Month: May 2020

Star Wars Stormtroopers Encourage Social Distancing at Reopened Disney Springs

With Disney theme parks having lost $1 billion due to coronavirus closures, and tentative plans in place to reopen Walt Disney World Resort in Florida this July, Disney World’s shopping district, Disney Springs, in Orlando, recently reopened to the public back on May 20…with some added advice from a pair of Stormtroopers.

The following video comes from the Disney Springs YouTube account and it shows a couple of First Order Stormtroopers performing a handful of pre-recorded balcony skits about social-distancing and protecting oneself and others by using masks. Take a look…

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“Yeah, I’m going to need you to move one male bantha’s length away, please,” says one Stormtrooper as she suffers the aggressive arrogance of her cocky co-worker.

When Walt Disney World Resort starts up again next month, the company’s plan outlines a limited capacity for the park, with visitors having to secure a reservation for the day they wish to attend in advance. The capacity of the park will then incrementally increase as the county furthers its reopening phases.

Looking for more Star Wars news floating around the galaxy? There’s a new “#MakeSolo2Happen” movement online, a new Star Wars movie from Taika Waititi in the works, and some new quotes from Mark Hamill about if he’d ever want to play Luke Skywalker again.

If you’re looking to travel way back in the realm of Star Wars fandom, check out these pictures and video from A New Hope’s first ever tour of the sci-fi fan convention circuit back in the summer of 1976.

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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.

Remember When Xbox One ALMOST Lost the Console War?

The Xbox One started with one of the worst sales pitches in gaming, but now it’s kind of hard not to love the console. But how did Microsoft make such a critical mistake and, more importantly, how has it turned that into a bright new future?

Join Kurt Indovina for this episode of Remember When as he looks back on Xbox One’s bumpy road to a roaring redemption, examining its confusing reveal, troubling rumors, and, of course, Don Mattrick. Kurt also invites fellow GameSpot friend Tamoor Hussain to give some extra insight, and why Phil Spencer was pivotal to making Xbox what it is today.

Remember When Xbox One Almost Lost The Console Race?

It’s wild to think how far Microsoft and the Xbox One has come. It started this generation with what even the company has admitted was a huge misstep. The Xbox One’s debut was nothing short of a catastrophe borne of mixed messaging that targeted the completely wrong crowd, and what many described at the time as anti-consumer strategies. It was a fumble that presented its competitor, Sony’s PlayStation 4, an opportunity. And Sony seized it.

Microsoft hasn’t been able to come back from that stumble. PlayStation 4 has maintained a sales lead and owned a great deal of the gaming community’s mindshare, but while the Xbox One hasn’t been able to gain ground, it has at the very least established steady footing again. The process of recovering has been a long and arduous one, but under the leadership of Phil Spencer, Xbox has worked its way back into the hearts and minds of gamers.

A new era of Xbox is now on the horizon, but in order to confidently move towards the future, it’s important to keep in mind lessons from the past. And that’s exactly what this episode of Remember When aims to do. It explores the original pitch for the Xbox One, arguably one of the worst sales pitches of all time, and then charts how Microsoft turned it all around to put Xbox in a strong position to achieve success with the Series X.

Of course, as always, writer and host Kurt Indovina has provided his insight into the process of making this episode, which you can check out below. If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the previous episodes of Remember When on YouTube.

Kurt Indovina: I have to be honest, for most of my life I’ve been a PlayStation fanboy. There’s no denying that I, like so many of us, have got caught up in associating my identity with a brand. I don’t really know when that happened or why, but at some point, I unabashedly picked a side, and that meant scowling at the competition, which was Xbox. But at some point in my old age, I started to care less about the side I was on and started to care more about the medium of video games as a whole. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t merit in understanding why we pick sides, and the competition is ultimately good for the greater industry. The story of the Xbox One is very telling of that.

Back when it was announced in 2013, I remember feeling confused as to what it was and who it was for. Was it something you watched TV on or was it something you played video games on? And why did I have to be online always? And wait, I can’t lend games to my friends? Nothing about its reveal screamed, “Hey, you! Yeah, you, gamer person. This is for you!” Actually, I walked away from that reveal thinking it’d be best for my dad. To me, it was pitched as a sleek all-in-one entertainment system geared towards upper-middle-class dads that wanted to watch football, the Price-is-Right, and occasionally play Call of Duty. At the time, I was no longer on my PlayStation high horse, but I had a hard time convincing myself to care at all about Microsoft’s new console.

Fast forward seven years and it’s kind of weird for me to say this, but, at the end of this generation, I think I may be team Xbox. So, how did this happen? Well, that’s exactly what this entire episode of Remember When is about. For this episode, I wanted to look back on how Microsoft managed to turn the Xbox One from a zero… to, well, a One? X? It’s truly an incredible redemption story. And I don’t think any of this would have happened without the towering success of the PlayStation 4. It was very clear that Microsoft started on the wrong foot, and in order to reposition themselves, it wasn’t about selling units but improving mindshare within its most dedicated audience: the gamers. And without the competition, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft would have ever learned a lesson.

Needless to say, I can’t wait for what’s next from both Sony and Microsoft the next generation. Furthermore, don’t worry, we’re currently working on a PlayStation equivalent to this style of episode. So be on the lookout for that in the near future.

New Call Of Duty Appears To Be Black Ops: Cold War

Like usual for the Call of Duty series, this year’s game has apparently leaked ahead of its official announcement. While Activision has already confirmed a new Call of Duty is coming this year, it hasn’t shared any details whatsoever, and we’d usually know by this point in the year when the next game would be releasing and what it would be called. However, according to a tweet that has since been corroborated by Eurogamer, this year’s game will be called Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. This would be the fifth main game in the sub-series, and it will apparently be going back to the time period that made the games famous. What we don’t know, however, is how closely it will follow the original game, or if it will be a completely new beast.

The Black Ops Cold War name first appeared on Twitter by leaker Okami13, and Eurogamer has since reported it’s heard the same news from its sources. This means that much like 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, developer Treyarch is going back to where Call of Duty: Black Ops started–a stark change from the future-based warfare the Black Ops series traded in with its third and fourth installments.

The Cold War setting has already been teased in Call of Duty: Warzone, with reported plans for the battle royale to eventually reveal the game in its entirety. Players have found a Cold War spyplane by glitching through walls. The reveal might have tied into the ongoing mystery behind the many vault doors in Warzone currently.

The original Call of Duty: Black Ops was set in the 1960s and featured missions during the Vietnam War. It was a landmark release for Treyarch, with our Call of Duty: Black Ops review scoring it a 9/10. At the time, critic Chris Watters wrote, “Call of Duty: Black Ops lives up to the top-notch pedigree that the series has earned, giving players an awesome new shooter to enjoy just in time for the holidays.”

Last year Call of Duty: Modern Warfare acted as a soft reboot to the 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, using returning characters and recontextualizing them in a story that acts as a pseudo-prequel to the original’s events. Whether this will be the formula Treyarch follows too has yet to be seen.

Now Playing: Call of Duty Could Return To Black Ops In 2020 | Save State

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Apple TV’s Central Park: Series Premiere Review

The following is a spoiler-free review for the first two episodes of Central Park Season 1, which is now streaming on Apple TV+.

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For all of the money Apple has been pumping into its still-infant delivery service, we’ve yet to see many shows that radiate with enough creativity to pull our attention from Apple TV+’s more established competitors. Central Park, though, is one of those shows. It’s an animated comedy, which is nothing new in itself, but get this: It’s also a full-blown musical with all only a handful of spoken lines dropped before its cast bursts into songs about everything from superheroes to scooping poop.

Its art style is an instant tip-off that it’s from some of the same folks who gave us Bob’s Burgers, but Apple’s massive cash piles allow it to be animated with a fluidity we never saw in co-producer Loren Bouchard’s previous show. For one of the first times on Apple TV, here’s an example of Apple putting all that money to excellent use.

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As in Bob’s Burgers, a lot of the action centers on a quirky family, in this case the family of Central Park manager Owen (Leslie Odom, Jr.), who lives in a sweet “castle” in the park’s heart. We also meet Paige, his journalist wife (Kathryn Hahn)—who works for “the number one most left-on-the-subway paper in the city,” his two kids (Kristen Bell and Tituss Burgess), and a lovable busker (Josh Gad) who creeps on them by peeping through their house’s windows. (It’s totally cool, he tells us; after all, he’s the narrator!)

Considering how many songs drop in each episode, I’m impressed by how catchy they are. It’s hard enough to come up with a single good musical episode — as The Magicians did so memorably in 2018 — but the two episodes I saw included everything from the showboating numbers expected from musicals to lightweight raps. Much of Central Park’s humor, in fact, comes from silly couplets like this: “Papa, I believe this puppy’s heaven-sent / I promise to pick up his every excrement.” Yes, in true Bob’s Burgers fashion, the poop jokes are as plentiful as gritty gum on Manhattan sidewalks.

Beyond that, the musical approach works so well because the actual singing is delightful, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as Kristen Bell famously voiced Frozen’s Anna, while Odom and Daveed Diggs (who plays a dour woman) established themselves in the hit musical Hamilton. Some of the songs are better than others — Bell’s “Weirdoes Make Good Superheroes” is an especially memorable standout — but none of them left me longing for everyone to start chatting normally again.

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It’s worth watching Central Park for the quality of its animation and its pun-laden musical numbers alone. It deserves critical attention, though, for the way it uses these elements to tackle important contemporary issues. Central Park tends to start with a foundation of familiar and comfortable concepts like teenage love and job dissatisfaction and then uses them to springboard into commentaries on the ways that, say, some of our most precious institutions exist only thanks to a fragile thread of legislation.

To its great credit, Central Park never knocks you over the head with these messages. Much as Apple TV+ did with its wonderful series Little America, it instead subtly communicates these ideas through empathy and shared experiences with the characters rather than through direct lecturing. The approach works more often than not.

In this era of social distancing and general uncertainty, Central Park also works as a powerful reminder of the importance and vitality of shared public spaces and, for that matter, the messy compromises we sometimes need to make in order for our communities to flourish. Sometimes, Central Park suggests, you simply have to deal with the fact that you’re going to have to pick up some trash. On the other hand, I admire that Central Park seems to be building to a conclusion that argues that some things shouldn’t be compromised.

If there’s one thing that almost all of Apple TV+  shows have had in common until this point, it’s that they take a couple of episodes to put the pieces in place and then the really good episodes — the ones that leave the best impressions — drop later in the season. Based on the two episodes of Central Park available at premiere, that’s true of this series, too. The difference is that few of Apple TV+’s shows have pulled off that approach so successfully, to the point that I’m now eager to see what Bouchard and his buddies have in store for us for the next few Fridays going forward. This is a beautiful and rewatchable setup, filled as much with heart as it is with scatological jokes. It’s also optimistic, and right now, that’s a welcome gift.

We Find The True Meaning Of Friendship In MK 11’s Aftermath DLC | Potato Mode

Mortal Kombat 11 has finally received its Aftermath expansion DLC, and brought tons of new content with it. New characters, stages, and story chapters to accompany brand new ways to bring the pain to anyone sitting on the opposite side of the screen as you. A nice surprise was also the return of friendships! Everyone’s favorite humor filled way to humiliate their opponent after defeat is well and alive in MK11! What better way to celebrate all of this new content? Why we are doing a special run-back episode of Potato Mode just to cover it all!

Potato mode is our premiere low graphic show where not only do we turn the graphics down all the way, but we take it just a little further. Textures, models, and more will be turned to mush as we fight and friend out way through each of the new stages and check out new fatalities and friendships for Robocop, Fujin, and Sheeva as well as many others. Whose insides will oddly look the most delicious in this second follow up episode of MK11 Potato mode?

Mortal Kombat 11’s Aftermath expansion is out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC now!