Emahlstadt

Eight key defensive contributors for the Horns have missed 20 out of 64 possible games and have been limited or injured in 20 more.

Want a recipe for defensive struggles?

Take a defense that ranked No. 123 in the SP+ returning production metrics, pit it against the No. 15 schedule in defensive opponent adjustment through 10 weeks, according to FEI, then throw in a rash of injuries at linebacker and in the secondary.

Here’s how bad those injuries have been for the Texas Longhorns — eight key contributors, including five starters in the season opener, have missed 20 of 64 total possible games and were injured or limited in 20 others.

In other words, defensive coordinator Todd Orlando has gotten 24 healthy games from those key players, only 37.5 percent. Eighteen of those games came in the first three contests — 75 percent.

The chart doesn’t include a stinger suffered by senior safety Brandon Jones against Kansas that caused him to leave the game or a “significant” elbow injury suffered by sophomore linebacker Juwan Mitchell that resulted in him sitting out the first half against the Jayhawks.

Those are the small ones, even though Mitchell’s injury resulted in true freshman David Gbenda starting at linebacker not long after moving back from running back, the position on offense decimated by injuries.

And losing Jones wasn’t exactly ideal as the Longhorns tried to hold on late.

Here’s the perspective, though — defensive coordinator Todd Orlando entered the season after losing eight starters with the No. 123 defense nationally in returning production and has only gotten three combined games of full health from sophomore safety Caden Sterns, sophomore safety BJ Foster, and sophomore cornerback Jalen Green.

Stop and read that sentence again.

If you were told before the season that a defense that lost eight starters would only have those three players available for three games of full health out of 24 possible appearances, would you bet on the Texas defense matching last year’s results?

That’s is an easy question.

The answer is no. Of course not.

All three players were expected to take significant steps forward and serve as the present and future of the Longhorns on defense. Instead, it’s essentially been a lost season so far for all three. Throw sophomore safety DeMarvion Overshown into that mix, too.

With those players missing games or playing through injuries, the next men up also got injured — Overshown, junior safety Chris Brown in the midst of his breakout season, and the team’s most experienced cornerback in junior Josh Thompson.

Thompson entered the season with three career starts.

Stop and think about that.

In the last three games, players from that group of nine players who have suffered injuries this season, which totals 27 possible player games, have only been close to or at full health in one of them. One in 27 — 3.7 percent.

The injuries to Green and Thompson, who had moved from nickel back to cornerback to help with inexperience there, left Texas with a group at cornerback that combined for 50 career tackles and three starts entering the season.

Arguably the most promising player from that group at the moment, sophomore cornerback D’Shawn Jamison, played offense last season as a true freshman and has had his own fair share of mistakes.

As a result of all those injuries, the season-opening depth chart against Louisiana Tech at linebacker and in the secondary was decimated by the time the Horns traveled to Fort Worth last week to face the Horned Frogs.

Of the 28 starts entering the season from that entire two-deep chart, senior safety Brandon Jones possessed 23 of them. Third-year safety Montrell Estell (essentially third string) and freshman safety Tyler Owens (not listed) were the only healthy scholarship safeties left on the roster with Jones playing in the nickel. If Orlando had wanted to pull either one during the game, he would have inserted a scholarship cornerback with no experience at one of those positions or a player who arrived at Texas as a walk on.

That’s the result of limited depth caused by a transition class when head coach Tom Herman arrived and a 28-man 2016 class that was cut in half by attrition.

The bottom line is that the Longhorns lost that game and the defense struggled at times, especially in slowing down true freshman quarterback Max Duggan, but go back and look at that final column on the injury report and then consider that Texas held TCU below its season averages in scoring and total offense and well below its season average in rushing yards.

The difference in that game was junior quarterback Sam Ehlinger throwing four interception, the Horned Frogs scoring 13 points off of those interceptions, and Gary Patteron’s defense forcing the Longhorns to kick field goals in the red zone or just outside of it three times.

And Duggan made some good throws to good receivers late in the game, the type of thing that a maturing player who was ranked as the consensus No. 5 dual-threat quarterback in the country last season has a tendency to do more often with more game experience.

Even outside of all the injuries, it’s worth wondering how the defense is performing compared to the other 10 defenses that ranked at the bottom of the FBS in returning defensive production this season.

The answer is actually relatively heartening, especially when viewed in context with the injuries.

There are certainly defenses that have performed significantly better than Texas despite losing even more production, like Kentucky and Washington, but it’s also extremely unlikely that either program has suffered the type of injuries that the Longhorns have on defense.

Moreover, Mark Stoops is in his seventh year with the Wildcats, while Chris Petersen is in his sixth season with the Huskies — both coaches have already dealt with the impacts of taking over those jobs. They’ve had enough recruiting classes to build depth on top of depth with their own recruits.

Continuity matters.

Ultimately, despite the unsatisfying nature of results on the field for Orlando in recent weeks, Texas still ranks as the median defense from that group in SP+ and the No. 4 defense from that group in FEI.

Both unequivocally support the argument that the Texas defense is not one of the worst in the country — in fact, it’s well better than average in FEI, despite all of the injuries.

Is any of this up to the Texas standard? Of course not, and Herman and Orlando and every single one of the leaders on defense have said that publicly and will continue saying it publicly until the group improves or the season ends, whichever comes first.

The bottom line is that no other defense in the country has likely dealt with the same combination of limited returning production and extensive injuries. Feel free to try to find one if you want.

And firing the head coach won’t solve those problems — almost certainly, it would create attrition in the high-quality recruiting classes from the last two years and result in a subpar transition class. Consider that not only premature, but also a recipe for continued mediocrity.

As for Orlando, does it make sense to fire a defensive coordinator whose group ranks, at worst, just outside the bottom third nationally despite the limited returning production and all those injuries and, at best, better than average, especially when compared to the defenses facing similar issues entering the season?

That doesn’t make sense, either.

Sometimes the answer is just patience.

Hideo Kojima has been announced as a speaker at EGX Berlin this weekend, where he’ll be talking about the highly-anticipated PS4 release of Death Stranding (and, perhaps, the remarkable spread he managed on the Death Stranding review scores). He’ll also be available for selfies with fans after the show. 

EGX Berlin is the German sibling of mighty UK games show EGX, created by VG247 owner Gamer Network. 

Kojima is on stage at 3pm on Sunday (2pm UK time, 10am Eastern, 7am PST) and will be talking for around an hour with Golden Globe-winning German director Fatih Akin about games, films and what connects them. Kojima is of course a huge film buff, having packed Death Stranding with celebrity talent including Norman Reedus, Guillermo del Toro and, er, Conan O’Brian, and the announcement follows Death Stranding receiving praise from Mad Max director George Miller.

Expect lots of in-depth discussion (in English) about the game’s thoroughly cinematic cast and concepts, which Kirk has considered at some length in our Death Stranding review this morning. If you can’t be in Berlin to watch in person, you can watch the entire session streamed live on the EGX Berlin Twitch channel. 

Those at the show have the opportunity to meet the man himself and get a selfie afterwards, during a one-hour public photo/meet-and-greet session. The details are all on the EGX Berlin website.

Death Stranding has had the stamp of a characteristically unique Kojima experience since the day it was revealed, and the reviews suggest it’ll prove thoroughly divisive – it’s not really like anything else out there, for better and worse. You can get a surprising amount of insight into the story from the eight-minute Death Stranding launch trailer.

If you want to get along and see Kojima in person, you can get EGX Berlin tickets over here.

The post Kojima to talk Death Stranding and meet fans at EGX Berlin appeared first on VG247.

It is a game of delayed rewards. Only when the credits roll do its narrative elements snap into place with a magician’s flourish. It took me fifty-six hours to complete the fourteen episodes that make up its core campaign. And it wasn’t until I hit Episode 5, “Mama,” that the game really clicked for me.

the journey, for all its frustrations - the slow, plodding pace of the early game and the obtuse beginnings of its story - still serves as a worthy foundation for the excellent experience that follows.

The final act shakes things up, but the gruelling 15-20-hour mid-section is a seemingly endless toil of literal hills and valleys

the opening hours are so ploddingly paced that it makes the whole thing seem like a personal attack on the speedrunning community.

The final 10 hours of Death Stranding are a slog, just like the first 10 hours

Blizzard sent over a rather large batch of Overwatch 2 screenshots, and we thought we’d share.

Blizzard announced Overwatch 2 today at BlizzCon 2019. While a date wasn’t provided, we do know it’s at least in the works.

Along with new heroes, players can expect to play on maps located in Rio and Toronto. A new game mode called Push was announced along with Hero Missions.

All cosmetics and progress will come forward into the game, and Overwatch 1 and 2 players can play together in a shared multiplayer environment.

Again, there’s no date just yet, but it’s in development for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

Enjoy the screens below.

Overwatch 2 Stills

Overwatch 2 gameplay screens

The post Check out this batch of Overwatch 2 screenshots appeared first on VG247.

Want more Diablo 4? Of course you do.

Diablo 4 was one of the worst kept secrets of BlizzCon 2019 this weekend. Matter of fact, there wasn’t really any surprise considering everything leaked.

Even though we knew Diablo 4 was coming, seeing it at the show was still nice, especially considering we got two trailers out of it.

Now, you can get another look at the RPG in this set of screenshots sent over by Blizzard.

A release date hasn’t been announced, and we expect to hear more about the game out of the show this weekend.

Enjoy.

The post Have another look at Diablo 4 with these screenshots appeared first on VG247.

Death Stranding is out now on PC, complete with graphical improvements and some PC exclusive content like wearable Half-Life headcrabs. You can read our original review below.

Hideo Kojima has always been fascinated by attrition: Tapping Circle through the pain in Metal Gear Solid’s torture scene, Solid Snake gasping as he crawls through MGS 4’s oven hallway, the extended ladder sequence of MGS 3, and the uncomfortably long jeep ride with Skull Face in MGS 5. Death Stranding is his attempt at capturing that feeling, effort as a mechanic, and selling it as an entire game. The results are mixed.

Death Stranding is a video game about the spaces in-between. A cataclysmic event has severed the balance between life and death. The dead appear to the living, dragging them into another dimension known as the Beach, and the people who brave this terrifying world are forced to use Bridge Babies (or BBs) to sense them. These unborn babies are encased in an artificial womb – not dead, but not quite alive, existing in their own purgatory, too. Schrödinger’s tot.

It’s also quite literally about the spaces in-between – the large swathes of landscape you travel across. Where most video games are built around what you do when you reach your destination – absentmindedly pushing forward on a stick or revving a vehicle to a destination – here the journey is the game, not the shooting people when you get there. It took 22 hours of playing Death Stranding before even I fired my first proper gun.

Since we got that very first trailer, people have been asking what Death Stranding actually is. Is it a stealth game? Sometimes. Is it an action game? Occasionally. For the most part, Death Stranding is a mountaineering game. Kojima has been talking up the online aspect – where structures created by other players appear in your world and vice versa (thank you, Captaindongs, for the bridge) – but it’s in the traversal where the game really does feel different. While there’s the odd boss fight and small pockets of combat scattered throughout, the majority of this huge 40-60 hour game is spent walking, planning, and creating infrastructure to make subsequent journeys easier.

You take control of Sam Bridges (Norman Reedus) as he attempts to spread chiral network (spooky internet) coverage across America, travelling from the east coast to the west. You go to a terminal, accept a job, and stack up cargo on your back and limbs. You stack as much as you can carry without toppling over like a human Jenga tower, then you head out into the weirdly Icelandic USA. Between jobs, you kick it in a private room and take showers, pull faces in a mirror, and drink Monster Energy. Sometimes you see Norman Reedus’s full ass. Sometimes he winks at the camera. Sometimes you take a shit and an advert for Reedus’s AMC motorbike show pops up on the shower curtain. Why do you take a shit? Because the game turns your shit, piss, and sweat into different types of grenades. The poo one? EX Grenade Number Two, obviously.

Hideo Kojima, a man in his 50s who once tweeted about his eggs looking like boobs, is known for having a puerile sense of humour, and that remains intact. One area that has improved here is in his portrayal of women. Yes, they might have daft names, but there is not a single whiff of tit. Progression! If it wasn’t for Troy Baker’s character, Higgs, occasionally licking peoples’ faces and, at one point, slapping Lindsey Wagner’s arse, it’d be a flawless victory.

Let’s talk about those silly names for a moment. Heartman? He’s a guy who has a heart attack every 21 minutes. Die-Hardman? He hasn’t died once. Deadman is made of dead people, obviously. You idiot. Mama? She’s got a ghost baby. I was half expecting Mads Mikkelsen’s character, Cliff, to be made of rock. Death Stranding wields metaphor like a cudgel and beats you over the head with it. Sam Bridges, the man who’s travelling the world to connect people, has aphenphosmphobia – the fear of being touched. That’s just, like, so deep, man. Let me take another hit on this bong.

For the most part, the story is overly complex nonsense. It’s a game of telling, not showing, where characters will stand and talk at you for full 30 minute stretches. In the opening three hours, you’re in control for a mere 30 minutes. At the end, there are back-to-back cutscenes that rival MGS 4’s ending. It goes back to attrition again, but this time it’s your attention span and not your stamina that’s being tested. The pre-release trailers and the discussion around them were ultimately far more interesting than what’s here, story-wise.

When the cutscenes and endless exposition get out of the way, though, there’s an interesting, beautiful, unique, unfortunately repetitive game here. It’s a game I’m glad exists, even though I’m not entirely enamoured with it. Remember how MGS 5 had a secret cutscene that would only trigger if every single player in the entire world decided to get rid of their nukes in the online mode? It’s a continuation of that idea, with every action you make potentially impacting another player in their own journey. Before I give you an example, let me explain the basic mechanics.

As mentioned, you stack yourself up with cargo. Depending on how you stack it, your weight shifts, though there’s an option to auto-optimise all cargo so you’ll just use that every time because why wouldn’t you? Sometimes you just need to get it from A to B. Sometimes you need to do it in a time limit. Sometimes there are further restrictions, such as carrying it by hand (manually keeping a trigger squeezed to keep hold), or keeping it flat. One side mission sees you literally delivering a pizza while it’s still hot and flat. You’re basically a Deliveroo employee at the end of the world.

Once you’ve figured out how you want your cargo, you head off into the landscape. Like I said earlier, it’s Icelandic – the end credits show that they shot on location in Iceland – but it’s meant to be the US. It bears no resemblance at all to the US, except for how fractured it is and how it only takes 22 hours to get a gun. There are rivers to cross, mountains to pass, and basalt to trundle across. Different surfaces affect your balance in different ways, and it’s about finding the optimal route while maintaining your center of gravity. Take on too steep a slope and you’ll slip, damaging your cargo and traumatising Schrödinger’s tot in the process.

You can actually plot your route by bringing up your map and drawing it out. Later, you can predict weather patterns such as wind and timefall – also known as rain, except this ages things and fucks up your cargo with prolonged exposure… a bit like a Hermes driver. You also have to decide whether you want to try to pass over obstacles – mountains, enemy camps, and more – or take an indirect, safer route. Often, this depends on the tools you have. If you have enough climbing anchors and extendable ladders, a mountain can be tamed. It’s that famous video game marketing line again: “You see that mountain over there? It’s a prick.”

One huge river at the base of a waterfall was my personal nemesis. I had to clamber down a cliffside to reach it and it seemed impassable. I couldn’t build a bridge over it because I hadn’t extended the network that far yet, so I had to try to find another way around, ultimately scaling an almost sheer cliff to bypass it. Later, I came back to the river with zipline structures and built an easy way across, both for me and for any weary traveller who might come up against what I just suffered through.

Once you make it to the end of a mission, you get rated for the route you took, the time it took you to complete, and the state of the cargo. You also accrue a currency called ‘likes’ through your endeavours, both from NPCs and other players who use your structures and vehicles. Similarly to social media ‘likes’, these don’t actually seem to serve any worth whatsoever, but they do make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The rating system is similarly pointless, though occasionally it doles out some incremental upgrades to things such as balance and likes received. Unfortunately, there are a few occasions in the story where the rating system bumps up against the human drama – there’s nothing quite like getting an S Rank for incinerating a loved one.

When you’re driving along a road you’ve built, or firing yourself through the air in a series of linked up sci-fi ziplines, Death Stranding nails its objective. You are rewarded for your patience, planning, and foresight. The issue is, the reward is the ability to skip the core gameplay as much as possible, to automate the walking through well-laid equipment. Later, you can even use robots to cover minor deliveries for you, too. It feels like it is building up to a big payoff towards the end, but it completely undermines itself once it gets there. Once you reach the west coast, you’re forced to head back east again. Only now, timefall storms have ruined all your equipment. Instead of this being an opportunity to marvel at your work and trace a route back through it, it’s just a 50 minute slog back to the other side of the map in a single mission.

Death Stranding does have its moments, though. Because it’s mostly walking around a vast environment while listening to Hideo Kojima’s Spotify playlist, action sequences are extremely tense when they do happen. One of the main bands of enemies are Mules. These were Deliveroo drivers like you once, but they forgot the reason they were doing it and now they just steal shit and deliver it to themselves. They have beacons dotted around their camps that ping your cargo, then they head out in a van to mess you up.

Combat is a simple, one button affair, though you can also launch luggage at peoples’ faces. Most of the time, it’s best to try to escape. In one such encounter, I ran through a wheat field like a Tory, dodging electrical spears as they rained in, escaping into a derelict barn up ahead. From there, I used a ladder to escape through the broken roof and dropped down behind them, stealing their vehicle and gunning it until its battery died. I’ve also crept into Mule camps and stolen cargo from under them, strangling dudes while concealed and using a harpoon gun to snatch goods away from distant tents. In the entire 44 hours I played, probably less than four of those hours were spent in action sequences like this.

Elsewhere, you have to creep past the ghosts that appear in the rain, using your BB to sense them with a robotic arm attached to your suit. This is just a case of creeping slowly and changing direction as needed. Later, grenades and a melee stealth attack makes them almost pointless encounters – all the tension falls away. If you are grabbed, you enter a boss arena where you can throw grenades at an oil dog, oil whale, or oil squid while jumping over rooftops.

At some specific story points, you’re whisked away to other places for exciting, one-off action sequences. These moments are huge standouts, but they come so late that I imagine a good portion of players would have fallen off by then. The same goes for some of the most interesting equipment – exoskeletons, a cargo carrier that you can ride like a snowboard, those ziplines, the harpoon gun, and more – which doesn’t come until you’re into the double digits.

If you do manage to hold out, you will be rewarded with flashes of brilliance, it’s just that those flashes are buried as deep as the core story is buried in the endless dialogue. And as profound as it wants to be, this is still a game in which you can equip and unequip your penis so you can piss out Red Bull. The good stuff is waiting for you beyond that piss, beyond the shit grenades, beyond that Ride with Norman Reedus advert unceremoniously plastered into a game universe where I didn’t see a single television set. It’s just a test of attrition.

Version tested: PS4 Pro. A review copy was kindly supplied by Sony.

The post Death Stranding review – interesting, incredibly pretty, and kind of dull appeared first on VG247.

ok but everybody needs to see this departments halloween costume 😂😭😂 pic.twitter.com/ShizpSke5a

— kaela (@bmkaela) October 31, 2019

Hi @Florence_Pugh

It took almost three weeks in the making, but I’ve decided to go full May Queen for Halloween. pic.twitter.com/cmZccOijs1

— Callum (@callumthough) October 26, 2019

ah, halloween in new york pic.twitter.com/tUVsXC9UR2

— molly taft (@mollytaft) October 30, 2019

Thomas as #PierreDelecto and Joe as Nacho. World beware. pic.twitter.com/3SstDeyvwb

— Tagg Romney (@tromney) October 31, 2019

Untitled Halloween Costume#untitledgoosegame @house_house_ pic.twitter.com/xsSi5LVej8

— robooort joe/두부우우우우우아빠 (@royojo) October 26, 2019

Due to an epic #parentingfail BEHOLD the Halloween uh pineapple pic.twitter.com/JMyPmY1tYC

— Gaby Hinsliff (@gabyhinsliff) October 31, 2019

These people do this setup every year, and I think we should recognize what legitimately terrifying decorations these are. pic.twitter.com/YfDiTFklxd

— Elizabeth Minkel (@elizabethminkel) October 30, 2019

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by January Jones (@januaryjones) on Oct 31, 2019 at 3:54pm PDT

photo of the meeting where management tried to get us to move past Barry's firing. credit: victor jefferies pic.twitter.com/n1XLGkqltr

— Lauren Theisen (@theisen95) October 30, 2019

Just vibing with my son pic.twitter.com/zMrje20c4g

— Hannah Mamalis (@Hantmam) October 26, 2019

Went back to my artistic roots this year pic.twitter.com/sBnkv7Uhu0

— grandma cybernetica (@Wifiwifey91) October 27, 2019

guess who carved pumpkins today pic.twitter.com/HEsaIkukNZ

— donald (@donalddangg) October 26, 2019

I love this so much. Neural net generates a bonkers costume, and a human makes it happen https://t.co/GR0QtNp3XV

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) October 28, 2019

1/72ジークフリード　
"パンプキンフェイス"#punpkinface#macrossdelta #siegfried#マクロスデルタ#ジークフリード#閃光のaxia #Halloween

ハセガワのF-14パンプキンフェイス
のデザインをバンダイジークフリートに落とし込んで製作しました。
みなさんハッピーハロウィン！ pic.twitter.com/5vcWLBQ2tq

— ムラマツ・ケン(GBD Re:RISE期間限定) (@mulatsucoto) October 29, 2019

Everyone’s telling scary stories for Halloween so I’ll talk about something that happened to me when I was a kid because hey, trauma never gets old.#ScaryStories

— Grady Hendrix (@grady_hendrix) October 30, 2019

pic.twitter.com/pBDpyQ4egm

— Drac 🦇 Bloodryk (@BudrykZack) October 29, 2019

Back in September, we reported that Paul Feig was planning to write and direct a movie for Universal called Dark Army that would be somehow connected to the studio’s collection of classic movie monsters. In other words, it was the same basic setup (and a similar name) as the Dark Universe, the studio’s attempt to make…

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One of several things that makes Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter a standout installment in the franchise is the fact that one of the unlucky victims is played by a young Crispin Glover. The actor played Jimmy in The Final Chapter, who shows off his one-of-a-kind dance skills before getting a meat cleaver straight to the face courtesy of Jason Voorhees.

Chatting with Yahoo on the road to Halloween, Glover reflects on The Final Chapter and admits – like Betsy Palmer before him – that he only took the Friday role for the paycheck.

“Just before I got Friday the 13th, I had moved out of my parents’ house, I only had a certain amount of money and I was getting low on funds,” Glover told the site. “And then I got Friday the 13th: Part 4. I needed a job. I needed to work. I needed to continue working.”

Glover also admits that he’s not a fan of slasher films in general, though he notes that if there’s one of them he has respect for it’s Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

“I’ve only seen two of those [Friday the 13th] films: I saw the original film and the one that I’m in,” Glover explained. “I remember when I saw the original one, not too long before it I’d seen the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and when I saw the first Friday the 13th, I thought, ‘Well, this is extremely derivative.’

He added, “I liked the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre very much. There’s a whole industry that’s basically what they call the slasher industry.”

“I find [Friday the 13th] derivative of that particular original Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”

Crispin Glover’s new film Lucky Day was released earlier this month.

There's a certain thrill in the idea of crafting a silver-tongued character in an RPG, someone who in a world of violent aliens and hostile factions can talk themselves out of trouble while leaving their laser pistol holstered.

I played through The Outer Worlds attempting to do just that, pumping all of my skill points into the Dialog skill, and only the Dialog skill, every time I leveled up. It didn't mean I could avoid combat—there's still tons of it—but only putting points into Dialog didn't exactly hurt me on the battlefield because those Dialog skills not only give you more options while in conversations, allowing you to lie, persuade, and intimidate, they also give you effective abilities in combat, too.

Here's how it all worked.

The Houston-area product is the second Longhorns pledge to reopen his recruitment this week.

The 2020 recruiting class for the Texas Longhorns took another hit on Friday morning when Aldine Macarthur cornerback Joshua Eaton announced his decommitment:

The 6’2, 175-pounder committed to Texas over Texas A&M and close to 30 other schools in late August after picking up his offer from the Longhorns during a Junior Day back in February.

In recent weeks, however, Eaton took an official visit to Oklahoma — while he said the right things in the aftermath of that trip, there was enough buzz behind the scenes for multiple projections for Eaton to flip his pledge to the Sooners to land in the 247Sports Crystal Ball for Eaton, including five in the last two days.

Texas currently holds cornerback pledges from Kitan Crawford and Ethan Pouncey and is still pursuing Arizona standout Kelee Ringo, though the Horns have lost the significant momentum once possessed with the consensus five-star prospect, who has been considered a heavy Georgia lean since May.

After losing Eaton, a consensus four-star prospect ranked as the No. 340 player nationally, the 2020 recruiting class for Texas dropped to No. 6 nationally, according to the 247Sports Composite team rankings, but remains No. 1 in the Big 12.

Well, Techland did say that they’d still be producing DLC for Dying Light while working on the sequel, but we certainly didn’t expect this! Just in time for Halloween, the devs have announced that Left 4 Dead 2 will be crossing over with Dying Light.

No release date or details have been revealed for the crossover, but it’s always nice to see L4D get some love, especially when its spiritual successor, Back 4 Blood, is currently in development.

Survivors!
Are you ready for some serious zombie slaying? #left4dead2 style is coming! pic.twitter.com/Lv4XXyf8Jn

— Dying Light (@DyingLightGame) October 23, 2019

Meanwhile, Dying Light 2 is scheduled to lurch onto PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC in Spring 2020, with next gen release in the future.

bulkbinbox:

máscara: muriel nisse

The Horns only have one bye week next season and it comes at the end of September.

The 2020 schedule for the Texas Longhorns is now set after the Big 12 released the conference schedule on Tuesday morning.

After the previously-announced non-conference schedule that includes the home opener against South Florida, a trip to Baton Rouge to play LSU, and a home game against UTEP, Texas will open Big 12 play on the road for the first time since 2007 with a game against Kansas State.

The other road games include Texas Tech (Oct. 24), Kansas (Nov. 7) and Oklahoma State (Nov. 28), with the trip to Stillwater representing the first time the Longhorns will close a regular season facing the Cowboys.

Conference home games at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium will include West Virginia on Oct. 17, the latest date for a home opener since 2008. The other Big 12 opponents traveling to Austin next season are Baylor (Oct. 31), TCU (Nov. 14) and Iowa State (Nov. 21)

The annual Red River Showdown against Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl is scheduled for Oct. 10, with the Big 12 Championship game set for Dec. 5 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

The only bye week next season will be Sept. 26, so the Longhorns won’t have any chance to rest or recover once conference play begins.

2020 Texas Football Schedule

(Home games in bold caps; all times TBA)

Sept. 5 – SOUTH FLORIDA

Sept. 12 – at LSU

Sept. 19 – UTEP

Sept. 26 – Bye Week

Oct. 3 – at Kansas State*

Oct. 10 – vs. Oklahoma* (Cotton Bowl – Dallas, TX)

Oct. 17 – WEST VIRGINIA*

Oct. 24 – at Texas Tech*

Oct. 31 – BAYLOR*

Nov. 7 – at Kansas*

Nov. 14 – TCU*

Nov. 21 – IOWA STATE*

Nov. 28 – at Oklahoma State*

--

Dec. 5 – Big 12 Championship (AT&T Stadium – Arlington, TX)

Fallout 76 [PC] | $16 | Amazon

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There has been much consternation about Todd Orlando’s defense on this site and others, as well as complaints from former players about how obvious & ineffective the pressure tactics are.

I tuned into the last few minutes of the game last night to witness the hell everyone was going through, and it seemed pretty obvious to me - the guy who at best knows 15% as much about football as Scipio Tex - who was blitzing before the ball was snapped. I made a crack about it last night, but today I thought I’d try it on a bigger sample size to see if I was just getting lucky. While I used to watch a lot of football, I watch very little these days; I haven’t watched a NFL game in going on 2.5 years and I rarely watch college football any more. I think I saw 3 Texas games last year and I’ve caught maybe a quarter of one game combined this year. I do learn some things through osmosis as I still go on Texas boards, but my football muscle is definitely atrophied.

So here’s what I did: I turned on the LHN rebroadcast of the Kansas game and watched the Kansas offensive possessions from the first half. Since it’s the two-hour condensed version, I didn’t see all of the plays but it ended up being 20 snaps in total. I’d wait for the defense to get set, then write down if I thought they were blitzing and how many guys I thought were coming. (I was guessing which guys as well, but didn’t write down who because I couldn’t always make out numbers.) I figured I’d get like 20-25% of the blitzes right, tops. I mean, I’m just an average viewer, not a defensive coordinator or former player, right?

I correctly picked if the blitz was coming 17 of 19 times. (One snap I didn’t count because LHN didn’t get back to the play in time.) That’s a 89% hit rate. On the 13 blitzes I saw coming, I got the specific blitzers correct 5 times. That’s a 38% hit rate. And again, I don’t watch football; if I’m able to guess when he’s sending a blitz and have a decent guess on who, I can only imagine what people who do this for a living are pulling off.

What the hell, Todd.

It’s not every day that a largely forgettable Dreamworks yeti movie can come under fire from multiple national governments for violating a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. And yet, that’s exactly where Jill Culton’s Abominable—remember that one? It’s the one where Zendaya wasn’t Meechee—finds…

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Injuries, resulting position changes, and decreased hitting in practice all contributed.

For Texas Longhorns defensive coordinators, history tends to repeat itself in three-year cycles of failure.

Manny Diaz was fired two games into his third season in 2013 and Vance Bedford was relieved of his duties four games into the 2016 season.

Now, in 2019, the narrative of Todd Orlando’s tenure in Austin, at the least, is hanging on the brink as the Horns struggle in particular to make tackles or otherwise achieve in traditional metrics.

“The answer is, yes, they were glaring,” Herman said of the tackling issues against Oklahoma. “Really good athletes. We’ve got good athletes too that need to be able to tackle better, and we’ve got to teach them how to do that. Even though we weren’t in pads yesterday, did spend a good 10, 15 minutes working — there’s still drills you can do in tackling in terms of angles and leverage and all of that. And we’ll tackle live in practice tomorrow.”

Herman admitted that backing off on tackling following all the injuries in the Oklahoma State game ended up hurting the team.

“Again, so banged up defensively, it was not a great decision on my part, in retrospect, to limit the tackling these last few weeks in practice, and it showed. We’re going to have to find a way to keep our guys healthy but also get some quality reps because we need to improve in that area.”

The injuries aren’t just a factor on the defensive side of the ball, either — ever since the Horns were temporarily decimated by injuries at the running back position, those players have been non-contact in practice. In other words, Texas defenders haven’t tackled a running back in practice since preseason camp.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

Losing so much experience in the secondary hurts, too — Davante Davis made 26 starts over four years, Kris Boyd made 33 starts over four years and had close to 200 career tackles and 40 passes defended, and PJ Locke III had 31 career starts and finished third on the team in tackles last season.

So Brandon Jones was the only returning player among the top five tacklers for Texas last season.

The result of losing eight defensive starters from last season’s team is that the Horns ranked No. 121 in the returning production metric of S&P+. Longhorns fans hated that metric entering the season, but the numbers didn’t just come from nowhere.

Then the injuries hit — the high ankle sprain for sophomore safety Caden Sterns that led to his knee injury, the hamstring injury for sophomore safety BJ Foster and then his stinger, the shoulder sprain that sophomore linebacker Joseph Ossai has played through, the fractured foot for junior defensive back Josh Thompson. The shoulder separation for sophomore cornerback Jalen Green. A vertebrae injury suffered by sophomore safety DeMarvion Overshown kept him out for three games. Now the fractured forearm suffered by junior safety Chris Brown.

As a result, two players are now gutting their way through shoulder injuries — Foster was wearing a brace on that shoulder even before his stinger — and other players are learning new positions. Some players are seeing the first extended playing time of their respective careers, like both starting cornerbacks and sophomore safety Montrell Estell.

Should the Horns be able to play through these type of injuries? Sure. Has recruiting in the secondary been historic? No doubt. Do those two realities ensure that Texas can survive so many injuries with a youthful group without some struggles? No. Absolutely not.

On Thursday, Herman reiterated the renewed focus on live tackling in practice.

“We’ve emphasize it more — the old coaching adage is that you get what you emphasize,” he said. “We allowed the rash of injuries to affect the way that we prepare and obviously that showed last Saturday. But I thought our guys had a renewed focus. Put yourself in those guys’ shoes. They know what that looks like and it’s not a good look.

“They were hungry to be coached. Hungry to be taught. We got a lot of good work in this week.”

“It wasn’t one week — it was trying to protect our players. Not near as physical in practice for a couple weeks and, again, I’ve said it maybe in my press conference, said it today on the radio show, first time in a long time I can remember us getting out-physicalled. Call a spade a spade. We were.”

The message that Herman delivered to his team is that nothing matters more than tackling on defense and moving people on offense — freshness is secondary and so is availability.”

Orlando echoed Herman in saying that the missed tackles were glaring. To address the issues, Texas did a lot of live work during practice on Tuesday, often known as “Bloody Tuesdays” under Herman because the practices feature full pads and happen at full speed in an attempt to establish a culture of physicality.

“There are technical things, angle things, like any fundamental or technique, we’re going to rep the heck out of it until it gets resolved,” Orlando said on Wednesday. “I did see flashes at times, I liked the spurts that we had, especially second quarter, third quarter, I thought we stepped up. There was a little bit of a short field where the game could have gotten a little bit out of control, but I didn’t like what we did in the fourth quarter when it was on the line.”

Orlando was explicit in saying that he wasn’t making excuses, but the reality is that Texas is putting significant stress on its players having to learn multiple positions. Any element of hesitance due to a lack of familiarity with the position or scheme tends to contribute to missed tackles.

It’s not a coincidence that the Horns only missed a small number of tackles against the Tigers when healthy and then fell apart against the Sooners playing a number of backups and those two players with shoulder issues.

So some of the veteran players on the team believe that there’s some hesitancy from the young players who are unsure of themselves.

Orlando didn’t outright deny that claim, merely pointing out that the staff is trying to simplify the defense and has been doing so for the last several weeks, while getting back to focusing on the basics.

“It’s a fundamental and technique thing,” Orlando said. “There’s guys that are throwing too early, the quote-unquote gator tackle, going at somebody. If I go to tackle you, and I launch at you from this, I don’t bring much power to you. You’ve literally got to get through a guy. If you throw a little bit too early, and you got a dynamic guy that’s strong in his lower half, he’s gonna break right through that stuff.

“You watch the film, and you critique it to them, it’s all technical. There’s not a kid out in the field that can’t do that. If a guy is so much better of an athlete, or so much stronger, and you’re kidding yourself like it doesn’t matter what this kid does. It’s not that. It’s getting through a near hip. Not running in front of a guy. As you contact, running your feet instead of launching yourself because you don’t get any power that way.

“You put the film on, and the majority of these guys they’ll tell you. It’s not like this is the first day we’re teaching tackling. I mean you come into spring ball, you do it all the time. You come into fall camp, you go through it. But then when it’s live bullets, and you’re going against some good guys, it better be exact. That’s what we want. We want to be exact.”

This maddening little web toy on vole.wtf challenges visitors to draw a perfect circle and judges them on how well they do. After dozens of tries with a mouse, I could only manage 92.9% perfection (which looks more like 80% tbh).

Then I tried it on a touchscreen and got much closer: 95.2%. Several more tries with an Apple Pencil bumped it up to 97.7%, after which I retired so as not to waste the entire rest of my afternoon on this.

And of course, here’s the classic video of Alexander Overwijk drawing a perfect freehand circle on the blackboard in about a second.

I love everything about this video — the way he swings his arm to warm up, his drying-the-blackboard flapping motion, and the ease of his perfection. 100.0%. (via sam potts)

Although Blizzard has yet to make any big Warcraft 3: Reforged announcements this year, those currently playing the beta have given us a first look at the remake.

Warcraft 3: Reforged is Blizzard’s full-on remake of the original classic. Unveiled almost a year ago at Blizzcon, Reforged is built on a new engine and is scheduled for release at some point this year.

We have not, however, heard anything about it pretty much since it was first announced. It appears select few are currently playing a beta build of Reforged, which is good news because it means we finally get a proper look at gameplay.

Given that there’s been no official buzz about that supposed beta, it’s likely because it’s meant to be under NDA. That did not stop YouTuber Book of Flames from uploading a few matches, though.

The YouTuber posted three videos showing the different factions. They have been up for several hours now, so hopefully everything is above board.

The one we’ve embedded below features Human vs Orc, but they also have one from the Orc perspective, and a third showing Human with Pandas against two AI opponents.

It certainly looks promising, and we’re very likely going to learn more at Blizzcon next month.

The post First Warcraft 3: Reforged beta footage is here appeared first on VG247.

Sauron - A @billelis & @KevinCassidyArt collaboration.
Considering Sauron is the Lord Of Darkness it seemed fitting that his physical appearance is dark and monstrous.
His eyes have been moulded by dark power and the eye of Sauron is ever imposing, casting his gaze over Mordor. pic.twitter.com/CxK3556SVX

— Billelis®️ (@billelis) October 15, 2019

.@bmoviesd & @alamodrafthouse are celebrating the epic conclusion to the Skywalker saga - STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER w/ a new collectible magazine that is mandatory reading for any fan! Feat. exclusive interviews, deep dives & more! Get yours today: https://t.co/VfhqbTWTxg pic.twitter.com/HIRG6smdd4

— MONDO (@MondoNews) October 15, 2019

In case you were curious because I was not credited. https://t.co/T5B67n21W2

— Oliver Barrett (@oliverbarrett) October 15, 2019

Peter Falk's self-portraits as Columbo pic.twitter.com/BciAmFelKd

— priscilla page (@BBW_BFF) October 15, 2019

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A post shared by Janusz Pozniak (@janusz_pozniak_glass) on Oct 12, 2019 at 3:17pm PDT

You can get it now! Hope you all get to grab one! One they are gone, they are gone: https://t.co/AC8zD5Oy8f pic.twitter.com/tmOgTqz3jh

— CROM (@BITSOFCROM) October 13, 2019

Into it but don't know why I'm short. https://t.co/VlkTid7CZs

— Jemaine Clement (@AJemaineClement) October 7, 2019

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A post shared by @sloaneleong on Oct 14, 2019 at 8:56pm PDT

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A post shared by Julian Totino Tedesco (@juliantotinotedesco) on Oct 15, 2019 at 8:21am PDT

Day 15: It's Nandor the Relentless from What We Do in the Shadows! #inktober2019 pic.twitter.com/XmZvXEjmU9

— Count ScaryKrystal 🦇 (@ScaryKrystal) October 15, 2019

Omg Pascal patting Rapunzel's hand while she's getting yelled at pic.twitter.com/bWEmVn1qkO

— Jenny Nicholson @ Halloween (@JennyENicholson) October 15, 2019

With the Kitten Arsenal from Momotaro Toys, arms your 1/12 scale army with the deadly power of kittens.

Double pistol kittens
Sniper kitten
Sword kitten
Four pod rocket kittens
Rifle kitten
Crossbow kitten

Analogue is back, and its latest creation is small enough to slot in your pocket.

Analogue is a company dedicated to creating what are essentially the video game versions of high-end record players, providing the best-quality hardware so that fans can experience retro games exactly as originally designed and intended, but on all-new hardware with a modern design and current inputs. Previously the company has released high end versions of the NES, Super NES and the Sega Mega Drive, all of which have been the gold standard in their class.

The latest member of the family? The Analogue Pocket. It’s coming in 2020, and it’ll cost $199.99.

The Analogue Pocket is exactly what you probably think it is. First off, it plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games. All you have to do is slot in a cart and the games will play on its 3.5 inch LCD screen, which has a maximum resolution of 1600×1440, ten times that of the original Game Boy. A modern screen means you won’t need to sit at a very specific angle in the sunlight to see the screen like you did with the old hardware, too.

The reason that the Analogue machines are so coveted by hardcore fans of retro games is pretty simple – they’re among the most reliably realistic ways to play these classic games without digging out original hardware. While all-in-one machines like the official SNES Classic and Mega Drive Mini exist and are solid value, Analogue’s high-end machines have two key advantages: firstly, you can use original carts. Second, there’s no emulation involved.

Entirely accurate emulation is essentially impossible, so the Analogue Pocket follows in the footsteps of Analogue’s previous machines by using FPGAs. FPGA stands for Field-programmable Gate Array, but in layman’s terms it is essentially a chip that can be programmed to act like another chip at the hardware level. So the chip in the Analogue Pocket can pretend to be any member of the Game Boy family at the hardware level, right down to circuits and transistors. This means the games run almost pixel-perfect to how they do on real hardware – and where they don’t, the FPGA can be tweaked and patched with firmware updates. This has worked out brilliantly on the Super Nt and Mega Sg, and hopefully continues to do so here.

“All clone systems fucking suck,” Analogue CEO Christopher Taber told us back in 2018. He’s long been on a mission to provide an alternative.

The Analogue Pocket goes beyond Game Boy, however: with a cartridge adapters, the machine can also be made to play cartridges from the Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx. The announcement also curiously says that there could be more adapter carts to come for the machine, too.

Finally, the machine also has a nod to all those musicians who plug Game Boy hardware in to use it as a synthesizers – the machine has a digital audio workstation called Nanoloop built right in. It can be used as a synth and sequencer for creation and performance, which is a neat addition.

On top of all this, Analogue plans to also release a new ‘Analogue Dock’ – and you’ll be able to drop the Analogue Pocket onto this in order to make it into a TV-based machine for playing those handheld classics on your TV if you so wish. You can sync up bluetooth controllers or use the dock’s two USB ports to plug in wired input devices. The dock will be sound separately.

Here’s the full specs of both the machine and the dock:

Analogue Pocket Specs:

• Compatible with Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance carts (plus other machines via adapters)
• 3.5″ LTPS LCD Screen with 1600×1440 resolution at 615ppi
• Rechargable Lithium ion battery with USB-C charging
• Stereo Speakers and a 3.5mm Headphone Output
• Mappable buttons
• Original-style System Link port.

Analogue Dock Specs:

• HDMI output
• Bluetooth for wireless cotnrollers
• 2 USB inputs
• Fully compatible with Analogue’s DAC for older displays

The post The Analogue Pocket looks like a handheld retro gaming dream appeared first on VG247.

In just eight years, Analogue has transformed itself from a maker of wildly expensive bespoke Neo Geo consoles to a retro gaming giant. Capitalizing on the buzz around Nintendo's Classic Mini NES and the following mini console craze, the Seattle-based company has created premium high-definition consoles based on the NES, SNES and Genesis, all of which have been extremely well received. Today, it's announcing its most ambitious project to date: the Analogue Pocket.

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe have the kind of faces Norma Desmond waxed nostalgic about in Sunset Boulevard. Like all the stars of the silent era, they don’t need dialogue; a whole movie could be hung on the topography of their features, on what Pattinson does with those haunted eyes he used to fix on Kristen…

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Horse Sense (1999) pic.twitter.com/cMP93O3ECw

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

Candleshoe (1977) pic.twitter.com/rhL9XubY7W

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

Gus (1976) pic.twitter.com/Pyfsq9AdEi

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

The Biscuit Eater (1972) pic.twitter.com/nCvjUCgRwt

— Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019

GTFO returns with some fresh, but still terrifying gameplay.

GTFO, the co-op horror shooter from 10 Chambers, has been off the radar for a while. The game was initially set for release this spring, but ended up getting delayed to a mysterious future date.

Although GTFO borrows from games like Left 4 Dead, its gameplay revolves more around collective stealth and navigation of very hostile enthronements. Shooting your way out of a problem should be your last resort, as seen in new gameplay by IGN.

The footage below shows 15 minutes of action from alternating points of view of the different classes. The upgrades to presentation and UI are immediately noticeable, and gunplay appears to have been improved as well. The video shows most of a single match, with players having to rely on their class’ abilities to push to an evac point.

It’s very tense, much more than you’re used to from that style of game. Watch it in full below:

The post Watch 15 minutes of intense GTFO co-op gameplay appeared first on VG247.