Disney Pixar Announces New Animated Film Luca

Disney and Pixar have announced a new original animated film called “Luca,” which will open in theaters next summer.

As the official Twitter announcement reveals, the film will tell the story of “a boy named Luca as he experiences an unforgettable summer in a seaside town on the Italian Riviera.” Variety reports that Luca is set to leap into theaters on June 18, 2021.

The coming-of-age film is set to be directed by Enrico Casarosa, who previously directed the 2011 Pixar short La Luna about a young boy who helps his father and grandfather harvest stars from the moon. Andrea Warren will serve as a producer on the upcoming feature-length film, which will celebrate the bond that is formed between Luca and his newfound best friend one summer, until their adventures are threatened by Luca’s dark secret: he is a sea monster from another world below the water’s surface.

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“This is a deeply personal story for me, not only because it’s set on the Italian Riviera where I grew up, but because at the core of this film is a celebration of friendship. Childhood friendships often set the course of who we want to become and it is those bonds that are at the heart of our story in Luca,” Casarosa said in a statement. “So in addition to the beauty and charm of the Italian seaside, our film will feature an unforgettable summer adventure that will fundamentally change Luca.”

Luca joins a long line-up of animated movies currently in the works at Disney. Pixar’s Soul was originally scheduled to hit theatres this summer, but it was pushed back from its original June 19, 2020 date to November 20, 2020 following the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. This shift in the theatrical release schedule prompted Disney to postpone the release of Raya and the Last Dragon from November 25, 2020 to March 12, 2021.

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

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Let Its Stars Pretend They Were Superman

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater made its PlayStation debut more than 20 years ago, and for skateboarding legends such as Rodney Mullen and Chad Muska, they can still recall just how influential the Neversoft game series was on their careers at the time.

“They had to put me on top of a van because it was so intense,” Rodney Mullen said to The Verge about the fan response that he received after appearing in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. “It was a sea of people — around me. And although I had a strong name from all of those years prior, this was unlike anything I had ever seen. That was my first taste of it, and it just went on. I could not believe the exposure the game gave to me.”

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The Epic Games Store Introduces Its First Achievements

Slowly but surely, the Epic Games Store is attaining feature parity with its direct competitors. Achievement support is on the way next, and an early form of the feature has already been implemented in one game.

There is now a notification and pop-out menu that appears when you unlock achievements in Ark: Survival Evolved. Epic says this is an early version of the feature that will change and evolve over time before eventually making its way into other games. For now, achievements will be tracked in the background while Epic fine-tunes the interface.

The fledgeling storefront has introduced a number of new features this year, such as wishlists, download throttling, self-service refunds, and support for more currencies. Mod support, gifting, and additional social features top the list of upcoming additions.

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Steam Adds Another Restriction To Prevent The Use Of VPNs For Cheaper Games

Steam has put another restriction in place to prevent users from continuing to take advantage of the platform’s regional pricing system. Typically, games are cheaper in countries with lower incomes, leading to some users utilising VPNs in order to hide their actual location and purchase games at a significant discount.

Steam already has multiple restrictions in place to stop this exploit, but now the company has introduced another process with the aim of further deterring those looking to cheat the system. As SteamDB notes, you now need to complete a purchase with a payment method from the country you claim to be located in before Steam will approve a change to your store region. So if you want to purchase a game from Malaysia, for example, you’ll first need a Malaysian credit card.

“If you have moved to a new country, or are living abroad for an extended period of time, you can update your Steam country setting when you complete your first purchase using a payment method from that country,” Steam’s updated policy explains. “If your location differs from your current Steam account store country setting you’ll have an option to change your store region while you view your cart or as you complete your purchase.”

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Samurai Shodown Is Getting A New Free DLC Character From A Chinese Mobile Game

Samurai Shodown is getting a new character on August 5, and they’ll be completely free. The new fighter is Gongsun Li, a character from the Tencent game Honor of Kings, and they look pretty powerful.

If you’ve never heard of Honor of Kings, there’s a good reason for that–the game has never been released outside of China, where it’s massively popular. It’s an interesting choice for a free character, and Gongsun Li will be available worldwide.

It’s not quite Banjo-Kazooie in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but hey, it’s free–and she looks like a great character in the video below, with a varied, interesting moveset.

You’ll be able to fight as Gongsun Li in the Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC versions of the game. It seems like she’ll be available for free indefinitely, too.

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Ghostwire: Tokyo Director Talks About The New PS5 Features

One of Bethesda’s upcoming games is the PlayStation 5 game Ghostwire: Tokyo from developer Tango Gameworks. Game director Kenji Kimura recently spoke about some of the game’s PlayStation 5-exclusive features such as its use of the DualSense controller, 3D audio, and more.

Kimura told IGN that it’s difficult to explain why Ghostwire’s use of the DualSense controller is so special without giving people the opportunity to try it for themselves. Kimura hopes that might be possible before launch, but the best he can do that is tell you why it’s going to be great.

“You need to experience it directly because this is very difficult to explain both verbally and in text, but the DualSense haptics and adaptive triggers felt so good that it made us, the developers, say, ‘Woah!’ because they allowed for us to feel and experience the various actions and attacks like never before,” Kimura said.

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The 2020 Emmy Awards Will Be A Virtual Ceremony, And Here’s What They’re Planning

The 2020 Emmy nominees have been announced, with Watchmen emerging as the frontrunner and Netflix chalking up the most nominations, but 2020 is not an ordinary year, and the ceremony will not be ordinary either. With much of the US still in lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Emmy ceremony will be a digital event, with no big gathering.

Variety has gotten hold of a letter sent out to the acting nominees, and it details how the digital ceremony will happen this year. The letter, which is co-signed by host Jimmy Kimmel and several producers, outlines what is expected from nominees on the night, and how they’ll be working to ensure that the September 20 ceremony is still worthwhile.

“As you’ve probably guessed, we’re not going to be asking you to come to the Microsoft Theatre in downtown LA,” the letter reads. “This year, it’s still going to be TV industry’s biggest night out… but we’ll come to you!”

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See Brendan Gleeson As Donald Trump In First Trailer For New TV Series

Showtime has published the first trailer for its political limited series The Comey Rule, showing Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump and Jeff Daniels as former FBI director James Comey.

As you can see in the trailer, Gleeson looks and sounds the part of the President of the United States, while Daniels looks convincing as well.

The miniseries is based on Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, as well as “more than a year of additional interviews” with key subjects. Showtime, who shares a parent company in ViacomCBS with GameSpot, describes the show as an “immersive, behind-the-headlines account of the historically turbulent events surrounding the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.”

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Microsoft Flight Simulator Seems Like the Perfect Quarantine Game

If you haven’t noticed, opportunities for air travel have been a little bit scarce as of late. Sure, it’s still possible to fly from here to there, but it’s much less desirable than it used to be for obvious pandemic-related reasons. And I definitely miss it. Playing the new Microsoft Flight Simulator has done a lot to fill that gap, and then some, offering up the chance to not only see the Earth from thousands of feet up, but also the opportunity to take control of one of 20 different planes to chart my own courses.

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The great thing about Microsoft Flight Simulator and its real-time Bing maps integration is you can hop into a plane and take off from basically any airport in the entire world. At last count, over 37,000 airports, airfields, and even tiny dirt airstrips were available to you. The 30 airports available with the base game are hand-crafted to resemble the actual airports on which they’re based as accurately as possible. If you’ve ever flown into LAX or JFK, you’ll probably be astonished at how well they’ve been recreated here by Asobo Studios. But the 36,970 other airfields are also impressive, even if they aren’t modeled on actual architectural blueprints like the hand-crafted ones. For example, my local airport in midcoast Maine is absolutely tiny, with two runways: one just over 1,500 meters and the other just over 1,200 meters.

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The algorithm used to fill in the three-dimensional structures from real-world Bing maps data recreated my local airport to a level such that I wasn’t sure if it was generated or built by a programmer. Sure, there are a few smaller buildings missing, and the signage isn’t in place, but it’s close enough I could actually recognize it when I was taxiing to park.

But that’s just my small rural airport. The real joy of Microsoft Flight Simulator has been visiting places I’ve never been before. I watched a short YouTube video on Hong Kong the other day and when it was over I thought, “It would be cool to fly over Hong Kong at night, I bet.” And so I fired up Flight Sim and I did. And it looked incredible. I was able to fly around the city and see the towering skyscrapers lit up with the warm orange hues of halogen and cool blues of mercury streetlights on the patchwork of city streets below. Couple that with the half-moon reflecting off the ocean and a few low-clouds and it was sublime, almost like a low-fi hip-hop beat come to life.

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Beyond Hong Kong at night, I visited other places on my bucket list, flying lower and closer than real-life would ever allow. I took off from Galeão International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and immediately pointed the nose toward Christ the Redeemer, the massive granite statue looking over the city. After circling around, I radioed the tower and went back in for a landing. The level of detail in the model of the statue is incredible.

I flew a similar sight-seeing tour of the Great Pyramids, coming in lower and closer than any real-life plane would be allowed. I also took a tour of the Grand Canyon, dropping down inside and carefully maneuvering my plane between its foreboding walls.

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I have to say, Microsoft Flight Simulator is scratching my travel itch while letting me explore and experience more than I ever could simply sitting in seat 24C on a commercial jet. It’s almost an addiction at this point. If I’m watching a YouTube video or something on Netflix and I see an interesting location, I make a note to visit it later in Flight Simulator. With no clear end in sight to the stay-at-home and quarantine orders still covering so much of the country and much of the world, Microsoft Flight Simulator let me escape the confines of my small town and explore the world anyway, and for that I absolutely cannot wait for its full release on PC on August 18

 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Summer Update Part 2 Brings Back An Old Glitch As A Permanent Feature

Animal Crossing: New Horizons update 1.4.0, also known as the Summer Update part 2, is now live, and its headlining features are the additions of the Dream Suite, a new fireworks feature, and the ability to back up your save data. But it’s also added back in a feature that has was patched out of the game earlier.

A glitch in earlier versions of the game allowed you to remove the UI when using your Nook Phone to take a photo, letting you get clean footage of your character’s movements from a fixed angle. As Polygon notes, this glitch, which was patched out earlier this month, is now back–but this time it’s a feature, included on purpose.

As you can see in the tweet below from Animal Crossing World, the game will now let you remove UI elements when taking a photo by clicking the right stick. This isn’t possible if you’re playing using just the left Joy-Con in horizontal mode, but it’s possible in all other control variants.

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