The first beta test for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary‘s release on PC is coming up soon. Developer 343 Industries announced in a blog post (via Windows Central) that the first public test–or “flight” in the Halo vernacular–will begin in February.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is the second title within Halo: The Master Chief Collection that’s coming to PC and other digital stores, following Halo: Reach at the end of 2019.
Microsoft is looking to test various elements of Halo: Combat Evolved, including the campaign (both solo and co-op), as well as multiplayer and its progression system.
In addition to launching the first Halo on PC, this next testing phase will include updates and improvements for Halo: Reach that Microsoft is testing before rolling out publicly. One of the updates is a feature that allows players to crouch while moving, which is supported on both mouse and keyboard and controller.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for PC will cost $10 USD on its own or $40 USD through The Master Chief Collection. A release date for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary’s final version for PC hasn’t been announced yet. The remaining titles in the package–Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo 4–will release later. They will also be tested first through the Halo Insider program before launching publicly for everyone.
Part of the reason why Microsoft is being so thorough and extensive with its testing is because Halo: The Master Chief Collection got off to a horrible start on Xbox One back in 2014, and the company doesn’t want to repeat those same mistakes. It’s also worth noting that Halo: The Master Chief Collection is in a very good places these days with active player populations and ongoing support and updates.
2020 is a very big year for the Halo brand, as 343’s other internal team is working on Halo: Infinite for release across Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC later this year.
Confederate, the controversial HBO show from the minds of Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, has been officially canceled. HBO programming boss Casey Bloys confirmed this to TVLine.
Confederate was to take place in an alternate reality and depict the ramifications of a Confederate victory during the American Civil War. It would have been set in a version of America where slavery had not been abolished.
Back in 2017, the show’s announcement sparked some controversy, with many arguing that Weiss and Benioff were not the right pair to tackle this subject matter. In May 2019, Bloys said that the show was not a priority, and when Weiss and Benioff signed their new deal with Netflix, it looked like Confederate was done for.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a huge movie, earning 10 nominations at the 2020 Academy Awards and grossing over $373 million worldwide. Now, in an interview with critic Peter Travers on YouTube, Tarantino has talked about his process working on the film, and what inspired the film’s narrative.
(Warning: some spoilers for the movie follow.)
Tarantino recalls the slow process of writing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and says that when he initially started work, it didn’t take form as a movie script right away. “I wasn’t in a hurry to sit down and write a movie script,” he says. “Even my very first couple of years writing on it, I wrote it as a novel, or at least a couple of chapters as a novel, in a exploratory way.”
An opening scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Pacino was initially written in the style of a one-act play. These were exploratory writing activities, Tarantino explains; he never seriously intended to write the whole piece as a book.
Tarantino says that the movie really started to coalesce when an older actor on a movie he was directing (he does not give specifics) approached him about their own stunt double, who they’d been working with for nine years. The actor approached Tarantino and asked if they could maybe use the stunt double for a scene they were shooting soon, for the sake of giving the stunt double something to do in the movie.
On the day in question, the stunt double showed up and did a great job. Tarantino says that as the day went on, he observed the relationship between the actor and their stunt double. “You could tell that there was a time where this guy was a perfect double for the actor,” Tarantino recalls. “Perfect. I mean, you could have shot close-ups with the stunt guy, and they would have passed. This time…was not that time.”
Instead, there was an air of melancholy to the pair, Tarantino recalls.: “this was maybe the last or second-to-last thing they’d be doing together.”
Tarantino says that as he watched the two actors, who were both dressed in the same costume, have a discussion, he could “see the whole nine years of their relationship,” knowing that this is the tail end of it. He thought about what this friendship would look like, when “one is working for the other”. The stunt person, he thought, is the one person the actor always knows on every movie set, as they might find themselves working with actors or directors they don’t know. “Wow…that’s an interesting relationship,” he thought.
Tarantino also talks in the interview about Sharon Tate, and how he thinks she has been, historically, “reduced to an extra in her own story” because of the brutality and cultural impact of her murder. He talks about how audiences, when they think about Sharon Tate, are mostly just going to think about her murder at the hands of the Manson family–before they’ve seen the film, at least. “I think the perception of Sharon has changed…now people think of her as more than just a murder victim.”
He also addresses controversy around how few lines Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate has in his film. “The fact that people would think that a character is denoted by the level of dialogue that they have…that is a situation where I just don’t agree with that hypothesis.”
The director also addresses his impending apparent retirement from film-making after his next movie. “I haven’t retired, so the idea of me talking about the aesthetics of my retirement before I’ve retired is kind of obnoxious…But I guess I do believe that directing is a young man’s game,” he says, saying that he’d like to work more as a writer. “My modus operandi is facing a pile of blank paper, where there was nothing before, and filling those blank pages,” he says.
Tarantino would like to “lean a little more into the literary,” he says, and become more of a homebody following the impending birth of his first child. However, he also acknowledges that he’s not entirely sure what he’ll do next.
Tarantino was attached to direct a new Star Trek movie until recently, but it looks like that film won’t be happening now. Tarantino also intends to direct the five episodes of Bounty Law he wrote for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the Avenue 5 premiere follow…
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Those looking for a new series that matches the acerbic wit and venom of Veep could obviously do worse than HBO’s Avenue 5, from Veep (and The Thick of It) creator Armando Iannucci. Yes, even though an argument could be made that the series became even funnier when Iannucci left as showrunner after Season 4 and David Mandel took over, Avenue 5 is still filled to the brim with enough spiteful workers, bitter cogs, and depleted hollow leaders to satisfy anyone’s penchant for rampant pessimism.
Bottom line: Avenue 5 is funny. The series opener, “I Was Flying,” certainly has a handful of drop-dead diabolical lines. But the witticisms are also often sidelined because of the series’ sci-fi skin. As a viewer, you spend equal time absorbing both the premise and the jokes and because of that some of the dry laughs don’t land.
Because it’s the pilot, one gets caught up trying to figure out the bones and bible of this future world (that smacks of Wall-E, Brazil, and a few other surreally defeatist takes on humanity’s fate) at the expense of some of the humor. Obviously, as the series goes on, the particulars of the show’s world will start to feel normal and more attention can be paid to the idiots in charge of this vanity pleasure cruise around Saturn (that gets magnificently derailed into a galactic prison), but this first episode has the unenviable job of introducing us to everything while still having to be funny.
The ensemble, while chock full of comedy chops, is lacking crucial root-ability at the moment. This could easily change as it the show moves forward and finds nuances to the characters that allow us enjoy them a bit more, even as soulless as most of them are. Of course, Veep’s bread and butter was verbal brutality but we still perversely rooted for the Selina Meyer and her team as the perceived underdogs. The best part of Veep, in fact, was that we could equally enjoy Selina’s wins as much as her humiliating losses. We don’t quite have that yet with Avenue 5 as it follows people in charge who don’t care about the people they’re supposed to protect – and also the people themselves, who are nightmares in their own right.
House M.D.’s Hugh Laurie (also of Veep, and of a tremendous British comedy background) is the anchor here, as Captain Clark, space “hero,” in charge of glad-handing and keeping spirits up aboard space-cruiser Avenue 5. Part of his day-to-day not only involves smiling and motivating, but tolerating Josh Gad’s man-baby Herman Judd, the hapless head of a Buy n Large-style tech company that’s taken over the cosmic exploration biz (as well as most of Earth one might assume). Because of Judd’s ridiculous needs and unfounded wants, the pilot-less luxury liner experiences a gravity mishap that sends it off course. So much so that a two month excursion becomes a three-year trek of terror.
The biggest laugh from the premiere actually involves a detour from the dialogue, as an entire Avenue 5 yoga class gets hurled into the side of the ship while the passengers’ loved ones get to witness the disaster unfold in real time on Earth – but with a 26 second delay. It’s fun to watch people panic with no immediate follow up to the catastrophe, as they have to wait for the transmission to catch them up. It was a big enough, and funny enough, moment that it was able to break through some of the series’ distracting gimmickry.
Lenora Crichlow’s second engineer, Billie, seems to be the odd one out, here at the start, as the only character devoid of ego and cruelty. Among Zach Woods’ misanthropic concierge, Suzy Nakamura’s humorless executive, and the other callous characters she might best represent our interests and ideas. It’s hard to say though. Avenue 5 feels like a social experiment as much as a high-concept comedy. As if everyone on board thought they were in the Good Place, only to find out it’s all a Bad Place illusion designed to push everyone to the brink of anxiety and agony.
Warning: Full spoilers for Episode 3 of The Outsider follow…
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The Outsider began to resemble Hulu’s Castle Rock, in a certain “mixtape” sense, this week with “Dark Uncle.” And by that I mean King-verse character Holly Gibney, played here by Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo, made her debut while Holly Gibney is also currently being played by another actress (Justine Lupe) over on the Audience Network’s Mr. Mercedes. Not that The Outsider and Mr. Mercedes are meant to exist in a shared universe like King’s books.
See Holly is also a key character in King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, which includes the books Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. Now the other show’s Holly is still a menagerie of mental maladies and marvels, but The Outsider’s take on her is still very much its own thing. It’s an iteration, and a portrayal, that’s different enough to (if you’d like) consider the two to be different characters. Overall, it’s just fun trivia and a way of segueing into the fact that Erivo is absolutely fantastic here.
With Holly in the mix The Outsider basically becomes a different show. Not tonally, per se, but now it’s now more of a full-fledged monster hunt, in very able-bodied X-Files way, featuring an investigator who’s going to be totally open minded about whatever she finds. And that’s going to hit a brick wall, most likely, with Ralph and the rest of the team. Especially Ralph since he flat out said he has no time or tolerance for the unexplained.
The way the first two episodes premiered together on the same night makes even more sense now given the introduction of Holly here and the shift away from the main town. With Jason Bateman’s Terry dead, and the damage already done back home — including the deaths of young Frankie’s family (Ralph eyes their fresh graves at one point) — the story is going to branch out more fully and dig into the lore of what this doppelgänger-type creature is. But there’s still a nice slow burn happening. The information is changing but the pace hasn’t quickened and that helps tether us to the Terry episodes.
Erivo gives us a Holly who’s both haunted and assured. Both vulnerable and in control. She’s a wonderful mix of limitations and savant-like acumen. And she lays it all out on the table for Ralph during their meeting. Her mental gifts got her poked and prodded by teams of cold scientists as a youth and now she’s doing her best to cope and contribute. So why is she brought in? Well Ralph’s guilt over all that went down has him working, while out on leave, to find out what happened. Not in full to clear Terry’s name (though he’d like to), but just to uncover the truth so it doesn’t eat away at him. And when Yunis shows him the bizarre evidence (and ooze) the creature left behind in a barn, the two head to Howie Gold for help.
Because of this, the story now has two prongs: Ralph back home tending to the Maitland grief (and young Jessa Maitland’s dreams that probably aren’t dreams) and Holly out in Dayton retracing the Maitlands steps. Which opens us up to a new wrinkle in the mystery.
“Dark Uncle” contained a mini-mystery that unfolded throughout, centered on an incarcerated man fearing for his life after he spotted a new inmate he was almost certain had arrived to kill him. Answers didn’t come to us until they came to Holly, in that her reading about why the cops would have questioned Terry’s dad for a completely unrelated issue led her to the case of hospital worker convicted of killing two girls.
We can safely assume, at this point, it’s a doppelgänger situation and that this creature/being kills in a chain, going town to town, spreading misery. And that its clone targets aren’t necessarily picked on purpose, but more circumstantially. The way the story opened, with the tale of Terry visiting his dad, with none of the family present, made it seem like maybe his father had some root cause in all of this. But the dad was just the reason Terry was in the same hospital as this inmate – who wound up killing himself rather than get shivved.
THE MOST STEPHEN KING THING YET
Nothing says Stephen King more than a bully-slash-creep who gets targeted, and puppeted, by the monster. And here we’ve got Jack, a drunken violent detective played by Marc Menchaca. To the show’s credit — and it just did the same thing with Holly — we didn’t meet Jack until the show wanted us to. It makes everything feel organic when characters enter focus as needed. Like how messy would everything have felt if we also followed Holly, off in Chicago, during the first two episodes?
Anyhow, Jack got himself stung (darted? quilled?) in the barn as the creature attacked him and…infected him? The back of Jacks neck looks like a burn and the injury is also so debilitating that the entity can cause Jack severe pain from far away, like flipping a switch. In time, the doppelgänger will probably turn Jack into its own person Renfield.
Examining the creature’s powers, at this point, we know that it can take someone else’s form. It also sheds that shape, in some manner, leaving behind glop and what seemed to be dried skin patches. Now, as of “Dark Uncle,” it can spit venom onto someone’s neck and cause them pain. We can guess that that pain makes them bend to the beast’s will as the thing didn’t kill and/or consume Jack. It let him go.
Now as for Jessa’s dreams…she was obviously somehow talking to the thing. Four times. But can it go in her dreams or was it actually in the house? And also, why her? Why not tell Ralph himself? It seems like a self-sabotage move (ya dumb monster!) since very few people would take Jessa’s story as being real. On the upside, the moment allowed Mare Winningham’s Jeannie to step forward as a more active character. At least someone more active than just being Ralph’s partner in mourning.
Fortnite is one of the world’s most popular video games. TikTok is one of the world’s most popular apps. Now, the two are joining forces for a new crossover campaign.
The Emote Royal Contest on TikTok is a new challenge that Epic and the makers of the uber-popular app have announced. Here’s how it works: film yourself performing an original dance move, then submit it on TikTok using the hashtag #EmoteRoyaleContest.
The winning dance, as decided by Epic, will then become a real emote in Fortnite. The winner will also receive 25,000 V-Bucks and a “Fortnite VIP giveaway package.” This includes two hoodies, a crossbody bag, a battle bus drone, a Funko toy, and the Fortnite edition of Jenga, among other things.
Fortnite players Jordan Fisher and Pokimane already created TikTok dances that will be turned into emotes in Fortnite. You can check out their videos embedded in this story to see what you want to try to do to get selected for the contest.
Warning: this review contains full spoilers for Batwoman: Season 1, Episode 10. If you need a refresher on where we left off before Crisis on Infinite Earths, here’s our review for Season 1, Episode 8. We’ll be checking in with all the Arrowverse shows this week to see how they’re moving forward from the events of Crisis, so check back for reviews of Supergirl, Black Lightning, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow this week.
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For all its struggles early on, Batwoman ended in a pretty good place in its midseason finale in December. The events of “A Mad Tea Party” ushered in a new wave of darkness in Gotham City, leading to the murder of Catherine Hamilton, the framing of Jacob Kane, and a major falling-out between Kate and her stepsister Mary. Couple that with the critical character arc Kate underwent during Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Batwoman has all the momentum it needs coming into 2020. Whether the series is going to take advantage of that momentum is another matter.
The events of Crisis altered the fabric of the Arrowverse in ways we’re only going to understand over time, but this episode suggests Batwoman’s status quo hasn’t been significantly altered. In fact, other than Vesper Fairchild’s reference to Oliver Queen’s death, the first half of the episode is basically a straightforward continuation of Episode 8, with few references to all the cosmic shenanigans that just went down. Batwoman has been pretty isolated from the rest of the Arrowverse to date, and it would be nice to see that start to change. At least the ending suggests the aftereffects of Crisis will start coming into play going forward (more on that later).
For the most part, “How Queer Everything Is Today!” sets about picking up the pieces of the damage caused by Alice last year. Jacob is wallowing in jail with the same criminals he put away. Sophie is trying to lead the Crows while the GCPD presses its advantage. And Kate is trying to simultaneously patch up her relationship with Mary and finally bring Alice to justice.
But despite picking up right where things left off in December, Episode 10 struggles to start of the second half of Season 1 with the right sense of urgency. The doom and gloom of Episode 8 has mostly faded. This is most evident with Kate herself. The rage and sense of betrayal she feels is downplayed in favor of scenes of her enjoying her new gadgets or fretting about how she’s being depicted in the Gotham tabloid scene. Even when Kate actually confronts her sister, we never get a true sense of the hatred that’s been festering for weeks. Instead, Episode 10 plays like business as usual in the majority of its scenes.
There is the “Jacob in jail” subplot to spice things up. Unfortunately, as much as the murder of Catherine has managed to shake up the Kane family dynamic, this episode is also an uncomfortable reminder that we’ve seen this plot twist play out in more than one Arrowverse series already. On The Flash, both Barry Allen and his father dealt with being wrongfully imprisoned. Half of Arrow’s seventh season explored Ollie’s time locked behind bars. Batwoman needs to find some way of distinguishing Jacob’s ordeal from those stories. The series has already struggled enough in terms of trying to establish its own identity.
The main Terrier storyline this week is generally pretty uneven. The idea of Terrier as a villain turns out to be more compelling than the reality. There’s always potential in a hacker mastermind with the key to unlocking everyone’s most deeply held secrets. Revealing that villain as nothing more than a socially ostracized high schooler quickly undercuts that story and removes most of the tension. Instead, Terrier’s brief rise and fall becomes little more than another excuse for Alice to ham it up. The series has hinted Alice is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the current threat to Gotham, but it would be nice to see more progress on that front.
Still, as clunky as this episode is in terms of trying to use Terrier/Parker Torres as a mirror for Kate’s own fears and insecurities, ultimately the character does serve a valuable purpose. One of Kate’s more noteworthy qualities is the fact that she, unlike Oliver Queen, doesn’t really want to become “someone else” when she wears a mask. Her whole life is built around her integrity and refusal to pretend to be someone she’s not. For Kate, having a secret identity goes against the grain of who she is. That’s one thing this episode gets right as it explores Kate’s need to redirect the narrative and be open about who she is. In most superhero shows, a hero giving a one-on-one interview to come out of the closet would seem silly and out of place. But here, it makes sense.
As for that ending, the show may have finally found a way of making the sister dynamic more interesting and unpredictable through the addition of Beth 2.0. The obvious assumption is that this Beth is from one of the alternate Earths that existed pre-Crisis. My working theory (at least until one of these shows establishes otherwise), is that all parallel universe doppelgangers were squeezed into one composite person when the Earths merged, and this Beth is an example where that process didn’t happen.
There are other, slightly less outlandish possibilities as well. This could be an impostor trying to mess with Kate’s head. It could be that Alice has found a way to slip in and out of Crow custody and taken on her old identity. But the Crisis theory seems the most dramatically rich option. What does Kate do when she’s finally reunited with the person she’s been searching for her entire adult life? Can she separate this Beth from the damage done by the other Beth? How does Alice react to seeing a better, happier version of herself? Maybe this series can still use the fallout of Crisis to its advantage.
Dragon Ball FighterZ will get at least one more fighter, with Ultra Instinct Goku set to appear in the game this year. The new DLC was announced in Japanese V Jump Magazine, and shared by the Twitter account Dragon Ball Hype.
It’s unclear if this new character heralds a third FighterZ Pass, but Gematsu reports that we’ll learn more during the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour Finals 2019 – 2020 in February.
This is the eighth Goku in the game, not counting the very Goku-like Bardock. Ultra Instinct Goku will join a roster that already includes Super Saiyan Goku, Super Saiyan Blue Goku, Goku Black, base form Goku, Super Saiyan Blue Vegito (Goku and Vegeta fused), Super Saiyan Blue Gogeta (Goku and Vegeta fused, but with a different method) and kid Goku from Dragon Ball GT.
Ultra Instinct was introduced in the latest anime series, Dragon Ball Super, during the Tournament of Power arc. The form shown in the magazine is “mastered” Ultra Instinct, a form in which the body reacts instinctively to every situation. The power-scaling in Dragon Ball FighterZ means that even Yamcha and Videl will potentially be able to beat Goku in this form. It’s not yet clear what Ultra Instinct Goku’s moveset will be.
The 26th Screen Actors Guild Awards were held on Sunday evening, honoring the best performances of 2019 in both film and television!
Joaquin Phoenix and Renee Zellweger took home the top acting prizes for movies while Peter Dinklage, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Fosse/Verdon’s Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams were among those who won for TV. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was the biggest surprise of the night, taking home the trophy for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture while both Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones were honored for their stunt teams.
Check out the SAG awards results below, updated as they roll in, with the winners noted in red and bold!
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.
Joe Biden, the former vice president of the United States of America, is currently campaigning to be the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential election. In an interview with the New York Times, when asked about the expanding power of Silicon Valley during Obama’s time in office, Biden found himself discussing a meeting with “the leaders of Silicon Valley,” and one unnamed game creator evidently left a sour taste in his mouth.
“And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America,” Biden says. “And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, was a multi- —close to a billionaire—who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people…”
An interviewer asks if he’s referring to video games, and Biden continues, “Yeah, video games. And I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively speaking. Have everybody contact. They get out and go out and contact the switchboard, just blow it up.”
The “Leahy” line is likely a reference to Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, although the context is not entirely clear from Biden’s response.
Biden recalls that one of the Silicon Valley people he was meeting with described them as “the economic engine of America,” which he took issue with. “As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment.”
“The point is, there’s an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance,” Biden said, referencing the idea that Silicon Valley was bolstering the economy.
It’s not clear which meeting, or developer, Biden is talking about. Kotaku has theorized several identities for the “creep,” but there’s no definitive answer.
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