Which ‘Modern’ Star Wars Movie is Best? 30,000 IGN Fans Answered
Welcome to the Internet, where feelings run strong on everything about Star Wars. While the original trilogy is still regarded as a classic series, it’s the modern movies that everyone seems to continue to debate the merits of. So we thought we’d ask the IGN fan community to help us rank every modern Star Wars film, including the prequel trilogy (well, the two released after 2000), the more recent films starring Rey, Finn, and Poe (even though their third film hasn’t released yet), and even Rogue One.
So what modern Star Wars movie did IGN readers love most? A whopping 30,384 of you answered, so check out the results below.
Best of New York Comic-Con: Watchmen, Walking Dead, Kamala Khan, and More
With another New York Comic-Con in the books, and all the pop-culture pixie dust settling on Manhattan's Jacob Javits Center, we've compiled a "Best in Show" for you - from the new Picard trailer to some wicked Walking Dead news to our Watchmen premiere first impressions to Ryan Reynolds saving the digital world in Free Guy.
First though, let's start you off right with some cool-ass cosplay from the convention, including Rocketeer, a Thor/Cap hybrid, Nurse Joker, and characters from Good Omens and Umbrella Academy!
WATCHMEN
Executive producer Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers) unveiled the first episode of his new HBO series, Watchmen, at NYCC, giving us our first real idea what his sequel series to the iconic comic is all about.
These Gears 5 and Mortal Kombat Figures are Huge
I love it when a collectible toy company touts all my favorite nerd franchises. Gears 5 was an enjoyable romp, and I literally cannot wait for Joe Taslim to ice spike dudes through the face in the Mortal Kombat movie reboot. In the meantime, I’m plenty fine with ogling these new figures from Storm Collectibles.
Storm Collectibles displayed a wide variety of figures from their current collection. We’ve got the cast of Gears 5, including the immense Warden with his dual-wielded murder sticks. There’s the cast of Mortal Kombat in their original garb, including the underrated Smoke and a bloodied Scorpion. The Street Fighter crew is hanging out practicing their Hadoukens. We even get the axe rider from Golden Axe and his ridiculous dragon. Is that Lobo and Doomsday?!
Cast & Creators Talk Batman Beyond 20th Anniversary
The cast and crew of the beloved Warner Bros. Animation series Batman Beyond were at New York Comic Con today to reflect on the show's 20th anniversary and preview the upcoming remastered Blu-ray release. Kevin Conroy (Bruce Wayne), Will Friedle (Terry McGinnis/Batman), and Lauren Tom (Dana Tan) were all on hand, along with producer Alan Burnett, casting director Andrea Romano, and James Tucker, who directed the Emmy-winning episode Eggbaby.
Released in 1999, Batman Beyond was a continuation and spin-off of Batman: The Animated Series and its follow-up The New Batman Adventures. All three shows shared several voice actors, including Kevin Conroy as Bruce Wayne. Spanning three seasons and a direct-to-video movie, Batman Beyond won two Emmy Awards and three Annie Awards for excellence in animation. Despite initial skepticism about a new Caped Crusader and the show's dark, cyberpunk sensibilities, it gained an enduring following and spawned half a dozen comic book series.
Batman Beyond Blu-ray Split Screen Comparison
The team at Warner Bros. Home Entertainment brought Batman Beyond to New York Comic Con today, showing off the upcoming remastered Blu-ray of the beloved series. And we've got one of the split screen comparison videos to show you right here.
The clip features the Jokerz gang causing trouble as usual, and facing off against Terry McGinnis (Batman).
Check out the Batman Beyond Blu-ray Split Screen Comparison clip right here:
The remastered Batman Beyond -- called Batman Beyond: The Complete Animated Series Limited Edition -- hits Digital next week and Blu-ray on October 29, 2019.
For even more on the set, be sure to check out our report from the Batman Beyond NYCC panel.
Netflix’s The Dragon Prince Season 3 Release Date Revealed
At New York Comic Con 2019, Netflix and Wonderstorm revealed the release date for Season 3 of The Dragon Prince.
The animated fantasy series will premiere on Netflix on Friday, November 22, 2019. Here's how the streamer describes Season 3. "The new season opens as Callum and Rayla finally enter the magical land of Xadia, and begin the last and most dangerous leg of their journey to reunite Zym with his mother, The Dragon Queen. Meanwhile, Ezran returns to the kingdom of Katolis to take his place on the throne, only to be immediately pressured to go to war with Xadia. Lord Viren, who is imprisoned and desperate, begins to realize the power of his new ally – the mysterious Startouch elf, Aaravos."
Joker Breaks October Record with Big Box Office Haul
Amidst a swirl of praise and controversy, Joker got the last laugh this weekend with an estimated $93.5 million domestic take, marking the movie as the biggest October launch of all time.
Todd Phillips' R-rated Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, broke the previous October release record set by Venom in 2018, which brought in $80 million.
Release the Snyder Cut Fans Buy Times Square Billboards During NYCC
A few days back it was reported that fans behind the Release the Snyder Cut movement were purchasing billboard space in Times Square for New York Comic-Con in order to continue forwarding their agenda to see the fabled alternate cut of the 2017 Justice League movie.
So did it happen? Well, see for yourself!
ComicBook.com's Brandon Davis stood in the heart of Times Square and posted proof.
They did it. They really did it. #ReleaseTheSnyderCut pic.twitter.com/IdKb0ohEsV
Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair Review – Uninvited Nostalgia
It's easy to love Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair when you start. The platformer is bursting with bright, saturated hues at every turn, with a whimsical soundtrack that's as catchy as it is cheery. It's a delightful veneer that quickly gives way to an otherwise predictable and unremarkable platformer. Despite changing its formula from full 3D to 2.5D, Yooka-Laylee is still too firmly rooted in a bygone era for platformers.
This shortcoming is hard to see at first, especially with Impossible Lair's intriguing setup. In theory, the Impossible Lair is an endgame challenge you can attempt in the opening moments of the game. It's a gauntlet of spike traps and moving platforms, populated to the brim with enemies ready to chew you up and spit you back out. Each stage outside of the Lair is meant to help you with this. You’re rewarded with a bee when you complete a stage, each acting as an additional hit point when you attempt the Lair once more. Gathering as many bees as you can lets you push further in while affording you more mistakes. This entices you to check back in with the Impossible Lair from time to time, seeing how well your new health pool holds up and if that (combined with your improving platforming skills) are enough to best it.
In practice, though, you're going to need pretty much every bee Yooka and Laylee can find, mostly due to how ridiculously difficult the Impossible Lair is compared to the rest of the game. It lives up to its name almost too closely, with no checkpoints throughout and long stretches of deadly chasms that will reset your progress significantly should you fall. It's completely different from the rest of the game's stages, which are well-paced with checkpoints and feature options to skip entire segments if you just can't get them right. The shift from accessible, pleasant platforming to a poorly balanced test of skill isn't an inviting one, and it sullies the otherwise interesting idea of having the Impossible Lair accessible at all times.
Outside of the Lair itself, this half-sequel, half-reinvention splits up into two distinctly different types of games. Individual stages are standard 2.5D platforming fare, tasking you with moving from start to finish, while a handful revolve around hunting down collectible items for completion. You navigate through spike traps, swinging ropes, rotating platforms, and dangerous cannons; everything feels familiar enough if you've played a platformer before. Enemies come in different varieties--some will hop in the air, others will charge at you on sight, and still others will simply move between ledges--but their designs aren't visually exciting enough to be memorable.
As familiar as they are, it's not long before stages start to feel like chores. Part of the problem is the merely serviceable platforming at its core. Yooka and his companion Laylee don't feel bad to control per se, but there's nothing exceptional about their move set either. Jumps feel a little floaty and it's annoying that your only attack is mapped to the same button as your roll (any hint of directional movement initiates the latter, and there's no way to change the control scheme), but outside of that there's really nothing remarkably good or bad about making your way through stages. It just feels far too routine, which quickly becomes boring no matter how varied the stages get as you progress.
There are technically 20 distinct stages, but in practice it's double that. Each stage can be manipulated in the hub world to alter both their makeup and challenge. For example, one level entrance on land can be submerged in water, flooding it and making new routes accessible via swimming. The changes are sometimes substantial, like introducing massive gusts of wind to help you float through the air or lasers that chase you through a route that was otherwise safe before. There are routes you'll see on your first run through a stage that are clearly meant for your inevitable return visit under different circumstances, which is a nice touch to their overall design.
Outside of these stages, the game transforms into an isometric 3D platformer, which lets you navigate through a relatively large world as you hop between individual stages. This area is more than just a hub for the real platforming awaiting; it's a self-contained stage unto itself, filled with its own puzzles, secret areas to uncover, and characters to interact with. Each part of the map is themed--there's one with large sentient fans that block paths with gusts of wind and an arid desert with a winding pipe system encroaching on its sparse wilderness, for example--which keeps things fresh as you travel between them.
Solving puzzles in this hub world rewards you with some additional bees for the Impossible Lair, but also with quills and tonics. You collect thousands of quills throughout your time in the game, using them to unlock the abilities that tonics offer, which can be incredibly useful in some tricky stages. One will force Laylee to stick around longer after getting hit, giving you more time to recover her and regain both her abilities and an additional hit point. Others let you glide for longer after a jump or lets Laylee emit a sonar pulse to reveal nearby collectibles. Others are just cosmetic. You can drench the screen in a variety of filters using FX tonics, or marvel at what a modern platformer would look like in a 4:3 aspect ratio before switching it back. They're good for a giggle or two, but not much beyond that.
Finding tonics is more fun than messing around with the abilities they offer. Secret paths are obscured slightly with the fixed camera angle, which makes picking apart your surroundings and uncovering them a treat. Others require some lightly skilled platforming to reach entrances to small caves (which themselves are sometimes locked away behind rocks you need to demolish or prickly shrubs you need to burn away) or the deciphering of clues from other characters to find keys to locked chests. It gives you more reasons to interact with the hub world behind just shepherding yourself from one stage to the next and lets you tackle them in your own time.
The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee's first crack at it, but it's still not remarkable.
What isn't as engrossing is the progression system that governs how you move between each part of the hub world. Gates, jokingly referred to as paywalls, are erected throughout the world, and each requires T.W.I.T coins to unlock. There are five T.W.I.T coins in each stage, hidden in shrewdly obscured rooms or located at the end of particularly challenging platforming routes, both of which are satisfying. Initially it's pretty easy to get by using the few you find naturally through playing. But the high requirement for later gates means replaying stages you've already completed is unavoidable, which quickly introduces an unpleasant pattern of repetition. It's a slog to have to slowly comb through levels you've finished to find one or two coins at a time just so that you can continue on the game's main path.
Having to backtrack through stages to eventually reach and tackle the Impossible Lair would be more tolerable if the final encounter wasn't such a steep difficulty spike, but in truth it's likely you'll tire of its routine platforming well before that disappointment sets in. The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee's first crack at it, but it's still not remarkable. If you're itching to return to a bygone era, then The Impossible Lair might scratch it. Just don't expect much beyond that.
Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair Review – Uninvited Nostalgia
It's easy to love Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair when you start. The platformer is bursting with bright, saturated hues at every turn, with a whimsical soundtrack that's as catchy as it is cheery. It's a delightful veneer that quickly gives way to an otherwise predictable and unremarkable platformer. Despite changing its formula from full 3D to 2.5D, Yooka-Laylee is still too firmly rooted in a bygone era for platformers.
This shortcoming is hard to see at first, especially with Impossible Lair's intriguing setup. In theory, the Impossible Lair is an endgame challenge you can attempt in the opening moments of the game. It's a gauntlet of spike traps and moving platforms, populated to the brim with enemies ready to chew you up and spit you back out. Each stage outside of the Lair is meant to help you with this. You’re rewarded with a bee when you complete a stage, each acting as an additional hit point when you attempt the Lair once more. Gathering as many bees as you can lets you push further in while affording you more mistakes. This entices you to check back in with the Impossible Lair from time to time, seeing how well your new health pool holds up and if that (combined with your improving platforming skills) are enough to best it.
In practice, though, you're going to need pretty much every bee Yooka and Laylee can find, mostly due to how ridiculously difficult the Impossible Lair is compared to the rest of the game. It lives up to its name almost too closely, with no checkpoints throughout and long stretches of deadly chasms that will reset your progress significantly should you fall. It's completely different from the rest of the game's stages, which are well-paced with checkpoints and feature options to skip entire segments if you just can't get them right. The shift from accessible, pleasant platforming to a poorly balanced test of skill isn't an inviting one, and it sullies the otherwise interesting idea of having the Impossible Lair accessible at all times.
Outside of the Lair itself, this half-sequel, half-reinvention splits up into two distinctly different types of games. Individual stages are standard 2.5D platforming fare, tasking you with moving from start to finish, while a handful revolve around hunting down collectible items for completion. You navigate through spike traps, swinging ropes, rotating platforms, and dangerous cannons; everything feels familiar enough if you've played a platformer before. Enemies come in different varieties--some will hop in the air, others will charge at you on sight, and still others will simply move between ledges--but their designs aren't visually exciting enough to be memorable.
As familiar as they are, it's not long before stages start to feel like chores. Part of the problem is the merely serviceable platforming at its core. Yooka and his companion Laylee don't feel bad to control per se, but there's nothing exceptional about their move set either. Jumps feel a little floaty and it's annoying that your only attack is mapped to the same button as your roll (any hint of directional movement initiates the latter, and there's no way to change the control scheme), but outside of that there's really nothing remarkably good or bad about making your way through stages. It just feels far too routine, which quickly becomes boring no matter how varied the stages get as you progress.
There are technically 20 distinct stages, but in practice it's double that. Each stage can be manipulated in the hub world to alter both their makeup and challenge. For example, one level entrance on land can be submerged in water, flooding it and making new routes accessible via swimming. The changes are sometimes substantial, like introducing massive gusts of wind to help you float through the air or lasers that chase you through a route that was otherwise safe before. There are routes you'll see on your first run through a stage that are clearly meant for your inevitable return visit under different circumstances, which is a nice touch to their overall design.
Outside of these stages, the game transforms into an isometric 3D platformer, which lets you navigate through a relatively large world as you hop between individual stages. This area is more than just a hub for the real platforming awaiting; it's a self-contained stage unto itself, filled with its own puzzles, secret areas to uncover, and characters to interact with. Each part of the map is themed--there's one with large sentient fans that block paths with gusts of wind and an arid desert with a winding pipe system encroaching on its sparse wilderness, for example--which keeps things fresh as you travel between them.
Solving puzzles in this hub world rewards you with some additional bees for the Impossible Lair, but also with quills and tonics. You collect thousands of quills throughout your time in the game, using them to unlock the abilities that tonics offer, which can be incredibly useful in some tricky stages. One will force Laylee to stick around longer after getting hit, giving you more time to recover her and regain both her abilities and an additional hit point. Others let you glide for longer after a jump or lets Laylee emit a sonar pulse to reveal nearby collectibles. Others are just cosmetic. You can drench the screen in a variety of filters using FX tonics, or marvel at what a modern platformer would look like in a 4:3 aspect ratio before switching it back. They're good for a giggle or two, but not much beyond that.
Finding tonics is more fun than messing around with the abilities they offer. Secret paths are obscured slightly with the fixed camera angle, which makes picking apart your surroundings and uncovering them a treat. Others require some lightly skilled platforming to reach entrances to small caves (which themselves are sometimes locked away behind rocks you need to demolish or prickly shrubs you need to burn away) or the deciphering of clues from other characters to find keys to locked chests. It gives you more reasons to interact with the hub world behind just shepherding yourself from one stage to the next and lets you tackle them in your own time.
The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee's first crack at it, but it's still not remarkable.
What isn't as engrossing is the progression system that governs how you move between each part of the hub world. Gates, jokingly referred to as paywalls, are erected throughout the world, and each requires T.W.I.T coins to unlock. There are five T.W.I.T coins in each stage, hidden in shrewdly obscured rooms or located at the end of particularly challenging platforming routes, both of which are satisfying. Initially it's pretty easy to get by using the few you find naturally through playing. But the high requirement for later gates means replaying stages you've already completed is unavoidable, which quickly introduces an unpleasant pattern of repetition. It's a slog to have to slowly comb through levels you've finished to find one or two coins at a time just so that you can continue on the game's main path.
Having to backtrack through stages to eventually reach and tackle the Impossible Lair would be more tolerable if the final encounter wasn't such a steep difficulty spike, but in truth it's likely you'll tire of its routine platforming well before that disappointment sets in. The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee's first crack at it, but it's still not remarkable. If you're itching to return to a bygone era, then The Impossible Lair might scratch it. Just don't expect much beyond that.