Every Announcement from Apple WWDC 2015
Today Apple hosted its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, where it unveiled a number of upgrades coming to most of its software platforms. If you missed out on all of the big news to come from the WWDC keynote, catch up with all of the major announcements right here.
As expected, iOS 9 made its grand debut today, and the upgrade is heading to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch later this year. Small improvements have been made to battery life and performance, but the biggest updates are coming to Siri, the built-in Maps app, and the new News app. Touted as a proactive assistant, Siri can now respond to contextual commands, such as something like "Remind me about this" to set a reminder to look at a site you're viewing at a later time. It is also deeply tied into the updated photos app, which can accept inquiries along the lines of "Show me photos from Utah last August."
The Rock Wants Carpenter Involved with Big Trouble Remake
Following the news last week that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is in negotiations to star and produce a Big Trouble in Little China remake, Johnson now says he's hoping to have John Carpenter come aboard "in some capacity."
“It felt like if we surrounded ourselves with the right group of people, the right writers who loved the movie too and wanted to honor it, bring on John Carpenter in some capacity," Johnson tells Entertainment Weekly, "If we did that, then we have a shot at hopefully making something good.”
The New Batman Has a Lot to Prove
We all want the best of the best, so let us point out the hottest comics and collectibles released each week. We spotlight our favorite comics that we know are money-well-spent, new books that look cool, and any toys we can't wait to play with.
Check out our picks, then take to the comments to let us know what looks good to you!
By writer Scott Snyder & artist Greg Capullo | DC Comics
New Batman! New Bat-armor! New haircut! There’s a whole lot of “new” in this issue and it’s got us cautiously excited for this different direction for the beloved Batman series. Batman is more than just pointy ears and a chest symbol, so this new guy has a lot to prove.
Porsche Coming to Forza Horizon 2, Forza Motorsport 6
Porsche, the most successful manufacturer in motor racing, is returning to the Forza franchise in a special Porsche expansion pack for Forza Horizon 2 on Xbox One tomorrow, reports Autoblog. Autoblog’s sources also revealed that, while this Porsche pack will be the only content of its kind for FH2, Porsche will also be a part of the upcoming Forza Motorsport 6.
The USD$10 FH2 Porsche Expansion will feature 10 Porsches, 10 Bucket List events, 10 Rivals events, and 15 new Achievements. The mix of vehicles ranges from classic models like the 1970 914/6 and 1987 959 to newcomers like the 2015 Cayman GTS and Macan Turbo.
Game of Thrones’ Season Finale is This Week’s TV Highlight
The second week of June brings us the return of Defiance on Syfy (followed by the debut of new series Dark Matter) and the third season of Orange is the New Black on Netflix. Plus, BBC America premieres the magical Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The CW wraps up its first season of iZombie, and HBO comedies Veep and Silicon Valley close up shop for the year.
IGN's 2015 Summer TV Preview Guide
But what we're really all salivating for is the Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones. Some huge, horrific things have gone down over the past two episodes and now it's time to close the curtain on this shocking season. Entitled "Mother's Mercy," the GoT season finale is expected to run about 10 minutes longer than usual, so adjust your viewing schedule accordingly.
Massive Chalice Review
Decades of what we'll call... light incest finally blew up in my face. I'd crushed the Cadence at every turn for 150 years. They could not stand up to the unified might of the houses that protected the realm, the houses that had fought the demonic incursion for generations. Their ancestors had lived and died--some on the battlefield, more at home in their beds; they had married and borne children and ruled the lands. But they were mortal, and I was not, and I didn't merely witness the rise and fall of dynasties: I guided them. I forged marriages and alliances and ensured a stream of children for the war effort. But... best laid plans and whatnot... I learned that I was not cut out to meddle in eugenics.
I'd spent so long focusing on maximizing the fertility of the land that I'd lost sight of a more important concern: can any of these love-crazed rabbits actually fight? And while my soldiers were many, they were weak; my hunters (read: archers) had the vision of Mr. Magoo and the mobility of Chris Redfield in the 1996 Resident Evil. My men had grown stagnant, but the Cadence had grown strong. Decisive victories were turning into near scrapes with destruction, and I knew when my last hunter died that my land was not long for this world.
Massive Chalice allows experiences like that one to flourish. Using a centuries-spanning war to weave its experiments, Massive Chalice is a game where accidents of birth, marriage, and being aged to death by eldritch abominations spreads ripples of repercussions across the decades and centuries. Here is a world brought to life through decisions that are wisely given time to breathe before they bear fruit. And it's a shame that experiencing those tales can be so intermittently tedious.
In Massive Chalice, you control an immortal ruler tasked with defending his nation against the omnipresent demonic scourge, the Cadence. In 300 years, a magical chalice will awaken and destroy the Cadence once and for all. But you must keep the kingdom alive until that happens.
And thus forms the basis of Massive Chalice's two major gameplay elements: grand marital strategy and turn-based tactical combat. In one half of the game, you must improve your land (through building population-supporting keeps, research-focused guilds, and military buildings), arrange marriages between the heroic bloodlines that keep the realm safe and thus ensure continuing generations of heroes, and guide the research efforts of the war. In the other half of the game, you lead squads of five soldiers (whose birth you might have arranged decades ago) into battle against the hordes of the Cadence.
The grand strategy portions of Massive Chalice provide its most organic memories, although, beyond the marital/breeding hijinks, the moment-to-moment interactions never equal the realization that decades of genetic planning (inadvertent or otherwise) brought you to victory or ruin. Heroes are divided by class, genetic traits, and personality types. If you marry heroes of the same class, they have children of that class. But if you marry heroes of different class, they have children of hybrid classes. And since the only heroes capable of reproducing are chosen by you, you can amass carefully constructed armies of diverse fighting forces that grow ever stronger or you can breed your ranged class to extinction because you forgot to marry any of them off.
Heroes have genetic and personality traits. They might be slow, or predisposed to having daughters, or small, or infertile. And (other than infertility), they can pass these traits on to their children. Suddenly, you find that you're producing an absurd number of men in your kingdom compared to women, and you remember marrying too many men with the "Produces More Sons" trait. Or you find yourself with those archers that can't shoot that I mentioned, because the house that was your archer factory features two spouses making kids genetically predisposed to being "nervous" (which lowers accuracy). Or by some miracle (because you know you didn't think about it enough), your melee families all have strong bodies and rarely miss. Watching your realm swing from crushing the Cadence to barely surviving because of bad genetic planning should be frustrating, but in Massive Chalice, it is more often amusing because you remember how you could have avoided the disaster.
But Massive Chalice extends you the invitation and then offers you a half-empty world in return.
There are also moments where the game presents you with choices and moral conundrums. Peasants riot in the West due to shortages caused by the war. One of your heroes kills a peasant trying to keep the peace. Do you sacrifice this potential hero? Or do you crush the peasantry? Multiple playthroughs reveal that the consequences of even these choices have an element of randomness, so you’re always kept on your toes about how your decisions will play out. These decisions can have consequences that are more frustrating than fair, though. The last remaining member of a family can die in childbirth. Rational decisions can have catastrophic consequences, removing members of your Vanguard (your squad) for a decade--if not more--and then returning them with negative personality traits. There's a fine line between "keeps you on your toes" and "cruel," and Massive Chalice plays hopscotch with that line.
Some choices are more silly and endearing. Do you feed a wild ostrich? Do you go on a deranged hot air balloon ride? They add levity and personality to a game where genuine personality is abstracted at most turns. You have the option to put the Double Fine spin on the biblical Judgment of Solomon (though this time it involves placing a baby in your magical chalice instead of cutting it in half). You can force two feuding heroes to go on a walkabout around your war-torn land thinking it will cure their anger, only for them to return angry at you instead of each other. These choices maintain the random absurdity of the more serious choices, but they are less frustrating because they at least illicit a chuckle instead of bitter curses.
Where the grand strategy campaign falters is, sadly, everywhere else. The sheer randomness of the gene pool you're presented with at the beginning of the game means it's easy for one of the three core classes to be extinct by the time you build your second keep, just because the few heroes born into that class were cursed with the "short lifespan" trait. Or all of your alchemists have the reveler trait from the start and so you're stuck with a line of drunks for the next three hundred years and you never quite know when a member of your vanguard is going to wake up with a hangover and ruin your mission. It doesn't help that the game's ability to present information to the player is obtuse at best. I ran multiple saves of Massive Chalice before I felt I had a proper handle on its mechanical quirks (and then I ran several more as I began to grasp the complexity of the genetic interplay).
It's also impossible to discuss Massive Chalice's strategic elements without bringing up XCOM: Enemy Unknown, because its design is borrowed quite liberally from that game. You make research, marital, and building decisions and then fast forward through the years until something happens that requires you to respond. Regions of the map are attacked by the Cadence at the same time, and you have to choose which land to help, which sows "corruption" in the region you didn't help, which can then lead to the permanent loss of regions if you continually ignore their needs. Bits of fallen enemies can be used to research better weapons and armor. Remove the marriage and breeding elements of the game, and Massive Chalice would veer close to being Fantasy XCOM in a way that feels less like homage and more like an unashamed clone. The research, production, and macro-military elements are about as thin as a heroin chic model, and if you can keep your heroes alive, the strategy offers so few meaningful choices that it becomes impossible to screw things up beyond poor genetic planning. By the 100-year mark, research and building decisions begin to feel like busywork to keep you occupied between battles rather than important moments in the battle for survival of your kingdom.
When the game puts so much effort into creating a genetically diverse breeding pool of clashing and conflicting personalities, it's disheartening that none of it can be seen on the field.
On the battlefield, things only fare slightly better. Although there are a host of classes in the game, they're broken into three core ideas: melee, ranged, and control. You're free to mix and match your squad of five heroes however you see fit (I tended to stick to two ranged, two control, and one melee). And then you're loosed in turn-based tactical combat within the game's sprawling environments. But that's partially where the game's combat falls apart.
Massive Chalice's maps are huge. If you're moving cautiously around the map, you can waste minutes inching around the levels hoping to bump into the enemy. And whatever algorithm/design principle Massive Chalice is using to generate enemy layouts on these maps is comically out of balance. Combat missions range from easy walks in the park with monsters healthily spaced out to cramped spaces with monsters packed into a singular corner of the map. This would be less problematic if Massive Chalice's combat weren't designed around fighting enemies in manageable packs. Fighting large swarms at once is a recipe for instant death.
It's even more frustrating because the core loop of Massive Chalice's combat can be good. Executing feints and lures to manage enemy unit size and inventing fresh ways to counter the Cadence's deliciously evil ways to hurt you (including attacks that age you and kamikaze poison plant monstrosities) is endlessly satisfactory. Combat is simple: you're limited to a small suite of abilities and items, but there's a synergy to the way the classes play off each other. And you're given enough agency to execute plans and watch them fall together (or go hilariously, miserably wrong). Some enemy combat abilities are outright broken. One enemy can teleport you across the field. If you can't kill it before it attacks, it can wreck all of your careful tactical planning. The aging effect of another enemy is merciless in a game where aging and mortality are constant specters. The length of Massive Chalice's battles is an exercise in pop relativity; if you settle into the groove and the Cadence isn't spaced preposterously apart, it can fly by. But if you're stuck wandering around in an aimless haze, you'll feel every agonizing second of fights that regularly push past the twenty-minute mark.
For a game that places such granular mechanical focus on the personalities and genetic makeup of the heroes you produce, the writing and aesthetics of Massive Chalice never translate this in a meaningful way. If much of Massive Chalice is a less complex XCOM, your heroes' traits become a less charming Valkyria Chronicles. For instance, I didn’t realize that one of my "reveler" heroes was hungover until he suddenly couldn’t move as many spaces. Characters that are "strong-willed" (which means they're unlikely to get the traits of their parents) don't project any force of personality on the field. When the game puts so much effort into creating a genetically diverse breeding pool of clashing and conflicting personalities, it's disheartening that little of it can be seen in battle.
The heroes of Massive Chalice felt more real to me as mythic heroes of bloodlines--their indelible effect on generations of warriors not fully understood--than they did as the figures they cut in battle. In the grand strategy portions, they were part of families with house sigils and house words and adopted children. On the field, they were hit point boxes killing other hit point boxes and I couldn't care less about them as individuals beyond being tools for securing ultimate victory. The game's lifeless artwork did little to alleviate this problem. Although watching the members of your Vanguards or Regencies age and wither away until death was fascinating, the look of the heroes was devoid of detail, and left me with an endless trail of blonde/brunette/ginger men and women with caberjack/crossbow/alchemist claws.
That's ultimately Massive Chalice's most unfortunate shortcoming. It’s a game with enough ambition and execution to spark the imagination, and enough organic entropy to let you suspend your disbelief about the families you help sire. But Massive Chalice extends you the invitation and then offers you a half-empty world in return. Massive Chalice's entropy speaks to me. The random chaos that one marriage can wreak over the decades is a mysterious well of excitement. But the flatness of its world and the tedium of several core elements of the Massive Chalice experience is a high price to pay.
New Xbox One Update Out Now to ‘Prepare for the Future’
Ahead of E3, Microsoft has released a system update for Xbox One that will apparently lay the groundwork for the future of the platform.
In a post on Twitter, Xbox spokesman Larry 'Major Nelson' Hryb teased that while today's system update may not add any noticeable features to console, it does "prepare for the future."
Your Xbox One will get a small update today. No new features. Just a few behind the scenes changes to prepare for the future.
— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) June 5, 2015
XSEED Wants You to Know About The Legend of Heroes: Trails Series
Publisher XSEED has taken to Tumblr to outline the process of localizing the Trails series of games.
"This blog will serve as more of a preemptive Q&A session," the blog reads, referring to The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky -- Second Chapter, The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, and "the Trails series in general," to keep people informed of the series' status in the west.
The blog will also showcase the first official screens from the PC version of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky -- Second Chapter.
Trails of Cold Steel is known in Japan as Sen no Kiseki, which translates roughly to the "paths/trails of a flash/flicker" meant to represent the glimmer of light caught by the steel of a blade as it's drawn. The process for making the term work as an English phrase is part of the blog's first entry.
X-Men: Apocalypse Actress Teases Mohawk Storm
X-Men: Apocalypse actress Alexandra Shipp just may sport a mohawk as Storm in the upcoming superhero film.
On Sunday, Shipp changed her profile pic on Twitter, showing the 23-year-old buzzing her head. She added by saying in a tweet: "Guess the secret's out."
Alexandra Shipp, who portrays Storm in X-Men: Apocalypse, changed her Twitter profile pic to this over the weekend.
Kholat Review
Shadowy conspiracies, supernatural voices, and fearsome blizzards. Mass murder, wandering spirits, and glimpses of a world beyond our own. These are Kholat's ingredients--ingredients that could have comprised an enthralling story, and one that Kholat itself doesn't tell. This exploration adventure squanders its foreboding icy atmosphere on a nonsensical tale that mixes age-old cliches like secret experiments and government cover-ups into narrative mud. Trudging through this mud proves exhausting; every story morsel is another bog to traverse, and the impenetrable ending is pure quicksand, sucking you and the hours you spent to reach it into a vortex of nothingness.
Story and atmosphere are all Kholat has, making its poor storytelling all the more egregious. The "based on a true story" setup is promising, at least: in 1959, nine hikers exploring the chilly Ural mountains died in bizarre circumstances, inspiring years of speculation, along with numerous novels, films, and television inquiries. Kholat has you retracing those real-life hikers' steps from a first-person view, taking its cues primarily from games like Dear Esther in which your primary way of interacting with the world is to wander through it and read the diary entries inexplicably littered throughout.
I say "inexplicably," though I presume there is a reasonable explanation for why these pages haven't become sodden by the falling snow or blown away by the howling winds of Dyatlov pass. Kholat's final moments have the air of a grand reveal; the cryptic narrator makes a resounding declaration, as if he is providing an answer to the game's mounting questions. This is to be the "a ha!" that ties it all together, but after two entire playthroughs, I'm not sure I can tell you what all the questions are, let alone make sense of the narrator’s answer. The clues are found in the pass itself, where metaphysical sights appear before you in eerie shrines and dark caves. They are also found in the diary entries left in the snow and tacked to trees, of course, which divulge confessions and weird science experiments in far more words than is necessary. In mystical stories like this, not everything requires easy explanation, but there's nothing to invest in when you can't make out a basic shape amidst the static.
You're left with snow, and lots of it. You cover a lot of uninterrupted space as you make your way around the pass, seeking the nine landmarks earmarked on your map. This map is Kholat's most promising aspect. The game does not feature a traditional interface; there are no waypoints leading you to your destinations, the map doesn't show you your current location, and you are given no standard quest objectives. Instead, you have a layout of the area, markers that show you the camps (that is, save points) and notes you have already found, and a sequence of geographic coordinates that indicate where you can find the vital landmarks. You journey forward based only on your reading of the map, and the occasional map coordinates that someone has scrawled across the rocks and walls throughout the region.
Navigation thus requires patience, thoughtfulness, and an appreciation for a measured pace. These aren't unreasonable things for a game to ask of you. However, Kholat doesn't progress at a pleasant adagio, but at an excruciating largo. The success of a slow pace rests on the impact of the moments that break it, yet such key moments are too rare, too broken, and too annoying to make exploration worthwhile. A few central revelations bring some percussion to the minimalist droning, including an event in which you flee danger amid a mass of glowing figures. The rest, however, prove problematic.
There are the ghostly silhouettes that roam a few of Kholat's areas, for instance, which kill you should you make contact with them. Sometimes, you collide with a spirit you couldn't have been expected to see; Kholat springs the entire mechanic on you without warning, and doesn't provide proper audiovisual cues to communicate when there is immediate peril. A couple of traps you couldn't have seen--or even suspected would exist--can have you falling onto wooden spikes and cursing at the 30 minutes you lost due to the infrequent save points. (You may also lose progress to the game's occasional hard crashes, an equally curse-worthy event.) Some ledges you are meant to drop down onto; other ledges of similar distance are off limits, and send you sliding into oblivion. "Gotcha" deaths are difficult to get away with in games, because they often feel unfair, but they can serve a purpose if used as a learning tool. In Kholat's case, there's nothing to learn from some of these deaths, because it isn't clear enough what you did wrong in the first place.
In many stories, blizzards and the frigid cold provide a specific kind of terror, and Kholat's moaning winds cry out tales of lost souls that the game ignores in favor of shapeless nonsense. Its ideas reveal the game Kholat wanted to be, but its aspirations soar far higher than the game it became. What good is a mystery if you don't care about what it might tell you?