Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Is the Alchemist with the Mostest in Doctor Strange
He knows how to get a big laugh from nothing more than an arched eyebrow
There are many ridiculous but not inconsiderable pleasures to be found in Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange: The sight of Mads Mikkelsen, villain supreme, skulking around in metallic eye makeup and a silly ponytail; the joy of listening to Chiwetel Ejiofor deliver unapologetically ridiculous dialogue with the same sonorous gravity he’d bring to a production of Hamlet; and last, but hardly least, the vision of Benedict Cumberbatch, as surgeon-turned-sorceror Doctor Strange, attempting to wrestle his rippling red cape into obedience, and failing. All of these things are funny, but not in a “Look how hilarious all of this is!” way, a la James Gunn’s 2014 class clown of a movie Guardians of the Galaxy. Doctor Strange has one significant quality that most Marvel adaptations lack: A sense of humor about itself, which it wears as lightly as the most gossamer Cloak of Levitation.
Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange is the movie incarnation of a minor Marvel character who first appeared in Strange Tales in 1963: He’s no Spider Man, or Iron Man, or Hulk. While Doctor Strange has his own solid fan base, he’s not forced to carry the beloved childhood memories of several million grown men on his shoulders.
That’s the last thing Doctor Strange—cynical, acerbic, supremely confident of his role in the universe—would want, anyway. When we first meet Dr. Steven Strange, he’s not so strange at all: Just a brilliant, glamorous surgeon, with a sweet, smart sometime girlfriend, Rachel McAdams’ Christine, and a drawerful of swanky collectible watches. One night, decked out in evening duds and en route to a charity event, he suffers a terrible car accident. (Texting while driving is his downfall.) His hands are shattered, and no amount of physical therapy will return them to their former unshakable glory. Then he learns of a secret place, somewhere near Kathmandu, where his powers might be restored. There he meets the enigmatic Mordo (Ejiofor), who leads him to a Celtic mystery chick with no eyelashes, The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton). She agrees to help Strange unlock a motherlode of mystical secrets that will, he believes, allow him to return to his old life. Not so fast, Doctor: There’s a price to be paid for all this shamanistic knowledge, and before long, our newly minted necromancer is mixing it up with the nefarious Kaecilius (Mikkelsen) and dodging the wrath of cranky sorcerer-librarian Wong (Benedict Wong).
Until the big climax—every Marvel movie has to have one—Doctor Strange is relatively quiet and visually beautiful, and some of its effects are wondrous: The Ancient One teaches the Strange one to summon currents of orange energy to his fingertips—they swirl around in glowing concentric circles before striking out in fiery flashes, like dragon’s tongues. The movie takes the idea of Christopher Nolan’s folding Paris, from Inception, and expands it into a series of dazzling, kaleidoscopic effects: The streets of New York and Hong Kong fold and unfold like angular M.C. Escher morning glories.
Those are great effects the first time you see them, and maybe the second. By the end of Doctor Strange, they’ve been repeated so often that they lose much of their magic. Luckily, the actors retain all of theirs. Although the casting of Scotswoman Swinton as the Ancient One, originally an Asian character, caused some controversy when it was announced, Swinton is so totally weird and out-there that her features and skin color are practically beside the point. (And though it’s true that Asians are underrepresented in Hollywood movies, the answer isn’t to cast only Asian actors as Asian characters, but to open the world of non-Asian characters to Asian casting. If we’re doomed to a system of one-to-one matching, racewise, that means we could never have an Asian Hamlet or Lear—or, for that matter, a black, Latino or Native American one.)
Even beneath his somber Samurai garb, Ejiofor can’t hide his obvious pleasure in getting to play, finally, a Marvel character: It’s delightful to see him having so much fun. And Cumberbatch, both a natural comedian and a subtle one, knows how to get a big laugh from nothing more than an arched eyebrow. That’s got to be one of the biggest and most delicate feats of wizardry in this vast and unknowable universe, and Cumberbatch comes by it effortlessly: No ancient Celtic secret needed.
Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Is the Alchemist with the Mostest in Doctor Strange
11-year-old soccer fan recreates Celtic Park stadium in Minecraft
The best part about Minecraft is the ability to express and create. Mojang’s sandbox has been used for some pretty impressive builds such as the Kingdom of Galekin that took over five years to build and is still going. Even sports fans can dive into the blocky world and give their support through creativity.
Sam is only 11 years old, and in Minecraft, he is a master architect. He is also a big fan of the CelticFootball Club from Glasgow and proved by building up their home turf in the video ground. The 3D tour of the stadium moves through the tunnel and welcomes the player with bright green field and seats. The build is even complete with a 5-1 score mocking Celtics rivals, the Rangers, from earlier in the season.
It was a creation made specifically for #BuildItScotland, an initiative to introduce children to new technology and ways to recreate monuments and landmarks from Scotland. Maybe we’ll see some other fun builds from the hashtag, but Sam’s Celtic Park in Minecraft scores major points with us!
11-year-old soccer fan recreates Celtic Park stadium in Minecraft
Microsoft launches Minecraft: Education Edition for schools
Microsoft wants kids playing Minecraft in class, and it’s hoping that schools will not just let them, but support them. It’s launching a version of Minecraft today called Minecraft: Education Edition that includes some classroom tools and a way to roll out accounts to every student in a class or district.
The app has been in development since last January, when Microsoft purchased a mod working toward the same goal. The educational tools went into a beta period this summer, with Microsoft hoping to have a full release ready by the time school started. It missed that date by a couple months, but the game is now ready to go on both Windows 10 and macOS.
Despite the new name, Education Edition isn’t dramatically different from regular Minecraft. It’s pretty much the same game, just with some tools that’ll make things easier for teachers — there’s a way to see where all their students are on a map, give students different resources, and teleport people to specific locations. There are also a few new in-game items,
including a camera and a chalkboard.
Microsoft’s hope is that Minecraft can keep kids engaged while teachers use it to explore other subjects. Educators will have to build out worlds that connect with whatever they’re teaching, be it a setting in a book or a historic structure. In one example on the game’s website, an enormous blocky model of the human eye has been made, meant for students to venture inside of to see how it works.
Worlds and lesson plans will be collected on Education Edition’s website, but Microsoft isn’t going to be making these on its own. It’ll be up to teachers to create instructive worlds, and therein could be the problem. Creating a Minecraft world is a time-consuming process — and that’s true even for people who are familiar with Minecraft. Getting teachers to create lesson after lesson just isn’t practical.
That means the success of Education Edition lies in large part on the broader community of educators. If there aren’t enough teachers out there who want to make and share worlds and lesson plans for Minecraft, it’s going to be hard to get a lot of people using it.
The game is available to schools starting today, for $5 per student for a year’s subscription.
Google launches Tango AR smartphone system
After more than two years of tinkering and finessing, today Google finally officially launched its Tango smartphone augmented reality system to the masses.
Right now, it’s only available on Lenovo’s $499 Phab2 Pro, which arrives in stores in the US today, but you can expect to see this in a bunch of Android phones in the next year or so.
About 35 applications are launching with Tango support at launch. I had a chance to demo about a dozen of them and results were mixed. Developers are really still figuring out what these cameras are good for and some might be trying a bit too hard to capitalize on the depth-sensing feature. There are certainly some ground-breaking apps in early infancy.
For gamers, Tango certainly offers a chance to have a more intense gaming session. Titles like Crayola Color Blaster show the ability of games to capitalize on larger playing spaces while utilizing the technology’s tracking abilities.
What were ultimately most intriguing were the non-gaming apps. iStaging allows you to position furniture in your home and see what a new lamp would look like on your desk. This app was one of the most effective in highlighting how much better Tango’s mapping has gotten over the past several months. Matterport’s Scenes app allows users to capture their spaces in volumetric 3D, what that’s actually useful for is a bit limited in scope, but visually it’s really freaking cool and highlights just how sophisticated even Tango’s first effort is.
Tango has tellingly undergone some organizational changes within Google since it was first introduced. The program is now operated directly alongside Google Daydream, the company’s central smartphone virtual reality effort. It’s clear that there’s very little intention to keep these programs separate for too long. The opportunities offered by Tango in terms of inside-out positional tracking would offer VR a major boon if a smartphone is launched that is Tango and Daydream compatible.
For all its notoriety and specialty, Tango is a feature bound for mass consumption. Depth sensing cameras are a feature that will inevitably land on smartphones with the clear use cases becoming most apparent after we all readily have access to them. Tango is starting with a rather tepid launch on a single Lenovo phablet, but the quality experience is certainly there.
Apple says no fun allowed on the Touch Bar
The Touchbar is serious business. Apple’s interface guidelines warn against all kinds of fun things that developers probably started thinking about when the new MacBook Pros leaked earlier this week. No doubt some apps will find a way to be creative even under the stern eye of Apple’s party police, but it’s clearly discouraged.
Here are a few choice items from Apple’s guidelines telling developers how to create Touch Bar interfaces:
- Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display.
- The Touch Bar shouldn’t display alerts, messages, scrolling content, static content, or anything else that commands the user’s attention or distracts from their work on the main screen.
- Avoid animation. The Touch Bar is considered an extension of the keyboard, and people don’t expect animation in their keyboard.
- Use color tastefully and minimally. In general, the Touch Bar should be similar in appearance to the physical keyboard.
- In general, the Touch Bar shouldn’t include controls for tasks such as find, select all, deselect, copy, cut, paste, undo, redo, new, save, close, print, and quit.
Now, admittedly, some of these things could be annoying or pulled off poorly. And it’s clear that Apple wants developers and users both to think of the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard, not of the screen. But prescribing usage in that way often isn’t a good idea. The fact is it’s both, and ought to be used for both.
Who wouldn’t want a stock ticker there, or a Twitter feed, or a progress bar for downloads and file operations? There are plenty of possibilities to explore here, and it seems a disservice to insist that things remain monochrome, key-shaped and static.
I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.
Even if we’re going to keep things boring, why not have copy, paste, save and all those on there? Sure, they duplicate shortcut keys, but so do a bunch of the things they showed onstage today.
Standardizing stuff so users know more or less what to expect is a good idea, especially with a new feature like this, but this is more stifling than standardizing. Experimentation with novel user interfaces has created all kinds of fun apps with intuitive and interesting controls. Apple is pretending it already knows everything about how this interface should be used, when it’s actually a wide open field.
Whether any of this matters depends a lot on how rigorously Apple enforces these design guidelines. Will it be satisfied with simply encouraging its own limited vision of what should appear on the Touch Bar, or will it actively discourage apps that step outside it? We’ll know soon. But it would be a shame to see this cool new feature fall short of its potential.
Microsoft Monday: Windows 10 Creators Update, Surface Studio, Surface Dial, Minecraft For Apple TV
“Microsoft Monday” takes a look back at the past week of news related to Microsoft. This week, “Microsoft Monday” includes details about a fake “Blue Screen of Death” malware that is spreading, the free games for Xbox Live Gold members in November, the Windows 10 Creators Update, the Surface Book i7, the Surface Studio, the Surface Dial, the new MyPeople feature, Minecraft coming to Apple TV and more!
Microsoft Warns That A Fake BSoD Malware Called Hicurdismos Is Spreading
There is a new type of malware that is spreading known as “Hicurdismos.” Hicurdismos poses as Microsoft Security Essentials installer software. In Windows 8 and Windows 10, Windows Defender is installed and enabled by default. But some users might believe they need to download and install Microsoft Security Essentials.
Recently Microsoft discovered a threat detected as SupportScam:MSIL/Hicurdismos, which pretends to be a Microsoft Security Essentials installer. And Hicurdismos shows a fake Windows error message (known as the BSoD or the “blue screen of death”). The normal BSoD requires the user to reboot the computer, but the fake one recommends users to call a fake technical support number. Here is what the fake BSoD looks like:
Fake Blue Screen of Death by Hicurdismos / Photo Credit: Microsoft
And this is what the fake Hicurdismos installer looks like:
Hicurdismos fake security installer / Photo Credit: Microsoft
“The threat of technical support scams has been around for years, but it’s recently been observed to be growing. We’ve seen attackers becoming more sophisticated with their social engineering tactics to try to mislead users into calling for technical support and then they are asked for payment to ‘fix the problem’ on the PC that does not exist. Real error messages from Microsoft do not include support contact details,” said Microsoft in a blog post.
In the month of November, Xbox Live Gold users will be eligible for four new free games — two on the Xbox One and two on the Xbox 360. And both of the Xbox 360 games can be played on the Xbox One with backward compatibility.
Xbox One
Xbox Live Gold members can download Super Dungeon Bros for free during the month of November. And Murdered: Soul Suspect will be available for free from November 16th – December 15th.
Xbox 360
Monkey Island: SE will be free for Xbox Live Gold members between November 1st – November 15th. And Xbox Live Gold members can download Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon for free between November 16th – November 30th.
Microsoft Announces Windows 10 Creators Update, Surface Book i7, Surface Studio, Surface Dial And MyPeople
Last week, Microsoft hosted a Windows 10 event in New York City where it announced the Windows 10 Creators Update and several new devices.
Windows 10 Creators Update
Microsoft is emphasizing new creativity and gaming experiences with the Windows 10 Creators Update. One of the biggest additions is Paint 3D Preview.
Paint 3D / Photo Credit: Microsoft
Paint 3D Preview allows users to quickly create 3D objects. Using Paint 3D Preview, you can also turn 2D images into 3D objects “with just a click.” And Minecraft players will be able to 3D print items from the game Paint 3D. Microsoft is creating an online community of 3D printing fans to share their work and upload creations called Remix 3D. Remix 3D will support uploads from the SketchUp application.
The Creators Update also adds new features to Xbox such as e-sports and streaming broadcasts. Microsoft announced it has partnered with a company called Beam for the streaming partnership. And there is a tournament creation mode so users can customize brackets. In the past, Microsoft organized the Arena tournaments.
Microsoft Partners With Five Companies For Virtual Reality
At the Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced it has partnered with 5 companies for its VR headset platform. The five companies include HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus and Acer. These five companies will build virtual reality headsets with starting prices of $299. This means that there will be many more options than having to pick between VR headsets made by Oculus and HTC.
The new devices that were announced include the the Surface Book i7, Surface Studio and the Surface Dial.
Surface Book i7
Surface Book i7 / Photo Credit: Microsoft
The Surface Book i7 is the successor to the 13.5-inch Surface Book released in 2015. In comparison to the previous Surface Book, the Surface Book i7 has 30% more battery life meaning it has up to 16 hours of battery life rather than 12 hours in the previous model. The Surface Book has an Intel Core i7 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M GPU and a detachable 13-inch display. The retail price of the Surface Book i7 starts at $2,399. At the starting price, the Surface Book i7 has 8GB of RAM and 256 SSD storage. With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M GPU and 2GB GDDR5 memory, the Surface Book i7 is able to push 1.9 teraflops of graphics which gives it double the performance of last year’s model.
Microsoft Surface Studio
Microsoft also unveiled an all-in-one PC called the Surface Studio. The Surface Studio has a 12.5mm touch screen, making it the thinnest LCD monitor ever built. The monitor is a 28-inch PixelSense Display with 13.5 million pixels and a TrueColor feature making colors appear rich and vivid. With a zero gravity hinge, the monitor can be brought down to a 20-degree angle.
The Surface Studio has a starting price of $2,999. This model includes an Intel Core i5 processor, 1TB hybrid drive and 8GB RAM.
Surface Dial
Surface Dial / Photo Credit: Microsoft
Another major hardware announcement was the Surface Dial. The Surface Dial can be placed on the screen of the Surface Studio. From there, the Surface Studio will be able to automatically detect the location of the dial to generate buttons and toolsets for artists to edit designs. This tool would be especially useful for scrolling and zooming. You can also use the Dial to click or tap to pull up certain features. The Surface Dial – which is also compatible with the Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book – is available for pre-order now at a cost of $99.
MyPeople
Microsoft MyPeople
Microsoft is also working on new features as part of the Windows 10 Creators Update so that you can message people from the desktop similar to the way Apple’s iMessage platform works. The MyPeople feature will show you your contacts at the bottom right of the screen and you can send them content without having to open up a separate app.
“With MyPeople, you get faster ways to connect and share with the people who matter most. Instantly access your key people from the taskbar, use apps of your choice to connect, send emojis, and share files or photos with drag-and-drop,” says Microsoft.
The Windows 10 Creators Update is expected to launch in the spring of 2017.
Minecraft Coming To Apple TV
Minecraft / Image Credit: Mojang
During the Mac announcement last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook discussed an Apple TV update. The Apple TV now has over 8,000 apps and it will soon be getting Minecraft, the popular sandbox game created by Microsoft’s Mojang. Specifically, Minecraft should be added to the Apple TV by the end of the year. To optimize the game play experience, you will most likely want to buy a third party controller for the Apple TV.
Microsoft Monday: Windows 10 Creators Update, Surface Studio, Surface Dial, Minecraft For Apple TV
Apple News & Updates: Company Working With Minecraft To Launch It On Apple TV?
MacBook Event was held last Thursday and everyone felt excited as Apple announced the Apple TV. The best part would be this brand new TV would allow access from users from the TV content across other devices.
That announcement got Minecraft fans most excited and thrilled. Minecraft will be coming to Apple TV device before the end of 2016.
Minecraft is a popular game, a block-building survival game that got a lot of people hooked. The announcement would mean that the creators of Minecraft need to work on another platform again. The mobile versions of Minecraft on Windows 10, iOS and Android will be part of the apps cross- platform play.
Minecraft, now officially announced according to TechCrunch, to be on Apple TV, can result to a major assumption that lots of platforms would have its own version. An article in Venture Beat stated that the game Minecraft was originally released for PCs. Also, the property of $2.5 billion was purchased by Microsoft in 2014.
Microsoft, as much as Apple is interested with Minecraft, has its own plan with it. Last June, Microsoft released its plan in a tradeshow that the Minecraft experience will unified across devices through Xbox Live. So now that Apple announced that Minecraft will be on Apple TV, Microsoft’s market have a chance to get more consumers.
Apple TV though have more than Minecraft in mind. By the end of the year, there will be more than 1,600 apps and there is a possibility that a bigger app would be announced to take part.According to BGR, Apple while looking for a better TV experience came up with the app ‘TV’, this is the brand new Apple TV app. This could change the way one watch on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad.
The TV app by Apple will be released this December in the US and is available on tvOS, iOS and macOS. And there’s one interesting information that came from BGR, Netflix and Amazon Video seems to be ‘not’ part of Apple’s new venture towards Apple TV.
Apple News & Updates: Company Working With Minecraft To Launch It On Apple TV?
10 Marvel Comics Characters that Deserve Their Own Horror Movie
In the 15-30 minutes of downtime I corner in a day, I have a tendency to dive into comic books. Old, new, Marvel, DC, IDW, Dark Horse – you name it, I read it. It’s been this way for years, which have given me some wild insight into this creative universe. It’s also gifted me with an extensive knowledge of comic monsters. Today’s focus are a few of the monsters ruling the Marvel Comics universe. These are beasts who deserve their own films. But not those family friendly comic adaptations, we’re talking full bore horror films. Check out 10 Marvel Comics characters that deserve their own horror movies!
Morbius
Uh… Morbius is a living vampire. Yeah, you read that right: He’s a living vampire! He consumes blood, he attacks the unsuspecting, he stalks the streets under light of the moon. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything other than sinking his incisors into your neck and draining every last drop of your blood. Assuming Blade can’t track the man down, he could really run roughshod on a group of intoxicated 20-somethings.
Venom
Come on now, Venom is already one of the coolest and most imposing villains Spiderman has ever had the misfortune of facing. You know he’s a bad ass. You know he’d just as soon kill a speedbump as opposed to slowing for it, and you know that, while that symbiote is really worked up, he’s completely remorseless. This beast would make for a paralyzing villain in a horror feature.
Calypso
A psychopathic voodoo priestess of Haitian nationality… hmm, just imagine the possibilities! Seeing genuinely menacing female antagonists is always great. When they just so happen to be as unpredictable as Calypso, well, that just adds to the fun. This is a character that’s often gone underappreciated, but with the right casting, she could be one genuinely vile beast fully capable of fronting a horror film!
Carnage
Carnage is basically the ultraviolent version of Venom. In fact, in many ways Carnage makes Venom look like a boy scout. If you want to see a Marvel character that could make for a horrendously bloody film, you want to see Carnage. The dude more than lives up to his name, and you can bet were this feared commodity given the chance to front his own film we’d see an absurd amount of extremely grahic violence. We’re talking Hard-R, at the least!
Deathlok
Deathlok is a reanimated monster enhanced by cybernetics. He’s basically a cross between a zombie and the Terminator. If that’s not the kind of character who could take heads (and maybe eat a little brains in the process) and leave viewers stunned at his murderous aggression, I simply don’t know who, or what is!
Wolverine
Let’s just cut the crap and forget all about the X-Men flicks, and the Wolverine flicks we’ve seen. In each of those pictures Wolvie was displayed as a good guy with an angry streak. But let’s just imagine Wolverine on a true rampage, a mission to slaughter anyone and everyone. That could be the darkest Marvel movie ever created. And the blood… goodness the blood!
Jack O’Lantern
This dude just looks awesome. In fact, the villainous Jack O’Lantern makes Ghost Rider look like an anorexic weirdo with a BIC lighter affixed to his neck. What’s also cool about this character is the fact that he could totally and completely own a Halloween-themed genre pic. He might even give the Headless Horseman a good run for his money!
Legion of Monsters
Is this cheating? It sure feels like cheating. With Dracula, the Mummy, a hideous Wolfman and more on deck, this group seems like a very obvious selection for a big screen transfer. In fact, in some ways we’ve already seen this. And I’m not talking about classic Universal Monster Crossovers, I’m talking about the 80s flick we all hold so dear to our hearts: The Monster Squad.
Not that we’d be against a new rendition featuring these specific Marvel characters!
Man-Thing
A cross between the Swamp Thing and Cthulu, this character is destined to front a violence packed, blood-flinging flick in which vengeance at the core. Ted was wronged by those he trusted. They betrayed him in his quest to create the super soldier. But when he consumes that serum himself it turns him into something vicious… a monstrous killing machine and you can bet, there isn’t a single soul safe in the beast’s presence! Awesome flick in the making? We think so!!
Scarecrow
This dude was certifiably insane. He slaughtered too many innocents to count. He beefed with just about every noteworthy superhero on the Marvel roster. And through it all, he clung to that insanity, and then slaughtered more unsuspecting victims. In short, he’s a killing machine, and given his cool getup and ice cold demeanor, he could make for an absolutely magical horror film. Just keep all the Avengers away from him while he does his evil bidding!
10 Marvel Comics Characters that Deserve Their Own Horror Movie
40 Greatest TV Villains of All Time
Cyborgs and serial killers, crime bosses and capitalist pigs, literal demons and just plain dickheads: Evil takes many forms on television, and rare is the show that would be any good without it. After all, a memorable villain does more than provide someone for the main characters to punch, shoot, or wrestle into a pond in evening attire — they reveal the protagonists for who they are by demonstrating who they’re not. And let’s face it, they usually get the coolest lines.
Below you’ll find the 40 finest villains ever to (dis)grace your TV screen. No antiheroes here: Rather than clog up the list with the Don Drapers, Piper Chapmans, Walter Whites, and Tony Sopranos of the world, who drive their own stories, we stuck strictly with the characters who exist to run the others off the road. And believe us, this crew is the best at being the worst.
40. Kilgrave, ‘Jessica Jones’
“Jessicaaaaa!” If you’ve ever been filled with dread simply by hearing your own name called by someone who “loves” you, the telepathic predator no doubt struck a nerve. Actor David Tennant is best known for playing one of TV’s most iconic heroes on Doctor Who, and his turn as a villain sees him feed more than a little scenery into his maw. But the Kilgrave concept is so chilling, and so resonant with all-too-real abuse, that the character still belongs in any discussion of TV evil.
39. Ace, ‘Girls’
The murderous metahuman called Sylar from NBC’s Heroes was Zachary Quinto’s breakout role, but an even better villain awaited him. That would be Ace, the preposterously awful hipster who blew up the lives of multiple characters in Girls‘ fourth season. Given the charges of millennial self-absorption frequently leveled at Lena Dunham’s dramedy, creating the worst possible Brooklyn stereotype imaginable — from his jaunty cap to his trademark toothbrush, it’s like he was sprung from the same place the fraudulent chocolate brothers bought their beards — to be the core crew’s antagonist was a masterstroke. His best line, “Let’s take some selfies and get weird,” is what the Borg would tell people if it was going to assimilate them into Williamsburg.
38. Thomas Barrow, ‘Downton Abbey’
Of course, the show’s greatest villain is the British aristocracy itself. But if we limit ourselves to actual human beings, then scheming, sneering footman Thomas Barrow takes top billing. Embittered by both life in the closet and the underappreciated existence of the servant class, Thomas takes it out on his fellow employees with DGAF devilishness. Striking actor Rob James-Collier imbues his every scheme with a vibe that’s half snake charmer, half snake. But over time, as Thomas’ plight deepens — cowardice during the Great War, countless social-climbing attempts gone wrong, his attempts to “cure” his homosexuality — so does our sympathy.
37. Skeletor, ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’
The action cartoons of the 1980s were full of memorable villains, which made good financial sense: Many were glorified commercials for toy companies, and kids needed figures for their heroes to fight, right? But of all the big names — Cobra Commander, Megatron, Hordak, Mumm-Ra, the Shredder, the Misfits — Skeletor stands out from the pack. His skull-faced character design is a perfect encapsulation of what a “bad guy” would look like to a child, and that imperious cackling voice (courtesy of actor Alan Oppenheimer) is the sonic antithesis of He-Man’s heroic “By the power of Greyskull” battle cry. And most importantly for young viewers, he never wins.
36. The One-Armed Man, ‘The Fugitive’
Less a villain than the idea of a bad guy, the One-Armed Man was the human maguffin who drove The Fugitive‘s basic story — the real killer of Dr. Richard Kimble’s wife, whom the good doctor was on a quest to catch and thereby clear his name. Played by Bill Raisch, he was only glimpsed a handful of times before the end, but his influence lingers on: He bequeathed his moniker and disability to a prominent Twin Peaks character (real name: Philip Gerard, after the cop tracking Kimble down), and he’s synonymous with the mystery culprits that conspiracy theorists and accused killers alike concoct to explain seemingly open-and-shut crimes.
35. Reverse Flash, ‘The Flash’
You have to hand it to the writers of the show, one of the best and brightest of superhero TV’s new breed. (Spoilers ahoy!) After painstakingly establishing scientific genius Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh) as the Scarlet Speedster’s yellow-clad, time-traveling opposite number, they then revealed that Wells wasn’t Wells at all — he was Eobard Thawne (Matt Letscher), who murdered the man and stole his identity to accelerate his villainous schemes. The whole story is the kind of bait-and-switch a supervillain would love.
34. The Trinity Killer, ‘Dexter’
Talk about killer casting. Actor John Lithgow had long walked the line between manic and maniac in his performances, comedic or otherwise, but his role as Arthur Mitchell — the so-called “Trinity Killer” was — saw him leap that line in terrifying fashion. Initially seen as a family-man role model, he’s revealed to be Dexter‘s most prolific and disturbing murderer — evil in a way not even our homicidal antihero can stomach. This makes him the titular killer of killers’ most formidable target; it also places the people Dexter cares about in grave peril, as he learns to his lasting devastation.
33. The Gentlemen, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’
Faith, Angelus, Spike, Drusilla, Glory, the Mayor, Dark Willow: Joss Whedon’s influential horror-action-teen-drama hybrid had no shortage of memorable baddies, big and otherwise. But sometimes one episode is all it takes to cement your place in the horror hall of fame, and that’s the deal with the Gentlemen — the smiling, silent, spectral stars of the landmark episode “Hush.” Other Buffy villains may have wreaked more havoc or broken more hearts, but these entities were genuine nightmare fuel.
32. Constance Langdon, ‘American Horror Story’
We’ll say this for Ryan Murphy’s over-the-top anthology series: When it comes to creating memorable villains for talented actresses, the show is an assembly line. Take Constance Langdon, the murderous woman scorned at the center of the show’s first season, commonly called “Murder House.” Leaving a trail of dead bodies and cutting one-liners in her cigarette-scented wake, she was played by Jessica Lange like a one-woman crossover between Sunset Boulevard and The Amityville Horror
31. Black Jack Randall, ‘Outlander’
Racist, rapist, killer, colonialist, self-loathing closet case — plenty of actors would take this sadistic British army officer straight into moustache-twirling territory, and Starz’s bodice-ripper practically demands it. But Tobias Menzies does something special with Black Jack Randall, glowering and growling through every scene as though he’s a man incapable of experiencing pleasure at all, except at the expense of other people. While sexual sadists like Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones (on which Menzies briefly co-starred as Robb Stark’s doofus uncle Edmure Tully) delight in their depravity, Black Jack is harrowingly joyless.
30. The Master, ‘Doctor Who’
He’s the Doctor’s fellow Time Lord, and the entire multiversal spacetime continuum ain’t big enough for the both of them. Created to be the Moriarty to the do-gooding Doctor’s Sherlock Holmes, the Master has seen a number of incarnations over the course of the long-running British sci-fi series, from Roger Delgado’s Satanic approach to John Simm’s Tory-sociopath vibe. (“He” is currently a woman, played by Michelle Gomez.) But no matter who plays him or what he looks like, his goal is clear: Conquer the universe, and make the Doctor pay while doing it.
29. Lucretia, ‘Spartacus’
By any reasonable standard, Lucy Lawless’ warrior princess Xena would rank high on a list of TV’s greatest heroes. But like the god Janus, she has two faces, and her Spartacus villain Lucretia is the glorious result. Clawing her way up the social ladder at the side of her equally loathsome husband Quintus Batiatus, she views her slaves as little more than sexual playthings and disposable work animals; the revolt led by the couple’s prize gladiator is an inevitable response to that kind of cruelty. But there’s a tragic element to the fate that befalls her, too — it’s not hard to hear echoes of her arc in that of Cersei Lannister, Game of Thrones‘ similarly dangerous grand dame.
28. Vee, ‘Orange Is the New Black’
For some villains, how they die is almost as important as how they live. Played by Lorraine Toussaint (whose defense attorney Shambala Green would rank high on a list of the best recurring Law & Order characters, by the way), Vee was OITNB‘s second-season antagonist, a position she earned through psychological manipulation and brute force alike. A Fagin-like figure who used kids like Taystee as drug runners back in the day, she brutally assaulted Red and viciously manipulated Crazy Eyes before escaping. But her freedom was short-lived, thanks to a van-tastic demise that ranks as one of the great TV villain death scenes. Always so rude, that one!
27. Alexis Carrington, ‘Dynasty’
Few actor/character combinations have ever felt as seamless as Joan Collins’s embodiment of Alexis Carrington. She spent her tenure on the glitzy Eighties primetime soap making the lives of her ex-husband, oil magnate Blake Carrington, and his wife Krystle a living hell, all while looking and sounding like she just stepped off the Iron Throne. More than just a schemer, she was a physical threat as well: Her catfights, particularly the knock-down drag-out brawl with Krystle that saw them splashing and thrashing through a pond full of lilypads, were the stuff of legend.
26. Wilson Fisk, ‘Daredevil’
The kingpin of crime in Marvel’s first Netflix series brought a welcome complexity to comic-book black-and-white morality. Yes, he was a vicious ganglord, using an army of interconnected ethnic mobs to clear the way for his even more rapacious white-collar crimes of gentrification. But he was also a softie who genuinely cared about his mom, his girlfriend Vanessa, and, in his own perverse way, the city he tried to rule. The great Vincent D’Onofrio played Fisk like an overgrown toddler — vulnerable one minute and filled with tantrum-like rage the next. The performance risked alienating an audience for superhero media used to clear-cut crowd-pleasers, which is Fisk’s boldest move of all.
25. The Yellow King, ‘True Detective’
You know you’ve got a good villain on your hands when he manages to drive not just his victims but the entire viewing public insane. The figure at the center of the anthology show’s first season was the minotaur in its labyrinth of occult references and Satanic-panic creepiness — a boogeyman who turned out to be Errol Childress, odd-job worker and an enthusiastic serial killer of women and children. But this inbred good ol’ boy was best known as the Yellow King, the hallucinatory identity that Rust Cohle and Marty Hunt hunted for for years. It didn’t hurt that he was played by Glenn Fleshler, who’s carved out a nice niche as TV’s go-to heavy (see Boardwalk Empire, Hannibal, Billions).
24. Nina Myers, ’24’
Move over, Benedict Arnold: America has a new top traitor in town. Over the course of the show’s first season — ahem, first day — Nina went from heroic CTU operative to hated, murdering mole, serving as Jack Bauer’s archenemy for two more seasons before finally receiving the same lethal punishment she’d doled out to so many others. Actor Sarah Clarke gave Nina a steely-eyed glare and an equally unyielding personality, separating her from the jittery, guilt-ridden double agent Nicholas Brody whom 24 staffers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa would go on to create for Homeland.
23. Duck Phillips, ‘Mad Men’
For every Draper, there is an equal and opposite anti-Draper. Not-quite-recovered alcoholic advertising executive Duck Phillips (Mark Moses, in a challenging role) was a recurring thorn in the side of Mad Men‘s main man, a fact made all the more frustrating by the fact that Don hired him to begin with; he also stood as the single strongest example of Peggy Olsen’s terrible taste in men. Whether attempting to shit in Don’s office, staging a drunken swing-and-miss brawl with him in the men’s room, or (most unforgivably) ditching his family dog, Duck never had his ducks in a row. It didn’t make him the office’s resident alpha male, but it did make him the perfect foil for Draper’s unbeatable combo of looks, lies, luck, and raw talent.
22. Vern Schillinger, ‘Oz’
Long before he terrified Peter Parker as J. Jonah Jameson or triggered PTSD flashbacks for music majors everywhere in Whiplash, J.K. Simmons was the influential HBO prison drama’s equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West. Only instead of a broomstick and an army of flying monkeys, he had penchant for rape and terrorizing the penitentiary’s inmates, with an army of white-supremacist gang members to back it up. And his torment of, and payback by, his nebbishy “prag” Tobias Beecher was the show’s most visceral example of Oz‘s villain/victim dynamic.
21. The Cigarette Smoking Man, ‘The X-Files’
It was intended to refer to the likely longterm result of his tobacco habit, but this conspiratorial character’s second sobriquet, “Cancer Man,” is in many ways more apt. He and his shadowy Syndicate ate away the system from the inside, preparing the planet for alien invasion with a ruthless, decades-long cover-up — which, ironically, only Mulder and Scully managed to uncover. Played with weathered gravitas by William B. Davis, he is perhaps the prime example of the mastermind model of TV villainy.
20. Amanda Woodward, ‘Melrose Place’
Quick: Name a show about a high-powered, highly sexed advertising executive who emerged from an abusive past by seducing, fighting, lying, and occasionally actually earning their way to the top, even faking death to start a new life. Good guess, but Melrose Place did it with Amanda Woodward when Don Draper wasn’t even a twinkle in Matthew Weiner’s eye. Introduced late into the era-definining drama’s first season and played by Heather Locklear, whose stint on Dynasty gave her an impeccable primetime-soap pedigree, Amanda’s unpredictable secrets and voracious appetite for the male characters made her a sensation. Like several villains on this list, she was an afterthought addition who wound up taking over the whole damn show.
19. The Governor, ‘The Walking Dead’
No character before or since has demonstrated The Walking Dead‘s core contention that humans are a bigger threat to humanity than zombies ever could be than the tyrant formerly known as Brian Blake. Played from behind the black void of an eyepatch by an icy David Morrissey, the Governor ruled his survivor town of Woodbury with an iron fist. He mercilessly slaughtered outsiders and dissidents alike, and even turned on his loyal followers when they fail him. And his war with Rick Grimes and company for control of the prison where the latter group tried to make their home raised the show’s already brutal stakes to new levels of intensity.
18. Hannibal Lecter, ‘Hannibal’
Mads Mikkelsen is such an extremely handsome guy that if he didn’t have access to knives he could probably kill you with those cheekbones. But don’t let the tumblr gifsets fool you: On the inside, Dr. Hannibal Lecter is as close to pure evil as television has come. Believing humanity to be little more than pigs fit for slaughter, Lecter spends the bulk of Bryan Fuller’s beautiful, miraculously bloody series tormenting his opposite number, empathic FBI profiler Will Graham. When not carving up human bodies, he slices into Will’s brain — perhaps the only mind capable of comprehending his deranged ideas and emotions. But understanding can only get you so far, because in the end there’s no explanation for what he is. “Nothing happened to me,” he says. “I happened.”
17. Number Two, ‘The Prisoner’
When even the archvillains are interchangeable cogs in the machine, you know bad shit is afoot. This was the dilemma faced by Number Six, the stiff-upper-lip spy imprisoned in a bizarre open-air psychological experiment called the Village, in actor/writer/director/co-creator Patrick McGoohan’s paranoid classic. The colony is run by a series of operatives called Number Two, each of whom devises their own ways of trying to break our mysterious hero down. Few last long in the position, though by appearing in three separate episodes, including the soul-crushing highlight “The Chimes of Big Ben,” Leo McKern deserves special mention. If you’ve ever had to answer to the contradictory whims of uncaring bosses in a soulless corporate work environment, you know Number Two by heart already.
16. Newman, ‘Seinfeld’
“Helloooo, Newman.” Wayne Knight’s nosy neighbor was such a noxious presence in the lives of Seinfeld‘s gang of four that he generated a trademark villainous catchphrase from someone else — the sitcom equivalent of the Death Star making Luke Skywalker say “I have a bad feeling about this.” Whether part of the vast Postal Service conspiracy or all on his own, Newman was a nuisance in human form, and a type recognizable to anyone petty enough to have their own low-key arch-nemesis, which is basically all of us. “Perhaps there’s more to Newman than meets the eye,” Elaine once mused. “No,” Jerry spits back. “There’s less.”
15. Head Six, ‘Battlestar Galactica’
Or Cylons: It’s Complicated. Played with smoldering menace by Tricia Helfer, “Head Six” was so named because she was the Six-model Cylon (the humanoid robots bent on exterminating humanity) who seemed to exist only in the head of sleazy scientist Gaius Baltar. Maybe she was a hallucination, induced by trauma or guilt over accidentally enabling humanity’s partial demise. Or maybe she was some kind of cybernetic transmission who seduced him into triggering the apocalypse. Regardless, Head Six was of the great sci-fi allegory’s big ideas about morality, loyalty, deception, technology, and spirituality, all wrapped up in a little red dress.
14. Boyd Crowder, ‘Justified’
The Joker to Raylan Givens’s Batman, Boyd Crowder was the villain whose existence makes the hero possible. Thanks to actor Walton Goggins (who’s name sounds the moniker of a Justified villain), Boyd’s Southern-friend charisma helped him blow past a demise the writers planned for his very first appearance and made him as indispensable to the show as Timothy Olyphant’s straight-shooting protagonist. Through his many reversals of both fortune and morality, his compelling presence was a consistent throughline no matter which side of the law he wound up on.
13. Rowan Pope, ‘Scandal’
From Don Draper to Darth Vader, bad dads dominate our collective conception of villainy — and Rowan Pope makes those guys look like candidates for father of the year. As befits the mind-racingly twisty soap/political drama/thriller centered on his daughter Olivia, Papa Pope takes the morally dubious dynamics that make her such a compelling antihero and cranks them up to 11. Anything she can do, actor Joe Morton’s cold-blooded black-ops expert can do meaner, and has most likely been doing since before she was born. To him, she’s merely one of his many achievements — and as monologues like the rip-roarer above indicate, if he can’t have her, no one will.
12. Gyp Rosetti, ‘Boardwalk Empire’
“Nothing’s personal? What the fuck is life if it’s not personal?” That’s the beauty of the berserk Prohibition Era gangster who stole the third season of Boardwalk Empire — and, nearly, said empire itself — out from under Nucky Thompson’s nose. Wish him good luck, tell him it’s nothing personal, and he’ll take these harmless conversational niceties as insults worth murdering you for. Actor Bobby Cannavale dug into this role like a starving mafioso with a plate of pasta, and the resulting feast won him an Emmy. The sight of him walking through a shot-up whorehouse, blood-soaked and bare-assed naked with an autoerotic-asphyxiation belt still dangling from his neck, is one for the ages; the dude was an animal, and at that moment, it showed.
11. J.R. Ewing, ‘Dallas’
“Who shot J.R.?” That was the question that commanded the pop-culture zeitgeist of a nation, after the oil-magnate patriarch of primetime got popped. A better question: Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t have? As played by Larry Hagman, Ewing was proof of Hamlet’s lament “that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain”; no matter how dirty his deeds, he looked like he was having the time of his life. And given the subsequent ascendency of Ronald Reagan’s big-business, greed-is-good conservatism, the Dallas villain ended up being as much a prophet as he was a profiteer.
10. Catwoman, ‘Batman’
Cats have nine lives, but all it took for this particular kitty to attain pop-culture immortality was three. Actresses Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, and (in the big-screen cash-in movie version) Lee Meriwether each slipped into the black catsuit and slinked their way into the pantheon of Batman villains — no small feat, given that the Caped Crusader has the strongest rogues’ gallery in the entire superhero genre. Of course, compared to Cesar Romero’s Joker, Frank Gorshin’s Riddler, or Burgess Meredith’s Penguin, Catwoman certainly had sex appeal on her side, but there’s more to her than that. Any connection between this femme fatale and feminism was likely unintentional on the part of the producers, but the way her feline wiles made total fools of the Dynamic Duo spoke, or purred, for itself.
9. The Borg, ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’
“You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” For a collective consciousness of cybernetic organisms, the Borg sure have a way with words. While great Star Trek villains from Khan to Q draw strength from their individual idiosyncrasies and performances, the power of this alien race stems from the dystopian sci-fi perfection of the concept, courtesy of writer Maurice Hurley. The idea of a vast, cool, unsympathetic intelligence floating through the remote corners of the universe, absorbing entire civilizations unimpeded for centuries, is exactly the kind of heady stuff that characterized the franchise at its best. Of course, making them look like Hellraiser gone cyberpunk didn’t hurt either — nor did briefly assimilating Captain Jean-Luc Picard as “Locutus of Borg,” literally turning him into his own worst enemy.
8. Montgomery Burns, ‘The Simpsons’
When our socialist great-grandchildren use collectively funded time machines to travel back to our era, all they’ll need to understand capitalism is this man. Homer Simpson’s plutocrat boss (voiced, along with his obsequious minion Smithers, by Harry Shearer) is a man so wealthy that he’s completely out of touch with the reality that the rabble experience — and so obsessed with becoming even more wealthy that it almost qualifies as both a mental and phyisical illness. We think we speak for all of us when we say Boo-urns!
7. Gus Fring, ‘Breaking Bad’
Long live the Chicken Man! It’s difficult to overstate how crucial this criminal genius was to the appeal of Breaking Bad‘s central seasons, which first helped solidify the show’s cult following before turning it into a massive mainstream phenomenon. A brutal druglord beneath a legitimate-businessman exterior, everything about this fast-food exec-cum-ruler of a meth empire was as carefully constructed as his impeccable wardrobe and soft, precise speaking voice. (We can still hear actor Giancarlo Espositio croaking “I will kill your infant daughter.” Shudder.) He simply seemed impossible to outwit or defeat, which made the times Walter White pulled it off all the more impressive.
6. Al Swearengen, ‘Deadwood’
Open the fuckin’ canned peaches —it’s time to celebrate the cocksucker who made David Milch’s wondrous Western what it was. Black of both hair and heart, Swearengen wore many hats, though none were ten-gallon: bar owner, pimp, gangster, multiple murderer, and eventually, ersatz community organizer. Ruling from the Gem Saloon like a spider at the center of a web, he wound up just as ferocious in defending the town as he had been in exploiting it, with his hatred of the rich — and pathological fear of the Pinkertons — exposing a human side to his oily insectoid malevolence. Throughout the series, Ian McShane delivered every word of Milch’s gutter-Shakespeare patois like a man savoring the best drink he’s ever been poured, making Swearengen not just a great villain, but the prime exponent of a great show.
5. Bob, ‘Twin Peaks’
Behold, the answer to the question: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” As a being from the extradimensional vortex of evil with the red curtains and zig-zag flooring that was Twin Peaks’ visual signature, Bob is a kind of demon who relies on possession to perpetrate his horrible crimes. And while we won’t tell you whom he took over to commit the murder at the heart of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s still-peerless horror-mystery masterpiece, we will say that his every on-screen appearance, from the truly shocking reveal on down, is the stuff of nightmares. Actor Frank Silva, who screamed and laughed his way through the part like he was possessed, was just a crew member until a couple of coincidental glimpses of him on set led Lynch to create the character for him. The result: the greatest ghoul in the history of television, hands down.
4. Joffrey Baratheon, ‘Game of Thrones’
Seven gods, seven kingdoms, zero redeeming qualities — the atrocious boy king who bedeviled House Stark was a living embodiment of George R.R. Martin’s furious fantasy revisionism: If you’re a rich man with a good family name, you can get away with literally anything. In Joffrey’s case, this included torture, murder, sexual assault, the beheading of the show’s main character (R.I.P. Ned, you were too good for this world), and generally being a sneering little shit. He was so hateful that the few times he received any kind of comeuppance—an insult, a slap, a good old-fashioned regicide at the so-called Purple Wedding — are among the show’s most meme-able moments. Actor Jack Gleeson retired from showbiz immediately upon completion of the role; by scraping the bottom, he went out on top.
3. Livia Soprano, ‘The Sopranos’
“If you want my advice, Anthony, don’t expect happiness. You won’t get it, people let you down … It’s all a big nothing. What makes you think you’re so special?” Has any villain ever wielded a weapon half as effectively as Livia Soprano deployed pure nihilism? This monologue served as a backdrop for six(ish) seasons of her mafia-don son Tony’s brushes with death and depravity. Sure, she tried to have him killed, but it was the joyless way in which she lived that truly made her an enemy. The character’s story was tragically cut short by the death of actor Nancy Marchand, but in being struck down she became more powerful than Tony could possibly imagine; the damage she inflicted was irreversible.
2. Marlo Stanfield, ‘The Wire’
And now an object lesson in evil, courtesy of a purloined lollipop. By the time Marlo Stanfield waltzed out of a convenience store with a stolen sucker, he’d already been established as the crime drama’s most ruthless gangster yet — an underworld wunderkind capable of giving both the Barksdale organization and the Baltimore P.D. a run for their collective money. But we wouldn’t learn how ruthless until the shop’s guard, half-apologetically, told Stanfield he couldn’t let that kind of brazen rule-breaking slide. Marlo has the man executed. His crime: the audacity of expecting to be able to do your job without criminals, white-collar or otherwise, enriching themselves by destroying you for it. “You want it to be one way,” Marlo tells him. “But it’s the other way.” If there’s an epigraph for David Simon’s entire lament for the American city, there you have it.
1. Benjamin Linus, ‘Lost’
Like the magical mystery island that changed the lives of those aboard Oceanic Flight 815, Michael Emerson’s performance as Ben Linus warped reality around him. Originally cast as a for a brief arc as a castaway who may or may not have been one of the sinister Others, the actor brought such a twitchy, soft-spoken intensity to the work that showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse reimagined the role as the series’ Big Bad. Kidnapping, torture, mass murder, the sacrifice of his own daughter — there was nothing Ben wouldn’t do to protect the Island from those he deemed unworthy of its secrets.
Yet his nerd-turned-bully demeanor contained a perverse charisma — particularly when played off his odd-couple relationship with Terry O’Quinn’s John Locke, the Professor X to his Magneto — that slowly won audiences over. By the end of the series he was almost a co-protagonist, granted a shot at redemption he probably didn’t deserve. A series is only as good as its bad guys; Lost had its problems, but Ben Linus was as good as bad gets.
‘Deadpool 2’ Loses Director Over Creative Differences
Deadpool director Tim Miller dropped out of the wisecracking Marvel superhero’s sequel over creative differences concerning the 2018 film.
Miller, a title sequence animator and visual effects supervisor on video games, was in the process of working on the Deadpool 2 script when the creative differences arose, with sources telling The Hollywood Reporter that star Ryan Reynolds and Miller differing on the direction of “the Merc with a Mouth.”
In April, 20th Century Fox confirmed that Reynolds, Miller and co-screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick would all return for the sequel. As hinted in a post-credits scene, Deadpool will likely be joined by the comic book character Sable in the sequel, the filmmakers said at CinemaCon.
Miller is often credited with helping to bring Deadpool to the big screen: After the film loitered in development for years after Reynolds initially appeared as the character in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it was Miller’s leaked Deadpool test footage, and the viral response to the footage, that helped convince Fox to embark on the project.
Miller signed on to helm Deadpool in 2011, five years before it hits theaters. Deadpool eventually became the highest-grossing rated-R film of all time, grossing $782 million worldwide on a paltry (by superhero terms) budget of $58 million.
As Deadline notes, Deadpool is an especially important Marvel franchise property to Fox now that Hugh Jackman is closing the book on Wolverine following the upcoming Logan in March 2017.
Miller’s split with the sequel and Fox studio is said to be amicable, as the director will immediately jump onto another Fox property, Influx, the first installment of a planned trilogy.
Doctor Strange Just Screened, Here’s What The Critics Are Saying
Marvel has always rather good about letting critics quickly share their opinions about their latest features — typically letting critics and reporters post their thoughts on social media shortly after the first screenings have been let out. The upcoming Doctor Strange is continuing this trend, as tonight saw some of the first ever showings of the blockbuster in New York and Los Angeles, and now professionals are sharing their thoughts and feelings about the feature.
Not to be a bit egotistical a la Benedict Cumberbatch’s titular character in Doctor Strange, but I’ll start with my own reaction to the feature. Sadly at this time I can’t really elaborate much right now, but you won’t have to wait long, as my full review of the film will be available on Cinema Blend at 12:01am PST on Sunday:
Clearly I’m a fan, but I’m definitely not the only one. Highlighting the film’s big magic battles, and comparing them to the action we’ve seen in other Marvel Studios movies, Erik Davis from Fandango posted.
In his Tweet, William Bibbiani from Crave Online expresses that he doesn’t necessarily think that Doctor Strange ultimately represents the best we’ve seen from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but once again repeats the sentiment that the action scenes are something to behold.
Another positive voice in the crowd is Peter Sciretta from Slash Film, who goes a step beyond praising Doctor Strange‘s visuals by adding that that it’s worth the extra few bucks to see the blockbusters in 3D:
In her quick reaction to Doctor Strange, Haleigh Foutch from Collider again notes that what director Scott Derrickson has brought to the table visually is spellbinding — but also gives some love to the ensemble cast and the film’s lead:
These are just some of the earliest reactions to Doctor Strange, but, as mentioned, the internet will start to become flooded with them starting very, very early on Sunday. Stay tuned for my review as well as a whole lot of other coverage of the film – which will be landing in theaters in the United States on November 4th.
Doctor Strange Just Screened, Here’s What The Critics Are Saying
James Mangold Reveals ‘Logan’s’ Timeline and Talks Unique Tone
Earlier today we saw the first Logan trailer, which is cut to Johnny Cash‘s cover of NIN’s “Hurt.” Perhaps not a terribly subtle song choice, but it’s pretty damn effective. The fun nod to Mangold’s Walk the Line aside, the song choice also hints the filmmaker is bringing audiences a slightly different offering from the superhero genre, and that was the Mangold and 20th Century Fox’s intent with the trailer.
Below, James Mangold discusses Logan’s timeline and his aspirations for the film.
Mangold believes Cash’s music makes the trailer stand apart from the “standard, bombastic, brooding orchestral, swish-bang, doors opening and slamming, explosions kind of methodology of some of these movies.” Another way Mangold wants Logan to stand out from the herd? By making the stakes less global, more personal. Logan isn’t saving the world this time.
In an interview with Empire, Mangold talks about how his film is driven more by character than conventional genre spectacle:
Hugh and I have been talking about what we would do since we were working on the last one, and for both of us it was this requirement that, to be even interested in doing it, we had to free ourselves from some assumptions that had existed in the past, and be able to change the tone a bit. Not merely to change for change’s sake, but also to make something that’s speaking to the culture now, that’s not just the same style — how many times can they save the world in one way or another? How can we construct a story that’s built more on character and character issues, in a way as if it almost wasn’t a superhero movie, yet it features their powers and struggles and themes.
To make the character more vulnerable his healing powers have been slowed down. The Logan we see in the trailer is scarred and battered, a true depiction of Old Man Logan. Mangold explains Jackman and him had the freedom to play with certain rules and traditions from the X-Men series:
One of the things we all thought about as we worked on this film is, well, we don’t want to rebuild everything. We want to have some questions. In order to make a different Logan, and a different tone of a Wolverine movie, we felt like we couldn’t hold on to every tradition established in all the movies religiously, or we’d be trapped by the decisions made before us. So we questioned whether Logan’s healing factor causes him to heal without even a scar. We imagined that it may have when he was younger, but with age, he’s getting older and ailing. Perhaps his healing factor no longer produces baby-soft skin. So we imagined he heals quickly, still, but it leaves a scar. The simple idea was that his body would start to get a little more ravaged with a kind of tattooing of past battles, lacerations that remain of previous conflicts.
Although Mangold wants to dig deeper under Logan’s skin, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to see the character unleash his claws and go berzerk in Logan. Mangold promises visceral, R-rated action, which, based on the trailer, relies far more on practical effects and real environments than CGI:
This represents] to me the kind of aggressive, classical Wolverine action that we want in the movie – more of something that fans have been asking for, for a really long time. We’ve been limited in one way or another from giving it to them, but I think we’ve got the go-ahead to really go for it on this picture. So we’re really trying to deliver what folks have always imagined those kind of battles would look like. There is a lot of high-octane action in the movie. We’re just trying to do it very differently and very viscerally.
Mangold doesn’t have much to say about Laura Kinney (Dafne Keen) or Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook). He’d prefer to maintain a little mystery regarding those characters. The director does say Holbrook brings some humor to the villain, though, and that Keen’s character is a part of the film’s family. Mangold tells Empire that Logan, first and foremost, is a movie about family. Based on the trailer, and Jacob’s breakdown, this family is going to get put through the wringer next March.
Logan opens in theaters March 3rd, 2017.
James Mangold Reveals ‘Logan’s’ Timeline and Talks Unique Tone
Lessons for game developers from a lemonade stand
Back in Norman Rockwell’s America, kids weren’t afraid to take a chance on going into business for themselves. Rockwell’s iconic “Lemonade Stand” image showed a whole generation of children that to succeed in business, all they had to do was hang out a sign, and a whole community of lemonade lovers (or sympathetic neighbors) would gather round, happily paying a nickel for a cold cup of lemonade on a hot summer day.
Unfortunately for kids in the lemonade business – or the gaming business, for that matter – things are a lot more complicated today. Mobile game developers may find themselves among the thousands whose apps barely get played, or are never even downloaded. Let’s face it; if you go according to the odds, the chances of success in the mobile game marketplace (which grows by hundreds of titles a day) are not good. Is there anything developers can do to improve their chances?
The good news is that there is. Actually, the solution is rather simple; to get a lot of people to play a game, all you have to do is develop a community around a title, brand, or series, to create a group that will grow organically (provided, of course, the game is appropriately challenging and exciting) Here are some ideas on how to get “there” from “here.”
Get to the core
You have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is a core community, a small group of insiders that can act as a base for further “expansion.” To entice that initial group, game marketers (or their community managers) can build up a following by nurturing followers on social media, offering them an insider link to a new game or other benefits. For example, many new users will be willing to try out a new game as part of an alpha or beta test, members of an exclusive club whose opinion matters. And, of course, it’s important to reach out to everyone you have ever met online and in person and notify them that you have a new venture.
Chances are that most of those who respond will back out, but a small group – one that the game appeals to – will remain. That’s the core group that managers should get to know, communicating with them personally, taking their suggestions and integrating them in the game – in short, giving them a stake in the community, as founding members.
‘Tis better to give than …
This core group now becomes the front-line shock troop squadron with which managers can build a true following. Social media, blogs, special gaming events, press releases, etc. — a good PR firm or marketing person will get the word out that a) there’s a new, great, fun, and interesting game, and b) it’s already got a loyal group of followers who will welcome newcomers into the fold.
As new members come in, it’s important to groom them as well, with “treats” and positive reinforcement – communications, notifications, personal contact, etc., to make them feel a part of something.
Growing strong and healthy
It’s here that the true mettle of the fledgling community is tested. As more players join the community – it grows from infancy to childhood through its “teen phase.“ No longer a child, a game in its teenage years is when a gaming community is solidified, and gets ready to move on to “adulthood,” with the establishment of the game as a true influence and a major brand in the gaming world.
To accomplish this, it’s important to keep growing the community – coming up with new methods to bring in even more users. The key is to keep things exciting and new; for example, developing related spin off games based on existing characters, sequel games that offer more challenge and status, and cross-promotions across the community of players of different games (whether under the same brand or otherwise) can expose many more people to the charms of your game. It’s just like in the supermarket; the more “shelf space” you have in the App Store, the more engagement you have with potential players, who have a greater range of experiences to choose from.
Most important, though, is keeping players in the loop – making them feel that they count. It’s especially critical as the site and community grows; the more personal contact at this stage the better, because it shows that you really care about the individual, not just the numbers. Soliciting suggestions from players on how to enhance the game is key; players who spend hours a day engaged with your product will have a great sense of where things should be going.
Not all the suggestions will be good ones, but some of them will be; but that is part of the growing process, too. Implementing good ideas suggested by the community will further solidify ties to the game – and help bring your game to full maturity, to the point where it can hopefully become the most popular in its category. With this approach, game developers and managers will be able to build a great, supportive – and large – community around their game, avoiding the fate of the barely played apps.
The lemonade kids? They’re on their own now. …
The Boss Update for Minecraft Pocket Edition and Windows 10 is rolling out
After a small delay, the advertised Boss Update is rolling out for Minecraft on Windows 10 and Windows phones.
The Boss Update will bring Guardians, Ocean Monuments, the summonable Wither Boss fight, slash commands, and some UI refinements to the game. Additionally, it also provides the first iteration of Add-ons, allowing people to customize Minecraft using tools as simple as Notepad and MS Paint.
You can download some example Add-ons from Minecraft.net right here, including the E3-demonstrated Alien Invasion pack and a zombie Castle Siege pack. We’ll have some guides up shortly on how you can customize your own creatures in Minecraft, from the way they look, to the way they behave and interact with the game’s world.
The full changelog is as follows (via Mojang):
New Features
- Ocean Monuments
- Guardians and Elder Guardians
- Prismarine, dark prismarine & prismarine bricks
- Prismarine shard & prismarine crystal
- Sea lantern
- The Wither!
- Nether star
- Beacon
- Wet & dry sponges
- Slash commands (with a handy auto complete feature). Enable cheats for a world in the options screen for access, but note that Xbox Live achievements will be disabled when you’re using ’em!
- Custom key bindings! Hooray for lefties!
- A new Creative inventory search feature
- Add-On section for world settings
- Basic F3 support! (Win 10 only)
- Coordinates!
- You can change game modes in Realms (note that doing this will restart the realm)
- Ability to upload & download worlds in Realms
- Ability to promote players as operators in Realms
Tweaks
- UI improvements!
- Performance improvements!
- Tweaks to various mob action/behavior triggers, including fixing creeper explosions
- Elder guardian de-buff visuals fixed (feedback from Android beta)
- Fishing rods & arrows will fire in more than just one direction
- Lots of tweaks to water textures to make underwater more fun
- Tweaks to Realms settings
- Visual tweaks to sun, moon & stars when rendering in VR immersive mode
- Ridiculous numbers of bug fixes!
Sadly, the update still excludes the Windows Phone version of the game from Realms, Microsoft’s subscription-based dedicated Minecraft hosting service, but the company has always told me that it is their goal to bring it in, eventually, in addition to Xbox One and Xbox 360.
If you don’t have Minecraft and want to see what all the fuss is about, join me, Daniel Rubino and Zac Bowden tonight on Beam.pro where we’ll stream some Minecraft, chat with you about Microsoft and probably get blown up by wayward creepers!
The Boss Update for Minecraft Pocket Edition and Windows 10 is rolling out
The Impossible Problem of Where Minecraft Goes Next
It’s been two years since Microsoft bought Minecraft, and the new owners are faced with a conundrum: what do you do with a game that is already a phenomenon?
Complicating things further, Minecraft is now a seven-year old game. While lot of work has been put into keeping the game current, Minecraft is also beginning to show its age. Mojang developer Nathan Adams compared it to rebuild the engines of a jet in the middle of a flight, because taking the game down to patch it just isn’t an option. The tension at the heart of Minecraft heightens when you consider that the developers say difficulties associated with coding the blocky builder sometimes prevents them from adding features that the community wants, like a working API or a server browser.
I got a chance to suss out the future of Minecraft at last month’s Minecon, where the community rubs elbows with the people who make Minecraft great. Obviously, that description includes the developers, but it also expands farther into the YouTubers who make hilarious videos, the modders who create new ways to play, and the builders, who create wonderful worlds for others to enjoy as well.
This was at the forefront of my mind when I attended Minecon. Minecraft has always been a community-driven game, and I was curious how Mojang would handle that aspect of Minecraft’s identity while also pushing the game into new frontiers.
I met with Saxs Persson, developer for the Pocket and Windows 10 editions of Minecraft, and Matt Booty, head of Minecraft, in nearby Marriott hotel. Persson was dressed casually, in a black shirt and jeans. He came off as enthusiastic, prone to geeking out about new tech or features. Booty on the other hand was dressed in a button-down, slacks and came off as more reserved. They couldn’t have chosen a better pair to represent Minecraft.
“We want everybody to play with everybody,” Persson told me. “Minecraft is better when you can connect to your world wherever you with whatever device.” Windows 10 and Pocket Edition players already enjoy cross-platform play, but Persson paints a picture of complete compatibility – console and Java and Win 10 players all connecting and enjoying Minecraft together. In his ideal world, you’d be able to log on to the same persistent server from your iPad, your computer, and your console—a technical and legal hurdle that has been branched in part by games like Rocket League, but full connectivity across all platforms still seems like a lofty goal for Minecraft.
What’s more, this idea seems to ignore that the various Minecraft editions floating around all have varying features, something that even the biggest Minecraft fan finds annoying. For example, MCPE is still missing The End, but at the same time it will get additions that Java won’t see till later (or ever.) Persson didn’t specifically address version mismatches when I asked if feature parity was still a priority, but he also didn’t seem concerned about potential version conflicts. “There’s not a lot holding us back from connecting these versions, and parity is not the main goal,” he said. There is no doubt that this kind of cross-platform play would be popular and welcomed, but I’m skeptical as to how it would actually work. I’m also not sure it’s a feature that the community truly cares about.
Persson also enthused about “new input methodologies,” specifically the Oculus touch. Actually, VR played a big role in Minecon: the line to try it out was hours long throughout the entire event, and Mojang highlighted it often enough that VR seems to form a centerpiece for Minecraft’s future plans.
Virtual reality is still an incredibly niche technology, and Minecraft’s hallmark has always been its accessibility—you can run the game on pretty much any device. It’s hard to understand how adding a style of play that requires a powerful computer or console and a pricey headset fits with the existing appeal of Minecraft. Community response to VR offerings is and always has been tepid at best, especially among veteran Minecraft players, who remember Notch’s quarrel with Oculus in the past.
For now, most of the YouTubers and map makers and modders attached to Minecraft seem pretty happy with their current arrangement—Mojang is still very relaxed about letting people profit off of their game—but some are starting to see the writing on the wall. Long-time Minecraft YouTubers, such as skitscape and setosorcerer, have been moving on to other games or other careers. Map creators like Hypixel have had to adapt and often abandon single-player maps in favor of multiplayer ones, and the often-ignored mod community is starting to feel the strain of an aging game. Each recent patch has created a new set of problems — a recent one, for example, made many large texture packs unuseable, and while a different patch made PvP unplayable for many. With add-ons and an API still a long way off, frustrations continue to mount for some fans.
Mojang’s vision for the future of the game and the communities’ vision have not always been in line, and you could see the effects of that fissure on the showfloor itself. When I asked how they chose the people that ended up on stage at Minecon—essentially receiving the Mojang stamp of approval—or heading up the panels, Persson and Booty were a little evasive. “There is an active curation [of exhibitors],” Booty said about the people that were invited to attend the event and present, “ranging from trying to stay true to Minecraft’s indie roots to working with corporate partners and everything in between.” This was an obvious nod to the big name partners like Mattel that were taking up large amounts of real estate on the expo floor. There were plenty of indie names and creators features, but their competition was fiercer. The Minecon docket was stacked with young, high energy personalities who curated an atmosphere of fun and excitement—the old guard, like Hypixel and other creators, were less well represented.
Persson and Booty still recognized, at least in part, the debt that they owed to the the community. “We ask that they come and meet their fans with open arms,” Persson said, “as a true fan event, not just a primarily corporate one.” Persson and the Mojang team seem eager to signal to their fans that they were still the focus of the event and of their efforts, and that the Microsoft buyout still doesn’t indicate a change in direction or an abandonment of their core users. It was a necessary reminder, given that Minecraft’s indie origins made some people deeply skeptical of Microsoft’s purchase, and these same fans have remained guarded even as the company seeks to reassure them.
Regardless, the Mojang team has actually shown that they are listening to the community in some respects. Minecon saw the first full presentation of the add-on system, which allows players to tweak the behavior and statistics of mobs at first, and will eventually allow wide modification of all entities. Players have been asking for something like this as far back as 2011.
“Add-ons are just the first step,” Persson said, confirming that an application program interface, or API, was being co-developed – a feature that would make modding significantly easier. Persson admitted that two previous attempts at creating an API had failed, and that they had brought on the creators of Bukkit–a popular mod utility–to help them make this attempt stick. This may represent a serious commitment to developing an API, but those promises go back as far as 2009. The community remains skeptical after being burned so many times before.
It’s also obvious that Microsoft has invested heavily in making Minecraft more than just a video game. Minecraft’s developers preferred to use words like “platform”, “tool”, and “environment” instead of “game,” and they were effusive about applications for research, education, and machine learning. “At a high level, we want to maintain Minecraft as an innovation brand,” Booty said when asked about his vision for the future of the game. It was a little hard to pin down exactly what they meant by this — it sounds like they want Minecraft to be all things to all people, which, while ambitious, sounds like a recipe for failure.
Despite the abundance of buzzwords, Mojang’s description is a telling indication of Microsoft’s concerns over their $2.5 billion investment. Minecraft is a completely unprecedented phenomenon, and so too is a massive buyout of an indie game by a major corporation. Minecraft has already conquered video games, so it seems natural that Microsoft and Mojang now want to create something that supersedes gaming.
Everyone I talked to at Minecon was excited about exactly one thing—meeting their heroes, whether that was one of the developers, a popular YouTuber, or a modder. As far as the fans are concerned, the future of Minecraft will always be with the people who make the game great, not fancy technology. Mojang has loftier goals, though it’s hard to say if VR and added connectivity truly hold the key to where Minecraft goes next. Then again, predicting the future is no easy task.
Minecraft’s Boss Update now available for Windows 10 and Pocket Edition
Microsoft recently announced a major update coming to Minecraft on Windows 10. Today, Mojang has started rolling out the update, titled the “Boss Update” to Minecraft’s Windows 10 Edition and Pocket Edition. With the latest Minecraft update, players can now fight the wither, and the game also includes new ocean monuments, as well as the beacon. More importantly, the update brings support for add-ons which is a huge addition to the game. Along with all the new features, the update also comes with some user interface and performance improvements. Here is the full changelog:
New Features
- Ocean Monuments
- Guardians and Elder Guardians
- Prismarine, dark prismarine & prismarine bricks
- Prismarine shard & prismarine crystal
- Sea lantern
- The Wither!
- Nether star
- Beacon
- Wet & dry sponges
- Slash commands (with a handy auto complete feature). Enable cheats for a world in the options screen for access, but note that Xbox Live achievements will be disabled when you’re using ‘em!
- Custom key bindings! Hooray for lefties!
- A new Creative inventory search feature
- Add-On section for world settings
- Basic F3 support! (Win 10 only)
- Coordinates!
- You can change game modes in Realms (note that doing this will restart the realm)
- Ability to upload & download worlds in Realms
- Ability to promote players as operators in Realms
Tweaks
- UI improvements!
- Performance improvements!
- Tweaks to various mob action/behavior triggers, including fixing creeper explosions
- Elder guardian de-buff visuals fixed (feedback from Android beta)
- Fishing rods & arrows will fire in more than just one direction
- Lots of tweaks to water textures to make underwater more fun
- Tweaks to Realms settings
- Visual tweaks to sun, moon & stars when rendering in VR immersive mode
- Ridiculous numbers of bug fixes!
Minecraft’s Boss Update now available for Windows 10 and Pocket Edition
Teach Your Kids How to Code with Minecraft or Star Wars Tutorials
Programming is a valuable skill for kids of all ages to pick up, and when they learn by playing with their favorite characters and games it’s even more fun. Code.org has two new tutorials that will appeal to many kids based on Minecraft and Star Wars.
The Minecraft interactive tutorial has kids choosing between Steve and Alex for their character and then dragging and dropping code blocks to get their character to mine, explore, and craft in the very familiar Minecraft world (complete with that haunting music). There are 14 challenges available now, rated for kids ages 6 and up, and it looks like more languages will be added soon.
The Star Wars tutorial, also in beta, offers both the blocks code and a JavaScript version intended for older kids ages 11 and up (but depending on your child, it’s totally doable for younger kids as well).
These are incredibly fun tools, part of the Hour of Code, which many schools are scheduled to participate in from December 7 to 13th, Computer Science Education Week. You can volunteer here. Thanks Vin!
Teach Your Kids How to Code with Minecraft or Star Wars Tutorials
A Parent’s Guide to Playing Pokémon Go With Your Kids
While Pokémon Go is geared toward adults and teens, a lot of parents are playing it with their children too. I helped my kindergartener install it yesterday, and we spent an afternoon at a park looking for Pikachu. There are some safety concerns, but lots of potential for exercise and learning, too.
If you’re still not sure what this game is all about, read our explainer. It’s a free game where you walk to places in the real world to collect in-game supplies and characters. You can catch the pokémon characters almost anywhere, but if you want them to battle, you have to go to real-world locations called gyms. Supply stops and gyms are usually places like libraries, churches, and parks.
Figure Out Which Parts of the Game Are Age Appropriate
For a kid to get the most out of the game, it really helps if they can read and do simple math. You can read them the instructions at the beginning, but they’ll keep encountering creatures and objects that have names and stats.
To involve toddlers and preschoolers, you can play the game yourself, and offer the kid a chance to help at spin at each pokéstop. They can also try to throw pokéballs to catch the pokémon you find. That job takes a little dexterity, but if you have enough pokéballs, why not let them practice?
Once kids are old enough to have their own phones and transportation, they’re certainly old enough to play the game without help—but now you have to worry about where they’re going and whether they’re paying attention to their surroundings. More on that in a bit.
Set Up a Phone to Play Pokémon Go
You can install Pokémon Go on your own phone, of course, but if you hand it to a pokémon-happy kid, you may never get it back. Instead, see if you have an old phone or tablet around that has GPS capabilities. Even if it only has wifi and not a cellular data connection, you can still play the game.
You can do this by sticking to areas with wifi, of course. It’s even possible to catch pokémon without leaving home. Or you can use your own phone as a wifi hotspot, if your data plan allows, so you and your offspring can tour pokéstops together. Be aware that the iPod Touch doesn’t have GPS, so it needs to connect to stationary wifi spots (not your phone’s hotspot) to know its location.
Since Pokémon Go has lots of opportunities to spend real money, you may want to limit in-game purchases. On an iPhone, there’s a setting to turn off in-app purchases. On Android, make sure your phone is set to ask for a password for every purchase (and don’t blab the password).
I go a step further, on my kids’ phones. I have a throwaway google account that’s just for their games, and I don’t enter a credit card for payment. I just buy Play Store gift cards, so if they somehow find a way to spend money, the worst they can do is drain the $25 from their account.
Getting Started With Your Child and a Google Account
The first thing the app does is ask your birthdate. For adults, it then asks if you want to log in with your Google account or with a Pokémon Trainer account. For kids (13 and under), it doesn’t offer Google as an option. Unfortunately, since Pokémon’s servers are currently overloaded, it may be impossible to create a Pokémon Trainer account. You may want to create a dummy Google account (technically belonging to you, the parent) and have them log in that way.
When you begin, you can customize an avatar, and then it’s time to catch your starter pokémon. (You don’t have to wander around for this one.) If your kid’s heart is set on Pikachu, there is reportedly an easter egg that lets you catch Pikachu as your starter. It may not be easy to actually catch the little guy, though, so remind the kid that you can always go looking for wild Pikachu later.
Stay Safe—Especially Around Lures
Remember everything you taught your kid about watching where they’re going, holding hands near busy roads, and looking both ways while crossing streets or parking lots? They’re going to completely forget all that when they have their eyes glued to their phone. It’s worth having a little talk with them before they get run over by a car, about how to be careful and how maybe we’re going to put some more rules into effect—like only crossing a street when their phone is in their pocket, perhaps.
If your kid is old enough to wander around on her own, remember that she may now be walking around oblivious to her surroundings (even if she promises to be careful). You may want to revisit rules in this case, too: are you still okay with her traveling to the same places she’s usually allowed?
Lures make the situation a little more complicated, from a parent’s perspective. A player can set out a lure to attract pokémon for 30 minutes, but since these lures are visible to nearby players, they have the effect of luring people too. This can be fun: a bunch of kids can catch pokémon together, or a library or museum can set out lures to help attract people for an event. It can also be concerning to parents. Who’s setting out that lure, and why?
It would be possible for someone to set out a lure to attract kids for nefarious purposes—maybe a potential abuser, or just the neighborhood bully.
Be sure to ask your kid who he’s been running into while playing games. You don’t need to panic, but it may be worth revisiting your talks about how to recognize people and situations that might be unsafe.
Have Fun, And Learn Something
Roaming around may be the most worrying part of playing Pokémon Go—but that’s also what makes it worthwhile. How many video games come with built-in exercise, education, and opportunities to learn about art and the natural world?
The exercise is a given: you have to walk to incubate eggs, for instance. Driving doesn’t count, and the app knows the difference. Parks will often have a bunch of pokéstops close together, so even if you have to drive to get there, you can walk around to monuments, statues, and historical signs to collect supplies and look for new pokémon. Different kinds of places have different pokémon. I caught a goldfish-like Goldeen today near a lake.
But there’s more. A lot of pokéstops are at interesting places, including historical markers. Yesterday my son and I visited a cannon in a cemetery (dedicated as a war memorial) and a chestnut tree nursery in a park. I had driven by those trees a million times without knowing what it was, but signs explained how the area’s chestnut trees had been devastated by a fungus and park workers were trying to protect some of the trees so they could reach maturity.
While you’re out wandering, you may even find real animals. Some wildlife experts on twitter are now monitoring the hashtag #PokeBlitz to help you identify the birds, bugs, snakes, plants and other things you might find while looking for pokémon.
The game intertwines so many interests that it’s a natural for family outings. And since you can play it almost anywhere, it works for city strolls as well as nature walks. Watch out for safety concerns, to be sure, but don’t forget to have fun.
A Parent’s Guide to Playing Minecraft With Your Kids
When your kid shows interest in a popular phenomenon, usually there’s not much to understand—you just help them turn on the videos, and put the toys on their birthday wish list. But it’s a little trickier when your kid comes home and insists that they need to play Minecraft. You have some learning to do.
If you’re nervous about letting your kid log on to a server with other people, it may help to know that they don’t have to. We’ll discuss below how to set up a multiplayer world, but there are plenty of ways to do that while keeping the world private. Minecraft is also tons of fun in single player mode. If you do end up introducing your child to public servers, you’ll probably want to have a talk with them about online safety, and it may be a good idea to play with them at first.
Pick a Platform and Install the Game
There’s a version of Minecraft for every platform. The cheapest, and easiest to install, is the Minecraft Pocket Edition app. It’s $6.99 on iOS and Android. Once it’s installed, you just hit Play, create a world, and you’re off.
Pocket edition has a limited set of inventory items and commands. You can still do a ton of fun things, but currently the game lacks large “boss” monsters to battle, and you don’t have access to some of the lesser used items. The mobile app will do almost anything you can think of, but if you want the most flexibility down the line and the physically largest worlds, go with the desktop version. We imagine though, that your child will probably have a preference as to the platform you buy and install on.
The traditional and most full-featured way to play is on a computer, with the version that runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux. The software is free to download, but you have to pay a one-time fee of $26.95 to create an account. The program won’t run unless you log in.
Minecraft is also available for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and 4, Wii U, and a handful of other console and mobile platforms,at varying price points in the $20-$30 range, with licenses available either through direct download or physical copies, whichever you prefer. Once you’ve installed the version Minecraft of your (or your child’s) choice, create a Single Player world for starters, and begin exploring.
Learn the Controls
Even if it’s your kid that will be doing the gameplay, you’ll want to have a sense of how to move around and use objects in the game. I can’t count how many times a kid asked me how to do something, I googled and confidently told them the answer, and then felt a little clueless when they handed me the device and said “Show me how.”
On a computer, the w, a, s, and d keys control which direction you walk, and your mouse position controls where you look. Left click destroys a block; right click places the block you are holding. Similarly, interact with objects with a click: left click to hit, right click to use an object. So, for example, hold a bone and right click on a dog to give the dog a bone. Left click to smack the dog with the bone.
The space bar lets you jump, and in creative mode (more about that below), you can fly. Double tap the space bar to start flying, and tap it again to move higher. Shift lowers you down, and another double space drops you to the ground.
On a touch screen device, you’ll have arrow buttons on the left side of the screen for walking, and a separate button for jumping or flying on the right. Swipe the screen to look around. Place blocks with a tap, and destroy them by tapping and holding. You can use some items by tapping, others by tapping and holding, and still others by looking for a special button to appear at the bottom of the screen. For example, if you hold an apple and approach a horse, there will be a “feed” button. You can read more about all the different controls for all the different platforms on the Official Minecraft Wiki.
To manage your inventory, press “e” on your keybord (on the desktop) or tap the “…” button next to the row of nine empty boxes at the bottom of the screen (on mobile.) Scroll through to see what you’ve picked up, if you’re playing in survival mode. In creative mode, you can also search and scroll through hundreds of items that are yours for the choosing. Those nine empty boxes, by the way? Those are your “hot bar” of readily accessible objects. You can drag items from your inventory into them to use them quickly, like with a single tap or keypress, which comes in handy later.
So, What Do You Do?
So what do you do in Minecraft, anyway? What is your kid trying to accomplish when they spend hours at the computer playing? You already know the answer, actually: you mine blocks from your surroundings, and you use them to craft new things. Imagine walking through a world made of lego blocks as far as the eye can see. You can break off a block from the ground, from a tree, anywhere you like, and then you can use the blocks you’ve gathered to make something new.
In survival mode, you arrive in Minecraft land with literally nothing. You can karate-chop the world with your hand to gather blocks of dirt and wood. You can make a pickaxe out of wood, and use it to mine for stone. Then you can make a better pickaxe out of stone. In the meantime, you’d better create a shelter before dark, because that’s when the monsters come out. If they get you, you die:
Survival minecraft can be challenging and fun, but young kids are often more interested in building things, spawning animals, and exploring all the different types of objects that exist in the universe. (Me too, honestly.) You can do all that without fear of being killed by Creepers if you play your game in creative mode. That means you don’t have any damage or hunger meters, you can fly, and you can have as many as you want of anything. Diamond armor? Golden apples? Potions that let you see in the dark? All yours!
Fun Things to Try with Your Kids
Here are some things you can do right away. They’re easy in creative, and possible (if you can gather the materials) in survival. Best of all, if you’re new to the game, you can do them yourself, or if you’re installing for your kids or playing along with them, they’re fun for everyone involved.
- Watch the Sunset: A new day dawns in Minecraft every 20 minutes. You get 10 minutes of daylight, 90 seconds of dusk, seven minutes of night, and another 90 seconds for sunrise. It’s kind of beautiful.
- See in the Dark: If a young child starts crying for seven out of every 20 minutes while playing, now you know why. After dark, just snag a Potion of Night Vision from your inventory. On the computer you can search for items by name; on mobile, scroll until you find it. It’s dark blue. Right click, or tap and hold, to drink the potion.
- Change Your Skin: Gameplay is typically in a first person point-of-view, but if other players are around, they’ll be able to see you. You can also switch views while playing and see yourself in the third-person. If you’d like to tweak your look, visit minecraftskins.net, where you can choose a new skin. Hit Edit to customize it to your liking, and if you play the desktop edition, hit Change to submit it to Minecraft’s account servers. (Your skin is considered part of your account profile.) If you play on the mobile editions, Download the skin and save it to your device’s photo library. Then you can change your skin from within the game.
- Tame a Wolf: No wolves? Look in your inventory for an egg called “spawn wolf.“ It does exactly what you’d think. Feed one of your new wolves a bone, and it will start following you and exuding hearts. Once the wolf has been tamed, it wears a red collar and is a dog. Do not hit your dog with a bone. They attack as a pack when one is hurt.
- Ride a Pig: Hold a carrot on a stick, and all the pigs around will follow you. Place a saddle on a pig, and then you can ride it. The pig will walk constantly, but you can steer with your mouse as usual. To stop the pig, take the carrot and stick out of your hand.
- Teleport: If you’re playing with your kid in multiplayer mode, they’re almost guaranteed to wander off. If you type a forward slash, you’ll find you can enter commands. A handy one is /teleport, or /tp for short, followed by your kid’s player name. You’ll teleport right to where they are.
- Build a Beacon: Especially in survival mode, you’ll want to find a way to get back to your home. Build dirt, or whatever you’ve got, into a tall tower that you can see from a distance. While there are other ways to find your way home when you get lost, this is the simplest.
I learned all of these tricks from my six-year-old son, who in turned learned them from watching YouTube. As an adult, you may not have noticed, but roughly half of YouTube is just videos of people playing Minecraft. You can find a guide to the best channels, with notes on their kid-friendliness, at Common Sense Media.
Be warned: these videos often show features that go far beyond what you can find in an ordinary Minecraft installation. There are mods (modifications to either clients or servers), resource packs (which change game features like the appearance of blocks), maps (pre-built worlds), and mini-games (maps set up for solo or competitive games).
Playing With Others
In single player mode, you can set your kid up with a world of her own that she can build and proudly show you all about. But if you really want to play with your kid, you’ll need to learn about multiplayer Minecraft. There are three big ways to play multiplayer:
- On a computer, after creating a single player world, you can choose “Open to LAN” to enable others to connect to the world you’ve created. Your friends will need to know your IP address and port to connect to your server. Don’t forget that each player needs their own Minecraft account, so you’ll have to pay again to play together: one account for you, one for your kid.
- You can install a server on another, separate computer to keep your world running all the time. The server software is free, but again each player needs their own account.
- You can sign up for Minecraft Realms, a subscription service at $9.99/month. Only the person who sets up the world needs a paid subscription, and they can invite others to play with them.
Pocket edition, Windows 10, and consoles support those same three ways of connecting with other players, but are incompatible with PC/Mac editions. Realms subscriptions are, likewise, available either for the PC/Mac edition or the Pocket/Windows 10 edition. That means you can’t play on your phone and connect to your kid’s desktop-based world. Try both if you like, but make sure you consider which ecosystem you want to stick with before your kid starts building that massive castle.
New Walking Dead Image Teases A Major Comic Plot Line
Potential spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead TV show and comics.
The Walking Dead fans have been eagerly awaiting the return of the apocalyptic drama since back in April, and it’s finally upon us. In just one week we’ll be transported back into the world of zombies, Saviors, and the occasional cannibal. Season 7 promises to be a game changer for the series, as Rick and the Alexandrians are completely powerless to Negan and his forces. And while fans of Robert Kirkman’s comic book are eagerly anticipating the introduction of communities like The Kingdom, a new image from the AMC drama may be teasing yet another major comic book plot line: The Whisperers.
The Whisperers are a huge threat in The Walking Dead comic book series. You can see the image that is setting comic fans into a frenzy below, courtesy of the show’s official Instagram.
Pretty creepy, right? While this image is enough to build anticipation for Season 7 of The Walking Dead, fans of the comics are finding an entirely different meaning altogether. The Whisperers may be coming.
The Whisperers are an especially terrifying threat in the Walking Dead comic book series. They’re a murderous cult who disguise themselves by wearing the skin of walkers so they might blend in with the massive amounts of infected roaming the apocalyptic world. They don’t believe in killing the undead- living peacefully among them through their disguises. Instead, they reserve their violence for the living, and are known to be a threat both physically and emotionally. Much like The Wolves from Season 6, The Whisperers completely abandoned their lives from the pre-apocalypse, and live a violent cult-focused life led by an unnamed Alpha leader. And the group only speaks in whispers- chilling AF if you ask me.
The above image is extremely close to an iconic Walking Dead comic book moment. When The Whispers decide that Alexandrians are getting to close to their land, they kidnap and murder a group of survivors and put their heads on spikes. This marks a border of sorts for The Whisperers, and the moment is noted for killing off a few major characters that are present in both the comics and AMC TV series.
The idea that The Whisperers could be introduced in Season 7 is baffling for fans of the comics. Season 7 will finally delve into the threat of The Saviors, which we’d been eagerly anticipating since Season 6’s midseason finale. Season 7 must also introduce The Kingdom, and further flesh out The Hilltop community. With all of this material to cover properly, it seems bananas that they’d even hint at another threat. Chronologically, The Whisperers should be introduced after the Savior plot line ends, which can’t be anytime soon.
We’ll just have to wait and see if and when The Whisperers are introduced in The Walking Dead. The series will return to AMC Sunday, October 23rd.