Control‘s second and final DLC expansion, AWE, is out now. This expansion is designed to bridge the connection between Control and Remedy’s earlier game, Alan Wake–it turns out Remedy was building a connected universe all along.
All the time of writing, we’re able to purchase and download the expansion on the PlayStation Store; it still says that it’s “Coming Soon” on the Epic Games Store, and some players are reporting that they can’t download it through the Xbox One Season Pass yet; but if you can’t grab it right now, you’ll certainly be able to very soon.
Control creative director Sam Lake has tweeted enigmatically about what to expect from the expansion.
AWE is $15, or can be purchased with the earlier DLC pack, The Foundation, for $25 through the Expansion Pass. You’ll also get both expansions in the Ultimate Edition, and if you don’t have Control yet, this is the way to buy it–it’s the only way to get a free upgrade to next-gen.
Control made GameSpot’s Best of 2019 list, and the AWE DLC will bring the game to a close. The DLC is also accompanied by a free update for the base game, which improves some accessibility issues and makes some areas less frustrating.
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Grand Theft Auto V released in 2013, and has gone on to be absolutely enormous. Ned Luke, who plays Michael De Santa in the game, has said in an interview that while he knew and had played Grand Theft Auto, he didn’t know the name “Rockstar Games” before he was asked to audition for GTA V–and now the company is a very big part of his life.
In a huge interview with TheGamer, Luke has talked about the process of auditioning for GTA V, how it has changed his life, and what he’s doing now. He recalls how, for a period before applying, he had stepped away from acting and returned to his hometown to open a restaurant with his brother. When he returned to acting, GTA V was the first audition he booked.
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to do a video game,” Luke recalls, and when he was told it was a Rockstar title, he responded “Who the hell is Rockstar?”
“The only one I knew was EA Sports: Big, from SSX Tricky, which was my favorite game,” Luke says.
Luke runs through the auditions, and how he felt certain that Steven Ogg–who plays Trevor in the game–would book that part the moment he acted alongside him. “The chemistry was just stupid,” he recalls, and he told Ogg when they left “I don’t know about me, pal, but you’re booking this thing.”
Hilariously, many of his other anecdotes about Ogg involve him farting a lot on set. “I called him a methane actor. We had this thing where we could order healthy food with a lot of stuff in it that makes you fart.”
He also refers to Shawn Fonteno, who plays Franklin, as his “brother,” saying that it “took him a while to get used to this whole thing.” Fonteno had far fewer acting credits, and as Luke says, being in GTA V boosted the profile of everyone in it. “My star rating on IMDb went through the roof…It went up to like number 115 from being down in the millions. Then when the game came out, I went up to number 42.”
Luke also says that he recorded a role in Red Dead Redemption 2, but it was ultimately cut from the game. He also says that he would “love to do DLC” for GTA V, although Rockstar has previously said that won’t happen.
The full interview contains many more anecdotes, stories, observations, and more–check it out.
EA has now shared a schedule for when more details will be released. On August 27, EA will talk about the new updates for the World of Chel social mode. Then in September, the developer will reveal more details on the general improvements to gameplay as well as what’s new in the Hockey Ultimate Team mode. In October, EA will divulge more information about the greatly expanded Be A Pro mode and will, later on, share more details on Franchise.
EA warned that these dates could change, so don’t mark them on your calendar in pen.
NHL 21 launches on October 16 for PS4 and Xbox One. It’s coming later than usual this year due in part to complications related to COVID-19 and working from home. EA would have surely wanted the game to come out sooner, as the real-world NHL season is heating up with the playoffs right now, but these are unprecedented times.
Sky: Children of Light on Switch has been delayed. The game, which first came to iOS in 2019 and released on Android this year, will come to Switch in 2021. Nintendo fans will have to wait a bit longer for Apple’s 2019 Game of the Year.
The game, which was downloaded 20 million times in its first year, is the latest game by Journey developer thatgamecompany. On the game’s website, the studio has announced that the game has been delayed for the same reason so many things have slipped or been cancelled this year–COVID-19.
“Since March, our studio has taken safe measures to ensure all of our team members stay healthy–emotionally, physically, and free from COVID,” the post reads. “Through the pandemic, we’ve done our best to release Sky on Android, manage a live game, and launch two new adventure seasons too.”
As thatgamecompany is a small studio, keeping to this schedule while working from home has been difficult, and while they are “close to being in the final stretch” of the Switch version’s development, they’ve had to delay. “In the meantime, we have also decided to hire more staff to help us with this console release as well,” the post says.
Sky: Children of Light earned an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review of the iPhone version. “Sky is both different to everything thatgamecompany has made before but also a smart evolution of what makes its games special,” wrote reviewer Alessandro Barbosa. “It’s simple to play while feeling incredible at the same time, making the act of flight exciting every time your feet leave the ground. It also features a fascinating spin on in-game purchases, locking its most alluring rewards behind the action of making friends and making a positive enough impression on them.”
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I missed out on Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles when it came out for GameCube way back in 2004, so I was excited to hear it was getting remastered for modern consoles. A lightweight dungeon crawler based on the Final Fantasy universe, starring cute, Chibi-style characters? Sign me up! It ticks so many boxes for my interests, I couldn’t believe I never picked it up way back when. Well, it turns out past-me was doing myself a favor, because this is not a good or fun game in the slightest, and the remaster’s clunky multiplayer makes it even worse. In fact, its repetitive, boring, and frustrating nature means it’s a perfect metaphor for the year 2020: I expected really great things, but instead ended up living out slight variations of the same thing over and over again.
The Final Fantasy lore provides the scaffolding for stories, but Crystal Chronicles never actually builds anything on it. Look, I’m a sucker for dumb premises, and on paper this setting, in which everyone has to recharge their village crystals annually to keep from being poisoned, is exactly what I want from a cutesy dungeon crawler like this. I won’t knock it for being overly simplistic, because that’s exactly what I was expecting; besides, there’s so much else to knock it for and who has the time?
For one thing, the story plays out through boring interstitial cutscenes you randomly encounter at crossroads on the world map. Despite this ostensibly being a remaster, the character animations exude the purest of GameCube energy: mouths flap open and closed in a canned loop, body gestures are extremely limited, and the character models themselves don’t show a lot of signs of being updated from their 2004 versions. Square Enix has added voice acting here, something missing from the original GameCube version, but listening to someone read dull dialogue doesn’t do much to improve it. It’s hard to feel any connection to the secondary characters when their only purpose is to serve as the answers to eventual trivia questions.
I might have felt differently if people I met along the way popped into a dungeon once in a while to lend a hand, or otherwise had any effect whatsoever on gameplay, but the fact that they never do means all of these interactions are completely forgettable, trite filler I couldn’t for the life of me care about. Cruelly, you can’t just mash your way through the dialogue to get to the end, because you would then be punished later on when knowledge of your past dialogue options becomes a critical part of the story, so you still have to pay at least some attention.
On top of being boring and mostly useless, the crossroads scenes are bookended by some pretty ridiculous loading screens. I’m playing on my PS4 Slim, and it takes around 15 to 20 seconds both coming and going. I’ve loaded into cutscenes that last roughly the same length as the loading time, immediately followed by another 15 to 20 seconds of loading. Look, I’m more than willing to look past loading times when they, you know, load something good or worthwhile. But this is preposterous. More than once, I’d complete a dungeon, load, move my caravan one space on the world map (roughly two seconds of movement), only to hit a random crossroads scene… and jump back into the loading screen. In other words, that’s 15 to 20 seconds of loading, two seconds of movement, 15 to 20 seconds of loading, 10 to 60 seconds of pointless cutscenes, followed by another 15 to 20 seconds of loading.
It’s infuriating on the world map, but even more so in some of the levels. One of the dungeons, Moschet Manor, is set up like a mansion. There’s a central courtyard surrounded by monster-filled rooms — these are single rooms, mind you, not whole different branches or multiple locations — and entering into any one of them triggers a loading screen. Leaving them triggers a loading screen. It’s abysmal. To make it worse, the doors only open when the switch in front of them is showing the symbol for the element type of your chalice. That means I sometimes had to stand there while it cycled through every symbol before the switch activated, followed by a loading screen. Oh, and those switches are on the inside of the rooms, too, which means you need to do the same thing to leave. Any rhythm Crystal Chronicles might build up is quickly struck down by absurd loading times and pointless filler.
Fortunately, most of the boss introductions and some of the other repetitive animations are skippable by pressing the Option button. That’s pretty much all I can muster, positivity-wise: some parts of Crystal Chronicles can be skipped over entirely.
Oh, but not all of them. There’s a cutscene before the final battle, and while you can spam through the dialogue, you can’t skip it. With loading times and skipping through all the dialogue, it took me about two full minutes from the time I died until the time the battle started up again. Given the level of difficulty of the final boss, different attempts at this battle took me as little as 10 seconds and as long as 25 minutes – only to lose and start the horrible process over again. I’ve spent around 23 hours playing and I shudder to think of what non-trivial percentage of that time has been spent staring at loading screens.
I understand this is a remaster and not a remake, so keeping in the original difficulty and gameplay is fine. But the unskippable final boss cutscene coupled with the horrendous loading times – something that absolutely should be addressed in a remake on modern hardware – makes Crystal Chronicles impossible for me to enjoy for any length of time.
All of that sounds bad, but it’s not even Crystal Chronicles Remastered’s worst offense: co-op play has been relegated to online-only. If your memories of the original involve hanging out with a group of friends, conquering dungeons while using your Game Boy Advance as a controller, you can sort-of replicate it by installing the “Lite” version of this remaster. It’s basically a free trial version that allows you to join other people’s games and dungeon crawl with them at any point (provided they own the full copy, that is). So if you want to relive your Crystal Chronicles multiplayer dreams, you could have all your friends bring their Switches over with the free Lite version installed – or you play from the comfort of your socially-distanced homes. But I would much rather have had simple, local co-op instead, and since the Lite version isn’t available yet I’m not able to speak to how well it works as a convoluted stand-in.
Getting a group of friends together online isn’t exactly easy, either: you have to send them a proprietary 12-character friend code, one that expires every 30 minutes. This allows for cross-play, according to Square Enix, and the developers worked to develop the online rather than local co-op, saying it was either one or the other. Minecraft: Dungeons, a much better lite-dungeon crawler, offers the opportunity to play either locally or online, although it lacks cross-play.
There are also lobbies you can host or join, and when you first start a dungeon you’re given the option to play single or multiplayer. I was lucky enough to match up with a stranger on my first try, and we fought our way through River Belle pass. It was difficult to work together, since the only way to communicate is by choosing from a menu with pre-written dialogue options (“Let’s do this!” for example), but ultimately we were able to defeat the boss and… my connection was lost as it loaded into the post-level rewards screen. If you lose your connection at any time, you also lose any loot you might have gathered. So that was a waste of time. Also, if you’re joining a friend or stranger online to play, you don’t make any progress in your own game – that’s just for the host.
There’s also no drop-in, drop-out play, so if you find yourself in need of a hand in a particularly tricky dungeon or boss, you need to back out of the level, find someone to join you, and run through it again. There’s one dungeon with optional puzzles that can only be solved in co-op, so I’ll never see what’s on the other side of those doors because at this point I just want this to be over.
Leveling up in Crystal Chronicles is interesting, and if it didn’t require a repetitive grind I’d like it much more. Instead of earning experience points and leveling your character passively, you gain strength through collecting artifacts in the course of your dungeon crawling. There are up to eight per dungeon, and after you defeat the boss, you choose one of the artifacts to keep. Artifacts can increase your strength, magic, and defense, among others. It’s novel, and it’s almost thrilling to discover you collected an artifact with a +3 stat boost. Unfortunately, the repetitive nature of the dungeons and the battles ultimately overshadows the thrill of unlocking a powerful new artifact.
Fights, regardless of whether they’re against minions or a boss, are simplistic and require patience more than any other trait. Wait for any enemy to charge up an attack, run in and hit them, back off to avoid a hit, repeat. You can also charge up a spell and use that, and some of the attacks are ranged, which changes things up slightly. Regardless of the type of attack you use, the pattern is the same: wait, move out of the enemy’s attack, attack with your spell or weapon, get out of range, wait, and repeat. It’s boring with smaller enemies, but on the bosses it’s just mind-numbing because it’s simply a matter of repeating the same attack pattern for minutes at a time. It rewards rote memorization of simplistic patterns rather than any type of skillful timing or resource management. There were times when a boss’s minion might switch things up by coming at me from the left, but in the case of every boss, the best strategy is to take out the minions and focus on repeating the same pattern over and over again until the boss’s life bar is depleted.
You might have heard about a few extra dungeons being added in the remaster, and the good news is they exist! The bad news is you can’t open them up until you’ve beaten the main game, which took me just over 23 hours of solo play. They’re basically remixed “New Game+” style dungeons, mostly painted over existing ones with harder enemies but better loot. However, for some reason they’re not all available at any given time. In fact, they rotate depending on the real-world day. I got a dialogue screen informing me they rotate out each day at 4:00 am Pacific Time, which seems kind of unnecessary, but I’m not interested in playing them anyway.
Inception director Christopher Nolan’s next movie, Tenet, is coming to theatres–yes, theatres–in the US on September 3. Reviews for the film have been generally positive, and even Tom Cruise counts himself as a fan. To help promote the film further, Warner Bros. has released a neat behind-the-scenes video featuring Nolan, the cast, and the producers who talk about what a mammoth undertaking it was to make the big-budget blockbuster.
In the video, Nolan explains the origins of the project. “Tenet is an espionage story; it’s a classic spy story. I grew up loving spy movies,” he said. “But to make it [appeal to] today’s audiences … I wanted it to have bigger possibilities.”
He’s talking about Tenet’s take on time-travel, known as “inversion.” The idea here, which some scientists support, is that the entropy of an object or a person can be reversed. In essence, the people and objects in Tenet are moving backward while others are moving forward in time.
John David Washington, who plays the lead in the film, said in the video he needed to work extra hard on the fight choreography to account for this new mechanic. Washington does a lot of fighting in the film and he has many opportunities to display his athleticism (he is a former professional football player), but this was a new challenge, he says.
Also in the video, the producers and cast speak about how Nolan wanted to keep Tenet grounded in reality, so they used a lot of practical effects and shoots instead of relying on visual effects and CG.
To that end, the production team bought a 747 plane and blew it up at a working airport for one of the movie’s most explosive scenes. They also shut down an entire freeway to film a car chase scene, and overall, the production was a globe-trotting affair with scenes filmed in seven different countries.
Although Tenet is coming to cinemas, whether or not you feel safe attending is a decision you’ll have to make on your own.
Turrican, the 1990 classic action game, is coming back. The action series has long been dormant, but it’s making a return for its 30th anniversary.
The game, originally developed by Factor 5, is returning for an anniversary release from Strictly Limited Games. It’s unclear whether this will be a new game, a remake, or a port as of yet, but we’ll know more soon.
During Gamescom Opening Night Live, which starts at 11 AM PT on August 27, this birthday edition of the game will be shown off. Shortly after, pre-orders for the game, including limited edition releases, will become available on the Strictly Limited Games website.
Back in 2017, Factor 5 re-acquired the rights to Turrican, and was previously working on a cancelled PS3 sequel called Turrican: Cyclone. The press release calls this “the next chapter in Factor 5’s history.”
With September only a few days away, Pokemon Go developer Niantic has outlined some of the events it has in store for the game soon. The next few weeks will bring a handful of Legendaries back to Raids and introduce a new Research Breakthrough encounter, while Team Rocket’s Jessie and James will be blasting off at the end of the month. Here’s a rundown of what’s happening in Pokemon Go in September 2020.
September Research Breakthrough: Alolan Raichu
A new set of Field Research tasks and rewards will go live starting September 1, and completing enough of these will lead to a new Research Breakthrough encounter. Each time players achieve a Research Breakthrough in September, they’ll encounter Alolan Raichu. There’s a chance this Alolan Raichu will be Shiny as well.
Legendary Raid Bosses
Niantic is bringing a different Legendary Pokemon back to five-star Raids every week in September, giving players another chance to catch some rare and powerful monsters. The Legendaries will be available from the following dates:
Every Tuesday evening in September, Niantic will spotlight one specific Pokemon and bonus for one hour. These spotlight events will all run from 6-7 PM local time. You can see the full schedule below:
Date
Spotlight Pokemon
Special Bonus
September 1
Eevee
2x catch XP
September 8
Houndour
2x catch Candy
September 15
Tentacool
2x transfer Candy
September 22
Spearow
2x evolution XP
September 29
Skitty
2x catch Stardust
September Community Day
September’s Community Day event takes place on Sunday, September 20. As chosen by players, the featured Pokemon this month will be Porygon. The Virtual Pokemon will appear in the wild much more frequently than usual throughout the event, and if you can evolve it into its final form, Porygon-Z, up to two hours after the Community Day ends, it’ll learn the event-exclusive move Tri Attack.
Mega Evolution Events
To celebrate the arrival of Mega Evolutions, Niantic is holding three Mega Evolution-themed events throughout September. The first runs from September 1-7 and challenges players to complete as many Mega Raids as they can. The second will follow from September 11-17 and tasks players with using Mega-Evolved Pokemon in battles against Team Go Rocket members and Raid bosses. The final event runs from September 22-28 and has players building up their friendship level with their Mega-Evolved Pokemon.
Go Battle Night
Niantic is hosting a battle-themed event on September 24. From 6 PM to 11:59 PM local time, you’ll earn twice the usual amount of Stardust for winning Pokemon Go battles and ranking up in the Go Battle League. On top of that, Niantic is increasing the number of battle sets you can complete that night to 20 instead of the usual five.
Team Rocket’s Departure
Team Rocket’s Jessie and James are set to leave Pokemon Go at the end of the month. The infamous duo will be appearing in the game until September 30, making this your last chance to challenge them. Like other Team Rocket grunts, you’ll periodically see Jessie and James flying above the world map in their distinctive Meowth balloon; if you spot them, tap on the balloon to initiate a battle.
Victini Special Research
The Mythical Pokemon Victini made its debut in Pokemon Go during Pokemon Go Fest 2020, but all players will have a chance to encounter it in September. Niantic is rolling out a new Special Research questline revolving around the Mythical Pokemon at the end of the month. If you’ve already completed the Victini Special Research from Go Fest, you’ll earn additional Victini Candy from this new questline.
The next chapter of the Netflix horror TV show, The Haunting Of Hill House, is just around the corner. It’s got a new name this time around–we’ve left Hill House in favor of a trip to England for The Haunting Of Bly Manor–a take on Henry James’ gothic novella, Turn Of The Screw.
While Bly Manor doesn’t have a release date set just yet, it would seem an announcement is just around the corner. The show’s social media page posted a cryptic tweet showcasing a help wanted ad for a live-in nanny, featuring a phone number.
You can call the number–we certainly did–and be greeted by a creepy voice mail from the two children of the Windgrave family, letting you know that they are not home right now but, if you’re calling about the nanny position, their uncle will be conducting interviews in five days. We can’t be completely sure what will actually be happening in that time, but we can assume it’ll be some news about the show–possibly the first teaser trailer or an official premiere date.
James’ Turn Of The Screw focuses on–you guessed it–a live-in nanny (or “governess” in 1800s parlance) who is given the task of caring for two young aristocratic children after the death of their parents. The story follows the nanny’s slow descent into madness and paranoia as she begins to suspect that the house is haunted and that the ghosts are manipulating the children.
While Bly Manor will be a separate story from Hill House, you’ll recognize some familiar faces mixed in with the new. Showrunner Mike Flannagan is giving the series the anthology treatment, bringing back actors from Hill House for new characters. Victoria Pedretti (Nell Crain) is Dani, Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Luke Crain) is Peter, and both Kate Siegel (Theo Crain) and Henry Thomas (Hugh Crain) have been cast as well.
The Haunting Of Bly Manor will premiere on Netflix this year.
