Corey Feldman Claims He Was Stabbed in His Car
The Goonies and Gremlins star Corey Feldman has claimed he was attacked in his car by a group of three men, one of whom stabbed him.
"IM IN THE HOSPITAL! I WAS ATTACKED 2NITE! A MAN OPENED MY CAR DOOR & STABBED ME W SOMETHING! PLEASE SAY PRAYERS 4 US! THANK GOD IT WAS ONLY MYSELF & MY SECURITY IN THE CAR, WHEN 3 MEN APPROACHED! WHILE SECURITY WAS DISTRACTED, W A GUY A CAR PULLED UP & ATTACKED! I’M OK," Feldman wrote on Twitter, with photos of himself in the hospital.
Xbox Games With Gold for April 2018 Revealed
The lineup of games available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers in April 2018 has been revealed.
The following titles we be available for download for Xbox Live Gold members next month:
- The Witness - April 1-30 (Xbox One)
- Assassin's Creed: Syndicate - April 16 to May 15 (Xbox One)
- Disney/Pixar's Cars 2 - April 1-15 (Xbox One, Xbox 360)
- Dead Space 2 - April 16-30 (Xbox One, Xbox 360)
The Witness is "a labyrinthine mystery through a brilliantly designed world" which received a 10 in IGN's glowing review. It was also nominated for our 2016 Game of the Year.
Thanos Makes Even Winter Soldier and Falcon Get Along in Avengers: Infinity War
The Winter Soldier, aka Bucky Barnes, and the Falcon, aka Sam Wilson, are both trusted allies of Captain America, but in Captain America: Civil War, they didn’t exactly get along that well. Between the car seat bitterness and Falcon’s flat-out “I hate you” line after they were webbed up by Spider-Man, it was clear that these two heroes were begrudging allies at best.
IGN and a small group of press visited the Atlanta set of Avengers: Infinity War where we watched a scene being filmed and got a chance to talk to Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie. The actors revealed that when their characters eventually reunite, their determination to beat Thanos will inspire them to leave the past behind and cut each other some slack. The scene in question featured the Avengers landing in Wakanda to ask King T’Challa for aide in defending the Earth against Thanos, which saw the two characters cross paths for the first time since Civil War.
Amazon Reportedly in Talks to Pay $1B for Rights to Chinese Novel
Amazon is reportedly in negotiations to adapt the Hugo-winning Chinese sci-novel, The Three-Body Problem, and its two sequels into a three-season series, and is said to be prepared to pay $1 billion for the rights.
Financial Times (via io9) reports that, according to international investors, Amazon is negotiating for the rights to the sci-fi trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past, more often referred to as The Three-Body Problem, which is the title of the first book.
Dark Nights: Metal Reshapes the DC Universe
DC's epic Dark Nights: Metal storyline wrapped up today, and it's causing some major changes to the DC Universe.
Warning: this article contains spoilers for Dark Nights: Metal #6!
Unsurprisingly, the series ends with the Justice League rallying its numbers, defeating Barbatos and his Dark Knights and lifting Earth back out of the Dark Multiverse. But the big surprise is Batman's choice of ally for his final showdown with the Batman Who Laughs. Who better to help Batman defeat a twisted, Joker-ized version of himself than the actual Joker?
New Deadpool 2 Poster Released
20th Century Fox has released a new international poster for Deadpool featuring the sequel's three main characters.
In the image, via Blackfilm, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is sandwiched between the luck-manipulating mutant Domino (Zazie Beetz) and Cable (Josh Brolin). It also looks as though the Merc with a Mouth is giving Cable a wet willy. Check out the poster below.
Deadpool 2 international poster, via Blackfilm.
Final Fantasy 14 Is Free-to-Play for Returning Players for a Limited Time
Players who have been a bit lax with their Final Fantasy 14 monthly subscription can head back to the world of Eorza for a few days, free of charge.
The free login campaign lets players who have bought the game and registered their accounts hop back in for four days. The event is open for a limited-time only, running up until Sunday, May 6.
Players with suspended or banned accounts will be unable to participate, for obvious reasons, and if you're considering committing to a subscription partway through your trial, you should wait until the end of the four days to get your money's worth, as it were, as the free login period will be forfeit as soon as you sign up.
Sea of Thieves Is Microsoft’s Fastest-Selling New IP of This Generation
Rare has announced that Sea of Thieves is Microsoft's fastest-selling new IP of the current generation, and already the best-selling first-party game on Windows 10.
A week after release, the game has hit 2 million players - although it's not clear how much of a proportion of that player base is accessing the game through the Xbox Game Pass, which offers Sea of Thieves as part of a monthly subscription. IGN has contacted Xbox for comment on that.
The statement's wording, which announced that the game is "the fastest-selling first-party new IP of this generation", led to some speculation as to whether the developer was saying that was true across all platforms, but a tweet from Aaron Greenberg makes clear that the statistic applies purely to Microsoft.
How Dragon Quest Spawned an Urban Legend
We first published this in March, 2018, but we are re-promoting it as part of a new initiative on IGN where we spend a whole month exploring topics we find interesting in the world of video games (and hope you will, too!). April is our Urban Legends month, when we'll take a look at the bizarre, eerie, untold, and otherwise unexplained phenomena within the gaming community.
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I’ve been told the story more than once, and always in the same way. Every time a Dragon Quest game is released, thousands of children will be caught playing truant, and as many grown workers will take a sick day, leading to a measurable drop in productivity across Japan. Don’t forget, there’s no such thing as mandated sick pay in Japan - people were losing money to pay money for a game, just to play it on launch day.
The story continues that this phenomenon became so predictable that the government was forced to step in. The “Dragon Quest Law” was passed - Enix’s games now had to avoid a weekday release and arrive on a Saturday instead. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how popular this series had become – a simple RPG turned legitimate cultural phenomenon.
Like most good stories, it isn’t true. Unlike most stories, however, the truth is almost better.
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The untrue part of the story is really only that the government had to create a law – and that’s only because it never had to. The developers, feeling bad for having created a nationwide issue, essentially created the Dragon Quest Law for themselves.
“Basically,” explains series executive producer Yuu Miyake, “it was the general accepted practice in the industry was to have games shipped out on a Thursday, but there were kids who would skip school to go and buy the games. So we arranged with Nintendo to have Dragon Quest released on a Saturday as a special exception to that.”
It’s a tradition that continues to this day – the latest game, Dragon Quest XI got its own Saturday release, over 30 years after the first game arrived.
Dragon Quest has become an implacable piece of Japanese culture, not simply a game nor even, to use a phrase that makes me a feel a bit sick, a multimedia franchise. Its release is a cause for celebration, hobby shops have entire swathes of space given over to its merchandise, and Luida’s Bar, the restaurant opened as a limited-time celebration of Dragon Quest IX, is now entering its eighth year of business. I’m also fairly sure the old rule that you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat in London applies to Slime plushies in Tokyo.
That’s down in major part to Yuji Horii, the series’ primary creator, writer and, as Miyake puts it, “head of the fans”. It’s perhaps not a surprise that it would be Horii who became key to the operation - you can trace his drive for success from well before Dragon Quest was conceived. In 1982, Horii was a games writer for Shōnen Jump magazine. Sent out on assignment to report on an Enix game design competition, he decided to secretly enter his own hobby project – a simple tennis game. Looking at the rest of his career, it seems almost inevitable that his game was named among the winners, and Horii had to find a way to report on his own victory.
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In the process he met another winner, programmer Koichi Nakamura – they would go onto create Dragon Quest together after Horii became infatuated with early computer RPG Wizardry. In trying to refine and simplify that game’s style for less powerful ‘80s consoles, while adding a grand fantasy storyline, the pair essentially invented what would go on to be called the JRPG.
As one of the earliest console games to offer thoughtful strategy as opposed to reflex-based action, the first in the series sold incredibly well in Japan. Come Dragon Quest 3 in 1988, it had reached another level. Horii recalls going out personally to see the huge lines of people waiting to buy the game – it’s probably not a coincidence that it was around this time that the Dragon Quest Law was suggested.
In the process, Horii himself has become a part of the myth – the man who created the JRPG, who changed video games, and influenced Japanese culture as a whole. As a marker of his importance, I’ve signed legal documents forbidding me from mentioning where his office is located, for fear of it being mobbed. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Horii%20himself%20has%20become%20a%20part%20of%20the%20myth%20%E2%80%93%20the%20man%20who%20created%20the%20JRPG%2C%20who%20changed%20video%20games%2C%20and%20influenced%20Japanese%20culture%20as%20a%20whole."]
It’s a popularity that’s never quite translated to the west, no matter how good the reviews are. When I ask why a series as superficially similar as Final Fantasy has seen so much more success in the west, Miyake tries to give a reasoned response about the relative popularities of NES (where DQ first flourished) and PS1 (where Final Fantasy hit the mainstream) in each region, but Horii jumps in with a blunt response befitting of the man in charge: “It was basically down to the fact that Enix weren't putting as much much effort into overseas promotion [as Square].”
To me, it’s almost more satisfying that Dragon Quest remains a little mysterious to us while it remains seismic in its home country – how else would we have gotten that urban myth in the first place?
Over three decades on from the original game, some of those children who cut class to play the NES games are now working on the series, while entire new generations wait until the weekend for a chance to play. “There is a lot of pressure,” Horii explains when I ask what it’s like to release games that mean so much to so many people. “I'm always having to think about how we're going to surprise the fans next.”
Horii spends our entire interview downplaying his importance, countering every time I mention his cultural impact with a laugh and a rebuttal. But when I ask about what it’s like to see his work become a piece of his own country, he finally, just for a moment, acknowledges his place as the man behind the myth:
“I really just had this desire to make games that people would like and give enjoyment to people, and as a result of that, it's become what it has. Sometimes I look back and think ‘wow, I really am something special’.”
“Oh you do think that?” jokes his producer. “Yeah, sometimes.”[poilib element="accentDivider"]
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News, and he didn't get to mention that Horii's office is done up like a castle. It's very odd. Follow him on Twitter.
Dragon Quest 11 PS4 and PC Release Date Announced
Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age will be released for PS4 and Steam on September 4 in North America and Europe. However, the planned Nintendo Switch version will not be released this year, and the 3DS version released in Japan will not be released in the west at all.
The localised version of the gigantic JRPG comes with a number of additions and improvements, including voiced English dialogue, a Hard Mode option, overhauled menus, a faster dash to speed up exploration, and a first-person camera mode.
This will be the first time a mainline Dragon Quest game will be available on PC in the west.
However, it's a slightly different story on Nintendo platforms. The 3DS version of the game - which was a complete remake of the Japanese PS4 version, played in both pixel art and 3D versions across the console's two screens - will not be localised at any point.