed to filmmakers obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, festival programmers point to a “significant spike in COVID-19 cases” for the cancelation, adding, “It is deeply unfortunate that Southern California, and Los Angeles County in particular, is now one of the worst hit parts of the country.”

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Activision has followed through on its promise to nerf the DMR, which was causing some issues and headaches in the battle royale game Call of Duty: Warzone.

The newest patch is now live, and it reduces the headshot damage of the DMR 14 while also increasing recoil to deliver an overall nerf to the weapon. The Type 63 has also been nerfed with the same adjustments through the patch notes.

The Mac-10, meanwhile, sees its headshot multiplier decreased, while players using dual pistols will discover more hip fire spread and a decreased damage range. All of these nerfs and adjustments are specific to Warzone, not Black Ops Cold War.

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If you’re old enough to remember the early 2000s, you probably have fond memories of playing Flash games to while away the hours at your job or at school. As many longtime Flash fans know well by this point, Adobe officially halted support for the longtime multimedia platform back on December 31, citing security flaws and the existence of better tech. However, one prolific Flash developer took an unusual step to preserve their work: porting it to the original Game Boy.

That game is Anthony Lavelle’s IndestructoTank, and you might have hazy memories of it from your youth, as I do. It’s a grounded shoot ’em up similar to Defender or Moon Patrol, only your tank is completely invincible, and your goal is to bounce onto your enemies’ heads continuously so you don’t run out of fuel. The Game Boy port obviously limits the game’s color palette, and the on-screen action is a little bit tighter, but it plays just as I remember.

Though the ROM will work on a real Game Boy, for the rest of us, Lavelle has provided an emulator that works in your web browser on his Itch.io page. As a whole, Lavelle exhibits a sense of humor about the demise of Flash in a recent AMA, but it’s clear that he still has a lot of love for the platform. Arguably best-known for the puzzle game Shift, he says that Flash is the reason that he got into making games, and there will never be a tool quite like it.

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Sacha Baron Cohen has some not-so very nice news for Borat fans: He’s not planning on bringing the character back for another sequel. 

In an interview with Variety, Baron Cohen, who co-wrote and produced Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a follow-up to his 2006 box office smash, said that it’s very unlikely that he will revive the Borat character again, as he had a very specific purpose for returning to the role of the fictional Kazakhstani journalist last year, which he doesn’t think he will be able to find again for a third movie.

“I brought Borat out because of Trump,” Baron Cohen told the outlet, speaking about his decision to reprise the character after so many years. “There was a purpose to this movie, and I don’t really see the purpose to doing it again. So yeah, he’s locked away in the cupboard.”

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Baron Cohen revealed that he hadn’t planned to make a sequel to the first movie as he had “vowed never to make another undercover movie again” in the wake of his 2009 mockumentary Brüno because of how much it had impacted his real life, though he ultimately reversed that decision and decided to bring the character back for another outing last year.

“After Bruno, I was fairly traumatized. For about six months afterwards whenever I heard a police siren, I would start to get tense, because I’d been chased by the police so much. I vowed never to make another undercover movie again,” Baron Cohen revealed, before delving into his reasons for making the Borat sequel.

“I felt democracy was in peril, I felt people’s lives were in peril and I felt compelled to finish the movie,” he explained, discussing the relevancy of the movie. “The movie was originally about the danger of Trump and Trumpism. What coronavirus demonstrated was that there’s a lethal effect to his spreading of lies and conspiracy theories.”

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With many movie theaters remaining closed or operating a severely limited moviegoer capacity, Baron Cohen felt that the best option was to release the film digitally for as many people as possible to watch it before the US Presidential election in November, so he struck a distribution deal with Amazon Studios to allow the tech giant to release the movie exclusively on Amazon Prime Video in October.

In our review of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, we commended the sequel for managing to be “funny and relevant” all these years later. In particular, we praised Maria Bakalova’s performance, saying she was “every bit Sacha Baron Cohen’s on-screen equal” in the movie’s “avalanche of awkward, anxiety-cranking moments that’ll have you laughing while watching through your fingers like you would a horror movie.”

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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

If the ongoing supply issues and resurgence in cryptocurrency mining isn’t enough to make grabbing a new graphics card challenging, prices for them might soon be increasing in the US to make stock even harder to come by.

The price increase might soon affect numerous GPU manufacturers, as waivers that kept trade tariffs at bay have now expired. President Trump instigated a trade war with China in 2018, which would’ve increased GPU prices had companies not applied for waivers to prevent it. Those waivers expired, however, this month, meaning tariffs between 7.5% to 25% can now be applied to all PC hardware.

ASUS is the only company that has acknowledged this right now, writing to customers to explain why they might encounter higher than expected prices on products.

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Samsung has been showing off its massive wall-sized Micro LED TVs at CES since 2018, but now the company is finally ready to sell these massive screens to regular consumers.

Available in 88, 99, and 110 inch sizes, Samsung’s Micro LED TVs feature a 99.99% screen to body ratio – so you really are just getting a sliver of bezel with all that screen space. As the name Micro LED might suggest, these TVs utilize much smaller LEDs. They’re also self-illuminating, so they can produce perfect blacks and contrast like an OLED 4K TV can.

Of course, having a really big screen at home is great for simulating the movie theater experience, but you can also split any of these Micro LED TVs into four smaller displays. In fact, the 110 inch screen can become four neatly separated 55 inch displays – perfect for split-screen Mario Kart.

Samsung has yet to give a firm date of when these Micro LED TVs will release or pricing information, but you should definitely expect an eye-popping sticker price on these massive displays.

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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam

Samsung is introducing a new generation of TVs called Neo QLED. The company was the first to introduce QLED 4K TVs imbued with quantum dot technology and now is following that up with something new.

Neo QLED TVs feature an all-new backlighting technology that uses smaller LEDs while also eliminating the need for a layer of lenses to capture and transmit backlight illumination. Now each compact LED chip emits its own light similar to how OLED screens work.

The smaller LED also allows more lights to be packed into the same space, resulting in more backlighting zones and even greater brightness. At the same time, the smaller LEDs offer more finely controllable brightness and reduced bloom, resulting in higher contrast and deeper blacks.

Aside from the impressive new backlighting system, Samsung has fitted its Neo QLED TVs with a new AI Quantum processor. This new chip can more quickly process 8K image upscaling and introduce object-tracking sound that follows the action happening on the screen.

Samsung’s new Neo QLED TVs also introduces two new gaming TV-focused features. First up, Ultrawide Gameview is all about giving users the option of turning their TV into an ultrawide 21:9, or even super ultrawide 32.9, display. Secondly, there’s a new Game Bar UI that allows players to quickly change their aspect ratio, check input lag, and connect a gaming headset.

The first TVs to get the Neo QLED treatment include Samsung’s flagship Q90A line. Additionally, Samsung has announced a new Neo QLED 8K TV as well. We’re sure to get more details and specs on these TVs in the coming days, but don’t expect to see pricing until a few months later.

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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com

Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam