Month: March 2021

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is set to release exclusively for PlayStation 5 on June 11. It’s a third-person shooter developed by Insomniac Games, and it’s meant to showcase many of the PS5’s flagship features. It’s available now for preorder (see it at Amazon, or Amazon UK).

You can pick up the standard edition, of course, or go for the digital deluxe edition if you want some downloadable extras thrown in. Below, we have full details on what comes in each edition, as well as what preorder bonuses you can expect. Let’s get to it.

Preorder Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

• Get it at Amazon – $69.88
• Get it at Best Buy – $69.99
• Get it at GameStop – $69.99
• Get it at Walmart – $69.88
• Get it at PlayStation Store (digital) – $69.99
• Get it at Amazon UK – £69.99

The standard edition of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart comes with the game and the preorder bonus described below.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Digital Deluxe Edition

• Get it at PS Store – $79.99

Those who choose to forego a disc can pick up the digital deluxe edition. It comes with the game itself, along with the following digital extras:

• 5 armor sets
• Photo mode sticker pack
• 20 Raritanium (in-game upgrade materials)
• Digital soundtrack
• Digital art book

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart Preorder Bonus

Preorder the digital standard edition or the physical launch edition, and you’ll receive early unlocks for the Carbonox Armor from 2003’s Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and the Pixelizer weapon, which appeared in the 2016 Ratchet & Clank. US and Canadian customers who preorder will also get a $5 discount off official merchandise on the PlayStation Gear store.

What is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart?

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Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the latest in a long line of PlayStation-exclusive third-person shooters that goes back to PS2. This time around, Dr. Nefarious whips up a device that lets him access other dimensions. He uses it to separate the lovable Lombax Ratchet from his robotic friend Clank. Your job is to reunite the friends, while hopping between alternate realities and using a wide array of powerful (and often comedic) weapons. There’s also a new female Lombax in the equation, but we haven’t gotten many details about her yet.

The game also makes use of PS5-specific features, including super-fast loading times, 4K HDR graphics, ray tracing, haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, and 3D sound.

Other Preorder Guides

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Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

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Borderlands 3‘s Director’s Cut DLC has been delayed to April due to complications from the recent severe weather and power outages in Texas. Gearbox issued a statement saying that the conditions “unavoidably disrupted” its work, forcing it to push back the add-on by a few weeks. The new release date is April 8.

The Director’s Cut had been set for March 18, a date that was set in early February. But a severe winter storm hit Texas and surrounding regions on February 13, causing widespread blackouts and other infrastructure problems. Many Texans had no heat and frozen pipes for several days, and the death toll reached 70 in the United States.

Thankfully, Gearbox says, its employees are all safe. But the studio, based near Dallas, TX, was impacted by the storm regardless. It says it has now shifted the Director’s Cut date to “deliver the best possible experience.”

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With The Mandalorian: Season 2 name-dropping everyone’s favorite blue-skinned Imperial warlord, it seems only a matter of time before Grand Admiral Thrawn makes his live-action Star Wars debut. And while we don’t yet know which actor will take on that role, we can rule out one popular fan choice. Benedict Cumberbatch has torpedoed any possibility of playing Thrawn.

In an interview with Collider promoting his new film The Courier, Cumberbatch admitted he has no idea who Thrawn is and hasn’t taken part in any discussions about taking on the role in The Mandalorian: Season 3 or Star Wars: Ahsoka. More to the point, Cumberbatch has no interest in committing to a part that would require hours of painstaking makeup each day.

“That’s a straight no from me, right now,” Cumberbatch told Collider. “There’s no way I want to be turned blue. I turned the air blue, very recently. No no, seriously, I have precious time with my children and I think sitting in a makeup chair and being painted blue, and the amount of time it would take to do that and then take it off at the end of the day might just… it’s not the right time in my life for that.”

Grand Admiral Thrawn originally debuted in the 1991 novel Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. While the character initially appeared mainly in Bantam’s Star Wars novels and Dark Horse’s Star Wars comics, he later made the jump to Disney’s official Star Wars canon when he appeared in the latter two seasons of the animated series Star Wars Rebels. Thrawn was voiced in that series by Lars Mikkelsen, who coincidentally starred opposite Cumberbatch in the Series 3 finale of Sherlock. It’s not unreasonable to assume Disney might again turn to Mikkelsen to play Thrawn in live-action, especially with actress Katee Sackhoff’s Bo-Katan Kryze already setting a precedent in that regard.

IGN spoke to Zahn’s creator Timothy Zahn in 2020, who revealed he doesn’t see the current incarnation of Thrawn as being a fundamentally different character from the Expanded Universe version. Zahn is currently expanding on Thrawn’s back-story through a new trilogy of novels called The Thrawn Ascendancy.

The Courier is a spy drama based on historical events where Cumberbatch plays Greville Wynne, a British businessman who helps his government gather intel on the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Check out an exclusive clip from the movie below:

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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has released the first official trailer for The Unholy, an upcoming PG-13 horror film written and directed by Evan Spiliotopoulos in his directorial debut, scheduled to be released in theaters on April 2.

According to an official synopsis, The Unholy “follows Alice, a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate. When terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something much more sinister.”

Alice is played by Cricket Brown (Dukeland), and the journalist trying to claw his way to a career comeback is played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Walking Dead). Check out the trailer below.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Call of Duty content creator Brad “Drif0r” Overbey uploaded a brand-new video to his YouTube channel talking about how he “almost died” when people swatted his home.

About halfway through a video titled “Low Testosterone almost killed me,” Drift0r mentioned how 2019 and 2020’s swattings contributed to his ongoing battle with low testosterone. He said he “almost died four or five times” as armed people approached his Texas home.

“I got swatted a couple of times last year,” Drift0r starts at about the 12-minute mark. “There was an ongoing issue with harrassment. Another creator streamed one of his fans coming to my house with a ski mask and a gun in what I personally assumed was going to be an armed home invasion. Police took care of that in my front lawn, thankfully. And just a whole ton of crazy, bizarre stuff. I almost died four of five times. There were other people that were armed.”

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The still untitled The Boys spin-off has added Lizze Broadway (Bones, NCIS) and Jaz Sinclair (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Vampire Diaries) to the cast, according to Variety. The spin-off was fast-tracked suddenly last year on the strength of the Prime Video series, which isn’t a total shock given the original series was an adaptation of an already successful comic book series.

Broadway and Sinclair are the first announced cast members for the spin-off, which will take place at a college for young superheroes, run by the ominous Vought International–the evil corporation that controls The Seven. The spin-off has previously been described as “an irreverent, R-rated series that explores the lives of hormonal, competitive supes as they put their physical, sexual, and moral boundaries to the test, competing for the best contracts in the best cities. Part college show, part Hunger Games–with all the heart, satire, and raunch of The Boys.”

All that’s known about the new cast members is Sinclair will play Marie, and Broadway will play Emma–both young superheroes. The spin-off has not yet officially been ordered to go to series, but cast members being announced is a good sign that it’s a likely bet.

Continue Reading at GameSpot