Author: trafficblast

The original Captain of the USS Enterprise thinks there are still stories to tell about his version of James. T. Kirk.

We checked out the newest high end statues from Pop Culture Shock Collectibles, and they’re really impressive.

By a wide margin, South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the funniest roleplaying game since South Park: The Stick of Truth came out three years ago. This one’s gags are focused more on parodying the superhero movie franchise craze than RPG mechanics, which makes it feel a little less novel, but this time its turn-based tactical combat is also deep enough to stand on its own.

Like The Stick of Truth, The Fractured But Whole looks and sounds so much like the show that at a glance it could easily be mistaken for a 20-hour episode when you’re not in combat. The emulation of the crude animation style is spot-on, the voice acting is all completely authentic, and the writing quality is up to the high expectations. Exploring its expanded map of South Park and its densely-packed references to the show is a treat for fans, even though it’s quite similar to what we saw in The Stick of Truth. And sure, there’s some significant irony in the Memberberries appearing in a game so heavily based on callbacks to South Park’s 20-year history, especially now being a reference to a year-old joke themselves, but I’m going to let that slide.

Continue reading…

 

Want IGN UK Deals in your social feeds? Like us on Facebook and follow me on Twitter for the most up-to-date bargains.

Check out my Xbox One X Preorder Guide here and my Google Pixel 2 Preorder Guide here.

Oculus Rift Touch Controllers Bundle Plus 6 Free Games for Under £400

Continue reading…

Before founding Gone Home developer Fullbright, Steve Gaynor worked at 2K Marin on BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den, and speaking with IGN, Gaynor revealed how System Shock 2 inspired the creation of what is widely regarded as BioShock 2’s best DLC.

On the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered, Gaynor said the idea for Minerva’s Den began to form during his interview at 2K Marin, when he was asked to pitch a level that could be slotted into the BioShock story. “I had pitched the computer core of Rapture as a thing with a guy who was splicing to become smarter and see all of the possibilities with math and stuff,” he said.

Continue reading…

Rare’s long-anticipated Sea of Thieves is the latest game to receive an extravagant art book. Comic publisher Dark Horse has announced The Art of Sea of Thieves, a beautiful companion tome to the upcoming open-world pirate game.

The Art of Sea of Thieves will give fans “an unprecedented look at the ships, characters, and loot” of the swashbuckling title. The book features “hundreds” of pieces of art, as well as developer commentary that sheds more light on the development of the game and its world. You can take a look at the book’s cover below.

Dark Horse hasn’t announced a release date for The Art of Sea of Thieves, but the book is slated to arrive in early 2018. It is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Penguin Random House, and other book retailers.

Sea of Thieves likewise doesn’t yet have a release date. The game was originally slated to launch for Xbox One and PC at some point this year, but at E3 2017 Microsoft announced the title would be pushed back into 2018. Rare recently announced the title will allow cross-play between Xbox and PC players. The developer also added 540p and 15 FPS lock options to the PC version.

This isn’t the only gaming art book Dark Horse is publishing soon. Later this month, the publisher will release an eight-pound tome titled The Art of Overwatch, which features an extensive collection of artwork for Blizzard’s popular shooter. Dark Horse will also publish an enormous Legend of Zelda encyclopedia next April.

It would have been all too easy to completely and totally screw up a Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel, delivering something so terrible that it actually made the good films in the series worse by association. That’s not what Leatherface is. Instead, it’s simply a competent movie with no clear identity or goals, that seems to exist mainly to deliver one over-enthusiastically telegraphed twist.

Being an origin story for one of the most iconic horror movie antagonists in cinematic history placed Leatherface in a precarious position from the get-go. We’ve seen enough of these to know they rarely add much to the mythos, and they often detract from it by carving away bloody chunks of the mystery. Leatherface is a murderous hillbilly with a chainsaw who wears people’s faces. What more really needed to be said about this guy?

In the new Texas Chainsaw continuity into which this movie fits, Leatherface was a relatively innocent kid who’s taken from his abusive family–including his savagely bloodthirsty mother Verna Sawyer, played with gumption by Lili Taylor–at a young age and placed in an institution. As a teenager, he escapes with a handful of other inmates and a hostage nurse, and most of Leatherface concerns his time spent on the lam. Stephen Dorff plays a crooked Texas Ranger with good reasons for hating the Sawyer clan, and Finn Jones–far less annoying here than in Iron Fist–is his naive deputy.

If you’re not paying attention, you might not realize it, but Leatherface wants you to wonder which of the escapees is actually the titular villain. Early scenes put an emphasis on the fact that the institution changes the children’s names when they’re committed, and the movie doesn’t actually confirm who the future Leatherface is until relatively late in its runtime. But the cast is insular enough that it’s easy to spot the twist coming long before it happens.

Besides building toward that limp reveal, Leatherface doesn’t really know what to do with itself. It’s not as gory as it might have been, though a couple of scenes, especially one that flirts with necrophilia, exist only for their shock value and add nothing else to the movie. There are a few gruesome deaths, but nothing uniquely grisly enough to remember once the credits start rolling. It’s shot conventionally, and the score, like the rest of the movie, is unremarkable.

The best thing there is to say about Leatherface is that it makes an effort to get you to care about certain characters who might not have been so sympathetic. It definitely stumbles into that unfortunate horror movie pitfall of, essentially, demonizing mental illness, but it tries to show multiple sides of various characters, and it’s generally well-cast and effectively acted. Vanessa Grasse as the captive nurse, Lizzy, is an easy protagonist to root for, although you’ll also want to scream at her to make better decisions–a slasher genre staple, to be fair.

Overall, Leatherface never really revs up and gets going as anything more than a schlocky, competent callback to better films. Then again, it could have been much worse. Either way, we’ll always have the original.

The Good	The Bad
Some sympathetic characters	Stylistically unremarkable
Well cast and acted	Twist too telegraphed and limply delivered
	Relies on tired slasher tropes
	Unnecessary origin story

Ahead of its imminent release on the Community Test Environment, DICE has provided a look at some new Battlefield 1 content. This comes from the game’s next expansion, Turning Tides, and you can check it out in the video above.

One of the major components of what we got to see are two new maps: Cape Helles and Achi Baba. However, these maps are still in development; DICE has taken the unusual path of showing off white-box versions that don’t yet have their final textures in place. That means you’re seeing these maps in an early, unfinished state; you can expect the final releases to look nicer.

In the video, you’ll see some standard Conquest action as well as a new mode that returns from earlier in the series. In Conquest Assault, one team starts the round holding every point on the map; the enemy team attempts to make its way through to the last point before exhausting its supply of 250 tickets. Because the defending team doesn’t have a headquarters, players on that side are only able to respawn on their teammates if they lose all of their capture points. If all members of the team die, the attacking team wins.

Turning Tides also of course includes new weapons, a selection of which you can see in the video. The Assault kit gets the C96 Trench and M12P16, Medic gets the Farquhar-Hill (with range and stability variants), Support gets the Brownin GM1917 (also with a telescopic variant), and Recon gets the Arisaka and Carcano. There’s also the new Breech gun Flak option for Assault players that is ideal for taking down airplanes, though it works just fine on enemy infantry, too.

Turning Tides is slated for release sometime this December. Prior to that, those willing to wade into the CTE can check out a select portion of its content beginning on Tuesday, October 17. Turning Tides is the third major DLC pack for Battlefield 1 to date, with the Apocalypse DLC still to come in “early” 2018. In the meantime, you can put the latest Battlefield 1 update through its paces, which was released last week, and the Turning Tides concept art below.

Bungie will again conduct server maintenance for Destiny 2–and Destiny 1–today. Luckily, this won’t result in any direct impact on players, at least according to Bungie’s current plan.

“Backend maintenance” on both games is scheduled to begin at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET / 5 PM BST today, October 16 (3 AM AEDT on October 17). A duration for this was not shared, but Bungie said on Twitter, “There is currently no expected user impact during this maintenance.”

We also saw maintenance for Destiny 2 last Monday that did not coincide with any downtime, as previous maintenance periods did. Following that, Bungie released a small update intended to resolve issues with black screens when loading into The Tower. It’s unclear if we’ll also receive a new update today, but the fact that this affects both Destiny and Destiny 2 suggests we will not. This may also be related to the upcoming computer version; Destiny 2 releases for PC on October 24.

Today marks the last chance for the latest Nightfall, as well as the final day for the first-ever Iron Banner event. Later this week, Bungie will launch the Prestige Leviathan Raid. This was scheduled to launch last week, only for it to be delayed due to an exploit that allows its difficulty to be circumvented. A fix has not yet been implemented, but rather than delay the Prestige Raid further, Bungie will release it on Wednesday, October 18, and monitor it for Fireteams who make use of the exploit. This is important for teams that will rush to be the world’s first team to complete the Raid.