Watch All the Super Bowl TV Commercials
This Sunday, millions will be glued to their TVs, watching Super Bowl XLIX - and of course, all of the commercials that come with it. As the most-viewed event on TV every year, the commercial time for the Super Bowl remains a mega-hot commodity for advertisers, who continue to pull out all the stops in terms of production value and celebrity involvement.
Watch the Super Bowl XLIX Movie Commercials Here
As we get closer to Sunday, many of these ads will have an early debut. We'll be updating this story as more of the ads are released, letting you get an early look at what's to come Sunday, at least during those commercials breaks...
Nintendo Worldwide Amiibo Sales in the Millions
Nintendo released the numbers for the third-quarter of its fiscal year, and it revealed that the company sold 5.7 million amiibo worldwide.
That comes to roughly 1.6 amiibo for every copy of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, with numbers for Smash reaching 3.39 million total units worldwide.
Amiibo functionality isn't just limited to Smash, of course. Mario Kart 8 and Hyrule Warriors support the figurines, and the upcoming Kirby and the Rainbow Curse will have amiibo functionality, as well. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker will be getting amiibo support in an update in March, and there are many more games for both 3DS and Wii U with amiibo support planned.
First Photos from the Max Steel Movie
We've got our first glimpse of the upcoming live-action Max Steel movie, based on the successful Mattel toyline-turned-animated series.
Check out the first batch of images from Max Steel, featuring young stars Ben Winchell (A.N.T. Farm) and Ana Villafane (Los Americans) -- plus a glimpse of the titular armor -- below:
Gravity Ghost Review
Childhood is terrifying. Childhood is beautiful. Childhood is full of wonder. And childhood is marked by the continual loss of innocence that comes with each new year. Learning that the unexplored experiences which is exciting and enticing could kill you is part of growing up; as is learning that there are consequences to all of our actions no matter how pure our intentions may be. Those are heavy themes for adults to handle, let alone children, but they rest at the core of delightful platformer Gravity Ghost.
In Gravity Ghost, you control the ghost of Iona, a recently deceased young girl who lives on a secluded island with her two younger sisters and her older sister, Hickory, who became their guardian after the tragic death of their parents. The circumstances leading up to Iona's death unfurl throughout her story as tensions between her and Hickory arise: she believes that her sister's fiancé was responsible for their parents' deaths. You meet Voy, a seemingly tame wolf that Iona has befriended. And you watch Iona retreat deeper and deeper into her own heartache and isolation as the mystery and tension surrounding her death grow.
Gravity Ghost combines the aesthetics of Maurice Sendak with the narrative power of classic Don Bluth films like The Secret of NIMH, yet there's little to compare the game's overall style to. The art is like the pages of an illustrated children's book come to life with painstaking details and a beautiful colored-pencils effect, and before the (welcome) heavier elements of the story arrived, I grinned ear to ear at the sincere innocence of it all. But Gravity Ghost is a story about the price of innocence, and it explores guilt and death and family from a child's point of view without sacrificing clarity of insight and without ever looking down on or being condescending towards the perspective of its young star. Gravity Ghost operates on pure empathy, and the story's denouement left me on the verge of tears.
Gravity Ghost's gameplay is also quite good, although it never quite reaches the magnificent heights of the game's storytelling and art. Gameplay revolves around platforming with a physics twist. You leap back and forth between planetoid objects of varying sizes and manipulate the gravity wells of each object to shoot yourself across the levels. Along the way you collect stars which open the doors to finish each level, and flowers which lengthen ghost Iona's hair and allow you in turn to collect the ghosts of dead animals and terraform planets. Returning those animal-ghosts to their former bodies also leads to the sublimely animated cutscenes which move the story forward.
The variety of celestial objects in the game is a perfect fit for its tight three-hour running time. Gas giants allow you to bounce like a pinball machine. Fire planets propel you high in the sky off their steam. Water planets allow you to dive beneath their surfaces to collect stars and flowers. And gem planets are super-dense with stronger gravity wells than normal. Over the course of the seven constellations--with around 80 or so small levels in total--that make up the game's campaign, you also gain the ability to terraform the planets from one type to another, which is necessary for solving many of the game's simple puzzles.
Leaping back and forth between the gravity wells to collect the stars and flowers and ghosts and power-ups isn't always the smoothest experience, but the game gives you a host of tools to circumnavigate most potential sources of frustration, except in timed segments where the looseness of the gravity physics can become aggravating. Despite the looseness of the controls, bouncing and floating between the planets is an oddly Zen experience and it becomes quite soothing before long. It also helps that the soundtrack, from FTL composer Ben Prunty, adds to the game’s strange rejuvenative power.
The worst thing that can be said about Gravity Ghost is that I crave more of it.
Beyond the occasionally frustrating timed segments, the worst thing that can be said about Gravity Ghost is that I crave more of it. The game is short. It took me just over three hours to do a 100-percent run for each star and ghost and power-up. And, once you've beaten it, there are few incentives to go back and play again, minus chasing a couple of achievements you wouldn't think to chase on your first go around. But while Gravity Ghost may be short, it never overstays its welcome. Each constellation is the perfect length, and the game continues to implement new mechanics and kinks into the core gameplay up to the final levels.
It's easy to capture the happiest moments of being a child: friendships, vacations, exploring the vast, uncharted world in front of you. But it's hard to convey the toughest moments, those moments that we compartmentalize and repress beyond recognition as adults. And it's especially hard to convey such moments in language and images that both children and adults can appreciate and understand. That Gravity Ghost accomplishes this feat with such seeming ease is a testament to its imagination and its power.
NFL Denver Broncos’ Julius Thomas Plays Call of Duty with IGN
During IGN's world premiere live stream of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's Havoc DLC, Julius Thomas, Tight End for the Denver Broncos, joined us to play some Team Deathmatch on the new map, Urban.
As we play, we answered your Twitter questions about our favorite perks, the best of the new DLC maps, and more. If you missed the end of the stream, we closed things out with a few full rounds of the new Exo-Zombies mode.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's Havoc DLC is available now on Xbox One and Xbox 360. It's coming to other platforms soon. We'll keep you updated as we learn more.
Brian is an associate editor at IGN. You can follow him @albinoalbert on Twitter.
Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered Out Tomorrow
David Cage's cult classic murder mystery Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered is now officially confirmed and out tomorrow for PC, Mac, Linux, and iOS.
Last week, a countdown appeared on achillingfeeling.com, hinting at a project somehow related to Quantic Dream's interactive drama from 2005. The page now redirects to an official website for Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy Remastered.
A supposed Amazon listing for the remastered edition also leaked a few days ago, but now its existence is official.
Ranking DC’s 15 Event Comics
DC Comics is set to kick off their next major event called Convergence this April as elements from the old DCU will make a comeback in a conflict that spans the multiverse. With that big event on the horizon, we figured now would be a good time to look back at DC's past events and see how they measure up today.
Event comics and crossovers are just part of the territory when it comes to superhero comics these days. Ever since Crisis on Infinite Earths set the standard for epic, spectacle-driven superhero stories in the DC Universe, DC has been pumping out one event after another. Some of them have been immensely entertaining, while others are better left gathering dust in the quarter bin.
Xbox Live is Having Issues Again
Xbox Live is experiencing issues again. On the Xbox Live support page, core services on both Xbox 360 and Xbox One are listed as being affected, with sign-in problems listed under the Core Services heading on the page.
Additionally, purchases and content services are listed as problematic, specifically buying downloadable items and downloading items that have already been purchased. This problem was first posted to the Xbox Live support page yesterday at 7:45 pm CST.
The sign-in trouble was first posted to the site today at 5 pm CST.
Microsoft said that their support team is "already engaged and investigating right now," and they're trying to get it fixed "ASAP."
Pitt and Jolie, Together Again
Brad Pitt is in negotiations to star in his wife Angelina Jolie's forthcoming drama Africa.
According to TheWrap, Pitt will play famed archaeologist Richard Leakey in the biopic, which follows Leakey's defense of elephants against poachers in Kenya in the late 1980s.
Jolie is working with cinematographer Roger Deakins, who also shot her last film, Unbroken. She is also producing Africa and production could begin as soon as this summer.
"I’ve felt a deep connection to Africa and its culture for much of my life, and was taken with Eric Roth's beautiful script about a man drawn into the violent conflict with elephant poachers who emerged with a deeper understanding of man’s footprint and a profound sense of responsibility for the world around him," Jolie said of the project in a statement.
Agent Carter Character’s Major Marvel Movie Connection
Note: Spoilers for the most recent Agent Carter episode, from January 27th, follow.
It only took one episode beyond her introduction for Peggy Carter’s new neighbor, Dottie (Bridget Regan) to show she had some huge secrets on Marvel’s Agent Carter – as she quickly and effortlessly killed the dangerous Mr. Mink.
So how does Dottie have these skills? We have the answer, straight from the show's executive producers. Ready to hear it?
One last warning if you want to look away…
Alright, if you’re still with us, here goes! As some suspected might be the case, especially given the specific fighting style she used, Dottie is indeed a product of the Black Widow Program – or at least the program that will become Black Widow. Yes, before Natasha Romanoff would prove how formidable she was in the present day of the Marvel films, other women received the same training from Russia – and Dottie is here to represent that in Agent Carter’s 1946 setting.