If things had gone as originally planned, the Season 4 premiere of Community would be airing tonight on NBC. But last week, the network decided to hold off on bringing the series back, with its actual date as yet undetermined.
While Community fans wait to find out when we'll actually see the Greendale gang, the cast of Community have filmed this new video celebrating their premiere date on October 19th... That won't be on October 19th.
If things had gone as originally planned, the Season 4 premiere of Community would be airing tonight on NBC. But last week, the network decided to hold off on bringing the series back, with its actual date as yet undetermined.
While Community fans wait to find out when we'll actually see the Greendale gang, the cast of Community have filmed this new video celebrating their premiere date on October 19th... That won't be on October 19th.
They say that good things in life come in pairs. And they're right. Legs, bicycle wheels, Jedward... I could go on. Another new partnership worth getting excited about is Mountain Dew Energy's with Halo 4. Mountain Dew Energy has teamed up with Halo 4 to offer an exclusive on-pack promotion in the UK for the game which launches exclusively on Xbox 360 on November 6.
To celebrate this partnership, Mountain Dew are offering Halo fans the chance to become one of the first people in the UK to get their hands on a finished copy of Halo 4 at the game’s midnight launch at GAME in Statford City Westfield on November 5.
Not only will the winner get a free copy of the game before anyone else, they'll also get the chance to level-up in the game’s multiplayer in a VIP setting as they battle it out with four other lucky folk for the chance to win a trip for two to the Halo HQ in Seattle. For more information on this opportunity visit facebook.com/MountainDewUK.
Oh, and did we mention the fact that Mountain Dew Energy will also throw in a Limited Edition Halo 4 Xbox 360 console too?
For the chance to win this awesome prize simply answer this pathetically easy question:
Where are Microsoft’s studios based where Mountain Dew Energy will be taking one lucky winner to?
Submit your answer by emailing it to UKComps@IGN.com before 10am on October 29 with the subject line Halo 4, remembering to include your full name and a contact number that we call you on, should you be lucky enough to win!
Please note, travel and accommodation costs incurred attending the midnight launch are NOT included in the prize. This competition in open to UK residents over the age of 18 only with full terms and conditions on the next page.
Sir Roger Moore has predicted that Skyfall is going to be a huge hit following a private screening over the weekend, and has nothing but good things to say about the incumbent 007.
Speaking at "An Evening With Roger Moore" at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-Upon-Thames last night Sir Roger revealed, "I was invited on Saturday morning to a private screening of Skyfall. Now, I have always said that the best Bond was obviously Sean [Connery], but I’m happy to say when Skyfall is released on October 26, it is going to be the biggest [Bond film] there has ever been in the cinema, and he [Daniel Craig] will go down as the best Bond in history. It is fantastic."
Speaking to packed house on the former 007's 85th birthday to promote his new book Bond on Bond, Sir Roger went on to reveal how he had always backed Craig to make a big impact, "Before I saw Skyfall, I felt very angry about the way that the English press treated Daniel Craig. Before he’d started [Casino Royale] they predicted doom and gloom and they criticised him. I used to write letters of support to him, and I was so pleased when I saw Casino Royale because he was truly excellent in it. He’s a wonderful actor, if you’ve seen Munich or In Cold Blood, you know he’s a terrific actor."
We also happen to agree with Bond No. 3 as you'll find out in our Skyfall review here.
Bond on Bond by Sir Roger Moore is out now. Skyfall is in UK cinemas on October 26, and US cinemas November 9.
Tom is IGN's Social Media Editor and his favourite Bond is Timothy Dalton, come at me bro. You can stay abreast of his current pet peeves by following him on IGN and Twitter.
The effects of a real life high-speed collision on a car are catastrophic. In video games, however, things are different. Technical ceilings, licensing hurdles and other factors have long conspired to keep car damage relatively superficial; a pre-canned layer beneath the surface, peeled back gradually whenever the game detects the player should be seeing a few token dents and scratches.
When’s the last time you played a racing game, or perhaps an action game with a driving component, and marvelled at the realism of the crashes? For every one that gets even mildly close there are handfuls more that suffice with the bare minimum of slightly crumpled panels and scuffed paintjobs.
Surely it doesn’t have to be this way? No, it doesn’t.
And earlier this year a small start-up company called BeamNG proved it.
Watching BeamNG’s debut reel is a little like the automotive equivalent of the first time we all saw NaturalMotion’s euphoria engine in action way back in 2006, in that tech trailer of the Indiana Jones game that never came to fruition. Just like euphoria gave us tumbling bodies that look like real tumbling bodies, here were car crashes that looked like real car crashes.
This is soft-body physics.
You may have come across this video before; it chalked up two million views in just three days when BeamNG published it back in March. Perhaps you saw their second video, released in July, or the pair of single crash clips they uploaded just days ago. Or perhaps you’re a Rigs of Rods aficionado, an open-source driving sandbox game loved by fans for its soft-body physics (although they’re not as good as those on display in the videos here).
Where you haven’t seen these amazingly realistic vehicle collisions, however, is in a big budget commercial racing or driving game.
In October 2011 the Rigs of Rods team decided the potential for the sort of soft-body physics on show in their game was too great to ignore. They began work on a new a new physics engine from scratch. It was built upon the same physics concepts, just more refined and optimised.
The BeamNG team illustrate to us in a little more detail why they chose to focus on real time soft-body physics and how they differ from the norm.
Soft-body simulators are way more CPU intensive and do not like tweaks that get them away from physically correct behaviour.
“There are basically two types of physics simulations,” explains the BeamNG team, who’ve asked that their responses be attributed to the entire group rather than individual crewmembers. “Rigid body simulators and soft-body simulators.”
“Rigid body simulators are the dominant physics simulation paradigm as they are less CPU intensive and easier to ‘tweak’ for special behaviours. These systems simulate objects as a ‘whole’, where each different category of an object needs some programmer to code its behaviour. The artist is allowed to tweak some parameters of the programmed behaviour of each object.
“Soft-body simulators are way more CPU intensive and do not like tweaks that get them away from physically correct behaviour. They simulate objects as the sum of their parts where the object’s behaviour is emerging from the behaviour of all its parts. If the programming is clever and correct, the same system can simulate a wide gamut of different object classes.”
So basically, the artist is free to design whatever they wish and the design itself will define the object’s behaviour. The team explains that, due to the freedom that a soft-body simulator provides an artist (because they don't need to find a programmer to code any behaviour of a new type of vehicle), soft-body simulator games tend to foster highly engaged creative communities around them.
[T]he way physics is being done in today's games is too simplistic and artificially touched up.
“The accurate physics and freedom that a soft-body simulator has, as well as the inspirational and creative communities that emerge around them, are what originally attracted us to the field,” continues the BeamNG team.
“In our opinion, the way physics is being done in today's games is too simplistic and artificially touched up. In most games, it has nothing to do with reality anymore and more with ‘appearing’ physically correct. The underlying physics are tuned until the artists are pleased with the results.”
BeamNG assembles its vehicles from around 50 separate parts.
So what’s going on under the hood here? How does it all work? The team explains.
“First, we have only very simple entities that are simulated in our physics core. These are mass points, nodes in our parlance, and the connections in between them, beams. That's it. We do not have one line of code describing how a car should behave.”
We’re told to try and compare the concept to this construction toy. The balls are the mass points and beams are what connect them.
“In addition to the basic node and beam entities we have special entities that simulate more elaborate behaviour. Some examples of these are, hydraulics which are beams with the ability to expand/contract, and engines which are nodes with the ability to create rotational forces.
“So, when you want to simulate a car, you build a frame of nodes and beams, plus hydraulics and engine, that looks like the shape of a car. Similarly when you want to simulate an airplane you build a frame that looks like an airplane. The same applies for all other things that you could think of: bicycles, boats, ragdolls, etcetera.
“The traditional approach to above would require to have specially programmed code for each type of object class... Each of these different object classes would require a person with domain knowledge, car physics, airplane physics, to describe in code the whole object's behaviour.”
Perhaps what seems most stunning is not that a small team of four could put together such fascinating tech in the first place, but that in 2012 there’s still a hole in the industry big enough for them to do so. The game industry pursues realism tenaciously, and yet today’s games still do not feature cars that behave, flex under stress or deform as realistically as this.
The BeamNG team explain that the film effects industry and the motor industry have used this kind of simulation for some time, but their simulators are non real-time and require hours to calculate just one second of action.
“Concerning the game industry, while the whole mass-spring idea initially seems very simple, it's extremely difficult to make it work correctly in real time,” continues the team. “Mass-spring systems have very bad stability, they tend to explode, and are very CPU intensive. Also it is very hard to make them work for stiff materials, metals, in real time.
“Hence the majority of their usage is for calculating ‘soft’ materials like cloth.”
The team also expresses that it’s exceptionally difficult to calculate collisions in real-time for stiff mass-spring systems and keep them stable in the face of extreme collisions.
[I]t is natural that most of a game company’s efforts will be spent on ‘how things look’ rather than ‘how things move’.
“Think of a jet hitting a solid wall at MACH-1,” is their example. If you can't picture it, check out this controlled crash test of an F-4 Phantom hitting a concrete block.
“It requires an enormous amount of knowledge, experience, time and effort to solve all of the above problems efficiently,” they continue. “So it is reasonable for game companies to choose the more direct, proven and good-enough approach of rigid-body for vehicles and soft-body for cloths and other special cases.
“In addition the wide held rule of the gaming industry is that looks are the major selling point for games. So it is natural that most of a game company’s efforts will be spent on ‘how things look’ rather than ‘how things move’.”
Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles going forward, at least for developers of games that rely on real-world vehicles, will be the car manufacturers themselves. It seems like a double standard, factoring in what Hollywood does to cars regularly, but automobile manufacturers have historically been very strict about what they’ll tolerate when it comes to video game damage. We ask the BeamNG team if they would suspect this as a factor in preventing their engine being standard in all car-based video games or will things gradually change?
The BeamNG team suspect that the truth is more complicated and that it mostly has to do with expectation management.
“Concerning Hollywood, they have a preference of depicting extreme car crashes for which the viewer's expectation is that the car should indeed be totalled,” explains the team. “[We] don't think that car companies worry about these scenarios because it is naturally expected for a car in these situations to be totalled to meet with the user experience.”
These traditional damage models are in essence interpolations between predesigned car states.
“In a game, vehicle interactions with the world are not always so extreme as in movies. So if a player scratched a car on a wall and the game wrongly reacted by totalling the car it could create the expectation to the player that the real car would behave the same as the simulated car in the game. The general situation becomes worse due to the artificiality of the traditional game damage models. These traditional damage models are in essence interpolations between predesigned (damaged, undamaged) car states.
“So for a car company to be sure that no such ridiculous situation as the one described above would happen, they would have to go and check all the possible actions and damage reactions of the whole game. This isn't so easy to do exhaustively, so the simple solution for the car companies is to just forbid any car damaging.
“In our physics engine we can simulate realistically enough a Euro-NCAP suitable car, so that it won't be that far from the expected behaviour. On the other hand, if we'll be allowed to have such a car fall from 200 metres is a different story!
“Though at the moment, we are not portraying any licensed cars, so what car companies will allow us to do is currently irrelevant for us.”
Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and how many of the latter he's smashed into other cars on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
Warning: Full spoilers from the episode to follow.
It didn't take long for New Girl to get back in the swing of things for Season 2. In a matter of minutes, I felt right back at home as Jess and Nick shared some quippy bathroom banter and Schmidt begged Winston to scratch the inside of his crotch cast. ("And before you ask, yes, I have been able to reach completion with some very precise and vigorous nipple play.") But after a long and seemingly uneventful summer, it was time to kick things back into high gear with Schmidt's DANGER-themed "rebranding" party, at which Jess, recently laid off from her job, volunteered to be one of the shot girls.
I must admit, I actually really like the idea of Jess's unemployment as an overarching plot device. Much in the same way that she had to cope with losing her boyfriend in the pilot, here we got to see how she handles another loss, this time with her teaching position. It was also fun to see the hilariously awkward support from the guys once they got the news (a la Nick's winking and Schmidt's disoriented sense of direction).
Jess's turn as a cocktail waitress was also pretty classic and -- what's that word again? -- "adorkable." Parker Posey's guest spot as Jess's "26-year-old" competition made it all the sweeter, too; her appearance was definitely one of the highlights. It's almost a shame we didn't get to see more of her, but then again, that almost made it funnier. Nick's comments comparing Jess to other shot girls were also pretty great. ("You're the nurse that I want to wake up to after I've had my stomach pumped. Different kind of hot -- but still hot!") And reintroducing the tiny silver hat from the lost and found was a nice touch.
We also learned that, not only are Schmidt and Cece are still broken up, but Cece now has a new boyfriend, Robbie (played by Franklin Nelson). Of course, that left the door open for Schmidt to continue his usual parade of shenanigans. His spinning flails of fire -- "the most dangerous element of all the elements!" -- was perhaps the most delightfully ridiculous, although I also enjoyed Robbie's nonchalant responses to Schmidt's interrogation. ("I don't like music. 'What's up with me,' you know?")
True to form, this episode also had a couple of really sweet moments, too. Schmidt and Cece's final conversation seemed to hint at a future reunion at some point, which would be preferable. Meanwhile, Nick and Jess's heart-to-heart outside was exactly what the episode needed to round things out. Indeed, "Re-Launch had just about all the makings of an exceptional episode of New Girl. Unfortunately -- as always, it seems -- Winston got the short end of the stick here. He never can seem to find his place, even when he's loosely attached to another character's storyline. While his drunken schtick was certainly not without its laughs, it felt like his character was kind of on the outskirts this time around. Having said that, Jess's storyline was the real draw this week, and it should be interesting to see how her unemployment pans out in future episodes.
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love on Twitter and IGN.
Warning: Full spoilers from the episode to follow.
It didn't take long for New Girl to get back in the swing of things for Season 2. In a matter of minutes, I felt right back at home as Jess and Nick shared some quippy bathroom banter and Schmidt begged Winston to scratch the inside of his crotch cast. ("And before you ask, yes, I have been able to reach completion with some very precise and vigorous nipple play.") But after a long and seemingly uneventful summer, it was time to kick things back into high gear with Schmidt's DANGER-themed "rebranding" party, at which Jess, recently laid off from her job, volunteered to be one of the shot girls.
I must admit, I actually really like the idea of Jess's unemployment as an overarching plot device. Much in the same way that she had to cope with losing her boyfriend in the pilot, here we got to see how she handles another loss, this time with her teaching position. It was also fun to see the hilariously awkward support from the guys once they got the news (a la Nick's winking and Schmidt's disoriented sense of direction).
Jess's turn as a cocktail waitress was also pretty classic and -- what's that word again? -- "adorkable." Parker Posey's guest spot as Jess's "26-year-old" competition made it all the sweeter, too; her appearance was definitely one of the highlights. It's almost a shame we didn't get to see more of her, but then again, that almost made it funnier. Nick's comments comparing Jess to other shot girls were also pretty great. ("You're the nurse that I want to wake up to after I've had my stomach pumped. Different kind of hot -- but still hot!") And reintroducing the tiny silver hat from the lost and found was a nice touch.
We also learned that, not only are Schmidt and Cece are still broken up, but Cece now has a new boyfriend, Robbie (played by Franklin Nelson). Of course, that left the door open for Schmidt to continue his usual parade of shenanigans. His spinning flails of fire -- "the most dangerous element of all the elements!" -- was perhaps the most delightfully ridiculous, although I also enjoyed Robbie's nonchalant responses to Schmidt's interrogation. ("I don't like music. 'What's up with me,' you know?")
True to form, this episode also had a couple of really sweet moments, too. Schmidt and Cece's final conversation seemed to hint at a future reunion at some point, which would be preferable. Meanwhile, Nick and Jess's heart-to-heart outside was exactly what the episode needed to round things out. Indeed, "Re-Launch had just about all the makings of an exceptional episode of New Girl. Unfortunately -- as always, it seems -- Winston got the short end of the stick here. He never can seem to find his place, even when he's loosely attached to another character's storyline. While his drunken schtick was certainly not without its laughs, it felt like his character was kind of on the outskirts this time around. Having said that, Jess's storyline was the real draw this week, and it should be interesting to see how her unemployment pans out in future episodes.
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love on Twitter and IGN.
The story, created by Thomas Tull and Matt Wagner, revolves around John Tower, a man (at least we assume he is a man) who specializes in hunting down the kinds of things that the law can't. If, for instance, you are fairly certain that your family was murdered by a pack of werewolves, then you'd ring up John Tower and he'd make sure that said werewolves didn't come around anymore. Like I said, it's not exactly a new story, but Wagner's script manages to keep it interesting. In the book's 70 pages we get to see a man-made ghost, an owl demon thingy, and some really creepy vampires. It's cool stuff, as long as your idea of cool is seeing a vampire ripping the head off of a small child in extreme, gory detail (the kid is also a vampire, so I guess it's okay).
The dialogue, like the story itself, often feels stiff. None of the characters standout or doing anything particularly unexpected or interesting. You'll no doubt find yourself wishing you could get to the next monster and the next fight scene, because that's where this book excels. When the word balloons drop off the page and the plasma knife comes out, The Tower Chronicles gets good. Real good. It's just all those bits in between that'll have you wondering if this was originally a spec script for a Lorenzo Lomas movie from the early 90s.
Like the writing, the Simon Bisley's art is hit and miss. His detailed, exaggerated style looks amazing during the aforementioned fight scenes. The vampire melee towards the book's end is worth the cover price alone. It's sinister stuff, in all the best ways. The problems start when characters have to interact without a ghost or a monster attacking them. That's when things look awkward and lack a clear flow. It's a shame, because I'm sure there is more to Tower than his typical, brooding, tough-guy demeanor; it's just hard to care when he looks like such a bizarre dork. I just want to see more vampires and less FBI agents and mullet-topped bounty hunters.
The Tower Chronicles is scheduled to be a big story, covering several of these 70 page, over-sized books. Hopefully, as the story unfolds, the dated, stale feeling that haunts this book will be exorcised. This could be a great series, especially if we get more vampires ripping the heads off of people -- because that stuff is awesome.
Benjamin is a Ninjak enthusiast. He owns many variant covers and his office smells of honor. Follow Benjamin on Twitter, or find him on IGN.
Bucky just can't catch a break. Things keep getting worse for the poor guy and Winter Soldier #10 solidifies that. Black Widow is still brainwashed, and it looks like there may be no coming back. She's killed some very close friends. It's emotional, engaging, action-packed stuff. It's the kind of thing that will be sorely missing when Ed Brubaker leaves the Marvel Universe.
Brubaker keeps the stakes high. Winter Soldier has been a fantastic series since day one, but the recent story arc is really firing on all cylinders. This is Bucky's corner of the Marvel Universe, and it's a dark place filled with betrayal, murder and violence. The dialogue is snappy,the story is great and the characters are wonderfully realized. More people should be reading Winter Soldier.
Butch Guice steps in on pencils this issue. His layouts are fantastic, using a bending, disorienting layout for the flashbacks. It works well, giving a sense of chaos as the Black Widow pummels her way to freedom. It's not perfect -- Steve Rodgers looks a little off, for instance – but it's a damn fine looking issue. It's also worth noting that Marvel has started listing Bettie Breitweiser as providing “Color Art” instead of being credited as a colorist. I couldn't agree more, because what Breitweiser does is absolutely stunning. It is art and it's simply beautiful.
Benjamin has a crush on Rashida Jones. There, it's out in the open. Your move, Jones. Follow Benjamin on Twitter, or find him on IGN.
Man we love Breaking Bad, which is why we'll forgive AMC for making things a bit difficult as far as our coverage of the midseason finale is concerned - not making the episode available early for press, while airing it in the middle of a holiday weekend.
That all being the case, our review won't be going up until Monday, while our "Breaking it Down" video chat will be up Tuesday this week. But in the meantime, I wanted to give everyone a place to talk about what went down in "Gliding Over All." So spoilers obviously are fair game, since this is meant for those of you who've seen the episode to chat about it in the comments below. Make sure to check back at IGN on Monday for our review!
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow...
Hey, I remember that old Stabbing Westward song! "I can not save you..." Sorry guys, my '90s are showing.
Okay, so big things were poppin' in the True Blood season finale. And I don't mean that metaphorically. Fangers were 'splodin' all over the joint. And Sam (as much as it still hurts my brain to accept that shifters can turn into flies) flying into Chancellor Harris' mouth and then bursting out of her as a human was pretty freakin' rad. As was the final 10 minutes of "Save Yourself," in fact. But before I get into the whole naked, bloody "Billith" reveal - which actually seems to be borrowing from Deacon Frost's plan to become the Blood God from the movie Blade - I need to talk about the quick, unceremonious death of Russell and some of the things that were lacking in this season ender.
True Blood has always been an oddly paced show. Often, the finales dispatch with the "big bad" within the first half hour, leaving the rest of the episode to act as set up for the next season. One gets the sense that the writers know when they want to have big moments happen, but filling in all the moments in-between, or leading up to them, is treated as a stagnant chore. So we either get episodes of filler leading up to exciting bloody carnage, or we get random crazy side-stories that go nowhere and leave a handful of characters with nothing to do at the end but drink Cajun Margaritas. And witness the beauty of the orgasmic fairy birthing process. "I have no idea what's happening" says the drunken Mrs. Boathouse in Merlotte's, in that True Blood meta-way that tries to excuse the crazy bulls*** by having the characters call out how crazy their lives are. "Who the f*** does?" Lafayette replies.
So, while one story in this finale had "life or death" stakes, the other had Maurella telling everyone "My light broke" and leaving Andy with four newborn baby girls. The worst part of which is that we'll now have to see Andy comically deal with four newborn babies in Season 6. And as for Russell? The driving force for most of Season 3 and the man who we all cliff-hanged on last week? He got splattered by Eric within the first two minutes; before the opening credits. Now, since I figured that this season couldn't end without Sookie actually meeting and seeing "Evil Bill," I knew the Russell situation would get handled quickly. But not that fast. I mean, I'm glad Eric was the one who got to kill him, but the hastiness of the whole thing made it feel very unsatisfying. I would have much rather watched things play out in the field a bit longer than, say, watch "constantly seeing things" Jason constantly see visions of his vampire-hating parents.
But, like I mentioned already, the final act of this episode was pretty damn fun. And guys...skinwalking paid off! It was used to actually do something useful! And, I have to say that I didn't even know it was Luna acting as Steve at first. I thought it was just Steve being protective of his pet. We'd even seen him tell Luna not to shift into a human before. Also, Tara kissing Pam and Jess screaming "I knew it!" was awesome.
And I'm glad they decided to keep Evil Bill around for Season 6. Though, I'm not sure what his plan will be now that almost every vamp in the Authority HQ has been staked by Jason, Eric and Nora. His army seems to be gone. But who knows what Bill's mind is even going to be like after fully transforming into that blood demon thing? Will he even be in charge of anyone? Season 5 did a good job of expanding its vampire story out across the U.S. I mean, I still didn't believe Jess when she said that the Bill and the Authority were just crazy enough to take over the world, but it was a step in the right direction.
But now the world knows that Steve Newlin "eviscerated" 22 frat boys. And they know that shifters exist too, thanks to Luna. So there's definitely some interesting possibilities taking shape. The trouble is, it makes me care even less about the smaller characters at Merlotte's. This finale ended with a single cliff-hanger and not several character-specific cliff-hangers like last year. Which makes me really only want to follow this one story even more.
Oh, and Alcide's pack-master story was fine too. Robert Patrick's always a kick to watch, although Alcide now seems even more detached from the core characters than usual.
At this point, given the final scene, I can see no way back for Bill. Of course, we all thought that at one point when Angel turned into Angelus back in '97, so I suppose there's always a way. And this is where series creator Alan Ball leaves us, as he wrote this finale and now heads off to focus on his new Cinemax series, Banshee. He leaves us (thought probably not entirely) with our former hero flipping his crippling guilt upside-down and using it as an excuse for divine madness. It's funny too, to think about how every new Authority character that was introduced this year, aside from Nora, is now paste. No one from that now overly-familiar set was meant to survive the religious purge; with ever-devious Salome being the last to bite the dust. And now that Bill is Billith, will we ever know what Lilith's game was? I mean, she wanted one of them to drink all of her blood. So now what? Stay tuned...
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and IGN. WARNING: No Nudity!
Comedy Central has just announced its fall schedule, which includes the next season of South Park as well as all-new series and specials.
The fall season kicks things off on Tuesday, September 25 with a new episode of Daniel Tosh's Tosh.0 at 10pm, followed by the comedian's new animated series Brickleberry at 10:30. South Park returns the night after that on Wednesday at 10pm, with Season 2 of Key & Peele premiering directly afterward.
Additionally, the network will air two stand-up series: Season 2 of Gabriel Iglesias Presents Stand-Up Revolution (Thursday, October 4, at 10pm) and the series premiere of T.J. Miller's Mash Up (Tuesday, October 9, at 12:30am).
On Tuesday, November 6, The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report will televise live election night coverage at 10 and 10:30pm, respectively.
Also on the docket are several specials, including the fourth biennial event Night of Too Many Stars: America Comes Together for Autism Programs on Sunday, October 21; and new stand-up specials from Demetri Martin (September 29), Jeff Dunham (October 7), D.L. Hughley (October 27), Chris Hardwick (November TBA) and Russell Peters (TBA).
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love on Twitter and IGN.
I've always believed that 2D got pushed aside before its time had truly come. New tech arrived and forced things forward, leaving us to wonder what kinds of two-dimensional games might have been made with more powerful hardware to back them. Dust: An Elysian Tail, is a great example of such a game. Hand-drawn and animated by one lone developer, it's a beautifully penned love letter to fans of the Metroidvania sub-genre. Whether you play for an absorbing story, exciting combat, or the joy of exploration, Dust has you covered.
The first thing you're likely to notice when you start the game up is how it looks. Your journey begins in a magical glade, and brings you through dimly lit ice caverns, long-dead forests, snowcapped mountain ranges, and more. Each pops to life with a painterly beauty rarely seen in modern gaming. Dynamic weather effects and subtle use of ambient lighting provide a strong sense of mood in each new environment you visit. And as memorable as the locales are, the characters that inhabit them are even more so. The cast is populated by a variety of talking animals, strongly reminiscent of the Don Bluth animated films of the ‘90s. Their outlines are basic, but their exaggerated features and well-designed costumes make each of them stand out, none more so than the titular main character, Dust.
We often underestimate the importance of a visually appealing main character, but Dust makes sure we don’t this time. His tattered sedge hat and shimmering runed blade Ahrah make for an unmistakable silhouette. You'll only need to control him in action for a few seconds before feeling connected to him. This is due just as much to his silky smooth animations as it is to the sheer responsiveness of the controls. He seems to dodge, leap, hack, and slash at a thought, making combat feel fluid the moment you jump in. Short though the move list may be, attacks can be chained into one another in a surprising number of ways, resulting in impressive looking dances of death that feel satisfying every time you pull them off.
A variety of locales keeps Dust's luscious graphics fresh.
Whether on the ground or in the air, your entire repertoire of attacks, parries, projectiles, and magic spells make for a good time when fighting the varied hordes of enemies you face during your adventure. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the boss battles, which seem substandard by comparison. Given the genre, you'd be forgiven for expecting screen-high bosses with an endless array of powerful attacks for you to dodge. What you get instead is a collection of villains no larger than your own character, who have but one or two rudimentary ways of attacking you. All of them, including the grueling, overlong final boss can be easily bested by flying back and forth while spamming magic attacks. It seems odd that a game possessed of such great imagination should be so banal in this regard.
This shortcoming is made even more disappointing by the fact that the boss battles are so well incorporated into the story, which bears down with more thematic gravity than the game's visuals would lead you to expect. Despite the genuinely funny banter between Dust and his flying companion Fidget, the plot regularly delves into issues such as redemption, morality during times of poverty and war, and the very nature of the soul. It's all handled capably by a very strong voice cast that makes every character affecting in one way or the other. Dust isn't simply another grim-faced, sword-wielding badass. He's internally conflicted in a rather...unique sort of way, and I found watching him work through it genuinely engrossing.
What doesn't belong in this otherwise serene scene? Hmm...
It's rare for this kind of game to have such an extensive story, and combined with the quest, crafting and stat point allocation systems, it lends the game a sort of light RPG sheen. Many NPCs can give you sidequests which, when completed, net you a solid chunk of XP to level up with. Each time you increase your rank, you get to improve one of 4 core stats: health, attack, defense, and magic. Adding to the RPG feel is the crafting system, which has you searching for item blueprints and materials dropped off monsters to create powerful pieces of gear to augment Dust's stats with.
Both systems work well enough for you to gear your character towards your play style, but neither are sufficiently deep or rewarding enough to warrant trying different “builds” or farming for specific blueprints. And since most craftable items become available for purchase in shops shortly after you see their blueprint drop off monsters, the system's inclusion can seem superfluous at times. The strange lack of a “New Game +” mode to carry over all your stats and crafted gear to a second playthrough further marginalizes the importance of the RPG mechanics. It's still nice that they're there, but in the long run they don't add as much to the gameplay as they initially seem to.
Behold Dust's artistic beauty.
Still, these features are more or less icing on the Metroidvania cake. The core gameplay pillars all remain rock solid. Platforming feels effortless, and each new area brings new hazards and light puzzles with it, ensuring that you stay on your toes. As you'd expect, revisiting old areas with new abilities yields generous rewards. The world of Dust is overflowing with hidden treasures, secret areas, and a series of challenge maps designed to test your skills to the max. It'll take most players 12-15 hours to roll the credits while doing a minimum of exploration and backtracking, while completionists who want to 100% every area can easily push past the 20-hour mark, lending Dust: An Elysian Tail immense value for its $15 price tag.
Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.
Of all the disturbing things this show has done, there hasn’t been a detailed, in-your-face instance of any innocent bystanders paying a price. Sure, there was Jane’s dad, who crashed a plane and killed a bunch of people, but there wasn’t much tangible about that; we never saw people burning alive on a plane or crashing to the ground (that would’ve been pretty bleak, even for this show). The most we’ve seen is the crack addicts or dealers who occasionally kill someone or one another and they’re not "innocent" in the same way. Gale may have been the most innocent person on the show, but he was still a meth cook.
People are people and every death is a tragedy, yes, but it doesn’t hit home. We, the viewers, are mostly law-abiding citizens. We don’t do drugs (OK, most of us don’t), we don’t skirt the law, and we don’t kill anyone. Therefore, we don’t identify with the drug dealers or the addicts or any person who, to this point, faced direct, tangible repercussions -- i.e.: death (and on camera) -- for decisions they didn’t make.
Most of the people in the series do terrible things and don’t see the repercussions of their actions—especially Walt, our "hero". The one character who’s the most closely related to us, Jesse, has a conscience, but he’s still a cook and he’s killed. He does harm to other people. In "Dead Freight," we have a boy killed in cold blood, whose only crime was he wanted to motorbike through the wilderness. Everything about him was supposed to be the definition of innocence and childhood. He even wears a helmet because he feels safety is important (or his loving parents do).
And it was a horrible twist. It was a tragedy. It was disturbing. It was necessary. It was amazing TV.
Gotta love all of the little hints in there. First, there was the opening. Although the show’s done at least one red herring opening, this opening looked more like a flashback. The kid on the motorbike looked straight out of the ‘70s. The kid was off-screen just long enough to completely forget about him.
Then there was Mike saying, “I've been around long enough to know there are two kinds of robberies: the ones that get away with it and the ones that leave witnesses.” It could’ve been just a Way of the Gun kind of one-off random philosophical quote about murder and crime, but since this show is Breaking Bad (and doesn't have bad writers), it had to come into play.
There was also all the talk about (and action from) kids in this one, with Walt Jr. returning to Flynn and Holly existing (we haven’t seen much of her this season). The one that stuck was Lydia asking Walt if he had kids and their brief conversation about it. In any other episode these probably would’ve been red herrings, but they definitely weren’t... Holy S**t...
And there’s this odd parallel to this story and the meta-story, where the entire story is a train robbery itself. How much time do you think it took the Breaking Bad writers to A) come up with this idea and B) plan how to do it? I’m guessing weeks, maybe even months. It’s clear it took a long time to figure out the details anyway. The director made damn sure we knew they put a ton of thought and planning into it, from the feeder tubes and their installation right down to the little silver “SECURED” tags. There wasn’t a shot out of place.
Jesse Pinkman contemplates which came first, "bitch" or "yo."
So the writers came up with a great idea to solve a big problem for this season. It had to be executed to perfection. The tension was high. There were a lot of stumbling blocks.
But after this was done, how would the season progress? How would we take this into a far more disturbing territory?
And that’s where the motorbike boy came back in. With just that last minute—that last little flick of the wrist—the writers found their gateway into the end of the series while destroying everything Jesse had worked so hard for. It moved us into a bigger, deeper abyss.
How each character reacts to this will be important too. The idea of the train robbery was innocent, too. Jesse came up with the idea so no one would get hurt and it was a brilliant idea. It’s innocence was slaughtered at the same moment that boy was shot. Where will this take Jesse? Todd (Friday Night Lights' Jesse Plemons) was oddly the seasoned professional despite being the newest “member” of the team. He’s a good insert in this series to provide that bridge between where Walt and Jesse are into the bleaker territory. And dang did he deliver in this one.
Even without that last minute, this was an amazing episode. There was talk of killing Lydia again—and hey, she turned out to be innocent! That’s interesting. Holy Shlamoley, what’s going to happen with that? There was tension throughout and we were taken on quite a ride. “Flynn’s” return delved us back into developing Walt Jr. and where is that going to go? Is he going to side with Hank eventually? (Oh man, that scene with Walt and Hank in Hank's office was amazing).
The whole train robbery scene was action-thriller-y, even up to Walt doing the “HOOLLLD! OK NOW!!!” on the feeder tubes, right up until the final scene. “Dead Freight” was the series in a nutshell.
Maybe the greatest part of this episode was how well this will lead us into the end. This was a train robbery of an episode. It was beautifully crafted, excellently executed and we know the ending is coming soon.
I’ve done a lot of things in life that weren’t exactly easy. In 2008 I moved to Japan with what turned out to be an embarrassingly rudimentary knowledge of Japanese, and had to either learn to read fast or subsist entirely on convenience-store cup ramen. I spent six weeks as a door-to-door sales girl in suburban California, where on one occasion I was literally hosed down by an angry fat shirtless man yelling at me to get off his property. I sat through all of Transformers 2 without screaming, once.
Reviewing Dark Souls last year, though, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Playing that game with no online functionality and no help from wikis or fellow players for 80-odd hours, relying on an email thread with other hapless Dark Souls reviewers that soon became known as the Chain of Pain for help, turned an invigoratingly difficult game into a near-impossible one. For various boring review-related technical reasons I had to start that game over from the beginning four times without ever being able to finish it.
So it’s understandable that the thought starting all over again on PC with the Prepare to Die edition, which comes out in just over two weeks, is giving me heartburn. This PC release of one of the very best games of the past five years is definitely a port rather than any kind of remake – even on a powerful PC, it never looks any better than Dark Souls did on consoles, and it still struggles a bit on the framerate front from time to time. FROM Software has had tremendous trouble bringing the game to PC and has no experience with the platform, which means they’ve clearly had to work very hard just to get it up to standard. But it does come with ten hours of new gameplay that will draw Dark Souls players like moths to an open flame, ready and willing to be immolated.
It’s very, very annoying that the extra content, entitled Artorias of the Abyss, won’t be available to PS3 and Xbox 360 players as paid DLC until sometime this winter. If you’re a lover of Dark Souls and want to get at this new material, you’ll have to either purchase this version of the game and play the whole thing again, or wait for months before you can use your existing save. That’s not the most attractive choice in the world, and I’m not sure if it’s one I can face when the game actually comes out.
Thankfully, for the purposes of this demo, I’m deposited right at the entrance to the Abyss, a black portal from which a monstrous, many-eyed hand emerges to drag you away. Like the Painted World of Ariamis, it is a portal to another world rather than part of Dark Souls’ vast map, located down in Darkroot Basin. (Those wanting to avoid hearing anything about what it contains should probably skip the next few paragraphs).
It seems – from what I can gather – that the portal sucks you into the past, to when the legendary Knight Artorias was still alive. He’s a shadowy figure in Dark Souls lore – even more so than every other incidental character in the game, most of whom you can only really learn anything about by digging through wikis in the absence of in-game clues or exposition. It promises to tell the tale of the once-great night’s downfall, and how he walked the Abyss to meet the Four Kings.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing you encounter upon being sucked into the past is an absolute jerk of a boss
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing you encounter upon being sucked into the past is an absolute jerk of a boss, the Sanctuary Guardian. It’s a chimeric cross between a lion, a poison-tailed scorpion, a griffin, a ram and a really angry polar bear, and it will f*** you right up if you have it the merest opening. Oh, and it flies, and shoots killer paralysing lightning at you from its face. Even equipped with a fresh level-60 character and a couple of +5 weapons to pick from, it’s a monster of a boss, so fast and aggressive that there’s rarely time to catch your breath and down an Estus before the thing savages you with a headbutt-and-clawing combo after paralysing you with electricity.
As ever with Dark Souls, it looked almost impossible to beat him at first. After half an hour with the Prepare to Die edition I was facing the very real possibility that I might not be able to get any further. But the Sanctuary Guardian crumbled, eventually, with the help of a greatsword and some very well-timed dodges, and I was hit by that head-spinning wave of adrenaline and relief that every Souls player knows. I knew I’d been drawn back in.
The Sanctuary that the guardian was protecting turned out to be the Sanctuary of Oolacile – home of a civilisation that’s already been lost to the ages by the time Dark Souls starts. It’s a forested area not unlike the hidden place in Darkroot Garden guarded by White Wolf Sif (the wolf with the greatsword between his teeth), with winding forest paths weaving over a yawning, pitch-dark Abyss that seems to be slowly swallowing everything around it. As you approach this cavernous void, there’s a growing otherworldly rumbling in your ears that makes your heart rise into your throat.
Pick your way around its edge and you’ll find less terrifying things: stone knights with giant hammers, scarecrow-like forest monsters chasing you with hay-forks and gigantic scissors. Down through the ruins of some long-abandoned building that looks a lot like the perimeter wall that you fight the Moonlight Butterfly from, you find a white mist door leading through to a stone city that seems to wind down into the darkness. I’m not allowed to talk about what lies beyond, but there are supposedly about ten hours’ worth of gameplay in this area for moderately skilled players and I’ve only seen two or three hours’ worth, so we can be certain there’s much more to see (including, presumably, some of the promised new items and weapons, which didn’t turn up despite a thorough scouring of the forest).
I’m still not sure whether I’ll actually play the Prepare to Die edition, from the beginning. If this were a better version – properly HD, with a better framerate, nicer-looking environments and a Blighttown that didn’t slow to a crawl when you pointed the camera in the wrong direction – I’d be very tempted. But playing the same game again, with all the same niggling faults and graphical quirks, from the start, just to get access to this new content? I think I might endure the wait until it’s out on consoles, and hope that it will spur a new wave of Dark Souls players to repopulate the online servers.
You might decide to do the same, if you’re already a Dark Souls fan. But if you’re a PC gamer who’s never played Souls before, then despite this port’s problems, there’s absolutely no question: clear your schedule for the end of August, and prepare for one of the defining gaming experiences of your life. I promise, you’ll get used to the framerate.
Keza is in charge of IGN’s games team in the UK, and adores Dark Souls despite the fact that it may have had permanent effects on her mental health. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
[Editor’s Note: At IGN one of the things we've all come to agree on is this: Minecraft is special not only because it allows you to unleash your creativity, but because it allows you to create a narrative for your character. Are you the king of the realm? A crazed and brave slayer of zombies? A spelunker? Or maybe, just maybe you're like this pour soul here: a bewildered victim of a ship-wreck, starting in a world with only a single tree and a single land mass. What follows is the start of a one survivor's story, told through a his journal. Can he survive with just a single tree and his wits?]
DAY ONE
I awoke with a start. Head throbbing. Disoriented. Where was I? Where was the ship? Oh god! The ship…was gone. Wrecked.
I shouted out, but received no reply. I quickly realized that I was wholly and completely alone here. But where is “here,” anyway?
Oh no.
Oh no. No no no!
I quickly realized I had washed up on a small island. For a moment I felt hopeless. But I only allowed myself that one moment. I steeled my nerves. I quickly found two small trees. And some tall grass.
I can do this.
I felled the trees and quickly replanted the saplings. I knew I would need ample wood supplies if I wished to have any hope of survival.
I also gathered as many seeds as I could manage from the surrounding tall grass. Using the wood from the initial two trees I fashioned a few simple tools, including a farming implement, and planted a very basic farm plot.
My lifeline.
Oh God, is it already mid-day? They will be coming soon.
Using a crude wood pickaxe I struck at the earth wildly. I didn’t have a plan. Just survival. I would huddle in a dark dirt hovel overnight, if I had to.
By the Void-Makers, finally some luck! I had used all my wood fashioning my initial tools, and had resolved to spent the night in darkness. Just as I began to lose hope, through pure happenstance I managed to stumble across a small coal deposit.
I quickly crafted a few torches using the coal. By torchlight I burrowed a basic shelter, constructing a basic work bench, furnace and storage chest along the way. By now I was beginning to feel a bit silly about my frenzied digging. Surely they wouldn’t be able to reach an area as remote as this.
Right?
I resolved to take a look outside, confident that my earlier precautions would prove to be causeless.
Oh no. No no no.
They're here.
END OF DAY ONE.
Justin is Editor of IGN Wireless. He also enjoys playing Minecraft during his free time and apparently has a penchant for the dramatic. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
When you think of "wildly successful peripherals" virtual reality headsets are probably not the first things that come to mind. But a recent slew of head-mounted displays (HMDs) seems to indicate the timing's right to retry.
Oculus launched its ultra-high-tech VR headset's Kickstarter a little earlier today, and already it's found plenty of support and full funding. So what makes them so special?
While the technical specifications are subject to change, currently the Oculus Rifts are set to features ultra-low latency head tracking with 6 degrees of freedom (DOF), 110 degrees diagonal field of view, a resolution of 640x800 per eye, stereoscopic 3D rendering, and weigh around .22 kilograms.
But what's all that tech talk mean for an everyday user? It means the Oculus Rift's will feature a far larger display than those others out there and track your head without the lag you might consider synonymous with head-mounted virtual reality.
John Carmack has been a vocal supporter of the Oculus Rift - praising the device, and saying that the angles offered by the Rift were so impressive he ditched plans for his own HMD as soon as he tried these out.
Other big players praising the Oculus Rift includes Cliff Bleszinski of Epic, Gaikai, David Helgason at Unity, and Michael Abrash and Gabe Newell of Valve.
The Oculus Rift isn't your average consumer-facing Kickstarter - they're only hoping to get enough funding to produce development kits. This allows the Kickstarter goal to start with a much lower goal - in this case a $250,000 goal that has already been doubled. It also means there's not as much incentive to buy big if you're not making games.
If you're not a developer, you can show your support by pledging one of the low tiers and in turn pick up a pretty sweet poster or shirt, or you can pledge $275 or more and receive a prototype device with Doom 3 BFG edition, the first Oculus-ready game, or as we like to call it, "The most expensive version of Doom 3 ever."
What do you think? Could the Oculus Rift's finally be the VR headset we've been waiting for? We're cautiously optimistic, and we'll update you as we know more.
Nic is the Editor of IGN Tech. He loves technology almost as much as Skittles, Boyz II Men, and Pitfall! You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
Every week, IGN collects the best quotes from the last seven days and packages them all up in a weekend-friendly bundle. The list of things up for discussion today includes:
Battlefield 4
DayZ
Dear Esther
Diablo III
Dishonored
Fable: The Journey
Fez
Gabe Newell
Gamer Pledge
God of War: Ascension
Medal of Honor: Warfighter
Mega Man
Ouya
The Secret of Monkey Island.
You can see all of the past 15 weeks worth of quotes by Googling IGN Games Quotes.
"There will be other ways to get into the beta aside from MoH Warfighter. At this time, however, it is the only way to guarantee entry."
Battlefield 3 community manager Ian Tornay calms the community, some.
“While we began developing our game before DayZ, we've been encouraged by fact that DayZ has become so popular. And yes, of course some of our latest design decisions were influenced by the DayZ community forums.”
Sergey Titov, executive producer of The War Z says there is some cross-over with runaway hit DayZ (pictured).
“Dear Esther has now sold over 250,000 copies since launch. We always said we'd celebrate if we shifted 20,000.”
Life in the fast lane for developer Dan Pinchbeck.
“Diablo III was designed from the beginning to be an online game that can be enjoyed with friends, and the always-online requirement is the best way for us to support that design...While we…’ve never said that this requirement guarantees that there will be no cheating or game cracks, it does help us battle those problems.”
Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, explaining things.
"It's been a poor, poor five years for fiction in the video game industry. There have been too many sequels, and too many established intellectual properties that have been ruling the market."
Dishonored creator Victor Antonov.
"I think the presentation itself is partly to blame. It looked a bit like some spammy shooter, but actually we were building this big world around it. Y'know, you have about two minutes and 45 seconds to demonstrate what you're doing. I know that a main problem people have is they think we've taken the Fable series and trivialised it."
Lionhead creative director Gary Carr on Fable: The Journey’s difficult introduction at E3 2011.
"It’s a s**tty numbers game to be playing for sure but as a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Had Fez been released on Steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away too!"
Polytron’s Phil Fish on Microsoft’s standard $10K charge to update his Xbox Live game.
