What Makes a Great Tutorial?
Tutorials are essential to every game experience. In that time we learn the game mechanics, the key players, and of course the main quest. The first few hours of a game can easily make or break our opinion of it.
So what makes a great tutorial? Beyond just explaining the controls, what do some games do that hook you at the start and keep you coming back?
A bad tutorial can be boring, it can be tedious and repetitive. But a good tutorial can be funny, insightful, entertaining, and give you a great first impression of the world you’re going to spend hours in.
From the Cemetery of Ash in Dark Souls 3 to Vault 101 in Fallout 3, here are some great tutorial levels and the archetypes that hold them together.
Game of Thrones Showrunners on Finale’s Big Betrayal
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf," continue below.
Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish met his end at the hands of Arya Stark in the Season 7 finale of Game of Thrones. During the "Inside the Episode" segment for "The Dragon and the Wolf," series showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss discussed the work that went into setting the stage for that shocking moment, much of which was done in Season 7's prior episodes.
Game of Thrones Showrunners Talk THAT Ending
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf," continue below.
The wall that protected the people of Westeros was breached at very end of "The Dragon and the Wolf," and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have shed light on why they decided to conclude Season 7 on such a dire note.
"For many years now we've known this would be the ending of the penultimate season," Benioff revealed during the finale's "Inside the Episode" segment.
"The wall's kept these things out for eight thousand years and there's no really reason it can't keep doing that unless something puts a hole in the wall," Weiss explained. "There's one thing on the board from the beginning that is now big enough to do that and that's a dragon." As such, Weiss said that having the undead dragon blaze a hole through the wall "just started to suggest itself as a logical way forward."
Game of Thrones Finally Confirms Who Jon Snow’s [Spoiler] Is
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf," continue below.
At long last, once and for all, Game of Thrones has set the record straight: Jon Snow is not the bastard son of Ned Stark and some mystery woman, but instead the legitimate son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. Additionally, Jon Snow isn't his real name. Instead, his birth name is Aegon Targaryen.
This is a huge revelation for not only audiences but the show itself. (And yes, for the record, HBO did accidentally reveal this after Season 6.) Bran Stark's confirmation that Jon is the one true heir to the Iron Throne couldn't have come at a worse time, because it was right when Jon was in the middle of having sex with his aunt, Daenerys Targaryen.
Game of Thrones: Season 7 Finale Review
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
And that's all she wrote for Season 7 of Game of Thrones! Let's hope this is enough to tide us over until quite possibly 2019, for the eighth and final season, though I don't think we've left all that much on the table here as far as pretty bows placed atop fan theory gifts. Unless you count the recurring theory that Bran is somehow also the Night King thanks to a Three-Eyed time travel snafu and the Prince Who Was Promised prophesy.
"The Dragon and the Wolf" was almost feature-length, shaving it close to 80 minutes. It's definitely the longest episode of the series to date and, unsurprisingly, it was heavily dialogue-driven. Here's the thing: We've reached the end of the seventh season and when you combine all the characters killed off and storylines ended thus far, there's not much going on all over the place compared to the way it used to be. Right now we've got, at most at a time, four places to hop around to per episode. It used to be that you could flip back and fourth from anywhere to five to eight separate stories in a single chapter.
Splatoon 2: The Ideal Online Shooter for Non-shooter Fans
There are numerous reasons as to why I let the original Splatoon pass me by when it debuted on the Wii U in 2015, but chief among them was that, in recent years, I just haven't been enjoying online shooters like I used to. This is largely because I'm older and more anti-social now; I have less desire to talk to or even interact with strangers online while playing games, not that I've ever found much of what's said in online lobbies to be worth engaging in.
Because of this, if I do ever feel the need to dabble, it tends to be in those shooters that are large in scale and with a high number of concurrent players, or at least something in which I can go lone wolf, leave the mic unplugged, but still contribute to an overall team effort. To this end, the Battlefields and Titanfalls of this world have been solid options for me, but even then, my online investment in such games has been fleeting at best.
How Inhumans Brought a 2,000 Pound Teleporting Dog to Life
"I have a surprise," says Carlos Barbosa, production designer for Marvel's Inhumans. We're on a tour of the series' Attilan sets in Hawaii back in May, moving from the throne room through Black Bolt's silent room, toward the Royal Family's personal quarters. But Barbosa decides to make a pit stop at the only thing on set that can make the attending group of press gasp in delight: Lockjaw.
Lockjaw is far and away the most beloved character from Marvel's Inhumans comics, and he's the character the creators of the TV show adaptation are expecting to be the standout here as well. It's hard not to become enamored with the pup, a 2,000 pound, 6-foot-tall teleporting French bulldog who lives on the dark side of the moon. On set, even though he was still just a work in progress, Lockjaw was the standout of everything we got to see.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre Director Tobe Hooper Dies
Famed horror director Tobe Hooper has died. He was 74.
The director, best known for his work on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, died in Sherman Oaks, California, Variety reports. According to the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, Hooper died of natural causes.
Tobe Hooper
Box Office: This Was Hollywood’s Worst Weekend in 16 Years
The Hitman's Bodyguard topped what has been the domestic box office's lowest-grossing weekend in sixteen years.
Director Patrick Hughes' action-comedy earned an estimated $10.1 million in its second weekend. The Hitman's Bodyguard opened in first place last week, earning just over $21 million in its domestic debut. Comparatively speaking, the box office leader this time last year was Don't Breathe, which earned over $24 million in its late August debut.