Leave it to Keanu Reeves, one of the greatest human beings to ever grace this planet, to outshine every video game that Xbox showed off at E3 on Sunday.
It turns out that Reeves is in the highly anticipated game Cyberpunk 2077, which is being made by the same developer who gave us The Witcher series. And to help hype up the game and the news of its release date, Reeves himself came on stage to deliver the good word.
Someone from the audience clearly yelled out to him that he is breathtaking, which is objectively true, and he yelled back that they, in fact, are breathtaking. And then he elaborated that everyone is in fact breathtaking, including you and me.
Of course, as a character in a game like Cyberpunk 2077, people are wondering if it will be possible for players to develop a romantic relationship with the character. That would be icing on the cake.
In the years since its release in 2005, Psychonauts has become a cult classic as an early game that was about something much deeper than it seemed. But because it was so ahead of its time, Psychonauts found both critical and commercial success to be middling compared to creator Tim Schafer's other knockouts like Secret of Monkey Island.
But in 2019, Psychonauts is back for a sequel, its cult following out in full force to cheer its return to the main stage of Microsoft's E3 showcase. A 30-minute demo for Psychonauts 2and a Q&A with Schafer show the series has found the right time to shine.
You play as Raz, a member of a team of people who use psychic abilities to go inside others' heads. Through puzzles and Psi-Powers, you battle their inner demons, like the goopy Regret monsters in the demo, who can “weigh you down” and are plaguing Dr. Caligosto Loboto's mental world. Loboto's been acting funny lately, so you're tasked with blasting through his mental blockages to figure out who his nefarious “boss” is, a mysterious new character we only got a glimpse of.
“We always approach the more serious themes in Psychonauts with a philosophy of, you never know what's going on in someone's head,” said Schafer. “Anyone who seems like they're acting in a negative way or showing divergent behavior, sometimes if you can just go inside their head, you can see what they're wrestling with. And in this game, you can help them with that. Most of the characters, even the villain in the first game, is redeemed by you helping them wrestle with what's troubling them inside their head. And that's also with lots of laughs along the way.”
Despite all the years in the real world since the first one came out, Psychonauts 2 picks up only three days after that game ended. And though a lot of the original design team is back for the sequel (along with some fresh faces), Schafer emphasized that they still have their work cut out for them.
“It takes time, the game,” he said. “You realize even though it's been many years since the first one and everyone on the team has learned a lot since about how to make games, the process is always just a long journey to figuring what the real heart of the game is.”
In 2017, Double Fine released a VR game in the universe called Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruins. While you don't have to have played that game to jump in on the sequel, the new game will still pull from the lore established in that one. And when asked whether Psychonauts 2 would support VR as well, Schafer slyly replied, “I think that's a smart idea.”
The demo showed how the psychoactive and surreal elements of the game world lend themselves to the kind of wacky mind-bending experiences VR is best known for. In Loboto's mental world, hallways grow longer all of the sudden, or the whole perspective shifts to become like a 2D platformer.
Some whacky stuff going on into Loboto's head
It's like Inception, if Inception was a colorful comedic video game world.
While Psychonauts might look like kid stuff at first, what made it a favorite among headier game critics was how it tackled issues of mental health and illness through gameplay — long before indies like 2018's Hellblade did it.
“There's a lot of topics in the game that can be problematic if you don't approach them in a way that's sincere and respectful,” said Schafer. “It's about drawing from your own personal experiences instead of a stereotype, which makes it actually potentially helpful to people.”
The first game might've released a little too ahead of its time. According to Schafer, the re-release on PC made more money in its first five years than the original release ever made.
And as for finding the heart of the game, Schafer seems to have a pretty good grasp on how, “it's about that sense of empathy, about seeing people from the outside then seeing them from the inside, and realizing you don't understand what they're going through.”
Certainly, he said, that's what's stuck with people since the first game in 2005, even though many of its saddest and most melancholic bits were hidden inside a game world that emphasized comedy.
“But that's what's interesting to me, presenting this slice of life where there's a full range of human experiences,” said Schafer. “It's still funny, but it can go to all the places life stories go.”
Psychonauts 2 is slated for release in 2020 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac and Linux
Minecraft is taking a step into the real world later in 2019, and it's looking to examples like Pokémon Go for inspiration. We've seen Mojang's global sensation flourish in virtual reality already, and now it's taking aim on a new technological frontier: augmented reality.
The new game is called Minecraft Earth and it's exactly what you would think, delivering an Android/iOS take on the Minecraft experience. It's not quite the same as the game you know from PCs, consoles, smartphones, and tablets, but it does embrace the same core ideas.
For starters, it's free to play. Microsoft isn't yet talking about how players will be invited to spend money, beyond asserting up front that there won't be “loot boxes.” McHugh described the monetization philosophy as “player first and player-friendly.” Minecraft Earth won't be an ad-supported app. My guess is in-app purchases will take the form of resources and other time-savers.
When you step outside your home with the app in hand, you'll be looking at a map of your surrounding area but re-written in the game's trademark blocky look. It's like Minecraft layered on top of the real world, with all the points of interaction you'd expect from the bigger game. You can dig down for resources, chop trees to pieces for wood, or go fishing in bodies of water.
“The idea here: Minecraft covers the planet,” Microsoft's Stephen McHugh said during a recent call.
“The idea here: Minecraftcovers the planet.”
“So your neighborhood is blocks, you can walk through parks and neighborhoods and have different Minecraft adventures, you can find blocks and hidden chests. You can build everywhere … and go right inside your builds.”
The whole experience begins with “tappables,” the basic resource-gathering process in Minecraft Earth. It works sort of like PokéStops; whenever you venture out into the world you'll come across interactive nodes in the game that you can tap on to receive resource blocks. It's quick and easy, rewarding you with resources just for interacting with the game while you're on the go.
That only covers your basic resources, however. Rarer blocks can be obtained by taking on Adventures. It's not clear exactly how they'll work, but McHugh described the mode as a “life-sized experience” that could incorporate things like lava and hostile or friendly mobs in addition to rarer resources. Adventures will also be multiplayer-friendly experiences.
Players will be able to scratch that Pokémon Go itch by collecting, raising, and breeding mobs of your own. It starts with feeding one of the random creatures you encounter and getting from it a spawn egg. You can then drop that spawn egg into your own, personalized building space, where it'll hatch and give you a new pet.
That personal Minecraft Earth space is your build plate, which McHugh describes as “the core of our experience.” It's where you can use the resources you've collected to put your own creative spin on the game. It's also a multiplayer-friendly space, so your fellow Minecraft Earthplayers can hop in and behold the glory of your build and even help you add to it — activities that any Minecraft fan will tell you is always a part of the fun.
You won't have to wait too much longer to find out for yourself. Microsoft is planning to kick off a closed beta for Minecraft Earth sometime during the summer. You can get more info on that from the game's official Twitter account.
For a game that is fundamentally about the act of creation, Minecraft hasn't changed all that much.
It's grown, certainly. Updates over the years have added new animals, monsters, and biomes, additional ways to play and — the most important thing, let's be honest — pet cats (among many other things). But the core of it all remains the same: build the blocky world of your dreams.
Now, that's all poised to change.
Minecraft isn't going anywhere. But at E3 2019, Microsoft showcased two fresh takes on what a game bearing that title can be. They're both very different experiences, but each taps into different facets of what's made Minecraft such a powerful force for an all-ages audience.
Dungeon grinding
On one side we have Minecraft Dungeons, which looks and feels like a blocky answer to Diablo. It's a game of exploration and monster combat that sets aside the main game's survival elements entirely. Levels are randomly generated and grouped together by biome, but everything you do is driven by a quest for more loot.
I can't drum on that Diablo comparison hard enough. Your character screen is standard RPG fare, with equipments nodes that correlate to the different types of gear and armor you might equip. You don't choose a character “class” in the traditional sense, though. Instead, the gear you equip determines what kind of adventurer you are.
Loot rarity is a thing, so progress and tougher foes will eventually bring you gear with different-colored thumbnails, featuring more and better spell-like effects. The enchantments that appear on any given loot drop are random, but there's some choice involved as you pick which enchantments to actually activate.
Minecraft Dungeons borrows some of its ideas around progression from games like Destiny, which hinge a character's power level to the numerical ratings on the gear they have equipped. The game isn't out until 2020, so some details are vague at this point; but there's a hub town for managing you progress between dungeon crawls, as well as plans for some kind of endgame (i.e. harder content for the most powerful characters).
The thing that struck me immediately about Dungeons was its sense of personality. Yes, it looks and plays like a Diablo-style game. But there are all these little touches that feel distinctly Minecraft.
Animate door keys need to be beaten into submission and ferried to a locked door, but take care not to let a monster hit you or it might run away. You can acquire wolf companions that follow you around and help out with combat. Bow-wielding skeletons send hails of arrows your way, and the ones that actually land stay where they are for a time, turning your character (and your wolf, when it applies) into walking pincushions.
For all of its trappings as a serious-minded action RPG, Minecraft Dungeons is unassailably cute. Even at a glance, it's the bright, colorful, and perfectly family-friendly Minecraft world kids and adults alike have indulged in for more than 10 years. Not that I'd expect anything different from a game produced by the team at Mojang, but it's a refreshing-yet-familiar twist all the same.
It's a Minecraft world
Being at E3 is hard work.
If Minecraft Dungeons taps deeper into the base game's exploration and survival thrills, Minecraft Earth — which will launch in beta form during the summer months of 2019 — is more directly about the act of creation and reshaping the world around you. You can read that literally here: this is an augmented reality game.
It's easy to call Earth a Minecraft game by way of Pokémon Go, but that undersells what the game is actually doing. Yes, there are walk-around elements that see you wandering around your neighborhood in search of “Tappables,” or caches of basic resources of the kind you'd find readily available even just a few minutes into a fresh Minecraft game.
There are also more developed “adventures” that overlay entire scenes on top of the real world as seen from your phone or tablet screen. It might be a situation where a hole opens in the ground beneath your feet, leaving you to contend with an army of skeletons firing arrows up at you (and your friends, if you're playing in a group).
All of that tapping and adventuring comes together when you visit your build plate. This stretch of virtual terrain is yours to shape however you like, with or without help from friends. It's where all the resources you gather and animals you befriend can be placed. You can build from a bird's-eye perspective, but the magic of AR also lets you expand your creation to life-size proportions and actually walk around inside it.
As you build your own little space inside standard Minecraft, you start to feel a sense of ownership over that randomly generated world. Minecraft Earth takes that idea even further by pulling the same vibe out into the real world that you live in every day. The game uses your local road and terrain maps as the basis for all of your exploration and resource-gathering, so playing is meant to be as easy as going out for a stroll.
Minecraft has come a long way since that first alpha version surfaced back in May 2009. Under Mojang and Microsoft's care, it has grown immeasurably into a fuller version of itself. It may never be “finished” — that's the whole point — but games like Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Earth prove there's plenty of room to accommodate different kinds of experiences for different types of players.
The filmmakers behind the latest movie in the “X-Men” franchise created the uncanny valley but with a real person.
One scene in “Dark Phoenix” has a woman stepping away from her dinner party to tend to a barking dog. When she returns, she seems a bit … off. The color has drained from her face and she’s moving as if her own body is alien to her. That woman is played by Jessica Chastain, and her body has indeed been snatched by an alien named Smith, also played by Chastain.
Smith is the film’s primary villain, and a new addition to the “X-Men” movies. Her goal is to tap into, and usurp, the heightened superpowers that have turned Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) into a nearly unstoppable force. Smith is none too friendly to humanity in that pursuit.
The character has a look that is mildly off-kilter, like a trip into the uncanny valley, but using a human rather than a robot or computer-generated imagery to arrive there. The styling was minimal, but still involved a few thoughtful steps to get Chastain to this human-esque place. Below is a closer look at how.
Hair
Chastain’s light wig was inspired by some of Tilda Swinton’s screen looks.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
Chastain’s light wig was inspired by some of Tilda Swinton’s screen looks.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
The film’s writer and director, Simon Kinberg, said that Chastain wanted a look that went far in the opposite direction from her previous screen appearances. “We looked at stripping down, not just the pigment of her hair down to white, but actually stripping down almost all makeup,” he said in an interview. “She becomes this ghostly, and yet at the same time saintly looking character, depending on your perspective.”
Some of Tilda Swinton’s offbeat looks in movies were considered as inspiration. Chastain wore a light wig that helped in the transformation.
Eyes and Skin
The makeup was limited to a Korean BB cream to make Chastain paler.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
The makeup was limited to a Korean BB cream to make Chastain paler.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
Chastain worked with Linda Dowds, who has done her makeup for several films, including “Molly’s Game” and “Crimson Peak.” Dowds first considered using special contacts to give Chastain’s eyes an out-there look, but decided to forgo the lenses. Instead, she kept the makeup to a minimum, using just a Korean BB cream to make her paler. “It has a tiny bit of iridescence to it,” she said in a phone interview. “It lightens up the skin to give it a little bit of a glow and create something almost ethereal, but not anything too crazy.” The idea was to give “a little clue to something otherworldly, but not completely give it away.”
Lips
A tint, not lipstick, is the only hint of color on Chastain’s face.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
A tint, not lipstick, is the only hint of color on Chastain’s face.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
For Chastain’s lips, Dowds went with a tinted treatment rather than full-on lipstick. “In these lip tints, there’s some moisture and there’s a bit of color in them but they don’t flatten out the lips,” she said. That hint of lip color was the only signifier Dowds used to suggest life in Chastain’s face. Otherwise, it is a sea of paleness, with her eyebrows nearly fading away into the light skin.The filmmakers ruled out an all-white look as too alien.CreditDoane Gregory/Twentieth Century Fox
A Vision in Black
Smith learns how to toggle between light and dark. She needs to seem as if she’s going to Jean to help save her, even when her intentions are more nefarious. That duality also speaks to the larger themes of the movie, which deal in these contrasts. To assist with this visually, the filmmakers paid special attention to Chastain’s costumes.
When Kinberg and Chastain first spoke of the look, he said, she was interested in the idea of her character being clinical, almost like a doctor. So in addition to the pale skin and white hair, she wanted to wear white. “We tested that,” Kinberg said, “and it all started to feel too clinical, too alien.”
“When we put her in black clothes,” he continued, “the juxtaposition made her feel slightly off, but not so much so that if you saw her walk into a bar you would think, well that’s an alien.”
Daniel Orlandi (“Logan”) oversaw the costuming for Chastain, who was dressed primarily in two black outfits. “The black helped make her skin almost translucent,” he said. “It created a chic look, and her silhouette became much stronger when we darkened everything.”
Orlandi decided on a long coat with a little movement. “We tried some blazers, but that just seemed kind of common,” he said. “We wanted her to not be common, but also not flamboyant.” The result is something that feels calming, while projecting a sense of menace at the same time.
As Jean Grey begins to unravel, so do the X-Men as they take on her alter-ego, Dark Phoenix. USA TODAY
Spoiler alert! The following story details a major plot point in the new X-Men movie “Dark Phoenix,” so beware if you haven't seen it yet.
“Dark Phoenix” was pretty much non-stop roiling emotions for Sophie Turner as she filmed the epic breakdown of X-Men heroine Jean Grey. So much so that a running joke arose between Turner and director Simon Kinberg.
“He would be like, ‘All right, another intense climactic scene for the movie!’ And it would be every single day,” says Turner, 23. “I was constantly draining myself emotionally, but it was so exciting for me because it's one of the first roles I've had where I didn’t just stand in the background, able to hang out and make jokes and (mess) around on set. It really put me to the test and I loved it.”
But one scene almost broke Turner.
Seriously. This is your last chance to bail out, because things are about to get super-spoilery.
Powerful telekinetic Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) becomes a pawn in a cosmic conflict when her abilities grow stronger and more unstable in the X-Men film “Dark Phoenix.” (Photo: DOANE GREGORY)
“Dark Phoenix” finds Jean being blown up during a space mission, but instead of dying, she's possessed by a cosmic force that gives her god-like powers. Unfortunately, as addictive as these abilities are, this new entity inside her tears her apart, inside and out.
Jean was orphaned at a young age and taken in by Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) after she survived a car accident that killed her parents. But she finds out that Xavier’s been lying and her dad is still alive, not wanting to have anything to do with her after blaming Jean for his wife’s death.
The X-woman goes to her old home to confront him, and she runs into Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and the X-Men who’ve traveled to find her before she does something rash. Mystique tries to calm her down, but feelings get out of hand and Jean unleashes a telekinetic blast that forcefully impales Mystique onto the business end of a bulldozer, killing her.
“It's the catalyst for everything that happens in the movie,” says Turner, who was “hyperaware” of how important Lawrence’s fatal finale was. “There was a lot of buzz around the scene, and I didn't take it lightly.”
Sophie Turner says her role as a conflicted Jean Grey in “Dark Phoenix” is “on a different level” than any she's played before, including Sansa Stark. AP
The problem was, Turner didn’t sleep at all the night before because she was so worried about the scene, and the actress had trouble mentally getting into it during filming.
“It's such a kind of emotionally hyped-up scene,” Turner says. “I was crying because I couldn't get it, and then the minute I started to feel that kind of frustration and that anger, I realized, ‘This is what Jean is supposed to be feeling right now.’
“The fact that I couldn't get the scene right made me get the scene right.”
Jennifer Lawrence, who stars as the blue-skinned shapeshifter Mystique in “Dark Phoenix,” co-starred with Sophie Turner in one of the film's most pivotal scenes. (Photo: DOANE GREGORY)
Co-star Michael Fassbender was “really blown away” by Turner’s maturity and how she handled each shooting day, he says. “She really has to go to some pretty extreme places emotionally.” And Kinberg adds that actors would tell him how “incredible” she was: “Everybody knows she's a great actress from ‘Game of Thrones,’ but she definitely surprised all of us.”
Headlining “Dark Phoenix” was “a daunting task,” Turner says, but she adored the support from Lawrence and others.
‘I felt like, ‘Well, I'm really going to (mess) this up because I have (freaking) Oscar winners and Oscar nominees all around me and they choose me to lead it? That girl from that TV show?’ ” Turner recalls. “To have them root for me was just the most special thing.
