Category: Game

Naruto, Death Note and more Viz Media, the biggest publisher of manga and anime in North America, has teamed up with United Talent Agency (UTA) to start production on a few live-action projects based on its library of series.
Viz’s Chief marketing officer, Brad Woods, said in a press release that Viz will focus on bringing live-action entertainment to both national and international markets. Although Viz hasn’t mentioned which properties its interested in planning to adapt as live-action features, the company is home to a variety of hugely successful manga series, including Naruto, Tokyo Ghoul and One-Punch Man.
“Bringing the rich stories of manga and anime to life in new ways is an exciting opportunity with tremendous potential," Woods said.
Lionsgate is currently working on its own live-action Naruto film, although that appears to be completely independent of Viz Media and UTA’s new agreement. A live-action adaptation of Death Note is also in the works at Warner Bros.
Viz Media first entered the world of live-action entertainment with last year’s Edge of Tomorrow, which starred Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. The film was adapted from All You Need is Kill, a manga published by the company.
There’s no word on when production on live-action installments will begin, but Polygon has reached out to Viz Media for more information and will update as the story develops.

Yoshi’s N64 adventure makes a comeback Yoshi’s Story arrives on the eShop tomorrow as the latest addition to Wii U’s Virtual Console library. The Nintendo 64 game will cost $9.99 and, like other Virtual Console titles, will offer offscreen play.
Nintendo first launched the game in Japan back in 1997; it arrived stateside in spring 1998. The side-scrolling platformer, which had a unique storybook art style, serves as a sequel to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island for Super Nintendo. Players choose from a selection of Yoshi in the quest to take down Baby Bowser.
Until last year’s Yoshi’s Woolly World on Wii U, Yoshi’s Story remained the latest home console release for Mario’s trusty dinosaur companion. Wii owners got to replay the game when it launch on that console’s eShop in 2007, 10 years after it first launched.

You won’t be seeing DoA, PapaSmithy and MonteCristo at MSI League of Legends shoutcasters Erik “DoA" Lonnquist, Christopher "PapaSmithy" Smith and Christopher "MonteCristo" Mykles will not work the upcoming Mid-Season Invitational in Shanghai due to low freelance rates offered by Riot Games, the three announced in a joint statement today.
The casters said that after reviewing freelance casting rates across esports, they determined that Riot’s initial offer was "approximately 40% to 70% of the rate received by talent for major events." The individuals also rejected a second offer from Riot because, they said, it was still "far below industry standard for 2016."
The group added:
Since we are freelancers and not Riot employees, we rely on these contracts for our income and feel that we would damage our careers in the long term by accepting below-market rates. Furthermore, by agreeing to a significantly lower wage we fear that we may contribute to the regression of standards for freelance casters in the industry as a whole.
DoA, PapaSmithy and MonteCristo regularly cast Korean League of Legends matches, as well as many international events. MonteCristo is also the co-owner of North American organization Renegades.
A Riot Games representative declined comment to Polygon.

Amazon has found its blue hero Amazon has found the face of its new Tick series in Guardians of the Galaxy star Peter Serafinowicz, according to Deadline.
Serafinowicz, who played Denarian Saal in James Gunn’s superhero film and who voiced Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I, will play the blue, antennae-sporting superhero in the streaming service’s remake. The actor also voiced Mild-Mannered Pate in Dark Souls II. It was previously announced that Griffin Newman would be joining the show as Arthur, the Tick’s right-hand man and sidekick. Valorie Curry is also joining the series as Arthur’s sister, Dot.
Based on Ben Edlund’s comic book series from 1986, The Tick follows the titular superhero after he loses his memory and winds up in the blue uniform. In 1994, Fox ordered an animated series based on the character, and in 2001, produced a live-action series. That, however, only ran for nine episodes before it was pulled from air.
The Tick has been in development since 2014, but there’s no estimated release window at this time.

Blizzard gives players a new reason to keep playing Overwatch Blizzard released a substantial update for the ongoing Overwatch closed beta this week that adds a host of new character skins, new achievements and a new map based on the historic U.S. highway Route 66. The developer also introduced a new gameplay option called Weekly Brawls, which is are inspired by another Blizzard game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
Weekly Brawls, inspired by Hearthstone’s Tavern Brawls, are rotating game types that feature “a set of unique (and sometimes crazy) rules" from Overwatch’s Custom Game system.
Here’s how Blizzard describes it:

In one Weekly Brawl, you’ll only be able to play Soldier: 76, while in another Weekly Brawl, a random hero will be selected for you each time you respawn. Other Weekly Brawls will restrict you to Support heroes only, or Tank heroes only, or Defense heroes only…

Blizzard calls the new gameplay option "a work in progress and something we consider more of an experiment for now." Currently, Blizzard is rotating the new game type out on a daily basis, so it can test the feature. One of the earliest Weekly Brawls is called "Super Shimada Bros.," which features faster cooldowns for abilities and slower cooldowns for ultimates, and limits players to just two hero choices: Genji and Hanzo.
Overwatch’s latest update also adds a dozen new legendary skins for certain characters. Here’s a look at what’s new.

For a full list of changes, additions and balance update, check out Blizzard’s beta patch notes for Overwatch’s March 22 update.
Overwatch is coming to PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One May 24. The game’s open beta kicks off May 3.

It’s available March 29, just in time for the Stanley Cup Playoffs NHL 16, the current edition of EA Sports’ ice hockey simulation, is the next title to go in the EA Access vault of games. It will join the lineup on March 29, about two weeks before the NHL’s Stanley Cup Playoffs get underway.
Of the 16 titles in EA Access, eight so far are EA Sports titles. NHL 16 will make it nine-of-17; its predecessor NHL 15 also is on the list. EA Access added Madden NFL 16 to the vault on Feb 2, one week before Super Bowl L.
EA Access is a premium subscription available only to Xbox One subscribers. It costs $24.99 annually, or $4.99 month-to-month. A companion service, Origin Access, launched in January and has 17 titles in its library. The latest, 2014’s Titanfall, was added to Origin Access yesterday.

When the things that scare us the most also bring us closer together In my early twenties, I was plagued for weeks by the same dream about my teeth falling out. Each night they would wiggle lose and drop out of my horrified head. Each morning I would awake with a tiny jump before I realized every single tooth was still tightly in place.
It was a harmless dream. Even the panic didn’t last more than a few seconds. But that long-lost feeling was familiar to me as I played through Figment, an isometric adventure game that mixes fears with a stylish dreamworld.
Figment is the latest from  Denmark-based developer Bedtime Digital Games. The game, due out in 2017, is a work-in-progress for PC, PlayStation and Xbox systems. Speaking to Polygon, cofounder and game designer Jonas Byrresen explained that the game takes place inside the subconscious mind of a character players will never truly meet. This mysterious person has endured a trauma, and it’s up to players to figure out exactly what that incident was.
“When you go through a trauma … something fills up your head" said Byrresen. "In this case it’s a lot of fear and doubt.
"Plague represents our fear of everything filthy."
"Trauma is something that can take many shapes, but it’s also something a lot of people encounter during their lives. It represents an internal struggle that a lot of people will have. It represents something very basic and human."
Players adventure through this colorful world as Dusty — a character whose dour demeanor is offset by his Where-the-Wild-Things-Are-meets-Adventure-Time appearance. Figment’s fear and doubt manifest as comical, singing villains, which Dusty must confront and triumph over. During our demo, we ran into Plague, whose sick singing puns were accompanied by noxious gas and snot-hurling sidekicks. It’s a super gross, super silly take on a very basic human fear.
"Plague represents our fear of everything filthy, essentially, but also our fear of our own mortality because of disease and getting old," Byrresen said.
"It’s basically something we worked with from the start, this idea that we as humans just share some basic fears. It’s so deeply ingrained in us. There’s some nightmares we all have had."

It’s a concept that Figment nails in many ways. The first time I encountered teeth in the game — floating platforms and bridges for me to run across — I thought nothing of it. But as I crossed, they sometimes cracked and crumbled into nothingness. I was reminded of my own nightmares with a cringe.
Confronting these fears and nightmares, however, is central to Figment. Byrresen defines Dusty as the mind’s avatar for courage. Not just the heroic kind, either, but the kind needed to tackle every day life. The game’s villains will often run from you when they’re feeling threatened, but the only real way to victory is confrontation.
" are cowards, so they keep running away," Byrresen said. "Each world is about finding a way to corner them, and then finally having a chance for defeating them.
"You need to face your fears. That’s the way you overcome them."

Xbox and PC players can check it out 5 days later Starting April 8 at 10 a.m. PT, Battleborn will enter open beta, with PlayStation 4 owners getting access to the game ahead of Windows PC and Xbox One players.
After arriving first on PS4, the open beta period will hit Xbox and Steam on April 13. The campaign will run until April 18 at 7 a.m. PT, giving PS4 players a full five extra days to check out Battleborn, according to the game’s website. Players are not required to pre-register for access; instead, the download will be available on each platform’s storefront at launch.
Those who check out the beta on PS4 will not only get more time with Battleborn, but they’ll also be given the first downloadable content pack and an extra playable character for free when the full game launches. During the open beta — which won’t require a PS Plus subscription to check out — PS4 players will also have an additional character at their disposal.
Regardless of platform, open beta participants will be able to check out Battleborn’s story mode as well as two different multiplayer modes. Seven characters will be available to start with, and more are unlockable as players progress through the campaign.
Publisher 2K confirmed the timed exclusivity period on PS4 for the multiplayer shooter back in October. This was prior to the company delaying the game from a February launch to its new release date of May 3.
2K and developer Gearbox Software published a video detailing the game’s Story Mode to coincide with the open beta date announcement. You can watch that up top to get a sense of the game’s “TV-style" campaign. For more on Battleborn, read our impressions from back in October and check out our gameplay below.

We’re still a few weeks out from Dark Souls 3’s worldwide release date, but the much-anticipated, hyper-difficult role-playing game launches today in Japan. We’ve had a a review build for a week now, and while we wouldn’t want to ruin the whole game, we’re going to share a huge compilation of footage from our first 15 hours with it.
The video above is over an hour-and-a-half, and it includes a ton of new and never-before-seen stuff from Dark Souls 3. You can check out the challenges that await on the Road of Sacrifice, watch us take out the game’s first of four major bosses in Farron’s Undead Legion and even see us die a few times (naturally).
Again, all of this footage is from our first 15 hours with Dark Souls 3, what we would definitely call the early game. Late-game stuff isn’t spoiled here, but if you’re avoiding any spoilers at all, don’t watch.
Dark Souls 3 launches on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC on Tuesday, April 12. We’ll have a full review of the game closer to that date.

It’s hard to ask for assistance It seems like everybody on The Magicians is broken in some way, messed up by something in their past that they did or was done to them. As we’ve seen before on this show, it can be dangerous for people like that to open up to others, but tonight’s episode demonstrated the value of admitting that you need help from friends and family.
Picking up right where we left off with last week’s cliffhanger, “Homecoming" begins with Penny breaking the surface of a fountain in the Neitherlands, which, to the chagrin of Quentin and the Physical Kids, isn’t detailed in the Fillory books except as "a world between worlds." Only when Penny teleports elsewhere in the realm to escape the hostile welcome committee does he grasp the scale of the place, which holds countless fountains leading to countless worlds.
The Magicians offers a wonderfully realized version of the Neitherlands that delivers on the strangeness and desolation of the world described in the books — even if it’s inspired more by ancient Greece, with its terraced amphitheaters, than Renaissance Italy. And it’s exactly the kind of place that would contain "the greatest repository of knowledge, full stop," along with a prototypical librarian running one of that repository’s branches. Just a pitch-perfect setting, all told.

Unfortunately, Penny can’t find his way back to the earth fountain on his own, so he interrupts Quentin’s sexy dream — which made me roll my eyes with its lesbian kiss, until it winked at the viewer with a quip about the Bechdel test — to reluctantly ask for his help. When Quentin explains the situation to Alice, she realizes that she may be able to enlist her mother’s friend Joe, a traveler himself, in guiding Penny back home. (You’d figure that Quentin would’ve thought better of describing the dream to her, but nope!)
Alice takes Quentin on a trip to the Chicago suburbs, where they barge in on another relic of antiquity: Her parents are hosting a bacchanal that turns out to be a celebration of Veneralia, the ancient Roman festival marking the first day of April. Now we know why Alice is so shy and awkward. Before Alice asks her mother, Stephanie, for help, the two of them rekindle an old disagreement about her brother Charlie, and specifically, about finding out what really happened to him. While Alice was always obsessed with seeking the truth, her laid-back mother’s attitude can be summed up as que sera, sera.

In order to secure her mother’s help, Alice has to swallow her pride and acknowledge that her mother’s feelings are just as legitimate as her own. We don’t have much prior context for this relationship, but as played by Olivia Taylor Dudley and guest star Judith Hoag, it’s a nice moment of reconciliation between daughter and mother. Joe turns out to be Stephanie’s lover as well as her friend, in a "polyamorous triad" along with Alice’s father, as if the sex stuff on The Magicians weren’t weird enough already. In any case, Joe explains that Quentin and Alice can mark the Earth fountain for Penny — but they’ll have to pull off some difficult "sex magic" to do it.
This is the point where I was thinking to myself that the Quentin and Alice were going some great lengths to help out a classmate whom they care about begrudgingly. But the exercise pays dividends for the two of them as well. In talking out their limited sexual histories and their individual turn-ons, Alice and Quentin grow closer as a couple, and successfully activate the fountain beacon. Plus, it’s fun to see two awkward, neurotic magic nerds fall in love.
Penny makes it back to this plane of existence, but not before he gets some additional help from the Neitherlands librarian. He mentions the Beast to her, and she photocopies some pages out of the book of Martin Chatwin’s life. It seems that Christopher Plover isn’t the Beast himself; instead, he created the malevolent being.
The Beast has also wreaked havoc on Eliot, who seems to be spiraling out of control after having to kill his boyfriend, Mike, who was possessed by the Beast. The storyline in this episode with him and Margo seems like it’s going to function merely as more comic relief — "Mar-golem" certainly made me chuckle — but it ends with a sad gut punch. Eliot tries to get serious for once with his best friend, but Margo’s doppelgänger ruins the mood, leaving poor Eliot to silently wallow in his depression.

Julia, like Penny and the Physical Kids, gets roped into a search for a creature that is not of this earth, as Richard brings her into the fold at Free Trader Beowulf, a group of talented magicians that primarily interacts online in a Slack-like chat client. Richard notes the state of disarray inside Julia’s apartment; the messy scene tells us all we need to know about how quickly Julia and her addiction-prone personality have become enmeshed in this community. Our old friend Kady is one of the members of this tribe, and she and Julia get down to business after they get over the tension between them regarding Kady’s mother’s death.
Once they prove themselves to the rest of the crew, Richard lets them in on Free Trader Beowulf’s mission. Julia came to know Richard as the chaplain of her rehab facility, but he, too, has a skeleton in his closet (no pun intended). Wracked with guilt, Richard is looking to summon a god to provide the power source he needs to travel back in time and right this terrible wrong.