Amazon Prime Day 2019 is almost here. The online retailer’s annual summer sale officially kicks off on Monday, July 15, and it’ll offer Amazon Prime members bargains on hundreds of products, ranging from video games, consoles, VR headsets, and much more. The deals will extend into other forms of entertainment as well, including 4K UHDs, making this a good opportunity to bolster your movie library.
Prime Day may still be a couple of days away, but a handful of deals have already begun cropping up online ahead of the big shopping day, with many more to come once the sale officially begins. 4K UHDs are normally pretty pricey, so if you’re in the market for some new movies (and have the required hardware to play them), you’ll definitely want to browse this year’s selection of deals.
You can see some of Amazon’s best preliminary 4K UHD deals below. They include discounts on some recent blockbusters, as well as a few pre-orders on upcoming releases. Be sure to check back over the next couple of days, as we’ll be updating this list with more deals as they emerge.
Amazon Prime Day runs for a full 48 hours, ending at midnight Pacific Time on July 17, but that isn’t the only sale going on. Not to be outdone, many other stores, including Target, Walmart, Ebay, and all the other online retailers, are also offering discounts on a variety of video games, accessories, and other products to compete with Prime Day, so you’ve got plenty of deals to choose from.
While Phase 4 of the MCU is still largely shrouded in mystery and speculation, there has been a steady smattering of casting news revolving around one specific upcoming project: The Eternals, which so far, has reportedly nabbed big names like Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani as well as (potentially debunked) rumors of Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as unconfirmed roles in the ensemble.
But major talent aside, the question still remains: Who–and, perhaps more importantly, what–are Marvel’s Eternals? Where do they come from and how do they fit into the MCU’s current landscape? Are they the next Avengers? The next Guardians of the Galaxy? The next Asgardians? Or are something else entirely? To get to the bottom of these questions, we need to take a look into some real-life superhero history.
The once and future King
It’s impossible to disentangle the story of the Eternals from the legacy of one of comics biggest icons: Jack Kirby, the man responsible for co-creating the teams that established Marvel as we know it today like the Fantastic 4, X-Men, and Avengers. His name may not be as universally recognized as Stan Lee, but his fingerprints are all over the MCU and his ideas form the baseline DNA of our modern understanding of superheroes across the board. This is largely thanks to the fact that Kirby worked extensively on both Marvel and DC projects through most of what we know now as the Silver and Bronze ages–roughly between the early ’60s to the late ’70s.
Kirby’s relationship with both Marvel and DC is a point of some historical contention, but the long and the short of it is that during his time at either company, he was largely given carte blanche to create the stories he wanted, which he would write, draw, and edit on his own. At DC, that manifested as the Fourth World saga, a new cosmic mythology that gave us characters like Mister Miracle, Darkseid, Steppenwolf (shout out to Justice League, I guess), and Big Barda. It was left unfinished after the books involved were canceled, though the characters and the stories were eventually picked up years later by other creative teams. The cancelation prompted Kirby to pack up and return to Marvel, where he did–well, essentially the same thing. The Eternals were Kirby’s answer to the Fourth World for Marvel, and a chance to explore the same themes he began broaching over at DC in spite of his canceled books.
The themes themselves were pretty crazy. At this point in his career, Kirby was less interested in biff-bang-pow superheroics and more interested in things like high concept theology and how that would actually intersect with a world where superpowered gods walked the Earth. For the Fourth World, he took Judeo-Christian elements to make (and critique) a new, cosmic version of Heaven and Hell. For The Eternals, he went a bit more broad, cribbing from Greek, Roman, and Incan pantheons, as well as literary historical texts and epics–everything from The Odyssey to Shakespeare–to make a brand new creation myth for the Marvel Universe.
Okay, so what is the myth?
The Eternals story goes like this: The universe is populated with giant, timeless, immortal gods called Celestials who create experimental life on planets throughout the cosmos. Coincidentally, one of their experimental planets just happened to be Earth, about five million years pre-history, where they found the start of human life, conducted their experiments, and gave rise to three different “species” of humanity–humans, Eternals, and Deviants–all of which evolved over time as the Celestials observed from afar.
Humans were just regular humans, but Eternals and Deviants were special. Eternals were immortal, ageless and beautiful while Deviants were similarly timeless but monstrous and cruel. As the three species evolved together, the Eternals inadvertently became the foundation for many of humanity’s myths–the gods of various pantheons, the main characters in fables, etc–while the Deviants were driven underground to effectively become the basis for human concepts like demons or Hell.
With the Eternal/Human/Deviant trinity, Kirby was able to recontextualize the whole of human history in the Marvel Universe–but the effects were extremely localized at first. It took years, but eventually, the new creation myth was retroactively applied to characters like Thanos (yeah, that Thanos) who was revealed to be a Deviant from his home planet of Titan, the result of another Celestial experiment.
The major conflict of Eternals-focused stories is usually two-fold. They are constantly at war with the Deviants who hate both the Eternals and all of humanity, but they also struggle against the Celestials who tend to believe their experiments have shelf lives. The Celestials visit their planets in “hosts” to instigate apocalyptic events (like the biblical 40-day and 40-night flood) to hit the hard reset button on all life–something that both the Eternals and the humans tend to take issue with.
Who are the Eternals?
Honestly, there are way, way too many Eternal and Deviant characters in the Marvel universe to keep track of, so for the sake of simplicity, we’ll focus on the ones that are likely to play a big role in the MCU.
There’s Ikaris, the de facto protagonist of Kirby’s original series, and the father of Icarus, the guy with the wax wings from mythology. Ikaris is a friend of humanity and one of the major players in rallying his Eternal brothers and sisters to play a role in the world of superheroes.
Sersi is a trickster Eternal with magic abilities that can control and shape-shift atoms into new forms. She’s the basis for a whole bunch of myths and historical literature like the goddess Circe, and Penelope the wife of Odysseus to name a few.
Thena, an eternal who is “constantly mistaken” for the Greek goddess Athena, was the inspiration for the city of Athens. She had an affair with a Deviant leader named Kro which resulted in twin half-Deviant, half-Eternal children.
Other likely additions to the MCU are Zuras and Ajak who were Eternals that served to inspire and muddle Greek myths with Zuras becoming an analogy for Zeus and Ajak becoming an analogy for the hero Ajax. There’s also The Forgotten One, who was the basis of fables like Beowulf and Gilgamesh, and Druig who specialized in secrecy and espionage and worked with the K.G.B (a Black Widow tie-in, maybe?)
What does this mean for the MCU?
The short answer is: it’s almost impossible to tell. As it stands right now, outside from the existence of Thanos himself, we’ve only had one real allusion to the Eternals at all in the MCU–a throwaway line about Vormir (remember, the Soul Stone planet?) being the “center of Celestial space.”
Introducing the Eternals into the MCU means a serious chance to start doing some real archeology into the shared universe’s history–way beyond what we’ve already done with movies like Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel–but with that opportunity comes some unique challenges. Because they’re typically so tangential to the traditional superheroics, getting them to mesh in the established story will be tricky–even finding a place to back door them into the mix like Black Panther and Spider-Man via Civil War will be a careful balancing act.
However, risks aside, the Eternals mark a whole new universe of opportunity that could make the MCU seem even more expansive than it already is, and bringing the Celestial conflict into the spotlight is certainly one way to up the ante after Thanos.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what happens, the Eternals won’t be a replacement Avengers, and they’ll stand completely apart from other teams like the Guardians of the Galaxy or other mythologically inspired races like the Asgardians–which is a very cool prospect, but also an intimidating one. We’ll just have to hold on and keep our ears to the ground for more Phase 4 news before we get too deep into the guessing game.
SolSeraph is overtly inspired by the Super NES cult classic ActRaiser. If there was any shred of doubt of its roots given its mixture of action-platforming and sim-style management, that was removed when it opened with a slow spinning first-person view barrelling towards the earth–an homage to ActRaiser’s Mode-7 showpiece so specific that it virtually winks at the audience. Curiously, though, it’s some of SolSeraph’s departures from ActRaiser that let it stand on its own, for better and for worse.
SolSeraph puts you in the divine boots of Helios, the Knight of Dawn, as he helps build civilization and fight against a set of Younger Gods who each manifest as the embodiment of a natural disaster. There is a hodge-podge of religious iconography at play, and Helios looks especially angelic, but this isn’t tied to any specific faith. Instead, SolSeraph invents its own mythology, borrowing bits and pieces from world religions.
Each of the five territories consists of two distinct game types. To begin, you fight through monsters to unlock a new civilization. Each one is housed on its own environment type which presents its own set of hazards. An island nation is prone to constant flooding, for example, while the snowy northern tribe has trouble tending farms and needs to rely on livestock instead. You guide the people to manage their population and resources, like food and lumber, while also building defensive structures to fend off attacks from monsters. Then you can build a temple near one of the monster lairs, take part in another action-platforming or arena battle to clear it, and continue until you unlock the final portion that houses the Younger God boss.
This all may sound very familiar to ActRaiser fans, but the focus on defending against waves of monster attacks is actually a wild departure. SolSeraph’s approach is more akin to a tower defense game, as the waves of monsters all march on a set path toward a centralized base marked by a campfire. Defeating waves of monsters takes a variety of defensive structures, even earning its own part in the radial menu, along with the godly powers to summon lightning or dispatch a guardian. In short, it takes the formerly minor threat of monster attacks and makes it much more active and central to the experience.
On one hand, this change makes the sim portions feel that much more dynamic. Protecting your people from brutal waves of monster attacks can be much more frenetic than the relaxed, casual sensation of watching your society grow and occasionally guiding your people in the right direction. On the other hand, this approach comes at the expense of what made ActRaiser such an interesting examination of faith.
In ActRaiser, society grew on its own as you mildly steered them, and your tools were limited. You could summon an earthquake to destroy houses and encourage stronger building, but you couldn’t meticulously place each individual building on a grid. In some ways, ActRaiser functioned as a reflection on the limitations of divinity. Interactions were indirect, and the stories that played out were sometimes tragic. The people assumed it must be the will of a higher power, but in reality, you were powerless to stop some events that they had set in motion by their own free will. It’s a powerful idea that, in SolSeraph, is undermined by having such direct control over everything your civilization does.
The spirit is still there, to a point. The people pray to Helios without ever hearing an answer, so the idea is still present that they’re operating on faith and hoping some dispassionate deity will end their struggles. But this is present only in short story sequences, and it’s discordant with the mechanics of the game itself. There is no sensation that the culture is flourishing on its own. You aren’t gently guiding as much as dictating, which feels oddly out-of-step with the idea that the people have unproven faith in a higher power.
Functionally, the sim segments are relatively simplistic but often unintuitive. Monster waves come infrequently enough that it’s often easy to build up a massive arsenal of defenses before the first attack ever comes. There’s no real penalty for failure, and in fact getting a game over screen just starts the monster clock over again from zero while keeping all of your recent building changes. At the same time, it isn’t always clear where the monsters will be coming from or in what numbers. Building temples to clear monster lairs relies on meeting a threshold of “Souls,” which are gathered from defeated monsters. This can be counterintuitive in a game about a god gathering worshippers, who could also logically be counted as souls and more sensibly connect to building a worship temple. Instead, the population only matters inasmuch as it gives you bodies to assign to defensive structures and farms. There is no counter for your total number of assigned versus idle villagers, which means you may reassign them at a critical moment by accident.
The game’s other half, the action-platforming segments, can be unforgiving. The controls are rigid and monsters come from all sides, which often makes it difficult to turn quickly to take on different threats. Life comes at a premium, with very sparse health regen and a magic spell that only recharges one measly health point at a time. Checkpoints are often nowhere to be found, which is especially frustrating when you accidentally wander into an optional area with a tougher battle that grants some small permanent reward like extra Weather Magic for the sim portion.
Much more problematic in the action sequences is the interplay between the foreground and background. Helios does his battle strictly on one plane, but enemies often approach from the foreground or background. You can see them approaching, but until they reach your plane, slashing with your sword won’t touch them. The transition between untouchable and vulnerable isn’t clearly signaled, so oftentimes your best bet is to slash wildly at an approaching enemy until it takes damage–but since some of them fly diagonally towards you, this isn’t foolproof. The interplay between these areas can present a good challenge when it’s just background characters firing projectiles that you’ll need to dodge, but the tendency for enemies to cross from one plane to another just creates more frustration than it’s worth.
The Younger Gods boss characters are the exception to this rule and where the combat shines. The old-school challenge isn’t hampered by the gimmick present in normal enemy encounters. Better yet, the collection of boss designs are largely a creative mixture of different cultural traditions from around the world, and each one’s power set and attack patterns connect with the natural disasters they have represented for your people. Defeating them grants you a new power, but it’s nearly as satisfying to have defeated the personification of floods, drought, or wildfires, after watching your culture struggle with them.
SolSeraph could have hemmed slightly closer to the conventions of its clear inspiration, and it may have been better for it. The changes to the sim aspect create gameplay depth at the expense of tonal depth, and the action segments can be annoyingly clunky, especially with the unnecessary addition of enemies that are untouchable until an unclear point in time. The willingness to riff on one of the most beloved classics of an entire console era shows a remarkable amount of audacity, and it actually halfway works. It’s the half that doesn’t that makes SolSeraph such a qualified recommendation.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey recently introduced a Story Creator mode, allowing players to build their own custom missions. Ubisoft has noticed a glut of missions intended to easily boost XP, and has announced changes to the mode to prevent farming. The studio said in an update that it is doing this to maintain the integrity of the creative mode, as well as to keep the XP farming missions from crowding out other community stories that are using the mode as intended.
“Story Creator Mode was designed to be a tool for players to let their creativity and imagination run free as they build their very own Stories to share with others, using a modified version of the tools our own designers used to develop the quests in the game,” the update states. “These exploits risk jeopardizing the overall quality, integrity, and purpose of Story Creator Mode and results in less visibility for the creative, interesting and frankly fantastic community stories that have been published.”
The post details several steps it will be implementing going forward to reduce the instances of these XP farming quests. Those include filtering XP farming quests from its automatic recommendation system, hiding any stories that are reported for exploits, sanctioning those who misuse the tool, and updating the terms of use to reflect these changes. It also says it will be implementing “further solutions” in the future with other title updates.
While some of these changes do clearly connect with improving visibility for non-farming quests, banning the quests altogether isn’t necessarily needed for that goal. It’s worth noting that Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s steep experience ramp was one common point of criticism among reviews, including in our own. The in-game shop also offers a permanent XP boost item as a real-money purchase.
“When looking at Odyssey in the bigger picture, it can often feel like too much game for its own good,” Alessandro Fillari wrote. “There are numerous moments where the loop of exploring, completing missions, and traveling can slow the pace significantly. This is exacerbated by the expansive map, which can sometimes feel excessively big and a chore to travel through. … Several times throughout my journey, progression was somewhat exhausting, which made some of the more impactful and exciting moments in the story feel like a drag.”
For more content authored by Ubisoft itself, the final installment in the Fate of Atlantis episodic DLC trilogy is coming on July 16. That is the last piece of planned DLC that we know of for the game, which released in 2018.
Blofeld actor Christoph Waltz has been spotted on the set of Bond 25 and has filmed scenes for the new movie, according to the Daily Mail. The actor was rumored to be returning for the upcoming film a few months ago, and it seems those rumors were accurate.
When Waltz was spotted at Pinewood Studios in London, he reportedly put his fingers to his lips and said: “You haven’t seen me. I’m not here.” The Mail also claims an executive on the film told the newspaper “there’s unfinished business between Bond and Blofeld.”
The character is a longtime Bond villain perhaps most famously portrayed by Donald Pleasance in You Only Live Twice (1967) and Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). After legal disputes forced the character away from the franchise for over 30 years, he returned in 2015’s Spectre, this time played by Waltz. The villain’s helicopter is shot down by Bond during the film’s finale, but he survives and Bond spares him before walking away.
Other actors to reprise their roles for Bond 25 include Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes (M), Naomie Harris (Eve Moneypenny), Lea Seydoux (Dr Madeleine Swann), Jeffrey Wright (Felix Leiter), and Ben Whishaw (Q). The film, whose first footage was revealed just recently, is set for release on April 3, 2020.
EA has released a new update for FIFA 19 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The patch, which is live now, focuses on infrastructure improvements and sever reliability.
“The first change is focused on reducing the time that it takes for the game to retry sending gameplay information to the network when the initial attempt to send the information was unsuccessful,” EA says. “This is intended to reduce the likelihood of a delay in those inputs taking action in the game in situations where gameplay information was intermittently failing to be sent due to potential network issues.
“The second change is focused on reducing the amount of maximum buffer between when gameplay information is received by the game and when it is visually rendered on the screen.”
Server reliability in online matches has long been a source of frustration for some sections of the FIFA community. In theory, this update should help alleviate some of those issues, and EA says it will continue working to improve its servers for both FIFA 19 and FIFA 20.
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At first, I was one of many who were skeptical of clearing new dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers with an AI-controlled party. Dungeons (or instances) are often nuanced with specific mechanics, putting pressure on you to burn down bosses before things get out of hand. And there’s a certain comfort in taking on the challenge with a group of actual players who know what they’re doing, likely to carry or guide you if you’re having trouble.
But for my first-time dungeon runs in Shadowbringers, I’ve gladly given that up in favor of fighting alongside FFXIV’s cast–it’s hard to overstate the impact of experiencing the most pivotal battles with the characters who’ve shared your harrowing journey.
Dungeons have always been a strong suit of FFXIV as they offer substantial gameplay scenarios that tie directly into the overall story. While you always needed a party of real players, it was never prohibitively difficult thanks to a functional matchmaking system to fill the proper Tank, Healer, and DPS roles. But now we have the Trust system for main quest’s dungeons in Shadowbringers.
No longer do DPS players, such as myself, have to wait in potentially long queues to progress the main story. Despite a largely positive experience with random players, I’m not burdened with the fear of not carrying my weight (shout out to multiplayer anxiety). And I’m free to go at my own pace since I dictate when the party moves. That’s all well and good, especially for getting familiar with dungeon mechanics, but those reasons aren’t necessarily what make the Trust system so important.
Throughout FFXIV, it always felt a little odd that your long-time allies, Scions of the Seventh Dawn, would often conveniently show up in cutscenes once the dust settled, or they’d be fighting their own side-battle that you’d rarely get to see play out. But now, we see them participate in the consequential battles, and they are active in your success.
We wanted to make sure that we’re depicting them on this journey together and with you, so that players would fall even more in love with the characters and see them in that kind of light…make them more alive in this game we play. – Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of FFXIV
Take the first dungeon, Holminster Switch, for example (see the video above); it’s your first taste of the high stakes of Shadowbringers’ story, with creatures of Light consuming the people and wildlife, and setting villages ablaze. This is also a resolution for a smaller, yet tragic arc for the major character Alisaie and a close friend of hers. When you bring Alisaie and her twin brother Alphinaud along as teammates, small bits of dialogue between them give insight into the struggles she’s faced with. Alphinaud has been such an important character since A Realm Reborn, and finally he’s actively picking up the team with his scholarly healing abilities. Similarly, we get to see the enigmatic Crystal Exarch walk the walk and take part in the fight he’s helping lead, adapting to whichever role you need filled.
Holminster Switch also exudes a sense of urgency through well-scripted sequences and a powerful theme song that sets a bold tone for the dire situation. So, to overcome it with the ones who are integral to the events at hand, rather than players you probably won’t see again or that don’t exactly have a place in your personal journey, builds a stronger connection to the cast and narrative stakes. After all, it was one of the major reasons for creating the Trust system.
“…I’m fine. We should keep moving.
FFXIV director Naoki Yoshida himself shares the sentiment, and told me in an interview, “We had this goal of [telling a story about] trying to save the world from immediate doom, but you never really felt that sense of battling together with the members of the Scions. We wanted to make sure that we’re depicting them on this journey together and with you, so that players would fall even more in love with the characters and see them in that kind of light…make them more alive in this game we play.”
Yoshida-san continued, “We’ve manually programmed this AI so that it will bring out the personalities of these different characters, and we have spent a lot of development resources in order to bring out these characteristics.”
He also spoke to the balancing act of making sure it doesn’t overshadow the multiplayer aspect that’s crucial to FFXIV; it’s still an MMORPG. And in my experience, the trade-offs are easily recognizable. The Trust system only applies to the main story questline dungeons and is specifically designed to be less efficient than a competent party that uses optimal attack rotations and tactics. You’ll also wipe and reset to your last checkpoint if you yourself get knocked out in battle. Overall, it’ll take up more time to clear dungeons through Trust. One benefit first-timers get, however, is that AI-controlled teammates already understand how boss battle work–they’ll telegraph and brace for enemy attacks accordingly and set themselves up for phase transitions properly so the party doesn’t wipe from misunderstanding mechanics.
Finally, you can share some of those pivotal, hard-fought battles with the characters who matter most in the Shadowbringers expansion.
Accommodating different types of players is an important goal for Yoshida-san, who said, “With any aspect of it, all of our players seem to enjoy different elements of the game.” And for those who rather enjoy going solo, he stated, “It’s not necessarily a bad thing to want to play in an MMORPG by yourself and so, I feel that it might be nice to have a system that allows for that.”
Although I’m not finished with the main questline for Shadowbringers quite yet, I do understand that the Trust system changes after the last quest is complete. The AI characters are brought back down to level 71 and must be leveled up by taking them back into early dungeons to gain EXP–they do not sync to the proper level in the post-game. It admittedly sounds like a strange choice, and I’m not sure it’ll be appealing to grind dungeons to level them back up. For me, I’m content with its existence as a means to support stronger storytelling.
Speaking more broadly, it’s easy to think of the Trust system as the development team sowing the seeds for preserving the rich narrative aspect of FFXIV. In its most recent count, Square Enix reports that over 16 million players are registered with the game. But far into the future, when a player-base naturally wanes, those instanced dungeons tied to crucial story quests would become a nuisance to run if it solely relied on matchmaking or forming parties. Retrofitting previous content with the Trust system wouldn’t be without its constraints, though.
Yoshida-san spoke to how ambitious of an undertaking it would be, saying, “We mentioned that it will cost a lot of development resources, in order to program the AI. If we were asked, ‘Will we be applying this to previous content, like areas in A Realm Reborn?’ it’s going to be a very difficult decision because again, it takes massive development resources. We will need to make a decision if we want to continue applying this system to contents that are coming in the future.”
The world and narrative of FFXIV has spanned nine years at this point, accounting for the original launch which is the vital foundation for all that’s happened in the game. Finally, you can share some of those pivotal, hard-fought battles with the characters who matter most in the Shadowbringers expansion. Admittedly, this perspective on the Trust system’s importance hinges on how invested you are in FFXIV’s story. But I, and many others, see that FFXIV has transcended its MMO sensibilities to become one of the great tales told in the storied franchise.
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Walmart doesn’t want you to visit Amazon for Prime Day, at least if you want to score an unbelievable deal on an enormous new television.
Samsung 75-inch QLED 4K UHD TV Deal
Samsung’s QLED displays are astonishing. Seriously, the colors and clarity they produce are just fantastic. I reviewed one of Samsung’s QLED monitors a while back, and when I went back to my regular monitor, it felt like I went to a black-and-white screen. The reds and blues are so vivid and bold, without looking over-saturated or blown out.
