You will hear Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill like you’ve never heard them before in this -opsis.

Next: The Meg

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“Fix PUBG.” That’s the motto of the new push from Bluehole and PUBG Corp. Acknowledging that the community of players has been urging developers to do the hard work of actually addressing the numerous performance, balance, and quality-of-life issues plaguing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the developers have promised to work on a “months-long campaign” to essentially “fix PUBG.” It’s a stunning public admission that the studio for too long was focused on revenue generation instead of basics like security and engine optimization.

“The bottom line is, you’re the reason for our success. You’ve stuck with us, and now it’s time for us to deliver the fixes you’ve been asking for.”

The campaign started with a live update that launched yesterday.

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That’s one of the images UK-based land developer Lanpro used in a proposal for the construction of a 10,000 home “garden town” near Norfolk. An avid player of Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines immediately recognized that image as a creation of the game. In fact, the image wasn’t even created for the company’s proposal. According to The Eastern Daily Press, it was from a three-year-old Reddit thread. Matt Carding-Woods, the sharp-eyed Cities: Skylines fan credited the presence of the distinctive in-game refinery in the bottom of the proposal image for tipping him off. For its part, Lanpro says the image was only being used in an illustrative manner and the game software is used by other city planning firms “to model, engage and explain projects” which is quite the feather in Chirpy’s cap.

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So is No Man’s Sky finally good? We can’t reach a consensus, so we might have to impanel again after the next update.

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Fortnite will soon be available on Android mobile devices, but not through Google Play. Instead, iOS-less players will need to “sideload” Epic’s proprietary software to install and play the game. Speaking to Eurogamer, Epic’s Tim Sweeney confirmed that one of the reasons for not using Google’s app store was a financial concern.

Avoiding the 30 per cent “store tax” is a part of Epic’s motivation. It’s a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70 per cent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games.

Epic admitted that they would’ve done the same thing on Apple’s devices if they were able to load their software without using the curated (and revenue-sharing) method. Epic has not announced a date for Fortnite’s Android launch.

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Stardew Valley now has official multiplayer support. Developer Eric Barone has been working on the free co-op update for months, and thanks to an extensive beta and network assistance from publisher Chucklefish, the feature is now live. The 1.3 update doesn’t just add a way to farm with your four of your friends at the same time. It also comes with bug fixes, special winter events like a traveling festival and a mystery collection, new NPC interactions, and items to hoard. It also adds one thing that the game has been sorely missing.

You can now put hats on your horse.

Coo-op multiplayer is nice, but horse hats? How was this not a day one feature?

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The third story installment of The Long Dark is coming. Episode Three will launch as a free update in December 2018. According to the developer’s post, the third story act shifts the player’s perspective to Dr. Astrid Greenwood’s and the aftermath of Will Mackenzie’s travels in the first story episode.

More depressing survival adventure in the frozen Northern Canadian wilderness would normally be reason enough to (not) celebrate, but the update will also come with “redux” changes to Episodes One and Two. The revamped chapters will feature fully voiced NPC dialogue, a more open mission structure, an enhanced tutorial, bug fixes, and narrative scenes have been rewritten and will be presented in first-person view. Hinterland Studio is even removing the “fetch-questy” Trust System for now, but hopes to bring it back in another part of the game at a later date. Making a survival game is like crafting a fire in the snow with only newspaper rolls and wet matches. You just have to keep at it.

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https://youtu.be/XStvwK6yKvs

That’s the Angel City Chorale bringing down the house on America’s Got Talent. They are indeed talented, but their choice of song obviously helped showcase their amazing sound. Christopher Tin’s Baba Yetu, originally written as Civilization IV’s theme song, remains a powerful, beautiful piece of music. The Lord’s Prayer in Swahili seems to transcend language. It deservedly won a Grammy in 2011. You can check out the version used in-game here, or the re-release from Tin’s album, Calling All Dawns.

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Before we criticize the poor choices made during some hauntings, we’ll discuss Beyond the Black Rainbow, Miracle Mile, and Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter.

Next week: Mission Impossible: Fallout

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My first thought upon flipping through a volume of Jean-Michel Basquiat works from a 2005 exhibit in Brooklyn was, “This is Basquiat?” He has such an exotic and dignified name. I assumed someone with that name would paint idylls and classical portraits. I expected he would be famous because his creations were moving works of beauty. Someone named Basquiat might even be a French master.

My second thought was, “This looks like garbage.” Angry childish scrawls. Gerald Scarfe when he was in boarding school. The cover of a Butthole Surfers album. An unabashedly amateurish webcomic. The scene when the protagonist flips through another character’s journal and discovers that character is totally insane. I don’t like this stuff. This is not the sort of thing I even understand.

So here is the exercise. Continue reading →

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Extinction starts out as an alien invasion movie. As one of the invadees, Michael Pena plays a family everyman. It’s nice to see him as something other than a Hispanic sidekick, comic relief, or a comic relief Hispanic sidekick. Lizzy Caplan plays his wife. It’s nice to see her as something other than a token female playing thankless second fiddle to a male lead. Hopefully I’ll get to see that in a movie soon, but until then, I watched Extinction.

Continue reading →

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Tom Chick and Jason McMaster on The Crew 2, Wreckfest, Stonehearth, Northgard, and Far Cry 5 DLC.

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The premise of Sol: Last Days of a Star is that the sun is about to go supernova. She’s gonna blow any moment and you’ve got to beat feet, which is no mean feat, given that suns are a real drag. All that gravity, you know. Your only hope is to harvest sun energy to build up momentum to slip the fiery bonds of Sol.

The sun machine is coming down and there’s gonna be a party. Continue reading →

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Turn 10 is removing prize crates from Forza Motorsport 7. The prize crates, Forza’s version of random loot boxes, will take at least until winter to be fully excised due to their ties with other elements of the game, but the developer has already removed cars as prizes from the crates. Turn 10 has also unlocked 100 previously locked exclusive cars to all players. While the prize crates were never available directly for real money, they now offer nothing but cosmetic doodads and will stay that way until they leave entirely. Additionally, the tokens which you could buy with real money in previous Forza games will never be coming to Forza Motorsport 7, and Turn 10 promises that they will not appear in Forza Horizon 4.

“The overwhelming feedback has been that this system feels out of place in the game.”

While the tide may not be fully turning against the loot crate model, recent high-profile reversals from games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Middle-earth: Shadow of War show that publishers are paying attention. The additional revenue crate gambling brings in may not make up for the loss of some players that refuse to engage with the model, and the hit to the brand’s reputation. Recent legal developments in other countries are undoubtedly taking a toll on the scheme as well.

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That’s me on my third No Man’s Sky starting planet in a row that tried to kill me. Those are the breaks in the infamous survival crafting game from Sean Murray and Hello Games. I was trying to check out all the changes in the much-anticipated NEXT update that was just released. True multiplayer, a third-person view, more junk to craft, a better guided beginning, and loads of other stuff came in the free update. Some of it works better than others. For example, the guided beginning works a lot better if the random number gods put you on an hospitable starting planet. The ones that burn you with constant acid rain or the fiery heat of a too-close sun make for a less great first impression. Overall, NEXT is a lot of greatness. It doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it does fulfill a lot of the promise people thought the game was supposed to have originally.

Tom’s review of the game at launch is here.

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