The weekend box office numbers are in, and Tyler Perry’s new Halloween movie, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, pulled in $21.7 million to land at No. 1 in the US and Canada, according to Entertainment Weekly. That’s about 25 percent below last year’s original. The film did not get the best critical reviews but it had an A-minus CinemaScore, meaning audience members generally liked it. This suggests the film could have a strong follow-on due to positive word-of-mouth.
Rounding out the top five movies at the US/Canada box office this weekend were the Gerald Butler disaster movie Geostorm ($13.3 million), Happy Death Day ($9.4 million), Blade Runner 2049 ($7.2 million), and Only The Brave ($6 million).
Notably, Geostorm reportedly had a $120 million budget, so it’s not off to the hottest start (though international receipts will boost the number higher). Additionally, the Michael Fassbender thriller The Snowman made only $3.4 million for its opening.
You can find the full Top 10 list for the October 20-22 weekend below, as rounded up and compiled by Entertainment Weekly.
Console players have had over a month to explore Destiny 2’s planets and raids, but it’s finally time for for those on PC to jump in. By this point you probably know everything you want to know about the game, but that doesn’t change the mountain of new guns, gear, and other loot waiting for you in orbit.
From the team behind Until Dawn comes another choice-driven adventure, but instead of getting teens through a haunted mountain lodge, you’re solving murders. Using Sony’s PlayLink app, a group of players can vote on those choices together–but someone is also named the mole, who is tasked with sabotaging the investigation.
Much like a mummy rising from its sarcophagus, Origins is looking to breath new life into the Assassin’s Creed series with a totally new hitbox-based combat system. The ancient Egyptian setting also means lots of tall sphinxes and pyramids to parkour your way around.
Machine Games’ followup isn’t pulling any punches. The Nazis have won WWII and taken over the United States, which means it’s time for BJ Blazkowicz to lead a new revolution. Expanded dual-wielding options and a melee axe mean it’s gonna be a bloody fight. Look for a Nintendo Switch version next year too.
Mario’s latest adventure is all about free-form exploration. That means you can collect Moons, coins, and special costumes in any order you see fit, while making your way through a whole atlas of massive kingdoms. Also, shirtless Mario. Totally a thing.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection had a very rocky launch in November 2014. An ambitious game that packages together four Halo games and their multiplayer modes, the game struggled mightily out of the gate, with matchmaking times proving extremely lengthy and in some cases not working at all. Microsoft was quick to address the issues and the experience has improved dramatically. Still, Microsoft sees the issues as a “black eye” for the franchise. Last week, developer 343 announced yet another way it’s making it up to fans and sticking with the game. The Master Chief Collection will receive significant updates and improvements over the next year or longer, including an Xbox One X update and a wider update that will “help bring it forward and modernize many of the game’s systems to take advantage of Xbox platform advancements since its original launch.” It’s nice to see Microsoft’s commitment to the game, but why did things go so badly at the start? Halo franchise director Frank O’Connor recently addressed that in a lengthy and thorough blog post on Halo Waypoint (via Polygon).
Starting off by saying he’s no engineer and is making no excuses for what happened, O’Connor said, “in terms of chicken/egg scenarios, fixing the existing ‘vanilla’ Xbox One MCC was the Chicken that laid the Xbox One X enhanced version egg.” O’Connor suggested that it wasn’t always Microsoft’s plan to revisit The Master Chief Collection, but there have been a “series of changes to the Xbox architecture,” including the OS and back-end networking systems, that have “cracked open an opportunity we’ve wanted to seize for many, many months now.”
O’Connor said the launch of The Master Chief Collection was “one of my lowest ebbs, professionally.” He added: “Every angry mail I received, I took to heart. I felt like I had personally let our fans down. I have not spent a single day since the night the game fell down in matchmaking where I didn’t think about it.”
O’Connor added that one piece of resounding feedback was, “How could you not know that matchmaking was going to break?” The director explained that Microsoft tested the game’s matchmaking systems “incorrectly and with some (as we discovered later) faulty assumptions.” He added that the testing processes for the game differed from the norm because the games in the package were already tested for balance. Additionally, O’Connor acknowledged that 343 “we made mistakes in some of the scenarios we asked for.”
“We had, with the best intentions, created a massive and ambitious project that almost read like a Halo fan’s wishlist. As a player, I was incredibly excited. And as an employee, I was proud of the work and effort the team had poured into making this thing so big,” O’Connor said.
He added that The Master Chief Collection began as an idea to make Halo 2 HD, and leave it at that, but the idea came later to expand the scope to include the entire Master Chief saga in one package. “And so the project ballooned in scope and scale and ambition. We threw a ton of resources behind it internally and worked with some trusted partners,” O’Connor said.
But at launch, the game’s matchmaking systems struggled significantly. O’Connor acknowledged that its own multiplayer testing sessions “never got to the kind of scale” that could reflect a live environment.
“So we genuinely didn’t know until the day it released, how bad the matchmaking in particular was going to get,” he said. “I’m not going to ignore the other bugs, they were real, and important, but the way the UI and matchmaking protocols interacted with each other exacerbated many of the smaller items and amplified a couple of them in unpredictable ways.
“The short version was that for Xbox One we built some of the underlying systems to work on a brand-new platform, which was fundamentally, quite different to both the original consoles the games were designed for. We also had some very new (and frankly these have evolved since then and are now much better) online systems on a new console and made some educated, but (with hindsight) ultimately faulty, assumptions we made during development and testing.”
He also offered up an easy-to-understand metaphor for why the matchmaking struggled.
“Each potential player was assigned a kind of ‘ticket’ which would then grant them entry into a match or session–picture a virtual waiting room at a train station–when the train arrives (a match)–everyone has to board–or the train can’t leave,” he said. “Issues arose when folks left sessions before games had started that would cause the initial ticket distributions to fail, and that sometimes meant very long wait times for matches as tickets were issued and reissued–especially in countries with lower populations.”
O’Connor added that Microsoft made assumptions about how things would work. This was a mistake, and he said Microsoft wants to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
“Frankly, we don’t assume anything anymore. While we had some valid reasons to believe the game would function properly in the retail environment, we’ve shifted our development philosophy to basically assume nothing anymore,” he said.
Part of this effort going forward is the previously discussed “flighting” program, which is 343’s way of enlisting the community to help test updates in a live environment before they are rolled out to everyone. In addition to this, 343’s own testing will get “much more rigid.”
O’Connor added that he wants people to know how committed 343 has been and continues to be in the area of listening to and responding to feedback.
“Everyone here puts their heart and soul and sweat and tears into building our games,” he said. “I can tell you without hesitation that I have never heard someone here dismiss or ignore or belittle complaints. We always take them to heart. It’s the internet of course, so sometimes folks take it too far, with threats or other inappropriate reactions, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand the anger or disappointment those came from.”
You can read O’Connor’s full blog post here. If it doesn’t answer all of your questions, O’Connor said he plans to write another post in 2018 that will cover an “even more detailed technical breakdown” of what happened, why, and how 343 addressed it. “That’s what we owe you–that and a game we can both finally be satisfied with,” he said.
So this PPV sure as hell changed a lot over the last 48 hours!
A backstage outbreak of either viral meningitis or (now reportedly) mumps, that we’ll just call “Mumpingitis,” has felled both Bray Wyatt and freakin’ Roman Reigns, causing them to miss the TLC PPV completely. Now AJ Styles is subbing for Bray, in a match against Finn Balor that’s got just about every fan super-excited, and Kurt Angle is making his return to a WWE ring for the first time since 2006 to team with Seth and Dean in the 5 on 3 handicap main event. It’s all nuts!
How will they account for Kurt wrestling against his own RAW guys when he’s GM? How will they protect the dude in a match that’s filled with giant, dangerous table spots? Will he get knocked out backstage, spend most of the match off-camera, and then come down for the clean up win at the end? Will he get taken out and replaced by Jason Jordon? They wouldn’t promise us the moon and then deliver Uranus like that, would they?
40 of the world’s top players squared off last night in a two-hour PUBG Duo tournament battle royale in The OMEN Challenge: PUBG Edition at TwitchCon. Two games filled with big upsets, masterful tactics, and one flying car. Here is our recap of the event, but you can also watch the full replay here.
It’s time for tables, ladders, and chairs–oh my! The Raw brand-exclusive event hits the WWE Network at PPV today, and while two of the matches had to be changed because of illness, it ended up being for the better, as Kurt Angle returns to the ring for the first time since 2006.
TLC comes to the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As of this time, there is one match appearing on the Kickoff Show, which starts one hour prior to the main card. In total, there are seven matches on the card.
Aside from Kurt Angle making his first appearance in over a decade, one of the biggest matches of the night is Finn Balor vs. AJ Styles. Originally, Balor was going to fight Bray Wyatt, but because of an illness, The Demon will take on The Phenomenal One for the first time in WWE. Both men led the New Japan stable Bullet Club prior to coming over to WWE. In addition, TLC is the debut of Asuka, who held the NXT Women’s Championship for over 500 days and currently has a win-streak longer than Goldberg, who dominated the late-’90s.
Alexa Bliss (c) vs. Mickie James (For the Raw Women’s Championship)
Cedric Alexander & Rich Swann vs. Gentleman Jack Gallagher & The Brian Kendrick
Kalisto (c) vs. Enzo Amore (For the Cruiserweight Championship)
The Demon vs. AJ Styles
Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, & Kurt Angle vs. Braun Strowman, The Miz, Kane, Cesaro, & Sheamus (TLC Handicap Match)
The Kickoff Show starts on the WWE Network at 7 PM ET/4 PM PT today, October 22. It’s followed by the TLC event itself at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT on the WWE Network.
In case you’re not caught up, don’t worry; we put the final results in spoiler blocks.
Kickoff Show
Sasha Banks vs. Alicia Fox
Banks wins by submission at 10:12.
Main Card
Asuka vs. Emma
Asuka wins by submission at 9:26.
Cedric Alexander & Rich Swann vs. Gentleman Jack Gallagher & The Brian Kendrick
Alexander pins Kendrick at 7:52.
Alexa Bliss (c) vs. Mickie James (For the Raw Women’s Championship)
Bliss pins James at 11:23.
Kalisto (c) vs. Enzo Amore (For the Cruiserweight Championship)
Enzo wins by pin at 8:50.
Finn Balor vs. AJ Styles
Balor wins by pin at 18:14.
Jason Jordan vs. Elias
Jordan wins by pin at 8:47.
Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose, & Kurt Angle vs. Braun Strowman, The Miz, Kane, Cesaro, & Sheamus (TLC Handicap Match)
Australia and New Zealand are finally getting their own local servers for the massively popular free-to-play tank-battling game World of Tanks. Developer Wargaming has announced that the local PC server for both countries will open on November 1.
This is good news for players in these regions, as they can expect a better experience overall when it comes to network connectivity and matchmaking times. Wargaming Australia/New Zealand manager Travis Plane said the local server is the “number one request” that it had from its community in those countries.
The local World of Tanks server won’t be available 24/7. Instead, it will be available from 6 PM through 12 AM AEDT, so a period of six hours. Wargaming added that it hopes to extend the hours in the future, leading up to a “full-time local server” in 2018.
“It’s a long time coming but we hope that our players and the community can see that we’re truly committed to investing in Australia and New Zealand,” Plane said.
World of Tanks has more than 130 million players worldwide on PC, so it’s easily one of the biggest games on the planet when it comes to player figures. Adding the local server is a nice treat for players on that side of the world. “Some of our most passionate tankers are based in Australia and New Zealand and it’s exciting to be finally giving our community what they’ve been asking for,” Wargaming Asia-Pacific GM Jungwon Hahn said in a statetment.
Wargaming celebrated the announcement in Auckland with a party on October 20, while there is another celebration scheduled for October 26 in Melbourne. Then on November 1, Wargaming is throwing a party in Sydney. Wargaming also released a silly promotional video to hype this announcement, poking fun at itself for the lack of local servers. Check it out in the embed above.
Also bear in mind that the local World of Tanks server for Australia and New Zealand is only available for the PC version of the game. World of Tanks is also available on consoles like Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
