Month: February 2021

The first trailer for Dead Pigs, the debut movie from Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan, has been released. Yan’s first film made before her DC movie finally arrives this week.

The film is an ensemble comedy drama set in Shanghai, China. The movie uses a real-life incident, where thousands of dead pigs were dumped into Huangpu river, as a focus point around which Yan tells a variety of stories about life in contemporary China. The trailer is very fast moving doesn’t really provide details about what these stories are–we know there’s some dancing and a car crash–but the movie received rave reviews when it premiered at Sundance in 2019 and film fans will be keen to see the film that helped Yan get hired for Birds of Prey. Check the trailer out below:

Dead Pigs premieres on the streaming platform Mubi on Friday, February 12. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Yan admitted that it was strange to be finally talking about her debut movie four years after she shot it. “It feels a little bit like going back to my roots and going home,” she said. “I am deeply proud of the film. It feels good to finally get it out there, and hopefully, it doesn’t feet dated at all. I don’t think it does. If anything, the last crazy four years that we’ve had since I actually made the movie [have made] me see the whole movie in a different light, too.”

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Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World) and Seth Gabel (Salem) will appear in the upcoming video game Maquette, it has been announced. The pair will lend their voices to the couple, Kenzie and Michael, who provide players with details and instructions but are never seen.

Maquette is a first-person puzzle game developed by Graceful Decay and published by Annapurna Interactive, the gaming division of the film studio.

“This is about a relationship that ultimately doesn’t work out,” Howard told The Hollywood Reporter. “But it’s not a tragedy in any way, shape or form.” I think there’s something really nuanced about that that I really appreciated.”

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After Elon Musk tweeted about his love for Halo, Xbox marketing boss Aaron Greenberg followed up to suggest a potential collaboration between Tesla and Halo.

Greenberg said on Twitter, “Sure feels like a Tesla x Halo collab needs to happen at some point!?” he included hashtags for Tesla’s Cybertruck and Halo’s iconic Warthog vehicle. In another tweet, Greenberg stressed that this is only an idea at this stage.

“If you like the idea, speak up and maybe something in the future could happen–who knows!?” he said.

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The developers of Fortnite love to celebrate the passing of the seasons, and Valentine’s Day is no exception. The game’s Hearts Wild event is now live, and it has a variety of fun Valentine’s Day-themed activities for players to sink their teeth into, including the return of papercraft, some Creator Challenges, and even a new tournament.

If you’re trying to get your hands on the Lovely Outfit when it releases in the Item Shop, you have a chance to get it ahead of time. Players can grab a Duos partner and fight in the Hearts Wild Cup on February 9, with the best players in each region receiving the Lovely Outfit and Heartblast Back Bling. You have to have two-factor authentication enabled to participate though, so make sure you take care of that beforehand.

The event also brings new Creator Challenges to the game, with exclusive prizes for the teams that earn the most points. More details on that will be coming at a later date. Hearts Wild features the return of Fortnite’s papercraft, which allows players to download paper materials to build cosplay of their favorite characters. Additionally, the Welcome Hub has been festooned with flowers for the event, so check that out.

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Mainland Europe saw a massive jump in not only video game sales in 2020, but also digital downloads of various titles. According to sales tracker GSD, which tracks both physical and digital sales of video games, 123.7 million sales were logged in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Benelux, France, Iberia, Nordics, and Poland alone, a 19% jump when compared to 2019’s numbers according to the report via GamesIndustry.Biz.

Of those games sold by tracked publishers, 58.7 million of them were downloaded and accounted for a 47% rise in sales when compared to 2019. Even with lockdown restrictions in place due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the 65 million boxed games sold resulted in a 0.8% increase across those markets.

It’s worth noting though that those particular sales numbers don’t include Nintendo, Bethesda, and CD Projekt Red games, as those publishers do not share digital game sale numbers with the GSD.

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We may get some news regarding Final Fantasy 7 Remake this weekend, according to the game’s co-director. Motomu Toriyama said that an upcoming orchestral concert in Japan will include a “special program” with some of its own reveals.

Toriyama shared the news on the Square Enix Music Twitter account. The FF7R Orchestra Concert will take place on February 13 at 5 PM in Japan, or 3 AM ET / 12 AM PT.

“In addition to the performance we have a special program planned as well,” he said, according to a fan translation. “There will be a few things about FF7R that will be revealed only during this concert. I will also take part in this program, so please tune in!”

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Terraria developer Andrew Spinks announced the cancellation of the 2D sandbox game’s Stadia port on his personal Twitter. The reason can be attributed to Spinks’ frustration with being mysteriously locked out from his Google account, and Google’s lack of responsiveness over the issue.

In a Twitter thread, Spinks described his three week long lockout from services associated with his account, such as Google Play, YouTube, and Gmail. He firmly maintained that he “absolutely hasn’t done anything to violate [the] terms of service,” and considered the “bridge burned” with Google.

“My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward,” he concluded. “I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little. Doing business with you is a liability.”

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Epic Games is doubling down on its strategy of signing developers to deals to bring their games to the Epic Games Store as either full or timed exclusives.

A spokesperson told PC Gamer that Epic has more exclusives on the way in 2021/2022 than it’s ever had in total. “We have more exclusives coming in the next two years than we have published to date,” a spokesperson said.

PC Gamer estimates that there have been more than 100 titles that have released on the Epic Games Store as exclusives in some form or another since the platform launched in 2018.

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The notoriously brutal survival game Rust has gotten a little bit softer, with the addition of a new game mode that lets you take it easy. Well, easier. The new mode has a number of changes aimed at more casual players, either to entice more players to join or just let the existing player base relax once in a while.

As detailed in the announcement, the changes make death a little less punishing, and help make you less of a target. When you’re killed, you can reclaim half of your inventory either where you died or at a Reclaim terminal. (Items left there will expire after two hours). You can only view the inventory contents of wounded players. You can also spawn at the Bandit Town or any Outpost safezones, and the maximum team size in Softcore mode is four players.

There will be 10 servers to launch with the update and run the Softcore mode, but developer Facepunch assures players that the majority of servers will continue running the standard vanilla Rust experience.

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