Category: Game

A pithy podcast about the biggest, most interesting gaming, entertainment and pop culture news
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Here’s what we’re covering in your daily audio tour through the world of video games, related technologies and pop culture like comics, movies and TV.
THE BIG STORIES

Valve boss Gabe Newell fires host and production company after problems at the $3 million Dota 2 Shanghai Major
HTC Vive pre-orders are officially open
HoloLens Dev Edition pre-orders open for March shipment, includes new Conker game
PlayStation TV shipments end in Japan
Sony shutting down PSP’s native storefront
Nintendo cuts prices on favorites with Nintendo Selects line

THE BEST OF THE REST

Here’s how to use Apple headphones on your Xbox One controller
Video game releases for March 2016
Oscars 2016: Spotlight wins Best Picture, Leonardo DiCaprio takes Best Actor

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Polygon

Catch them late 2016 and 2017 Made-for-TV films based on classic Nickelodeon series Hey Arnold! and Legends of the Hidden Temple will debut in 2017, according to Variety. Both projects will be unveiled tomorrow during an upfronts presentation held by the kids channel’s parent company Viacom.
The reboot of ’90s game show Legends of the Hidden Temple will transplant the competition’s survival elements to reality. The film will depict a trio of siblings conquering a series of obstacles and will include references that Hidden Temple fans will remember, including the Steps of Knowledge and Olmec the talking head.
Legends of the Hidden Temple’s TV movie revival will premiere sometime during Q4 2016, according to Variety. It will be followed in 2017 by a two-part film based on the Hey Arnold! cartoon. Nickelodeon announced it would bring back Hey Arnold! for a film project last November.
Nickelodeon is also reuniting several other of its ’90s Nicktoons for a crossover film á la Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That movie is currently in development at Paramount Pictures and will be directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite). There’s no release date yet for the theatrical release, which will reunite characters from shows like Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats.

Another publisher scales back on 2016’s big gaming expo Publisher Activision will be at E3 2016, but the company won’t have dedicated floorspace at the show. Instead, the company behind Call of Duty, Skylanders and Guitar Hero will rely on its partners — namely Sony Computer Entertainment — to showcase some of its wares.
The new Call of Duty game from Infinity Ward will be at this year’s E3, the company confirmed today, but attendees will have to visit the PlayStation booth to see it.
“In June, we’re going to be at E3 showcasing gameplay from Infinity Ward’s ambitious new game," Activision said on its official blog. "We’re looking forward to sharing exciting new details about the next great Call of Duty game in partnership with our friends at PlayStation. We’re proud to be participating in this premier video game event, but won’t have an Activision booth on the show floor."
Activision isn’t the only major publisher forgoing a formal booth presence at E3 2016; Electronic Arts announced earlier this year that it will break from tradition and hold a dedicated off-site event called EA Play instead of showing games on the E3 show floor.
This isn’t the first time Activision has officially broken from E3. The company bowed out of E3 2008.
In recent years, Activision’s floor presence at E3 has consisted primarily of meeting rooms, where behind-closed-doors presentations were held, and large displays showing trailers for the company’s upcoming games.
Polygon has reached out to the Entertainment Software Association, which runs E3, for comment on Activision’s move.

PlayStation 4 Remote Play is coming to Windows PC and Mac in the console’s next update, version 3.50.
There’s no date yet for that next console update, but the beta goes live tomorrow. Unfortunately, it won’t include the ability to test Remote Play.
Here’s what you can test from 3.50 if you’re in the beta program:

Friend Online Notification – Want to know the moment your friends come online? With this update, you can, as we’ve added an option to be notified when members of your friends list sign on the network.

Appear Offline – Sometimes you want to play a game or watch a movie without being bothered by friends. Now it’s easier to go incognito as we’ve added the option to appear offline. You can designate if you would like to appear offline when you log-in or at any time from your Profile or the Quick Menu.

User Scheduled Event – Time for a play date! We’ve added the ability to schedule a future gameplay session with your friends on the system. When your event starts, users who registered for the event will automatically be added to a party so you can start playing right away.

Play Together – This features allows all members of a Party to see what each person is playing so that you can easily join a friend’s game, or start a new game together.

Dailymotion – With this update, you’ll be able to live stream directly to Dailymotion on PS4. We’ll also support archiving live broadcasts, like we do for other streaming services.

Sony says it will be releasing more details on the update, including other “key features" and its release date, down the line.

Just a few days ago, Harmonix mused in a blog post about the state of the rhythm gaming market on computers. Now, the studio is looking to bring Rock Band 4 to Windows PC, which would be a first in the history of the franchise. Harmonix aims to release the game this fall on Windows, via Steam, if its 35-day, $1.5 million crowdfunding campaign on Fig is successful.
With that money, Harmonix would hire Sumo Digital to handle the PC version, which would allow Harmonix to “stay focused on building new features and content" for the game, said Alex Rigopulos, Harmonix’s chief creative officer, in the Fig pitch video. Based in Sheffield, U.K., Sumo Digital is the independent studio behind games such as Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and LittleBigPlanet 3. Harmonix would self-publish the PC version, about a year after the studio and co-publisher Mad Catz released Rock Band 4 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
A PC version of Rock Band 4 is a proposition with many moving parts, considering the instrument controllers required to play the game; the licensing arrangements involved in acquiring the music; and the fact that longtime Rock Band players have spent a lot of money over the years on controllers and downloadable songs. And its announcement raises plenty of questions about how it’s all going to work.

Behind the music
Since Rock Band 4’s debut in October 2015, Harmonix has delivered updates on a roughly monthly basis with bug fixes, new features and more. Rigopulos told Polygon in a recent email interview that the studio plans to "maintain parity between the PC and console versions of the game." That means that at launch, the PC version of Rock Band 4 will "include all of the then-current features in the console versions," and from that point forward, Harmonix will keep all three versions in sync.
Rock Band 4’s three platforms aren’t the only concern. There’s also the issue of music security on PC, an open platform compared to the closed ecosystems of the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. Asked in June 2015 about the chances of a PC version of Rock Band 4, project manager Daniel Sussman said one of Harmonix’s main concerns would be to ensure that players couldn’t simply rip songs out of the game.
Rigopulos affirmed that thinking. "We’re currently evaluating a number of 3rd-party encryption solutions to ensure that the music in Rock Band 4 on the PC will be as secure as possible," he said.

Alex Rigopulos

The main soundtrack in the PC version of Rock Band 4 will be identical to the 65-song setlist that was featured in Rock Band 4 on consoles. Fig backers will receive an extra 30 tracks, the same as people who pre-ordered the console versions, along with three bonus "best of indie" songs.
Sadly, players will have to build their DLC libraries from scratch: Downloadable tracks remain tied to the console family on which they were bought (PlayStation, Xbox or Wii), meaning that any songs purchased previously won’t transfer over to PC. That includes the disc exports from previous Rock Band titles — unlike in the console versions of Rock Band 4, there’s no provision for importing music from older games into the PC version.
"Any song that is currently available as DLC for Rock Band 4 on console will also be available as DLC on PC," said Matthew Nordhaus, a designer on the game, in an email interview. To date, Harmonix has re-released into Rock Band 4 the music from Rock Band, Rock Band 3 and Rock Band Blitz; the studio plans to add the tracks from Rock Band 2, Lego Rock Band and Green Day: Rock Band at a later date.
Regardless of the source, anybody who has already purchased Rock Band games and/or DLC will have to re-buy that music if they want to play it on PC. It’s the same situation that befell people who switched platforms for Rock Band 4 — e.g., those who went from Xbox 360 to PlayStation 4.
Note that Harmonix had to negotiate with Sony and Microsoft to make it possible for Rock Band players to transfer PS3 purchases to PS4 and Xbox 360 purchases to Xbox One, respectively, at no additional cost. The idea of "cross-buy" has long been a feature of the PlayStation ecosystem, and Microsoft has started to implement it across Xbox One and Windows 10. But thousands of Rock Band songs amount to a lot of content that Valve would be giving away on Steam — and, of course, a lot of DLC revenue that Valve and Harmonix would be passing up.
Control yourself
Since there has never been a Rock Band game on PC, one might expect that existing Rock Band controllers wouldn’t work with the PC version. Thankfully, that’s not the case.
"We will support most existing Rock Band controllers, with some exceptions," said Nordhaus.

Matthew Nordhaus

The PC version will natively support PS4 controllers from Rock Band 4, since those instruments communicate over Bluetooth; any computer with built-in Bluetooth support or a Bluetooth adapter will do. In addition, Bluetooth-based wireless controllers from the first three Rock Band games on PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 or even Wii will function, as long as they’re used with the corresponding Bluetooth-to-USB adapters. It’s unclear at this point if the game will support Guitar Hero instruments.
Wired USB instruments don’t currently work with Rock Band 4 on Xbox One, to the chagrin of many Rock Band fans — particularly those who spent hundreds of dollars on the Ion Drum Rocker for Xbox 360. But supporting wired controllers on PC "should also be straightforward," according to Nordhaus, although he noted that "we need to test further to see if we need to write new drivers."
Wireless Xbox 360 instruments "will work, but will probably require us to write new drivers […] depending on which dongle/adapter you use," said Nordhaus. Harmonix can’t confirm support for Rock Band 4’s wireless Xbox One instruments yet, but Nordhaus said the studio is "working with Microsoft" on that issue.
As for PC owners who don’t already own Rock Band controllers, backers of the Fig campaign will be able to purchase them as an add-on to their contribution "at a discounted rate," said Nordhaus. Mad Catz currently manufactures all Rock Band 4 instruments, and a Harmonix representative told Polygon that those controllers will work with the game on PC. However, the spokesperson added, "We are going to be making some announcements on Rock Band hardware in the coming weeks as well."

Reviving the Rock Band Network
Bringing Rock Band 4 to PC allows Harmonix to bring back a popular element of Rock Band 3: the Rock Band Network, the system through which musicians could sell their own songs in the game. In the PC version of Rock Band 4, the infrastructure for Rock Band Network comes from Valve’s Steam Workshop, the service that allows players to create mods and other user-generated content for PC games.
The old Rock Band Network was available exclusively on Xbox 360, since it relied on XNA, Microsoft’s now-defunct development toolset. It also required song authors to pay for an XNA Creators Club account ($49 for four months or $99 for a year). That won’t be necessary on Steam Workshop, which is a free service.

Rock Band 3 players uploaded more than 2,000 songs to the Rock Band Network, none of them licensed by Harmonix — the way the system worked, the tracks had to be submitted by their rightsholders, or by people who had obtained the rights to upload them. The PC version of Rock Band 4 is starting with a clean slate, so those people will have to resubmit their songs to the new Rock Band Network, although Nordhaus said "it should be much less work" to upload existing songs than it took to submit them originally.
Rock Band Network songs had to adhere to Rock Band’s T for Teen rating, so they couldn’t contain any profanity. That standard remains in place for Rock Band 4, and Nordhaus told Polygon that Rock Band Network authors "will have the same control over every aspect of song creation that they always did." For new users, Harmonix is "looking at ways that we can reduce the time it takes to create a playable song," said Nordhaus.
Although Harmonix hasn’t finalized this yet, the studio is currently planning to sell Rock Band Network songs in Rock Band 4’s in-game music store alongside the DLC that the studio puts out. Authors will receive the same cut of song sales as before: 30 percent. And Rigopulos told Polygon that Harmonix is "interested in picking the most successful songs from PC and them back over to the consoles," which the studio did with the PS3 version of Rock Band 3.

Fig’s history with Harmonix
Harmonix is looking to raise money not on Kickstarter, like it did for the revival of Amplitude, but on Fig. The Fig platform was unveiled in August of last year. It gives developers the ability to solicit money from traditional rewards-based backers as well as equity investmenters. Those who choose to invest receive shares, which give them the opportunity to earn a portion of a game’s profits over time.
Fig launched with the participation of three independent development studios: Obsidian Entertainment, InXile Entertainment and Double Fine Productions. All three companies promised to fund their next projects through the platform, and placed members on Fig’s board of advisors, where they have a say on which projects are selected to run on Fig.
Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 was Fig’s third campaign, and the first project to come from one of the three founding partners. It was also the very first video game crowdfunding campaign to accept investment from anyone, not just high-net-worth individuals. In January it succeeded in raising more than $3.8 million in rewards-based money and equity investment reservations. More than $1.8 million is still uncollected, and pending U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approval.
Fig is currently running a campaign for Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch, a cannabis-infused brawler based on characters from Kevin Smith films such as Clerks and Chasing Amy. The Rock Band 4 campaign will represent the first instance of Fig running two funding efforts simultaneously.

In September of last year, Harmonix formally signed on with Fig. To cement that relationship, Harmonix placed chief creative officer Alex Rigopulos on the company’s advisory board. Fig told Polygon that as part of that partnership, both Rigopulos personally and Harmonix itself were granted stock options in Fig. Around the same time, Harmonix took on $15 million in private equity investment from 14 undisclosed investors.
The campaign for the Rock Band 4 PC adaptation is seeking $1.5 million, and Rigopulos told Polygon it is prepared to accept the entire amount in equity investment if offered. This includes both the sale of shares to high-net-worth accredited investors and the reservation of shares by unaccredited investors (to be purchased following SEC approval).
Anyone can invest in the success of Rock Band 4 on PC
Investments, sold under the Fig-branded term "Game Shares," will start at $250. Both accredited and unaccredited investors would receive the same return on those shares.
Harmonix told Polygon that the total budget for the game will be $2 million.
"Harmonix would be self-funding the remaining quarter," Rigopulos said via email. "We want to be in the same boat as the rest of the Fig investors."
For more on the Fig platform, see our StoryStream.

Grab a free anniversary theme while you’re at it Sony is honoring the Resident Evil franchise this week with a major PlayStation Store sale. To celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary — the first game launched on the original PlayStation in March 1996 — Resident Evil games and downloadable content are discounted until March 8 at 11 a.m. PT.
Capcom recently announced that it will release remastered versions of Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6 later this year for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The PlayStation 3 versions of these games are among those on sale, for those not willing to wait for the current-generation updates. The PS4 remaster of Resident Evil 0, which launched earlier this year, is also offered at a discount.
Check out these and other highlights from the sale below. For the full list of offers, including a free 20th anniversary PS4 theme, visit the PlayStation Store page.

Resident Evil 4 (PS3) — $6.99
Resident Evil 0 (PS4) — $15.99
Resident Evil 6 (PS3) — $6.99
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (PS3/PSP/Vita) — $1.49
Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition (PS3) — $10.49
Resident Evil (PS4) — $12.99
Resident Evil 2 (PS3/PSP/Vita) — $1.49
Resident Evil Code: Veronica X (PS3) — $4.99

The elements that made The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess so exciting when it launched alongside the Wii in 2006 haven’t aged very well, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.
The experience of playing through Twilight Princess with Wiimote in hand —€” assuming you didn’t hold out for the Gamecube version — was a powerful way for Nintendo to introduce its new motion-sensing hardware. Firing an arrow out of the tip of your controller was exhilarating. Its simulated swordplay was rudimentary, but satisfying. Even its darker, more “adult" (for lack of a better term) world assured me that Twilight Princess was the deep, polished Zelda game I’d wanted for so long, and persuaded me to ignore the many reasons that it was not.
More than nine years later, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD doesn’t have the distracting zeitgeist of a hardware launch to accompany it, and absent that, its flaws are a bit more pronounced. Twilight Princess HD lays bare the decade-old original, but in doing so, gives it an identity beyond gimmicks.
Twilight Princess HD isn’t just dark, it’s bizarre Structurally speaking, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess doesn’t stray too far from the franchise’s time-honored path. The usual routine of dungeon diving, Pieces of Heart-collecting and princess rescuing remains intact, but with a twist: Link is able to transform into a wolf when he interacts with the Twilight Realm, a parallel world to Hyrule which plays hosts to cryptic, shadowy beings. One such Twilight inhabitant is Midna, Link’s constant, smart ass companion throughout his journey.
Twilight Princess in unique among other Zelda titles because of its pervasive darkness, a theme that informs the aesthetic, character design and general feel of the entire game. That aesthetic is at its extreme in the Twilight Realm, but even regular old Hyrule looks half-alive and ominous, and the events that transpire there are equally unsettling.
This art direction isn’t always successful. When exploring a village illuminated by glaring sunset light, or a dungeon where abstract neon lines cut through shifting black fog, Twilight Princess can be a lovely game. But while its subdued palette makes it unique among other Zelda games, many of its environments resemble the lifeless, unsaturated worlds that characterized most of the previous console generation.

The visual enhancements of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD are impressive, where present. A lot of textures — particularly those on important character models —€” have been fully replaced, making Link and the cast he comes in contact with as vibrant as they deserve to be. The more essential change is to the screen itself: Twilight Princess HD’s UI is pared down —” the original’s Wiimote-shaped interface, which took up nearly one-quarter of your TV’s real estate, has been removed.

Twilight Princess HD’s graphical improvements drive home what’s truly unique about the game’s aesthetic: it isn’t just dark, it’s bizarre. Across the various Hylian races, character proportions differ wildly from person to person. Faces drift between realistic and cartoonish, from clown-like to monstrous. Inhabitants of the Twilight Realm aren’t just evil versions of franchise mainstays, they’re tentacled mutants sporting ornate, gigantic black masks. Many enemies, and even some friends —” here’s looking at you, Ooccoo —€” are downright uncomfortable to look at, making them all the more striking and memorable.
That distinction really shines through in the Twilight Realm, which despite what its name suggests, doesn’t feel oppressive or scary as much as it feels completely alien. The game’s soundtrack, which is solid throughout, is at its absolute best here, where every combat encounter features eerie atonal horns that shout over frantic synth arpeggios. It all comes together to give the Twilight Realm a strange, cohesive sense of place.
If only Twilight Princess allowed you to spend more time exploring the Twilight Realm. The game limits you to just a few visits to the parallel version of Hyrule, during which you’re usually performing repetitive fetch quests, like collecting Tears of Light. (Mercifully, Twilight Princess HD only requires you to hunt down 12 Tears in each province, down from the original’s 16.)
The Twilight Realm’s scarcity is a waste: Twilight Princess, like most modern Zelda games, doesn’t always know what to do with you when you’re not exploring a dungeon. Just a few interludes introduce new mechanics and characters — snowboarding with the yeti of Snowpeak is a particular high point. But most involve a mind-numbing amount of backtracking, which was time I would have much rather spent exploring the Twilight Realm in greater detail.
Twilight Princess HD’s transitional sequences can occasionally get pretty clumsy, but unfortunately, the main offender comes right at the very top of the game. The introduction to Twilight Princess is the series’ absolute worst. It’s a laborious, repetitive slog that sticks you with some chores —€” like goat herding, a terrible mini-game that you have to perform twice in the first hour —€” and sends you through the same path of the same patch of woods three consecutive times. The HD remake trims a task or two off the original’s checklist, but no amount of scene-setting or tutorial-distributing is worth the two hours effort that Twilight Princess HD makes you crawl through before the fun can begin.

Its campaign is uneven, but Twilight Princess HD’s high points are exceedingly high. Nearly all of its dungeons are stellar: The aforementioned yeti’s ice-carved mansion is probably the most ingenious location in the whole series. The statue-centric puzzle solving of the Temple of Time forces you to think about the same dungeon in two different, clever ways.
The stars of the show are the tools you’ll find in those dungeons, which pretty wildly divert from the series’ tried and true catalog. Later dungeons introduce the Ball and Chain, the Spinner and the Dual Clawshots, which set the stage for some of the best puzzles and most exciting boss fights this franchise has ever seen. The Spinner, and its corresponding boss fight, is nothing less than a stroke of genius.
The Cave of Shadows, the new "dungeon" that’s unlocked with Twilight Princess HD’s Wolf Link amiibo, cannot (and doesn’t really try to) live up to the standard of the classic game’s dungeons. It’s simply a reimagined version of the Cave of Ordeals, Twilight Princess’ combat-centric, wave-based endurance challenge — but the Cave of Shadows restricts you to Link’s Wolf form for all 40 floors of the cave.

It’s kind of a drag, largely because combat isn’t really satisfying when playing as Wolf Link. Swordplay in Twilight Princess is top-notch —€” sparring against the colossal, armored Darknuts is exciting, and requires reflexes and mastery of your different sword maneuvers. As a wolf, Link’s options are too limited for combat to be remotely satisfying 40 times in a row. Not only that, you have to complete the Cave of Shadows over the course of three dives, and trips two and three will require you to beat the floors you just finished all over again.
Twilight Princess HD’s best new feature is the addition of Hero Mode difficulty, which is nothing new for the series, but is a perfect fit for this particular game. Hero Mode doubles the damage Link takes and prevents recovery hearts from dropping in the wild. With those two simple changes, the systems of Twilight Princess HD click together more tightly.
Hero Mode forces you to thoughtfully utilize Link’s different offensive and defensive sword maneuvers to avoid taking damage carelessly. It makes you take consider your healing potions and inventory before stepping foot into new territories. It gives a good reason to hunt down every Heart Piece you can get your hands on. It fits thematically, too: In Hero Mode, Twilight Princess HD can finally be as dangerous as it looks.

After a delay out of 2015, last year’s Ori and the Blind Forest is finally getting its promised DLC. As discussed in the video above, Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition adds quite a bit to the original game. Most noticeably, the Definitive Edition brings with it an entirely new area, as well as two new character abilities for the titular … moon … cat bird … thing, including a dash move that should be of particular interest to speedrunners.
Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition is making other, more subtle changes as well. The game’s spirit wells, which previously served as static save points, may now be used as fast travel points around the game’s world. Completionists may still wish to take the scenic route, as new secrets and collectibles are scattered about, several of which take advantage of Ori’s new moves.
Most importantly though, Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition is adding more accessibility to a notoriously difficult game. The new easy mode option decreases enemy and environment damage, and it also adds new checkpoints to some of the more difficult platforming sections in the game. For players demanding more challenge, there’s a new harder difficulty setting as well as a new one-life mode. While the limitations here are self-explanatory, the game also adds final statistics from one-life games to a leaderboard for players to measure themselves against one another.
Players will be able to access developer Moon Studio’s new additions to Ori and the Blind Forest Definitive Edition on March 11th, the one year anniversary of the original release. Players who own the current Steam and Xbox One versions of Ori will be able to upgrade, though Moon and Microsoft aren’t talking about pricing yet. Xbox owners will also be able to share their game saves with the Windows 10 Store version of the game.

One of the first sequences in Quantum Break takes place a on university campus where things quickly fall apart, at which point the player is quickly rushed from one building to the next. However, if you stop and examine the scenery, you’ll sometimes be rewarded — like in the above sequence, where we stumbled onto a lecture hall blackboard covered with frantic scribblings about Alan Wake.
If you look closely, all the writing on the blackboard concerns the events that Alan Wake undergoes in Alan Wake and Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. However, the in-game writing seems to be picking apart Alan Wake’s experiences as a work of fiction — making references to things like the hero’s journey monomyth and noting references to English poet William Blake (echoing an Alan Wake ARG that appeared and quickly fell silent back in 2012).
So: what’s the in-universe explanation for all this? For our money, this is most likely scenario: the chalkboard belongs to an English teacher at Riverport University who giving a lecture on Alan Wake (the fictional novelist, not the video game) — or, more specifically, on the autobiographical manuscripts Departure and Return, the pages of which players collected throughout the two previous Alan Wake games.
However, that’s not the only major Alan Wake reference we stumbled onto in our first few hours of Quantum Break. Be warned: below lie spoilers for a pretty incredible piece of Alan Wake fanservice — one we uncovered in a very early section of the game we unfortunately were not permitted to record.
In Quantum Break’s very first playable moments, protagonist Jack Joyce shows up at Riverport University, and from there the player is encouraged to head directly for the campus’ physics building. If you ignore these instructions and explore a bit, you’ll find a small area where a student is tabling for a protest against the demolition of the on-campus library. Walk past her and you’ll find a tent with a large flatscreen television inside of it. Enter the tent and press X to activate the television, and you’re treated to something very special: a cinematic trailer for a live-action Alan Wake adaptation.
Here’s what happens next:

The trailer opens on a shot of waves, which fade into a dark forest, over which Alan Wake says the iconic line: “It’s not a lake. It’s an ocean." The camera moves through the dark forest, until resting on the face of an unconscious Alan Wake, whose eyes jolt open.
A male voice says "He’s been gone for five years." Fade up on what appear to be two detectives, a man with dark hair and a woman with blonde hair, standing in front of a wall covered in clues — perhaps about Alan Wake’s disappearance. Jazzy noir music begins to play.
Alan Wake’s voice: "Dark matter and dark energy constitute over 95% of our universe." We see the two detectives from the front, eyes furrowed in concentration, as they simultaneously lift mugs of coffee up to their mouth in perfect unison. It’s revealed that the male detective is portrayed by Remedy creative director and writer Sam Lake.
Alan Wake again: "We’re just a speck of light floating in an endless ocean of darkness." Glitchy static noises slowly overtake the music, and we see the two detectives walking through the forest, stumble upon what appears to be Alan Wake’s unconscious body.
"Every story finds its writer." Cut to a brief shot of the male detective flicking The Clicker in his hands, likely taken from an evidence box in the room.
Next we see the detective walking through a dimly lit, empty location with flickering lights. A figure emerges from the darkness, and the detective raises his flashlight to reveal the figure’s identity: Alan Wake, now with a full beard.
We see The Clicker again. A few shots of the female detective lost in concentration. A shot of Wake’s torso from behind, walking, flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in the other.
Back to the detectives’ clue board, where we see the female detective’s hands hang up a new clue: a mugshot of Sam Lake, with the words "ALEX CASEY" written underneath — the name of the protagonist in Alan Wake’s series of thriller novels. A brief flash frame of Sam Lake’s character, now revealed to be Alex Casey, appears — pale, lying on the floor, a trail of blood coming from his mouth. The female detective grabs her jacket and runs out of the room. In the next shot, we see bearded Alan Wake exploring the detectives’ room, examining the clue board and going through the evidence boxes.
Alan Wake begins paging through a folder full of paper found among the evidence, and snippets of Alan Wake voiceover can be heard: "Wake has a bloody knife in his hand." "He smiles a wicked smile." "Casey lies on the floor, eyes staring." He continues to frantically search through the pages, then looks up, horrified.
In the final shot, we see the female detective walking through the forest at night with a gun and flashlight. She walks into a building, then shines her light onto a man facing the wall with his back to her. He slowly turns around. It’s Alan Wake, and he looks scared. The detective looks down, and sees Wake standing over Alex Casey’s dead body, a bloody knife in Wake’s hand. She steps back, gun pointed at Alan.
Then, a title card: "RETURN," the name of Wake’s collectible manuscript from Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. The phrase "WHAT LIES BENEATH THE SURFACE" appears on screen. We hear Wake’s voice one last time: "All of us have two faces. The one we wear for all to see, and the face that lies beneath in the dark."

That’s a lot to take in, right? While it’s too soon to say what the exact extent of Alan Wake’s role in Quantum Break’s universe is, something tells us there’s more to this — and with Remedy recently filing a trademark for Alan Wake’s Return, we have to imagine it’s connected to this in-game trailer. Could Return end up being Quantum Break’s recurring in-game television show, a hallmark of Remedy games since the original Max Payne? Or is it something more? It seems like we’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out.
For more on Quantum Break, stay tuned for more video coverage from Polygon throughout the day. For more on Alan Wake, check out our in-depth video essay examining gameplay from the tragically unreleased Alan Wake 2.

Won’t someone think of the children? Seth Meyers had a very important question for Immortan Joe and his War Boys last night: why not make frequent long drives more environmentally friendly?
In the spoof, Meyers and the rest of the War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road are getting ready to gear up for another mission for more gasoline. While the other War Boys are ranting and chanting, pumping themselves up for the long drive, Meyers’ character starts to question the way they do things.
Meyers points out that it seems counterintuitive to drive gas guzzling vehicles all the way across the desert just to get more gasoline. His various suggestions for being more economical, including using a wind board to cross the desert sands, doesn’t go over well with any of the War Boys.
The spoof also addresses the white body paint the War Boys cover themselves up in, the random guitar playing and other strange features that occur in the movie that may have seemed questionable.
Mad Max: Fury Road recently landed numerous awards at the Oscars, beating out stiff competition from movies like Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Revenant.