Despite the fact that you don’t see much of your character in Mecha Break, the PvP mech shooter has a god-tier character creator, which allows you to tweak everything from your pilot’s height and hair color to the length of their fingers. This character creator is supplemented by the Matrix Marketplace: an in-game store where players can sell or auction off their painstakingly customized pilot designs in exchange for Corite, the game’s premium in-game currency.

On the surface, this seems like a really neat idea, especially because the game’s standard seasonal cosmetic store has a very small selection of items that rotate out every three days. If you spot a pilot with cute pigtails, for example, you can’t just go into the cosmetic store and buy that exact hairdo, as it’s very unlikely that a specific hairstyle will be available for you to purchase at any given time. You might find another cool hairstyle for sale, but it probably won’t be the one you’re looking for. Thus, you have two options:

Option #1: Wait indefinitely for the store’s offerings to feature the hairstyle/lipstick/eyeliner/whatever that you’re looking for, checking back every three days when stock has been refreshed.Option #2: Buy it from another player.

You might think Option #2 is the best choice, but unfortunately, it comes with a catch. You see, once you’ve purchased another player’s custom pilot look, you’ll get to use it on your pilot. You will not, however, be able to edit it in any way, shape, or form. The hair color cannot be changed, and the hairstyle itself can only be used in conjunction with the rest of the purchased pilot’s features (collectively referred to as a “style” in-game). You can’t wear the hairstyle by itself — you can only wear the full style, essentially becoming a clone of another player’s pilot, right down to their face and body shape.

This is great if you just want a sort of cosplay skin for your pilot, as the Matrix Marketplace is full of interesting customizations that can make your pilot look like a specific character from an anime, movie, or video game, and will save you the work of spending endless hours trying to build them from the ground up by yourself. But if you’re just looking for a specific hairstyle, makeup type, or accessory, you’re pretty much screwed. You can only edit the player-created custom pilot designs you purchase in the Matrix Marketplace if you already own the cosmetic items being used in the design, which would require you to purchase those items from Mecha Break‘s standard in-game cosmetic store, which defeats the purpose of buying a player-made style to gain access to a cosmetic item that isn’t currently available in the seasonal cosmetic store.

Unless you somehow get lucky enough to unlock all the cosmetic items you need via direct purchase from the rotating styles listed under the Seasonal Cosmetics tab, you’ve got no choice but to wait around for the right cosmetics to pop up, or take the L and change your character’s entire look, just to use the hairstyle, iris/pupil design, or makeup style you want. I’ve been hoping to get my hands on a cosmetic that would give my pilot heart-shaped pupils, but it’s not available for direct purchase in my seasonal cosmetics store, and the only version of it that’s currently for sale in the Matrix Marketplace is locked to a pilot design that includes short brown hair and facial scarring. It’s a really cool look, but it’s not what I’m going for. I just want the eyes!

The ability to sell your creations to other players for in-game money is a really fun concept, and is a great way for Mecha Break to highlight its incredible character customization options — a feature that can be easily missed in a game that devotes most of its screen time to giant robots. I’ve listed a few designs for sale (no bites yet, unfortunately), and I am all for giving players the tools they need to create the character of their dreams.

The problem is that players also need the freedom to use those tools, and freedom isn’t something Mecha Break allows for when it comes to attaining cosmetics. The game lets you customize the heck out of your pilot, but if there’s a specific premium cosmetic you’re in search of, you’ll need either the patience of a saint or a great deal of luck to actually get your hands on all the items you need to create your ideal pilot.

As fun as the Matrix Marketplace is, the fact that the cosmetics are locked to one specific color and pilot design is unbelievably frustrating, and I’m struggling to understand the reasoning behind it. I’m sitting here practically begging the game to take my money, but I’m not going to spend it on a player-made creation when what I get in return is a completely un-customizable pilot who has the right hairdo in the wrong color. It feels like buying a Barbie who has all of her clothes fused to her body, unable to be worn by other Barbie dolls unless I get lucky and find additional versions of the same accessories for sale.

The most frustrating part of all of this is that all of the items I’m currently hunting for were fully available to players during *Mecha Break’*s multiple beta tests, and could be purchased using Mission Tokens, a free in-game currency earned just by playing the game. Amazing Seasun Games made it clear that items like outfits would need to be bought with Corite, but until the game’s launch, players were under the impression that they’d have access to a much wider array of customization options. I got used to customizing my pilot‘s hairstyle, iris/pupil shape, eye color, and makeup exactly how I wanted it using only Mission Tokens. Now I can’t even get what I want with real-life cash, and the options to customize certain cosmetics — like eyeshadow and lipstick color — has disappeared entirely.

Mecha Break‘s Matrix Marketplace has other issues, too — you can sell just about anything, including weapons and items that make life easier in the game’s signature Mashmak mode, leading to accusations of pay-to-win mechanics, and the auction house is a bit of a mess. But that’s a discussion for another day. For now, I just want a way to get my hands on specific cosmetics without having to cross my fingers and wait indefinitely, or completely change my pilot’s entire look.

Then again, things could always be worse. At least Mecha Break‘s hairstyles aren’t distributed via randomized loot boxes.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Superman is the most powerful superhero in DC Comics, able to go toe to toe with its most powerful villains, like Darkseid and Brainiac. That’s why it’s surprising that his nemesis is Lex Luthor, a man without any superpowers.

The best versions of Luthor across comics, television, and movies make him a threat precisely because of that disparity. He fights Superman with wealth and connections rather than with fists or energy beams. He understands Superman’s moral code and uses it to his advantage, knowing that even if Superman is convinced Luthor is behind the latest scheme he’s unraveled, he can’t do anything about it without hard proof that will convince the authorities.

But superhero stories require an exciting climax, and writers have struggled with how to put Luthor at the center of the action. Some stories put him in a war suit so he can survive a punch from the Man of Steel. Justice League Unlimited gave him superpowers by fusing him with Brainiac. In Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman, which James Gunn said was a primary influence for his 2025 Superman, Luthor uses Superman’s DNA to gain his powers.

Gunn found a different way to let Luthor fight Superman, one that leans more into his skills as a mastermind. It’s a spin that links up closely with a clever recent reinvention of a Marvel villain, and it forces Superman to find a new way to take his nemesis down.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers follow for Superman — and Spiderman: Far From Home.]

Supermanopens just after Superman (David Corenswet) gets absolutely pummeled by the Hammer of Boravia, a hulking armored figure who claims to be avenging his home country after Superman stops Boravia from invading a neighboring country. The supposed national champion of Boravia is capable of smashing the world’s most powerful metahuman into the pavement, but it’s quickly revealed that he isn’t actually Boravian: He’s a creation of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who is guiding every blow in the fight from a command center in his Metropolis skyscraper.

It’s a team effort reminiscent of how the illusionist Mysterio operates in Spiderman: Far From Home. While Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) is disguised as a hero from another dimension, supposedly battling to save Earth from invading elementals, he has a whole crew working behind the scenes to make the illusion convincing, in a scheme to earn Peter Parker’s trust. Luthor’s Superman clone Ultraman is inside the Hammer of Boravia’s armor, delivering the big hits and taking Superman’s punches while Luthor directs his every move, with the help of a small army of lackeys. Luthor doesn’t need to fight Superman himself, because he’s used his intellect to stage a battle entirely on his terms. “Brain beats brawn,” Luthor crows when he has Superman at his lowest.

Like the MCU’s Mysterio, who spent 12 years uniting other disgruntled Stark Industries employees and plotting his revenge, this Luthor is patient. Luthor’s spent the three years since Superman entered the world stage studying Superman’s every move so Luthor could choreograph a fight against him. Luthor combed through the sites of his battles for blood he could use to clone Superman. Luthor convinced Boravia’s leader that the tech billionaire wanted a war for real estate — a nice nod to the land-grabbing versions of the character played by Gene Hackman in 1978’s Superman and Kevin Spacey in 2006’s Superman Returns — when Luthor was really just looking for an excuse to kill Superman. Even the Hammer of Boravia attack is just a distraction Luthor can use to infiltrate Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, in search of something he can use to fight Superman in the court of public opinion.

Both Mysterio and Luthor want everyone to know just how smart they are. Mysterio lays out every part of his plan at the villainous wrap party he hosts after successfully tricking Peter into giving him control of the tech Tony Stark deeded to Peter. Luthor similarly villain-monologues to Superman after imprisoning him, confident in the redundant defenses of having him trapped in a sunless pocket dimension in a cell with a living hunk of Kryptonite. The hubris might seem silly if it wasn’t so very core to his character.

While Gunn’s Superman doesn’t follow the plot of All-Star Superman, where the dying hero completes a set of Herculean trials to put his affairs in order, the movie is true to Morrison’s excellent version of Luthor. The brilliant scientist sees himself as an avatar of human potential and ambition, and Superman as an invasive species that threatens to smother those qualities. Luthor doesn’t think of himself as a villain, but as a savior of a threatened humanity. Gunn’s version of Luthor has even more of a point than Morrison’s, since this Superman was sent to Earth precisely because he’s so much stronger than humans that he could easily dominate the planet if he chose to.

Hoult beautifully delivers those same sentiments. His Lex is a petty tyrant who enjoys the fear he inspires in his subordinates so much that after dropping a mug full of pencils just to watch them scramble to clean up the mess, he  immediately knocks over another one, like a sadistic cat. But he’s honest about his failings, admitting that he’s extremely jealous of Superman. He had to spend years scheming to create a credible threat for someone who fell out of the sky and became the most powerful man on Earth.

But while Luthor accounts for all of Superman’s fighting techniques, he doesn’t grasp his greatest strength: the ability to inspire others. Superman escapes from Luthor’s prison by enlisting the help of Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). He stops his schemes in Boravia by getting the Justice Gang to take up the cause. His girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) leads the investigation that exposes Luthor’s crimes. Even Superman’s kindness to the misbehaving superpowered dog Krypto helps him win the final battle.Luthor ends the film shipped off Belle Reve, the base of operations of Amanda Waller’sTask Force X, so he will almost assuredly have more of a role to play in the future of Gunn’s DC Universe. Even defeated, this is a version of the character with huge potential. He’s already shown his skill at commanding a group capable of taking down Superman. With the ground laid for the Justice Gang to become the Justice League, hopefully Luthor will get to take on his other big role in DC Comics: leader of the Legion of Doom.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

All due respect to developer Rare — I really enjoyed my time with Diddy Kong Racing, team! — I’m choosing to willfully ignore almost the entirety of its work on the Donkey Kong franchise, because there’s a bunch of very confusing ape lore I’d prefer not to think about while I play Donkey Kong Bananza next week.

And, yeah, Candy Kong is a big part of that. I never want to think about Candy Kong in particular.

As a longtime fan of games Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and 1994 Game Boy game Donkey Kong, I’m going to approach the events of Bananza as the next major milestone in that franchise — a legacyquel, if you will. I’m positively buzzing at seeing how the events of Bananza lead directly into Donkey Kong, a story about Mario climbing a building to save a woman — if that is indeed how the Super Mario Odyssey team has decided to handle this potential prequel.

Nintendo is, of course, withholding those important story details in the lead up to Bananza. The company hasn’t explained why the modern-day Donkey Kong is buddying up with a 13-year-old Pauline, a person he seemingly kidnapped some 44 years ago. I’m both excited to see where this story goes and therefore earnestly avoiding spoilers for the upcoming Switch 2 game in a way I never thought I would. Who cares about Donkey Kong spoilers? Me, apparently!

While it’s been made clear in last month’s Donkey Kong Bananza Nintendo Direct that Country-era Kongs like Cranky, Diddy, and Dixie Kong will show up in DK’s new adventure, I’m going to recanonize those apes to suit my own selfish needs. There will be dozens of named and unnamed simians in Bananza, and I’ll recognize their existence with fresh eyes.

Why do I choose to ignore those Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Land games? Largely for their dated humor and Saturday-morning-cartoon-approach to extending the Donkey Kong universe in careless, corny ways. Also, the character designs are simply atrocious (see Swanky Kong, Candy Kong, Kiddy Kong, Chunky Kong, etc.). As previously mentioned, I have a real issue with the design of Candy Kong, an alarmingly sexed-up ape who feels like a barely disguised fetish and thus probably scarred impressionable children for life. (Funky Kong is OK.)

Donkey Kong Bananza, however, looks to flesh out Kong lore and ape variety in more visually intriguing ways. The game’s giant animal Elders and the menacing apes of VoidCo are a leap forward in design, and they give the world of Bananza a mystical, lived-in world feel. Bonanza’s bad guys look to be an evolution of the antagonists of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, albeit much more creative.

None of my planned willful ignorance of the Donkey Kong Country games (and by extension the Donkey Kong Country Returns games) should be interpreted as a slight against how those games play. They are fine. Some of them are good! Some of them are Donkey Kong 64. But as a Nintendo enthusiast turned off by the Rare-era planet of apes, I’m perfectly fine to let them all live in the past and move on to a brave new Donkey Kong world.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Magic: The Gatheringis embracing science fantasy for its upcoming space opera-inspired set Edge of Eternities, which will be released on Aug. 1. The genre shift required new mechanics and factions, but has allowed the game to bring back some old enemies too.

Vehicles, artifacts that need to be crewed to unlock their full potential as artifact creatures, have been part of Magic since 2016’s Kaladesh. But while typical vehicle rules require tapping creatures each turn to serve as crew, spacecraft — a new card subtype making its debut in Edge of Eternities — use a mechanic called “station” to gain charge counters equal to the power of the creature tapped and become an artifact creature permanently once they reach the designated threshold.

For instance, the legendary spaceship The Seriema gives players the ability to search their library for a legendary creature to add to their hand when it comes into play, and then becomes a 5/5 flying creature that makes other tapped legendary creatures indestructible once it has seven charge counters. Legendary vehicles and spacecraft can now serve as Commanders, but you can also stick with a more conventional choice like The Seriema’s cat-loving captain Sami, a human artificer who makes robot tokens.

“Sami is a consummate con artist, scoundrel and ne’er do well,” Wizards of the Coast story lead Roy Graham said during a video presentation. The Traitor Baru Cormorant and Exordia author Seth Dickinson has been writing about Sami, a mysterious artifact known as the Endstone, and a holy war to introduce the complex world of the Sothera system in what Graham said is the longest story he’s worked on in his five years working on Magic.

Station is also used on planets, a new type of land introduced in the set. There is one for each of Magic’s five colors, and they’re inspired by existing iconic lands like Tolarian Academy but need 12 counters to unlock their special abilities.

“We can give you these massive, awesome effects if we send you on a little, tiny quest,” Magic play design lead Andrew Brown said during the presentation.

While most of the card previews and fiction so far have focused on new characters, there are some familiar faces like the perpetually scheming artificer and planeswalker Tezzeret. The set introduces a colorless version of him, Tezzeret, Cruel Captain, designed to be useful in more types of Commander decks.

“He’s come to a setting well suited to his talents,” Graham said. “He sees limitless opportunity to make himself anew as a power to be reckoned with in this corner of the multiverse.”

Edge of Eternities also marks the return of Slivers and a new type of Llurgoyf, which features flavor text that puts a sci-fi spin on the monster’s first appearance. Another familiar peril is the Eldrazi, an ancient species native to the Blind Eternities that have twisted the planes of Zendikar and Innistrad with their immense power. The presentation included a preview of an Eldrazi card – Anticausal Vestige – with a new ability called “warp” meant to embody their ability to move quickly across the vastness of space. Rather than playing the card for its standard cost, warp allows players to cast it from their hand for a lesser amount but then exile it at the end of their turn. They can then cast it again for the full price on a later turn.

“Void” is another new mechanic that is meant to convey the unforgiving nature of space with kicker effects that trigger if a spell was warped or a nonland permanent left the battlefield on the same turn. “Lander” is a new type of token, which is sacrificed to search your library for a basic land to put into play tapped, designed to embody the spirit of space exploration.

Collectors will have plenty of new art to enjoy leaning into the science-fiction setting. Beyond borderless basic lands there is art inspired by old tourism agency photos and cards where the text itself is integrated into the imagery to give the appearance of ‘70s pulp sci-fi novel covers.

You can check the full first batch of Edge of Eternities previews below, courtesy of Wizards of the Coast.

Edge of Eternities will be released on Aug. 1. Preorders are open now.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

One month ago, Nintendo announced that the Switch 2 had sold 3.5 million units in four days after its June 5 launch, making it Nintendo’s fastest-selling console ever, and likely the biggest console launch of all time. It seems the new Switch is maintaining that momentum. Last week, an apparently accidental data leak on Nintendo’s corporate website suggested that the new console had either sold or was projected to sell 5.4 million units through the end of June. (PlayStation 5 sold 4.5 million units in almost twice that time.)

In other words, Nintendo has a hit on its hands, at least in the short term. Which makes it all the stranger that, after a media blitz immediately surrounding the Switch 2’s launch, there hasn’t been much hype or lasting conversation about the new console. Millions of people own one, but not that many of them seem to be talking about it; the gamer hive mind has moved on, with surprising speed, to the likes of Death Stranding 2.

Has something gone wrong? I don’t think so; in one crucial respect, Nintendo planned an unusual rollout for the Switch 2, which has yet to fully pay off. Is the console underwhelming? This is a matter of opinion — but to the extent that it’s true, I think it was almost designed to be.

As I pointed out in my Switch 2 review, the new console emphasizes continuity to an unprecedented degree. The interface is near-identical to the Switch’s, the form factor is extremely familiar, the data transfer process is seamless, and features like GameShare and Virtual Game Cards push the idea of a high level of interoperability. Switch 2 has been designed to live alongside Switch as much as replace it, and to slip into your life as easily as a new generation of iPhone.

This is totally deliberate on Nintendo’s part, and one of the things that most recommends the Switch 2. But it inevitably makes the system a little less exciting and less of a talking point. It’s a well-engineered and technically impressive upgrade to your Switch experience, but it’s not an all-new experience.

Another factor was Nintendo’s choice of launch game for the Switch 2. Here, Nintendo again chose a degree of familiarity over the shock of the new.

With its open-world design, Mario Kart World is theoretically a major shake-up for the Mario Kart series. It’s caused its fair share of controversy within the hardcore Mario Kart community. But perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how comfortable and familiar it feels. Nintendo has bent over backwards to preserve the classical structure and feel of a Mario Kart game, even within this new context. It seems likely that a silent majority of players have slipped it into their daily gaming routine without a thought.

Beyond this, Mario Kart as a whole is the essence of a known quantity. Nintendo probably chose World as a Switch 2 launch title on the basis of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s gigantic sales, but in doing so it also chose a game series that people regard as a kind of ever-present utility for Nintendo consoles, rather than an attention-grabbing system seller like, for example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s part of the fabric of almost every Nintendo fan’s life, but not necessarily what will get them most excited, or generate the most conversation.

This would all be a bit deflating if it weren’t for the fact that Nintendo has another game ready and waiting that is a much bigger swing, and has the potential to effectively launch Switch 2 a second time.

Donkey Kong Bananza’s July 17 launch date is a rarity — a major exclusive release timed just six weeks after the system’s launch. I’ve argued before that the game could likely have been ready for Switch 2’s launch, and that Nintendo has held it back, either out of fear of cannibalizing Mario Kart World’s sales or as a marketing strategy to extend the hype window for the Switch 2.

As a “launch” game, Bananza seems like a more exciting prospect than Mario Kart World. It’s the first 3D Donkey Kong platformer in 25 years; it’s a new game (and change of franchise) from the Super Mario Odyssey team; and it’s a bold, open-ended design, more than a little reminiscent of Breath of the Wild, with free-form destructibility at its core. On the face of it, it has a level of scarcity and novelty that Mario Kart World just doesn’t.

There’s every chance that Donkey Kong Bananza will revive Switch 2 hype and flood timelines more effectively than Mario Kart World did. It could be that Nintendo got its launch games the wrong way around. Or it could be that this was the company’s plan all along, and it had always planned Switch 2’s launch as a two-stage rocket. We’ll find out on July 17.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

If you are a sucker for role-playing games and for retro things in general like me, there are plenty of choices to feed your vintage soul. We’re talking literally dozens of options. Despite that, for the past eight years, I have only played Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and have had a blast doing so. But driven by curiosity and circumstance, one fateful night, I left my D&D books on the shelf to dive into the unforgiving world of Dungeon Crawl Classics. What I found is a tabletop game I’m eager to return to — and I even learned some lessons I’ll apply to my future D&D games.

The Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement began in the mid-2000s, mainly as a reaction to the publication of Dungeons & Dragons 3e. Beginning as a topic of discussion on online forums, growing interest in OSR spawned a loose community of game designers and gamers, united by a common passion for Erol Otus and Larry Elmore’s art, 10-foot poles, and tables. Lots of tables. Nowadays, this playstyle refers to dozens of TTRPGs that draw inspiration from the earliest days of the genre. One of the most popular and appreciated of them is Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), published for the first time in 2012 by Goodman Games.

DCC sits in a weird spot in the OSR universe. While the art, feeling, and tone are straight out of the 1970s (the official inspiration being Appendix N, the list of books that informed the creation of the original Dungeons & Dragons), the rules are actually a streamlined version of D&D’s 3e — yes, the same edition that made many players so unhappy that they decided to create their own retro-inspired games. This is interesting because DCC came out in the waning days of D&D’s 4e, which was disliked even more by players, but a couple of years before Wizards of the Coast came out with the most successful version of D&D to date, 5e.

Like so many others, I fell off the D&D wagon during the 4th edition years, and was pulled back in when 5th edition gave us simpler rules, a focus on storytelling, and exceptional campaign settings (such as Curse of Strahd). I have been running games (yes, I am an eternal DM) almost nonstop for eight years now, and it’s been great. I have moved twice in that time period, and D&D helped me make friends, build connections, and spend my free time with creativity. Together with my players, we have told amazing stories that will live with me for a long time. However, that odd, wizened dragon called Old School was always staring at me from the corner of my eye…

Two weeks before writing this, I picked up the entire DCC library at a discount. Fatefully, one of my players could not attend that week’s D&D session, so we decided to put our campaign on hold and try something new in his absence. It was time to go old school.

I opened the DCC Quick Start rules, and was welcomed by the illustration of a brave warrior and a maiden (admittedly, scantily dressed) fighting off a Pteranodon with a clearly evil wizard looming behind, which seemed to come straight out of a pulp trade paperback. (OK, I’m interested.) The following page was a spoof on the black-and-white martial arts ads found in 1970s magazines, which proudly proclaimed DCC as the “Deadliest Game Alive.” (Now I’m entertained.) Before getting to the rules, one final message appeared: “You’re no hero.” Now I’m fully in.

The premise of DCC is that the game is not a heroic fantasy where players find fulfillment by building the strongest characters possible and achieving godlike feats. Instead, it’s a deadly run for treasure and glory where the fulfillment comes from surviving the horrors that await you. In DCC, you start by creating several 0-level peasants. Then you run them through a first dungeon, and if any of them survive, you get to pick one and bring it to level 1, where your adventuring career actually begins. The game’s core statement is that trying to balance player characters and monsters is a fool’s errand. This idea was also included in the OSR’s “manifesto,” A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, written by Matthew Finch in 2008. DCC takes that idea and runs with it: In the game, everything about your character is randomized. You roll six stats, as usual, but there are no bonuses to them, and most importantly, you don’t decide where to assign the roll. If you roll low for your strength, for example, you won’t decide to play a warrior, because you won’t hit anything. Randomization brings balance, and it works surprisingly well.

Perhaps the biggest issue I’ve had with D&D 5e is how difficult it is to balance encounters after players get past the first three or four levels. I like to play narrative-focused campaigns, but I still want my players to feel a level of danger and excitement during the game, and that hasn’t been easy. At the end of the Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, for example, players who should be between level 9 and 10 get to fight Auril, an actual goddess (albeit with limited powers at that moment). I was expecting this to be a challenging fight at least. Instead, my players easily dispatched Auril not once, but thrice (she has three forms, each one stronger than the previous one). Keep in mind that level 10 is, in theory, only half of a character’s progression in D&D.

It’s not a coincidence that, for the entirety of 5th edition, Wizards refused to publish adventures or campaigns for “high-level play,” tailored for characters of level 10 and above. (The only exception was 5e’s final book, Vecna: Eve of Ruin.) It was a silent admission that the game was not balanced for those levels, and it never would be. In DCC, on the other hand, character classes only get to level 10, and the game makes it very clear that getting so far should be an exception, not the rule. A level-5 character, for example, is described as “once in a generation,” with an incidence of one in every 10,000 people. At level 9, you are “the best there ever was,” with an incidence of one in every 10 million. At level 10, you are a demigod.

This is a perfect example of “old school mentality,” but I think there is a lesson here that can be applied to D&D campaigns, too. As a DM, you should not think that the only way to reward your players for surviving your challenges, progressing in the story, and showing up to sessions (the mightiest deed of them all!) is to have them level up. Sure, current D&D is built on that reward system, but what if you shake things up? Why not try to make the act of surviving the reward? Walking out of a really tough fight or a deadly dungeon without having to roll a new character can be a big moment of satisfaction for players, and there are always different rewards you can give. A powerful magic item, hoards of treasure, rising in the ranks of an organization, the deed to a house, or even something related to the new Bastions system; all of these things can reward players without impacting the balance of future encounters. More importantly, these rewards have a practical effect on the game, enriching it more than, say, a Barbarian gaining an extra use of Rage at level 6.

At the end of our DCC session, each of my players had one character surviving. (The game encourages players to run at least four or five characters each at level 0, as most will die in horrible and amusing ways.) They made it by the skin of their teeth. The session had been nonstop combat and exploration, two things I usually dread at my D&D table because they tend to be the slowest and most drawn-out. Instead, all the players were excited and satisfied. It was an eye-opener for me. I have been thinking for a while about making my D&D games deadlier in some way – especially as we are currently playing Out of the Abyss, the Underdark setting of which really plays into that – but I was afraid of getting out of my comfort zone. Now, I’m eager to insert some of that old-school feeling of “anything can happen” into my games.

I admit that DCC is not for everyone. Players coming from D&D could take offence at the fact that “species” are still “races” here, and they are classes too (you don’t get to play an “elf wizard,” just an elf), or at the exclusive use of male pronouns to refer to characters in the rules. However, if you have been thinking about trying an OSR game, or you are simply curious after reading this article, I encourage you to give it a shot. There are plenty of published adventures, too, and they are all weird, bizarre, and deadly fun. Laser harpies? Check. Barbarians fighting space robots? Also check. Even if you’re not an old-school fanatic, there are plenty of lessons from Dungeon Crawl Classics that can be applied to your Dungeons & Dragons games, too.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

The Switch 2 launch lineup was weird — or that’s what I thought after watching the April Nintendo Direct, anyway. Sure, Mario Kart World as a launch game made sense from a business perspective. When a re-release of Mario Kart 8 sells 68 million copies on the original Switch, it’s hardly surprising to see Nintendo lead with what data shows would more than likely be a big success. But was that really it? Just a racing game?

One month later, I’ve played Mario Kart World more than any other game on my Switch 2. The way it fits into my life, whether I have a few minutes or an hour to play, transformed it from being an odd-seeming launch choice to one that makes perfect sense, even if Nintendo’s doing its best to make it seem otherwise.

I opted for the Mario Kart World bundle to save money, but the really exciting part about getting a Switch 2 — or so I thought at the time — was the chance to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in full at last. I bounced off the game hard after speeding through some of its more difficult challenges for guides, and since it stuttered frequently in places and froze for several seconds during transitions between the open world and dungeons, I figured there wasn’t any point starting again until a more powerful Switch existed. The day my Switch 2 arrived, I loaded Tears of the Kingdom to see how much of a difference the frame rate improvement makes and haven’t played again.

Instead, I’ve spent most of my time with Mario Kart World. So far, I’ve ended up playing it far more than I played Breath of the Wild alongside the launch of the original Switch in 2017. At the end of a long day, after work and family obligations, I don’t just lack free time. I lack the desire to do much with the time I have and certainly don’t want to do something that requires mental effort. I could explore more parts of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 or learn how to play a new character in Street Fighter 6 — or I could put a cow on a motorcycle and have them do backflips off a dinosaur.

It’s an easy choice, and one that fits into lunch breaks, quick sessions at night, longer play with others over the weekend — whatever I want, really. If I’m yearning for something with a bit more depth beyond learning a course’s shortcuts or messing around with wall-riding, I can always go online for a quick Knockout Tour. Five or 10 minutes in Tears of the Kingdom won’t get me much, but I can start and finish something that feels enjoyable and worthwhile in the same amount of time in Mario Kart World.

Not having enough time or willpower to allocate to longer games isn’t a problem unique to me. While it’s easy to label this a recent cultural trend brought on by publishers releasing a ludicrous number of games every week and the rotten state of national and world affairs, it’s not really a trend at all. It’s a constant of how we interact with games. Researchers studying how to improve project scope in game development for the Entertainment Computing journal found that most players never finish a game, even if they like it. As far back as 2013, former Ubisoft designer Jason Vandenberghe wrote in Game Developer Magazine that any good game developer knows most of their players won’t finish their game.

In a parallel universe where the Wii U wasn’t a historic failure, Nintendo’s software pipeline hadn’t dried up during the console’s final years, and the company didn’t have to prove it was still a contender with Breath of the Wild, I could see Mario Kart World or something like it being the launch game for the original Switch. Its mix of quick-hit challenges and longer races are the embodiment of the “anywhere, anytime, however you want” style of play Nintendo pioneered with the system, and it slots into your schedule without feeling like you’re having to sacrifice something else just to enjoy it. It’s the kind of game for people who don’t finish games, which is most of us.

That was important for Nintendo in 2017 when the convenience of mobile gaming living in your pocket seemed like its biggest competitor, and it seems even more important now when time and money constraints are influencing the industry more than ever. Of course Nintendo wants to launch its new, expensive system with a game that won’t make people think they’ll wait until X months later when they have more time, one they can play with friends and family without having to buy additional consoles and games. It just makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is Nintendo’s approach to pretty much everything else about the Switch 2’s launch lineup. Mario Kart World seems like an anticlimactic opener thanks in part to the lack of transparency about what’s next. Yes, the excellent-sounding Donkey Kong Bananza is out later this month. But beyond that, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is still floating in the aether, with no announced release date, and Pokémon Legends: Z-A is months away. Where Nintendo promised a set number of games each month and extensive third-party support during the original Switch’s first few months, there’s little indication of what’s in store between now and the holidays.

Nintendo provided fewer development kits to its publishing partners than it did in the lead-up to the first Switch’s release, in what some publishers told me is an effort to focus on quality. The policy led to excellent ports such as Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky, but it also means there’s just not as much coming to the Switch 2 this year. Or if there is, we don’t know about it. That leaves Mario Kart World to steer the console through its first months of life, and racing games rarely carry much weight with critics or consumers, no matter how good they are.

Mario Kart World might not have the star power of a new 3D Mario game or the surprise appeal of something like Donkey Kong Bananza, where a second-tier mascot suddenly takes center stage. It might not have the universal appeal of a Pokémon sequel or the shiny veneer of a new Metroid. What it does have is convenience, flexibility, and respect for my time. In that regard, Nintendo was right after all: Just a racing game was enough.

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Electronic Arts announced Thursday it will be shutting down the servers for Anthem, the BioWare-developed, always-online, cooperative multiplayer action game, effective next year.

“After careful consideration,” EA’s statement begins, “we will be sunsetting Anthem on January 12, 2026. This means that the game will still be playable online for the next 180+ days. As of today, you can no longer purchase in-game premium currency, but you can still use your remaining balance until the servers go offline. We deeply appreciate your dedication, passion and support over the years and we’d like to thank you for that.”

In the FAQ section of its statement, EA clarified that Anthem will remain downloadable and playable from digital libraries until Jan. 12, 2026. While premium currency can no longer be purchased, existing currency is still usable. Anthem has been removed for sale from digital stores, and will be removed from the EA Play library on Aug. 15.

The announcement of Anthem’s servers shutting down comes as a surprise, especially considering EA and BioWare effectively gave up on the title a few years ago when it canceled its previously announced redesign.

In February 2020, one year after Anthem debuted to a lukewarm reception, BioWare announced plans to redesign the game. The aim, according to then-general manager Casey Hudson, was to “reinvent the core gameplay loop.” (Hudson has since departed the company.)

When it was canceled in February 2021, BioWare executive producer Christian Dailey said, “In the spirit of transparency and closure we wanted to share that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop our new development work on Anthem (aka Anthem NEXT).”

Anthem is a multiplayer online action-RPG developed by BioWare, where players pilot customizable exosuits called Javelins to complete missions on an alien planet. Anthem was released on PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One in January 2019.

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Xbox Game Studios’ new Perfect Dark game — the project that was first revealed in 2020 as the debut title from internal studio The Initiative — has been canceled. Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, confirmed the game’s cancellation and the closure of The Initiative in a note to employees, according to a report from Windows Central.

That note also confirms the cancellation of Rare’s Everwild. Both games have been canceled in tandem with mass layoffs at Microsoft’s gaming division.

“We have made the decision to stop development of Perfect Dark and Everwild as well as wind down several unannounced projects across our portfolio,” Booty said. “As part of this, we are closing one of our studios, The Initiative. These decisions, along with other changes across our teams, reflect a broader effort to adjust priorities and focus resources to set up our teams for greater success within a changing industry landscape. We did not make these choices lightly, as each project and team represent years of effort, imagination, and commitment.”

The reboot of Rare’s Perfect Dark franchise was revealed at The Game Awards 2020, two years after Microsoft founded The Initiative, the Santa Monica, California-based studio led by Darrell Gallagher, former studio head at Crystal Dynamics. Xbox Game Studios re-revealed the new Perfect Dark during a 2024 showing of the game, which was said to focus on ecological sci-fi themes.

Last year, Booty said Perfect Dark would focus on “a near-future war over advanced tech that threatens the lives of millions.” Playing as heroine Joanna Dark, players would employ stealth, parkour, high-tech gadgetry, and good old-fashioned firearms to fend off global disaster. The game was planned to feature elements of first-person shooters, immersive sims, and stealth-action.

Perfect Dark was being developed by The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics for Xbox Series X and Windows PC. The game never had an announced release date.

The original Perfect Dark was released on Nintendo 64 in 2000. A remaster was released for Xbox 360 in 2010. Rare followed up the original game with a spinoff for Game Boy Color in 2000 and a prequel, Perfect Dark Zero, in 2005.

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Project Hail Mary, an adaptation of the science fiction novel of the same name from The Martianwriter Andy Weir, is set to be released on March 20, 2026, but Amazon MGM Studios has already shared a full trailer for the film. Rather than mostly focusing on Matt Damon growing potatoes on Mars, the movie from 21 Jump Street directors and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller stars Ryan Gosling as a sixth-grade science teacher sent to space to save the Earth.

Like The Martian’s hero Mark Watney, Gosling’s Ryland Grace gets knocked out, wakes up alone, and has to use his wits, good humor, and knowledge of biology to survive outer space. But a lot more is at stake in Project Hail Mary, where an unexplained phenomenon is dimming the Earth’s sun, endangering all life on Earth. Despite his lack of experience and general disinterest in going into space, Grace winds up on a mission to travel 11.9 light years from Earth and try to figure out what’s going on and save the world. It’s not all bad, though, as he gets to meet an alien he dubs Rocky.Screenwriter Drew Goddard also authored the adaptation of The Martian, so he has plenty of experience translating Weir’s wry humor and highly technical brand of sci-fi into an entertaining feature film. It helps that, like Damon, Gosling has the star power to handle a lot of solo scenes involving the practicalities of life in space.

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Each week on Polygon, we round up the most notable new releases to streaming and VOD, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.

Porky Pig and Daffy Duck fight sentient bubblegum monsters animated with John Carpenter-style body horror in The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, which pops onto Max following its March theatrical release. For a less zany, more psychological spin on horror, today’s the day to watch Orphan and Carry-On director Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Woman in the Yardon Peacock. For some video game-inspired sci-fi fun, rent the time travel comedy Escape From the 21st Century, where three nerds gain the ability to jump into their future adult bodies whenever they sneeze, or The Jurassic Games: Extinction, where contestants fight dinosaurs to the death.

Here’s everything new that’s available to watch on streaming this weekend!

New on Hulu

F*** Marry Kill

Genre: Comedy thrillerRun time: 1h 37 minutesDirector: Laura MurphyCast: Lucy Hale, Virginia Gardner, Brooke Nevin

A true crime fan (Lucy Hale of Pretty Little Liars) becomes convinced that one of the three guys she’s seeing is a serial killer who’s been targeting women through dating apps. Using clues revealed through her favorite podcast and her own investigations, she’ll have to piece together who she actually wants to be in a relationship with, and who’s a murderer.

Survive

Genre: Post-apocalyptic thrillerRun time: 1h 30mDirector: Frédéric JardinCast: Émilie Dequenne, Andreas Pietschmann, Lisa Delamar

A family trip at sea takes a very unexpected turn when the Earth’s magnetic poles reverse, causing the oceans to flood the land and leaving their boat stranded in a desert. Before the waters come back, they’ll need to cross the hostile land to find another stranded vessel while being pursued by some very angry crabs.

New on Max

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

Genre: Animated science fiction comedyRun time: 1h 31mDirector: Pete BrowngardtCast: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol

Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza) get a job at a bubblegum factory to pay for home repairs in this feature film spinoff of Pete Browngardt’s Looney Tunes Cartoons. Unfortunately, the factory is at the center of an alien plot to turn the denizens of Earth into zombies, and the duo have to fight a horrifying gum monster to stop it.

New on MGM Plus

A Working Man

Genre: Action thrillerRun time: 1h 56mDirector: David AyerCast: Jason Statham, David Harbour, Michael Peña

Entertaining on a screen of any size, Jason Statham’s latest thriller follows Levon Cade, an ex-black ops soldier trying to start a new life as a Chicago construction foreman while fighting to retain custody of his daughter. But when his boss’ daughter is kidnapped, Cade must put his old skills to use by running and gunning his way through the Russian mob.

New on Peacock

The Woman in the Yard

Genre: Psychological horrorRun time: 1h 27mDirector: Jaume Collet-SerraCast: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peyton Jackson

Still injured from the car accident that killed her husband, Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler of Carry-On and Station Eleven) struggles to care for her two kids in their rural home. Things get really stressful when a mysterious woman covered in black clothing appears in their front yard saying only “Today’s the day.” As she gets closer, the family is plagued by misfortune until Ramona has to confront her head-on.

New on Tubi

Please Don’t Feed the Children

Genre: Science fiction thrillerRun time: 1h 34mDirector: Destry Allyn SpielbergCast: Michelle Dockery, Zoe Colletti, Andrew Liner

After a virus carried by kids turned adults into cannibals, anyone under 18 is rounded up and kept in camps. A group of renegade teens looking for freedom across the border take refuge with a woman who welcomes them with milk and cookies but then holds them prisoner. To survive, they’ll have to learn her twisted secret.

New to rent

Escape from the 21st Century

Genre: Science fiction comedyRun time: 1h 38mDirector: Yang LiCast: Ruoyun Zhang, Elaine Zhong, Yang Song

Fans of Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer should check out this high-energy film about three teenage nerds who get the power to travel 20 years into the future into their adult bodies. Discovering that the world isn’t as good as they’d like it to be, they fight for their future through a training montage and battles spiced up with stylized animation.

I Don’t Understand You

Genre: Horror comedyRun time: 1h 36Director: David Joseph Craig and Brian CranoCast: Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Morgan Spector

Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells of Big Mouth play a gay couple looking to celebrate their anniversary with a dream vacation in Italy before they adopt a child. Unfortunately, they end up accidentally killing a nice old lady in an isolated farmhouse, and the language barrier leads to a series of miscommunications and dark comedy twists.

The Jurassic Games: Extinction

Genre: Science fictionRun time: 1 h 42mDirector: Ryan BellgardtCast: Todd Terry, Ryan Francis, Todd Jenkins

The sequel to 2018’s The Jurassic Games continues the premise of a virtual reality competition where death row inmates fight dinosaurs to entertain audiences. The prisoners fight and ride raptors and even use power-ups to turn into dinosaurs themselves while trying to fight the game itself from the inside and shut the spectacle down for good.

Pins and Needles

Genre: HorrorRun time: 1h 21mDirector: James VilleneuveCast: Chelsea Clark, Kate Corbett, Ryan McDonald

When her car breaks down on the way to campus, a diabetic biology grad student looks for help and instead finds herself drawn into a twisted experiment meant to find a way to extend the lives of the wealthy. As her insulin supply dwindles, she’ll need to find to escape in time.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Magic: The Gathering is gearing up for yet another collaboration, this time with Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog in a trio of Secret Lair one-off, limited edition card sets.

Unlike the previous Final Fantasy collab, a wide release crossover with four pre-built Commander decks and an entire set of cards sold in randomized packs, the Sonic collection will be limited to three Secret Lair releases, which are timed releases for specific and rare cards. The Secret Lair either includes new versions of iconic Magic: The Gathering cards, with art tied to a specific collaboration, or entirely new cards, and Sonic got both of these.

The first Secret Lair x Sonic: Friends & Foes collection includes seven new cards: Sonic, Super State, Shadow the Hedgehog, Miles “Tails” Prower, Dr. Eggman, Knuckles the Echidna, and Amy Rose.

Secret Lair x Sonic: Friends & Foes

Meanwhile, Sonic: Chasing Adventure and Sonic: Turbo Gear, two previously existing collections, will receive new artwork, which can be seen below.

Secret Lair x Sonic: Chasing Adventure

Magic: The Gathering is giving some of its classic artifacts a Sonic-themed makeover with Turbo Gear. These cards are also made to work well with the Secret Lair x Sonic: Friends & Foes set, like teaming up Knuckles with The Reaver Cleaver to turn it into “Knuckles’s Gloves” for an unexpected combo.

Secret Lair x Sonic: Turbo Gear

All three “Secret Lair x Sonic the Hedgehog” drops will be available in both regular ($29.99) and foil ($39.99) versions on Magic Secret Lair starting at 9 a.m. PT on July 14.

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Nautilus, which premieres on AMC on June 29, tells the origin story of Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, portraying him as an Indian prince seeking to use the eponymous submarine to get vengeance against the British East India Company. While the series has elements of the fantastical, it’s rooted in history that showrunner James Dormer (Medici, Beowulf: Return to the Shadowlands) got to experience firsthand while working as a low-ranking British diplomat in New Delhi at the time India was celebrating 50 years of independence.

“We brought out the royal yacht and the Queen came and I organized a small film festival and the headline in the newspapers at the time was ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ which wasn’t what we were looking for,” he told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “Quite often people from the high commission would be pulled into Bollywood movies to play nasty East India Company villains.”

That same villainy is on display in Nautilus, which opens with Nemo (Shazad Latif), French engineer Gustave Benoit (Thierry Frémont), and many other captives from around the world forced to work on the Nautilus, which the East India Company hopes to use against China. Nemo, Gustave, and their allies steal the vessel and are pursued by the company’s most advanced battleship over the course of the 10-episode season.

“[Executive producer Xaviier Marchand] brought [Nautilus] to me as a pitch, and I just fell in love with the idea,” Dormer said. “My kids are half Bangladeshi, so it was a kind of a story that wasn’t too dark that they couldn’t watch it. It was really interesting to be able to look at that world through the eyes of an Indian hero.”

Dormer admits it was tricky to produce a family-friendly story about the British Raj, combining scenes of child labor and displays of racism with classic pulp antics like a little dog and a kid who are constantly getting in trouble.

“We do go to some quite dark places looking at what the British did,” Dormer said. “It’s not like you’re doing Indiana Jones where there’s a white hero running around stealing people’s relics. You’re telling a story from the point of view of people who have been oppressed. You have to feel the weight of that on them sometimes.”

While Dormer had watched Disney’s 1954 adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he hadn’t read Verne’s novel until he was tapped for the show. He was surprised by how topical it was, dealing with oppression and environmentalism – a subject Dormer brings to Nautilus in the second episode when the crew saves a pod of whales. He tried to keep to the spirit of Verne’s work while adding more action.

“There was also a lot about mollusks, which isn’t inherently dramatic, so we had some license to pimp it up,” Dormer said. “With Nemo, I wanted to hold on to the darkness of his character, which is obviously harder when you’re telling a long-form story because you can’t have a character that’s just bitter the whole way through. You have to take him on a journey. Shazad was amazing. No matter how bad the lines I threw at him were, he was able to make them resonate and feel real.”

Dormer was thrilled to have the budget to live up to his ambitions for the series, which is packed with sea monsters and naval battles.

“There was a scene we wrote where Nemo jumps onto a whale, and then there’s another ship that gets broken in half,” he said. “I write that stuff assuming that it’s then going to get cut back and they’re going to end up in a little rowing boat or something. But with this show, it was like, ‘let’s do that, and can we actually do it bigger.’ It was really liberating. I feel we just sneaked in at the end of peak TV. 700-odd people worked to build huge sets and there was a manual for how the Nautilus worked that someone put together. I feel very privileged to have been a part of it.”

The first two episodes of Nautilus premiere on AMC and AMC Plus on June 29. New episodes will be released weekly on Sundays.

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Nintendo has patched Mario Kart World with an apparently small change to the way courses are selected in online lobbies. But the change has infuriated players who were already frustrated with the style of racing in the first open-world Mario Kart game.

In short: By changing the way the “random” option works when voting on the next course to play, Nintendo has made it impossible to guarantee that the next course will be a three-lap circuit race, in traditional Mario Kart style. In doing so, it has pushed players even more firmly toward the unpopular “intermission” races, which feature a cross-country drive to the chosen circuit followed by, usually, a single lap at the destination.

Mario Kart World’s main online mode is ranked online lobbies. They way they work is that, after completing a race, everyone can muck around in free roam for a minute while voting on where to race next. Three options are presented, and they’re all adjacent tracks to the one that’s just been raced — so they’re all options for “intermission races” that include the drive to the next location.

Alternatively, you can pick “random.” If it won the vote, this option would teleport everyone to another circuit somewhere else on the map, where they would participate in a “normal” three-lap race. Prior to the patch, the random option had become overwhelmingly popular due to players’ distaste for intermission races, which tend to involve more straight-line driving along freeways, dealing with hazards, and less technical cornering.

Post-patch, the random option can pick from the three offered “intermission” races as well as teleporting players somewhere else — and seems weighted to pick the intermission races quite often. There’s no longer a way for players to vote for a guaranteed three-lap circuit.

Polygon has asked Nintendo for comment on the reasoning behind this change. But it certainly seems as though Nintendo, in defiance of players’ wishes, is doubling down on the way the developers want Mario Kart World be played, with players progressing organically from point to point around the world map.

Nintendo is so committed to this playstyle that you can easily play Mario Kart World for dozens of hours without ever encountering three-lap versions of many of the tracks. (You can choose them as an option when setting up Vs. mode races, and when racing in friends-only lobbies.) And now the developer has made it even rarer to encounter this kind of race online.

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Publisher Dark Horse is giving the deluxe treatment to Lone Wolf & Cub, the landmark manga series from writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima, with a series of re-releases slated to launch starting this year. The new oversized hardcover editions will feature the manga’s epic story in its original right-to-left reading format, with Japanese-language sound effects.

Lone Wolf & Cub Deluxe Edition vol. 1 arrives in December 2025, and will collect stories from the Dark Horse paperback collections of Lone Wolf and Cub vol. 1 and 2, and stories from vol. 3. Lone Wolf and Cub Deluxe Edition vol. 2, coming in March 2026, features stories from Lone Wolf and Cub vol. 3, 4, and 5. Additional volumes of Deluxe Edition collections will follow, Dark Horse said in a news release.

Each announced edition will span 720 pages, and measure 7 inches by 10 inches. They cost $54.99 each. Dark Horse has been publishing Lone Wolf & Cub in various formats since 2000, starting with the 28-volume, smaller-sized (5 inches by 7 inches) trade paperback collections designed to mimic collected versions from Japan. Dark Horse also sells cheaper omnibus versions of the series.

Koike and Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub manga ran from 1970 to 1976. Lone Wolf & Cub tells the story of Ōgami Ittō, a disgraced shogun’s executioner, who travels with his son Daigorō as a masterless samurai, on a quest for vengeance across feudal Japan. Koike’s spartan prose and Kojima’s dynamic illustrations, paired with the influential trope of a strong father traveling with his vulnerable charge, has had a profound impact on comic book creators and other media — it was a key influence on Star Wars’ The Mandalorian, for example.

Lone Wolf & Cub has spawned multiple live-action movie adaptations, as well as sequels and spinoff manga series, but the original manga series is a seminal work. The new Deluxe Editions look like they may be the best versions released to date.

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As divisive reactions to 28 Years Later continue to take shape, the movie has inspired some side chat about how, exactly, we’re expected to think about 28 Weeks Later, the other 28 Days Later sequel.

Now that Boyle and Garland have made their own sequel, it feels like 28 Weeks Later has been squeezed out – especially because Boyle, Garland, 28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy, and 28 Weeks Later star Rose Byrne had another genre thriller that was released almost simultaneously with that 2007 film: Sunshine, a visionary sci-fi flop that nonetheless feels of a piece with Boyle’s two horror movies.

28 Weeks Later came out at a more typical follow-up speed in 2007 and in the last 18 years has not maintained its predecessor’s staying power. In fact, 28 Years Later starts with a title card that explains that, while the rage virus spread into the rest of Europe, seen in a memorably bleak final shot of the 2007 film’s finale, it was ultimately beaten back to England, undoing but not erasing the movie’s ending. As Years opens, the rest of the world has remained safe for many years, while the United Kingdom is under strict quarantine.

But beyond questions of here-and-now continuity, 28 Weeks Later remains an odd fit with its siblings. The 28 Years Later walk-back of its ending comes after 28 Weeks Later itself appends a clear resolution to the original movie after the fact (showing that in those 28 weeks, the rage virus has mostly been wiped out and England is supposedly ready to be re-inhabited) before then undoing that with its own story (which shows how the virus reemerges). So when part of that story is then walked back by the newest installment, 28 Weeks Later looks even more like a false start. It doesn’t help that the movie, well-made as it is by director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, wasn’t written by Garland or shepherded by Boyle, who hired Fresnadillo and executive-produced the film but by all accounts let the new filmmaker do his own thing. Which, on its own, is great! More sequels should be given that level of autonomy, and 28 Weeks Later is certainly worth a watch.

But when it comes to thematic cohesion, Sunshine is a much snugger fit between Boyle’s two 28 movies.

Just as 28 Days Later takes a familiar genre idea – the zombie apocalypse – and approaches it from an unusual angle, Sunshine essentially runs back the asteroid-mission disaster-movie double feature of 1998. While Deep Impact and Armageddon had drastically different styles, both of them were stories about Earth facing a cosmic yet naturally occurring threat, and a long-odds shuttle mission designed to save humanity. In Sunshine, Earth isn’t threatened by an asteroid but the sun itself, which is dying. A team of astronauts and scientists including physicist Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy, remaining Boyle’s experiential face of existential threats) has been tasked with bringing an enormous nuclear payload to the dying star and, essentially, jump-starting it back to life, not unlike the mission to blow up this or that threatening asteroid.

In terms of mood, Sunshine picks up more or less from where 28 Days Later leaves off, rather than the this-no-wait-that contradictions of its actual sequel. 28 Days Later ends with Britain still quarantined, with the emotional respite of Jim (Murphy) still alive after another long episode of unconsciousness. He and his small group of allies face both a bleak situation and more than a glimmer of hope, as the movie ends with a plane overhead looking as if it might bring aid to the stranded survivors, though help is far from assured. Similarly, the mood on the spaceship Icarus II isn’t exactly cheery. (I mean, the ship’s designation, from its name to its number, is not encouraging) A previous mission has already failed. (Seriously, Icarus?) Still, the job is undertaken with the hope that Earth can be saved, and that the crew might not even die trying.

Boyle and Garland depict their mission without ever cutting back to any form of mission control. (The movie doesn’t show any action on Earth until its final scene.) This creates a form of quarantine, with the eight-person crew creating a makeshift community somewhere between the skeleton crew of survivors in 28 Days Later and the more robust island community in 28 Years Later. While traditionally post-zombie groups have functioned as microcosms of society, Sunshine has the crew represent humanity in a different way. They do express some differences in problem-solving and some interpersonal animosity, but as a collective, the crew is singularly concerned with the survival of their species, possibly at the expense of themselves. This is inverse concern of the 28 Years Later community that seeks to quarantine from the outside world, using it only as a means of conducting its own coming-of-age rituals and presumably some supply-mining.

Moving from seeking basic survival (in Days) to humanity’s survival (in Sunshine) to the protection of a single community above all else (in Years) is, granted, not a natural, linear progression. But at times, the three movies feel like photographs taken of the same subject from vastly different vantage points – something further reflected in their respective visual styles. All three movies have drastically different looks: Days was shot on early digital video, giving it a blotchy, pixelated look of consumer-grade immediacy; Sunshine used a variety of techniques, including 65mm celluloid, to capture deep blacks and the unsettling glow of a too-close sun; and Years returns to digital but using customized iPhone rigs for imagery of greater clarity chased with otherworldly qualities. Yet all three movies, even the largely film-shot Sunshine, are using their individual visual styles for similar aims.

28 Days Later filters “reality” through miniDV pixels in a way that first makes an abandoned London look more real and later, more intense actions look increasingly abstract and nightmarish. Sunshine does something similar as it gets closer to the sun; a late-movie sequence set within the massive nuclear payload shifts the environment from the intricacy of a spaceship to the more abstract space of what looks like a gigantic cube of glowing lights. Once the movie crosses this threshold, it uses stuttering freeze frames as means of inserting disorienting micro-pauses into the most frenzied points of action, a technique further adopted by 28 Years Later.

Across the movies, Boyle uses his camera to capture “reality” in ways that are so vivid that they threaten to bend and break their own visual formats, a kind of hyperreality in disguise. (This is something that 28 Weeks Later, for all the sturdiness of its craft, doesn’t really do.) Before things in Sunshine go truly haywire, Boyle often frames characters through various filters – screens, reflections, read-outs – that put some digital distance between the people and their environment, which is eventually stripped away when they encounter the terrifying raw power of the sun, depicted in overexposed blasts that distort the image.

That mind-and-body-altering sun power also leads to the consensus least-liked element of Sunshine: the fact that it turns into something of a slasher movie in its final stretch. As the crew weathers a number of disasters involving their effort to collect a second payload from the distress-signaling original Icarus, they eventually encounter Icarus captain Pinbacker (Mark Strong), whose exposure to the sun’s power has convinced him that God has told him to sabotage the missions, allowing the whole of humanity to reach heaven. This inspires him to systematically attempt to murder any and all remaining crew members. These slashery overtones aren’t a cheapening of the previous hour-plus, however; they’re perfectly in keeping with the buggy, frayed-nerve finales of other Boyle movies. The visual effects employed to portray Pinbacker are astonishingly effective, blurring and distorting the image of his sunburned body so that the movie can’t ever face him head-on.

Pinbacker’s crispy transformation recalls the apocalyptic warnings of 28 Days Later (“the end is extremely fucking nigh!”), the vicar at the start of 28 Years Later who welcomes the rage virus breakout as a similarly welcome end-times event, and, on a physical level, the different forms of zombies seen later in 28 Years Later.

But the true Pinbacker figure in that film is far more benevolent than any of those. Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is also a straggler from a different time who has stared death (and maybe, by extension, God) in the face, and is spoken of in hushed, frightened tones by Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the otherwise seemingly hardy father to the film’s young hero Spike (Alfie Williams). He even has an altered body, slathered in orange-red iodine as a means of keeping infected at bay, recalling the full-body burns Pinbacker wears as a sort of uniform. Kelson, however, has not been driven mad by his experience, instead reaching a less aggressive form of enlightenment. Rather than hastening humanity’s demise (or appointing himself a savior; Pinbacker is basically doing both), he memorializes the dead in his massive bone temple, wanting to pay tribute to the humanity that has passed through this world, infected and uninfected alike.

It’s in this section that Boyle and Garland feel like they are specifically progressing from both 28 Days Later and Sunshine, poking around in another apocalypse variation to find something more reflective than a blood-simple portrait of man’s inhumanity to man. Unexpectedly, and despite the requisite zombie violence, they do find it. For all of the new movie’s wild visual flourishes, 28 Years Later closes this chapter of Spike’s story with one of Boyle’s least frenzied endings. (The sequel-tease final scene is obviously a whole other thing.) The brief, time-warping serenity Murphy’s Robert attains as he approaches the surface of the sun feels like it carries over into the beauty that pervades 28 Years Later even in its ugliest moments. Spike essentially chooses what the crew of the Icarus fights for: the ability to keep moving forward and potentially experience a particularly beautiful day, even in the face of terrible loss.

None of this is a knock on 28 Weeks Later, which has its own very 2000s-era thematic concerns connected to American interventionism and a global inability to see each other’s humanity. But compared to Boyle and Garland repeatedly looking at an imperiled planet and musing over what might be preserved and how, that middle sequel feels like a different world entirely. It’s grounded in a different, albeit similarly bleak, reality. It’s really Sunshine that prepared 28 Years Later to reach, however messily, for the stars.

Sunshine is available to rent on various VOD platforms.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Disco Elysium developer ZA/UM doesn’t just make games. The company also has a fashion arm, ZA/UM Atelier, which has previously released a Disco Elysium-inspired range of clothing and accessories, including a bomber jacket, cargo pants, and a matching tie and pocket square set.

Now, ZA/UM Atelier is expanding its brand of “fiction made fabric” fashion with a new collection inspired by The Alters, the stylish sci-fi survival game from 11 bit studios (This War of Mine, Frostpunk). The first pieces from that line were revealed Wednesday, in tandem with Paris Fashion Week.

Two pieces are available for pre-order now: a track suit and a sheep-shaped shoulder bag that references The Alters’ Project Dolly space expedition (and Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell). But there’s more to come, including a beautiful kimono-inspired jacket and a winter coat that makes the wearer look like they stepped out of a Mœbius book.

“The Alters is a game about who we are — and who we might’ve been. The way we present ourselves to the world – through clothing, expression, or even the smallest personal detail — is deeply tied to the lives we live and the choices we make,” said Tomasz Kisilewicz, The Alters game director at 11 bit studios, in a news release. “This collaboration with ZA/UM Atelier felt like a natural extension of that philosophy — an embodiment of identity through design. We can’t wait to see how our community responds to this fusion.”

“Each member of our collective has deep admiration for the creative work of 11 bit studios,” added Kristiina Ago, head of ZA/UM Atelier. “The Alters deep and sometimes painful journey of ‘self’ seemingly implored us to dive into the texture, technique, utility, and storytelling that define Jan Dolski’s personal style. Our Paris Fashion Week exhibition is the culmination of year-long design exploration. We are extremely honoured to have been entrusted with extending The Alters experience, ZA/UM Atelier’s first studio collaboration, into the world of fashion.”

“I think it’s fair to say that when we’re not making our own art, we are deeply admiring the creative genius of other studios,” said Mikk Metsniit, marketing principal, brand and partnerships, ZA/UM Studio. “Our hope is that The Alters is the first of many Atelier collaborations.”

ZA/UM Atelier’s Jan Dolski Dolly mission jacket (€399) and matching utility pants (€289) and Dolly Baa-Baag (€169) are available for pre-order, and will ship later this year. Images of the collection are below.

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Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel’s resuscitation of four popular characters with a spotty track record at the movies, is nearly upon us. And as the July 25 release date looms, so does Galactus, Eater of Worlds. The cosmic threat has been shrouded in shadow in most of First Steps’ reveals, but a new final trailer for the Pedro Pascal-led blockbuster showcases just how BIG of a bad the MCU’s new big bad really is. And if the retro First Steps truly throws back to the early Fantastic Four comics, the movie might be more of a tragedy in line with Avengers: Infinity War than a triumphant franchise kick-off like Iron Man.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Galactus and his herald the Silver Surfer in 1961’s Fantastic Four #48 as, what the Watcher describes as “the ultimate danger — perhaps the final danger.” Even the omniscient being who swears he never wants to intervene (but always does?) quivers in his boots upon the arrival of the Surfer, who prepares Earth on behalf of his hungry master. Galactus isn’t necessarily an evil guy, he’s just starving! A hangry villain for the ages.

But, basically, over a three-issue run, the Fantastic Four have no idea how to stop him. By Fantastic Four #50, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, Ben Grimm, and even the Silver Surfer — who rejects his role as herald and fights Galactus alongside the FF — are so down on their luck, that the Watcher breaks his rule and sends Johnny zipping across the cosmos in search of a deus ex machina weapon called The Ultimate Nullifier. When the Human Torch brings it back to Earth, looking absolutely wiped afterward, Galactus gets spooked. The Ultimate Nullifier really will ultimately nullify him! So the towering planet-gobbler asks politely not to get nullified and, in return, will move on to eat some other unsuspecting planet. The Watcher agrees, hoping Galactus could, you know, eat a desolate planet instead of one populated by millions of people, and everyone goes along their way.

The Galactus Trilogy, as those three issues have become known as, was truly revolutionary for its time, for having a villain that simply could not be beaten, thus flipping the main premise of all superhero stories of the time: the villains always get their due. First Steps could take a cue from those early Lee and Kirby books in a major way: While we’ve seen Pascal’s Reed gulp as he admits he isn’t sure if Earth is safe this time, there’s a certain magnitude to the terror of Galactus as seen in this new trailer. The assured superhero team looks completely out of their depths — and with a new baby to deal with on the side! Based on the end of Thunderbolts*, there may not be an epic fight in store for the Fantastic Four at the end of First Steps, but a radical sacrifice that changes the multiverse forever. Bleak.

At least the arrival of Galatcus means we’re getting the biggest popcorn bucket ever.

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[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the first hour of Death Stranding 2, which is now in early access]

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach‘s “I won’t do it” choice, the first in Kojima Productions’ long-awaited sequel, is a bit of a surprise. Here you are, presented with your first main-story mission – and you can refuse it.

The stakes seem high enough that folks playing the game early are leery of turning the quest down, but while there’s a bit of deception involved in how important your choice is, this little sequence does a lot to establish Death Stranding 2‘s emotional beats and one of its core themes.

After Fragile, Sam Bridges’ colleague from Death Stranding, tracks him down with a job opportunity to extend the internet-like chiral network into Mexico, players get the option to accept outright or dig a little deeper into her company’s motivations. If you skip asking for more information, you missing out on some important character development for Sam. What Fragile says isn’t entirely appealing to Sam, who thinks this venture is just economic imperialism disguised as public service, and you get the seemingly radical choice to turn down the offer.

The decision is giving streamers pause for thought – well, some of them. Of the five longplays I watched, only one was brave enough to turn Fragile’s job down. On Wednesday, one popular streamer, Jacksepticeye asked Fragile for all the details before immediately accepting the job to help save Mexico. Others, such as GameRiot, hesitated and worried that refusing might backfire in some horrible, unexpected way. Even “no commentary” streamers like Shirrako paused longer before deciding to accept the job than they did before choosing any other option.

The truth is that your choice doesn’t matter. Death Stranding 2‘s “I won’t do it” choice is another in a tradition of games tricking you into thinking your decision matters, like debating over letting Junjiro stay in Assassin’s Creed Shadows or pressing two control sticks to make Clive Rosfield break through a subconscious barrier in Final Fantasy XVI. Junjiro stays regardless of your choice, Clive can’t not accept the truth, and Sam has to take Fragile’s commission. However, if you’re the type of person who’s interested in Death Stranding for its story, you should refuse her request once or at least watch a video where someone does.

The scene after Death Stranding 2‘s first tutorial where Sam preps dinner while Lou does toddler things plays again after you refuse. She’s busy with building blocks; he tests the sauce. She rams a wooden toy into his ankles; he’s proud of his little porter-in-training and gives her a big hug. The photo board has a new image of Sam speaking with Fragile in front of a hologram displaying plans for the chiral network in Mexico, and the camera zooms into it, dropping you off at the point where Sam has to make his choice. You can refuse it again for a shorter, amusing little flashback that gets cut off before you finally have to agree.

The whole scenario seems like just a funny little gag at first, a cute way to show you that you can’t progress without accepting the job – except it’s the same for Sam. The game focuses on his unwillingness to get drawn back into the wider world, but the unspoken sentiment is that he’s trapped in an unhealthy cycle of hiding, getting found, and running away again. He can’t move on without accepting this job either, whatever the consequences of it might be.

There’s a very specific intention to having these scenes replay when they do. Fragile waxes eloquently about the importance of connecting people and how technology can improve life – while conveniently hiding the parts people want to ignore. Then you see again things like Lou playing with tactile toys and no digital objects in sight; Sam enjoying the simple pleasure of making a meal without a recipe app telling him exactly what to do; and the two sharing a tender moment together.

Kojima Productions’ marketing for Death Stranding 2 constantly asks “Should we have connected?” It’s an obvious follow-up from the first Death Stranding‘s theme of bringing people together. However, it’s also asking you to think a bit more deeply about the kind of connection that’s worth having and what’s more important: a digital network of anonymous people spanning the globe or a handful of close, meaningful relationships anchored in reality and affection? It’s worth keeping that question in mind as you play through the rest of Death Stranding 2.

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Persona 5: The Phantom X will give you more chances to collect personas and steal even more hearts alongside some new phantom thieves — all from the comfort of your own phone.

Persona 5: The Phantom X (also known as P5X) is finally going global after being available for more than a year in countries like China and South Korea. Developed by Perfect World, the game brings all the elements fans love from the Persona series, but this time alongside a gacha system.

If you’ve received the calling card, here’s when Persona 5: The Phantom X releases in your time zone

What time does Persona 5: The Phantom X release?

According to a press representative for Persona 5: The Phantom X, the game will be available at 2 p.m. EDT on June 25 for Android, iOS, and Windows PC. Here’s when that is in your time zone:

11 a.m. PDT for the west coast of North America2 p.m. EDT for the east coast of North America3 p.m. BRT for Brazil7 p.m. BST for the U.K.8 p.m. CEST for western Europe/Paris3 a.m. JST on June 26 for Japan4 a.m. AEST on June 26 for the east coast of Australia

What to expect from Persona 5: The Phantom X

Alongside Persona 5 Strikers, Persona 5 Tactica, and Persona Q2: Cinema Labyrinth, The Phantom X is another spin-off sprout out of the fifth mainline Persona game. While it is officially licensed by Atlus and Sega, P5X was developed by the studio Perfect World, the developers behind Tower of Fantasy and the upcoming gacha game Neverness to Everness.

From classic personas to metaphorical palaces, Persona 5: The Phantom X offers more of the Persona 5’s universe to the fans — kind of, since the game takes place in an alternate universe from the original Persona 5. P5X puts you back in Tokyo, where we play as Wonder, the leader of a brand-new group of Phantom Thieves.

Persona 5: The Phantom X is a complete new adventure that wears its origins on its sleeve. Just like in the original game, the Phantom Thieves in P5X want to reform society by stealing the hearts of certain individuals. To do so, you fight enemies using personas in turn-based battles, where hitting the elemental weaknesses is key to victory.

Like in previous Persona games, P5X features social links, characters with whom you can build closer relationships with — and eventually romance some of them. The game also features Lyn Inaizumi, who was present in all other Persona 5-related games singing the opening theme, “Ambitions and Visions.”

The biggest difference in P5X is the gacha system. Similar to games like Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, you’ll use specific currencies to pull for characters from a banner in Persona 5: The Phantom X. When you pull in the banner, there’s only a chance to get the character you want, so make sure to save your currency accordingly.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

George R. R. Martin just can’t catch a break, huh?

The author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, which adapted into the HBO show Game of Thrones, is suffering from perhaps the worst case of writer’s block in recorded history; Martin published A Dance with Dragons, the fifth ASOIAF book, in 2011 and hasn’t completed the planned seven-book series since. He receives plenty of flak from fans for not finishing the books yet, and now a contemporary in Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of The Witcher book series, is throwing shade too.

“I will write something else. Relax. No need to fear. And unlike George R. R. Martin — whom, by the way, I know personally — when I say I’ll write something, I will,” Sapkowski said to start a panel at Opole book festival (via Redanian Intelligence) in comments originally made in Polish.

Sapkowski meant no ill will, and empathized with the position Martin is in. “I totally understand him. Because if someone had pulled a stunt like that on me, filming a series based on my books, and then getting ahead of what I intended to write, I’d also be wondering whether there’s any point in writing anymore,” Sapkowski said, touching on how HBO’s Game of Thrones lapped the ASOIAF novels and provided an unsatisfactory conclusion for the series’ story. “If it’s already been done, right? Makes no sense. It’s nice when they adapt your work, that’s the author’s bloody right, but to adapt what doesn’t exist yet, to extrapolate like that? That’s just indecent.”

He echoed the theory that Martin isn’t continuing the series because the idea of it has lost its luster after Game of Thrones’ disappointed with its final seasons. “So Martin still isn’t writing, probably because he got offended that they filmed the continuation [of Game of Thrones], but I bet he didn’t give the money back, knowing how life goes. I wouldn’t have given it back.”

Martin has busied himself with other projects in lieu of finishing ASOIAF, like producing an animated reimagination of the story of Hercules. The man will do anything to procrastinate finishing his magnum opus, and maybe that’s OK. At this point, fans of the books have to be content with the likelihood that Martin doesn’t produce a written ending to A Song of Ice and Fire. Plenty of them will continue to love the series as it is, and some diehard ASOIAF fans recently sent Martin a collection of nearly 1,000 letters expressing gratitude and support for the author.

Sapkowski himself is no stranger to adaptations; The Witcher was adapted into a Polish film in 2001 and a TV series that lasted one season the following year. The Witcher gained mainstream popularity once CD Projekt Red got a hold of the license, culminating in 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Netflix is currently in the throes of adapting it for TV; the third season in 2023 saw the exit of star (and huge fan) Henry Cavill, leading to Liam Hemsworth wearing the medallion for the final two yet-to-be-released seasons. Sapkowski opts not to comment on the quality of the Netflix adaptations, which include two animated Witcher films, saying, “I appear in the end credits. Which means: if I say something positive, you’ll say, ‘Well of course, the magpie praises its own tail.’ And if I say something negative, you’ll say, ‘Idiot.’ So I won’t say anything.”

The Witcher ended as a seven-book series in 1999 with The Lady of the Lake, but Sapkowski returned to it in 2013 with Season of Storms, set sometime before the events of the first novel. He’s returned to it again with Crossroads of Ravens, which released in Poland last year before a wider international release later in 2025. It’s a prequel that follows a young Geralt, fresh off of completing his Witcher training at Kaer Morhen.

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28 Years Later is a superb, multifaceted horror movie with a lot of different things on its mind, and over its two hours it moves through quite a few tonal shifts: folk horror, coming-of-age family drama, gory action movie, and surreal meditation on societal breakdown. Even in this context, though, the ending is jarring, and might leave viewers wondering: What was that all about?

On one level, it’s a setup for the film’s sequel. Screenwriter Alex Garland wrote a trio of scripts for the return of the zombie franchise, and the second of these, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, has already been shot and will be released in January 2026. 28 Years Later’s final scene clearly sets up characters who will play a big part in the next movie.

But viewers outside the U.K. may not realize that the scene has an additional, shocking layer to it, because it makes explicit reference to perhaps the single most reviled figure in British contemporary culture: the media personality and prolific sexual abuser Jimmy Savile.

To say the least, it’s a bold choice, and it leaves the filmmakers with a very fine line to tread in The Bone Temple. Let’s dig in.

[Ed. note: The rest of this article contains full spoilers for the ending of 28 Years Later.]

What happens at the end of 28 Years Later?

28 Years Later’s final act is dominated by an elegiac passage, in which the young hero Spike (Alfie Williams) says goodbye to his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who has accepted a peaceful death at the hands of Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) rather than suffer through her cancer. Spike then chooses to go walkabout on the infected-infested mainland rather than return to his island community, after dropping the baby he and Isla found back at the island.

Twenty-eight days later, Spike is attacked by a group of infected. Escaping them, he is rescued by a colorful group of crazed warriors who attack the infected in flamboyant style. Their leader is Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who was the Scottish boy seen in the movie’s prologue set at the start of the outbreak. He wears the crucifix his priest father gave him upside down.

After the moving and meditative end of the film proper, this final scene is a total change of mood. O’Connell’s lines are played for broad laughs, the soundtrack mixes the Teletubbies theme with loud punk music, and the style employed by director Danny Boyle is frenetic and irreverent.

But the imagery is also extremely sinister, because the gang’s gaudy tracksuits, gold jewelery, and long blond wigs are clearly modeled on Jimmy Savile. As if there were any doubt, the credits seal it — O’Connell’s character is referred to as Sir Jimmy Crystal. Anyone outside the U.K. is likely wondering…

Who is Jimmy Savile?

If you grew up in Britain in the late 20th century, as I did, Sir James Savile was an inescapable, kind of clownish, but also beloved pop cultural figure. He came to prominence as a radio DJ in the 1960s and was a TV fixture through the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s as a presenter of the Top of the Pops chart show and Jim’ll Fix It, a sentimental early-evening variety show in which he made the wishes of kids come true.

His persona was that of a benevolent weird uncle. His mannered, catchphrase-heavy delivery and signature look — often embellished with tinted glasses and huge cigar — were much mocked and imitated, and made him incredibly famous. He was known for tireless charity work, particularly fundraising for hospitals, which led to his knighthood in 1990.

After his death in 2011, claims of rape and sexual abuse by Savile — which had been a distant rumor during his life — started to solidify. Over the following years the truly horrifying scale of his crimes became clear through criminal investigations and public inquiries. His victims numbered in the hundreds over five decades, and included many children and vulnerable people. Many of his crimes were perpetrated at the hospitals he visited under the guise of his charitable work. He appears to have been protected and his actions covered up by bosses at the BBC, in the National Health Service, and by other establishment figures.

So, in the U.K., Savile’s indelible public image has become synonymous with predatory evil — as well as with the hypocrisy and corruptibility of the establishment.

What does Jimmy Savile mean in 28 Years Later’s world?

The first film in Boyle and Garland’s zombie series, 28 Days Later, shows Britain being completely ravaged by the Rage Virus in 2002. It follows that in this world, Savile’s crimes were never exposed, and he would live on in the mind of survivors like Jimmy as a national treasure: the famous, funny weirdo who was nice to little kids on TV.

Or would he? Jimmy, a young boy in 2002, may not even have been born when Jim’ll Fix It went off the air in 1994. After that, though he was still famous, Savile’s ubiquity in British culture started to wane. He is not quite as potent a figure for U.K. millennials as he is for Gen Xers like Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and me, because they don’t have any positive associations with him from childhood. So it’s questionable why Savile would loom so large in Jimmy’s imagination that he would style his cult after him. (Teletubbies makes much more sense; the iconic preschoolers’ show originally ran from 1997 to 2001.)

Why did the filmmakers use Savile?

There’s a clear dramatic irony to the use of Jimmy Savile imagery in 28 Years Later. U.K. viewers know about his crimes, while the characters don’t. For us, he’s a symbol of evil. For O’Connell’s character and his acolytes, he’s a preposterous, half-remembered image of a bygone Britain.

Asked about the use of Savile imagery, Boyle told Business Insider, “He’s as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honors system. It’s all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers.”

In the same interview, Garland called Sir Jimmy Crystal “a sort of trippy, fucked up kaleidoscope” and also referred to the deceptive power of nostalgia. “The thing about looking back is how selective memory is,” Garland said. “It cherry picks and it has amnesia, and crucially, it also misremembers. We are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past.”

It seems like Garland and Boyle are using Savile to make the point that the nationalist nostalgia behind movements like Brexit (a clear inspiration for 28 Years Later’s vision of an isolated Britain) clings to a romanticized past that was, in reality, much darker.

What does this mean for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple?

Boyle has said that The Bone Temple “is about the nature of evil,” and that Sir Jimmy Crystal is the embodiment of this evil. “The role of Jack O’Connell’s character and his family, which is a replacement, really, for the family he loses at the beginning of the film, is to reintroduce evil into what has become a compassionate environment,” he told The Independent. It seems as though The Bone Temple may shift the series’ emphasis away from the infected and on to a more human antagonist.

While it may not be controversial to associate Savile with evil, it’s of questionable taste to use the image of a man with hundreds of living victims just to make a point or to get a reaction. The filmmakers certainly seem to be in provocateur mode in the ending of 28 Years Later; O’Connell is unafraid to be deliciously entertaining in his Savile-style get-up, while Boyle amps up his shooting and editing style into something that’s almost a parody of his punk-rock Trainspotting heyday.

This kind of provocation is one thing as a surprise coda, and another as the basis for an entire movie. It’s also one thing coming from Boyle, who is himself an icon of the “Cool Britannia” 1990s and is deeply fluent in the country’s iconography (so much so that he directed the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics). But Boyle isn’t directing The Bone Temple; that task falls to an American, Nia DaCosta (Candyman, The Marvels), who can’t have the same level of familiarity with the subject matter.

It all leaves DaCosta with some fascinating but very tricky British cultural territory to navigate in The Bone Temple. She’ll have Garland’s script as a map, and presumably the guidance of both Garland and Boyle as producers. But in the U.K. — where Savile’s image has gone from ever-present to all but forbidden over the past 15 years — it can’t help but be intensely controversial.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Mike Judge’s iconic ’90s duo, Beavis and Butthead, are grunting and giggling their way into Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone as a part of the game’s upcoming mid-season update.

The announcement was shared via a post on the official Call of Duty Twitter (formerly X) page, featuring an image of the skins players will be able to purchase. Beavis and Butthead stand in the foreground sporting military gear while Coach Buzzcut and Todd Ianuzzi linger in the background, dressed in their standard outfits from the TV show.

The skins use cel-shading to give the characters a cartoonified look that remains true to the show’s two-dimensional aesthetic while still allowing the skins to function in the 3D world of Call of Duty.

But reactions from players have been mixed. Some have pointed out that despite the fact that the Beavis and Butthead skins feature them wearing tactical gear, these skins will surely be easier to see compared to other Operator skins that blend in with the game’s environment a bit better.

“I love Beavis & Butthead, but this is one of the last places I thought I’d see them,” one player wrote. “Plus, won’t they be easier to spot versus other operators?”

Others bemoaned the Fortnite-ification of Call of Duty‘s Operator skins.

“They are trying so hard to be Fortnite,” another player replied.

But some players — especially those who grew up watching the show — can’t wait to open their wallets.

“I speak for everyone when I say we will all be buying,” wrote one big-time Beavis and Butthead fan.

The skins will become available in-game when the Season 4 Reloaded mid-season update goes live. Activision has yet to announce a specific date, but players have around two more days to finish their Season 4 battle pass, so Season 4 Reloaded (and the Beavis and Butthead skins) should become available on or shortly after June 26.

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Warcraft director Duncan Jones shared the first look at his next project Tuesday, Rogue Trooper. Based on the 2000 AD comics character, the film is notable for being animated in Unreal Engine 5, the video game design tool used to create some of the most popular games of 2025, like Split Fiction and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

“We are so excited to share a first look of the film and show the amazing fidelity with which the team have used our actors on set performances to drive the animated characters,” producer Stuart Fenegan said in a news release. “That level of detail and nuance was a priority from day one.”

Rogue Trooper will star Aneurin Barnard as the titular character. Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, and Asa Butterfield will also lend their voices to the project.

Jones’ Rogue Trooper film has been a long time coming. It was first confirmed in 2018, the same year the director’s latest film, Mute, was released. Jones is perhaps best known to gamers as the writer an director of 2016’s Warcraft, based on Blizzard’s series of the same name. At the time, for Polygon, Philip Kollar called Warcraft “just good enough to make me aware of what could have been — and just bad enough to make me despair that it wasn’t.”

The film will follow the “Genetic Infantryman,” originally created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, “who finds himself the sole-survivor of an invasion force. Desperate to track down the traitor who sold him and his comrades out, the super soldier is accompanied by three killed-in-action squad mates, whose personalities have been stored in his gun, helmet and backpack.” You can check out the first images from the film below.

Rogue Trooper doesn’t have a release date or trailer yet, but expect more news to come out of San Diego Comic-Con next month, as Jones excitedly teased in the news release, “AHHHHHHHHHHHH! WE’RE ALMOST FINISHED! SEE YOU AT SDCC!!”

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By any measure, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a resounding success. It sold 3.3 million copies in 33 days (because of course) and is a front-runner to be awarded Game of the Year. But one person isn’t playing it: Charlie Cox, the voice behind expeditioner Gustave.

“Apparently, the game is awesome — I’m not a gamer, I have no idea. I haven’t played it,” the Daredevil: Born Again star said during a panel at Washington State Summer Con. He said he was in the studio for “four hours maybe,” and is quite surprised by how massively popular those four hours of work have become. Gustave has become a fan favorite — all the expeditioners have, really — and Cox is already dishing out his autograph for Gustave memorabilia. While he may not have been in the recording booth for long, Cox’s work in the game is vital to its story (perhaps Clair Obscur’s best element) and its success; it’s through his point of view that players first learn of the game’s world, conflict, and characters.

Charlie Cox talks Clair Obscur Expedition 33! @expedition33(Shy Charlie also makes an appearance🥹)#CharlieCox #Gustave #Expedition33 #ClairObscur #ClairObscurExpedition33 pic.twitter.com/GSdCvrvV0D

— charlie cox fansite (@charliefansite) June 22, 2025

With its success comes a heaping of praise and congratulations for the game, its cast, and the developers behind it, Sandfall Interactive. However, Cox isn’t quite comfortable yet with the praise that gets directed his way. “People keep saying how amazing it is and congratulations, and I feel like a total fraud,” he said, referring to the short amount of time he spent working on the game. “But I’m so thrilled for the company, I’m so thrilled it did really well.”

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is out now for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. Alongside Cox, it features a cast of heavy hitters including Jennifer English (Baldur’s Gate 3), Ben Starr (Final Fantasy 16), and Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings).

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