“Version 1.1 is a free update for all Ghost of Tsushima players,” says Darren Bridges, Senior Game Designer at Sucker Punch Productions. “This update brings the launch of Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, a brand-new co-op multiplayer mode inspired by Japanese mythology, as well as exciting new updates and New Game+ for our single-player campaign!” Yes, Ghost of Tsushima is getting a New Game+ mode. In it, you’ll retain all of the “Techniques, Gear, and Vanity items” you acquired in your main playthrough, but enemies will be much tougher throughout....

While it may not seem that hard to choose a difficulty setting (and the choice obviously comes down to personal preference), the odd names for God of War‘s various difficulty modes combined with the fact that the game doesn’t exactly do the best job of telling you about the differences between them mean that many people boot up the game with more than a few questions about which one is the right one for them....

As spotted by Eurogamer, this GoldenEye 007 mod (which you can find at N64 Vault) completely converts the N64 game’s original campaign mode and instead allows you to play out the major events of the 1977 film, The Spy Who Loved Me. While the mod’s developers recommend playing their project on an actual N64 for the ideal experience, you can technically run it through an emulator as well. Alternatively, you can just watch someone else play the mod and bask in its glory without dealing with the always awkward process of re-learning how to use an N64 controller after all these years....

While Guilty Gear Strive promises an open beta, it’s an open beta similar to ones we’ve seen from other games in the past. That is to say that that the beta will only be “open” to users at different times, will come with certain content restrictions, and may not necessarily represent the final game. That being said, it’s a pretty generous open beta compared to some of the other game trials we’ve seen in recent months....

What compels Michael Myers? Why does he wear the mask? What once seemed to be a simple but ominous question to psychiatrist Samuel Loomis—because he’s EVVILLL!—has somehow led to a dizzying variety of answers among the Halloween franchise’s various timelines and narrative cul-de-sacs. Michael could be evil because of a traumatic childhood and personality disorders, as per Rob Zombie’s recent remakes, or he could be evil because he is the reflective embodiment of an entire town’s hypocrisy (see: Halloween Kills)....

Halo Episode 6 After some fun action last week, a talky Halo episode puts more weight on its thin characterizations than they can handle. The UNSC is on the hunt for the second alien artifact. It could lead them to the Halo ring, but no one is entirely sure what it is. The important thing: both sides, UNSC and Covenant, want it. After attacking Halsey, the Master Chief continues to test the limits of his newfound shackles....

At some point on the drawing board for the Hanna season three finale, there was perhaps a version of the ending in which Hanna, her assassination-target-turned-lover Abbas and his six-year-old daughter Nadiya enjoy a sun-kissed moment at a coastal Mediterranean villa with whitewashed walls and a garden planted with orange trees and grape vines. That was the fantasy Hanna and Abbas created after spending their first night together in the safe house where he was hiding from Utrax assassins....

It’s as if it never went away. After a six year wait, Happy Valley is back and it’s as strong as ever. The characters, the dialogue, the plot and the stakes in this exceptional drama are just as vibrant and entertaining as they were when Sgt Cawood first introduced herself, fire extinguisher in hand, calmly summing up her life story to a petrol-soaked junkie threatening to set himself alight. In fact, the stakes are even higher this time, because creator Sally Wainwright has been clear that Series 3 marks the definitive end of Catherine’s story....

The middle of July is jam-packed with TV goodies like docuseries The Anarchists (July 10), rescued animated project Tuca & Bertie season 3 (July 11), and the latest Nathan Fielder creation The Rehearsal (July 15). The real heavy hitter arrives later on though. Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin premieres on July 28 and will introduce the next generation of the PLL franchise. It doesn’t have a release date yet but July will also host season 3 of the delightful Harley Quinn at some point....

Evil Clown comics used to be a regular feature in National Lampoon. The 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs (based on a Victor Hugo novel) presaged Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s The Joker–a feat we’d see come full circle on screen with 2019’s melodramatic take on the character, Joker–and Rob Zombie’s 31 features a rampaging horde of murderous clowns. So none of this is anything new. In fact in terms of creepy cinematic clowns, few can touch Lon Chaney’s turn in He Who Gets Slapped....

The first episode of Hulu’s final Jeph Loeb produced Marvel series (aside from the upcoming animated offering M.O.D.O.K.) Helstrom has everything you’d expect from the kind of straight-to-streaming exorcism movie you stumble across on a boring Sunday afternoon and immediately regret watching. There’s expository newspaper clippings about terrible crimes, fake exorcisms broken down by a cynically droll demonologist, a new fresh out of the church Vatican believer who wants to do good, creepy diary entries that look like they’ve been scrawled by demonic child, and a lot of sepia toned flashbacks....

Directed by Ron Howard, the film is clearly meant to be empathetic to these Appalachian folks even as it studiously avoids any hint of the divisive politics that have set blue states and red states apart for decades. But that evasion robs the movie of any context or wider background commentary. Perhaps this is done as a way to make it more palatable to general audiences, but it nevertheless giving Hillbilly Elegy a TV movie patina that it never quite shakes....

His Dark Materials Episode 5 If the fun of last week’s episode sent this adaptation soaring up into the skies, the sad weight of this week’s brought it back down. Lyra’s side mission was characterized by terror and grief, Serafina Pekkala’s first appearance was grave and sorrowful, and our introduction to Will Parry added a somber social realist thread to this fantastical story. Stopping the grief from becoming suffocating, there were light moments, and warm ones – at least in Lyra’s world....

The first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel has done right by both fans of the original series and George R.R. Martin’s novel’s. The show has faithfully adapted everything that it can from Martin’s Fire & Blood (which is written as a historical text and therefore leaves much up to interpretation) while also introducing some genuine surprises and alterations. Still, for as fan-friendly as House of the Dragon has been thus far, a handful of Fire & Blood die-hards have pointed out that a major character appears to be missing....

Magic: The Gathering’s new Dungeons & Dragons crossover set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, is finally in the wild. AFR promised to be a crossover with MTG in more than just name, but they’re two wildly different games. How could you capture the feel of a D&D campaign in a card game? The answer seems to be in the flavor: it’s not just how you play a game of Magic with AFR cards that captures D&D; it’s in how well the new set captures the vibe of a campaign with art, card names, and the variability it’s introduced to each hand of Magic: The Gathering....

For some, source material is sacred. But productions that prioritize faithfulness above all else lose so many opportunities, perhaps the most important of which is a chance to reach new and diverse audiences. Some fans of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series, which is set to be adapted into a Shonda Rhimes-produced Netflix adaptation later this month, may bristle at any suggested changes to the source material. However, as we already know from the series’ marketing and production announcements, Bridgerton is open to making major changes to the source material, including altering the racial and ethnic backgrounds of several main characters, adding new characters altogether, and likely incorporating elements from later books into the first season—all signs that this adaptation isn’t looking to make the same mistakes as other period drama adaptations, such as Outlander or Poldark....

“I saw that your serial killer’s dead,” Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) informs partner Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) in an early scene in the opening episode of Evil season 2. “Is there anything I should be worried about there?” The first thing he learns is not to be concerned about any possessive feelings Kristen may harbor towards Orson LeRoux (Darren Pettie), the man Ben says was “bludgeoned.” And while the audience is already pretty sure what happened, that’s about all he gets....

The first season of the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon had to cover a lot of ground. From introducing several dozen new characters—entirely too many of which either shared the same name or looked confusingly like one another—to laying the groundwork for the intra-family civil war that will eventually make dragons extinct, the story spans over two decades of Targaryen history. And, limited to a scant 10 episodes, this means that its narrative is often forced to skip from major event to major event, with little time or space to flesh out the emotional fallout in between The repeated use of multi-year time jumps didn’t really do any of the show’s characters any favors: flattening arcs, blurring motivations, and barely acknowledging entire relationships to an almost laughable degree at various points in season 1....

iCarly ran on Nickelodeon from 2007 through 2012 and embodied these descriptions more than any other adolescent show of the decade. Starring Miranda Cosgrove as the clever and ambitious 13-year-old Carly Shay, the show depicted the journey of teenage exploration through the eyes of her webshow, a program that eerily resembled the entertainment provided by YouTube pioneers and OG social media stars of the time. With her friends Sam (Jeannette McCurdy) and Freddie (Nathan Kress), and her goofy older brother Spencer (Jerry Trainer), Carly shared her oddball sense of humor with her web show audience, and vicariously through her actual TV audience behind the fourth wall....

In a testimonial that appears in the new documentary, Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters, centered on the impact of the eponymous Hellboy comic book creator, Gaiman makes the surprising disclosure that he was tapped by del Toro to script the sequel’s animated prologue. With the film having taken as a stylistic divergence from its darkly-toned 2004 predecessor towards a more colorful fairy tale aesthetic, Gaiman was tasked with giving the segment a more authentic sense of fantastical whimsy, which was better placed in the hands of a writer the caliber of Gaiman....