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All the way back in October 2018, Bleeding Cool brought you the the news that Rick and Morty writer, producer and all-around Man of Mystery Mike McMahan was developing an animated Star Trek comedy series for CBS All Access. Titled Star Trek: Lower Decks, the show would be about the “support crew serving on one of Starfleet’s least important ships.” While there was a previous Star Trek animated series, Lower Decks would be the first series to focus not on the bridge crew but on support staff – the unsung heroes of Starfleet.

Today, we are happy to report that Star Trek: Lower Decks is officially in production. McMahan posted an image to his Twitter account today of an empty room, supposedly the location of the show’s first episode table read. For those of you not up on your pop culture speak, a “table read” is when the actors (or in this case, voice actors) sit together and go through the script, with each person reading their specific roles. Knowing that the first episode table read was today, we can assume that voice recording for the show will be happening in the coming days… weeks… months???

ST: LD ep 101 table read today. I got here a little early. pic.twitter.com/oHJBzp3fw7

— Mike McMahan (@MikeMcMahanTM) May 7, 2019

Despite the fact that Star Trek: Lower Decks already has completed scripts and presumably a voice cast to read them, we know shockingly little about the show itself. McMahan is developing the show and Star Trek: Discovery showrunner Alex Kurtzman has signed on as executive producer. However, no casting or premiere date announcements have been made. In fact, other than the initial 2018 announcement, the only update we have had on is a TrekMovie.com interview with Kurtzman – who discussed the expected premier years for the two upcoming animated Star Trek series (Star Trek: Lower Decks and a younger ages show for Nickelodeon):

“So, the animation takes about a year to turn around, it’s a very long process. Both of those shows are moving forward now, and have series orders and we will drop them when they are ready, but I would say 2021 or ’22.”

Hopefully the show-runners won’t make us wait 2-3 more years for juicy casting and plot details – but in the meantime, we have to hope for something amazing. Personally, I would love to see “Star Trek meets The Office meets The Hangover“… like “What Happens On The Lower Decks Stays On The Lower Decks” or some such.

Maybe my sights are set just a little too high… but there is always hope:

“As a life-long Trekkie, it’s a surreal and wonderful dream come true to be a part of this new era of ‘Star Trek.’ While Star Trek: Lower Decks is a half-hour, animated show at its core, it’s undeniably ‘Trek’ – and I promise not to add an episode at the very end that reveals the whole thing took place in a training program.”

– Mike McMahan

The post ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 1 Table Reads Go for Launch appeared first on Bleeding Cool News And Rumors.

Mondelez, maker of beloved cookies like Oreos, Nutter Butters, and Chips Ahoy, may be getting into the CBD industry. The company’s CEO, Dirk Van De Put, told CNBC last week about its plans to get into CBD snacks: “We’re getting ready, but we obviously want to stay within what is legal and play it the right way.”

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David Jaffe, director of the first God of War game, has announced that he has a horror game in the works.

“I’m designing/writing something new these days. It’s a single player, horror game that is attempting something new with in-game storytelling and I am in love with it,” Jaffe announced on Twitter.

“I have shown no one what I’m working on. And thus I have no funding and no interest in the project. When I do show the world, it may be that everyone hates it and no one wants to make it. Or it may become the next big thing. At this stage, I don’t get to know,” he said.

Jaffe was the director on 2005’s God of War, and co-directed God of War 2 with Cory Barlog, who went on to direct last year’s wildly successful PS4 exclusive God of War.

He added that working on the game with no secured funding is “incredibly stressful and scary,” but that he’s also having “a lot of fun”.

Jaffe is also credited as a writer, designer, and director on various games in the Twisted Metal series. His most recent credit is as director for 2017’s Drawn to Death.

He tweeted out the news at the end of April, but there has been no follow-up or additional tidbits on what we might expect from his new game since then.

The post Original God of War director is working on a single-player horror game appeared first on VG247.

Some mornings, there isn’t enough coffee in the world to prepare you for something such as the Sonic the Hedgehog film trailer.

The film trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog debuted today during Sonic SXSW. This is our first look at the CGI-live action film starring Jim Carrey as Doctor Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik, and Westworld’s James Marsden as police officer Tom Wachowski.

Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation, BoJack Horseman) lends his voice to Sonic, Neal McDonough (Justified, Minority Report) plays Major Bennington, and it also stars Adam Pally (Kroll Show, The Mindy Project) and Tika Sumpter (Final Space, Gossip Girl).

Honestly, it’s doesn’t look too terrible (I guess?) but certain cuts to Sonic’s face had me a little creeped out – thus the coffee comment. Also, what does the song Gangsta’s Paradise have to do with anything?

The Sonic film was announced in 2014 under Sony Pictures before it was handed over to Paramount in 2017 after Sony backed out.

It was produced by Fast & Furious producer Neal Moritz and Deadpool director Tim Miller is executive producer.

Sonic the Hedgehog will arrive in theaters November 15, 2019.

The post Here’s the official movie trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog starring Jim Carrey and James Marsden appeared first on VG247.

Last month, Travel Channel launched “In Search of Monsters,” which takes viewers on a frightening hunt for the truth behind infamous and iconic monsters that brings their legends to all-too-real life. Utilizing new information, the latest evidence and investigations and featuring eyewitness accounts of encounters with these nightmarish beasts, each episode reveals all-new stories about the monsters you fear most and thought you knew.

The series returns on Wednesday, May 15 at 9pm EST with a new look at the Yeti!

“The mysterious Yeti footprints found by the Indian Army at Nepal’s Makalu Base Camp have been making headline news around the world. The legendary Yeti continues to fascinate and captivate people all over the globe, generation after generation. Ask around and almost everyone has wondered, or even has their own theory, about this mythical beast: Is it real, what could it be, where does it reside, how big is it?”

“Travel Channel continues to spark the conversation and allure around this legendary creature with an upcoming episode of its new hit series, “In Search of Monsters,” devoted to the Yeti and new theories and evidence in the never-ending quest for answers, including a nod to these recent findings.”

Many believe the Yeti is just another name for Bigfoot, but nothing could be further from the truth. Said to live at higher elevations, the Yeti is known to be extremely violent and while Bigfoot is believed to be a biological flesh and blood creature, many native cultures in the Himalayas believe the Yeti is a supernatural entity – the embodiment of the all-powerful local mountain gods. The Yeti had been thought to live in the Himalayas and the Ural Mountains, but incredible new evidence suggests that it may also reside in America.

Join a team of investigators and cryptozoologists as they reveal that this dangerous and elusive creature is not only real, but could be guarding the gateways to an otherworldly realm.

For more than 50 years, students at the Nippon Sport Science University in Japan have practiced shuudan koudou, which translates as “collective action”. You can see them in action in these pair of videos:

If you want the really good stuff, skip to ~1:35 in the first video to watch two columns of quick-walking students march backwards through each other. Whoa.

If you love boning aliens in your RPGs as much as I do, Subverse is going to right up your alley.

The Kickstarter for Subverse, “a tactical RPG/SHMUP hybrid that takes place in a fully explorable galaxy,” has raised over 10 times its campaign goal of £100,000, and is currently sitting at over £1.5 million. A true testament to how much people just love fucking aliens.

The game lets players pilot their own ship, the Mary Celeste, that’s bursting with “the sexiest and deadliest waifus” that you can recruit on your titillating journey. And there’s also “a perpetually stoned imp mechanic with six testicles” that you can “befriend” so the jury’s out on whether or not you can bonk him, but I hope so because that’s one epic tea-bagging session waiting to happen.

Why all of the sexiness, you ask? Because you’re a rebel, fighting back against the “puritanical, oppressive douchebags” who rule the Prodigium Galaxy and “pretty much hate anything sexy.”

Recruitable characters have their own backstories and you can earn their loyalty – as well as getting your end away with them.

There’s side quests, loot, and upgrades galore, as well as “plot-driven SHMUP missions” and “tactical grid RPG turn-based combat for a more nuanced approach involving less flying kamikaze laser dick-ships.”

The campaign ends today, so if you want a piece of the action, head over to the Kickstarter and pledge from £10 upwards to get a reward.

The post Sci-fi porn RPG Subverse, which features “imp with 6 testicles”, raises over £1.5 million appeared first on VG247.

Bloody Disgusting learned that principal production has begun on the scenic psychological thriller, Paradise Cove.

The Martin Guigui-helmed feature is now filming in Los Angeles with leads Mena Suvari (American Beauty, American Pie, “American Horror Story”) and Todd Grinnell (Netflix’s “One Day at a Time” and “Grace and Frankie”) at the mercy of “True Blood” and “Once Upon a Time” alum Kristin Bauer van Straten, pictured below.

In the film, a contractor and his wife (Grinnell, Suvari) head to Malibu to flip his late mother’s beach house and are terrorized by the deranged homeless woman (Bauer van Straten) living underneath.

Paradise Cove is the latest feature for director Martin Guigui, who has enjoyed a long career as both a feature director and Grammy-nominated music producer. The script was penned by executive producer Sherry Klein, making her first foray into the thriller genre after starting her career on TV’s “Star Trek: Voyager” and recently working on the animated fantasy film franchise Ever After High.

2019 has proven to be a truly tumultuous time for many of the most potent pop culture forces operating in our world, with the Avengers reaching their Endgame, Game Of Thrones soon declaring its winner, and now, per THR, the coming of news that A&E’s saga of familial strife, celebrity success, and much-discussed beef…

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A few months ago I noticed that several friends (who speak English and aren’t deaf) routinely watch TV and movies with closed captions and subtitles on. I asked about this on Twitter and the resulting thread was fascinating. Turns out many of you watch TV this way for all kinds of different reasons — to follow complex dialog in foreign or otherwise difficult accents, some folks better retain information while reading, keeping the sound down so as not to wake sleeping children in tight living spaces, and lots of people who aren’t deaf find listening difficult for many reasons (some have trouble listening to dialogue when there’s any sort of non-ambient noise in the background).

For instance, Stephanie Buck wrote:

I turned them on last night when watching Sex Education because the mixture of strong accents, British slang, and fast talking means I miss a lot otherwise. Also I’d had 2 margaritas.

David Sun Lee:

When I watch tv alone at night I gotta keep the tv low so the effects and soundtrack don’t wake up the kids. Usually that means the voice track is lost.

Jeremy Negrey:

Typically the whole family is in the living room, but some might be watching their iPad or on their phone so there is a lot of competing noise. I found it helps me focus on what I’m watching.

As Sebastian Greger notes in his summary of the resulting thread, closed captioning is a great example of how accessibility features can benefit everyone, especially those who may have disabilities or limitations that aren’t typically acknowledged as such.

The reasons why people watch TV with closed captions on, despite having good hearing abilities and not being constrained by having to watch muted video, are manifold and go far beyond those two most commonly anticipated use cases.

See also Why Gen Z Loves Closed Captioning.

This post first appeared in an issue of Noticing, kottke.org’s weekly newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Sonos One (Black, Gen 1) | $145 | B&H Photo

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As always, all kinds of upcoming projects connected to the Alien franchise are being announced today for “Alien Day,” and one of them is a tabletop role-playing game that’s on the way from Free League Publishing. It was announced with a trailer, which you’ll find below.

The official ALIEN tabletop roleplaying game will be a beautifully illustrated full-color hardcover book, both presenting the world of ALIEN in the year 2183 and a fast and effective ruleset designed specifically to enhance the ALIEN experience.

The game can be played in two distinct game modes:

Cinematic play is based on pre-made scenarios that emulate the dramatic arc of an ALIEN film. Designed to be played in a single session, this game mode emphasizes high stakes and fast and brutal play. You are not all expected to survive.

Campaign play is designed for longer continuous play with the same cast of player characters over many game sessions, letting you explore the ALIEN universe freely, sandbox style.

The rules of the game is based on the acclaimed Year Zero Engine, used in award-winning games such as Tales from the Loop and Mutant: Year Zero, but adapted and further developed to fully support and enhance the core themes of ALIEN: horror and action in the cold darkness of space.

“The year is 2183—little more than three years since the destruction of the Hadley’s Hope colony on LV-426, the disappearance of the USS Sulaco, and the closing of the prison and lead works on Fiorina 161. The loss of a Sulaco’s Colonial Marine unit along with these Weyland-Yutani sponsored outposts, and the implications of corporate foul play stemming from these incidents, have created an air of distrust between the company and the United Americas.

To add fuel to the fire, conflicts between the rival sectors of space have increased exponentially in the past five years. While unconfirmed, many believe that Hadley’s Hope was a test site for one of Weyland-Yutani’s bioweapons and that an enemy state sent a warship to nuke it from orbit. Others believe that the Company is working with a rogue nation to assume control of the colonies on the Frontier.”

Sign up for exclusive news and previews at http://alien-rpg.com.

Critters Attack!, the first new feature film installment in the franchise in nearly 30 years, lands on earth on July 23, 2019, from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD and Digital. Fans can also watch the fur-ocious creatures’ television debut on SYFY, scheduled to air in October.

Dee Wallace (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), who starred in the original Critters as Helen Brown, will sink her teeth into the franchise for a second time in the mysterious role of Aunt Dee.

Inspired by the film series from the ’80s and ’90s, Critters Attack! follows 20-year-old Drea (Tashiana Washington), who reluctantly takes a job babysitting for a professor of a college she hopes to attend. Struggling to entertain the professor’s children Trissy (Ava Preston) and Jake (Jack Fulton), along with her own little brother Phillip (Jaeden Noel), Drea takes them on a hike, unaware that mysterious alien critters have crash-landed and started devouring every living thing they encounter.

While being tracked by the ravenous critters, Drea and the kids encounter an adorable, seemingly harmless female critter named Bianca, an exiled royal fleeing the critter race. As the critters converge on the college campus, Drea and the kids, who are now inextricably linked to Bianca, rush to head them off. Will Drea discover her inner badass, and will it be enough to stop the critter onslaught? And is the critter princess as innocent as she seems?

SPECIAL FEATURES

• Engineering Gore; Designing Critters (featurette)
• Critters: An Out-of-this-World Experience (featurette)
• The Critter Ball (featurette)
• Scene Specific Commentary with Director Bobby Miller and a Critter

Critters Attack! is written by Scott Lobdell (Happy Death Day) and directed by Bobby Miller (The Cleanse). Rupert Harvey and Barry Opper from the original film franchise are on as producers. The film comes from Blue Ribbon Content in association with SYFY, and production services are provided by Blue Ice Pictures.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read Wirecutter's continuously updated list of deals here.

Want to play Remnant: From the Ashes early? Then you might wish to pre-order the game.

Remnant: From the Ashes is now available for pre-order, and if you drop the cash early, you’ll be able to participate in the VIP Preview Access ahead of its August release.

The survival action co-op shooter will be made available on the Arc Launcher, PS4, Steam, and Xbox One. The pre-order offer applies to all platforms and also comes with exclusive character armors, and a bundle of survival materials.

Below you will find more details on the pre-order bonuses, as outlined by Perfect World Entertainment.

Remnant: From the Ashes pre-order incentives

• VIP Preview Weekend Access – Experience the intense combat, challenging enemies, epic bosses, and flexible, gear-based progression of Remnant: From the Ashes before launch. Pre-ordering the game guarantees a spot in our exclusive VIP Preview Access period.
• Exclusive Armor Sets– Survive in style in these three unique armor sets. Deliver divine retribution in the Doomsayer Ex-Cultist Armor, unleash hell upon your enemies in the Gladiator Scrapper Armor, and get the drop on your foes in the Nightstalker Hunter Armor.
• Survivor Pack – You’ll need every advantage you can get to survive the nightmarish creatures and harsh environments of the apocalypse. Give yourself an early edge with this survivor pack full of weapon crafting materials to improve your artillery, medical supplies to keep you alive, and a temporary XP boost to give you a head start against the Root.

Announced last year, the game is currently in development at Darksiders 3 studio, Gunfire Games.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Earth has been taken over by mysterious, extradimensional beings called The Root. They aren’t very nice either.

In order to survive, you will have to jump into other dimensions and battle through dynamically-generated levels with up to two of your friends.

The game also features a character progression system, character customization, gear and weapon crafting, the ability to recruit tradesmen, and more.

Remnant: From the Ashes releases August 20.

The post Remnant: From the Ashes pre-orders grant automatic access to VIP Preview Weekend appeared first on VG247.

Apex Legends has been bleeding viewers on Twitch, and loosing the mind share of players after just a couple of weeks following its release.

Despite peaking at 40 million hours watched on Twitch in February – an-all time high for any game, Apex Legends has already dropped to 10 million per week.

That’s according to the latest StreamElements report (via VGR), which also revealed that in March, one month after Apex Legends launched, only two of the top ten streamers played it regularly, which no doubt contributed to its decline in viewership during the same month.

Fortnite, which suffered a brief drop during Apex Legends’ launch, is now once again back on top with over 20 million hours watched each week. In fact, setting aside the brief window where Apex Legends dominated Twitch, Fortnite remains the most consistent battle royale game on Twitch.

The financial sector has also noticed this decline, and some market analysts are already warning investors not to buy EA stock expecting Apex Legends to butt heads with Fortnite.

WY Capital called the game “overvalued”, but admitted it’s hard to accurately determine its value thanks to its biggest competitor, Fortnite, being the product of a private company, as opposed to EA being a publicly traded company.

As Respawn struggles to keep up with Epic Games’ pace, it follows that Apex Legends will continue to decline. This is bad news for EA, since the publisher hoped the success of the free-to-play game would boost its stock after Anthem, and Battlefield 5 both disappointed.

The post Apex Legends decline spooks investors – report appeared first on VG247.

Constellation is coming in for some pretty thick Schadenfreude following the company’s announcement last week that it was closing down some Ballast pubs and stopping construction of another. No one loves buy-outs, but when Constellation paid a billion dollars for Ballast Point in November 2015, it really rubbed people the wrong way. It was peak Ballast then, as the San Diego brewery was enjoying explosive growth thanks to the fruit IPA trend and charging $15 a sixer for it. Because of these things, no one seems to feel very bad for Ballast right now. 

Here’s a confession: I wasn’t one of the nay-sayers. I wrote at the time that I understood the company’s logic and didn’t think it was crazy. That may have been second only to my conviction that Trump could win the election in terms of epic miscues. And yet, Ballast’s collapse gives us an opportunity to revisit the deal and see where it went sideways. One mistake was on Constellation; the other illustrates the vagaries of the beer biz.

In 2015, craft brewing had been on a decade-long cycle of incredible growth. Volume nearly tripled between 2006 and 2015. Goose Island IPA, brewed at AB plants and distributed at a discount nationwide, was growing at 250%. Constellation wanted to enter the craft segment, and ABI had illustrated the advantages of buying breweries outright. The company chose Ballast Point, clearly (now) overpaying but relying on three hypotheses: 1) that IPA was going to be the future of craft, 2) that there would be a small number of breweries able to seize and hold a national market, and 3) that Ballast Point, with its San Diego cachet and red-hot Sculpin brand, was the best vehicle to go national quick. The billion dollars secured what looked to them like the strongest IPA maker in 2015.

Complimentary trends quickly revealed the faults of this thinking. The first, which I don’t think anyone saw at the time, was the idea anyone could create a national IPA brand. There were around 4,500 breweries when the deal was struck; another 3,000 have opened in the forty months since. In that time, Goose IPA did go national, but has been in decline since. Much of the growth in the craft segment has been with new breweries selling hyper-local. Goose Island may be available naitonwide for years to come, but that will come at the cost of being a discount IPA. Ballast’s preposterous retail price was never going to survive a sustained national campaign, even if some breweries were able to establish national brands. (Though Constellation was at least correct in betting in IPAs.)

But the really big mistake was missing the trend on the other corner of the country. Just at the moment Constellation was gambling everything on grapefruit IPAs, hazies were entering the national consciousness. This was the more deadly error. San Diego IPAs are essentially the inverse of hazies: they’re sharply bitter, they feature a hop palate of citrus-pine, they’re clear or nearly so, and they favor neutral yeasts. Hazies represented an evolutionary leap forward, harnessing new-wave hops for densely tropical aromas, and hopping techniques that de-emphasized bitterness for fruitiness. High-ester English ale strains had the side-effect of making heavily dry-hopped beers cloudy.

Big deals like the acquisition of Ballast Point take months or years, so the hazy thing wouldn’t have been nearly as prominent when talks started. Still, any company making billion-dollar bets have to account for trends, and Constellation totally missed the haze craze.

No brand was more identified with the (old) San Diego school than Ballast, so this represented some very bad timing. But it’s worth considering those forty months to see just how radically the market shifted. I wrote my first post about hazy IPAs a bit after the acquisition. A year after the deal, breweries were still flooding the market with grapefruit IPAs and calling it “innovative.” Meanwhile, craft beer growth has stalled out—a predictable cyclic event, but one which came exactly at the moment Ballast was trying to create a national footprint.

And finally, the two trends were complimentary accelerants for each other. The more big brands groped for national markets, the more their beers seemed mainstream and passe. Meanwhile little breweries have feasted on sales of small-batch IPAs that siphon sales away from supermarket brands. Whether “independent” means anything to consumers is an open question, but the market is nevertheless fueled by new, local breweries selling pints and cans from their taprooms.

Everyone was right: Constellation was crazy to pay a billion dollars for Ballast. But it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider what might have happened if hazies hadn’t come along.

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“If you gaze into the abyss,” Nietzsche famously wrote, “the abyss gazes back into you.” So is the case with a mysterious image circulating on the internet, retrieved from some dim cavern on the dark seabed of our digital age and forced into the harsh light of a public eye unequipped to handle it.

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... Just one more thing... Lt. Frank Columbo, the blue-collar detective played for decades by the great Peter Falk. This figure is a one-off sculpt, hand made and hand-painted, which was a private commission. #JPK #jonpaulkaiser #handpainted #sculpting #sculptor #columbo #frankcolumbo #justomemorething #commission

A post shared by Jon-Paul Kaiser (@jonpaulkaiser) on Apr 16, 2019 at 11:56am PDT

Kirk Douglas wanted to be Judah Ben-Hur. At the time it came out, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur was the most expensive movie ever made. It was a huge, overwhelming production, cast with thousands of extras and filmed on sets bigger than anyone had ever used. And the film turned out to be a phenomenon. It was the…

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Superheroes: Not always super. And according to the new Amazon series The Boys, they can be downright nasty. Take, for instance, the moment in this extremely NSFW trailer, when a Wonder Woman-powered superhero sits on some dude’s face until her super-strength makes his head explode. That is but one of the gnarly…

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They (a proverb? the internet? someone smart, probably) say that wisdom is the ability to hold two competing ideas simultaneously, which is why fans of The Handmaid’s Tale might be the wisest motherfuckers of all. For instance: Elisabeth Moss is phenomenal on the series, which is a fantastic and eerily familiar tale…

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Game of Thrones made its return to HBO last night and, surprise, someone died! According to this compilation video, over 174,000 people have died on the show in seven seasons. The sheer numbers and the fact that some of the deaths have been, shall we say, a little creative (even for a fantasy show) sometimes interfered with my ability to fully suspend my disbelief when watching. Take Khal Drogo killing Viserys Targaryen by pouring molten gold on his head in the first season:

That’s a pretty outlandish death, an over-the-top display of sadism for the benefit of a TV audience. Right? Well, I’ve been reading Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and I’ve discovered that Game of Thrones hews close to historical precedent when it comes to inventive murder.

According to some sources, after the Roman Emperor Valerian was captured in battle in the 3rd century, he was subjected to something much worse than a simple death at the hands of the Persian Emperor, Shapur I:

The Emperor Valerian was humiliated after being taken prisoner and held in “the abject form of slavery”: used as a human footstool for the Persian ruler “by bending his back to raise the king as he was about to mount his horse,” his body was eventually flayed “and his skin, stripped from the flesh, was dyed with vermilion, and placed in the temple of the gods of the barbarians, that the remembrance of a victory so signal might be perpetuated and that this spectacle might always be exhibited for our ambassadors.” He was stuffed so all could see the folly and shame of Rome.

Around the end of the 10th century, a leader of the Rus’ was ritually executed by Pecheneg steppe nomads:

The capture of the prince was gleefully celebrated, and his skull was lined with gold and kept as a victory trophy, to be used to celebrate ceremonial toasts.

In 1182, rising tension between the Byzantine Empire and the rising Italian city-states like Venice resulted in attacks against citizens of the city-states who were living in Constantinople:

Many were killed, including the representative of the Latin church, whose head was dragged through the city’s streets behind a dog.

The Mongols, under Genghis Khan and subsequent rulers, used brutality as a tool to shock and awe local populations into peaceful submission, making examples of those who resisted their advances:

Nīshāpūr was one of the locations that suffered total devastation. Every living being — from women, children and the elderly to livestock and domestic animals — was butchered as the order was given that not even dogs or cats should be left alive. All the corpses were piled up in a series of enormous pyramids as gruesome warnings of the consequences of standing up to the Mongols.

It was a very effective technique:

In 1241, the Mongols struck into the heart of Europe, splitting their forces into two, with one spur attacking Poland and the other heading for the plains of Hungary. Panic spread through the entire continent, especially after a large army led by the King of Poland and the Duke of Silesia was destroyed, and the head of the latter paraded on the end of a lance, together with nine sacks filled with “the ears of the dead.”

When the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, they moved through the city “like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves, or like raging wolves attacking sheep,”

The city’s inhabitants were dragged through the streets and alleys, like toys, “each of them becoming a plaything.” The Caliph al-Mustaʿṣim was captured, rolled up in fabric and trampled to death by horses. It was a highly symbolic moment that showed who held real power in the world.

And finally, if there was any remaining doubt that George R.R. Martin modelled the Dothraki on the Mongols and Khal Drogo on Genghis Khan, consider the death of Inalchuq, a 13th-century Persian governor:

Stories such as that of a high-ranking official who was ordered into the presence of a newly arrived Mongol warlord and had molten gold poured into his eyes and ears became widely known — as was the fact that this murder was accompanied by the announcement that this was fitting punishment for a man “whose disgraceful behaviour, barbarous acts and previous cruelties deserved the condemnation of all.”

Perhaps Game of Thrones doesn’t seem so fantastical after all…

Vox recently asked a group of writers, advocates, and thinkers about ideas & practices that we accept now that will be unthinkable or barbaric to people living 50 years from now. Kathleen Frydl asserts that “the war on drugs” will be one such practice.

Today, heroin is still classified as a Schedule I, or prohibited, drug. The consequences of this fateful decision continue to haunt us. Gross failures of our criminal justice system, ranging from police corruption to excessive use of force, all achieve a scale, and foster a profound alienation, as a result of drug prohibition and the militant drug war it spawned.

Maybe in times of only modest failure, or devastation that affects only the marginalized, the tactics of deflection traditionally used to defend the drug war would be enough to sustain it. But it is untenable in the midst of the opioid crisis, the worst drug epidemic in our country’s history.

It is my belief that its staggering body count gives us little choice but face hard truths, even in the face of the deep dependence on the drug war that the US government has developed. What falls between now and that awful reckoning is nothing but denial.

Meredith Broussard believes that self-driving cars will be unthinkable 50 years from now:

The simple explanation for why this situation didn’t escalate: the unspoken social contract of the bus driver’s authority in this space. We have invested years in developing social contracts around both private and public transportation. When you get into a bus or a train, or even a car, you acknowledge that the person at the wheel is in charge. This power relationship is what allows shared transportation to flourish, and this social contract is what helps many of us in marginalized groups feel safer while riding transportation. It doesn’t feel safe to imagine riding in a shared driverless vehicle. Not just because the technology doesn’t work — but because it doesn’t feel safe to be alone in a small, enclosed space with strange men.

Uncharted creative director Amy Hennig has said that if real-time streaming of video games is the next revolution in the business, the industry needs to redefine the hobby to reach new, wider audiences.

She said that the industry has to figure out how to make games more accessible, easier to discover, use less esoteric controls and expensive consoles, and craft games to fit different play styles in order to find players not yet served by a gated community.

“This is where I think the revolution comes,” she told an audience at Reboot Develop today. “If we agree that the wide and rapid adoption of 5G is inevitable and if we agree that means in the same way that music streaming and television and film became inevitable, real time streaming – and I’m calling it real-time streaming because game streaming is too limited of a way to describe it – is inevitable.

“And what that’s going to mean is not only will that potentially, radically change games, it changes our business models, it changes the players in the space, it changes the content we can create. And these are the good and bad things we have to get ahead of. But it also changes the audience.”

Hennig pointed to Netflix’s Bandersnatch as “the best model of frictionally easing non-gamers into interactive content” as the audience is already on the streaming service and doesn’t need to pick up a controller. “Imagine how revelatory that would be to non-gamers who are being introduced to real-time content for the first time.”

“It’s controversial but inevitable,” she added. “We’re headed for some major change in exciting and worrisome ways. Some of that is how we define our own hobby and whether we as gamers are seeing our hobby as elite as opposed to something for everyone. You see already there’s a lot of debate around accessibility and difficulty.”

Hennig said the accessibility question is just about “being good humans” and accepting that some players have disadvantages to being able to play games. But she’s more torn on the difficulty question that’s being raised by recent FromSoft release Sekiro, that if you dumb down the game to include more people are you altering the core experience?

“We have to be open to the idea that we can welcome more people into our hobby,” she said. “The people we can reach are being unserved by interactive content. I don’t believe they’re non-gamers. It’s incumbent on us to meet them where they are.”

Hennig warned that Hollywood and TV studios are watching interactive entertainment – and streaming – and are keen to get involved. And if developers, designers and publishers don’t jump on these new opportunities they could miss out on defining a new era of interactivity in games.

“Everybody in Hollywood, every TV and film studio, has an interactive division. They are going to be on this and they don’t know how to do what we can do. They certainly don’t understand interactivity, they don’t have our experience,” she said.

“We have a great opportunity to get in that space and redefine interactivity for a new audience. And if we don’t, other people will. We should have the humility to not just go ‘here’s the games we’ve been making, open wide, become a gamer’. We really should be crafting experiences for them.”

Hennig said she’s been looking towards the indie space, where games aren’t necessarily about “the intimidating factors” of mastery, difficulty and conquering.

“We need to think of games as experience, and that doesn’t require difficulty, fail states, set backs. We get dogmatic and think ‘if it doesn’t have this it’s not a game’. All these games like Fortnite and PUBG should exist, games should be about competition and difficulty and mastery. But what happens is that makes them not accessible to this wider audience.”

“There’s this exclusive attitude about our medium and our hobby that I don’t think is actually healthy. Can we widen our horizons and take what we need to do, and be first to market in this place where other people are going to try to come in and clumsily do something and they’re going to put a stink on the whole thing because they don’t know what we know or how to do it.”

“There’s this exclusive attitude about our medium and our hobby that I don’t think is actually healthy”

Projects like Google’s Stadia streaming service could have potential, said Hennig, provided it’s not just an “invisible console”. And games that don’t have fail states, like Celeste and Return of the Obra Dinn, are interesting for new audiences, but are hard to discover if you’re not on forums or following the games business on a daily basis.

Henning added that expensive hardware and intimidating controllers don’t make it easy to attract new audiences to games, either.

“We don’t make it easy. While it’s well-crafted for us, it’s an absolute non-starter for this audience,” she said of traditional controlers. “What we have Trojan Horsed into people’s homes is smartphones. Everybody has that in their pocket. Why are we not using that as an input device for this audience?

“None of this is a critique of what we do,” she added. “I’m just looking at what we’re going to have to do if we want to try to reach this wider audience.”

While she acknowledged that some may get existential and ask why the industry needs to cater to anyone other than hardcore gamers, Hennig said it’s not about leaving anyone behind or abandoning the existing players or games.

“It’s an ‘and’, not an ‘instead’,” she said.

The post Developers need to master real-time streaming before Hollywood “puts a stink” on games, warns Hennig appeared first on VG247.

Negative Atmosphere is a new sci-fi horror shooter that’s clearly inspired by Dead Space.

The game was shown off at EGX Rezzed last week, and developer Sun Scorched has put up the demo on YouTube. Right off the bat, you can clearly see the Dead Space inspirations in the design of the protagonist, the narrow corridors with blood smeared everywhere, and even the organic, on-suit HUD elements.

Negative Atmosphere appears to be more of a straight shooter than Dead Space was, at least in this demo, with the hero wielding an assault rifle rather than Isaac’s makeshift weapons made from laser cutters.

The demo represents just five months of work, and the team is currently using Patreon to fund ongoing development. There is a plan, however, to take it to Kickstarter once there’s a solid playable demo.

It certainly looks promising, especially since no one seems to be interested in making a Dead Space spiritual successor. Check out the footage below:

The post Negative Atmosphere is a Dead Space-like sci-fi horror shooter appeared first on VG247.

When you go to see a family movie at the theater, you’re putting your trust in the employees running the joint that the trailers they’ll be playing before the film will be as age-appropriate as the movie itself. But every so often – and it happened last year when a trailer for Hereditary played before Peter Rabbit… oops! – well, let’s just say they’re not so great at their jobs.

As reported by BBC, children at a showing of Peppa Pig: Festival of Fun at Empire Cinema in Ipswich, England were horrified when the trailers for the James Gunn-produced horror/superhero movie BrightBurn and Blumhouse’s Ma played before the animated family movie about a friendly pig. According to the adults in attendance, many children left in tears.

“Normally I would expect her to be singing and dancing when watching something like [Peppa Pig] but she was just really subdued,” Charlie Jones told the site, relaying the experience she and her 2-year-old daughter (and 10-month-old son) had at the fateful screening. “I tried to cover her eyes during the trailers and told her they were silly films for mummies and daddies, but there were lots of kids crying and she was very confused and started crying too.”

Doing damage control, a spokeswoman for Empire made the following statement: “As soon as the staff on site were made aware of the situation, the programme was stopped and trailers were taken off-screen immediately. We do sincerely apologise for this and for any distress caused and will be reviewing our internal procedures to ascertain how this came to be.”

BrightBurn has been rated “R” for “horror violence/bloody images, and language,“ while Ma has been rated “R” for “violent/disturbing material, language throughout, sexual content, and for teen drug and alcohol use.” The BrightBurn trailer highlights a woman pulling a piece of glass out of her eye, as well as some intense action and an evil kid in a creepy mask. The trailer for Ma is similarly a bit much for 2-year-olds, with one dude getting splattered across the road by a truck that’s presumably driven by Octavia Spencer’s villainous title character.

Oops.

(credit: Aurich x Getty)

Following an initial announcement last October, Sony has announced that PSN players will finally be able to change their online handles starting sometime Wednesday in the US and Thursday in Europe. But players who do change their online names might face issues ranging from minor to critical when trying to play some legacy PS4 titles.

PlayStation Director of Social Media Sid Shuman writes that all PS4 games published after April 1, 2018 "have been developed to support the online ID change feature." That said, he adds that not all recent releases have been tested, and some may not "fully support the feature."

For PS4 games published before April 1, 2018, Sony has already identified a handful that experience serious problems after users change their PSN names. The following games may run into "critical issues" such as loss of in-game currency and game or trophy progress along with improper functioning of user-generated content and other parts of the game (including paid DLC). Sony recommends you not change your PSN name if you plan on playing any of these titles:

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Grim news today, as The Hollywood Reporter brings word of Paramount’s diabolical plan to develop a prequel to Grease. If any of our readers have young children present, you may want to close your laptops now, as what we’re about to tell you is incredibly disturbing. Paramount has hired screenwriter John August of Big…

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As scary as every single zombie in the game is, this year’s remake of Resident Evil 2 is at its most tense and terrifying when Mr. X shows up, and gamers have been having a whole lot of fun with the character these past couple months. Mr. X has become something of an internet meme, replaced by various modders with everything from Nemesis to Thomas the Tank.

This latest mod is the coolest of all, turning Mr. X into Jason Voorhees!

YouTube’s Rayofpandas shares the below video of the mod, which plucks out Mr. X from Resident Evil 2 and replaces him with the Jason Voorhees that was designed by Tom Savini as special DLC add-on content for Friday the 13th: The Game. The design was based on the final moments of Jason Goes to Hell, imagining Jason after spending some time down in Hell.

Here’s what he looks like in the world of Resident Evil 2…