Dave Jewitt breaks down all the biggest gaming announcements from Sony, Nvidia, Razer, and many others at the CES 21 show.Animal Crossing: New Horizons was undoubtedly one of the biggest game launches of last year, and its popularity isn’t slowing down in 2021. To the joy of makeup-wearing Animal Crossing fans everywhere, Nintendo has announced an Animal Crossing: New Horizons collaboration with cosmetics brand ColourPop, and the collection looks as adorable as you’d expect. The Animal Crossing x ColourPop collection launches Thursday, January 28 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET, and you can sign up to be notified at ColourPop.
The Animal Crossing ColourPop collection appears to include four different eyeshadow palettes, each with four different shades inspired by characters from the game. There’s an Isabelle palette with warm pink and yellow shades; a cool purple palette inspired by the Able sisters; a silvery green palette featuring the Nooks; and a brown neutrals palette that’s a nod to Blathers and Celeste. The shade names are all references to the game as well, like “Resident Rep,” “Meteor Shower,” and “Water Landing.”
Respawn has snuck Kings Canyon back into Apex Legends for a limited time. And that’s not all either, Apex Legends’ original map seems to be the new home for The Mirage Voyage, which has parked in the empty crater where Skull Town used to be. If you want to see for yourself, you’ll have to act fast–Kings Canyon will only remain in the rotation until January 21.
Kings Canyon was removed from Apex Legends’ map rotation at the start of Season 7: Ascension, replaced by the battle royale’s third map, Olympus. Season 7 saw the removal of The Mirage Voyage from World’s Edge as well, the first town takeover to seemingly be removed from the game. Now we know better–it wasn’t removed, it was just moved.
If you go into the cabin of The Mirage Voyage, you can find a new audio recording from Mirage’s mom. It’s…a very sad message to listen to–it’s clear her mind is beginning to go. However, if you listen to the whole message, there are a few cool lore tidbits. The biggest of which is that Mirage’s uncle is Droz, a Titan Pilot you meet in Titanfall 2. Initially a part of the 6-4 (the game’s best Faction), Droz goes on to partner up with Davis to found The Last Resort–both Pilots work with you in Titanfall 2’s Frontier Defense mode.
As of this writing, episodes 1 and 2 of WandaVision are available on Disney+. We’ve gathered every Easter Egg and reference in one place, which you can see below, and each week we will update the slideshow with more easter eggs and theories as the new episodes air. Spoilers of course follow!
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From nods to I Love Lucy and Bewitched to pivotal stories in Marvel comics and the MCU, these first episodes are filled with callbacks that can be easy to miss and may give us a glimpse as to what the future holds for not only WandaVision, but the MCU as a whole.
For more on WandaVision, be sure to check out our explainer on the show and the comics that could inspire it, our reviews of the first two episodes, and when each episode of WandaVision airs on Disney+.
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Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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With an eye to social politics, Regina King has forged a storied career as an actress. She’s appeared in challenging and heralded films, like Boyz In The Hood, Ray, and If Beale Street Could Talk, for which she won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. On television, she gave voice to the spirited brothers at the center of the superb cartoon series Boondocks. Then, just last year she awed audiences as Sister Night in the revered HBO sequel to the graphic novel Watchmen. Since 2013, King’s been carving out a career as a director as well, helming a slew of TV dramas. Now, King has come to put her auteur stamp on cinema with her feature directorial debut One Night In Miami, and she does so with all the confidence and might of Muhammad Ali.
Adapted from Kemp Powers’ play of the same name, One Night In Miami imagines what might have been said between four major figures of 1960s Black Excellence. It’s set on February 25, 1964, the monumental night when Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) was crowned the world heavyweight boxing champion. After the fight, Cassius (Eli Goree) celebrates with friends: millionaire soul singer Sam Cooke (Hamilton‘s Leslie Odom Jr.), NFL star Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and Civil Rights activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir). However, revelry turns to tension as the foursome begins to debate what it means to be Black and famous in America.
Staged simply and leaning hard into dialogue, One Night In Miami can feel precisely like what it is — a stage play translated to film — yet King keeps things from becoming static by pulling the action outside the motel for a spell and stretching the time beyond its central struggle. Though the film is chiefly set on that one night, it begins in 1963. There, each historical figure is established within the context of a white audience. Cassius fights in an arena full of white people who boo his bravado. Sam plays at the Copacabana, where a white audience scowls at his song. In his Georgian hometown, Jim chats with a wealthy white neighbor, who pairs congratulations on the football star’s history-making season with a casually slung slur. Finally, a news program with a white anchor introduces footage of Malcolm, describing him as preaching “a gospel of hate.” This setup reflects not how America saw these men, but how much of white America did. In this, King urges her audience to recognize who gets to write the history of a nation. It is those in power.
Power is the central topic on this night in Miami. Each member of the quartet carries a power, won from hard work, resilience, and extraordinary talent. White Americans cannot ignore them, because they are on TV, on the radio, and — Jim reveals with a wink to The Dirty Dozen — soon will be in movies too. With a mind to the movement, Malcolm pushes the others to consider how they might use the platform of fame to do more for their Black community. His passion turns to preaching, which chafes at Sam, who bears the brunt of the orator’s stinging arguments. However, writer Powers keeps a delicate balance, never allowing one character to run away with the conversation by providing provocative counterpoints. What unfurls is an intense debate about what is owed and what is risked, offering no easy answers.
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The conversation swings from systemic racism to economics, colorism, corruption, and faith. Yet things never veer into the theoretical, as Powers’ adapted screenplay grounds it in facts and personal stakes. This gives King’s cast meat to sink their teeth into, and each does so with a gusto that brings history alive. Goree is bombastic and exhilarating as Cassius. He dances around the ring, throwing that pretty face at his opponents as a dare. His speed and exuberance are smirking rebellion. Goree masters the iconic boxer’s popping patter, yet never falls into the trap of comical impersonation. Instead, he is a vision of youth, athleticism, and unapologetic pride.
Slim and somber, Malcolm becomes Cassius’s foil. Ben-Adir smoothly takes on the punching cadence of the iconic speaker along with the precise hand gestures that punctuate his points. Yet Ben-Adir folds in a vulnerability that gives a peek behind X’s public persona. His tone is imbued with a soft melancholy that silently speaks of brewing troubles. His smile is sheepish as he presents his friends with a paltry snack of ice cream. To all this, Ben-Adir smoothly layers a world-weariness that reveals the tireless burden of this man’s battle, which underlines his sparking frustrations with those who could aid him but — as he sees it — won’t.
Where Malcolm is tense, Jim is cool as the underside of a pillow. Tall, broad, suave, he strides and grins with ease, knowing he is a force on the field and off. The others insist this pro athlete always says what he means, and yet within this story Powers finds corners to speak of insecurity as the football legend considers a new line of work. To this, Hodge brings a seductive swagger, a radiant charm, and a deep-set determination. As friends feud, he plays mindful mediator but without pulling his punches, knitting together friendships so rich they feel real.
Broadway star Odom slides smoothly into the shoes of Sam, whose voice enchanted with songs of yearning and love. Yet he must bring to this bouncy persona a fire that Cooke himself may have felt he couldn’t show. He does so with a brilliant burning that will have Hamilton fans cheering once more. In this way, King and her cast take these men down from stodgy pedestals of history and resuscitate them, pumping blood into their veins and breath back into their lungs to allow them to be more than history but human.
You can’t walk away from this drama with the cozy lie that things are so different now. Regina King won’t offer a consolatory end-beat that sings of promise and progress. She reminds you of loss, so we are left with the weight of it. We are left to consider what such a setup might look like today. (One could imagine artists like Ray Fisher, John Boyega, and Cardi B in such a room talking just as candidly.) What King gives us is a gift of insight, humanity, and then the silent challenge to stop watching and start doing.
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Comedian and actor Bill Burr has a role on the Star War TV show The Mandalorian as Mayfeld, a character who–like Burr himself–speaks with a Boston accent. Some part of the Star Wars community has raised some concerns about this.
Burr defended this character’s Boston accent in an interview with Jimmy Fallon. Burr said people don’t seem to care that Han Solo can communicate with Chewbacca or that C-3PO has an English accent, so it’s not much concern that Mayfeld has a Boston accent.
“What about English? Doesn’t that look weird if you went to a galaxy far, far away and you get off, and somebody’s like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ And you totally understand them?” Burr said. “What about the fact that Han Solo is talking to a bigfoot? He’s talking bigfoot, Han Solo’s speaking English. They never break character. How about C-3PO with an English accent, that was OK?”
When people think of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, they’ll likely gravitate to either the comics from Bryan Lee O’Malley or the live-action film from Edgar Wright. However, one of the lesser-known strands of the Scott Pilgrim brand was the film’s licensed game tie-in. Like the film, it was not only a faithful adaptation of the comics’ tribute to geek culture and retro games, but it also happened to be a fun co-op brawler in its own right. After a sudden delisting from digital video game stores in 2014, the once-lost licensed game has scored a second life with the Complete Edition, and it hasn’t lost its exuberant style. The game’s passion for a bygone era can often be a bit overwhelming, yet it still offers a satisfying time brawling through the streets with friends.
Like its comic and film counterpart, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game sticks with the same video game-inspired conceit, but interprets it into an actual video game. After the titular character meets the girl of his dreams in Ramona Flowers, Scott and his bandmates Kim and Stephen, along with Ramona, have to fight a rogue’s gallery of evil exes seeking to disrupt the relationship. In the vein of a classic arcade brawler, the game keeps its story light to put all its energy into showing off the stunning 2D visuals of its side-scrolling beat-’em-up gameplay, which leans heavily into the splendor of the retro era.
The original game wore its inspirations–classic games like River City Ransom, Final Fight, and Final Fantasy–on its sleeve, and the Complete Edition keeps its aesthetic and core gameplay intact. What you get in this enhanced package is the full game, the four bonus modes involving zombies and dodgeball, and the extra DLC characters–which include Wallace Wells, Knives Chau, and hidden character Nega-Scott. The Complete Edition also comes with Network Mode for online play, which was a late addition in the final DLC for the original game.
Ukrainian developer GSC Game World has provided an update on the status of the highly anticipated and long-in-development first-person horror survival title STALKER 2.
According to GSC Game World, STALKER 2 development is “progressing smoothy” on PC and Xbox Series X|S. While a release date has not been nailed down yet, the studio reiterated that STALKER 2 will hit Xbox Game Pass the same day it launches on both platforms.
GSC Game World’s public relations specialist Zakhar Bocharov said the studio is “pleased to see” how well STALKER 2 is progressing and is confident about the experience being created.