WWE 2K20 feels like a transitional entry in 2K's pro wrestling series. With longtime developer Yukes splitting from 2K in August this year, Visual Concepts took over sole development of the series after the two developers previously worked on the games together. The end result is a buggy mess of a game that takes several Big Show-sized steps backwards from its predecessor. It doesn't just lower the bar, it breaks it.

The problems begin with the sheer abundance of bugs and glitches found in almost every match and menu screen in 2K20--it borders on the absurd. I've seen superstars teleport across the ring and float in midair. Oftentimes objects will violently vibrate on the spot or sink into the floor. Characters have a tendency to get trapped inside the ropes, whereby their bodies will stretch and contort in ways the human body isn't supposed to. Sometimes wrestlers are invisible in cutscenes or duplicated in matches. Other times they'll completely stop moving, forcing you to restart the match over again. If you put a custom logo on your created wrestler, the game will crash whenever you try to start the MyCareer mode--this is something I frequently experienced and also has been widely reported as an issue. It will also crash if you try to create an arena, or during loading screens for no reason at all. Commentary will suddenly become fixated on talking about attacks to the core, even if you're hitting your opponent in the head, while every online match begins with around a minute of lag that's so bad the in-ring action resembles a slideshow.

Not all of these issues are entirely new considering the series has been riddled with glitches for a number of years now. But their pervasiveness is much more frequent in 2K20, with some kind of bug appearing in near enough every match if you're unlucky enough. Obviously, your mileage will vary when it comes to technical issues like this, but with the plethora of glitches lurking in every nook and cranny of 2K20, it's a matter of when you'll be afflicted and not if. Some of these glitches are hilarious, there's no denying that, but it doesn't take long before they lose their charm--even if they do add a goofy element of entertainment to matches that are painfully dull otherwise.

This is because the actual wrestling in 2K20 is significantly worse than it has been in previous years. The only new addition to gameplay is a reworking of the controls that makes it slightly less cumbersome to perform certain actions. Beyond this, the in-ring action is still overly-reliant on a binary reversal system and plodding combat. It's an acquired taste, for sure, and it's been solid enough in the past, but 2K20 undoes all of that goodwill by removing any semblance of the series' previous competence. Targeting and hitboxes are frequently terrible, resulting in numerous whiffs between both yourself and the AI, particularly when weapons are involved. The controls are unresponsive a lot of the time, and sometimes the reversal prompt will just refuse to appear. The AI will also occasionally forget it's in a wrestling match and stand still for 10 seconds at a time, or it will continuously run into things and wind up jogging on the spot until you bother to interrupt it. Some of the animations look good, but they're mostly stitched together with missing frames that just make everything feel slightly off. There's no real flow to the combat either, or any sense of hair-raising momentum. Matches are lifeless affairs that lack any sort of excitement, falling into the category of being either mind-numbingly boring or incredibly frustrating.

In terms of game modes, this year's MyCareer puts you in the laced-up wrestling boots of platonic best friends Tre and Red. The story begins with the pair reminiscing about their wrestling careers before they're inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, charting a course from high school to the main event of WrestleMania 2029 as they try to complete a literal to-do list of WWE dreams. The writing in MyCareer falls into a lot of the same pitfalls as modern WWE shows, presenting smug, unlikeable babyfaces that continually make poor decisions and lack any sort of depth or character development. Red is the angry hothead with lines like "I'm going to give your grandmother bed sores!", while Tre is an idiot who turns everything he says into a painful joke. Wrestling is inherently corny, but the writing in 2K20 is often insufferable, and its protagonists are impossible to care about.

The writing in MyCareer falls into a lot of the same pitfalls as modern WWE, presenting smug, unlikeable babyfaces that continually make poor decisions and lack any sort of depth or character development

MyCareer is at its best when you're interacting with current WWE superstars. Samoa Joe turns in an excellent performance as one of Tre's main rivals, and there's a delightful scene with Broken Matt Hardy when you're on a journey into the underworld to find the Undertaker. While the characters we see on TV each week are confined to the realms of reality, the writers on 2K20 are able to indulge in otherworldly fantasy elements and play around with the WWE's more eccentric personas. These moments are few and far between, though, and it takes far too long before you eventually reach the WWE. The first few hours of MyCareer are spent fighting on the indies in meaningless matches where the focus is entirely on Tre and Red and the inconsequential secrets they're hiding from each other, while the final act centers on Red's boring rivalry with her old school bully. The story's overlong and just drags for the vast majority of its runtime, making it a chore to play through.

Character progression is another sticking point in MyCareer, both in regards to customizing your characters and leveling them up. Almost every item included in 2K20's substantial creation suite--including hairstyles, attires, moves, taunts, and so on--is locked. The only way to gain access to all of this content is by praying to the RNG gods that you get what you want in loot boxes, or by buying each item outright for a considerable portion of your in-game currency. Thankfully, there's no real money involved, but structuring unlocks in this way is still a needless hassle that arbitrarily restricts your ability to create the kind of character you want to create--which is only exacerbated now that you have two characters to customize.

Leveling up each character isn't much better, either. At the outset you're asked to choose from a number of wrestling archetypes, such as luchador and technician, before gaining access to a mammoth skill tree. The problem with this is that the vast majority of said skill tree is hidden until you unlock an adjacent hex, making it impossible to plan out your character's build beyond the next few upgrades. Admittedly, this would be more annoying if improving your characters wasn't as unsatisfying as it is. The attributes you unlock provide such minuscule increases in your skills that they're almost imperceptible once you're out in the ring, to the point where I would go hours without bothering to level anyone up.

The other significant mode in 2K20 is Showcase Mode, which focuses on the Four Horsewomen of the WWE: Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks, Charlotte Flair, and Bayley. It explores how the four superstars ushered in WWE's women's revolution, focusing on the most important matches of their careers thus far, from the tremendous fatal-fourway between the four competitors at NXT Takeover: Rival, Sasha, and Bayley's redefining match at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn, and culminating with the main event of this year's WrestleMania between Becky, Charlotte, and Ronda Rousey. The video packages before each match are enjoyable if you have a fondness for these characters and those early days of NXT, even if the video quality is abysmal. But the matches themselves run into the same problems as the Showcase Modes of the past. During each match you're tasked with completing myriad objectives in order to recreate what actually happened to a certain degree. This results in some matches lasting upwards of half an hour, and with no mid-mission checkpoints, losing a match either because you were pinned, the AI was pinned, or because one of the glitches caused the game to break, is incredibly disheartening.

WWE 2K's annual release schedule has felt superfluous for a number of years now. This has never been more apparent than with WWE 2K20, a game that's not only riddled with frequent technical issues, but one that's notably worse than its predecessor in almost every area--whether it's the dull and unenjoyable combat, the fact half the roster look like terrifying goblin facsimiles of themselves, or MyCareer's obnoxious and tedious story. This is the moment the WWE 2K series hit Rock Bottom.

EA has announced that NBA Live 20 will not ship this year after previously announcing the title would be delayed to late 2019. Now, EA is looking to retool the series for next-gen consoles before releasing NBA Live 20.

During EA’s quarterly financial earnings call for Q2 2020, EA CEO Andrew Wilson revealed that the company will not release NBA Live 20. Instead, NBA Live will be redesigned for next-gen consoles.

EA Sports released the following statement on Twitter:

“We’re excited by our progress but remain hyper ambitious – so we’re not going to release NBA Live 20 this season.” Instead, EA says it has “sights set on creating something fresh for the next generation of players and platforms. We know we need to earn our future every step of the way, so we’re taking time to get it right for our players.”

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The news that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have exited their planned Star Wars trilogy at Lucasfilm was surprising… and yet not all that surprising. Not only had the pair recently inked a very lucrative contract with Netflix, which would seem to conflict with making three Star Wars movies in terms of the duo’s schedule, but also the execs behind our beloved galaxy far, far away have established at this point quite a history of hiring and then firing or otherwise losing directors for their films.

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Game of Thrones' planned prequel series is no longer going forward at HBO.

After a pilot for the Naomi Watts-starring series was filmed earlier this year, the network has opted not to move forward with the untitled Game of Thrones spinoff, Deadline reports. Jane Goldman, the showrunner for the pilot, is reportedly sharing the news of the lack of pickup with the cast and crew. IGN has reached out to HBO for comment.

The show, which may or may not have been called "The Longest Night," filmed its pilot in Northern Ireland over the summer. The series would have starred Naomi Watts as its lead. The Game of Thrones prequel cast also included Josh Whitehouse, Naomi Ackie, Denise Gough, Jamie Campbell Bower, Sheila Atim, Ivanno Jeremiah, Georgie Henley, Alex Sharp, and Toby Regbo. The pilot was directed by S.J. Clarkson.

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Sony has announced that it will be shutting down its PlayStation Vue TV streaming service on January 30, 2020. The company cites a hugely competitive field and a desire to focus on its core games business as reasons why it’s pulling out of the TV streaming business.

“Today we are announcing that we will shut down the PlayStation Vue service on January 30, 2020,” Sony Interactive Entertainment deputy president John Kodera writes in a new blog post. “Unfortunately, the highly competitive Pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected. Because of this, we have decided to remain focused on our core gaming business.”

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The Mandalorian's latest trailer finally gave us a look at comedian Bill Burr's bounty hunter character in action, even if just for a fleeting second.

Burr's character makes an appearance around the 1:28 mark and he appears to be in some type of confrontation with an unknown enemy, all while firing two blaster pistols and wearing an automated blaster on his back.

Not much else is known about Burr's character, but Comicbook.com reported that Burr had previously appeared on The Rich Eisen Show and discussed how his role came to be and how he wasn't even really a Star Wars/sci-fi fan before accepting the role.

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The Force is...going to be plenty busy this fall, as in addition to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and The Mandalorian, Respawn's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order will be coming to our galaxy with a brand new adventure.

EA and Respawn have debuted the launch trailer for Jedi: Fallen Order, which you can watch above, teasing Cal Ketsis' intense adventure that awaits players this November. The trailer teases the story we know so far — that after Order 66 Jedi are being hunted down while Cal attempts to find something the Empire also desperately wants — as well as some of the epic-looking fights to come.

Though EA and Respawn have remained relatively tight-lipped about Jedi: Fallen Order, we recently got to go hands-on with hours of the adventure and came away impressed by Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order's scope, combat, and world-building. You can also check out all the new details we learned from our Jedi: Fallen Order preview.

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Jurassic World 3 director Colin Trevorrow has opened up about his decision to bring back Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum for the next movie, which he refers to as "Jurassic Park IV."

In an interview with Empire, Trevorrow, who is co-writing the upcoming trilogy-capper with Emily Carmichael, revealed that he had always wanted the original franchise stars to feature in the Jurassic World trilogy in some capacity, but he needed to establish the best way to continue their legacy.

"We'd have to come up with a reason why Ellie, Malcolm and Grant all went to the theme park on the exact same day it broke down – again," he said, addressing their absence in Jurassic World. "The next film allows the legacy characters to be a part of the story in an organic way."

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Sony has published five new trademarks that secure the company names for up to five generations of potential PlayStation consoles.

The trademarks, initially filed for earlier this month, provide Sony with exclusive use of ther terms PS6, PS7, PS8, PS9, and PS10. The publishing of these trademarks was picked up by trademark blogger Piercesword.

This is not an uncommon approach for Sony. PS2 and PS3 trademarks were filed a year in advance of each console’s release, while trademarks for the PS4 and PS5 were filed back in 2006.

It should be noted that these trademarks don’t indicate that Sony is definitely planning to make these consoles. Rather, it makes sense for the company to own the trademarks to consoles it potentially may make in the future in order to prevent other businesses snapping up the PS branding before Sony does. So even if PlayStation 6 is never made, the trademark is still safe and can’t be used by anyone else to capitalise on a brand Sony has spent over two decades building.

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You stand in a room and the floor is the ceiling, or maybe it's the other way around? No, everything is the floor and you're falling through infinity. Welcome to the Manifold Garden, a game where you need to prepare to have your mind warped by the beauty of repetition and some seriously impressive puzzles. It is an Escher-inspired fever dream of a game--you have the ability to allocate gravity to any side of an environment at any time, and it's surprising just how many different puzzles the game manages to pull from this concept, with new elements gradually being introduced at just the right pace to grant further complexity without being completely daunting.

To start, there are colour-coded cubes which need to be placed on switches to open doors or other mechanisms. It doesn't take long to discover these colours are also relevant to their own personal gravity and as such, cubes can only be moved when the world is in that orientation. Add stairs going in different directions, switch combinations, and staggered environments, and even these relatively basic puzzles take some mind-bending to get accustomed to, which makes for further payoff when solutions come.

It takes a while to adjust to the changes in orientation, so for the first few hours, I often found myself getting lost and even feeling a little nauseous and headachy (though it's worth noting that there are settings to adjust field-of-view, which helps). I found that the more I came to understand the concepts, the less this happened, as my mind stopped fighting what it was seeing. Towards the end of the game, I could rapidly make these changes; I could almost hear the click in my brain when everything started to become intuitive and second nature. Things that weren’t immediately obvious, like understanding that the gravity of one block can be used to stop another from falling in order to trigger a seemingly impossible switch, went from edge-of-the-brain concepts to be instinctual.

There was one particularly devilish puzzle where I had to use several different cubes to hold a single, vital cube in place. It had to be done in a specific way and sequence to take advantage of their individual gravities. When I first approached this problem, it hadn’t previously occurred to me that this was even possible, and I was left stumped for ages. The payoff for working it out, however, was not only immensely satisfying but helped open my mind for further puzzles. I began using cubes to hold various things in place, and even as steps for myself (even when it was unnecessary to solve an actual puzzle). It’s in these moments where I felt like my power in this ever-changing space was growing, where the game made me feel like a master of my own domain.

The aesthetics of Manifold Garden are confrontingly beautiful, in that they are both stark and complex. The music is minimal, though it builds in peak moments with intense synths which seem to mirror the environment. There are practically no textures to speak of and almost everything is made of simple polygons; the environments are littered with stairs which seemingly go in every direction, whether or not you know that's what they are at the time. Some of the environments are simple, like a beautiful block tree with running water displays in a sort of Japanese garden aesthetic. Others are incredibly complex with moving parts in multiple directions. When looked at up close, it can appear dull and barren, but a step back will often reveal the psychedelic beauty in greater patterns.

The physical stages themselves actually repeat endlessly into the void of the world, and this is more than just an aesthetic choice--it allows you to fall off a ledge forever and then land back on otherwise unreachable areas, creating another obtuse mechanic that comes into play during later puzzles. In every way, Manifold Garden's world challenges you to think differently while maintaining that you're always safe--there isn't death or fall damage of any kind. This allows you to explore without fear, while also taking the time to internalise the game's logic.

As you progress through the increasingly layered architectural stages, you'll find little-to-no hand-holding and for the most part, this is fantastic. There's just enough direction that you get the satisfying sensation of working things out yourself, which comes with a deep feeling of accomplishment. Even as new, unexpected elements are added, they're grounded with enough familiar imagery that you can eventually decipher new solutions with minimal prompting. For example, cube trees grow cube fruits, which can be planted in special areas and given water to provide new trees and more fruit; water can move a turbine to provide the power that opens a door, allowing you to move forward. I was stumped multiple times throughout my playthrough, but it was never due to an obtuse new mechanic being added. Instead, the puzzles are all legitimately clever and tricky, which required me to look at them from literally all angles in order to work out a solution.

There's also an incredible density of puzzles. Sometimes, even traversing from one room to the next provides you with a new obstacle to reconcile your way around. Very rarely did I feel like Manifold Garden provided much reprieve. Instead, it keeps your mind constantly thinking, always looking for new angles, and firmly on the tips of your toes. But, there's also no pressure--no enemies, no time limits--and this makes Manifold Garden feel like an intensely cerebral experience from start to finish.

There was one puzzle in Manifold Garden that was so tricky I couldn't solve it myself--and I later discovered it was only because I'd missed something from an area I thought was finished. The game doesn't always do enough to provide you with clues to solve its problems--in this one occasion, I wasted possibly over an hour trying to find a solution where there was none. There were a few other moments where I felt that a little more direction would have been welcome, or where I solved a puzzle on accident and missed an important lesson as a result. However, being forced to work out every other problem in the game for myself was so gratifying that in the end, I felt like it was worth the hours lost to obscurity.

As I stood in the impossible world of the Manifold Garden, I felt tested and worthy. Its puzzles are incredibly satisfying and offer a very clever blend of step-by-step knowledge-building with increasingly challenging solutions. The environments are awe-inspiring in their endless repetition, but repetition isn't a trait reflected in the game's challenges. There is always something new, or a new way to look at something old, as you traverse through the infinite horizon. Manifold Garden is a feast for the eyes and the mind, so long as you can wrap both around what it has to offer.