When it comes to sports video games, I’m of the opinion that the wackier they are, the better. If I want a game that captures every detail of a real sport accurately and authentically, I’ll just go outside and play that sport myself, or maybe watch some professionals do the same. In a virtual version, I want to see the sport enhanced with features that would be impossible on a real field of play.

Much like its predecessors, Mario Strikers: Battle League fulfills this video game sports fantasy quite nicely, offering what is essentially the Super Mario Kart version of simplified soccer. And while the game has some balancing issues (especially in single-player mode), as a whole, it’s a frenetic and fun take on the sport that could easily sustain a strong online multiplayer community.

The more things change

If you played the original Super Mario Strikers on the GameCube or its 2007 sequel on the Wii, you know the basics here. While the game is ostensibly a four-on-four game of soccer (without the possibility of the ball going out of bounds), it more closely resembles a knock-down, drag-out brawler most of the time.

You’ll find yourself constantly charging at nearby opponents to knock them down and get the ball or prevent a pass, without a yellow or red card in sight. Then, on offense, you have to constantly be ready with a quick-reflex dodge or be on the lookout for an open pass to avoid losing the ball to a similar pummeling.

Despite the full-contact changes to real soccer, this is still a game of careful positioning. On offense, you have to push forward for a charged, centered shot without overcommitting and letting the defense come back with a fast break. On defense, you have to be careful that tackling the ball carrier doesn’t leave you out of position to block a pass or a powerful charged shot. Battle League‘s lob passes also open up the field in the third dimension a bit, letting you sail the ball over a tight defense and set up a good shot that can more easily get by the computer-controlled goalkeeper.

Mario Kart-style items like shells, banana peels, and bombs are also still in play here; they are effective on offense to create some much-needed space or on defense to stop an attack quickly. Those items now come in boxes thrown down on the field at random, which sometimes necessitates breaking up a play and running out of your way to pick them up. The game also self-balances a bit by providing the losing team with item boxes that only they can pick up throughout a match.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1860144

E3 might not be happening this year, but Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest has stepped in to provide the fire hose of hype-filled trailers and game announcements that would usually happen during an E3 week.

Don’t have two hours to spare to watch the livestreamed kickoff event. No problem. simply skim through this page to catch up on all the announcements.

Aliens Dark Descent showed off a heavily cinematic trailer that featured the titular aliens and strongly evoked James Cameron’s movies. Brief gameplay scenes showed a squad of marines shooting at Xenomorphs from an isometric perspective. Coming in 2023 to Xbox and PlayStation consoles as well as PC.

The Callisto Protocol was the first of many Summer Game Fest games to bring up strong Dead Space vibes, right down to the camera angle. A brief trailer and gameplay demo highlighted the “extra gore” including ghost-like enemies and the protagonist getting chewed up by the blades of a giant fan and a motorized gear. Coming December 2 to consoles and PC.

Flashback 2 is a sequel 30 years in the making, bringing the original 2D puzzle platformer from 1992 to a new generation. The game was announced last month, and a very brief teaser showed hard-to-parse scenes with a lot of careful walking to the right and a 3D motorbike section. Coming to PlayStation and Xbox consoles as well as PC in winter 2022, followed by the Switch in 2023.

Fort Solis features the vocal talents of Troy Baker as a medical officer in the titular fort, where something horrible is happening on a lonesome planet where assistance is not close at hand. The thriller is described as “Dead Space meets Duncan Jones’ Moon” with a focus on discovery and many different modes of traversal. No announced release date yet for this Steam release.

Stormgate pre-rendered cinematic trailer featured a lonely archeologist finding a powerful shield on a seemingly deserted planet. But when she’s attacked by huge, winged demons flooding through a “stormgate,” she needs to hide behind that shield while receiving some assistance from a soldier in a railgun-equipped mech suit. A developer of the free-to-play real-time strategy game promised “no play-to-win,” and players can register now for a planned 2023 beta.

Highwater comes from the makers of Golf Club: Wasteland, and takes place in a similar world ravaged by climate change. The “narrative-driven isometric survival game” will feature a protagonist taking a motorized raft through the ruins of civilization, taking on armed guards in turn-based combat as they try to sneak onto a rocket to a better world. Coming in 2022.

Goat Simulator 3 is not a typo; that’s the name of this first sequel to the ridiculous 2014 breakout hit. A cinematic trailer for this follow-up sees multiple goats causing absolute chaos behind a jogger on a boardwalk, firing rocket launchers, and driving vehicles. Coming in fall 2022 to the Epic Games Store.

Midnight Fight Express stood out from the Game Fest crowd as a game developed by a single person: a father from Poland. The isometric action featured the requisite brawling, dodging, and shooting in some stylish environments. A demo is live now on Steam ahead of a planned August 23 launch.

Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero are anime-infused action RPGs coming to the “Hoyoverse.” The short trailer seemed reminiscent of games like Genshin Impact and Nier Automata, with a lot of lore that will likely make sense to people who are already immersed in the world of these games. Honkai: Star Rail is already available in beta, while Zenless Zone Zero has just started development.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1860076

Universal Pictures dropped the final trailer for Jordan Peele’s latest film, Nope. We finally learn something about the plot, and yep, it looks like aliens. Maybe. Probably.

As we’ve reported previously, trailers for Peele’s films never reveal too much since much of the pleasure of his movies comes from their frequently bizarre twists. We wouldn’t have it any other way. All we knew thus far about Nope is that Daniel Kaluuya (who was nominated for an Oscar for Get Out), Keke Palmer (Hustlers, Black Panther), and Steven Yeun (Minari, Okja) play “residents in a lonely gulch of inland California who bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.”

The first trailer dropped in February—very moody and atmospheric but offering few details. In April, Universal Pictures marked the start of the NBA Playoffs by dropping a brief teaser featuring eight-time NBA All-Star Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors. There were no new details, and the highly photogenic Curry won’t be winning an Oscar any time soon, but it was a cute meme-worthy marketing move by the studio.

But now, the final trailer audit provides some much-desired insight into what the film is actually about. Kaluuya’s and Palmer’s characters (OJ and Emerald Haywood) are clearly brother and sister who own a small ranch they’re running as a tourist attraction. Ricky “Jupe” Park (Yuen) is their cowboy master of ceremonies.

OJ’s and Emerald’s lives are thrown into turmoil when their father unexpectedly drops dead. And it doesn’t look like a natural death; one of his eyes is badly damaged. Then OJ sees “something above the clouds that’s big,” and the duo ponder whether that unidentified flying object might be responsible for their father’s sudden death.

They also see a prime opportunity to make a lot of money by being the first to capture the existence of these suspected aliens on camera. Sure, the Internet is full of footage that people claim are UFOs, but “ain’t nobody gonna get what we gonna get—the money shot,” Emerald tells OJ. “Undeniable proof of aliens. The Oprah shot.” They recruit a guy named Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to help them get that money shot, with the additional help of a Fry’s technician named Angel Torres (Brandon Perea).

But it seems the aliens are camera-shy, and the scheme makes them angry. The result: A whole lot of people mysteriously disappear, presumably captured by the aliens. Apparently, the best way to ensure you don’t get taken is to not look at whatever is out there. And whatever OJ and Emerald saw in that cloud, “It’s not what you think.” So… maybe not aliens? We’ll soon find out.

Nope opens in theaters on July 22, 2022.

Listing image by YouTube/Universal Pictures

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1859986

How low can you set your expectations for Jurassic World Dominion?

If you can burrow those expectations deep into the earth, perhaps so far that researchers don’t discover them for thousands of years, you may have a good time. That goes double for parents who are looking for a movie to watch with amped-up, pre-teen dinosaur aficionados. The film’s ideal audience agrees with its filmmakers about what matters here: the dinosaurs, not the humans.

This is the kind of film in which a Quetzalcoatlus appears on the horizon, and a character responds by saying its name briskly yet accurately, just before the majestic flying dino emerges in terrifying and detailed fashion. This creature gets better and fuller justification for its actions than pretty much any actor in the film—which might have been fine, had Dominion‘s writers not spent so much time trying, and failing, to stitch its characters’ motivations together.

“Look at you… and look at me…”

My favorite things about this film are easy to list, so I’ll start there.

First, the dinosaurs are great. The budget invested in this film’s roster of ground, air, and sea behemoths is well spent, and the production team clearly had a blast cracking open modern paleontology records and expanding the series’ dino roster beyond the usual suspects. Fast ones, lumbering ones, even ones with feathers: they’re all here, and they’re generally used to terrorize the humans. Even better, the acting, framing, and light-and-shadow bounces in these crucial moments shine in ways that will make you forget how many green screens are likely in use.

Second, the best action scenes are nuts. My favorite, which sees velociraptors chasing trucks and dirt bikes, has been spoiled in trailers to some extent, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had in the film’s execution. That’s largely because the cinematography emphasizes prolonged shots instead of countless rapid cuts, making its stunt driving look all the more incredible.

And third, Jeff Goldblum is fantastic. Though he’s wedged into the film under some of the series’ most moronic pretenses (which is saying something), his character Ian Malcolm shines as a self-professed “chaoticist” (take that, futurists). What’s more, his contribution has been upgraded from the phoned-in, behind-a-bench narration sequence in the last Jurassic World film. In one early moment, he greets a longtime friend with Goldblum-ian aplomb: “Look at you… and look at me… and look at you!” It’s the exact tongue-in-cheek attitude that this film needs, and he certainly adds to Dominion‘s watchability whenever he’s in the frame.

Sadly, Goldblum is crowded out of the film often enough for the rest of Dominion‘s disappointing content to come through.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1859522

It has been 15 long years since Dwayne Johnson first expressed interest in playing Black Adam, a classic DC Comics supervillain dating back to the 1940s. The project was stuck in development hell for years, but the film is finally coming to theaters this fall. And we now have the first trailer for Black Adam, giving us a peek at the character’s origin story and his inevitable encounter with the Justice Society of America (JSA).

(Spoilers for some of the comics below.)

The character made a cameo appearance as a villain in the first issue of The Marvel Family comics in 1945. Canonically, he is an ancient Egyptian named Teth-Adam, whom the wizard Shazam chooses to be the latter’s successor. Teth-Adam was presumed to be pure of heart, but once endowed with the powers of Shazam, he became corrupt, killed the ruling pharaoh, and took over the Egyptian throne. Shazam was unable to revoke those powers, so he exiled Teth-Adam to the most distant star in the universe.

It took Teth-Adam 5,000 years to fly back to Earth—this was the 1940s, after all—at which point he encountered the Marvel Family. Eventually, one family member tricks him into saying “Shazam” again, and Teth-Adam reverts to his human form, aging 5,000 years instantly. This is the story depicted in 2019’s Shazam, when the wizard explains what happened to young Billy Batson. (In that film’s version, Teth-Adam, aka Black Adam, unleashed the Seven Deadly Sins on Earth and wiped out entire civilizations.)

DC Comics acquired the rights to Black Adam in the 1970s, and he became a recurring character in their Shazam Family comics. Initial interest in making a film that would be centered on the character dates back to the early 2000s, with Johnson in the title role, but New Line Cinema placed development on hold in 2009. In 2014, Warner Bros. picked up the project, intending to make Black Adam part of the DCEU. Originally, Johnson’s Black Adam was meant to appear as a villain in Shazam, but by then he was a huge, bankable movie star, and the studio decided to give him a standalone film. (He does briefly appear in hologram form when the wizard tells Billy the backstory.)

Black Adam reunites Johnson with Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra. The film’s premise is that an exiled Black Adam re-emerges some 5,000 years after his banishment and is thrust into the modern world, where his ruthless take-no-prisoners approach to combating evil-doers doesn’t quite fit in with the prevailing cultural mores.

Black Adam will also introduce the JSA into the DCEU. Pierce Brosnan plays Kent Nelson, aka Doctor Fate, a JSA member who wields a magical helmet. Noah Centineo plays Atom Smasher, a JSA member who can manipulate his molecular structure to change his size and strength. Aldis Hodge plays Hawkman, an archaeologist and the reincarnation of an Egyptian prince. His trademark wings give him the power of flight. And Quintessa Swindell plays Cyclone, the granddaughter of the Red Tornado, who controls wind and can generate sound.

The cast also includes Sarah Shahi as Adrianna Tomaz, a university professor and resistance fighter in the fictional nation of Kahndaq, Black Adam’s original homeland. She’s a love interest in the comics, and it seems likely she’ll fill a similar role in the film. We also know that the Intergang criminal group is going to appear in the film.

The trailer hints at the character’s origin story, as we see Teth-Adam as a slave in ancient Egypt who loses his son and is granted god-like powers quite similar to Shazam’s. But we don’t otherwise learn much about the plot. This is apparently by design, according to producer Hiram Garcia, who told io9 recently that this first trailer is meant to be more of a teaser. There are glimpses of Atom Smasher, Cyclone, and Doctor Fate, who tells Black Adam that he can choose to be a villain or a savior of this world. There’s also a telling interaction with Hawkman, who is possibly being positioned as the moral foil to Black Adam’s antihero. Hawkman insists superheroes don’t kill people. “Well, I do,” Black Adam replies. And of course, we get snippets of Johnson’s trademark dry wit.

Black Adam hits theaters on October 21, 2022.

Listing image by YouTube/DC/Warner Bros

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1859570

On Tuesday, a wealth of new sci-fi and fantasy trailers emerged for feature-length films expected to launch on streaming platforms by the end of this summer. While most come courtesy of the “Netflix Geeked” brand, the biggest arguably comes from 20th Century Studios, mostly because it suggests some much-needed redemption for the Predator series.

Prey, set to launch exclusively on Hulu on August 5, twists the series’ naming convention to clarify that our favorite alien beast is now in the bow-and-arrow sights of an eager hunter. In terms of timeline, this film qualifies as a “prequel,” as it rewinds to 18th-century America and stars Comanches who had apparently not yet had their lives upended by invading colonists. The trailer features actor Amber Midthunder as the apparent lead and implies that she is the first in her tribe to discover a Predator. Her character, Naru, is nearly killed in a bear hunt gone awry, only to see the bear yanked away at the last second by a much more powerful adversary.

The trailer’s harrowing battles and chases point to Predator’s clear technological lead over its Comanche rivals, as it responds to a quartered bow with infrared laser sights and does some underground burrowing. Caucasian militiamen emerge briefly with era-appropriate muskets, but the trailer implies that they aren’t the heroes of this story; rather Naru’s mastery of Comanche weaponry and traps could give her the upper hand in protecting her brethren from a confusing alien force.

As a successor to the despised 2018 reboot The Predator, Prey appears to have nowhere to go but up—and its massive shift in setting, era, and tone is even more extreme than the shift we saw from 1990’s Predator 2. Yet while the new film’s straight-to-Hulu launch could be taken as a pessimistic sign that it’s not up to theatrical snuff, it comes with an incredible silver lining for anyone tuning in with hopes of an authentic take on Comanche culture: a day-one audio dub of the entire film in Comanche language, toggle-able via Hulu’s built-in audio selector.

Director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) confirms the feature in a Slashfilm interview by pointing to the awkwardness of Hunt for Red October, which began with Russian actors switching to English language early in that film. Prey will instead default to all actors speaking English from beginning to end, with a full dialogue dub for the film’s American Indian actors available for those who prefer it.

Netflix’s Geeked week of announcements focused exclusively on feature-length summer 2022 films on Tuesday, and its biggest reveal came in the form of Day Shift, the directorial debut from longtime Hollywood stunt coordinator JJ Perry (John Wick: Chapter 2, The Fate of the Furious). Star Jamie Foxx drives the first-look trailer by narrating a barrage of high-octane scenes and raw “behind the scenes” footage, in order to double down on its promise of “amazing” and “practical” stunts.

Sure enough, the footage thus far emphasizes a lack of CGI in favor of real-life car chases, peppered with crashes and explosions, along with the film’s cast of vampires bending and contorting their actual bodies to look like the undead. And, hey, Snoop Dogg shows up with a massive cowboy hat and a Gatling gun—so what could possibly go wrong? However, by the trailer’s end, Foxx insists not once, but twice, that the film will offer viewers something they’ve “never seen before,” which we hope isn’t overcompensating on his part. We’ll find out when Day Shift premieres exclusively on Netflix on August 12.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1859479

Before last month, Enrico Ricciardi was one of the most respected members of a niche community of classic PC game collectors, with a practically unrivaled collection of rarities that he regularly bragged about on social media. Today, he’s a pariah in that community, the central figure in a wide-ranging alleged forgery scandal that has changed the way many collectors look at their hobby.

At least seven PC game collectors have publicly or privately identified dozens of suspected forgeries they say Ricciardi traded or sold as far back as 2015 and as recently as last month. Collectors estimate that those trades and sales include games that would be valued at well over $100,000 total on the open market if they were authentic.

Ricciardi told Ars he is also a victim who simply unknowingly passed along suspect collectibles without checking them thoroughly enough. Regardless, the overwhelming evidence suggesting that there are many forgeries circulating through the world of rare PC games has shaken the trust of that community to the core.

“It’s like finding a double agent in an intelligence organization,” collector Dan Chisarick told Ars. “He knows the holistic value of classic games and the kind of damage that fake copies can cause.”

A rift in the community

The world of PC game collecting has yet to attract the kind of eye-popping, seven-figure-dollar sales seen with some rare Nintendo games. Still, a committed collecting community has developed around older PC titles, with some people paying thousands of dollars for intact disks, packaging, and materials of computer games from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Collector Stephane Racle told Ars that games that used to sell for tens of dollars now routinely go for “hundreds” on sites like eBay.

“PC game collecting is niche, but it’s growing because console collectors are finishing their collections and looking for the next frontier,” said Joel McCoy, founder of the 6,000-member strong Big Box PC Game Collectors Facebook group (BBPCGC). “And there are few games as rare as old PC games.”

“You kind of assume that everything you get is legitimate.”

PC game collector Stephane Racle

The members of the BBPCGC group are “generally friends,” Racle said, and they are happy to share their big finds and arrange trades or purchases with fellow members (McCoy made it clear to Ars that the group does “not take any responsibility for transactions among members,” though). Trading in a “fairly congenial sort of community” like that, “you form relationships with people” that aren’t possible when buying from random eBay sellers, Racle said. “It’s not all about money… You [sometimes] get two people who agree on a trade, and no money changes hands… You kind of assume that everything you get is legitimate.”

This used to be the center pieces of my collection. Rare and expensive old games.
Now it turns out I‘ve been scammed and sold forgeries by a well known figure in the Ultima and tetrogames community. Along with many others#ultima #akalabeth @RichardGarriott pic.twitter.com/wuiAQPSuG2

— Dominus of Exult (@Dominus_Exult) May 30, 2022

Collectors told Ars that this is an assumption they will no longer make. On May 30, the BBPCGC published an extensive set of documents outlining evidence of forgeries within three members’ collections, all tied to trades and sales made by Ricciardi. Ars also reviewed similar evidence recently published by Racle (who was coincidentally investigating some of his own items without knowledge of the wider BBPCGC investigation) and provided privately by other collectors, some of whom asked to remain anonymous.

Speaking to Ars, McCoy made it clear that while all of these alleged forgeries came through Ricciardi, the BBPCGC can’t say for sure that Ricciardi was the one actually making them. McCoy said the group’s investigation was focused exclusively on whether Ricciardi was “selling and trading fake games.”

“That was proven and is grounds enough to be ejected from the group,” McCoy said.

“I believe [Ricciardi] should have been able to spot fakes,” he added.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1858275

It’s Geeked Week courtesy of Netflix, which means a smorgasbord of new teasers for upcoming series. Most notably, we got some new teaser footage for The Sandman, a teaser for the third and final season of Locke & Key, and a full trailer for the Resident Evil live-action series. There were also teasers for a new series from the creators of the masterful German series Dark, called 1899; Mike Flanagan’s The Midnight Club; the anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities; and Wednesday, Tim Burton’s new series focused on a grown-up Wednesday Addams.

(Spoilers for prior seasons of Locke & Key below.)

The Sandman

Sandman fans have longed for a screen adaption of Neil Gaiman’s iconic graphic novels for decades, and we’re finally getting it, thanks to Netflix, executive producer David Goyer (Foundation), and showrunner Allan Heinberg. Gaiman has been heavily involved as an executive producer and has regularly enthused on social media about his delight about how the series turned out. If this teaser is any indication, we’re inclined to agree. It certainly gets the look and feel of the graphic novels exactly right.

As I’ve written previously, the titular “Sandman” is Dream, aka Morpheus, among other names. He is one of seven entities known as the Endless, and he is seeking to correct his past mistakes. The other Endless are Destiny, Destruction, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death (portrayed as a perky punk/goth young woman). Tom Sturridge snagged the coveted role of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming. Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays Death, Donna Preston plays Despair, and Mason Alexander Park plays Desire. Game of Thrones alums Gwendoline Christie and Charles Dance play a gender-swapped Lucifer and the charlatan magician Roderick Burgess, respectively.

The cast also includes Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian, one of the (failed) nightmares created by Dream; Vivienne Acheampong as a gender-swapped Lucienne, chief librarian of the Dreaming; David Thewlis as John Dee/Doctor Destiny; Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, occult detective and ancestor of DC Comics antihero John Constantine; Patton Oswalt as the voice of Dream’s raven emissary, Matthew; Razane Jammal as Lyta Hall; Kyo Ra as Rose Walker, who encounters the Corinthian while searching for her lost brother; Stephen Fry as Rose’s guardian, Gilbert; Sandra James-Young as Unity Kinkaid; and Sanjeev Bhaskar and Asim Chaudhry as Cain and Abel, respectively.

Per the official premise:

There is another world that waits for all of us when we close our eyes and sleep—a place called the Dreaming, where The Sandman, Master of Dreams (Tom Sturridge), gives shape to all of our deepest fears and fantasies. But when Dream is unexpectedly captured and held prisoner for a century, his absence sets off a series of events that will change both the dreaming and waking worlds forever. To restore order, Dream must journey across different worlds and timelines to mend the mistakes he’s made during his vast existence, revisiting old friends and foes, and meeting new entities—both cosmic and human—along the way.

We got our first peek at the series when Netflix released a brief teaser last September during its Tudum global fan event. That footage focused on Dream’s initial capture by Roderick Burgess and his acolytes, who were trying to capture his sibling, Death. This latest footage gives us even more of Sturridge’s Dream, as well as brief glimpses of Lucienne, Lucifer, Johanna Constantine, and the creepy bleeding eyes of Holbrook’s Corinthian. We also see the crumbling ruins of The Dreaming in the wake of the Sandman’s prolonged absence, as Death warns him that much has changed in the interim.

The Sandman debuts on Netflix on August 5, 2022. We are counting the days.

Locke & Key S3

There’s a powerful allure to the basic premise of Locke & Key: Three traumatized siblings whose father was recently murdered return to dad’s ancestral home, Key House, with their mother and discover that the house is filled with hidden magical keys that “whisper” to the children until they find them. Only kids can hear the keys whispering, and any adults who witness the “magic” of the keys in use quickly forget what they’ve seen. The TV series has successfully preserved that allure.

The first season covered most of the main narrative arc in the comics but left out a lot of the background lore about where the keys came from, who made them, and who (or what) the shapeshifting character Dodge really is. Those questions were at least partially answered throughout S2. Dodge was a demon from beyond the black door who sought to forge a new magical Demon Key out of a remnant of Whispering Iron, then use it to build a demon army out of the townsfolk. The Locke family and their allies defeated Dodge in the season finale, although there’s a brief glimpse of Dodge in their original female form in the teaser, suggesting they might be back in some form.

The second season also included flashbacks to the American Revolutionary War and the conflict between the Locke family and a British general named Frederick Gideon (Kevin Durand), revealing how the magic keys were made—and why they have such a strong connection to Locke descendants. The flashback material was partially drawn from Clockworks and featured heavily in the first arc of World War Key, a new Locke and Key comics release that serves as both a prequel and sequel to the original run.

The third season will complete the planned trilogy as the Locke siblings face their greatest adversary yet: General Gideon, whose demon-possessed “echo” was resurrected from the well just like Dodge. He’s now in possession of the Anywhere Key, and he’s got a long-standing grudge against the Locke family. He’ll also be much harder to defeat, even if the Locke kids manage to get all their keys back. Chances are we’ll see at least one new key in play as the series wraps.

The final season of Locke & Key drops on Netflix on August 10, 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1858677

CUPERTINO, Calif.—At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling.

The system will leverage Apple’s custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This “temporal reconstruction” system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming “XeSS” system from Intel.

Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD’s system, since Apple has yet to announce a way for MetalFX Upscaling to leverage its custom-made “Neural Engine” system. Apple has previously spoken at length to Ars Technica about machine learning models used to drive its custom silicon, but today’s Metal 3 API news didn’t include any such mentions, leaving Nvidia’s RTX series of graphics cards in the lead in that department.

By announcing this functionality for some of the world’s most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction—even if MetalFX Upscaling isn’t open source, unlike AMD’s FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they’ll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones.

Metal 3 will also include a new “resource-loading” API designed to streamline asset-loading processes in video games, which currently sounds similar to Microsoft’s DirectStorage system to optimize visually intensive IO processes that might otherwise be bottlenecked by traditional protocols.

To celebrate this Metal 3 API milestone, Apple confirmed that popular and processing-intensive games Resident Evil Village and No Man’s Sky will come to macOS “later this year.” Apple also says the same Metal 3 API benefits will land in iPadOS 16 this year.

This article has been updated to clarify how Apple’s Neural Engine may or may not figure into the Metal 3 API.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1858971

Years after announcing a deal to bring back MTV’s most popular cartoon characters of all time, Paramount+ finally took the wraps off its first major Beavis and Butt-Head production this week. And, honestly, this is about as “Ars Technica” as the ’90s cartoon duo might ever get.

Warning: this preview includes spoilers based on the recently released trailer. If you want to go into this film as clueless as its lead characters, consider yourself warned.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe will premiere exclusively on Paramount+ on June 23, and its handlers at MTV are already calling this feature-length treatment “the dumbest science-fiction film ever made.” The film appears to resurrect the polished-yet-childish animation style established in their previous feature-length adventure, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America—only this time with CGI flourishes that you might expect from dumb teenagers flying not only through space but also time.

The good name of NASA has never been so besmirched, as the titular duo (heh, heh, “titular”) dons official astronaut garb while completing training exercises in what resembles NASA’s Houston base—which checks out, considering the series has always vaguely taken place down the road from creator Mike Judge’s Austin-area home. Yet for accuracy’s sake, the shuttle’s launch appears to send the boys to Florida, based on where NASA traditionally stages its human launches, as these sure look like Kennedy Space Center LC39 launchpads.

Either way: Do you want to see Beavis and Butt-Head enter zero space and propel their bodies on a spacecraft with the force of their own puking? How about watching the guys raise and lower test NASA hardware into a docking port so that it resembles sexual intercourse? Ah, the future is now.

B+B-H (and their time travel variants) now, Daria spinoff soon

Speaking of the future: The trailer points to both ordinary life in the year 1998 and extraordinary events in the year 2022, as the duo enters something that resembles a black hole (heh, heh, “hole”) before crash-landing in full spacewalk attire on a Texas beach some 24 years later. (That’s good news because a series like Beavis and Butt-Head, which has included frequent cartoonish near-deaths of its characters, should be careful to establish ’90s timeline continuity.)

What’s more, these time travelers aren’t alone. Four other versions of both Beavis and Butt-Head can be seen in the trailer, and the most prominent ones in this week’s new footage speak to the default teen versions as glossy-eyed, robe-wearing variants—who say “amusing” and “yes” at the same cadence that the normal guys say “heh, heh” and “fartknocker.” Another version of the duo is likely a dream sequence of Beavis’, as it sees him riding a flying Pegasus with Butt-Head’s face and hair while clutching onto a beautiful woman in Heavy Metal-inspired garb—but, for the record, I’d watch an entire streaming series based on such a fantasy-adventure premise, Paramount+.

Beavis and Butt-Head‘s most recent revival was announced in 2020 with plans to air on Paramount-owned Comedy Central, but the deal was shaken up this February; now, its order of TV-length episodes will premiere on Paramount+ at some point in 2024 and will last for at least two “seasons.” The same 2020 announcement flurry also included news of a new animated series named Jodie, which would serve as a spinoff of Daria, itself a spinoff of Beavis and Butt-Head‘s original animated run. Last month, news emerged that Jodie had been retooled as a feature-length film, but its target platform (theaters, TV, or streaming) has not yet been confirmed.

While Beavis and Butt-head are slated to Do the Universe, the trailer doesn’t clarify whether other familiar series faces will join them. Everyone, from annoyed gym teacher Coach Buzzcut to annoyed neighbor Tom Anderson, is absent so far, but time travel and multiverse angles sure seem fruitful for jokes at other cartoon cast members’ expense—or, at the very least, token mentions of creator Judge’s last stab at the “dumb humans travel to the future” premise that was Idiocracy. Thanks to a release date only three weeks from now, we won’t have to wait long to find out.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1858114