Supergirl opens in theaters on June 26.

Walking into Supergirl, I was excited. I had real expectations. Before you even get to the DCU of it all, I’m officially a fan of Craig Gillespie. He’s a guy who makes movies that are all better than you’d think they’d be – Cruella and I, Tonya and Lars and the Real Girl and even The Finest Hours, that boat-broke-in-half rescue movie was surprisingly really good. These are movies that could've easily become forgettable entries in their particular genres, like just another biopic or live-action remake or movie about a guy who’s in love with a sex doll. So the prospect of tackling a superhero movie with that particular ability to elevate a film in an otherwise tired category was intriguing.

Where the DCU is concerned, I’m here for James Gunn’s universe. I’ve liked what’s gone into it so far and I loved Milly Alcock’s first appearance as Kara in her cameo in Superman. I think this version of Supergirl is a blast and her solo outing didn’t do anything to change my mind on that front. But this is also where Supergirl starts to become a tale of two movies. For everything that the movie does right, that thing’s got an alter ego that’s doing it wrong. As a result, the movie is this shuffling, few-steps-forward, few-steps-back kind of slog that never really finds a rhythm.

For example, the reluctant hero thing is actually very difficult to pull off. It’s hard to play “I don’t care” in an engaging way, because if the character on screen doesn’t care, then I certainly don’t care either. Alcock manages it here about as well as you could hope for. Kara’s a mess and there’s no real concern with her ever not being a mess as part of her journey. It’s very fun. The other side of that coin, however, is that she doesn’t have much of a journey. She’s not a markedly different person at the end of the movie than she is at the beginning. Not because of anything she did or didn’t do as a character or an actor, but because the story she’s been put in doesn’t give her much to do and the result is a movie that sort of flattens out and drags.

When she first meets Eve Ridley’s Ruthye, the young girl out for revenge against the man who murdered her entire family, Kara is protective, sticking her neck out to do the right thing for a kid who’s in over her head. By the end of the film, Kara… does exactly the same thing. Part of the point there is that it highlights the impact she has on Ruthye. (Ridley ultimately gets the lion’s share of the character work in the film, and her character’s journey winds up feeling far more complete than Kara’s.) So while Milly Alcock’s performance is a real strength of the movie, and she does pull off the reluctant hero trope, it is still a very familiar trope and the shorthand that’s used in portraying it is a real weakness.

Familiarity in general is another villainous plot Supergirl tries to thwart. On one hand, the movie wears its influences proudly. The comparisons to James Gunn’s work on Guardians of the Galaxy have been obvious since the trailers first dropped, and we knew the True Grit/archetypal Western structure would be a big part of the film because of the source material, Tom King’s Woman of Tomorrow run. A Mad Max influence is just as obvious in the grimy, lifeless terrains and dying worlds on which most of the movie takes place, planets where people scratch for survival. But the old, reliable Mos Eisley Cantina should get a shout-out as well. The alien design and practical makeup FX and costuming throughout the movie are genuinely top shelf, and clearly the customers in Star Wars’ most wretched hive were on the filmmakers’ minds.

And yet, while I’ll happily take “True Grit meets Mad Max by way of Guardians and Star Wars,” there's still a dulled edge to the whole movie. Instead of taking the post-apocalyptic vibes of Mad Max, they lift a whole plot point straight from Fury Road and handle it, frankly, a little clumsily. And instead of the emotionally relevant needle drops of Guardians, Kara gets slow-paced montages set to a Jimmy Eat World cover that I found… well, it was baffling.

The film's two other headliners fall into these buckets as well. Matthias Schoenaerts as the film’s villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, looks incredible. His whole appearance would make the creature design team from A New Hope proud. The beads studded into his face, the machinery grafted into his body, the weird little red button he needs to activate to speak, all of it adds up to a striking and genuinely pretty cool image that would have felt at home in the Thunderdome.

But… they don’t ever do anything with it.

Krem, for all the post-apocalyptic biker gang aura he generates, gets nothing else to go on. He has some affectations that Schoenaerts was clearly having a good time with, like how he’s eating something in almost every scene, but that’s all they really are – affectations. There’s nothing that makes him scary or formidable other than a few throwaway lines about his relative strength and the way other people on screen fear him.

Meanwhile, Jason Momoa's Lobo finds his way into the movie as well, and the mostly-impervious anti-hero bounty hunter is just as much fun as fans have been anticipating. Cigar-chomping gets thrown around a little excessively any time a J. Jonah Jameson or a Hellboy or a Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum from Independence Day show up on screen, but Momoa more than earns the descriptor in all the best possible ways in Supergirl. He looks the part as well, with face paint and prosthetics that cut the kind of imposing figure the fan favorite deserves.

But… Lobo doesn’t need to be there.

Characters come and go in movies, sometimes with very little fanfare, sometimes playing crucial roles in the story. And they don’t always have to be the latter. The issue with Lobo is that he feels a little extra tacked on. The one scene he has with Kara has real reshoot energy. It’s added on to a scene that didn’t need any extra motivation to get to the next scene, nor is he a particularly unique foil for Kara that propels her character in any meaningful way. He just happens to be looking for the same group of guys that Kara and Ruthye are after. The only real added value he gives the movie is a few (admittedly fun) one-liners. And maybe that’s all Lobo needs to be. Ultimately, he shows up to put his immortal stamp of approval on Kara’s actions, but that feels both unnecessary and more than a little pandering, and it leaves me not entirely sure what to do with him.

So the story of this movie continues to be, “they did it right on one hand, but on the other, not so much,” and as just the second entry into Gunn’s DCU, that issue spills over into all the stuff that comes with being a part of a currently-expanding expanded universe. On one hand, Supergirl needs to continue building outwards to some extent, and this is another of the film’s strengths. Her scenes with David Corenswet’s Superman are wonderful. That’s not to say that Superman saved the day here, or that Supergirl needs Superman to be interesting. It’s that the dynamic between the two of them is great – one positively looking toward the future, while the other still nurses old wounds. I’m definitely looking forward to more of this duo on screen.

But on the other hand, where her solo film is concerned, Supergirl needs to flesh out Kara’s backstory. The structure of how and when flashbacks are deployed in Supergirl aside – because my personal preference would have been a straight chronological telling of the story as opposed to stopping in the middle to tell us her backstory – I did find myself way more interested in her time growing up on a floating, life-boat of a city after the destruction of Krypton. There’s work being done there on both fronts, as the film continues to build on the changes made to Kal-El’s origin story from Superman while introducing another side to that story via Kara. The “present day” of the film, with all the cribbing from True Grit and Mad Max and Guardians, feels far less fresh and interesting than Kara's shielded childhood on Argo, even if both have their entertaining moments.

Again though, this is Supergirl’s biggest challenge. There are a lot of things that work throughout this movie, but there are just as many reasons why they don’t quite add up.

The Get Out will be released in select theaters on June 26, and on Digital and On Demand on June 30.

Russell Crowe's Albanian night club owner tries to retire from the money laundering business in the LA-set misfire, The Get Out, an underworld crime caper that tries but fails to capture the charm and richness of writers like Elmore Leonard (and filmmaker fans of Leonard like Tarantino).

Before delving into shortcomings, let's note that Crowe himself is the most vibrant part of the film. It's a good reminder of how fun he can be as a comedic performer, though the side effect of The Get Out could be making you watch The Nice Guys again (which also includes pining for a sequel). As earnest, hardworking Marco Kapak, who is truly in love with his much younger girlfriend, Sunny (Teresa Palmer), Crowe anchors the film while providing the best balance of tone.

Kapak is a quasi-criminal in a landscape of more brutal cartel characters (which allows for a Pope's Exorcist reunion with Daniel Zovatto), but The Get Out — originally titled Bear Country — feels like a mess of a story lacking the spark of cleverness to excuse all the rambling. Directed by Derrick Borte and adapted from a novel by Thomas Perry, the film isn't fun enough to warrant its '90s-style crime ensemble, nor are the moments of violence that are meant to act in contrast to its lighter elements captivating enough to add true excitement. Ultimately, it's a parade of half-measures.

After a heart attack makes Kapak rethink his current vocation, setting his sights on a relaxing future away from his current stress, he starts making moves to sell off his club. Enter Aaron Paul's Jeff, a poor schmo who's in over his head and forced to act as a sabotaging pawn. Jeff's story is the least satisfying of the bunch, as Paul is given only constant anxiety and frustration to play, with no narrative reprieve.

The Vampire Diaries' Nina Dobrev plays a wild card bank teller who attaches herself to Jeff (as one more melodramtic bad thing in Jeff's sad life), but she's just given the "crazy" card to work with and a token pop culture reference to wear as her identity. The Get Out sets up a lot of moving parts, including Luke Evans and Josh McConville as different parts of the law enforcement spectrum with secrets of their own. There's the whispered promise of things colliding in a twisty, rewarding way, but the third act is pretty flat, and we're never given a decent surprise or revelation.

With some format tinkering, The Get Out could have had some zigs and zags to make things more entertaining, but instead we're shown everyone's hand when we meet them, and then we just watch them randomly succeed or fail. Crowe maintains his charisma throughout, but the story — which aims for the comedy of errors/serendipity circus vibe — is too dry and toothless.

I’ve always liked Dead or Alive – unfortunately, that sentence usually has to be followed by a “but,” lest people think you’re some kind of weird pervert. “Not like that!” you might yell. “I think the mechanics are rad!” It’s tiresome, and Dead or Alive 6: Last Round deserves better than that stuff dominating the conversation around it. I’ve spent the last few days shaking seven years of dust off, but I really want to put it through its paces and spend some more time in the ring before I slap a number on it – as well as test it out on live servers since this updated edition still doesn’t have rollback netcode for some baffling reason. Fighting games are complex beasts, even when they’re essentially just re-releases that bundle all of the DLC together into one big package, and I want to give Last Round its due. But, so far, my impressions are positive.

The Dead or Alive series has always been extremely simple: one button for punches, one for kicks, one for throws, one for holds, and a “new” (as of the 2019 original) special attack button that performs a Fatal Rush autocombo and unlocks special meter moves. But more than a lot of fighters, Dead or Alive is, at its best, a chess match. Using what’s known as the Triangle System, every move invites a countermove – strikes beat throws, throws beat holds, holds beat strikes – and every attack is also an opening, if you’re good enough.

What makes this fighting system great has always been the Holds. See, you can counter essentially any strike by pressing hold and the direction you expect the attack to hit (high, low, or mid, though mid punches and mid kicks require different directional inputs), potentially stopping any offensive in its track. Holds are inherently risky, though. They won’t stop throws and still lose to strikes if mistimed or if you don’t use the right one – but land a hold right and you can swing an entire round. It’s absurdly satisfying to pull off, even against the computer.

The mind game that creates rules, and it’s still here in Last Round, but it doesn’t change that Dead or Alive is also incredibly easy to pick up. It’s not quite as deep as, say, Virtua Fighter, but anyone can play Dead or Alive 6. Getting good at it involves really digging into moves and countermoves, knowing how both the character you’re playing and the one you’re playing against work, and using that knowledge to pick the right option at the right time. It feels great when you land a hit, and hurts to take one.

When you’re getting smacked around and watching your health bar go the way of the dodo, it stings. But it should. That means you made a mistake. Shouldn’t have mistimed that hold, ya know? But when you max out your Break Gauge in order to hit a Break Blow – think Critical Blows from Dead or Alive 5 – or get just enough Break Gauge to pull off a Break Hold and turn the tables with a nifty counter, the Triangle System sings. Adding a meter to a 3D fighter is always risky (just ask Tekken fans how they feel about Heat in Tekken 8), but I think Dead or Alive 6’s implementation has managed to stand the test of time.

As far as the “new” stuff, Last Round doesn’t have a lot beyond a new photo mode, which I haven’t played around with much yet. This is mostly just a re-release of Dead or Alive 6 with all the DLC included, which is a fine enough thing for it to be. As someone who played a lot around the original’s release in 2019 but then didn’t keep up with every update since, I haven’t tried all of the DLC characters yet, but I have run some sets with Momiji and Rachel, and they feel right at home. The former trades power for speed and aggression, while the latter is all brute strength through short strings that turn into lots of damage, which tracks if you’ve played as either of them in Ninja Gaiden.

Beyond that, I’ve been enjoying the disjointed but breezy story mode and the still-quite-good teaching tools as I mess around with various members of the cast. Story mode in particular is enjoyably silly. Sure, its story is about tournaments and evil corporations and global conspiracies and ninjas and cyborgs and all sorts of crazy stuff, but it’s also very endearing. Where else can you see a guy yell “Hey, ninja man!” at an actual ninja before throwing a steel drum at him and immediately thereafter watch two women bond over their love of fighting, and then watch a couple of kids cheer on a New York street fighter after a sparring match? Not many places.

It’s also nice to see a fighting game campaign that puts women in its lead roles instead of relegating them to supporting players like most others do. The boys play their parts, but overall this show belongs to Kasumi, Helena, Ayane, Honaka, and Hitomi. They make choices, have agency, and solve their own problems in a way people who have only ever seen them playing beach volleyball might not expect. And sure, the story is a little Looney Tunes, but every fighting game’s is. Ever paid attention to Street Fighter lore? There’s a guy who thinks he’s a car, and that might not even be the weirdest part of it. Dead or Alive makes a hell of a lot more sense than something like Mortal Kombat (and I say this as someone who likes MK's nonsense), and while the overarching plot can be messy, the individual scenes and character interactions work well and are a lot of fun.

Of course, that’s not the reputation Dead or Alive is typically known for, and because one of the selling points of Last Round is that you get all the DLC costumes (though they still have to be unlocked in-game even if you own them), I suppose I now have to talk about the thing that consumes every piece of criticism ever written about this series: how everyone looks and moves. Yes, the women look Like That™. Yes, many of them are very bouncy. Yes, you can dress them in revealing outfits if you’re into that. Personally, I’m here for the punching.

If we’re being honest, there is no shortage of sexy characters in fighting games; Soul Calibur’s Ivy is quite literally a dominatrix and Capcom’s sexy outfits for Chun-Li sell so well that the last couple Street Fighters made the GDP of a small country. If anything, fighting games have only gotten hornier as time has gone on. I mean, have you seen the Guilty Gear cast? Or Street Fighter’s Juri, who is now Foot Fetish: The Character? Compared to some of that stuff, Dead or Alive 6’s brand of horny feels kind of… quaint? Some of the outfits here are tacky or tasteless, yeah, but I also don’t have to use them, or let them define my entire perception of Last Round. And if someone does use one of the ones I dislike online? All the more reason to kick their ass.

In fact, many of the visual improvements that were dismissed in 2019 as Team Ninja “being weird” actually hold up quite well. It rules that characters sweat during combat and you can see cuts and bruises on their faces and bodies when they’re doing their win poses. You should be a little sweaty and beat up after a fight, and it doesn’t feel like those details have been added with purely exploitative, leering intentions. Fighting is a brutal, bloody business. I like that Dead or Alive 6’s characters look like they’ve been in a brawl after a knock down, drag out fight.

So yeah, Dead or Alive is still Dead or Alive, but you have to take the good with the bad, and there is certainly good here. I’d kill to have this many costume options in most modern fighters, and I’d rather put Helena into one of her many fabulous dresses than a swimsuit anyway. There’s also an impressive visual variety across everyone’s designs, especially in an age when we’re seeing a lot of the same face shapes and body types be recycled. I want to be clear: I’m not saying Dead or Alive 6 is immune to criticism. Some of it is absolutely deserved; but spending time with it after a few years away also makes me think there’s some stuff here that deserves more praise than we previously gave it credit for. I hope we can be normal about that.

While I’ve so far enjoyed getting back into Dead or Alive 6 saddle, there are a few things about Last Round that concern me enough to spend more time with it before assigning a score. I can’t use Mai or Kula yet, despite the edition Koei Tecmo provided to us for this review supposedly coming with unlock codes for them, which I’m hoping is just a “the game isn’t out yet” issue and not a larger problem. I also want to test the netcode on live servers – just like the original, there is no rollback netcode in Last Round, which is… concerning, though potentially not gamebreaking. And I want to spend more time with the rest of the cast and run through stuff like DOA Quest to see how it holds up. But it feels good to be back in the ring. Dead or Alive has always felt good. And I hope Last Round continues to feel that way as I put more time into it.

The story of Star Fox’s latest outing is one we’ve seen before – both because it’s literally a remake of 1997 Star Fox 64, but also because it follows the familiar formula of so many recent reimaginings like it. More than just a fresh coat of paint slapped onto one of my favorite childhood games, it introduces a rewarding Challenge mode, slightly improved multiplayer options, and a bevy of brand new well-made cinematics that take a deeper dive into Star Fox lore. Add all those elements to an original game that still largely holds up three decades later and it makes for the best 20 or so hours of Star Fox I’ve ever played. Here’s hoping this is the start of a whole new generation for the series.

Let me start where most people will: the main campaign. Star Fox games have always had a relatively unique structure, where a fairly short series of levels are full of branching paths and alternate exits, meaning you’ll never see all 16 stages (or even most of them) on a single playthrough. A full, seven-mission run might only last an hour or less, but it took me about 10 hours to see all the different paths and earn every medal on both the normal and expert difficulties. Some may worry that the shorter campaign might feel lacking, but while it’s not necessarily a Thanksgiving dinner that will leave you stuffed, there was still more than enough meat on the bone to keep me entertained across multiple runs.

Returning to these recognizable stages on the Switch 2 was a thrill, and I was amazed by how great everything looked as my muscle memory returned after all these years. Everything from the reflections on the waters of Corneria to the kaleidoscopic wormholes you travel through look fantastic, which makes identifying any of the alternate path objectives easier than ever. The revamped soundtrack stands out as well; it perfectly captures the vibe of each location and keeps every campaign run brisk and interesting.

The brand-new, fully voiced cinematics also really help to bring the entire cast to life. There is a unique cutscene between each stage of the campaign, and unlocking an alternate route will even give you a different version of that cinematic when selecting the mission you’ll take on next. These scenes are weighted more toward the war against the big bad, Andross, but they also help deepen your understanding of and endear you to each member of the Star Fox team (even Slippy), fleshing out their personalities to a level the original never did. Conversations with Slippy show his love of engineering and how much work he’s put into the Arwings while the oldest member of the team Peppy confidently displays his years of wisdom by offering insight on why a planet might be a target for Andross. Falco’s nonchalant bravado and cockiness comes through with every voiceline, and the cool and confident Fox now has an added bit of wittiness.

This is a spoiler-free review of Batman: Knightfall Part 1 - Knightfall. The film premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and will be released on digital and home video later in 2026.

After a bit of a post-Crisis on Infinite Earths lull period, DC’s direct-to-video line of animated movies is back in action. And DC certainly picked a whopper of a storyline to return with. Batman: Knightfall Part 1 - Knightfall kicks off a new trilogy covering what is arguably the most seminal Batman comic yet to be adapted (it’s certainly high up on our list of the greatest Batman graphic novels). Fans of that iconic ‘90s crossover story will be pleased to know that Knightfall succeeds in delivering a very streamlined but generally faithful and loving take on the source material.

The premise of Knightfall is right in line with the comic. The film chronicles the origin of the rivalry between Batman (Anson Mount) and Bane (Michael Mando), as the latter makes his way to Gotham City and sets about systematically trying to wear down the Dark Knight physically and psychologically. Even as Batman deals with this shadowy foe and an endless gauntlet of Arkham Asylum escapees, he struggles to mentor his newest Robin, Tim Drake (Jack Griffn), and help the tortured vigilante Jean-Paul Valley (Pablo Schreiber) overcome his mental conditioning. As Bane understands all too well, even Batman has a breaking point.

My main concern coming into Knightfall was how well this trilogy would be able to cover such an extensive library of material. The Knightfall/KnightSaga trilogy comprises dozens of comics on its own, and that’s not even counting the essential prologue material like Sword of Azrael and Vengeance of Bane. It’s a lot of ground for even three films to cover.

Fortunately, screenwriter Jeremy Adams seems to hit on the right approach when it comes to adapting that voluminous saga. Not unlike Denny O’Neil’s excellent Knightfall novelization from the ‘90s, Part 1 trims a great deal of fat from the original crossover, jettisoning those characters and storylines that aren’t absolutely essential to the bigger picture. The end result keeps the focus squarely on Batman himself, his small circle of allies, and Bane.

This is a time before the modern Bat-family was firmly established, and you have a film that sees the Dark Knight constantly torn between a pathological desire to go it alone and a growing need to let others in. It’s a particularly dark and brooding take on the character, but one that serves a purpose and builds a worthy character arc for Bruce and his alter ego.

Knightfall captures what made the Batman line such an exciting read in the early ‘90s. It certainly looks like a ‘90s Batman comic come to life, with the animation directly evoking the hulking, Gothic physicality of Kelley Jones’ art and Batman’s billowing, almost living cape as rendered by the late, great Norm Breyfogle. Visually, this is easily one of the more stylish and attractive offerings from DC’s long-running animated line.

When it comes to Bane, Knightfall delivers what may be the most faithful take on a villain who hasn’t always fared the best in other media. He’s an imposing force of nature who quickly emerges as a legitimate, urgent threat to the Dark Knight. Yet he remains a character with a sympathetic backstory and clear motivations, with the film taking pains to show us Bane’s tragic upbringing in the hellish prison Peña Duro. It certainly helps that Mando excels in the role. While it’s a bit odd that the character speaks in perfect, unaccented English, Mando brings exactly the right source of menace and bravado to the screen.

The rest of the voice cast is solid, as well. Mount already had experience playing Batman in the Injustice animated movie, and his gravelly voice is well-suited to a conflict dealing with a slightly older and more weary Caped Crusader. Mount gets bonus points for drawing such a subtle but firm distinction between his Batman and Bruce Wayne voices. Schreiber is also strong as Jean-Paul. While his delivery is definitely a bit melodramatic at times, that suits a character who carries as much psychological baggage as he does. Another highlight comes in the form of Bruce Boxleitner’s Commissioner Gordon, a troubled man who can do little but watch as his old friend pushes himself further and further beyond his limits.

No, Knightfall is hardly a perfect adaptation. As much as it focuses on cutting out what isn’t necessary and focusing on the core of the story, it does skip over a few critical elements. Not enough time is spent fleshing out Jean-Paul’s origins and history as Azrael. And as much as the film emphasizes Bane’s obsession with Gotham and the Wayne family, it skips over what I’d consider to be a crucial link between the villain and Batman. At a brisk 80 minutes long, there’s only so much room to work with.

Still, it’s impressive what Knightfall is able to accomplish with its modest runtime. It captures most of what makes Knightfall such a compelling read among the vast Batman canon, and it doesn’t attempt to cram too much material into too small a space. I won’t spoil where in the Knightfall crossover this adaptation ends, but it’s a logical stopping point that sets up an equally exciting Part 2.

The Invite will be released in select theaters on June 26 before receiving a wide release on July 10.

Olivia Wilde’s double date dramedy The Invite achieves the kind of artistic maturity and formal control that was missing from her first two features, teen comedy Booksmart and scattered sci-fi Don’t Worry Darling. Although a nearly scene-for-scene remake on paper, it’s arguably Wilde’s first good feature for the way it imbues the story of Cesc Gay’s 2020 Spanish original, Sentimental (or The People Upstairs) — and its subsequent Italian, Swiss, French, and South Korean versions — with energy and intensity from minute one.

Penned by Toy Story 4 scribes Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (yes, the actress), and purchased by A24 after its Sundance bow, The Invite follows a middle-aged couple on the rocks who host their attractive upstairs neighbors for dinner before one thing leads to the next. Its swinger/spouse-swap premise disguises a pressurized tale of domestic discontent, crowbarred open by exotic curiosities. In the process, its impeccably cast characters are forced to leave everything about themselves on the table… or at least, more of themselves than they’re comfortable with. This psychological unspooling holds your attention right up until it can’t; the film eventually peters out, but only near the very end, leaving quite an enjoyable experience in its wake.

Seth Rogen plays Joe, the film’s ostensible protagonist, whose life as a failed pop punk musician in the aughts has given way to a mundane music teaching job in California. He bicycles home at his wife’s behest, leading to a snappy introduction rife with split-screens and other economical tricks that introduce us to his high-strung spouse, Angela (Wilde), who meticulously prepares their apartment for a fancy evening while their tween daughter is away. Unbeknownst to Joe — though according to Angela, he simply forgot — they’re meant to host their idiosyncratic neighbors for an informal dinner, the prospect of which sends the unhappy couple spiraling through never-ending disagreements.

Wilde’s 107-minute version (about half an hour longer than the original) smartly delays both the arrival of the guests and their eventual proposition. This allows The Invite to marinate in the awkward atmosphere of a married couple putting on a cheery façade that threatens to crack at any moment. Joe and Angela barely talk to each other anymore, at least not in a way that doesn’t involve petty sniping, and to make matters more uncomfortable, their guests — the frank, filterless firefighter Hawk (Edward Norton) and his free-spirited therapist girlfriend Piña (Penélope Cruz) — see right through their ruse and aren’t afraid to call it out.

The ensuing evening is a tale of dysfunction forced into temporary alignment (and beyond that, painful honesty) by Hawk and Piña’s apparent harmony. Still in their honeymoon phase, the alluring guests are so seemingly in sync emotionally and sexually that their explosive lovemaking has long been heard by Joe and Angela downstairs. It’s a disturbance the hosts argue about bringing up, a minor point from which much of their conflict stems and which is subsequently magnified, including and especially their compunctions around sexual liberation. Maybe they’re too prudish for an orgy, but they’re certainly willing to demonstrate otherwise if only to prove each other wrong, leading to some hilarious escalations.

Wilde and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra capture each conversation with dizzying verve, as though any given interaction were a make-or-break moment for the hosts. Their relationship rests on a knife’s edge, a sensation that Wilde carries throughout her haggard performance as a woman who struggles to see herself through anyone else’s eyes, or as anything but a bored, unattractive housewife. Wilde, despite being a conventionally beautiful Hollywood star, plays this insecurity in immensely convincing ways. Rogen, meanwhile, portrays a husband tipping so far over the edge of unhappiness that he practically exists in constant free-fall. He smooths over difficult conversations with weed and poorly-timed jokes at everyone else’s expense, and cuts through the film's overlapping dialogue like a hissing pipe.

Norton and Cruz play their opposites in fascinating ways, with an air of shocking honesty and self-confidence concerning their bodies and sexual proclivities. They disguise all of this under and around the conventions of polite conversation, even though they have only one goal in mind: sleeping with their hosts. Wilde captures this objective through careful movement and blocking as the characters move throughout the film’s single location, before she suddenly peels back the layers of the guests’ dysfunctions too. All the while, composer Devonté Hynes ping-pongs between jagged and melodic notes to mirror the characters’ states of mind before remarkably building to the familiar, seductive tones of Georges Bizet’s classic opera, Carmen; the Habanera has rarely sounded so mischievous.

All these wonderful aesthetic setups, however, demand payoffs the film isn’t really willing to engage with. Wilde’s remake goes much further with its chemistry and sensuality than Gay’s — whose version feels intentionally more mundane — but it cuts itself off at the knees without offering Joe and Angela a complete glimpse of the emotions and sensations their marriage has long been missing. Its climactic scenes seldom replace the movie’s initial bursts of energy with anything nearly as engaging or enveloping.

When it slows down to really dig into its characters and unveil their emotional cores, The Invite runs out of steam, becoming stilted and stage-like until eventually, its conclusions teeter halfway between something definitive or cathartic and hauntingly open-ended. It is perhaps a fitting irony that a film so effective at portraying festering discontent should close in such a dissatisfying fashion. Then again, accidentally or otherwise, few films more honestly replicate how a dwindling relationship feels like a chess game at stalemate.

Back in 1994, a guy named Richard Garfield — who you may remember from another one of his inventions, Magic: the Gathering — essentially invented the subgenre of programmed movement games with RoboRally. Over the years, this chaotic game of robots racing through a hazardous factory has become a cult hit, inspiring love and hate in equal measure, and enjoying a number of different editions and expansions.

Now, 32 full years after the original, it finally has a spin-off with some fresh mechanics: Robo Rally Dice. Interestingly, Garfield's name isn't on the box. Instead the design credit goes to Kane Klenko, who's made a bit of a name for himself as a fan of real-time play and dice rolling including his most popular game, FUSE; concepts which he’s now brought to Robo Rally.

What’s in the Box

Rules and How It Plays

In programmed movement games like this, the idea is that everyone pre-selects a set of actions which they unveil at the same time and then implement on the modular board that you’ve set up before play. In most cases, and the Robo Rally games are no exception, the entertainment value is in trying your hardest to figure out a turn in advance within limited parameters, only to watch your plans fall apart when they come into contact with everyone else trying to do exactly the same. And, of course, pre-programmed movement fits the theme of racing robots pretty well.

The original game gave players nine cards from a random selection and got them to plan out five moves. The cards were things like move forward, turn left or right, about-turn and suchlike. Robo Rally Dice jettisons the cards for, you guessed it, dice, with the custom symbols matching similar movement patterns to the old cards. However, you don’t just roll the dice and abide by the results. You don’t even roll them, put a few back, and re-roll the remainder Yahtzee-style. Oh no. You can keep on rolling as long as you like, as fast as you like, picking out dice one by one and adding them to your mat.

Obviously there's a catch, otherwise the game would go on forever. The first player to be satisfied with their selection of five dice picks up the black dice and starts rolling, calling out each time they roll a six. After three sixes, anyone who's still not finished has to stop and face a turn with an incomplete set of moves.

The in-game effects of this are interesting, and worth discussing at length since they’re the primary way Robo Rally Dice differs from the original game. First up, the dice make it easier to do what you want. It’s possible, for example, in the original game that you might desperately need to move forward and have no cards to do it. Here, you’ll almost always be able to make progress in the race. Rather, it’s the time pressure that leads you to accept compromises or even make mistakes in planning your turn.

As it turns out, the time pressure is as much of a weird psychological trick as it is anything else. Everyone wants to put down all of their dice, so whoever finishes first is unlikely to be that much further ahead of everyone else. So by the time they’ve grabbed the black dice and started rolling and even got one six, let alone three, most of the other players have probably finished. But, not always. Sometimes those sixes tumble out in quick succession. Sometimes players lose dice through damage, so they can end their turn plan much faster than their competitors. Sometimes, someone is left short when the third six is rolled and the fact that it’s rare doesn’t stop everyone feeling the terror that it might be them when it happens.

So you have this weird amalgamation of mechanisms which, in isolation, feel like a terrible idea but somehow, in concert, they work. The dice selection phase feels like a crushing timebox when, really, it isn’t, and the pressure leads to you planning suboptimal moves. That, in turn, substitutes for the lack of cards that stymied you in the original, without the heartless frustration that engenders. You’ll get the desired effect that the player’s robots speed through the factory at a satisfactory pace, but from time to time, they screw up. That’s when the game gets both more and less interesting.

After each die is resolved, there’s an ordered checklist of things to go through. If you’re not bumping into anyone else’s robots, or on any board icons, you can ignore this and play rumbles on. However, when those effects apply, you have to be quite careful about how you implement them and in what order, which slows things down in what’s supposed to be a fast-paced, madcap game. The results, however, are often enjoyably anarchic, especially when bots push each other into unexpected squares, which can then derail all the following movement dice, leading to a growing chain of chaos. Of course, the more people you have at the table, the more chances you’ll have of these interactions and this definitely plays better with a full complement.

Most board scenery is designed to add to the insanity, such as conveyor belts that move your robot unwittingly, or gears that change its direction. But there are also damaging elements like pits and lasers which can lead to you losing dice for the following turn: the robots themselves also have lasers that shoot at the end of their moves. To mix things up there are also positive icons that can be worth making a race detour for, adding further unpredictability to events. Missiles hurt other robots on the board if you land on them, while batteries allow you to add upgrades to your robot.

Upgrade cards are clearly there to add more strategic elements to the game but the reality is they’re a mixed bag. You can get them from dice rolling as well as batteries, and some need dice to activate, requiring a mish-mash of rules that are easily forgotten in the fast-paced play. As a result, the upgrades themselves are often easily forgotten, too, in the dash to cross the finish line first, and when they’re remembered, it just slows things down. It may be that leveraging these cards—a mix of movement and offensive capabilities that do things like let you move diagonally or rebound laser shots to their originator—is the hallmark of more skillful play, but it’s just not how they feel in practice. There’s also too few of them: a measly 20 cards, many of which are duplicates.

Where to Buy

• Get it at Amazon for $34.99
• Get it at Target for $39.99
• (Out of stock at Walmart)

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance writer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.

The Steam Machine is finally here after looming on the horizon for the last eight months or so. And while Valve has been adamant that the Steam Machine is an entry-level gaming PC, rather than a new, fourth player in the console space, this little box has captured the attention of console and PC gamers alike.

At $1,049, the Steam Machine is unlikely to win over the hearts and minds of PlayStation and Xbox faithfuls, but it is easily the best living room PC I’ve ever used, despite being a bit weaker than either of the base consoles. But what’s truly impressive is that it’s able to do that while also being one of the best ways to just get into PC gaming in the first place. PC gaming has always been expensive, and the Steam Machine is certainly no different, but Valve was able to cut away most of the tinkering and just get new players into the game.

The RAM crisis may have caused Valve to raise the price, but $1049 for a gaming PC is certainly not unheard of, especially for a rig as small as this. So, yeah, the Steam Machine isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you have the budget, it’s an incredible device to hook up to your TV.

Expensive, Or Is It?

The Steam Machine’s price has been a constant topic of conversation ever since it was announced back in November 2025. Back then, Valve made it very clear that the Machine would be priced competitively with a comparable gaming PC, and at that point, I assumed it’d land at around $800. But gaming PCs, and the components they’re made of, have become much more expensive since then.

Thanks to the ongoing RAM crisis, fueled by seemingly every company needing to build a hyperscale datacenter, the 16GB of RAM in the Steam Machine alone would cost nearly $250 by itself. And, with that in mind, it makes it a little easier to understand how Valve landed on a $1049 price point for the 512GB version and $1349 for the 2TB model, even if it makes it a bit harder to recommend.

That makes the Steam Machine around $400-450 more expensive than the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5 to start. That price probably disqualifies Valve’s new mini gaming PC in the eyes of many console faithfuls, but it makes a lot more sense for its intended purpose as an entry-level gaming PC.

Because as much as that $1049 price tag is shocking at first glance, Valve is still keeping its word about keeping the price competitive. I took a moment to price out a similarly-specced gaming PC on PCPartPicker, and it ended up being around $1050, and that’s with a full-sized ATX PC case, rather than the Steam Machine’s tiny little cube.

Whether you’re just getting into PC gaming and need a low-effort starting point, or if you already have a huge Steam library and you need a mini gaming PC for your living room, the Steam Machine is arguably a pretty good deal. Especially because unlike most gaming PCs, the Steam Machine is ready to play games as soon as it boots up for the first time. And, well, time is money.

Design and Features

Right out of the box, the Steam Machine doesn’t look like much. It’s a little cube, about 6-inches on each side, with an RGB light bar across the bottom. And that’s one of the main appeals about this little PC.

At the beginning of this console generation, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X both had out-of-this-world designs. The PS5 looked like some fancy space-age building in a gentrified neighborhood, while the Xbox Series X looked like a mini-fridge with green accents in the vents. Depending on your sensibilities, the Steam Machine is so small and unassuming that it might be the first console-that’s-not-a-console that actually blends in with the rest of your entertainment center.

Everything about the Steam Machine’s design seems purpose-built to blend into your living room, down to the cooling. There’s only a single fan on this thing, located in the rear of the device. That doesn’t sound like enough, but most of this cube is a giant heatsink that takes cold air from the front of the device and passes it directly out of the back. Just take off the magnetic faceplate and peek inside, and you’ll see just a block of aluminum fins to that effect.

This is such a simple cooling solution in theory, but it immediately solves the overheating problems of anyone that just wants to shove their console on a shelf and forget about it. You don’t have to worry about keeping the sides of the Steam Machine free to ‘let it breathe’ because the only air intake is in the front of the console, which then spits hot air out of the back. And, you’re going to want both the front and the back of the device clear anyway to access the ports.

There are three ports on the front of the Steam Machine, two USB-A ports to connect controllers or other peripherals and a MicroSD card reader. I love that the card reader is in the front here, because if you already have a Steam Deck, you can easily swap the SD card carrying your game library between the two, and have immediate access to whatever you’re playing.

Just like any desktop PC, there are way more ports ‘round the back. There’s an HDMI and a DisplayPort for displays, along with a power connector, an ethernet port, two USB-A ports and a USB-C port. That’s admittedly less than a lot of full-sized PCs, but with the size of the Steam Machine, it’s hard to expect anything more.

It’s important to note, though, that the power connector is the same as what’s found on other game consoles like the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. That certainly helped a lot in my testing, because it kind of just slotted right into my setup, but it also just means that the power connector will be super easy to replace, as there are a ton of cheap power connectors you can buy online for this thing.

If you don’t necessarily want the Steam Machine to blend into the background, the faceplate is swappable. It’s attached by magnets on each of the four corners, and the Machine comes with a plain black one preinstalled. If you have the cash for the 2TB model, it’ll come with two extra faceplates, but because the attachment is so simple, I expect there will be a little cottage industry that springs up selling 3D-printed faceplates with all kinds of wild designs.

There’s also the RGB light strip at the bottom of the device. By default, this acts as a sort of status indicator, glowing blue when the PC is on and blinking white when it’s trying to go to sleep. But you can go into the ‘Customization’ menu and either turn the light off entirely, or change it to any color or effect you want.

More Than Just a Console

It would be easy to dismiss the Steam Machine as an overpriced console, but it is so much more than that. There’s a reason that Valve repeatedly hammered home the idea that this is intended to be a gaming PC – it can do so much more than just play games.

While it’s true that the PS5 and Xbox have a slew of different apps that extend their utility, a lot of those boil down to watching Netflix or something similar. The Steam Machine, on the other hand, is just a Linux PC that launches in Steam Big Picture mode, so the possibilities are basically endless.

You’re not going to find much in the way of ready-to-install entertainment apps, but even without swapping the operating system over to Windows – which you can do – you can install a bevy of different programs. Yeah, you can just use it to watch Netflix through the Chrome browser if you want, but you can also plug in a keyboard and mouse and code on this thing. Try doing that on a PS5 without jailbreaking it.

Admittedly, that narrows down the appeal of the Steam Machine a bit. People who just want a little entertainment box might be better served with a traditional console, but I don’t think that necessarily matters. One of the beautiful things about PC gaming, and one of the reasons PC gamers are so attached to their machines, is because a great gaming PC becomes a sort of appliance in their home.

I already mentioned how well the Steam Machine fits into an entertainment center, but the small size and unassuming aesthetics also makes it a great fit on any desk. Simply plug in a keyboard and mouse, and the Steam Machine is powerful enough to be a little mini workstation, especially for lighter tasks like coding or writing.

That’s probably a big reason why Valve wasn’t able to use sales from the Steam Store to subsidize the cost of the Steam Machine. Even without playing games, the Steam Machine is just a great little mini gaming PC, and in that world the $1049 price that is so high compared to a game console actually starts looking like a bit of a bargain.

The Big Picture

Being more of a gaming PC than a game console doesn’t mean that the Steam Machine carries the same kind of baggage as Windows 11 devices. Just like the Steam Deck before it, Valve’s mini PC is basically plug-and-play. As soon as you boot it up, it’ll pull up a log-in screen that you can get past simply by scanning a QR code with the Steam Mobile app. And, then you’re just in Steam Big Picture mode, where you can just start downloading and playing games.

For a lot of people, that’s as deep as you’re going to need to go. And, even if you do need to tweak some settings, it’s super easy to just hit the Steam Button on the Steam Controller, or the equivalent menu button on whichever controller you’re using to bring up the Steam menu. From there, you can go into settings and tweak everything from default game resolution to the RGB lighting.

You can also use the Quick Access menu – brought up by the 3-dots-button – to tweak system settings like refresh rate and even how much power is being pumped into the GPU. It is surprisingly easier to tweak settings on the Steam Machine than it is to tweak things on an Xbox or PS5.

Of course, you can go into the Linux desktop and really get into the weeds. But unless you really want to add your Epic Games or other games libraries, you probably never have to even look at the desktop if you don’t want to. Although, being able to go to the desktop and just use the Steam Machine as an actual computer is what makes this thing one of my favorite PCs in years. There’s just something incredible about a gaming PC that’s connected to my TV that I can push a button and turn into an actual workspace, when typically it’s the other way around on Windows machines.

Performance and Gaming

The Steam Machine is packing a 6-core, 12-thread Zen 4 processor, paired with a RDNA 3 GPU with 28 CUs, the equivalent of a Ryzen 5 7600 and a Radeon RX 7600, respectively. That’s not exactly a recipe for a high-end gaming PC, but it is more than enough to run most modern games, although you will have to tweak settings to play at 4K.

Unfortunately, Valve came out the gate claiming the Steam Machine would be able to play games at 4K60 with FSR. The Steam Machine absolutely can do that, but not with all the eye candy enabled. And, it just so happens that when I’m testing a gaming PC, I benchmark with all of that eye candy enabled.

If my testing process was limited just to my regular benchmarks, the Steam Machine wouldn’t look too great. In Cyberpunk 2077 with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset at 4K, and with FSR set to ‘Performance’, the Steam Machine only managed to get 14 fps. That’s pretty dismal, but once I turned down ray tracing, that number skyrocketed up to 42 fps at the same resolution.

Then, in Forza Horizon 6, with the Extreme preset without ray tracing, the Steam Machine got 30 fps with FSR set to ‘Performance’. And in Total War, Warhammer 3, on the Ultra preset at 4K, the Steam Machine gets 23 fps. These numbers don’t exactly bode well for Valve’s ‘4K60’ frames, at least until you remember that, at its core, the Steam Machine is a gaming PC.

All it really takes to hit those 4K60 numbers is to tweak with the settings. Once I turned those games down to their respective medium presets, Forza Horizon 6 was able to get 57 fps, and Cyberpunk 2077 was able to get up to 64 fps. And that’s exactly where I’d want the Steam Machine to be, if I’m just connected to a TV in the living room.

The same was true across all the games I played in my time with the Steam Machine: I had no problem hitting averages between 50-60 fps in pretty much every game I tried. There are some games, like Death Stranding 2, which averaged around 45 fps with its medium preset, but even that is still very playable. It’s important to keep in mind too, that the image quality that comes with ‘Medium’ presets on PC, is typically about the same as what you’d get from the base PS5 and Xbox Series X.

For instance, in 007 First Light, I set most of the settings at around medium or high, and managed to get around 55-60 fps. That’s not quite the same locked 60 fps that the PS5 or Xbox Series X gets, but those consoles typically use dynamic resolution in games, which means the resolution will scale up or down in order to maintain a locked frame rate.

That option will certainly be available in some games on PC, but for the most part, you’re going to have to tweak games until they run at the frame rate you’re comfortable with.

It’s also worth noting that a driver update came out after this review went into edits, which may improve performance. We’ll be testing that soon and will have those results in a performance deep dive in the coming days.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episode 5!

I'm of the mind that Rick and Morty should reference past episodes and storylines more often than it does, so theoretically, I should be all over "Jer Bud." This episode is basically a sequel to Season 1's "Lawnmower Dog," finally bringing Morty's (Harry Belden) old dog Snowball (Rob Paulsen) back into the fray after years' worth of visual cameos and Easter eggs. But instead of being a fun callback to a simpler and more innocent time for the series, "Jer Bud" merely argues that Snowball was better left in the past.

Sometimes the series struggles to take a fun premise and build on it in a meaningful way. Episode 5 is different in that it never really seems to have anything worth building on in the first place with the Morty/Snowball storyline. It starts off a little bland, and it never gets off the ground when Morty finds himself dragged into another conflict involving the fate of an alien civilization.

In this case, Morty finds himself unwillingly thrust into the role of liberator of a race of grotesque, inbred humanoid pets called Mups. This episode leans a lot on the idea that, once they're granted sentience and given power over their own destinies, dogs wind up behaving an awful lot like humans. And sure, that tracks, but there's never much humor to be found in the whole situation. The concept of the Mups is never particularly funny, nor is there much visual humor to their physical deformations. None of it clicks as it should.

The one thing I'll grant this storyline is that at least it makes an effort to shuffle Rick (Ian Cardoni) to the background and allow Morty to shine on his own. Rick has such a tendency to dominate the series from week to week, so it's nice to see a concerted effort to shift the spotlight to the rest of the Smith family. It's just too bad that Morty's storyline is so underwhelming.

Thankfully, at least we can usually count on Jerry (Chris Parnell) to salvage the show in its weaker moments. The Worm Jerry subplot is far more successful than the Morty/Snowball storyline. Not unlike in Episode 4, the show gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that Jerry is possessed by a larger force and acting a bit out of character. It's a lot of fun watching the worms inside Jerry push a simple job interview to bizarre and inane heights. Parnell is clearly having a blast exploring this different, much cooler side of his chronic loser character.

The Worm Jerry storyline takes a lot of amusing twists and turns by the end, spanning from a seedy alien drug den to a plane falling through the sky while Jerry cooly guides a woman through childbirth. This storyline makes solid use of the supporting characters around Jerry, including Rick himself and both versions of Beth (Sarah Chalke). Season 9 hasn't done much with Beth or Summer (Spencer Grammer) yet, so it's good that at least one of them gets a bit more attention here.

The two halves of this episode are wildly opposed in terms of quality, and ultimately they sort of cancel each other out. The result is definitely the weakest installment of Season 9 overall. But hey, take solace knowing that it only gets better from here in the latter half of the season.

Full spoilers follow for House of the Dragon Season 3, Episode 1.

High stakes. High seas. High treason. This season opener has everything. This is the Battle of the Gullet and it is every bit as spectacular as we could have hoped, all pirate battles and flaming missiles and hand-to-hand combat. It’s surrounded by the sort of scheming, seduction, confession and devastation that makes for good character drama too. If the rest of the season is anything like this, this Game of Thrones spin-off might finally have a way to outfight its predecessor.

We’ll come back to the character stuff. The centrepiece of this episode is a hugely exciting air-and-navy clash between Lord Corlys Velaryon’s (Steve Toussaint) fleet and the Tyroshi fleet led by Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn). For Lohar, it’s a grudge match; for Corlys, it’s only part of his blockade of King’s Landing on behalf of Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and her “Blacks” in the civil war called the Dance of Dragons against her cousins, the “Greens.”

Lohar’s determined to hit the Sea Snake where it hurts, sending half her fleet to burn his home: “High Tide is a monument to the Sea Snake himself. Do you think his focus will hold when he sees his treasure aflame?” She’s right: it is another devastating blow to a man who already lost a wife and two children. Happily, he’s also a badass. He lures Lohar away from the fleet, sinks two of her companion ships thanks to some fancy-pants sailing through a narrow channel, and then fights hand-to-hand against the ferocious Tyroshi captain. Abigail Thorn is great as Lohar here, absolutely convincing as a leader of men and a serious threat to Corlys. She’s already come close to taking down a dragon before getting to this personal vendetta.

Given that Corlys begins the episode having a moving heart-to-heart with his formidable illegitimate son Alyn (Abubakar Salim) and that he then earns Alyn’s respect as a sailor and a captain during the battle, you have to wonder if he’ll survive this fight; he’s missing at the end of the episode. If this is how he goes out, fair play. It’s an exceptionally well-shot, almost entirely practical battle; apparently the ship tanks and sets were so massive at Leavesden Studios that they overshadowed the new Harry Potter’s Privet Drive.

The battle in the air goes less well. Yes, Prince Jacaerys (Harry Collett) and Baela (Bethany Antonia) ride into the fight and decimate the Tyroshi fleet, but Jace’s dragon Vermax is almost taken down by Lohar early on, and then Rhaena (Phoebe Campbell) joins the battle to devastating effect. In this episode, we see that she’s finally wooed a dragon of her own, but in one of those rabbit’s foot scenarios her half-feral beast refuses to obey her and attacks friends and foe alike in the heat of the moment. Her attempts to help contribute to the battle’s biggest loss as Vermax is harpooned in the chest and drags Jace into the drink with him. It’s a devastating finale.

On the bright side, at least it saves Rhaenyra from having to confront her son’s high treason: the reason she is not there on her own dragon is because he locked her in her room for her own protection. She’s on a high this episode, convinced by Alicent’s (Olivia Cooke) offer to surrender King’s Landing and confident in her new dragonriders, who are waiting grumpily near Harrenhal to ambush awful Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and his massive dragon Vhagar. (So oversized. What is he compensating for?) Of course, this follows two seasons of dithering, so you can understand why her team isn't so convinced. It’s a bit late for her to start quoting Elizabeth I now. Rhaenyra’s line, “I may appear to have the weak and feeble body of a woman but I possess the heart and spirit of a king” is a historical lift from a speech that also preceded a major naval encounter. Anyway, she sends for her husband, Daemon (Matt Smith), who’s just destroyed a Green-aligned Lannister army at Red Fork with the help of the Riverlords, and enjoying the blood-splattered look.

The late-arriving Starks bring Daemon the head of Lord Jason Lannister (Jefferson Hall), while his fully-armoured twin Tyland tries to keep control of his Tyroshi allies on the Gullet. So much for one Green army, but the spoiled, rather prissy Ormund Hightower (James Norton) has another on the way, including the dragon Tessarion. Oh, and Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) is out there with his forces, alongside Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), who’s increasingly horrified by Cole’s nihilism and his lack of control of his thuggish men. That’s a lot of potential fighting men still on the board.

Then there are the main members of the Green royal family. Alicent is horrified, on her return to King’s Landing, to find Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) missing and Aemond all too present, when she had promised Rhaenyra precisely the opposite. Aegon’s run for it is interrupted by Rhaenyra’s troops and Lord Larys’ (Matthew Needham) scheming, unbeknownst to his mother, but it takes all of Alicent’s considerable powers of persuasion – and a hint of something closer to seduction on Aemond’s part, ewww – to send her son off to Harrenhal and clear the way for the deal she has made. As for that kiss, we needed something to really turn the stomach this episode, right?

In summary, we’ve got dragons in action; ships sinking and burning and firing; armies clashing; Larys and Aemond and Aegon and Cole being awful; and Alyn and Corlys and Daemon being badass. If the show were always like this, it wouldn’t just match Game of Thrones, it would outshine all but a handful of episodes. Two years ago, rounding up Season 2, I speculated that showrunner Ryan Condal had held back on the action last time to build a war chest for this season. I thought I was joking, but this episode makes me wonder. If this signals the path for Season 3, it’s going to be a feast.

Spoilers below for Episode 4 of Cape Fear. New episodes stream every Friday on Apple TV.

Over the last three weeks, Apple TV’s Cape Fear has settled into a Morse code-like cadence: long, meandering, and richly shot dashes of vibes with heavy plot punctuated by quick outbursts of violence and drama. Episode 3 followed the pattern with the shocking return of actress Juliette Lewis to the franchise, and Episode 4 — ominously titled “Pierced” — is no different.

In the immediate aftermath of Lewis being unveiled as Max’s (Javier Bardem) as-of-now unnamed stalker, we’re plunged right back into the creepy torpor of the show. Max is shown praying at a shadowed, candle-lit altar, later approaching Tom (Patrick Wilson) at a bar and telling him that Zack (Joe Anders) “really needs a father;” if he’s not intent on disrupting the Bowden family’s lives, he certainly has a knack for accidentally running into them. Natalie (Lily Collias) lashes out at her parents and calls her stepfather a cuck, and later, Max confronts a used car salesman and torments him with the fact that he slept with the man’s wife.

While Episode 4 commits the same sin as its predecessors by frequently trading forward momentum for digging deeper into mood and tone, it’s not completely out of bounds. “Pierced” does more with swish pans, off-putting camera angles, and explosive musical cues than most series could do with an army’s-worth of in-your-face edits. Here, the style elevates the story instead of papering over its defects. It seems the point of Cape Fear is to make you feel unsettled, and in that regard, the show has been an unfettered success so far.

This week’s A-plot sees Anna (Amy Adams) attempting to free Ruben Ramirez (Roberto Sanchez), another wrongly-convicted man, from prison. This time, the inmate has all but given up and says he’s dropping his appeal, but Anna is determined and goes to the house of a man named “Smiley” who may be able to provide an alibi. What follows is a scene straight out of Silence of the Lambs as Anna talks her way into Smiley’s house, which is full of snake enclosures beautifully lit by a rainbow of lights, and tries to trick him into a confession. When he lashes out, pulling a gun while throwing her phone to one of his snakes, Anna gets the hell out of there.

Meanwhile, Navaeh/Amber — the girl who seduced Natalie in last week’s episode —takes Natalie to a friend’s house and badgers her into getting a body piercing, generally further ingraining herself into Natalie’s life. Later, the two girls break into the house of Natalie’s friend Callie and have sex in her bed. Navaeh is definitely bad news, and we’re about to find out why.

As all of this is going on, Tom tries to bond with Zack at an art show, only to find that Zack is using the opportunity to approach the girl he distributed lewd photos of the year before. This triggers Tom flashing back to his brother’s suicide, which he tells everyone was a car crash. We even see Tom repeatedly hit himself as Zack does when he’s ashamed of his own actions; it seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the sneaky adulterous lawyer.

Later, Anna asks Max — why does she keep reeling this guy back into her life? — to help convince Smiley to talk. After a shocking moment in which Max grabs and kisses her, and Anna reacts somewhere between “Get the hell away from me” and “I don’t totally mind this” (is there more to their relationship than what we’ve seen so far?), Max murders one of Smiley’s precious snakes with a fork and threatens him. We don’t see what happens next, but Max reveals a taped confession that exonerates Ramon.

We also see Anna approached by Max’s stalker. It’s frustrating that we weren’t able to dive right into the aftermath of Juliette Lewis’s Episode 3 appearance at the top of “Pierced,” but what we’re left with here is equally as compelling and disconcerting. The stalker asks Anna if “she’s his whore now,” and says to stay away from Max. She also intimates that she had something to do with the murder of Max’s wife.

The episode ends with yet another jaw-dropping revelation. Anna’s co-worker Ray (Jamie Hector) has been digging up information on Navaeh and it turns out — surprise! — that her mother was a prison nurse known to have “relations” with a high-profile inmate; in other words, she’s probably (definitely) Max’s daughter. Thus, a huge piece of the puzzle falls into place, and another giant flashing sign blaring “Stay away from Max Cady, Bowdens!” lights up.

While Episode 4 of Cape Fear takes way too long to get to the good stuff, the slow pacing and conveyor belt of jump scares and moodiness serves it well in big moments like sudden acts of rage (sorry, Mr. Snake) or series-turning reveals. While it does sometimes feel like the pacing could be sped up a bit — the show could probably be 6-8 episodes instead of the planned 10 — the artistry and cinematic scope of the story are still a welcome sight in an age of Volume-shot shows. “Pierced” isn’t a revelatory episode of television, but if you’re into Cape Fear’s richly macabre sensibility, it’s still a treat… even if it’s more of the same.

Some spoilers follow for both seasons of Sugar. Sugar Season 2 is available on Apple TV now.

As detective shows go, Sugar is one of the more intriguing offerings of recent years, and not just because Colin Farrell's eponymous PI is revealed to be an alien. Through the eyes of this otherworldly sleuth, series creator Mark Protosevich endeavors to grapple with what it means to be human — the way we act, the way we feel, and the choices we make when faced with right and wrong. Do we just observe the horrors of the world, or do we try to do something about them? Must we take a life to save lives or achieve some sort of justice?

In Season 1, John Sugar faced those existential questions against a Los Angeles backdrop. His investigation into the missing granddaughter of a wealthy studio head led him to the serial killer son of a senator whose murderous machinations were being covered up, not just by powerful figures of Earth, but also by Sugar’s own people. Their secret presence had been revealed, causing some to be targeted for death while others (by the final episode) decided to return to their home world. Not John, though; he chose to stay in order to get answers about his presumed dead sister, Djen (Maeve Whalen), from his treacherous best friend, Henry (Jason Butler Harner), and to find out just who sold his people out.

Season 2 kicks off — again — in East Asia. Sugar locates a near-dead Henry, who succumbs to his wounds before the PI can learn any more about his sister. The PI looks around a hideout covered with blown-up black-and-white photos and "Beware Assimilation" painted on the wall before destroying all evidence of it and Henry in a fire. Farrell continues his velvety voiceover, waxing poetically about home, isolation, and the emotions of living, yet that warning of assimilation will hang over the eight episodes once Sugar returns to Los Angeles to take on a new case.

Protosevich certainly offers a compelling neo-noir plot for Sugar to get caught up in. This time, he's not working for the wealthy elite, but Korean-American immigrant Danny Moon (Jin Ha), a poor up-and-coming boxer whose chaotic brother, Ji (Raymond Lee), has gone missing. With the help of Sasha Calle's cool, street-smart protégé Val, and Shea Whigham's gruff, cancer-stricken government operative Tom, Sugar unearths a conspiracy involving Ji, narcotics, the sheriff's department, and the homeless community. Season 1 might have touched on the wealth gap in LA, but here it becomes part of a cogent critique of societal prejudice toward those pushed to the margins.

Sugar has always been an empathetic hero and a sparkling-eyed contradiction to the world-weary dicks of Old Hollywood that he's long idolized, but his privilege has rarely been checked. He drives a classic Corvette Sting Ray and lives out of a Chateau Marmont-esque hotel with a closetful of pristine bespoke suits to boot. Spending time with people like Val, Danny, and Ji while navigating the less affluent sides of LA awakens him more convincingly to the very human struggle of living a good, moral life. Throw in an endearing romance with Laura Donnelly's "is she/isn't she?" femme fatale Charlotte and a vendetta against Tony Dalton's charismatic antagonist Sheriff Ray Vega, and Sugar's got a persuasively entertaining and evenly-paced storyline to rival that of The Big Heat.

Protosevich has never been subtle about how much those kinds of Hollywood films are an education on Humanity for Sugar. The alien moves with a cineliterate lens: His mind flickers to Paul Newman in The Hustler as he hustles a woman for information on Ji at a pool hall; later, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a 1941 classic about maintaining your identity and inner worth, is playing on his TV at a moment of pensivity for what bad thing Sugar had to do to save innocent lives. Yet this meta-contemplation fails to illustrate the vivid character study of a lonely alien hiding out in the body of a human.

This is not a question of Farrell's performance. His kind gaze and warm, earnest presence evoke memories of Bruno Ganz's angel in Wings of Desire and David Bowie's alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, it's a struggle to comprehend Sugar's unease with human assimilation when the series shrouds so much of his alien heritage in ambiguity. If Sugar is worried about being too nurtured by human behaviour, what inherent nature is at risk?

It's a frustration inherited from Season 1, where many of the science fiction elements were breadcrumbed in. Here, a few flashbacks to Sugar's interactions with a rogue alien, his sister's secretive work, and a hint of his telekinetic powers are not enough to stave off hunger for meatier details about this alien race's behaviors, their backstory, and their purpose on Earth.

By the final episode, Sugar resolves his initial conundrum — and we get to see exactly why these aliens are allergic to cinnamon — but this subplot leaves us with more questions. A third season would hopefully clear those up, but maybe if Sugar was as much of an homage to sci-fi as it is to film noir, Season 2 would be a far more satisfying slice of cinematic cake.

Wins and losses. Knockouts and submissions. These sensational headline-grabbers are essential to MMA, but they only make up one part of the bigger, brutal picture. The pieces that are arguably more important — the countless bloody knuckles, cuts, gashes, and bruises it took to reach that point — often get lost in all the pre- and post-fight commotion. Luckily, these unforgiving journeys full of sweat, sacrifice, and punishment are the stories EA Sports UFC 6 aims to deliver, and, man, does it do that well. With an impressive roster of legendary fighters and a handful of curated stories that captured my complete attention the minute I dove into them, I’ve found myself enjoying and appreciating the violent art of MMA more the longer I played, even if EA Vancouver’s latest creation has strayed further than ever from the sport’s reality.

No, I don’t mean how the fighters’ joints will occasionally bend in awkward ways during a fight (although that still cracks me up whenever I catch it). I’m talking about Flow State, the newest and most significant feature added since the series moved to the Frostbite engine in UFC 5. For the uninitiated, Flow State is a boost that, once activated, practically turns you into Bradley Cooper in Limitless. You know, that movie where he takes a pill to unlock 100% of his brain, making things easier and more predictable? It’s pretty much like that.

In UFC 6, though, it’s harder to trigger since you can’t simply choke down a sketchy tablet mid-match. Instead, filling your fighter’s meter depends on the perks they have equipped and the boost conditions each one has. For example, a grappler like Islam Makhachev will enter Flow State much faster by chaining together offensive submission moves than by unleashing a flurry of well-timed hooks and roundhouse kicks.

Look, I get that “flow” is a very real thing because I’ve repeatedly watched Anderson Silva dodging a hailstorm of punches like he’s Neo from The Matrix (Chris Weidman is Agent Smith in this scenario). But his instinct was born out of endless reps in the gym, and probably a bunch of behind-the-scenes knockouts, too. The flow in UFC 6 is the opposite; it’s manufactured and gimmicky. Out of place like a Street Fighter move dropped in the middle of the octagon’s bloody canvas. After getting so used to the straight-up, no frills fighting that all the previous games in the series were known for, it’s hard to take a feature like Flow State into account. I’m not even kidding, I always forget to activate it when my meter’s maxed out because it’s the last thing on my mind. I’d much rather focus on my hit-and-run fighting style, not losing my advantage on the ground game, and avoiding getting my face beaten to a bloody pulp, thank you.

It’s also a double-edged sword in online fights, whether that’s in full-rules Ranked, Stand & Bang, or Online Career. Even though you can use Flow State to push the advantage or turn the tide of battle in your favor, your opponent can just as easily do the same. As of launch, most PvP brawls have pretty much turned into a race where the person who fills their meter fastest wins. Or, at the very least, gains a big lead in the scorecard with it. Either way, Flow State is an obnoxious feature to keep track of when there are already so many things to juggle within the octagon.

Still, even something as unrealistic as Flow State can’t knock down UFC 6’s hard-hitting combat, which is otherwise as savage as ever. I’ll be honest; the revamped controls and button combinations had me reeling at first, as if I was on the receiving end of a Jon Jones elbow. But once I got used to it, my vision cleared and the wild haymakers I was throwing turned into a coherent string of jabs, uppercuts, and leg-buckling hits.

My return to familiarity only became more satisfying because each punch and kick that I dealt felt like it landed with even greater force than in UFC 5. The result of those blows — the dripping eyebrow gashes, flying sweat, and spittle — that decorates the canvas once both fighters collide and start exchanging vicious strikes also looks as vivid as ever. Even more than these moments of brutality, UFC 6 has greater physical realism, with the unexpected body contortions — those weird, jerky animations that come up when a limb flies towards an opponent — happening less during fights, which is great when that’s an issue I saw all too often in its predecessor.

Remember the Titans

Now, the Flow system does have its moments, especially in my favorite mode, Hall of Legends, which features three UFC greats in Max Holloway, Alex Pereira, and Zhang Weili. It’s where I’ve spent most of my time because everything in it, from the videos of each champion’s humble beginnings to the thrilling reenactments of their most iconic fights, is all so easy to get lost in. And it was one of these bouts — Holloway’s BMF title win against Justin Gaethje in 2024, to be exact — that helped Flow State shine, if only for a little bit. Of course, the most iconic part of that fight is the last 20 seconds, and I was able to recreate it with the help of Max’s Flow Boost, which has him actually point down at the canvas when it’s activated. You would not believe the noise I made when I saw and did that for the first time — like a caveman discovering fire. And no, my primitive side didn’t stop there; I made more of the same grunting sounds after playing through Weili’s and Pereira’s own curated experiences.

You would think that, having seen some of these scenes live, rewatching their digital reruns years later wouldn’t be as exciting. But they still are, at least for me, and I think they’ll only continue to retain that same electricity into the future, which is a big part of what makes UFC 6 particularly special. These interactive memories are all so expertly told and uniquely individual in the way they unfolded that experiencing them again and again (yes, I went through them multiple times) didn’t feel like a chore at all. And I hope that whenever the seventh installment does come out, EA Vancouver doesn’t just dispose of this mode and instead gives Hall of Legends the same care and attention it did here.

Still, you’re probably wondering why this would be anyone’s idea of a favorite mode when there are a few other exciting ones to choose from. Well, reader, it’s because I’m a sucker for a good story, and it doesn’t get much better than immersing myself in the lore behind three legendary champions. Although the dedicated UFC Career story, called The Legacy, is a close second. That’s right, there are now two separate Career modes you can pick from: the former, which drops you straight into Dana White’s octagon, or the latter, where you star as Chris Carter, a relative no-name who starts from the bottom. Do I even have to tell you which one I was drawn to first?

Yes, as soon as I saw The Legacy, I pressed select faster than you could say “Chama”. Don’t worry; I won’t be spoiling much of the plot here because I would like everyone to experience it knowing as little as possible. But I will say I love how it immediately got me invested in the journey with a rivalry, a career derailment, and the promise of revenge. Sure, it may sound like the overused plot of a Rocky movie, but that stuff works; just ask Sylvester Stallone. There are so many more pre-fight events that demand your attention this time, too, which makes this mode both more entertaining and less repetitive than UFC 5’s.

If going through a rags-to-riches story isn’t your jam, you can always jump headfirst into the big leagues with the newly rebranded UFC Career mode (EA Vancouver added UFC at the beginning, if you didn’t notice). Although I wasn’t as invested without the standalone story to back it up, it’s still plenty of fun – not only due to the improvements I mentioned before, but also because Ken Shamrock and Randy Couture are finally included in the roster. At least now I don’t have to create them both from scratch just to start a modern career with them, even though it is hilarious to see a 62-year-old be called a newcomer by the commentators.

Overall, developer EA Vancouver’s decision to create a separate prologue tale from the UFC Career mode is ultimately what distinguishes UFC 6 most from its predecessor. Not only does it give you more options and a better onboarding experience, but it also doubles down on the overall pitch for this version: that every fighter has a story, a central concept I have seen consistently and resonated with the more I’ve played UFC 6.

The Gym-fluencer

Still, even decent stories have their shortcomings with parts that drag and feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. And this tale of MMA, which so far has had more highs than lows, has one such blemish called The Gym.

When I first heard about it, I thought it would be like MyTeam in NBA 2K or Ultimate Team in Madden. Unfortunately, it’s neither of those. Instead, it’s where you can recruit (collect?) a bunch of different fighters so you can train them…to earn cosmetics. Remember that thing I said earlier about straying further than ever from reality?

That’s right, training in this mode is purely for the sake of looking good — not in the “lift weights to get buff” way, but in the style of a vain influencer who does it just to get free stuff. Instead of Lululemon apparel, though, UFC 6’s The Gym grants fighter-specific rewards, like coins, backgrounds, multicolored fight kits, and belts. So, let’s say you train Max Holloway up to level 14, which seems to be the current cap for all fighters; at that point, you’ll have earned five different shorts, 500 coins, a background, a profile pic, and the biggest prize of all, a UFC Champion belt. See that, people? Hard work does pay off!

Again, it’s all just so unnecessary when the only point of training the fighters you collect in The Gym is to earn accessories that you probably won’t even notice once you’re in the octagon. I know I don’t, because I’m much too mesmerized by the bleeding cuts and blood spatters that practically turn the canvas into a brutalist Pollock painting. Sure, there’s beauty in the hundreds of punishing hours that fighters put in to eventually reach peak form and conditioning. But not when it’s minimized and turned into a sideshow for knick-knacks like this.

I love pixel art. I find that, even decades later, the best-looking games of the ‘90s – Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – can still be breathtaking in a way older 3D games usually aren’t. That’s why I take notice whenever Square Enix uses its signature HD-2D art style, and why it’s so exciting to see that aesthetic expand past its turn-based roots with The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, the first action-adventure game to get this modern-retro treatment. Even though its titular hero may be wearing red instead of green, it essentially asks the question, “What if Square made A Link to the Past?” The answer is an adventure I never knew I wanted – one with a compelling story, impressive build customization, and a world I hope we see more of.

Elliot is an adventurer – a fact he makes sure everyone is aware of – who helps anyone that may be in trouble or has a problem to solve. After a summons by the king, your seemingly routine quest turns into a mission to save both the princess and the kingdom itself, traveling through time to do so. Elliot is is easy to root for, charismatic without ever crossing over into cheesy. Traveling alongside our hero-in-red is Faie, a small and slightly amnesiatic fairy who helps Elliot navigate and faces down foes with her magical abilities. She is a bit chatty (how chatty can be adjusted but never turned off completely) and occasionally falls into the “partner who gives you the puzzle answer too soon” trope, which is unfortunate, but is still a pleasant companion to have. Over the span of the 20-ish hours I spent with Elliot, Faie, and the rest of the supporting cast, I grew to love this world and was invested in the lives of these characters – even if the most emotionally impactful moments don’t arrive until quite late, sometimes not until the post-game portions.

One of the core components of The Adventures of Elliot is its time travel, which can be a tough thing to get right in a game, and it never quite lives up to its promise here. You’ll jump from age to age, and while that’s reflected in some ways as certain locations or routes change depending on the time period, these differences are rather underwhelming. It’s neat to find the ruins of a once great building from the Age of Magic during the Age of Reconstruction, but venture a short distance outside the city walls, and you will see the same trees and shrubs regardless of when you find yourself. Stranger still is the lack of any sort of evolution or development in the settlements of the beastmen tribes you frequently visit. You’re telling me that the wolfish Ulfur, even in a thousand years, never figured out how to set up a few more tents?

On the topic of those pesky beastmen, the enemies of the various ages don’t change, either. Whether I was exploring dark caves in the present day or the ancient sands of the Age of Budding, I was swinging my sword at the same slugs, rat people, and weird flying things. You can at least skirt around them pretty easily if you just want to get somewhere in a hurry (with the exception of the occasional room that requires you to clear out all the enemies before moving on), but the lack of variety does mean that after the first few hours, you will have seen a majority of the foes you will face on your adventures. The best Elliot offers in terms of age-exclusive enemies is a palette swap for the robotic automata units, with their once-shining chassis becoming caked with an aged patina in the years that follow their invention during the Age of Magic.

But while the time travel might not alter them much, the world itself and the designs of the characters and enemies within it still make this another beautiful example of Square Enix’s HD-2D aesthetic in action. There were occasional encounters where a monster would be hidden behind a wall or other piece of scenery, but that was only a minor inconvenience and was brushed aside whenever I stumbled across the next stunning landmark. The drooping indigo leaves of Grandree, the crown of the Mount Phoenix volcano, and the glistening structures of the grand city of Weyzn are just a few such places. Not to mention the creative boss sprites, such as the laser-shooting lava lizard Salathmadra, or my personal favorite, a frog don that rides a turtle around. All of this and more shines on Nintendo Switch 2 where I did my full playthrough, nearly as well it did during my tests on the PC build, with only slight slowdown and longer load times being the main noticeable differences with the former.

Crystal Combat

Much of what The Adventures of Elliot does feels very familiar, but equipable Magicite buffs and the “crafting” system you can use to make more of them is one of the most interesting twists it introduces. You would be forgiven if you assumed Elliot to be an RPG upon hearing it was developed by Square Enix and Team Asano, but it actually has very little in common with the genre those teams are best known for. Instead of gaining levels to become stronger, your growth is tied more to Magicite that you slot into your weapons, granting different modifiers and enhancements.

These crystals can be found in chests or crafted at a special shop using shards that are dropped by enemies. Coming in progressively rarer and stronger tiers, each of the seven possible weapons has a whopping 15 unique Magicite options that can be swapped in or out at any time, even during combat. Perhaps enemies are moving around a bit too much, so you want a stun effect that will let you land hits more easily – just hop into the pause menu, equip the Magicite that does that, and get right back into the fight. That flexibility is empowering.

There are also some awesome combinations of crystals that turn Elliot from an adventurer into a weapon of mass destruction. For example, the bow’s Fire Shot Magicite will give its arrows a chance to light a target on fire, while the Explosion Magicite causes, well… an explosion when you hit a burning target. It’s exciting to experiment and find a powerful combo like this, which can melt a boss’ health bar in no time flat. Between being able to have two weapons equipped at a time (each assigned to a specific button) and the ability to swap their Magicite quickly, as well as a variety of helpful magical spells from Faie, I always felt ready for whatever encounter awaited me next.

Team Asano really knocked it out of the park when it comes to just how seamless and easy all this swapping can be, too. A convenient radial menu can be popped up at any time to swap weapons, and similar screens are used for your potion vials and Faie’s magic as well. All three are accessible from the others with a simple button press, and opening these menus freezes the action around you. During tricky fights where I needed to plan and prepare, or just stop and analyze the situation, it all worked splendidly. At the same time, though, hot-swapping weapons and guzzling potions basically became muscle memory by the end of the campaign, so I never felt like those menus slowed things down or took me out of the action unless I specifically wanted them to.

Combat itself is a nostalgic trip to simpler days when all that was involved was looking at an enemy and pressing a button to swing. It feels good to just walk up and spam my sword attacks to take out enemies, but there are still ways to quote “get good” for those who want to really excel. Elliot can parry with his shield, leaving a foe dazed and open for critical hits; you can cause some enemies to explode and, in the process, damage their allies; or you can just hurl some pots at their heads for old times' sake.

If you do find yourself having trouble on a boss or another annoying mob, The Adventures of Elliot is rather gracious with its revives, allowing you to pay to have Faie heal you back to full. The price doubles each time, but resets when you visit certain checkpoints (unless you are playing on the Very Hard difficulty). The best part is that this is completely optional, instead giving you the option to simply respawn at the last save point. This revive proved to be a welcome option against some of the bosses where I needed just a bit more life to come out victorious. As long as you have the money, you can just brute-force your way through anything, but it never feels like you need to do that.

However, Elliot rewards you for playing well and avoiding damage, too. Every enemy you strike down will add to a chain count, and enemies drop more goodies when they’re defeated if you reach a high enough number, making this a great way to grind for resources – but the moment you take the slightest bit of damage, the combo breaks, and you have to start all over. I had high combos break more times than I care to admit due to becoming overconfident and overlooking the dangers around me.

For those battle masters that want to really test their mettle, Elliot offers a special Temple of Trials. This pits you against not only previous bosses but also increasingly difficult mobs of enemies. The rewards are worth it, and it's a great place to test out those weapon combo ideas, but they are not for the faint of heart!

Watch Out for Pit Falls

Outside of combat, Elliot has a surprising amount of platforming. Leaping across gaps, diving underwater, and figuring out how to get up to some nearby plateau all play a far bigger role in this adventure than I had anticipated. Dungeons tend to feature at least a few sections that will test your dexterity, requiring you to maneuver around pits or over lava. Thanks to how tight Elliot’s controls are, I generally had a good time with these sections. There are some handy accessories that can help you out too, such as one that lets you briefly hover or another that prevents you from taking damage if you drop into those pesky holes. Since many areas of the map can be explored in whatever order you want, you may even encounter places with abilities like Faie’s Warp spell that let you bypass parts altogether.

The varying terrain height also allows for some fun experimentation during combat. When enemies were nearby, ledges stopped being simple hills and instead became high grounds, ripe for the taking. My go-to strategy usually involved chucking bombs down on the enemies below or sending Faie out to beat on them for a bit. Though setting them on fire or exploding nearby bomb slugs with her magic also proved devilishly effective.

Traveling through time is just as convenient as traveling across the map itself. Special guideposts are placed around the world that, once activated manually the first time, can be fast-traveled to from your map screen at any point. It doesn’t matter what age you or your desired location are in, you can get there in a flash. The maps are also covered with various markers pointing towards treasure chests, shrines to upgrade both Faie and Elliot, collectible cats, and lots more. That’s quite helpful for secret hunting, but it’s actually so much information that I wish I could filter the icons or even turn them off completely for the times I simply want to discover things on my own.

The maps inside dungeons have all of the same helpful features, with icons pointing out all the chests or cats and guideposts positioned at both the front entrance and right before the boss. You won’t be able to teleport into a dungeon from the world map, or to the outside from within one, but most of the beefier dungeons have a convenient guidepost nearby. It was always just a short detour to heal up or restock at a village if I found my resources lacking before a boss fight, which I appreciated a lot.

Link? No, I’m Elliot

Okay, it’s time to address the moblin in the room: The Adventures of Elliot shares a lot of DNA with A Link to the Past, and the Zelda series in general. It would frankly take longer to list out all the things it has in common with that SNES classic than those it doesn’t. Calling this “The Legend of Elliot: A Link to the Pasts” really wouldn’t be too off base. A lone swordsman on a top-down quest to save a blonde-haired princess, wielding the likes of bows, bombs, boomerangs, and even a dash you can use to bonk into things. You have your fire dungeon, water dungeon, and forest dungeon all checked off the list, and you get a neat glowing magic sword, too. Being so reminiscent of one of the greatest video games of all time is hardly a bad thing, and finding all the little nods and callbacks almost became a game of its own for a big Zelda fan like myself. Elliot even manages to pull off a convincing “hyah!” when he swings his sword that would make Link proud.

I am all for more Zelda-style games like this, and Elliot does a great job of recreating that formula while also introducing a few twists that help it stand out. But when you follow the overall blueprint so closely like this, it unavoidably puts you into direct comparison with what came before, and Elliot’s quality doesn’t quite reach the same lofty heights as its inspirations. The dungeons tend to lean on the simpler, more straightforward side, and I never found the “puzzles” to be much of a brain buster. (Though, also in typical Zelda fashion, Elliot’s equivalent to the Water Temple did feature water level shenanigans that made me grumble a bit.) I can only recall a handful of times where trying to figure out how to reach a specific area on the map left me scratching my head, and people who grew up with or frequently played 2D Zeldas may not find much of a challenge here in general, but I can see how The Adventures of Elliot could be an on-ramp to the genre.

Of course, Elliot differentiates itself significantly by having multiple endings to uncover, the best of which require a deeper dive into the various ages. There is a good amount of stuff to do and discover here; playing through on Hard, which felt similar to a standard 2D Zelda level of difficulty for me, it took just under 14 hours to get my first ending, and I found the rest of the endings within another 10. That was the perfect size I wanted from a game like this, and some of those endings were so good they may have had me holding back tears.

Spoilers follow for Widow’s Bay Season 1, which is now available to stream on Apple TV.

Now that the first season of Widow’s Bay has ended, let’s dive deeper into the passionate conversation that’s been growing exponentially with each new episode. Is it really the best new TV show of the summer? On the whole, I think the answer is a resounding yes. The Apple TV series, created by Katie Dippold, has pulled off a minor miracle in effectively balancing its blend of horror and comedy and its deep bench of inspirations — Stephen King’s multitude of spooky New England hauntings and happenings, Twin Peaks, John Carpenter, Jaws, the list goes on — without getting pulled too far in any one direction. There’s simply nothing like it on TV right now.

Widow’s Bay is about a tiny, insular island off the coast of New England that’s basically stuck in a past era. It’s accessible only via unreliable ferry, cell service is practically nonexistent, and the economy has long been sustained by fishing and whaling. The only person desperate to revitalize the place is Mayor Tom Loftis (an outstanding Matthew Rhys), and everyone hates him and his plan to turn Widow’s Bay into the “next Martha’s Vineyard” tourist destination — primarily because the born-and-raised islanders believe their home has been super-haunted since its founding.

Part of what makes the paranoia funny is how its characters weather their superstitions. There’s the middle-of-the-road hushed terror of the townie priest (Toby Huss), but also the extremes in the ranting and raving sea dog Wyck Crawford (an always great Stephen Root) and the matter-of-fact acceptance of chainsmoking mayoral office worker Rosemary (Dale Dickey, who gets her moment to shine in tracing the generational lineage of the island’s curse in Episode 9, “Emergency Shelter”). What ties them all together, though, is their certainty of the unavoidable force that grips the island, and Tom is a dangerous idiot for trying to pretend otherwise.

That gets to the heart of what Widow’s Bay is really about. For the show being chapterized like a monster-of-the-week takedown in its horror specialty of choice — IT, Carrie/Wicker Man, Michael Myers, etc. — its overarching question lies in how a population makes peace with the very land it resides on. How do they deal with the burden of the sordid legacy of a place laden with hundreds of years of history that includes human sacrifice, cannibalism, and other strife? For Tom, specifically: How does someone be a good custodian of a place they don’t — or even really want to — understand?

Early in the season, Tom, who was born off-island and became mayor by default (he ran uncontested), brushes off as lunatic whispers the claims that the island has “awakened.” By Episode 2, “The Lodgings,” he starts to buy into the ghost stories after spending a night at the Breakwater, the charming yet creepy local inn. He finally accepts the malevolence at the heart of Widow’s Bay in Episode 5, “What to Expect on Your Trip” — which closes out with a hilarious 311 needle drop — when he takes diabolical-looking mushrooms that are meant to connect him to the island’s source. The practical, process-oriented Tom then must decide: Is it time to attempt to tame or bargain with the supernatural? From what we learn about the island’s history in Episodes 6 and 7, what Tom at first considers to be an optional negotiation turns out to be mandatory for the town's leaders.

As thematically interesting as it is, Widow’s Bay would not be as successful without all of the involved talent, both in front of and behind the camera. There’s not a stinker in the cast, down to the townie randos who make entire meals out of scraps of dialogue — like the dour white-hair who shows up late in the season to yarn about island history during the impending generational storm, or even the janitor who asks if a trash can had enough to eat. Then there’s the regulars: Kingston Rumi Southwick (Presumed Innocent) as Tom’s socially pliable teenage son, Evan; Kevin Carroll (The Leftovers) as local “I can’t believe this shit” cop Bechir; the hilarious Jeff Hiller (Somebody Somewhere) as mayor’s office employee Dale; K Callan (Knives Out) as Tom’s elderly secretary Ruth who takes off around 3pm; Christian Clemenson as the oddball town doctor; and so on. Dippold, who was a writer on Parks and Recreation, knows how to flesh out a backwoods town. Hell, she even sneaks in a very Parks and Rec-ian town hall with locals braying contradictory pleas at Tom while he’s tripping balls. Even the guest stars — Tim Balz (The Righteous Gemstones), Chris Fleming, Betty Gilpin (GLOW), Hamish Linklater (Midnight Mass) — are here, albeit briefly, giving inspired performances.

But the cast is held down by its big three characters. It’s hardly a surprise that Rhys (The Americans, The Beast in Me) is fantastic as Tom — a man who is a pathetic try-hard to most around him, but is ultimately caught up in his own grief. Root, similarly, stands out as Wyck, who refuses to let Tom allow the island to fall to calamity. Last but certainly not least is Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia, the breakout fan favorite of Widow’s Bay. If there’s one ding I can make at the series, it’s that its first three episodes don’t fully lock in until the Patricia-forward episode, “Beach Reads,” which is probably one of the best episodes of TV for the year, full stop. (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Episode 5 gets some worthy competition!) O’Flynn makes incredible choices with Patricia’s dichotomous unflagging self-assurance and deep insecurities throughout the season, but it’s that episode in particular, wherein she accidentally does witchcraft on the town — and again in the slasher episode “Your Baggage” — that she gets to shine most.

The DNA from the episodes’ directors also seeps through to make the tone of Widow’s Bay so successful. Hiro Murai, who directed most of Atlanta as well as several episodes of Barry, helmed five episodes. Andrew DeYoung — a Tim Robinson collaborator who directed the 2024 film Friendship and five episodes of The Chair Company, as well as other revered comedy series like Pen15 and The Other Two — and Sam Donovan (Severance, The Crown) get two episodes apiece. And X/Pearl/MaXXXine auteur Ti West took the one-off flashback episode. Nothing to scoff at!

By the season finale, it’s certain the island is governed by an ancient and unseen eldritch, blood-thirsty entity. The question of how Tom and the other islanders will deal with it remains. I cannot wait to see what they’ll do in Season 2.

Leviticus will be released in theaters on June 19.

A year of strong films from debut horror directors continues with Leviticus, the feature debut from Australian writer/director Adrian Chiarella.

Joe Bird stars as Naim, a teenager living in a small, very religious town. Naim’s newfound secret romantic relationship with his classmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen) and subsequent discovery of Ryan’s dalliances with another boy, Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), have terrible consequences when, fueled by jealousy, Naim outs Ryan and Hunter. When a so-called “Deliverance Healer” (Nicholas Hope) is called in by the community, his methods of stopping the boys from acting upon their urges involve very dangerous and potentially deadly methods.

Amongst horror’s many subgenres, this is essentially a classic curse movie in which the curse causes those afflicted to see something that looks and sounds exactly like the person they most desire, only for that entity to attack and try to kill them when they let their guard down. And it’s a very well made curse movie, with Chiarella doing an excellent job both of setting the scene and building tension throughout the story, as these boys realize just how much danger they’re in and how little they can trust their own eyes.

Obviously, this is a movie about homophobia — a story about how painting a young person’s love and desire as inherently wrong and something to be suppressed at all costs can have terrible consequences. The extra messed-up thing here is that these teenagers — including a girl we meet in the film’s classic-style opening kill sequence — are seeing the face of the person they love as their potential killer. But that’s because the people around them have decided that just loving or lusting after this person is something that is so despicable, death is an acceptable way to “solve” the problem if they can’t just somehow turn off their feelings.

Chiarella commendably shapes his film’s actual storytelling as very straightforward and often understated, correctly trusting that the metaphors and analogies he’s using will work just fine on their own. There’s no out-of-place speechifying here; Naim and Ryan aren’t suddenly stopping to deliver out-of-character pointed monologues about what it feels like to grow up gay in this judgmental environment. They speak like normal kids, where any talk of wanting to get out of this town already has plenty of context for why it would be especially important for them.

The film rests on the shoulders of its young leads, who are very much up to the challenge. Bird — who made an impression in 2022’s Talk to Me, another recent attention-getting Australian horror movie — is excellent as Naim. It’s an often quiet and contemplative role where he’s able to show us a lot about the character through his expressions and demeanor, selling us on Naim’s frequent discomfort and the more easygoing, happy side that begins to manifest when he’s with Ryan. This in turn gives way to his fear and terror, both at what begins to happen and his own responsibility for setting these events in motion, all of which Bird expertly conveys.

Clausen is also great as Ryan. His character is not as fully fleshed out as Naim, since we don’t have as clear a picture of his home life or as much perspective on the before and after of what he goes through; unlike the more reserved Naim, it seems he’s a popular kid, but his dynamic with his friend group isn’t really represented. But Clausen is able to imbue Ryan with a lot of sweetness and empathy beneath his outward bravado, along with showing the big changes in his attitude once that Deliverance Healer pays him a visit.

Also doing strong work is Mia Wasikowska, who’s been mostly sticking to small, independent movies since her days starring in big budget films like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland or Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. As Naim’s mother, she plays things impressively ambiguous, depicting a woman who watches her son from afar with expressions that could read as loving, menacingly judgmental, or perhaps a conflicted mixture of both depending on the moment.

Chiarella makes sure his queer horror movie never forgets it's a horror movie. Leviticus is genuinely creepy and filled with tension, especially after Naim himself falls under the same curse as the others. The idea of never knowing if the person you most long to see is actually this evil thing out to kill you gets plenty of mileage here, as both Naim and the audience share the same doubts and fear every time “Ryan” shows up to see Naim. One scene in particular does a great job of using that uncertainty to flip around an expected outcome in a very clever way. Chiarella also knows how to deliver a heart-pounding jump scare when he needs to, never overplaying that approach but making sure there’s a couple times that are definitely scream-worthy.

The film also benefits from Jed Kurzel’s evocative score, which blends together feelings of both eeriness and melancholy. Kurzel’s music is just right for the story being told and its conclusion, which offers no easy solution to this scenario yet doesn’t fall into utter hopelessness in a manner that feels appropriate for the subject matter.

Toy Story 5 is in theaters on June 19.

Woody, Buzz and the gang are back in theaters for Toy Story 5, a fourth sequel to Pixar’s flagship franchise that proves no matter how well you wrap up a story, there’s always room for more. This time, the now-very-antique toys are faced with their most dangerous challenge yet… screen time.

But how necessary was this sequel? And how can the brain trust at Pixar successfully pull these toys out of the attic again? To find out, I took both my film critic hat and my kids (7 and 11) to a press screening of Toy Story 5.

Right off the bat I can say that the movie does Pixar proud in the visual department. It isn’t quite the revolutionary jump in graphics that Toy Story 4 had over its predecessors, but the usual Pixar bump is there. In fact one scene that starts with an establishing shot of the sky and trees and a school bus had me thinking for a split second that they'd actually shot some real footage for the film before kids from the uncanny valley came running into frame.

My son had a quote about that as well… “better grafics." He almost got it. To be fair, he took my notebook in the middle of the theater and wrote it in the dark, so there’s a chance he knows how to spell it right.

My kids were very excited to tag along to this press screening, but less so when I started asking them questions on the ride home. My daughter, who just finished fifth grade, said it was starting to feel like homework, and I had to remind her that this was, in fact, my job and yeah, it’s a little like homework.

For starters, it’s difficult to talk about Toy Story 5 without a heavy dose of context for the entire franchise. Obviously it’s a sequel and there are four movies worth of story to keep in mind, but more than that this is a franchise that has had two separate occasions to wrap up in a pretty satisfying way. There are crowds of people who would agree it should have just been a trilogy, ending on Bonnie’s porch at the end of Toy Story 3. And while Toy Story 4 started the conversation of “why are we still doing this” for some, it defied the odds and put a decently neat bow on the franchise again, and with even more finality.

So “why do we need a Toy Story 5?” is a bigger question here than it has been even for other long-running franchises. That is, fair or not, the hole that this movie was starting in for me. For my kids, though? Not so much. In fact, their least favorite entry in the franchise is the widely beloved Toy Story 3. But my daughter had a very interesting reason for that – one that leads me back into this review proper.

First and foremost, a Toy Story movie, and I would argue a Pixar film in general, needs to be fun, and Toy Story 5 certainly trots out some fun moments. The animation style of Bonnie’s imagination and the scenarios she concocts while playing with her favorite toys is maybe the strongest of any such sequence in the whole series. And from a battalion of stranded next-gen Buzz Lightyears trying to find their way back to Star Command to forgotten toys wasted in the wake of tech, there are plenty of memorable laughs. Conan O’Brien in particular is hilarious as Mr. Smarty Pants, a potty-training assistant.

In fact, the trio of new characters – including Smarty Pants, the kids-first digital camera Snappy, and Atlas, a map device that’s, for some reason, a hippo – were my daughter’s favorite characters in the entire movie, and I can’t really argue with that. They’re a blast. (They also do one of my favorite Toy Story things, which is questioning their own existence in a legitimately terrifying way.)

However, on the balance this movie may be more of a downer than it was fun. There’s a maudlin sense of dread that hangs over most of the first half of the movie, where a real sadness revolves around Bonnie and her inability to make friends that can meet her where she’s at. Now, this was something that my daughter and I had an interesting conversation about. After Bonnie’s parents get her Lillypad (Greta Lee), her first tablet nervously purchased as a way to help her connect with all the other kids in her orbit who already have one, Bonnie’s online dynamic in a chat group goes pretty immediately bad. My kid and I talked about who was to blame for it – the bullies who were being mean, or Lillypad, who served as an easy conduit, providing access to Bonnie for the bullies. She actually blamed Lillypad, saying, “It’s important to know who good people are in real life.”

There’s wisdom beyond her 11 years in that, and I’m proud of her, but also she agreed it was the iPad’s fault, so joke’s on her – she’s getting less screen time from now on. Meanwhile, my 7-year-old son said, “I like how the tech took over,” so… I guess for sure less screentime for him too.

And, to finally get back to my daughter’s point, the other thing a Toy Story movie needs is a good villain. To quote her thoughts on Toy Story 3… “I hated that the villain was just evil the whole time.” I thought that was an interesting take because Lillypad, for her part, is doing what she thinks is best for Bonnie which, based on the conversation my daughter and I had, makes placing the “villain” label on her a little more difficult. She’s a stand-in for the idea of technology causing kids to grow up too fast, not necessarily the antagonist in and of herself.

Now, I think that’s in the Pro column for this movie, as some of the franchise's best moments are from villains who see the error of their ways and are big enough to pivot. I would argue Tom Hanks’ Woody actually represents the best version of that in the original Toy Story because he was straight-up the bad guy of that movie, but that’s probably a different article.

Toy Story films also need a relatable phase of life at their center – something universally experienced, like growing up, leaving home or letting go. These are all things just about everybody can relate to without any extra direction from the filmmakers, and Toy Story 5, for at least the first half, is very much missing that universality. Growing up with social media is a modern and I suppose widely relatable experience that wasn’t around 30 years ago when the first Toy Story came out. But instead of being about “remember how it can be difficult to be a kid?”, a lot of Toy Story 5 is more focused on “kids these days and their screens, amirite?” The difference there is that Toy Story 5’s statement feels like it’s the filmmakers’ telling us about it instead of letting us get there emotionally ourselves. The result is an out of touch-ness that is, quite frankly, surprising to see from Pixar. For a lot of the film’s runtime Toy Story, very uncharacteristically, doesn’t have much to offer to the conversation about young people’s relationship to their screens and there’s not a lot of the real emotional stakes this series has been trading in for four movies prior to this.

To be fair it doesn’t let parents off the hook either. As a remote worker myself, I felt properly seen and criticized by a scene where a parent is just shouting “you’re muted” while parked in his home office on zoom. It’s difficult though to take the critique too seriously coming from Pixar, a company sprung from the same Steve Jobs that brought us the iPad in the first place. But that also might just be me being defensive. But I followed up about this scene with my kids and if it reminded them of me, to which my son said “oh 100% totally. It wasn’t funny because it was work.” So the movie does have its finger on the pulse of human connectivity in, lo, these modern times to some extent.

I know I’ve been more negative than not about this movie for like 1500 words now, but really the second half of Toy Story 5 is much better. A lot of what I like about it and how the movie lands gets into some spoiler territory, so it’s just harder to get into detail about it. Before I attempt to though, I feel like I have to call out everybody’s favorite cowboy. This movie did not need Woody. It’s a testament to the job the franchise has done of ending in a satisfying way twice now that he feels so tacked on in this one. In fact, it’s enough to make me wonder if he wasn’t even in the early drafts of the movie, until an exec got hold of it and said, “put the cowboy in, you maniacs.”

You could lift Woody straight out of the movie and there would only be two differences. Number 1, the movie would be maybe two minutes shorter. He’s got no business to do off on his own that affects the plot in any meaningful way. And number 2, it would actually help out Buzz (Tim Allen). This movie wants so badly to be a two-hander between Buzz and Jessie (Joan Cusack), and it almost pulls it off. But when Woody comes back and starts hatching plans, it takes away Buzz’s agency. Buzz could’ve taken a next step into responsibility, adulthood, leadership, whatever box needed to be ticked for one of those universally relatable life phases that Toy Story has always hung its hat on. Instead, he just kinda keeps following orders and it feels like an opportunity was missed in favor of rehashing some of his and Woody’s old dynamic.

Now, again, pretty much all of my issues with this film are in its first half, but I think that’s also in part because I was dreading how they were going to attempt to stick the landing. But happily, the second half of the movie manages it a lot better than I’d feared.

From the midpoint of the movie, Toy Story 5 really starts to nail the things Pixar does best. It’s adventurous, with well-choreographed and stylish action, and just a lot funnier. The heart of the movie finally shows up to deal with things like what it means to really make meaningful connections or the distinction between games and actually playing. Woody also starts to fade into the background, leaning into more of a comic-relief role than being front and center, and, surprise surprise, the film is better for it.

Most importantly, after all the hemming and hawing about “what’s to be done with tech,” the film finally takes a stand. It’s not an overly ambitious one, or even one that will surprise you, but it was very necessary to walk out of the theater feeling good about it. Ultimately, Toy Story 5 does have something to add to the conversation beyond old guys shaking their fists at clouds about “kids and their tablets these days.”

But speaking of kids and their tablets, mine apparently have not had enough of Toy Story. I asked them what they’d like to see in a Toy Story 6 and my son just started yelling about needing Spoony to join Tony Hale’s Forky and his knife bride Karen Beverly (Melissa Villaseñor). He kept getting louder and doing different goofy voices every time my daughter would try to chime in. But finally she was able to articulate just wanting more Toy Story. Couldn’t get more detail out of her than that. Maybe it’s the idea that she, like Andy or Bonnie or, it would seem, Pixar, just can’t bear the idea of leaving these toys behind.

When Epilogue released its first device, the GB Operator, back in 2021, it gave retro game collectors a way to save their favorite games. That handy little device not only let you play your physical Game Boy games on your PC, but, more importantly, made it so that anyone with a PC and an open USB port can back up the saves and games from their aging Game Boy carts. Now the team is back with the SN Operator, offering that same convenience but for your Super Nintendo and Super Famicom games. It’s a 16-bit banger and a must-have for folks with SNES and SFC collections. Now, my original endgame Final Fantasy III save will live forever!

Much like its smaller sibling, the $60 SN Operator is simple to use, requiring only a single USB cable (included in the box) running from it to a USB-C port on your machine. Once hooked up, it’s just a quick install of Epilogue’s Playback software and you are set to start playing or backing up your favorite SNES games. It’s about as painless and easy as you can get. Linux and Apple retro fans have nothing to worry about either, as both the Operator and Playback will work on those machines too.

After plugging in the Operator and opening Playback, you will be given a couple of choices – either to play the cartridge that is currently inserted, back up the data on the cart, or load data onto the cart. The back-up functionality includes options for both the game data itself, letting you digitally back up your beloved 16-bit library, or your save files. Thanks to the transfer speeds of USB Type-C and the small size of the ROMs and save files, these processes only take seconds.

While I don’t have a massive collection, I was still able to blaze through the process, backing up about 30 games in about 20 minutes. Loading things back onto a cart, at least the saves, is just as quick, making this a great way to back up your save, replace your cart’s old battery, and reload the saves to the cart when the replacement is done. Loading the ROM files themselves isn’t as simple and requires specific writable/re-writable carts, which retail carts aren’t.

Playing your games on the SN Operator, Epilogue’s device acts more like a cartridge reader of sorts, with the Playback software doing that actual playing. This is in contrast to something like Analog’s Super NT, which opts for the fPGA to imitate original hardware. This means it’s using emulation, but it does require your game to be plugged in to play. And since you are playing your own back-ups, things are all above board.

Epilogue’s Playback software uses the popular open source bSNES emulator as its default and does a solid job of it, featuring multiple shaders to pick from, cartridge autosaving, cheats, and various other settings. If you have a preference, the Playback software does include other options (mostly variations of SNES9X). The game back ups you create from your carts aren’t tied to the SN Operator or Playback and can be used with any Super Nintendo emulator out there. While I admit that I’ve never been overly sensitive to picking up latency in games, every game that I tried with the SN Operator, from climbing Kefka’s Tower or avoiding King K. Rool’s cannon balls, felt just as good as I remember them feeling on my original hardware. I especially enjoy playing my old favorites and unlocking achievements courtesy of the link you can use to connect to a Retro Achievements account.

When it comes to compatibility, every official game that I have thrown at it has been read and properly labeled (though a couple of times I did have to bring out the ol’ “blow in the cartridge” trick). I tried both North American and Japanese games, and they all booted up just fine in all of their 16-bit glory. The only games that wouldn’t read for me were my reproduction carts of the fan-translated Bahamut Lagoon and Tales of Phantasia – both games having never been released in the West with official localizations (with the exception of the later GBA port of Phantasia). One thing to be aware of, however, is that support for the Super Game Boy (the specialty cart that let you play your Game Boy games on the SNES back in the day) is confirmed by Epilogue to be incompatible with the SN Operator. Of special note for collectors or shop owners, if making sure the copies of the games you are getting are legitimate, SN Operator will also be able to let you know whether or not the cartridge that’s plugged in is authentic and official, meaning no more opening up the carts to verify.

That said, if you really want to play and back up your GB/GBC games, I highly recommend you just snag the GB Operator. That will play all your games and even display those nifty Super Game Boy borders for games that featured them, like Pokemon Gen 1. You can even have both operators plugged in at the same time, with no issue. Inside the Playback software, there is a dropdown menu that lets you toggle between which device is being read from. Epilogue has done a great job making every step of the process using the SN Operator as painless as it could be.

For myself, the biggest draw and selling point of the device is about its back-up functionality, more specifically, the fact that I can backup my save files. The game back-up and being able to “use” my own carts again is a neat feature, but rescuing a beloved save file matters so much more. Think of that 100% Link to the Past save that you and your sibling worked together on, or that Lunar Surface Final Fantasy 2 one that you are so proud – being able to back up and preserve those files before the respective cartridge batteries die and they disappear forever, that’s the big selling point for the SN Operator. And in that regard, Epilogue’s latest is easily worth the money and then some.

The device itself is solidly constructed, but I’ll note that, at least with my unit, the carts had a very tight fit when slotted in and were difficult to pull back out. I would have appreciated some sort of easy-release mechanism.

Epilogue continues to impress me and the SN Operator has let me sleep soundlier knowing that these immensely meaningful parts of my childhood are saved from their plastic shells. The peace of mind knowing that those memories are back-up is worth far more than its $60 price tag, and for anyone else with a Super Nintendo library in their closet or attic somewhere, the SN Operator is one of the easiest recommendations I can give.

Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.

Warning: This review contains full spoilers for Rick and Morty Season 9, Episode 4!

Celebrity guest stars are hardly uncommon for Rick and Morty, but a lot of them tend to blend into the background and wind up overshadowed by the main cast. Season 9 is no exception in that regard. But occasionally, you have a one-off character who rises above the pack and really takes advantage of a celebrity's particular vocal talents. Such is the case with Reese, delightfully voiced by the one and only Owen Wilson in "A Ricker Runs Through It."

For whatever reason, this episode is fueled more than most by the strength of the vocal performances. There's a lot of fun to be had early on with Rick (Ian Cardoni) and Morty (Harry Belden) spiralling into their latest feud. Cardoni's extra-drunk Rick is downright hilarious, full of all the whiny, petulant energy one could ask for. And Belden's Morty responds in kind with his own prolonged temper tantrum.

And then in walks Wilson's Reese to save the day. This feels like a character tailor-made for Wilson and his particular brand of folksy charm and light southern drawl. His arrival immediately changes the tenor of the whole episode, with Rick morphing from malevolent, abusive drunk to lovable scamp and Morty coming out of his shell a bit. You can't help but like Reese as much as they do, which of course means that there's something seriously amiss with him.

It's not long before that particular shoe drops and we learn that Reese is just Rick's convoluted way of working around his computer's password protection system. It's an amusing reveal, but the real fun with this episode is that it manages to continue steadily building on said reveal and grow more and more bizarre with time. Sometimes, Rick and Morty episodes struggle to keep that storytelling momentum going and really push a concept to its fullest (case in point - last week's "Rick Fu Hustle"). But that's not a problem here. Writers Jax Ball and Albro Lundy manage to keep building and escalating.

There's the reveal that Rick has developed a source of infinite vodka, a feat achieved by enslaving a world full of kindly hog workers. That situation spirals out of control when Morty successfully exfiltrates Reese, only for this human password manager to become the catalyst that sparks the hog uprising and triggers complete bedlam back at the Smith house. You really have to appreciate how bizarre the flow of events is in this little storyline.

That said, it's Jerry (Chris Parnell) who really steals the show in "A Ricker Runs Through It." He unwittingly becomes the host for a gas cloud-based service technician who's a little too psyched to have a new meat sack to run around in. It's a lot of fun watching the possessed Jerry hit the town and revel in his newfound freedom. And getting back to the idea of this episode being especially driven by the vocal performances, Parnell's loopy cloud voice is highly amusing in its own right. Now if only the series could find something more for Spencer Grammer Summer and Sarah Chalke's Beth to do this season...

This is a spoiler-free review of the first four episodes of X-Men ‘97 Season 2. The series premieres on Disney+ on July 1.

Sometimes, it doesn’t necessarily pay to put popular franchises in the hands of devoted super-fans. Look at Star Wars, for example. No one would accuse Tony Gilroy of being the world’s biggest Star Wars nerd, yet Andor is arguably the best thing to come out of that property in the Disney era. But with a project like X-Men ‘97, the rules are a little different. This is a series fundamentally built on nostalgia. The writers and animators are clearly deep, deep fans of the original X-Men: The Animated Series and the comics that inspired it. The result has been and continues to be a show that reveres the past even while being unafraid to chart a bold new future.

Without burying the lede here, X-Men ‘97 Season 2 is exactly what fans of Season 1 have been waiting for. The several-year gap between seasons may have been painfully long, but the series doesn’t suffer one bit because of it. These first four episodes build nicely off the fallout of Season 1 and quickly establish an even darker and more foreboding status quo for this animated Marvel Universe.

Season 2 is divided along three parallel points in time, all linked by a connection to the tyrannical villain Apocalypse (voiced in different eras by Ross Marquand and Adetokumboh M'Cormack). Half of the X-Men have been dragged into the future, where Apocalypse reigns over mankind and the nomadic Clan Askani is the only resistance left. The other half find themselves in Ancient Egypt, a time when Apocalypse is still a young mutant waging war on Rama-Tut (John de Lancie). As those twin conflicts play out, it falls on a haphazard band of mutant heroes like Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith), Forge (Gil Birmingham), Jubilee (Holly Chou), and Cable (Chris Potter) to fill the void left by the missing X-Men and continue the fight for human/mutant coexistence in the present.

These first four episodes juggle those conflicts with grace. It helps that the writers don’t attempt to keep all these plates spinning simultaneously, but rather break each storyline into its own dedicated episode (or episodes). This gives each group of characters room to breathe while still maintaining a brisk overall sense of pacing and progression. Unlike Season 1, it’s clear from the outset what the overarching conflict is and who the main villain is this time, and Season 2 is quick to build on that foundation.

If anything, the series can be a little too quick in that regard. That was one of the few drawbacks of Season 1 - that relentless pacing that sometimes caused the series to blow through classic X-Men source material in the span of a single episode. For example, “Fire Made Flesh” gave us a very stripped-down version of Inferno, and “Remember It” abruptly cut short all that fascinating potential on Genosha. There are times here, particularly in Episode 1, where it seems the series is still pushing forward a little too rapidly and not giving the material full breathing room. At some point, X-Men ‘97 is going to run out of vintage X-Men stories to adapt, so what happens then?

Still, you have to admire the writers’ ambition, and there’s a lot of great material for classic X-fans to sink their teeth into. These episodes adapt elements of classic ‘90s storylines like The Rise of Apocalypse and The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, while also including nods to more contemporary X-Men comics for good measure. But it hardly matters if you’re not familiar with the material that inspired the series. Like its parent series, X-Men ‘97’s greatest strength lies in its ability to make you care deeply for these characters and the madcap soap opera that is their lives.

Season 2 really leans into that quality. Beneath all the colorful trappings and the time travel spectacle, the series is really concerned with the very real and personal struggles our heroes face. Cyclops (Ray Chase) and Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale) have reunited with their time-displaced son Nathan (Michael Johnston). But how long can this reunion last, and can they put their responsibilities as parents over the needs of the world at large? As Jubilee is drawn into Cable’s war, how much is she willing to compromise for the sake of the survival of her people? And perhaps most pivotal of all, Professor Xavier (Marquand) and Magneto (Matthew Waterson) find themselves locked in another ideological battle, this time over the fate of the man who will be Apocalypse. All of this is tied together by that age-old question - is the future written in stone, or can fate be altered?

That Xavier/Magneto storyline is easily the highlight of these early episodes. They, along with Rogue (Lenore Zann), Beast (George Buza), and Nightcrawler (Adrian Hough), find themselves stranded in the past amid En Sabah Nur’s first great war. The series thrives here when it comes to exploring Magneto’s complex moral code and worldview. He’s no longer a villain in the strict sense of the word, but there’s still a vast gulf separating his actions from that of his old friend. And by setting part of the series during Apocalypse’s early years, the writers have a valuable chance to explore a very different side of the character. He’s no longer the pompous mutant overlord, but a man who is still malleable and capable of great good. All of this culminates beautifully in Episode 4’s climax, one which rivals “Remember It” in terms of emotional impact.

The Cable/Jubilee storyline also proves surprisingly entertaining. It serves as a bit of a fun palate cleanser amid all the time travel melodrama, while also highlighting just how grim the situation in 1997 has become. Defeating Bastion and Operation: Zero Tolerance was hardly the end of mutantkind’s woes. This material leans into some of the more colorful trappings of the ‘90s X-Men milieu and gives the series a chance to flesh out several characters who were basically glorified cameos in the original series.

Naturally, X-Men ‘97 doesn’t have room to give every character the attention they deserve. Morph (J. P. Karliak) and Nightcrawler are fairly underutilized here, and Rama-Tut is far less a focus than a character so devilishly voiced by de Lancie deserves. Even the ever-popular Wolverine (Cal Dodd) remains a bit of a lower priority for the series. Those hoping for Season 2 to immediately launch into exploring the ramifications of losing his adamantium will come away disappointed, though I have little doubt we’ll be getting an episode dedicated to that subplot at some point.

Visually and sonically, the series continues to work very well as a modernized update to the original. The animation is fluid, colorful, and dynamic, and Season 2 has the added benefit of these new eras to bring an extra dash of variety to the table in terms of costumes and environments. There’s an especially impressive action scene early on in Episode 1 that makes great use of fog and ethereal lighting. Episode 4, meanwhile, reminds us just how massive the scope of X-Men ‘97 can become when the situation calls for it.

The voice cast is equally impressive, whether it’s the X-Men: The Animated Series veterans like Dodd, Buza, and Zann or the contemporary replacements like Chase and Hale. Waterson remains an MVP of the series, as there’s no way Magneto’s grandiose dialogue would work without the proper force and dignity behind it. And as mentioned, de Lancie is really a delight as Rama-Tut in those few scenes in which he appears.

Only Apocalypse himself leaves me feeling somewhat ambivalent on the vocal front. M'Cormack is great as the younger version of the character, but Marquand’s evolved Apocalypse doesn’t quite capture the booming, bass-y menace of John Colicos from the original animated series. Hopefully, that’s a role he’ll settle into as this Apocalypse-centric season continues to unfold.