For me, skateboarding has always been about getting into a flow state. Much like playing Tetris, I’m at my best when I’m skating almost subconsciously, not thinking and acting in the moment. It’s not an easy zone to get into, and music has always been my shortcut. So the greatest compliment I can give to Skate City: New York is that I’ve spent the past week fine-tuning the perfect playlist, all so that I can also perfect my runs in the game.
New York is a sequel to the original Skate City; both are available through Apple Arcade, though the first game was eventually ported to consoles as well. It comes from Snowman, the studio behind the Alto series, and the shift to New York is a lot like the move from Alto’s Adventure to Alto’s Odyssey. It’s not an entirely new experience but, rather, one that changes the setting and adds some seemingly small — but very impactful — tweaks.
What makes the series so well suited to mobile is the way it balances approachability and depth. Skate City is extremely easy to pick up. It’s a side-scrolling game, so you’re always moving left to right, and all of the various tricks and moves are performed either by a swipe, tap, or hold. It all feels...
While we’re all waiting for official news about the Switch 2, Nintendo has gone ahead and announced a very different kind of console. The company is teasing a collaboration with Lego that will see the original grey brick known as a Game Boy rendered in Lego blocks. There are no details yet, aside from the fact that it’ll be out in October, but it’s likely an official reveal is coming soon.
I’m not going to spoil anything because the new season of Severance doesn’t premiere for 10 days. But I want to be clear — the first season of the sci-fi thriller wasn’t a fluke. The Apple TV Plus series burst onto the scene in 2022 with a story about tech workers who were forced to live in purgatory thanks to an experimental procedure that split their brains in two: one who lived a normal life outside of the office, and another who could never leave. It was tense and strange and downright horrifying — and also benefited from largely being a surprise. But even without that, season 2 hits just as hard as the original, pushing further into the dark, weird edges of the Severance universe, while expanding it in fascinating new ways.
Spoilers for the first season of Severance to follow.
As a little refresher, Severance is centered on a tech giant called Lumon Industries, which developed the mind-splitting procedure so that employees can work on sensitive projects in its basement with no concerns about that information getting out of the building. The severance procedure is dictated spatially: as soon as a severed employee gets in the elevator and heads downstairs, they, in essence,...
In Squid Game, schoolyard games are turned into nightmares, as players compete to survive and — if they’re lucky — earn a massive cash prize. But in Unleashed, a new mobile spinoff that’s part of the streamer’s fledgling gaming efforts, those games are fun. It’s a strange experience that sands off much of the appeal of Squid Game in service of making a multiplayer party game.
Unleashed is sort of like Fall Guys but in a Squid Game wrapper. You compete against 31 other players across three random games pulled from the show, like “red light, green light” or racing across a bridge made of glass. Slowly other players die off, and by the end one wins a whole bunch of money.
Aesthetically, the game mostly follows the show. There are a bunch of characters to play as — some pulled from the show, others new for the game — and even though there’s a cartoon aesthetic, things still get bloody, with players being shot for breaking the rules or crushed under some obstacle. There are the familiar green track suits and masked guards.
But the connections to the show are really only surface level. There’s no story element, so if you haven’t watched the show, you’d have no idea the kind of personal anguish many of the characters are going through.
In fact, many of the elements that make Unleashed a pretty fun mobile game are also what keep it from being a good adaptation of what Squid Game is all about. In order to reduce frustration, most of the games have respawning. So even if you fail at “red light, green light” and get shot by a guard, it’s not game over. It simply slows you down in a race to be one of a pre-determined number of players to cross the finish line and move on.
Similarly, the games can all be completed in a few minutes. This is great for playing short sessions on the go; being stuck in a 30 minute multiplayer match on your phone typically sucks. But when you put elements like the short run time and respawning together it, completely erases any of the tension that’s so core to Squid Game’s appeal.
And despite having no in-app purchases — Unleashed is completely free for Netflix subscribers and, for a limited time, non-subscribers — it’s still structured like a typical free-to-play game. You earn cash from winning matches and completing various goals, which is used to unlock new characters, costumes, and emotes. Every time I log on I’m greeted with a jarring number of pop-ups and notifications letting me know I just unlocked a zombie costume or that there’s a Christmas-themed event going on. Just this morning I was gifted a twerking emote.
Yes, now I can make Kang Sae-byeok, whose death was one of the most tragic moments of season 1, twerk in the middle of a deadly obstacle course.
Unleashed isn’t a bad game. In many ways, it’s a clever reinterpretation of online party games for mobile. But, like most of Netflix’s expansions of the Squid Game universe, it also completely misses the point of the show. It’s sort of like what Fortnite is to the original movie Battle Royale: a playful, colorful take on a brutal, piercing story.
Fortnite largely avoided the tonal dissonance by creating a cartoon-ish, multiversal world that is far away from an island full of kids killing their classmates. Unleashed, on the other hand, is another part of Squid Game — one that doesn’t seem to understand why the series exists.
Photo By Joaquin Corchero/Europa Press via Getty Images
Netflix’s push into live sports has snagged another major event. Today the streamer announced that it has acquired US streaming rights for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in both 2027 and 2031. FIFA is calling the deal “a landmark announcement for women’s football.”
The 2027 edition of the tournament will take place in Brazil, while the following World Cup doesn’t yet have a host nation. The Netflix coverage in the US will include both English- and Spanish-language broadcasts, and the streamer says that it will be creating more coverage in addition to the live matches:
Studio shows and top-tier talent will supplement coverage with commentary and entertainment. And in the lead-up to the tournament, Netflix will produce exclusive documentary programming spotlighting the top players, their journeys, and the explosion of the sport around the globe.
It’s all part of a growing trend of streaming services looking to live events — and sports in particular — as the next frontier. Apple has gone all-in in MLS, Amazon airs NHL games and is getting into the NBA next year, while the likes of Max, Roku, and pretty much every service have gotten into sports in some way.
The first season of Dune: Prophecy is about to wrap up — but there’s more on the way. Ahead of the finale on December 22nd, HBO has confirmed than the prequel series has been renewed for a second season.
The show premiered in November, and takes place 10,000 years before the events of the Dune movies from Denis Villeneuve. It stars Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as two Harkonnen sisters who form the galaxy-defining sect known as the Bene Gesserit.
“If you just know the Harkonnens from the movies, they’re these monstrous villains who are very clearly the bad guys,” showrunner Alison Schapker told The Verge about the series. “But that’s not where they started off, and this kind of story gave us a chance to complicate that understanding and dig into what made them that way.”
The first trailer for the next theatrical take on Superman is finally here. After some teasing, DC Studios released the debut look at the new film, which is simply called Superman. It opens with Superman crashing in a frozen landscape, clearly injured, before flashing back to his life as Clark Kent. A handful of villains make an appearance — including Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor — but overall the vibe seems to be one of hope. There’s even a very dramatic take on the classic Superman theme song. And yes, the dog makes an appearance.
Gunn, who is best known as the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, has previously said that he wants all of the new DC films — Superman included — to feel distinct from each other. “I want each project to have the feelings of the individual artist that’s working on it and to give them a lot of freedom — as long as it works — to create something special because what I’ve found through Marvel, what wasn’t exciting was when movies were tonally the same,” he explained.
A24’s lineup of films for 2025 is starting to become stacked — with fantastical creatures, that is. While the fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi is slated to hit theaters next February, the dark comedy Death of a Unicorn is due out in the spring. And you can get a feel for it in the brand-new trailer above.
The film follows a father and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) who are driving to a weekend retreat, and accidentally kill an animal ... which just so happens to be a unicorn. From there, it seems as though the dad’s rich boss (Richard E. Grant) and his family can’t help but see ways to exploit the creature’s magical powers for profit. While the vibe is light and funny early one, things not only get darker, but take a turn towards horror by the end of the trailer.
Death of a Unicorn is the directorial debut from Alex Scharfman, and it also stars Will Poulter, Sunita Mani, and Téa Leoni. Hereditary director Ari Aster serves as a producer, while horror legend John Carpenter.
Secret Level actually just premiered on Prime Video, and comes from the same team behind Netflix’s animated sci-fi anthology Love, Death and Robots. Its 15 episodes span a range of notable video game franchises, including Warhammer 40,000, Dungeons & Dragons, Mega Man, and the recently-shuttered Sony shooter Concord. It also awkwardly straddled the line between TV show and advertisement. In fact, one of Secret Level’s most infamous episodes — a bloody, dark reimagining of Pac-Man — turned out to be tied to an upcoming game.
The end of the end of the world is now in sight. Apple just announced that its post-apocalyptic series Silo, which is in the midst of its second season, has been renewed for two more seasons. That means that season 4 will be the show’s last.
Silo first debuted in 2023, and it tells the story of the remnants of humanity, who live in an underground silo where they’re largely safe from the ruined landscape outside. However, things get much more complex very quickly, and the show is laden with mysteries. The series is based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels from Hugh Howey, and Apple says that the final two seasons will tell “the complete story” of the books. (So far, the first book has been split across the first two seasons of the show.)
“With the final two chapters of Silo, we can’t wait to give fans of the show an incredibly satisfying conclusion to the many mysteries and unanswered questions contained within the walls of these silos,” showrunner Graham Yost said in a statement. Rebecca Ferguson, who stars in the show and serves as an executive producer, added that “I have always felt passionately about telling the entire story contained within Hugh Howey’s books, so I couldn’t be happier that audiences around the world have enthusiastically embraced the show.”
Capcom had quite the surprise in store at The Game Awards. The developer announced a sequel to Okami, a beautiful and beloved action-adventure game that originally launched back in 2006.
The sequel — which doesn’t currently have a name — was revealed in dramatic fashion with a musical performance. Original director Hideki Kamiya is returning for the game, which will be developed by his new studio Clovers. It’s still very early though; during the reveal TGA host Geoff Keighley said that “production is about to begin.” Capcom, meanwhile, says only that “a new adventure in the same vein as Okami has been set in motion.”
Not only has it been quite some time since Okami debuted, its announcement also comes at a time when Capcom seems intent on doubling down on its biggest franchises. Right now that means a lot of Monster Hunter and Resident Evil. Up next is Monster Hunter Wilds, which is launching next year, as well as the mobile spinoff Monster Hunter Outlanders.
We already knew it was in the works, and now we have an idea of how it will look and play. At the Game Awards, Gearbox Software revealed the first proper trailer for Borderlands 4, which is due out in 2025. The trailer starts with a cinematic depicting a large-scale conflict of some sort, before getting into the actual gameplay — which is as colorful and violent as you’d expect from the franchise. The game is playable solo or co-op with up to three other players, and Gearbox says that there are “billions” of weapons to use.
Here’s the basic set-up:
Break free from the oppressive Timekeeper, a ruthless dictator who dominates the masses from on high. Now a world-altering catastrophe threatens his perfect Order, unleashing mayhem across the planet. Ignite a resistance and blast your way through mechanical monstrosities, bloodthirsty bandits, and vicious beasts. Amass an arsenal of death-dealing firepower to wreak havoc as you tear your way across Kairos.
The 2024 edition of The Game Awards started with a bang — the very first look at the next Witcher game. It’s called The Witcher 4 and was revealed via a lengthy cinematic trailer that starred Ciri in place of Geralt, who led the original trilogy.
There aren’t many details yet, but CD Projekt Red says that in the new game, “Ciri takes center stage as the protagonist, embarking on her own journey to become a professional monster slayer.” It will be a single-player, open-world RPG. The studio says that “the cinematic trailer is pre-rendered in a custom build of Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU.”
It doesn’t sound like the trailer will necessarily be representative of the final game, however. Here’s how CD Projekt Red explains it:
In the nearly six-minute trailer, viewers were introduced to Ciri, the adopted daughter of Geralt of Rivia, as she takes on a witcher contract in a remote village that has been terrorized for generations by a fearsome monster demanding human sacrifices. Framed as a short, self-contained Witcher story, the trailer showcases Ciri’s new abilities and tools, including a chain and advanced magic powers.
At the heart of the trailer is Ciri’s perspective as an outsider to the village. As the villagers say goodbye to one of their own — a young girl they are preparing for a traditional ritual sacrifice — Ciri chooses to intervene. Aiming to slay the beast and save the girl at the same time, Ciri finds herself at odds with the prejudices and superstitions of the people she tries to protect, leading her to confront a painful witcher lesson: that monsters come in all forms.
Geoff Keighley’s enormous and expensive video game commercial show celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.
It’s that time of the year. The Game Awards 2024 starts December 12th at 7:30 PM ET / 4:30 PM PT on Twitch and YouTube. This year marks the awards’ tenth anniversary so expect some big surprises to celebrate the occasion. We already know Borderlands 4 will make an appearance as well as the next game from Hazelight Studios, the developers behind Game of the Year 2021 It Takes Two.
Keighley’s BFF Hideo Kojima will probably show up to show off more of Death Stranding 2 or maybe even his new game / movie hybrid project OD. And with 2025 mere weeks away, the GTA VI hype season will officially start, likely with a new, potentially record busting trailer. Here are all the news, trailers, and surprises for this years Game Awards.
This year, we know at least a few of the major reveals, which will include the first gameplay trailer for Borderlands 4 and the next release from Hazelight Studios, the team behind surprise hit It Takes Two. Games like Palworld, Dying Light, and Mafia: The Old Country, are all confirmed to make an appearance, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if Hideo Kojima showed up as well, either to show off Death Stranding 2 or OD.
The ceremony kicks off at 7:30PM ET on December 12th and, as per usual, it’s streaming a huge bunch of places including YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, Instagram, and many others. (You can find the complete list right here.) It’ll also be streaming inside of Fortnite, if the metaverse is your thing.
The ongoing goal, according to Devin Winterbottom, Epic’s executive vice president of game development, is to keep expanding in ways that make people rethink what Fortnite actually is. “The worst outcome for us is that everything looks like battle royale,” Winterbottom says. “That’s not what we want to do.”
For Brick Life, that takes the form of a family-friendly nonviolent space where players can explore and socialize inside of a Lego city. It launches today as part of a broader rebranding of Lego Fortnite; now, those two words refer to a hub that houses all of the Lego experiences in the game, while the survival title has been renamed Lego Fortnite Odyssey. In between those two major releases, Lego...
