New York Comic-Con is filled with a ton of eye-catching booths, events, and cosplayers everywhere. It's a sensory overload; however, I found calm and inner-peace when I was this life-sized JoJo's Bizarre Adventure statue at the Viz Media booth, which you can stare at for hours below.
This statue coming in at around seven feet tall is quite possibly one of the coolest things at the convention. The attention to detail, the paint, and sculpting are amazing. After getting hypnotized by Jotaro's two belts, floating gold chain, and the defiantly popped collar on his jacket, I knew I need to start watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
Viz Media had the statue out as part of a contest during New York Comic Con where they wanted con-goers to take a selfie using the hashtag #jojospose on Twitter and Instagram. Winners would then be selected to receive Set 1 on Blu-ray. The link to the contest rules is broken, but Viz is offering up a few deals on their products, so if you're still at Comic-Con for Sunday, you have a few hours left to check it our for yourself.
A new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer will be shown on October 9 during Monday Night Football and, ahead of it, a teaser has been released. The video, which you can watch below, appeared on Twitter and shows Rey wielding a lightsaber.
The scene seems to pick up shortly after the closing moments of The Force Awakens, during which Rey travels to Ahch-To to meet older Luke Skywalker. As you can imagine, Rey will no doubt undergo training under Luke's tutelage, and the video is a sneak peek at that.
The Last Jedi arrives in theaters on December 15. Actor John Boyega, who plays Finn, recently revealed some new plot details and explained that Finn would continue to be a reluctant hero. "He just wants to get away and not be involved," he said. "His intention in the first place was to go to the Outer Rim. He was brought back [in The Force Awakens], but this is his chance to get away and perhaps find Rey and go off together. He's trying to do that at first."
To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of The Witcher franchise, we've teamed up with J!NX to give away five (5) $100 Giftcards to use towards their new The Witcher 3 apparel and accessories collection! Scroll down to enter below.
Entry is open to US residents, void where prohibited. Competition ends on Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 5:00PM PT. Five winners will be contacted via email.
J!NX has released an epic loot chest to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of The Witcher franchise. See their new collection:
Enter below (the additional entries are optional to increase your chances of winning):
Jonathan Blow led the design of two iconic independent games that dug deep into the minds of those who played them: Braid and The Witness. Both were released on consoles and PC, but Jonathan and his team at Thekla broke into the mobile platform recently by porting The Witness to iOS. It brought up plenty of questions about how this style of game was adapted to a much different ecosystem and what it means for him and his squad of developers.
The Witness received critical acclaim when it initially released in 2016 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. GameSpot's own Mike Mahardy gave it a 9/10 and stated in his review, "The Witness tells a human story, about people trying to make sense of the world around them." It even earned ninth place in our Best Games Of 2016 list. Naturally, we jumped at the opportunity to speak with Jonathan over the phone to pick his brain on the challenges of game development, mobile games, what the future holds, and games he's been playing.
GameSpot: As a game developer, talk about some of the challenges in porting your game to a mobile platform. What difficulties did you run into with getting the game to run properly?
Jonathan Blow: There were sort of three main aspects to it. Part of it was just brute force on the graphics engine, hammering on things to make them fast in a way that's customized for mobile platforms. Our shaders are simplified a little bit so we don't have to spend as much computation per pixel.
The second part, Apple has a graphics API (application programming interface) called Metal and anytime you take a relatively complicated engine like ours and adapt it to a different graphics programming interface, that's already a bunch of work. But it's good, because in this case it lets us use the hardware much more effectively than we would be able to if we were using something like OpenGL to draw on iOS. It just doesn't let you have as much control over what's actually happening.
And the third part was just content. We went through and did lower-poly versions of almost everything in the game. It's not like there's a lot of copy and pasting of things all over the island, every area's unique, and so that was a lot of work, especially for our small team. We didn't outsource it, because we thought we might get subpar results. The other thing about The Witness is the gameplay depends heavily on how things look, in a way that's not true for most games, so we felt we had to be super careful with that whole process. When I play the game now, it's like I almost don't notice that it's not the same as the PC version graphically. Part of that is probably because I'm playing on a smaller screen, but things look good for how small the form factor is! It's funny, because when we were building the game, we got a bunch of devices to test on. And one of those test devices was the iPhone SE--it's super tiny. It's not a high-powered system, but somehow the game runs great on it, and I'm shocked by that. It's this tiny tiny thing!
One of the many mind-bending puzzles that The Witness throws at you.
How did you come to the conclusion with the tap-to-move control scheme?
Early on this was a question, and I'm like how are we gonna control the game. And most games that do 3D aren't free roaming. Those are not good models for comparison, but some of them do this virtual joystick, which I think for this game especially would make it really unplayable if we did that; just having to walk around the whole island with a virtual thumbstick. Though, we could've done that port much much faster.
I seem to remember way back, early in 3D days on iOS there was a demo that Epic put out, I think it was called Epic Citadel. It had this tap-to-move interface; when you tap something, you go there. It wasn't that great, because it wasn't a real game they put a ton of time into. And they also had virtual thumbsticks, but I always felt like that was a proof of concept.
So, this would decide a while back that [tap-to-move] was going to be how navigation worked. In The Witness you'd go up on the mountain and tap somewhere across the island and it'll move you there. Doing all this pathfinding across the island, accounting for the states of which doors are open or closed, all this stuff took a substantial amount of work. That wasn't necessary for the original version of the game, because in the original game there was no pathfinding, you just walked around. That was a big part of making it playable for sure.
You previously mentioned that The Witness has no action sequences because you want players to focus on understanding puzzles and soaking in your environment, free of distractions. Mobile gaming is more prone to distractions around you. It's almost like this metagame of being distracted in your real world. Do you see that as a barrier to get the full experience of The Witness? What are your thoughts on that?
It might be. I mean I'm not sure what to think about all this, it's a little weird. On the one hand, mobile is defined by 'I got my phone and I'm on the bus and I can play something.' but on the other hand, if I'm gonna watch a movie I might just take my iPad in my apartment and then I'd just watch the movie in a focused way. I think those things are possible. It comes down to culturally, how do people have their lives and their expectations set up?
I do strongly dislike what has happened, even with PC games, that started sort of on mobile where it's expected that you're supposed to be doing something. You have all these notifications pop up and bother you all the time. I don't think that's conducive to a deep experience. I turn all that stuff off on Steam, for example, or any other service like that. I have it turned off on my phone.
But I think a lot of people have that stuff turned on and... well, I don't know. I'm sure some people will have a distracted experience, and if they have a super distracted experience, they may not be able to play the game very effectively, because it's very subtle. But then I'd just hope that through shared numbers, because it's a very popular platform, that we'll end up having a lot of people play it in a relativity focused way. We'll see if that happens.
Mobile gaming tends to not be as deliberate, do you think the deeper, more abstract themes are likely to be lost on mobile? Did you do anything differently to make some pieces more noticeable?
We really didn't do anything to change the game in that way at all. In part because it would be so hard to change. With the original game, everything has constraints on everything else. Making something larger to make it more obvious on a phone, that's one thing that you might do. Well, now that thing is going to encroach into some neighboring area that's precisely sized for a reason and it might block a sightline between one thing and another thing. In most games it doesn't matter, most of the time, but in this game it matters a great deal.
Like I said, the individual meshes, textures, assets, and stuff are decreased in weightiness for mobile. There are lower polygons, fewer pixels, and and we worked a lot harder on compressing them. But the actual shape of everything in the world is the same. The sizes of things are the same, the colors are as close as we can get them although the screens on mobiles tend to be a little bit different in terms of color balance than PC monitors.
Charting unexplored territory is a huge theme in The Witness. So, for you exploring this uncharted territory of porting a game for mobile, how is this different from creating a console or PC game? What did you learn through trying to adapt to a mobile platform?
I mean, it actually wasn't super different. As we said, it was a challenge, because the hardware can be very much on the low end. On the high end, an iPad Pro is actually a pretty fast machine. Trying to work the low end, that part is challenging, but we didn't approach it like we're trying to make a free-to-play game with microtransactions. When we did the design, we thought of what subtle things can we do to improve the control scheme so that this part of the game works better? How can we put invisible mark up into the world to help the pathfinding better in this particular situation?
It was very specific design decisions where the constraints came from the game that we had already made. If we were designing a new game from the ground up for iOS, it would probably make a big difference, but I cannot even tell you exactly how it would be different because we haven't designed that thing.
I would say we lucked out a bit. When you get down to it, technically they're both computers that render graphics roughly the same way. I mean the details are all different between those platforms, but the computing paradigm is the same, so there's nothing shocking there. The paradigm of the game on those platforms is very different.
Are there any thoughts on bringing The Witness, or even Braid, to the Nintendo Switch?
There certainly have been thoughts in the past. There's something I could say there, but I'm not sure if I can say it. You know, we would consider it. We're not doing that right this second. We're a very small studio and you can tell this iOS port took us a while. I think we did some other stuff before that, like we did the PS4 Pro HDR patch and upgraded stuff, and with Xbox One.
We have limited work power to deploy for various things, we just need to know if there would really be a sizeable audience there, and we're not sure about that right now. I don't know; if it seems like it would be a potentially successful thing then we would look at it, but we've also been working on this game for a while. We're kind of ready to do new stuff, so it's not high on the priority list, but I'm not saying we won't ever do it.
Puzzles can reflect the environment itself, in cryptic or obvious ways.
Speaking of Braid and porting games to mobile, any thoughts on bringing it to iOS or other mobile platforms?
I thought about it lately. Actually, a long time ago when Braid came out, iOS was new, but there was a possibility of bringing the game to that platform back then. And I decided not to do it because I wasn't convinced that the controls could be good. Because I've played platformers of the time and they were all kind of crappy. I'm not sure if I'm convinced of that anymore, I think maybe the controls could be playable. We don't have any specific plans at this time for that, but I wouldn't rule it out.
It's been over a year since The Witness released. Now you're able to go back to it, bring it into a much wider platform. How do you feel overall about? When you think back to The Witness, what do you look at and say 'wow, we really nailed it right there'? Even your proudest moments or when you've heard people describe their experience with The Witness?
There's sort of two aspects. One is just that we managed to make this game, it's a really complicated game where the world is very interconnected. So many things, both influenced and uninfluenced by other things in the world, have a significance of sorts, that the player won't understand until later, and that significance makes them difficult to design and build. The fact that we managed to do that and make it all work is great. I don't honestly know if I'm ever going to do another game like that again. Maybe I will, but it won't be for a bit. It was very challenging. It was the most challenging design that I knew how to do at the time. And then from players' experience, it's interesting for players to feel that.
You see an instance of something becoming meaningful in a way that you didn't expect, and then another instance of that, and then another instance of that. At some point, it builds up a bigger, more abstract pattern and you're in a world that's meaningful in a way that you never expected or not used to. That's very subtle, and whenever people say that they had that experience, I'm very happy with that. I know that we managed to do something that's not only subtle, but something that most video games don't even try to do. It's nice!
Do you have thoughts you wanted to add about bringing The Witness to a larger audience? Or is there anything you want to say about your future projects, or anything else you're working on?
It's a little too early to talk about future stuff, not showable yet. We do have future projects, so I don't think that's a surprise. We've been working so hard on getting the game ready that I don't know what to expect from people being able to play it on iOS at all. On the one hand I'm even hoping that anybody plays it. Obviously I think it's a good game and it's the best that I knew how to make, but we have this world where all these iOS games are free to play with microtransactions, and this isn't that. It's old fashioned, you pay some money and get the game. And broadly speaking, that kind of game is a minority of the iOS market. People just don't pay for games on the platform as much, with some exceptions. We have to see how that goes.
I have no way of predicting how that will go. Apple is certainly giving us some great featuring. We're right there right now, on the front of the IOS 11 store. So we'll see what that turns into. In terms of just people actually playing the game, I don't know what to expect. We took this PC and console game, we changed the controls around and hopefully it's easier for people to deal with and understand. But we don't really know, we'll find out.
2017 has been a great year for games. You want to shout out anything that you've noticed or been playing this year?
Dude, I'm playing a lot of [Playerunknown's] Battlegrounds lately. Maybe a little bit too much. Everybody's playing so it's not a surprise. A really good game came out a couple of months ago on Steam called Fidel Dungeon Rescue that I really liked. It's sort of like a dungeon crawler roguelike. It's a little bit inspired by The Witness in a sense, it's hard to explain because it's very different gameplay-wise, but then you can see why. That game's good.
Following a teaser earlier this week, a new trailer WB's Justice League is here, released on the final day of New York Comic-Con. It's an action-packed, all-star affair featuring DC's most iconic heroes, check it out above.
The latest trailer revolves around living in a world without Superman, and the reason Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg have to join forces: they're up against an enemy too powerful for any of them to take on alone.
This trailer is also the first time we've seen Henry Cavill as Superman in the movie's marketing. It's not quite the appearance of Superman in the way you expect, however. Lois Lane (Amy Adams) has a dream about her engagement to Clark before [Click to reveal spoiler] he died in Man of Steel.
Overwatch's 2017 Halloween Terror event is set to begin on October 10 and will have a selection of new themed character skins for players to earn. Thus far developer Blizzard has only officially revealed new skins for Reaper and McCree, but images of a few more appear to have leaked via Facebook.
The pictures, which you can see below, were served up as adverts on the Facebook and Reddit user Mnemosynaut reposted them for all to see. The designs are very cool, with Mei becoming a Jiangshi for the All Hallow's Eve festivities, Zenyatta transforming into a Cthulu-inspired Omnic, and Symmetra finally being made to look like the demon we all know she is. Of course, it's worth restating that Blizzard hasn't officially revealed these yet, so if they turn out to be fake we'll be impressed and very heartbroken.
Click image to view in full screen gallery
As mentioned above, Halloween Terror 2017 begins on October 10 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and will run until November 2. Blizzard previously shared a very brief teaser that shows off new Halloween-themed skins for McCree and Reaper. The video was accompanied by a poem which reads: "The nights grow cold / And monsters appear / A great evil gathers / And Halloween draws near..."
Last year's event also included a PvE event called Junkenstein's Revenge. Although Blizzard hasn't said whether this will return for Halloween Terror 2017, it seems likely as Junkrat's Junkenstein skin is featured in the logo for this year's event.
Junkenstein's Revenge is co-op mode that tasks a team of four with battling waves of enemies while defending a point, effectively serving as Overwatch's take on Gears of War's popular Horde mode. Blizzard has said the event will have other "spooky new content," but we'll report back if it details exactly what else that includes.
Both Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead take place at different time periods during the same undead outbreak. However, that won't stop the two shows from having a crossover of sorts in 2018, as revealed today during New York Comic Con.
During the Walking Dead panel, held at Madison Square Garden, creator Robert Kirkman made a comment that had fans of the two shows excited and puzzled all at the same time. "One character from one show will appear on another show," explained Kirkman.
The creative mind behind the successful series remained tight-lipped about not only who was going to appear but also which show they would appear on. Will we see someone from Fear survive long enough to appear on The Walking Dead or vice versa?
Although it's doubtful, maybe we could see Ezekiel without his trusty sidekick Shiva. As cool as it would be to see someone like Glenn return, Fear only starts four or five weeks prior to when Rick wakes up in the hospital in Episode 1 of TWD--give or take a week depending on a plethora of other virus-related factors. It seems more plausible for this crossover to happen on Fear, as it's the less popular show and could use a bump in the ratings. Also, the show's characters just aren't as exciting as TWD's cast.
In addition, a teaser for TWD's Season 8 was revealed, which you can watch above. It returns to AMC on October 22, while Fear's third season comes to a close on October 15. Fear has been renewed for a fourth season, which will come out sometime in mid-2018.
Compact, powerful, sleek. What we once knew as Project Scorpio is now the Xbox One X, and its launch is quickly approaching. Thanks to Xbox Wire, we now have a closer look at how the forthcoming console came to fruition after three years of engineering.
Microsoft's E3 2017 briefing gave us out first real look at the power behind the X iteration, and now we've got more insight into how Microsoft have packed the power into such a small box. The Xbox One X is smaller than the Xbox One S, and Microsoft claims it's 40 percent more power than any other console on the market.
It takes a lot to cool down six teraflops of power. In a standard PC tower, that challenge isn't quite so daunting. But in a 13.5 by 10 inch box, keeping it cool and air flowing is a task all in itself, so the design team turned to high-end PC and graphics card cooling systems. The result was the Xbox One X's custom vapor chamber and fan system.
What makes this system so unique is that it places the motherboard at the top and the cooling system below. As the system is running, the heat literally sinks into the vapor chamber which fills with water. A vacuum sucks up that hot water and uses it to power the radiator fins, and a centrifugal fan pulls air through the console to keep everything, including the power supply, crisp and cool.
The Xbox Wire post also discusses how it came up with the visual design of the Xbox One X, referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the unconventional way it placed all the console's components within its shell. Check out the full Xbox Wire post here for that and other insightful information on the Xbox One X's creation.
GameSpot News Top 5 brings you the week's need-to-know news in a format with pictures and sound. Below you'll find an outline on this week's five big stories, but to get the full banter with Jess and Dan, check out the video above.
Hawken Is Shutting Down On PC
After five years, the free-to-play multiplayer mech FPS Hawken is shutting down its servers on PC. It was one of the best-looking games of 2012, and was released on PlayStation and Xbox One last year. Will those console versions be sticking around? Find out!
Some aggressive moves from Vivendi in the recent past have suggested that the conglomerate may be eyeing a hostile corporate takeover of everyone's favourite French AAA video game publisher. Now Ubisoft are making a play to win back their power, and continue being independent, agile company they want to be. Stay tuned to this saga.
Goose Game From Australian Devs Sets Internet On Fire
The independent studio responsible for the disgustingly enjoyable local multiplayer game, Push Me, Pull You, have released a trailer for their next project. You play a goose, and your goal is to be the annoying and aggressive jerk geese are in real life. Watch the trailer and tell me that's not something you want to play.
PlayUnknown's Battlegrounds May Have Its Xbox One Exclusivity Extended
Probably everybody's favourite game right now, PUBG, may have its upcoming console exclusivity period with Xbox One extended. There are reports floating around that Microsoft and Bluehole Interactive are having discussions regarding the matter, but it apparently will come to PlayStation 4 once that agreement ends. Meanwhile, everyone on PC is too busy actually playing the game to give a damn.
Like it or not, people just can't get enough of Destiny 2. This week Bungie announced a ton of stuff that's happening to the game including seasons, new Iron Banner, a hard mode for the Raid and more. I'm excited, and I don't care if you aren't.
Spoilers for Archer, up through the Season 9 premiere, below.
FX and the creators of Archer brought a special treat to New York Comic Con 2017: the premiere episode of Archer Season 9, another anthology-style departure for the show. The season's been dubbed "Danger Island," and it sees the core characters re-imagined as the owners and managers of an island-based hotel and charter plane company.
Despite being slightly unfinished--the episode ran with time codes flashing along the bottom--the premiere delighted the audience at the Hammerstein Ballroom with everything Archer fans have come to expect. That includes Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) sleeping around and ruining lives, irresponsible firearm use, Aisha Tyler owning every scene she's in, dysfunctional relationships between family members and co-workers, cameos from actors like Eugene Cordero and Jon Daly, and copious amounts of drinking.
But it didn't answer Archer fans' most urgent question: Is Archer still in a coma?
As a re-imagining of Archer's core characters and settings, Archer: Danger Island may take place in an alternate timeline, in Archer's coma dreams, or somewhere we can't even imagine. (Although the show's co-executive producer, Casey Willis, dropped a big hint later in the panel: "Being in his coma subconscious, all the people that he cares about are what shows up," he said.) But its premiere episode, at least, doesn't address Sterling Archer's fate, seemingly leaving the main series' story on the backburner for another season.
Archer Executive Producer Matt Thompson took the stage after the episode and explained why the show's creators have leaned into these anthology seasons, which let them explore new stories outside the spy genre. "We kind of learned a little bit when we did the cocaine season," Thompson said.
"Archer: Vice," Tyler, who plays an island princess in the new season, interjected, laughing. "We shouldn't call it the cocaine season."
"What it did, really, was re-energized us," Thompson resumed. "I don't watch a lot of TV shows that are in their ninth season, because at some point, for me, the storylines kind of run themselves out."
"It's exciting for us as creators because I'm not just trying to figure out how to tell you another spy story today," he continued. "And I think my partner, Adam Reed, just couldn't bring himself to writing another season of a spy thing."
"We may have lost some viewers," Thompson admitted.
"But f*** those guys!" Tyler exclaimed. The crowd erupted.
Whatever Archer's creators may prefer, it's clear that the show's viewers are as eager for the main story to resume as they are to find out what Danger Island has in store. As soon as the panel opened to audience questions, Thompson had to acknowledge whether the show will ever get back to reality.
"We're going back to all that. We're gonna get to everything--hopefully," Thompson promised. "We won't leave it hanging."
Archer: Danger Island sees Sterling Archer, his mother, Jessica Walter's Malory, and a new, more muscular version of Pam (Amber Nash) running an island hotel and charter plane company somewhere in French territory. Cheryl (Judy Greer) plays a newlywed who sleeps with Archer, ruining her marriage, while Tyler plays a savvy island princess trying to convince Chris Parnell's new character--whose name seems to rhyme with "Ducks"--to purchase land within the island's dangerous jungle. And Lucky Yates' Dr. Krieger has transformed into a parrot named Crackers--about which Yates shared a fun story.
"When I was three years old, my parents were still trying to potty-train me, so they bribed me with a parakeet," Yates said. "They told me if I pooped into the potty they'd get me a parakeet, and I was on the sh**ter within five minutes dropping a sweet deuce." They followed through, and he named the bird Crackers. His character in Danger Island was named in that parakeet's honor.
Another audience member brought up the possibility of an Archer movie.
"Anything could happen, right? We just need to talk to the right people at FX," Willis, one of the show's executive producers, said, half-joking--given how many executives from FX were likely present.
"I heard Harvey Weinstein might not be doing anything," he added.
Archer returns with Archer: Danger Island some time in 2018.
If you're a fan of Rick and Morty you'll be familiar with the unhealthy, mostly unexplained obsession the show's manic super-genius protagonist has with Szechaun Sauce. The limited edition condiment from McDonald's was mentioned in the first episode of season three, and since then has spiraled into somewhat of a cultural phenomenon. In fact, it's reached the point where McDonald's is actually bringing it back, but for a very limited time.
The sauce will be available today in limited quantities at select restaurants. Given the incredible popularity of Rick and Morty and the fanbase's obsession with the one-off joke, it's going to be tricky to get some of the sauce. Even more so because some of the restaurants that were supposed to have the sauce haven't received shipments.
Thankfully, McDonald's did us a solid and sent some to our very own Michael Rougeau, who, along with Mat Elfring, Tony Wilson, and Entertainment Tonight's Ash Crossan, put it to the taste test. See what they both thought of it below.
Buddy has also gone back through the whole third season of Rick and Morty and put together a compilation of the best Rick moments, so give that a watch too while you're at it.
Crossover junkies, it's your time to shine. Funko announced two more dual packs will be coming to its Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite pop collection, this time with the title's DLC characters: Black Panther and Monster Hunter.
The two dual packs will contain one Black Panther and one Monster Hunter figure. One pack will be sold widely with standard coloring, and the second, a color variant pack, will be available exclusively at Best Buy.
These two packs join an already large collection of Marvel Vs. Capcom: Infinite dual packs. The collection currently includes Captain Marvel/Chun-li, Gamora/Strider, Rocket/Mega Man X, and Ultron/Sigma. Like Black Panther and Monster Hunter, each come in standard and color variant packs.
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