Samsung’s New Flagship 8K TV is Our New Ultimate Desire
The Samsung Q950TS is the most gorgeous 8K TV we’ve ever laid our eyes on. While it might seem like easy to fall for a screen just because it has 33,177,600 flashy pixels, the Samsung Q950TS is also just the whole package as a high-end television.
First, off it’s the thinnest LCD TV we’ve ever seen with a side profile that only measures 15mm thin. This makes it even thinner than LG’s newly introduced Gallery Series TV, which measures 20mm deep when sitting flat against the wall.
What’s even more impressive is there isn’t any trickery with a thin panel and a bumped out bottom that houses some crucial components like on an OLED TV, this whole screen is really just 15mm thick from end to end so it’ll fit completely flush against the wall should you decide to mount it there.
Netflix’s Locke & Key: First Scene Revealed
Netflix has revealed the first scene (watch here) for Locke & Key, the upcoming show based on Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez's comic book series from IDW Publishing.
The first scene is two minutes long, and it features Ken Pak's character, who is listed as Mark Cho on IMDb. He is shown taking a phone call, entering a house, and revealing one of the magical keys the series is known for. He then stabs himself with that key, seemingly infusing the power of the key into himself. The scene ends with the house going up in flames.
How the 2010s Changed the Gaming Industry, For Better and Worse
A lot can change in ten years. As we enter a new decade and count down to the Xbox Series X and PS5’s debut, let’s look back at the tech of the 2010s that changed the gaming industry — for better or worse.
Virtual Reality
A decade ago, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii were entering their twilight years, PC gaming was allegedly in decline, and anyone that said VR was probably talking about the Virtual Boy or Johnny Mnemonic. But in 2012 Oculus revealed the Rift, a virtual reality device that aimed to truly achieve presence – the feeling when you put on a headset of being present in a virtual world.
The Rift’s success would go on to define much of the decade when it comes to tech innovation. VR was heralded as the next frontier in gaming, and Valve and Sony quickly followed suit with VR headsets of their own. Still, slow user adoption has kept most developers from dedicating major resources toward making VR games. And without games, people don’t have a reason to buy the headsets. Chicken, egg. But however you look at it, VR is here to stay, and with the announcement of Half-Life Alyx coming in just a few months, VR might finally have the killer app it needs to hit critical mass. Probably.
Get Eximius Free With IGN Prime
IGN Prime has partnered with Ammobox Studios to bring you EXIMIUS. IGN Prime members, grab your steam to a Strategic Action Shooter (FPS/RTS Hybrid) that focuses on squad-based combat.
EXIMIUS is a FPS/RTS hybrid that focuses on squad-based combat. The game features an intense 5v5 multiplayer experience with each team comprising of 4 Officers and one Commander.
The RTS Commander has the ability to build bases, train infantry squads and assigning them to the Officers from a top-down overview. Manage captured resources and assign troops to support your allied Squad Officers as they surge forward to victory. Command vehicles, air support and dropship powerful abilities to change the dynamics of the battlefield.
AMD Navi Graphics Cards in 2020 Could Have Ray Tracing
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has hinted that ray-tracing will play a bigger part in the company’s graphics cards in 2020. During a roundtable interview session at CES, Su name-dropped the existence of a “Big Navi GPU” that rumors say can compete with high-end GTX cards.
“The discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us,” Su said at the CES roundtable (via Anandtech). “So you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don’t usually comment on unannounced products.”
AMD currently has a variety of graphics cards for a wide range of customers, whether it’s the 5500 series for budget gamers, 5700 series for higher-end customers, and the recently announced 5600 series for 1080p gaming.
Speedrunner Beats Every Fallout Game During AGDQ 2020
It's Awesome Games Done Quick week, which means we all get to watch as our collective childhood gets destroyed by talented gamers all coming together for the sake of charity as they perform incredible speedruns in a variety of games. To celebrate this awesome event, we’ve decided to highlight some of the craziest speedruns this week-long marathon has to offer.
So, what’s better than playing through one game really really fast? Playing through five games really, shockingly fast.
Speedrunner TomatoAngus (the G is silent) took the spotlight on the ADGQ stage on Jan. 6 and played through all four mainline Fallout games, as well as Fallout: New Vegas. The speedrun is in the Fallout Anthology category of speedruns, of which TomatoAngus is currently the world record holder with a time of 1 hour and 27 minutes.
Wattam Review – Forever Wondering
There's a part in Wattam where your friend (an old-fashioned telephone) is crying because the sun took its receiver and is making a long-distance phone call. To solve this cellular problem, you have to gather all of your friends, stack them up, and climb on top of them so you can explain the situation to the sun and ask for the receiver back. Once you get up there, the sun gives it back and apologizes for the misunderstanding. The telephone says that it's okay, and then you carry on with your day.
That might sound like a hallucination, but that's the heart of Wattam. It's a bunch of silly concepts and weird actors being constantly thrown into head-scratching scenarios that you have to solve. In this world, it doesn't really matter that everything is so bizarre. What matters is ensuring all of your friends are happy, and every character would do absolutely anything possible to make their reality a friendship utopia.
Every character in Wattam is a vibrant random object that changes shapes, forms, and sizes the more you progress and interact with the world and its environment. The game starts with one character, but you meet plenty of new pals, and later in the game the screen becomes charmingly cluttered, like a kid dumped a bunch of their toys on the floor and didn't clean it up. Among the characters are trees that can gobble up others and turn them into a fruitified version of themselves, a toilet named Linda that can turn characters into poop, and a nose named Ronald that can sniff up characters that are buried underground. The characters always seem to be having fun, embracing the change and sometimes adopting new personas and using catchphrases to parody genres like action movies and whodunits. They treat each other like old friends and run around and play with each other even when you're not controlling them. Watching them all interact and utilize their powers together adds a sense of life to this zany world--it may be weird, but they have their own fascinating ecosystem going on.
The main character is a green cube with a bowler hat named The Mayor. At the start of the game, The Mayor finds out about "Kaboom," the hidden power of its hat which launches everyone in the nearby radius into the sky in an explosion of laughter (the people love a good Kaboom). With your newfound ability and the strange charisma of a cube, it's your job to explore the world, learn its history, and keep everyone happy. Most of the time you're acting as a mediator, walking up to whoever is crying at the given moment, asking them a genuine "What's wrong?" and then solving their problems via a mini-game. It's tough work at times due to some pushback from awkward controls and sudden frame rate drops, but it never gets frustrating. You just look down and realize you're playing as a cool little apple who loves to dance and you finish the mission. It's also satisfyingly worth it at the end of each puzzle when you see your motley crew of inanimate objects cheering you on and having a blast together in this world you helped soothe.
You can play as anything on the screen, and when you swap into a character, it changes the main instrument in the song that's playing in the background. Each character has their own designated sounds: If you switch to a plant bud you'll hear the theme with a xylophone, for example, and if you switch to a poop you'll hear fart noises. Each quirky object has a clear and thoughtful theme tune, and the soundtrack as a whole always has you grooving. Sometimes I'd take a break from the main story to swap to a character and just listen to how the songs sounded from their perspective. There's a jazz song on the soundtrack called "A Long Time: The Six Years" that has no business going that hard.
Wattam is a collection of plotlines with objectives that can be completed in a few minutes, so each time you go back to the game it feels like a vastly different experience than what you were doing half an hour previously. One moment you could be running around as a miniature acorn, trying to find a spot to bury yourself, and the next you could be meeting a golden bowling pin that wants you to stack your friends to its exact height. It could so easily have been disorienting to be forced to constantly learn new mechanics and to always be playing the game in new ways every few moments, but Wattam isn't overwhelming. There's a sense of intrigue whenever a new character needs help, because whenever you help one, something in the game changes significantly--someone will gain a new power or maybe a mysterious staircase will emerge for you to investigate.
While it's essentially an anthology of short mini-games, Wattam has an underlying plot that's revealed over the course of a few cutscenes. These stop all the tomfoolery to tell a story of the apocalyptic events that happened right before the start of the game; it's a surprising tonal shift but it still fits very well with Wattam's ethos. Wattam is cool because it isn't just eccentric for eccentricity's sake--it also has a message it wants to share. You meet a few characters that come in the form of scroll, a book, and a futuristic floppy disk that explain that message and why connections and bonds are so important in this world. While they aren't the deepest cutscenes in the world, Wattam's message inside of them is ultimately heartwarming and offers context to things you wouldn't think are connected.
It isn't often that you play something that is so pure and unapologetically itself, but that's Wattam. I don't know if I'll ever play another game that makes me turn all of my friends into fruit so I can progress. It oozes passion, and it has an infectious enthusiasm that's present in each and every aspect of it. Wattam never takes itself too seriously, and that makes it easy to buy into its world and suspend your disbelief. While the gameplay is all over the place, Wattam is held together by themes of friendship and a cohesive soundtrack that actually leave you grinning long after you're done.
Wattam Review – Forever Wondering
There's a part in Wattam where your friend (an old-fashioned telephone) is crying because the sun took its receiver and is making a long-distance phone call. To solve this cellular problem, you have to gather all of your friends, stack them up, and climb on top of them so you can explain the situation to the sun and ask for the receiver back. Once you get up there, the sun gives it back and apologizes for the misunderstanding. The telephone says that it's okay, and then you carry on with your day.
That might sound like a hallucination, but that's the heart of Wattam. It's a bunch of silly concepts and weird actors being constantly thrown into head-scratching scenarios that you have to solve. In this world, it doesn't really matter that everything is so bizarre. What matters is ensuring all of your friends are happy, and every character would do absolutely anything possible to make their reality a friendship utopia.
Every character in Wattam is a vibrant random object that changes shapes, forms, and sizes the more you progress and interact with the world and its environment. The game starts with one character, but you meet plenty of new pals, and later in the game the screen becomes charmingly cluttered, like a kid dumped a bunch of their toys on the floor and didn't clean it up. Among the characters are trees that can gobble up others and turn them into a fruitified version of themselves, a toilet named Linda that can turn characters into poop, and a nose named Ronald that can sniff up characters that are buried underground. The characters always seem to be having fun, embracing the change and sometimes adopting new personas and using catchphrases to parody genres like action movies and whodunits. They treat each other like old friends and run around and play with each other even when you're not controlling them. Watching them all interact and utilize their powers together adds a sense of life to this zany world--it may be weird, but they have their own fascinating ecosystem going on.
The main character is a green cube with a bowler hat named The Mayor. At the start of the game, The Mayor finds out about "Kaboom," the hidden power of its hat which launches everyone in the nearby radius into the sky in an explosion of laughter (the people love a good Kaboom). With your newfound ability and the strange charisma of a cube, it's your job to explore the world, learn its history, and keep everyone happy. Most of the time you're acting as a mediator, walking up to whoever is crying at the given moment, asking them a genuine "What's wrong?" and then solving their problems via a mini-game. It's tough work at times due to some pushback from awkward controls and sudden frame rate drops, but it never gets frustrating. You just look down and realize you're playing as a cool little apple who loves to dance and you finish the mission. It's also satisfyingly worth it at the end of each puzzle when you see your motley crew of inanimate objects cheering you on and having a blast together in this world you helped soothe.
You can play as anything on the screen, and when you swap into a character, it changes the main instrument in the song that's playing in the background. Each character has their own designated sounds: If you switch to a plant bud you'll hear the theme with a xylophone, for example, and if you switch to a poop you'll hear fart noises. Each quirky object has a clear and thoughtful theme tune, and the soundtrack as a whole always has you grooving. Sometimes I'd take a break from the main story to swap to a character and just listen to how the songs sounded from their perspective. There's a jazz song on the soundtrack called "A Long Time: The Six Years" that has no business going that hard.
Wattam is a collection of plotlines with objectives that can be completed in a few minutes, so each time you go back to the game it feels like a vastly different experience than what you were doing half an hour previously. One moment you could be running around as a miniature acorn, trying to find a spot to bury yourself, and the next you could be meeting a golden bowling pin that wants you to stack your friends to its exact height. It could so easily have been disorienting to be forced to constantly learn new mechanics and to always be playing the game in new ways every few moments, but Wattam isn't overwhelming. There's a sense of intrigue whenever a new character needs help, because whenever you help one, something in the game changes significantly--someone will gain a new power or maybe a mysterious staircase will emerge for you to investigate.
While it's essentially an anthology of short mini-games, Wattam has an underlying plot that's revealed over the course of a few cutscenes. These stop all the tomfoolery to tell a story of the apocalyptic events that happened right before the start of the game; it's a surprising tonal shift but it still fits very well with Wattam's ethos. Wattam is cool because it isn't just eccentric for eccentricity's sake--it also has a message it wants to share. You meet a few characters that come in the form of scroll, a book, and a futuristic floppy disk that explain that message and why connections and bonds are so important in this world. While they aren't the deepest cutscenes in the world, Wattam's message inside of them is ultimately heartwarming and offers context to things you wouldn't think are connected.
It isn't often that you play something that is so pure and unapologetically itself, but that's Wattam. I don't know if I'll ever play another game that makes me turn all of my friends into fruit so I can progress. It oozes passion, and it has an infectious enthusiasm that's present in each and every aspect of it. Wattam never takes itself too seriously, and that makes it easy to buy into its world and suspend your disbelief. While the gameplay is all over the place, Wattam is held together by themes of friendship and a cohesive soundtrack that actually leave you grinning long after you're done.
The Rise of Skywalker – What Is the JJ Cut?
The JJ Cut. It might sound like the name of a lethal, and therefore banned, breakdancing move. And look, it might be. But the JJ Cut some Star Wars fans are talking about lately is a rumoured version of The Rise of Skywalker that includes swaths of material that was allegedly cut by the malign gloved hands of Mickey himself, jowls quivering, minutes before diving into his Scrooge McDuck-style money pit. Or by Disney execs, anyway.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has been, to put it mildly, divisive. This writer happens to have loved it, seeing it as an antidote to the cynicism and world-weariness of 2019, but there’s no denying that it felt… well, rushed. Partially because it had to close a lot of the doors that Rian Johnson flung open with The Last Jedi, but also because it had to wrap up a nine-film saga somehow. The co-writer of The Rise of Skywalker, Chris Terrio, told Awards Daily the following:
What Happened When Luke Skywalker Fought the Knights of Ren?
Back before his nephew became leader of the Knights of Ren, Jedi Master Luke Skywalker once fought the fabled Knights of Ren. And thanks to Marvel's Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren #2, we know how that battle played out.
Read on to find out what happened during this fateful encounter and learn why Kylo Ren hates his real name so much. And if you missed it, check out our breakdown of The Rise of Kylo Ren #1.
Beware of full spoilers for The Rise of Kylo Ren #2 ahead!
