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The PlayStation 5 design is… not for everyone. It’s been called an alien spaceship, a high-end router, a toilet seat, and many equally unfavorable terms. But personally? I don’t mind it. The weird, misshapen console is the most unique-looking thing on my TV stand. I like risks, and Sony took it with the PS5.
But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The overhangs and lack of color options make it impossible to blend in, no matter where it sits. Dbrand, a company famous for its premium stickers and equally premium snark, decided to take matters into its own hands. The company released the Darkplates, while simultaneously daring Sony to sue. Sony obliged.
Sony sent Dbrand a cease-and-desist citing the unique (and idiosyncratic) shape of the plates. According to Dbrand, that’s because Sony wanted to sell their own plates (which it now does). So Dbrand got to work redesigning its plates.
The result is the Dbrand Darkplates 2.0, a new design with rounded edges that comes in three colorways: black, white, and retro gray. The colors all look great, but they’re extremely plain compared to PlayStation’s own announced plates, which come in black, red, pink, blue, and purple.
Whether you opt for black or white, disc edition or disc-less, the new plates feature a mesh-covered opening for the fan, which can keep your PlayStation cooler. And that’s a decently big deal, as Gamers Nexus did tests that showed removing the panels entirely could drop the temperature by around 5 degrees. You can also remove the filter, which makes it easier to clean while (presumably) keeping the PlayStation’s temperatures even lower.
On the inside of the Darkplates, you’ll find a nearly microscopic slew of 1s and 0s. It’s Sony’s entire cease-and-desist letter, printed in binary on the inside of the case. It’s just the right amount of petty, and I love it.
Dbrand also offers skins that cover the middle of the PS5. These skins come in matte black, retro gray, classic white, triple black, and a graffiti-floral print called “robot camo.”
Finally, there’s also a skin that covers the PS5’s light strip. This skin is really nothing more than a translucent sticker – just something that covers the very bright RGB light strip on the PS5 and tints it to another color. These work okay – I was partial to the teal blue color, which adds a really interesting hue to your PS5 when the power light is white or blue, but just looks a little murky when the light is orange.
Dbrand Darkplates 2.0 – Assembly
I’m old enough to remember when you had to apply your own stickers to action figures. Your Ninja Turtle van would come with decals you had to apply yourself; mine were always, irredeemably crooked.
So, it’s a welcome surprise that I was able to apply the Dbrand skins easily and without mistakes. I know it sounds overkill, but Dbrand’s tutorials helped a ton. And besides, if you’re spending $10 on a sticker, overkill is welcome.
As for the Darkplates themselves, they snap right on with ease.
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Neptune Frost was reviewed out of the Sundance Film Festival.
While it makes for a worthy new chapter in the language of Afrofuturism — the artistic philosophy that influenced Marvel’s Black Panther — Neptune Frost struggles to be greater than the sum of its parts. A science-fiction musical with scrappy, eye-popping designs, the U.S.-Rwandan production is filled with catchy numbers and fascinating ideas, both surrounding the literal and the ethereal. However, while its individual strengths are marvelously inventive, they rarely coalesce into something resembling its characters’ full-throated calls to liberation. It’s the rare modern genre piece whose aesthetics feel genuinely subversive and rebellious, but their impact is often dulled by the extended gaps between the film’s few revolutionary moments.
Co-directed by Rwandan-born playwright Anisia Uzeyman and American poet Saul Williams, the movie was conceived by the latter as a graphic novel and a stage play before making its way to the screen. The story of two characters whose paths collide in a realm between dimensions — a safe haven, of sorts, for those escaping persecution — it features moments that speak loudly and proudly to themes of queerness, anti-colonialism, and spiritual rebirth. The first major character names themselves Neptune, and their escape is rooted in society’s rejection of their gender identity, which is expressed, at first, through touching moments of self-discovery. Their metaphorical rebirth is marked by a transition between the two different actors playing them (Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja), who each present as a different gender, but feel part of the same physical and emotional continuum, as Neptune begins to slowly but surely break free from rigid codes of behavior and attire. Both Ngabo and Isheja bring a wonderfully considered quietness to the role, which eventually evolves into something powerful and mysterious.
The second lead character is Matalusa (Kaya Free), an exploited miner who experiences a devastating personal loss, but is forced by both his bosses and the colonial remnants of European churches to swiftly accept his grief and move on. A man whose labor involves the mining of coltan — a dull ore used to make hard drives and other computer parts — Matalusa’s fleeing from his oppressive surroundings speaks directly to the film’s revolutionary themes, and is accompanied by chants and protest slogans that seem to bind each of the characters (in every dimension). However, the moments that match the visual energy of his violent escape are few and far between.
In the meantime, Neptune Frost does feature some unique musical detours composed of soft, poetic whispers, which keeps things intriguing. However, the catchiest and most effective numbers (in a mix of French, English, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, and Swahili) are bunched largely in its middle section, from raps about technology and social media to ballads about escaping the vicious hand of western industry, which forces miners and other workers into a modern form of colonialism.
That so much of their exploitation surrounds technology leads to fantastically conceived costumes (by Cedric Mizero) and production design (by Mizero and Antoine Nshimiyimana), a blend of leftover computer parts and traditional East African garb and accessories. The in-between dimension, where Neptune and Matalusa eventually meet, is populated by hackers and rudimentary cyborgs. Their cobbled-together appearance reads like an attempt to weaponize and re-fashion the very emblems of western capitalism that continue to oppress them.
The lines between technology and tribal emblems blur even further when the screen itself morphs and glitches, and its static takes the shape of centuries-old traditional designs. In these moments, the film feels volatile, as if it were about to explode into something completely and powerfully abstract, though it very often returns to a feeling of literal-ness, and grounded-ness, despite its retro-futuristic appearance. It rarely escapes the documentarian feel with which it opens; it seldom takes on the form of something ahead of its time, or something belonging to a new realm of media, even though its designs and concepts (and even its aforementioned glitches) all imbue it with the potential to do so. Its aesthetics always feel on the verge of something truly transformative; it’s a weird movie that could have, and should have, been weirder!
Its sci-fi hallmarks are intriguingly and amusingly matter of fact.
Its sci-fi hallmarks are intriguingly and amusingly matter of fact — cellphones, in this strange dimension, are embedded in what appear to be crystals mined by exploited labor, drawing a direct connection between our technology and where it comes from — but these are largely front-loaded in the story. The approach rarely evolves, thematically or visually, and the designs aren’t often complemented by new ideas that help transform or further contextualize them. It can’t help but feel as if the story is at a standstill whenever a musical number isn’t the central focus.
However, there is also an admirable simplicity to Neptune Frost, despite its complex thematic musings. The bits that work, and land with the most emotional impact, are the ones focused on Neptune, because the camera so clearly loves them, even in their worst and most vulnerable moments. In addition, the authorities from whom Neptune and Matalusa escape have simple designs that are shockingly effective. The only thing out of the ordinary about the local police — who otherwise dress in familiar shirts and trousers — is the flimsy masks they wear, behind which their faces are technically visible, but are obscured just enough to turn them into an intimidating, inhuman force.
Characters react to the film’s bizarre, electronic soundscape as if it holds cultural memory, and Williams’ music often plays like a survival mechanism — an escape from surrounding horrors. However, the attempts to weave these sonic concepts into something rousing and non-traditional are eventually hampered by a plot that takes distinctly, disappointingly literal form (despite the razzmatazz in every frame). It’s a unique movie with images you’ve never seen before, but it comes frustratingly close to escaping the stratosphere and truly soaring.
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This is aspoiler-freereview for all 12 episodes of All of Us Are Dead, premiering Friday, Jan. 28 on Netflix.
All of Us Are Dead is South Korea's latest entry into its excellent, escalating body of undead mayhem (Train to Busan, #Alive). A zombie outbreak series (mostly) set within the carnage-filled classrooms, hallways, and stairwells of a multi-storied high school, All of Us Are Dead pulls no punches and unleashes a savage and seemingly never-ending assault of fast-running zombies on an unfortunate squad of students who've managed to survive the first wave of a zompocalypse. It's clever, thrilling, and also... a bit exhausting.
Unfolding over 12 solidly packed hour-long episodes, All of Us Are Dead is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of zombie horror. Whether this production, from South Korea's JTBC Studios and Film Monster, is at all a victim of typical Netflix bloat is unknown, but it's definitely best absorbed a few episodes at a time and not in a full binge swoop. After three or four episodes, you might be like "Hell yeah, this rules!" but then around Episodes 8 and 9, there's a chance you'll feel a bit snowblind amongst all the thrashing limbs and gnashing teeth.
One of the show's inherent strengths -- which is that it takes its time moving our lead characters from one area to another (sometimes a whole episode will involve them trying to move just 50 feet) -- also leads to repetitive beats later down the road, mid-season. A ton could be trimmed from this tale, especially some of the adjunct stories that focus on other outbreak survivors outside of the school, but overall, the upsides outweigh the sluggishness.
The most exciting part of most zombie stories is the initial crushing downfall of civilization and fortunately, that's the entire focus here. Likewise, every crisis these teens face throughout this ordeal feels real, immediate, and grounded. In turn, every solution they arrive at, to get themselves out of their in-the-moment conundrum, makes sense. It all feels like these are solutions relatively smart humans could come up with, whether they're trying to escape a gymnasium equipment closet, move from room to room in the school, or simply create a small enough window to book it fast and get a running chance.
All of Us Are Dead's zombie action is never not impressive. Whether it's giant chaotic crowd shots, massive ensemble brawls, or tricky "oners," this is massively kinetic storytelling that will drain you as emotionally as it drains our heroes physically. Likewise, there are dozens of instances involving astounding body acting, with the zombies contorting in fiendish and inhuman ways reminiscent of Jennifer Carpenter's performance in The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Yoon Chan-young and Park Ji-hoo anchor this gory and dense horror-coaster, as neighbors and best friends since kindergarten Chung-san and On-jo. Chung-san like-likes On-jo, but On-jo like-likes Park Solomon's former bully Soo-hyuk (while Soo-hyuk crushes on Cho Yi-hyun's morose class president, Nam-ra). It feels silly to write it all out, since it might make the overarching stakes feel trite, but the relationships are more complex than one might assume and provide the actual lifeblood of the story, which is absolutely necessary during some of the middle chapters when bloodletting becomes a bit of a blur.
All of Us Are Dead flounders the most when it strays away from the school.
Some of the other students in the ragtag regimen of survivors may feel tacked on or short-sheeted at first, character-wise, but the series does a good job of making them all feel vital by the end. They wind up as a found family of sorts, who've seen ample atrocities, experienced enormous loss, and now feel abandoned by the world. All of Us Are Dead flounders the most when it strays away from the school, and many of the threads we follow elsewhere lead to rather flat finishes, but the high school heart of the show rarely stumbles. The series also has a rather malicious time with herd thinning, as hardly anyone is exempt from a nasty demise no matter how important you feel they are to the story.
Our perpetually cornered, trapped, and besieged heroes move from classrooms to rooftops to mountains to city streets in an attempt to find any sort of suitable sanctuary while the government decides what to do with the lost city of Hyosan. The series juggles quite a bit between the students, parents, soldiers, and cops while also threading in a bit of social commentary about the trauma created by bullying.
One of the school's bullies, a towering thug named Gwi-nam (Yoo In-soo), incessantly stalks our main characters in one of the more fatiguing elements of the series, but All of Us Are Dead still has a bit of fun playing around with the idea of half-zombies, meaning those whose natural immunity to the virus causes them to transform into something in between the living and dead. If you pace your viewing just right, and break up any potential tedium, the series becomes a unique, effective, and hyper-violent gem.
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The Afterparty premieres with three episodes on Apple TV+ on Jan. 28.
Murder mysteries have long been a TV staple, from Columbo’s feature-length episodes to Jessica Fletcher’s amateur sleuthing on Murder, She Wrote. Now, Apple TV+ has thrown its hat into the crime-solving ring with The Afterparty, and this addition to the streamer’s growing library offers a playful twist on an all-too-familiar genre. Showrunner Chris Miller (creative partner Phil Lord is an executive producer) has assembled a cast packed with performers equipped to hit the hilarious and emotional beats of a whodunnit told from multiple perspectives. The three-episode premiere avoids repetition thanks to the genre-blending set-up and leaves you wanting more.
The Hillmount High School’s 15-year reunion provides the initial setting, but the murder itself occurs at the lavish afterparty hosted by Xavier (Dave Franco). The world-famous pop star and actor is beloved by the public, but his old classmates harbor resentments dating back to adolescence, and the list of potential suspects is long. A limited time to solve the case — in part, because of the high-profile victim — means Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) and her partner Detective Culp (John Early) have to think outside the box to catch the killer. Toggling between the scene of the crime and events leading up to the tragic end of the evening helps keep the momentum and intrigue going.
“The same thing could happen but you see it in a different way. I want to hear your mind movie,” Danner explains to the remaining guests at Xavier’s residence. It is from Danner’s unusual evidence-gathering technique that the genre-mashing conceit is born, but it isn’t the first time individual perspective has been wielded to raise doubt. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 psychological thriller Rashomon is still the definitive example of how different perspectives can lead to contradictory recollections of a crime, but there have been different attempts over the years to play with this idea of memory. More recently, Showtime’s The Affair used this approach to explore infidelity and a hit-and-run killing to depict an unreliable narrator. Nevertheless, the “mind movie” framing is a fun spin on gathering evidence that taps into recognizable tropes.
Establishing the rules and comedic tone early in the first episode helps set the mood. Cameos from some Lord and Miller regulars (who we won’t spoil here) flesh out Xavier’s level of fame and Franco effectively dials up the insufferable celebrity levels in a flashy purple suit worn without a shirt. No one seems too sad about his demise and his home is largely dedicated to images of himself. Because so much time is spent in this one location (as well as the high school), it helps that production designer Tina Tholke has decked out Xavier’s abode with an array of focus-pulling decor.
Cycling through the same night using this framework means we get to see the same locations using a different lens, which includes different lighting schemes, color palettes, music, and camera techniques. Even if you aren’t a rom-com fan, the major beats are recognizable, and The Afterparty is successful as both a whodunnit and genre study. It is more playful than, say, last year’s Kevin Can F*** Himself, which combined comedy and gritty drama to varying results. While some jokes do fall flat in The Afterparty (particularly the second episode), they are typically followed by a punchier line.
The reunion backdrop is a familiar one, which has featured in comedies like Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion and Grosse Pointe Blank, as well as current TV obsession Yellowjackets. Several explanations point to why writers keep turning to this event as a backdrop, and there are few things more relatable than anxiety attached to revisiting high school. Plus, the pre-existing history between former classmates provides a strong foundation of grudges, regrets, and even unrequited love. It is also why it is a rich landscape for a murder mystery with a format twist.
Chris Miller’s grasp of the various tropes and familiar beats is more than a corny gimmick.
Aliq (Sam Richardson) leads the ensemble as he is driving the story, which takes him on a romantic roller coaster amid the obstacles thrown up by the murder. The idea of second chances is another major theme, and the literal portrayal of this through the medium of song in Episode 3 is quite the earworm — I have already rewatched this episode multiple times. Ben Schwartz as Yasper is as if Jean-Ralphio Saperstein from Parks and Recreation had more self-awareness but the same desire to bust out a tune. It is an infectious, scene-stealing performance and his chemistry with Richardson is part of the overall charm.
Another standout is Zoë Chao, who is finally getting to break out of the “best friend of the main character” box, which includes her role on the recent HBO Max comedy Love Life. Meanwhile, Haddish gets some terrific one-liners and proves she is equally funny in the straight-man role as when she is leaning into the outlandish.
There is a risk, of course, that watching the same night unfold multiple times could get boring awfully fast. Thankfully, there are enough competing elements in the first three episodes to suggest this story still has enough steam left for the remaining five installments. The premiere is longer by 15 minutes than the following chapters, but this covers the necessary initial set-up before launching into the “mind movies” of each witness (and potential suspect). Recurring jokes and repeat touchstones mean that while the storyteller’s perspective changes, there are also necessary anchors that help maintain the overall threads.
The opening credits tap into a Saul Bass aesthetic, which immediately sets the tone, and Miller’s grasp of the various tropes and familiar beats is more than a corny gimmick. Caring about the murder mystery plot doesn’t come as an afterthought and this series will likely benefit from a repeat watch to assess the various clues that have been dished out. The Afterparty joins Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building and Rian Johnson whodunnit hit Knives Out as a satisfying contemporary spin on the beloved detective formula. Without going into the various twists and turns, it also isn’t clear cut as to who the killer is, and while it is impossible to say whether The Afterparty will stick the landing, it is certainly off to a good start.
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Up until now, the "main series" Pokémon games have been strictly turn-based RPGs following a young protagonist on a quest to become a powerful Pokémon trainer. Each successive game has layered on a slate of new Pokémon to wrangle and, more recently, increasingly absurd and bloated mechanics to try and spice up a system that fundamentally remained unchanged. So at last, we have Legends: Arceus: the reinvention we asked for. Developer Game Freak has scrapped nearly everything I’ve come to expect from a typical Pokémon game — Gyms, random encounters, an Elite Four, trainer battles on the overworld, an evil team bent on world domination — and started over, rethinking even its most basic systems like Pokémon encounters and evolution from the ground up. A lot of this impressive transformation pays off, in that we get to interact with creatures that have never felt more alive in more dynamic ways, but Pokemon’s evolution is not yet complete, because the semi-open world around all of that feels like an unimpressive afterthought due to its bland emptiness.
There are many and varied reasons why people come clamoring back to Pokemon year after year, but at the heart of it perhaps is the enjoyment derived from collecting a veritable army of interesting monsters, customizing and bonding with a specific team of powerful ones, and overcoming increasingly difficult challenges alongside them. In that regard, Legends: Arceus is still the Pokémon we know and love. But everything surrounding it — how you encounter these creatures and learn about them, how you fight against and alongside them, and the challenges you face together — has been flipped on its head.
The way Legends: Arceus completely reimagines how you go about capturing and battling Pokémon is exemplary. Pokémon wander the overworld as they did in Let's Go and Sword and Shield's Wild Area, but instead of touching them to start every fight, here you have a buffet of options for how to approach each encounter. You could, for instance, toss a PokeBall right away for a capture attempt, or send out one of your Pokémon for a battle, or play it safer and use items like berries to distract them or mud balls to stun them. Some Pokémon will flee the second they see you, requiring you to stealthily hide in tall grass to get a good shot in. Others might attack you directly – your actual character, not your Pokémon – and you’ll have to dodge-roll or take a hit to your limited health bar. Granted, this doesn’t sound like a radical idea if you’ve ever played an action game, but for Pokemon RPGs this level of real-time action and peril is a new and welcome change that properly casts Pokemon as the actual, dangerous critters they are.
The way Legends: Arceus completely reimagines how you go about capturing and battling Pokémon is exemplary.
Tied in with this are many of Legends: Arceus' more impressive touches, specifically in how wild Pokémon react to you or simply exist in the world as actual creatures with distinctive behavioral quirks. For instance, Nosepass will always fall asleep facing north, Sudowoodo freeze in a tree pose when they think you've spotted them, and Magikarp will stupidly flop right up to you because they have no idea you're packing a team of level-80 behemoths that could eat 10 of them in a single bite. Not every Pokémon has this level of personality, but the many that do feel real in a way Pokémon haven't in any other main series game, if not quite at the levels of liveliness we saw in Pokémon Snap.
Even more thrilling are the occasional "space-time distortions" that appear across Legends: Arceus' five separate, self-contained biomes, bringing with them a bevy of rare and powerful Pokémon rapidly spawning in and out to create a scene of delightful chaos. And then there's the pure, delicious terror of running across a massive, red-eyed "alpha" Pokémon in the wild and having it chase you halfway across the map. Listen, you haven't really experienced Pokémon until a Chansey has blasted you straight into the ocean with a well-placed Hyper Beam. All of this makes the creatures of Hisui feel much more lively and dynamic than any previous game, though naturally it doesn’t approach the level of detail we see in something like Breath of the Wild.
You haven't really experienced Pokémon until a Chansey has blasted you straight into the ocean with a well-placed Hyper Beam.
Battling, too, has received an overhaul that adds a new strategic layer to encounters, most noticeably with the addition of Strong and Agile attacks. If you've played any of the Bravely Default games, this will feel a bit familiar: aside from normal attacks, you can also opt to either sacrifice attack power to bring your turn back sooner with an Agile move, or give up future turns for an extra-powerful hit now. The system does fail in a couple ways, however: for one, most wild encounters are over so quickly that much of this isn't always worth bothering with. For another, the strategic element of sacrificing power for turns or turns for power doesn't work as well when either you or your opponent is switching Pokémon in and out constantly, forcing the turn order to shift and reset again and again. That makes it harder to strategize when you're getting your butt kicked by a powerful monster, and nigh impossible in trainer battles when you're both just one-shotting each other's Pokémon back and forth. On the whole it's a good idea, but the fights Legends: Arceus usually provides don't always allow it to shine.
What works far better are the subtler changes to how different moves and status effects are used in battles. I won't go into all the details here, but if you've been a Pokémon fan for years, you'll immediately notice that moves like Rollout don't work the way you remember them, or that status effects like Sleep seem different from usual. The vast, vast majority of these changes are for the better, serving to tighten up battles and working well within the faster-paced, damage-heavy framework. Other major changes are noticeable outside of battle, too, with both evolving Pokémon and changing up their movesets now conveniently available directly from the menu as soon as certain requirements are met. No longer do you have to trek out to a Move Tutor and pay them in rare items to relearn older moves – every attack a Pokémon has ever learned is always available to swap in at any time outside of battle.
Every attack a Pokémon has ever learned is always available.
Legends: Arceus also does away with series staples such as held items, breeding, eggs, and abilities, and doesn't have an equivalent to Mega Evolution Z-Moves, Gigantamaxing, or any of that other nonsense; it doesn't need it. It's not that Legends: Arceus isn't a complex game – far from it, in fact – but that complexity has been shifted into strategic approaches to encounters, capturing, and team building rather than an increasingly tall tower of systems layered atop one another.
It doesn't hurt that Legends: Arceus is much more difficult than any Pokémon game in recent memory, especially when you combine the turn-based battle mechanics with the more action-oriented movement required to set them up in the first place. Wild Pokémon overall just seem to do more damage across the board, and even early on you can run across massively powerful Pokémon that will wreck your entire team and your character if you're not careful. In the first area, for instance, wandering down a particular path will put you right in the sights of a massive, red-eyed Rapidash at an unreasonably high level. You can run if you like, or try to catch it and risk losing, but there's no denying it's a sobering early moment for those who are used to Pokémon games being a cakewalk. This is a welcome removal of Pokemon's historical training wheels, especially for fans like me who have been craving more challenge from Pokémon for years. But it does lose a lot of the series' past accessibility as a result (and there’s no easy mode), which is worth keeping in mind given its wide-ranging, all-ages fanbase.
There are plenty of good real-world reasons why Game Freak thought an overhaul was in order, but in the world of Legends: Arceus, battling and catching Pokémon is the way it is because you are, by and large, actively inventing both as you go. Rather than the usual plucky young pre-teen setting out on a gym challenge, you play as a modern-day teenager flung through time and space to a past version of the Sinnoh region from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, known in its own time as Hisui. You're instructed by a mysterious voice to meet every Pokemon, and then dropped near a settlement called Jubilife Village, where Pokemon are known as terrifying creatures that humans must fear and avoid. This pleasantly surprising twist allows for a completely new perspective on the, frankly, quite frightening monsters we've been collecting for the last two decades, as you join an expedition team instructed to investigate the 242 different Pokémon that live in the region in an effort to help humans learn to live safely and peacefully alongside them.
Legends: Arceus is much more difficult than any Pokémon game in recent memory.
And what better way to do that than by compiling a PokeDex? Except this, too, is not the PokeDex we're familiar with. Beyond just catching every Pokémon once to complete the encyclopedia, you can only fully fill out an entry by completing a number of bonus tasks unique to each monster. Catching at least one is required, but other research tasks include things like battling a certain number, witnessing them using certain moves, encountering them in specific ways or at certain times, and more. For example, a Bidoof will be one of the first Pokemon you catch, but to fully research it you might catch multiple, evolve one into Bibarel, defeat several in battle, or finish a sidequest in Jubilife Village where a bunch of Bidoof are causing an annoyance. Such sidequests are available aplenty, and help the citizens of Jubilife work through their fears of the monsters they live alongside… and even learn to love them.
Filling out the PokeDex improves your rank in the expedition team, which is required for certain progression milestones and rewards, but it's also a wonderfully fulfilling task on its own because it's so open-ended. I often found myself wandering off from the main story path into forests, caves, mountains, and rivers looking for new monsters to catalog, watching them move, and spending time getting to know them so I could discern how best to tackle each new research task. When combined with the new capturing and battling systems, Pokémon Legends: Arceus' main loop of visiting a new area, working on the PokeDex, turning in progress, and repeating proved fun and enticing for hours on end.
But fun as it was to catch and catch and catch Pokémon, Legends: Arceus' brilliant new systems come with a major downside: they all exist within an ugly, empty world.
Filling out the PokeDex is a wonderfully fulfilling task on its own.
Now that the Switch has multiple lovely, stylized open-world games with big grassy fields and roaming monsters, this particular world comes off as especially disappointing. With the singular exception of its pleasant skies, it's just not nice to look at, ever. Its five areas, which include the Obsidian Fieldlands, the Crimson Mirelands, and the Cobalt Coastlands often look depressingly similar to one another. Textures are ugly and repetitive, grass and trees are excessively simple and obvious, and the water effects are utterly bizarre, especially when Pokémon are swimming. Objects pop in and out at close range, and large wild Pokémon spotted in the distance run at an agonizingly slow framerate that makes them look like stop-motion animations. And to be very clear, none of this is a rarity – it looks like this constantly, in both docked and handheld mode (though handheld is a bit better), and often kills the immersion of running around what should be an exciting natural world stuffed with Pokémon.
If anything, it looks worse the further you get: when you begin to unlock Pokémon that enable you to gallop, surf, and fly over the world rapidly, the visual disappointments – and the awkwardly placed, artificial barriers at the world's edges – become even more obvious and difficult to look past.
What's more, while Arceus' overworld is massive in size, so much of it is functionally empty. Sure, the lore explains that the Hisui region is still largely uninhabited by humans, so it makes sense not to have tons of massive, bustling cities. But when I say empty, I mean empty, even of interesting natural phenomena or roadside curiosities. I cannot emphasize enough how much of this world is just long stretches of grass patches or bare, empty mountains covered in Geodudes, especially in the later areas. It's just all Pokémon, all the way down. There are a number of map-named places referencing towns or landmarks in Diamond and Pearl that are clearly intended to be their precursors but, aside from maybe having a few extra flowers or trees or slightly differently colored grass, there's little reason to really explore or appreciate them. Just catch your Pokémon and be on your way, nothing to see here.
While Arceus' overworld is massive in size, so much of it is functionally empty.
The handful of landmarks Hisui does have are frequently disappointing, too. So, so often in Legends: Arceus I saw what I thought might be a cool mountain cave or interesting ravine or island, only to find it inhabited by more of the same Combee and Buizels I'd been bumping into since I got to Hisui. A couple of small settlements parked around the region have absolutely nothing to offer beyond a sidequest or two – you can't even use them as camps to heal your team. Even the music that backs up your adventure is lackluster and oddly inconsistent, fading in and out at odd times and featuring a mix of calming Breath of the Wild-style piano melodies and energetic remixes of Diamond and Pearl route themes. Essentially, exploring and getting to know Hisui is entirely about cataloging its Pokémon – the region, world, music, and landscape itself is an underdressed, inelegant afterthought.
Even worse, without interesting landmarks, Hisui is also entirely devoid of anything resembling dungeons, or even puzzles, really. There's one sort-of dungeon about 20 hours in with a couple of extremely basic shape-memorization puzzles, but then you never see anything like it again. Part of this is likely due to the fact that riding on Pokémon has entirely replaced the old system of "Hidden Machine" moves usable for both traveling and puzzle solving on the overworld. While I welcome not having to carry a Bidoof with me at all times to break rocks, Legends: Arceus feels like it lost a little too much of itself without cool ruins puzzles to solve or interesting spelunking trips. With no suitable replacement for the traditional gyms, Rocket hideouts, and the like, there's no meaningful build-up to major encounters and no moments of satisfaction that come from surviving a long excursion into a dangerous place with a powerful enemy at the end. I didn't realize how much adrenaline conquering something like a Victory Road really gave me until it was suddenly missing.
What all this means is that what you're doing for almost the entirety of Legends: Arceus' first act is catching and battling, over and over again. And that system is strong enough that it does manage to keep things interesting most of the way, though admittedly after the first 20 or so hours of repetition I was starting to flag. Interspersed boss fights with powerful lord and lady Pokémon that actively mix up the action game mechanics of their battles help freshen things up, though I could have done with a few more actually challenging trainer battles than the story threw at me. But then I reached Legends: Arceus' ending…or should I say endings?
When you see credits roll about 30 hours in, the “ending” you’ve seen is really more of an act one finale, leading directly into a robust second half with 20 or 30 additional hours of sidequests, battles, legendaries, and more. That on its own is great, and a lot of that extra content is pretty fun, too, including a seriously tough boss battle and some excellent legendary Pokémon hunts and fights that really make use of Legends: Arceus' overworld creature-catching and item-use mechanics for interesting, strategic encounters. In fact, they made me wish more of the earlier Pokémon encounters had forced me to make better use of my toolset for stealth and stunning – those felt like missed opportunities in hindsight.
But one massive piece of Legends: Arceus' second half sucks: finishing it. The actual, for-real ending is gated behind two absolutely massive and frustrating collect-a-thons. One of the tasks is to collect 107 of an item scattered across all six zones, with absolutely no guide as to where any of them are beyond the number remaining in each area. The other task is, unsurprisingly, capturing every Pokémon available – a job made agonizing by the fact that many are extremely rare. At one point, I spent several hours doing the following: leaving Jubilife Village for a certain area, flying to the very specific spawn point of a Pokémon I needed, seeing it was not there, warping back to camp, going back to the village to reset the spawns, and repeating until I found what I needed. I similarly spent hours sitting on a mountaintop, waiting for a space-time-distortion to appear in hopes that it might, maybe, have the Pokémon I needed. And if I accidentally made any of these Pokémon faint or flee, too bad. Do it all over again.
I spent several hours repeating the cycle until I found what I needed.
This is so, so far removed from the Pokémon fantasy I wanted to see the series evolve into. I understand that Pokémon has always had these kinds of obtuse, repetitive challenges for its rarest monsters (remember Feebas in Ruby and Sapphire?), but never have they been required to achieve a main story ending – not even back in the good ol' days where catching 'em all was still the slogan. And given the modern reinvention of the series we see here, this sort of tedious mandatory activity should’ve been the first thing to be discarded.
If Legends: Arceus had hidden more of these rarer monsters behind puzzles or interesting sidequests or actual overworld mysteries, that would have been one thing. Instead, it's just a lot of waiting, repetition, and luck (and, for everyone else playing it post-launch, presumably online guides) that I found immensely discouraging despite the enticing proposition of, you know, actually getting some form of resolution to the plot established in the first five minutes. On the bright side, online and local trading will be available at launch, which may speed up this process for some, but that doesn’t change the annoying nature of being told to go out and find something that’s just not there to be found the vast majority of the time.
So what awaits at the end of all this? I won't spoil it, but suffice to say it involves one admittedly fantastic, memorable boss battle, and then nothing. The story never really resolves. Multiple characters repeatedly hinted to have suspicious and interesting motives never explain who they are or what they're really up to. One particularly tragic character never even gets an acknowledgment that his unresolved story is actually pretty messed up for a Pokemon game, much less a happy ending (or any ending, really). Questions raised early on in Legends: Arceus are never answered sufficiently, and even when you get back to town, no one remarks on the feat you've just accomplished. Maybe it was my own fault for being led to believe that there was some greater story being told here beyond "catch 'em all." But after 64 hours, it was a wildly disappointing payoff for the work of finishing the longest main story a Pokemon game has ever had, even if the journey to get there was a lot of fun.
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Raised by Wolves Season 2 premieres with two episodes on HBO Max on Feb. 3, 2022.
The return of Raised by Wolves kicks off with a well-curated pairing. Most of the eight episodes in Season 2 will arrive on a weekly schedule, but HBO Max is set to release the first two chapters on Feb. 3. The first is an unexpected reversion to something resembling the show’s previous status quo, despite the seemingly propulsive conclusion to Season 1. The second episode, however, plays like a retroactive justification for this apparent step back. The two-part premiere may not answer any of the show’s lingering questions — many of them don’t feature at all — but it deepens the more intimate mysteries at its hearts, especially those concerning the atheist android couple Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) as they become increasingly human.
When the first season ended, Mother and Father’s plunge into the core of Kepler-22b yielded an unexpected detour. The enormous serpentine child Mother was deceived into bearing — dubbed “Number 7” in these new episodes — took to the air, while the couple’s six human children remained stranded near their desert home, as the undercover atheist warrior Sue (Niamh Algar) bled out from a gunshot wound. Except for Number 7, none of these cliffhangers yield dividends when the new season begins. The show quickly reunites all of its separated characters, who are welcomed into a new atheist colony in the promised Tropical Zone; meanwhile, Sue’s husband, Marcus (Travis Fimmel), remains on the run despite his skirmish with arriving atheist scouts in the previous episode.
However, the establishing of an atheist colony, as a renewed setting for the series, allows familiar character dynamics to evolve in a brand-new context. Where the first season explored Mother and Father’s emotional interiority against a backdrop of nuclear family, the second season — in its second episode especially — brings their haphazard familial unit into conflict with wider society, whose rules and laws the two androids begin to navigate in different ways. Where the Mithraic were governed by faith in the deity Sol, their warmongering atheist rivals appear to take orders from a kaleidoscopic artificial intelligence known as “The Trust,” further blurring the philosophical lines between the two factions.
If there was one element of the show’s premise that felt malformed in Season 1, it was the idea that in 2145 — a mere 12 decades in the future — Mithraism might not only grow into the world’s dominant religion, but might also replace all traces of Christianity while adopting all of its hallmarks. The Season 2 premiere, however, teases a couple of brand-new mysteries regarding not only the religion’s history, but the history of this new planet and its relationship to both humans and A.I. Answering questions with more questions certainly runs the risk of late-era Lost-ification, but Raised by Wolves avoids muddling its mysteries by presenting each one with emotional clarity. We’re no closer to understanding what this planet is, or what ongoing story the colonists have wandered into, but every discovery has a precise and lucid effect on one character or another, which manifests in each performance.
Collin and Salim retain Mother and Father’s decorum and base politeness, but their composure is lost more easily — a reflection, perhaps, of the idea that this return to status quo is much more fragile. However, since the repurposed androids are programmed to analyze their every impulse, not only do Collin and Salim step swiftly in and out of their respective forms of aggression (Mother’s remains explosive, while Father’s is more subdued), but this whiplash is also punctuated by both characters gazing inward, and ruminating on their increasingly frayed demeanor. The actors, therefore, are tasked with not only going to more vulnerable places each time their characters butt heads, but with stewing in a radioactive afterglow, as they try to parse volatile emotions they’ve never felt before.
As for Mother and Father’s children, Campion (Winta McGrath), who Mother brought to term in an external chamber, continues to wrestle with his beliefs in a world of binary extremes, but the returning orphan Paul (Felix Jamieson) is the one to watch this season. As a kid who feels betrayed by both sets of “parents” — the androids who forcefully adopted him, and Mithraic parents Marcus and Sue, who turned out to be atheist turncoats disguised as his actual parents — Jamieson is much looser and more animated this time, and he brings an emotional maturity even to Paul’s juvenile acts of rebellion. As a version of Paul who no longer trusts anyone, his patience wears thin when he’s forced to live among his lifelong enemies as he searches for what he believes to be Mithraic relics and prophecies.
The most intriguing dramatic elements still come courtesy of Mother.
The atheists’ colony introduces a handful of new characters. Peter Christoffersen plays Cleaver, their tattooed, stone-faced leader who has an uneasy relationship with “The Trust,” and who brings an unexpected bite to every conversation. James Harkness joins the cast as Tamerlane, Cleaver’s hard-bitten subordinate, whose unwelcoming attitude towards the colony’s android and Mithraic guests becomes a central source of tension. However, the atheists’ most engrossing facet is their vicious ideology and the way it manifests in their social structure, which the show steadily unearths through the eyes of existing characters. Last season, the exploration of how the atheists harnessed violent impulses was limited to how this affected Marcus, but this time, the show paints a more complete (and more discomfortingly paradoxical) portrait of their brutality.
This bigger picture not only complicates Mother and Father’s new allegiance to the colony, but it also creates a key thematic mirror for Marcus. Last season, the former atheist heard what he believed to be the voice of Sol, and he now becomes a prophetic leader to a small band of Mithraic disciples — among them, a new human character Decima (Kim Engelbrecht) and her android companion Vrille (Morgan Santo), whose dynamic is revealed to be a fascinating inversion of the human-android relationships we’ve seen thus far. Marcus has come a long way from being a militaristic pawn, but the journey that lies ahead of him — concerning whether he can deprogram the violence that was beaten into him, and replace it with a theology he claims is peaceful — could prove to be one of the season’s key dilemmas, especially if the true nature of “Sol’s voice” is revealed.
The most intriguing dramatic elements, however, still come courtesy of Mother, whose residual pregnancy belly is a constant reminder of the monstrous child lurking somewhere in the darkness. Her evolving physiology and emotional complexity continue to mirror Kepler itself; like the planet, Mother is caught in an anatomical and spiritual tug-of-war between destroyer and life-giver, which continues to manifest in ways that speak to the show’s Ridley Scott influence, and the psychosexual body horror that has permeated his work. The Tropical Zone is surrounded by a primordial ocean, but one that is acidic to alien outsiders, while Mother’s life-giving, milk-like blood has begun to exhibit similar corrosive properties. The quandary she faces when the colony is threatened by Number 7 — a terrifying aberration that is still, technically, her biological child — is poised to draw on both her most nurturing and most destructive tendencies.
Scott, who directed the show’s initial episodes, has only nominal involvement this time, and the director of the two-part premiere (TV veteran Ernest Dickerson) doesn’t quite craft the same haunting atmosphere. However, Dickerson and the writers of each entry — showrunner Aaron Guzikowski and Jon Worley respectively — deftly lay the groundwork for a story that feels in line with the musings Scott helped bring to Season 1, about the increasingly blurry boundaries between faith and programming, and the disquieting nature of biological imperative.
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This review contains spoilers for Episode 5 of Peacemaker, “Monkey Dory,” which airs on Jan. 27 on HBO Max. To catch up, check out our review oflast week's episode, and our spoiler-free take on thethree-episode premiere.
Peacemaker delves deeper into the purpose of Project Butterfly in an excellent, genre-blending episode that continues the impressive work the series is doing of providing deep character building, a compelling central mystery, and plenty of over-the-top action.
After nursing a wicked hangover with some adorable comforting from Eagly, Peacemaker finally gets the briefing that he’s been asking for on what Project Butterfly is. This takes the form of an absurd powerpoint presentation which continues the main character arc: exploring whether or not Peacemaker can become less of a jerk.
Peacemaker and John Economos’ bonding over having the same taste in music seemed too convenient — the shift in the way Peacemaker views the A.R.G.U.S. agent after he eviscerates a gorilla with a chainsaw feels much more earned. It also garners some hilarious pouting from Vigilante. The decision to spend so much time developing Vigilante seemed dubious at first, but he’s turned into a great addition to the crew as a version of Dexter played for laughs, happy to share the warped way he views the world and the extent to which he fantasizes about killing people.
The sloppy nature of this mission also makes a lot more sense with the explanation that this is an off-the-books mission because the Butterfly conspiracy goes so deep that Amanda Waller couldn’t officially investigate it. Peacemaker’s point that this sounds a lot like the deep state helps lampshade how fraught plots like this can be in the age of QAnon, but modern politics also aren’t stopping Marvel from developing its upcoming conspiracy-centered series Secret Invasion, so Peacemaker might as well beat them to the punch.
James Gunn is paying tribute to iconic films in the Alien infiltration genre with the mission to Glan Tai Bottling Company, which features references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and They Live. Peacemaker’s X-ray helmet serves as the equivalent to They Live’s sunglasses with the exact same effect of horrifying his colleagues when he starts murdering people that only he can see aren’t really human. It is a little disappointing that, when pushed into a fight, Butterflies tend to act more like super-strong zombies than the people they can otherwise pretend to be because while their overwhelming numbers create a challenge for the Project Butterfly team, having opponents capable of tactics or even more taunting would be more engaging.
Besides delivering plenty of schlocky sci-fi action, “Monkey Dory” also dips into more traditional police drama and noir sentiments. Adebayo’s conflict with her partner reflects any number of stories involving cops that are married to their job, but it’s even more fraught here given that Adebayo took the gig just to help them financially rather than because she has some higher calling. But as Waller pointed out, she’s good at black ops work.
Episode 5 delivers a satisfying mix of plot, character development, and mayhem.
The tender scene between her and Peacemaker, where he expresses so much relief at having someone to talk to who isn’t a bird or a sociopath, seemed like it might be a set up for Adebayo to discover Peacemaker’s been keeping a captive butterfly. Instead, the planting of the diary makes her the villain of the scene. It’s clear that Adebayo’s pushing Keeya away less because she really believes Harcourt’s warning that she needs to protect her from danger and more because she doesn’t want her to see the person that she’s becoming under Waller’s guidance.
As Peacemaker points out with his ludicrously long litany of names, Economos’ decision to frame Peacemaker’s father, Auggie, for his son’s crimes in Episode 1 may be the biggest mistake made during the series. The fallout continues with detectives Sophie Song and Larry Fitzgibbon getting into a very noir conflict where Song refuses to accept the easy lie, even if it means freeing a racist monster like Auggie, and especially when it becomes clear that her bosses would rather she drop her investigation.
Christopher Heyerdahl is deeply creepy as Muhn’s ally Caspar Locke, explaining to Song just how malleable the truth is even in the face of hard fingerprint evidence and the eagerly recanted testimony of witness Evan Calcaterra. This investigation is likely to just keep getting her into more trouble, but like any good noir detective, she won’t let her career or safety get in the way of uncovering the truth.
“Monkey Dory” ends with a big payoff on last week’s reveal about Murn, a deliciously tense scene contrasting Adebayo’s playful use of Peacemaker’s helmet with the lurking knowledge of what she’ll find when she looks at Murn. Next week’s episode is called “Murn After Reading,” so we’ll likely get some more details on his character and potentially more information about what the Butterflies are really up to.
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This isspoiler-freereview for all eight episodes of The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, which premieres Friday, Jan. 28 on Netflix.
Kristen Bell skewers Lifetime murder mysteries in new series (hold onto your butts...) The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Phew. Yup, with a mouthful of a name reminiscent of parodies like Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, The Woman in the House (etc.) seems to take many of its cues from Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig's A Deadly Adoption, which as you'll recall was the comedic duo's elaborate bit that involved doing a Lifetime movie (it actually aired on Lifetime), the joke being that they played it straight. A lot of that is on display here in The Woman in the House, but at a whopping runtime of four hours -- eight half-hour eps that bleed together into one binge movie -- the entire premise swiftly runs out of steam.
Even Ferrell and Wiig's A Deadly Adoption was pushing it, length-wise. This type of shtick was barely able to stretch to those 80 minutes, much less three times that with The Woman in the House. Look, everyone here is committed to the gag, and appropriately soap-ifies their acting to accommodate this specific type of melodrama, but there's a conceptual imbalance here that hinders everything, and it only feels more accentuated the longer the series gets drawn out.
There will be healthy stretches where The Woman in the House just calls things down the middle, where it feels like a bunch of notable names doing Hallmark fare, but then there are elevated moments where it lashes out with full parody like Airplane or The Naked Gun. This radiates an uncertainty of tone, as the season bounces between satire, parody, farce, and just having the joke be that that there is no joke. Admittedly, there are some absolutely hilarious breakouts, moments rife with glorious insanity. The Woman in the House will occasionally drop a nugget so funny that you truly wish the format were different. This is, for sure, a fun genre to play around with, but the delivery system is less than ideal.
Given Bell's particular P.I. past with sleuth series Veronica Mars, her lead role here as a haunted, wine-soaked woman convinced she witnessed a murder feels like a nicely placed gag in its own right. Confident she can piece together the puzzle on her own, Bell is more than at home in snoop mode. And, playing against expectations, her character, who's prone to blackouts and delusions, is actually good at chasing leads and digging up old secrets.
Having lost her family, Bell's Anna has spent years in a bathrobed stupor, drinking one overflowing glass of red wine after another. When hunky widow Neil (Da Vinci's Demons' Tom Riley) and his 9-year-old girl Emma (Samsara Yett) move in across the street, Anna starts to imagine herself fitting into their lives as a way to rebuild her own (while also regaining what she's lost). From there, everything spirals into a mad swirl of murder, betrayal, false accusations, and (believe me) one hell of a bats*** final showdown.
Again, most of the time The Woman in the House just colors within the lines, making everything feel like a legitimate Lifetime movie and that gets pretty dull rather quickly. If the actual crazy moments didn't feel so few and far between then perhaps this amusing experiment would have yielded better results. There's a condensed version of this concept that's probably crazy good.
For fun, check out the trailer for 2015's A Deadly Adoption...
Heathers director Michael Lehmann aptly replicates the overall look and vibe of a "woman in peril" cable movie, leading this lively cast -- including Almost Human's Michael Ealy, Teen Wolf's Shelley Hennig, Veep's Mary Holland, and The Umbrella Academy's Cameron Britton -- through all the red herring beats, providing a fun ensemble filled with nosey best friends, wily con artists, and local Boo Radleys. There's no doubt that everyone's on board for this slice of silliness, it's just not presented in the most beneficial way.
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Nathan Drake is back once again with his first PlayStation 5 adventure, bringing Chloe and friends along for an updated and upgraded dual package of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and the spinoff Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Offering enhancements and some huge performance leaps over the globetrotting thief’s PS4 & PS4 Pro release. But is a treasure worth fighting for?
This new remaster offers a few paths to play, with existing disc or digital owners of the PS4 version of either included game being able to upgrade for $10s, euros, or great British pounds to this new pack. Or you can make a full purchase if you’re new to the Uncharted fold, and even PC players will get a release later this year. As we have seen in previous remasters from Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima, you can easily import your PS4 save using the main menu’s in-built conversation tool. Allowing you to pick up where you left off – just sharper and faster than before. Simply download or USB copy your save over to your ps5 drive, then fire it up and convert it to a PS5 format. Note that you can copy multiple saves; you simply need to do them one at a time from the main menu.
Indiana Modes
The biggest upgrades are resolution and performance, with Legacy of Thieves offering three modes of play. Sadly, there is no multiplayer included in this version, which is a shame as one mode would’ve really helped that style of gameplay. The first of the trio of modes is Fidelity, which runs at a sharp and crisp 3840x2160 (aka 4K) resolution at the same 30fps as the PS4 & Pro version, which run at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, respectively. This helps all related buffers within the image, such as alpha textures, shadows, screen space reflections, and more.
Sadly, there is no multiplayer included in this version.
Next – and likely the most popular – is Performance mode, which offers the same 2560x1440 resolution of the PS4 Pro by doubling framerates to 60fps by halving frame-times to 16.67ms. The loss in pixel clarity from 4K is a minor but noticeable sacrifice, but the gain in temporal pixel counts and extra fluidity is a welcome one, specifically considering the controller input latency which I will get to later.
Finally, we have the Perf+ mode, which again doubles framerates over the Performance mode to 120fps – so long as you have a TV to support that. The cost is, again, resolution, which now drops by 50% to 1080p, matching the base PS4 but running at four times the framerate. This mode is clearly the one that looks the softest on a 4K screen, but the latency improvements are again noticeable even over the 60fps Performance mode. No Dynamic resolution scaling appears to be in use but the engine’s temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) helps minimize noisy segments and the MB shutter speed has been increased to compensate for the faster framerates, which helps improve clarity in motion on objects, textures, and more over the PS4 and PS4 Pro. All three modes are available in Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy and can easily be swapped in the menus with no delay, meaning you can pick your poison between pixel clarity or pixel frequency, and swap between them based on what you’re doing at the time.
With a game such as Uncharted, the increased controller refresh fluidity is beneficial, if not game changing. What is a humongous improvement, though, is the cartridge-like loading times – or rather the near lack thereof. Even on an SSD-powered PS4 Pro the load from a save unpacking into RAM can take over 36 seconds; on PS5, Legacy of Thieves is over 10 times faster, with loads now taking approximately three seconds and effectively removed. Menus simply fade out and the action fades in. This shift to a native PS5 app enabled Naughty Dog to leverage the SSD speed most integral to the memory subsystem configuration, all within the new SDK and relevant API calls. In addition, the Legacy of Thieves version has a smaller in footprint on your drive due to the Oodle texture compression tech and dedicated compression hardware built into the PS5’s system on a chip (SoC). With both games installed, it occupies 40% less drive space as a whole.
Performance
What of that performance then? Let’s start at the top: with Uncharted 4 and the PS4/Pro version, both targeted 30fps and in the majority of action, and they held close enough to that to never be an issue. One of the biggest and most frantic sections was the Raiders of the Lost Ark homage truck-and-jeep chase that was first revealed in the famous E3 2015 gameplay trailer. It saw dips on base PS4 and Pro to almost identical levels, mostly only into the next refresh cycle of 16ms, but this could see low 20fps moments crop up in brief segments of action, largely fill-rate and bandwidth-limited, but occasionally you could also get longer stutters with context switching. These cause 80 to 100ms spikes and hangs when they occur, pointing to CPU, memory, or other cache-related delays. These happen with the switch over to driving as the world simulation is warped back into line. As a 30fps game running on original PS4 hardware, though, it was solid.
It should come as no surprise to see that on PS5 it does not drop a stitch within the same stressful segments when running in the native 4K/30fps mode. It keeps the frame-time meter flatter than a bad guy’s ECG after a run-in with Nate the serial killer. This is true of the Fidelity mode both in Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy.
Action-heavy scenes secure Performance as the preferred mode in my playthrough of the PS5 port.
Moving to the 60fps Performance mode, we do now start to see some drops in these same heavier sections of Uncharted 4 and some of the battles in Lost Legacy as well. They’ve been always minor and never that frequent in my run of play, but when it happens it skips into the next refresh cycle and they never add more than short-lived, mid-50fps segments. Most action scenes, cinematics, and exploration are at a steady 60fps, which is a solid boost from the previous 30fps ceiling. The same scenarios and sections play out in both games and really secure Performance as the preferred mode in my playthrough of the PS5 port.
The final Performance+ 120fps mode is the most demanding on CPU time, and any bottlenecks that may crop up when trying to target such a high refresh rate of 8ms. As such, we can see more frequent dips from this target in both games across action, and they are the biggest when driving across the wide, linear levels in the jeep. Uncharted 4 does come out on top, maintaining frame rates above 100fps in my tested segments. Again, due to 8ms frame time being half that of 60fps the drops here are almost imperceptible when they crop up. The Lost Legacy, on the other hand, can be a little heavier on the GPU and fill-rate with all the foliage amongst the battles, which see us drop close to that 100fps line more often and into the 90s when we look at long terrain views while driving. These are again, brief, and infrequent enough to not be of a great concern, but they’re the only drops I really noticed without the frame-rate tool picking them up.
Also, with this being a PS5 port of the Pro version now running at four times the framerate, we do see some physics glitches and sped-up animation crop up at times. They’re noticeable when they do, but are rarely game-breaking. The extra fluidity offered by the 120fps mode from the movement and the controller input times are excellent, though. Alongside the DualSense improvements of Haptic Feedback and adaptive triggers, we can see huge reductions in input times, which is a key area of the Naughty Dog engine. They stagger work over three frames in addition to any core engine polling latency, meaning that each frame is treated to CPU-GPU-render stages. Based on the PS4 Pro, we see approximately 144ms of input time as the median, i.e., the most likely input times from a collection of tested actions. This is slightly slower by 4 to 8ms on the PS5 in the 30fps Fidelity mode, but we see big and noticeable reductions on this as we move through 60 and then 120fps modes, with 120fps being sub-100ms and approximately 60ms at the absolute best point.
Summary
Uncharted 4 is The Last Crusade for Nate in more ways than one. Here it is refined, smoother, faster, and sharper, but not to a level I am sure many hoped. Unlike God of War on PC, which we covered a couple of weeks ago, we get no further bells and whistles over PS4 Pro. Improved textures and resolution are the only minor visual boosts, with level of detail, ambient occlusion, and others all remaining the same. These would still not transform Uncharted 4 or The Lost Legacy, but might have enticed more returning fans to double dip on the Legacy of Thieves Collection. It remains to be seen what the PC version scheduled for later this year will offer over this one; support for a 21:9 aspect ratio would be great to add. Overall, Legacy of Thieves on PS5 is a great update to those than prefer faster and cleaner images but more aimed at those diving into either of these for the first time, or the cheaper $10 option for the hardcore who want to double dip. It’s a refined and improved version for sure, which highlights just how far Naughty Dog was ahead of the pack even in 2016. But for anything over sheer performance and controller improvements, you may be left wanting a little more treasure.
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Most standing desks are more about function, less about form. Yet FlexiSpot’s Comhar EG8 Standing Desk takes a road less traveled in an attempt to look just as good as it performs. Those efforts seem to have paid off. This isn’t just a great standing desk that works smoothly, but it also looks smart and elegant doing it. That’s without mentioning its extra features – three charging ports and a built-in drawer – and its incredibly uncomplicated setup.
There’s a lot to love here, even if it isn’t exactly for everyone. For gamers who prefer a more elegant and minimalist aesthetic, the FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk is an appealing proposition.
FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk – Design and Features
If you’re looking for a desk to fit right in with your gaming setup, you might have an entirely different computer desk in mind. There isn’t any funky RGB lighting here, nor are there any sort of gaming-inspired trimmings.
With its modern yet elegant design, the EG8 Standing Desk fits better in an office or a home office setup with its 0.2-inch tempered glass top, rounded edges, and solid black (or white) look. Even its controls and charging ports look smart, with the control panel they sit in seamlessly integrated onto the tabletop itself, as opposed to attached to it.
These are touch controls consisting of up and down arrows, as well as four programmable preset buttons labeled one through four. To program each numbered button, you simply set the desk to the height you want, then hold down the number for three seconds. To make it even easier for you, there is an LED on the left-hand side of this control panel which displays the actual current height as well as an indicator for when the desk is at its lowest or highest height.
Also on the control panel are three ports meant for charging devices. There are two USB Type-A ports here and a USB-C one, giving you charging flexibility. FlexiSpot doesn’t outright specify whether these ports offer fast-charging capabilities, unfortunately. In case you find yourself constantly pressing those height buttons accidentally, there’s a lock button to the right of the ports to avoid that.
To the left of the control panel, right smack in the middle of the desk, is a drawer that’s also seamlessly integrated. It’s only 1.5 inches in height so you sadly won’t be able to fill it up with thicker devices like a pair of headphones. However, it does go in deep, so you can fill it up with regular office accessories as well as smaller, thinner devices like a Nintendo Switch.
If you are looking for a massive tabletop that’s 50 or more inches in length, you might be disappointed to know that the FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 is only 48-inches long. However, there’s still plenty of space here, thanks to its 24-inch width. You should be able to set up a computer monitor, a couple of laptops on each side, a set of computer speakers and still have enough space for all your peripherals.
Just be careful with that glass top when you are organizing your devices and accessories, as it doesn’t really take a lot to scratch it.
FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk – Assembly
The FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk is surprisingly easy to set up. Unlike other standing desks, whose assembly can be a bit involved, this one doesn’t take much effort. It’s so easy, in fact, that even those who haven’t assembled a standing desk before should be able to do so within minutes.
That’s largely thanks to the control panel that’s already built into the tabletop and the motor already attached to the lifting columns (or legs), which are also already put together. Essentially, there are only four parts here to screw together – the two feet, the lifting columns, and the tabletop.
All you need to do is set the tabletop right-side down, screw the lifting columns/motor unit to it, then attach the legs. After that, you only need to connect the motor to the control panel with the included power plug, and connect the table to an outlet once it’s right-side up.
Really, the only thing that’s tricky in this whole setup is flipping the table back up. The tabletop is not only heavy, but it also has that glass top, which means you have to be very careful. I was able to flip it myself, but it wasn’t easy nor particularly safe. I recommend setting the tabletop down on a thick blanket to avoid scratches, and have someone assist you with the flip.
FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk – Performance and Gaming
Smooth and fairly quiet, the FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk certainly fits in an office setting where you don’t want a loud desk disturbing your colleagues every time you make a height adjustment. The controls or buttons are responsive as well – a light press is really all it takes to set it to a pre-set height, and a light yet longer hold to make manual height adjustments.
The desk can be adjusted from a minimum of 28.3 inches or around 2.425 feet up to a maximum of 47.6 inches or almost 4 feet. Other desks can go lower and higher, but the FlexiSpot Comhar EG8’s range should be good enough for most people – that includes those over six feet tall.
Since there are no incremental stops to the height, you can pretty much adjust it to the exact height you want, which is incredible. I recommend a preset for sitting and another for a standing position so you can alternate throughout the day quickly and with ease.
If you want to take that further, or maybe get your workout in while also working, FlexiSpot even offers under desk bikes that you can bundle in with the Comhar EG8.
Back on the desk, there might not be a whole lot of gaming-focused features here – in fact, there’s none at all – but it also makes for a great gaming desk. In fact, that glass top is perfect for reflecting any RGB lighting you might have, doubling it and making your rig light up even more.
To avoid accidents and broken devices, the FlexiSpot Comhar EG8 Standing Desk does come with an anti-collision function, which you can set to three levels of sensitivity, or turn off if you have no need for it. This feature works perfectly, and it’s saved me from a handful of small disasters.
The only thing I don’t like about the anti-collision function is that in order to set the sensitivity, you have to press and hold the up and down buttons at the same time for about 5 seconds. Although that sounds simple enough, you cannot just hold down the buttons and have it cycle through the sensitivity settings. Instead, you have to press and hold over and over until you get to the setting you want. It’s not a big deal, obviously, just something that might annoy some people.
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Lucy and Desi was reviewed out of the Sundance Film Festival, where it made its world premiere. It'll debut on Prime Video on March 4.
Lucy and Desi, Amy Poehler’s directorial debut, is a brisk documentary about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, which proves surprisingly intriguing in its retelling of well-known facts. While it rarely treads new ground in its exploration of the TV legends, it skirts around familiar, talking-head stylings by focusing not only on the couple’s personal lives, but the way their journeys behind the camera often manifested on screen.
There are plenty of interviews to be found — with comedy experts, contemporaries, and even the couple’s own children — but Poehler, writer Mark Monroe, and editor Robert A. Martinez use them sparingly and effectively. For the most part, they construct their narrative from old tapes and interviews of Ball and Arnaz themselves, creating a feeling of present-ness, as if the late comedy legends were calling in and divulging secrets. Granted, little that they say isn’t already a matter of public record, but the film attempts to put the ball back in their court, offering them a say in their story, albeit indirectly, with a video-essay approach that matches life events with specific scenes and episodes of I Love Lucy, and several of the couple’s other works.
Lucy and Desi is as much a chronicle of the super-producers’ lives as it is an interrogation of the real experiences that informed their comedy, and while the latter aspect rarely pierces the surface, it also comes courtesy of a modern comedy icon in her own right. Poehler, for her part, doesn’t seem concerned with making didactic statements about the couple’s work as a straight retelling of reality, but rather, she uses old TV footage to complement existing tapes, as if these scenes of domesticity were a replacement for the interviews with Ball and Arnaz which she could not shoot herself. However, this approach only goes so far. If old episodes of I Love Lucy are a window into the Ball-Arnaz household, Poehler attempts to discern its interior from a distance, rather than taking a peek inside.
While its analysis may not be rigorous, the film makes up for it with its palpable energy, which arrives as loudly and immediately as the actors themselves in a given TV episode. It approaches Ball and Arnaz with the grandeur of a documentary about legendary heads of state, while its aesthetic (including the heavy atmosphere of composer David Schwartz) is that of modern True Crime awash in flashing lights. Photographs and other objects like audio tapes and written letters abound, rapidly moving and sliding across the screen, as tangible reminders of the duo’s stardom. In its best moments, the visual texture feels like memories flooding back to you. It may not be deep, but it is certainly dazzling.
Despite its breadth of scope, it’s also a marginally more comprehensive look at the specific events covered by Being the Ricardos, Aaron Sorkin’s biopic misfire. The documentary captures the energy that Ball and Arnaz frequently brought to the screen, delivering it in concentrated doses without lingering too long — the film is certainly attention-grabbing — and it only slows down during the more sobering and unfortunate parts of the couple’s domestic story.
If there’s an emotional through line to be found during the Lucy and Desi’s birth-to-death telling, it’s one revealed fittingly in retrospect, after the couple’s infamous divorce: the idea that Ball and Arnaz were better suited as creative partners than as spouses, despite the place they hold in the collective consciousness as one of American television’s most beloved pairings. It’s a harsh truth, and one Poehler only touches on after sweeping you up in its feverish romance, so its fallout lands all the more impactfully when the film finally slows down and switches gears, focusing on more somber territory.
The movie shines brightest in its personal contextualization of Ball’s comedy.
While it may not illuminate new details for those already familiar with Ball and Arnaz, its swift pacing prevents it from simply plodding between known points of reference. It certainly helps that stars like Carol Burnett and Bette Midler show up to tell delightful first-hand stories of their own, thus enhancing the point of view Poehler brings as a Hollywood comedienne for whom Ball undoubtedly paved a path. The movie shines brightest in its personal contextualization of Ball’s comedy — few documentaries have added this much emotional depth to pratfalls — and though it often attempts to do the same for Arnaz, its focus on the Cuban trailblazer is far more limited to dates and facts.
How unfortunately fitting, that a man who the film itself frames as having lived in Ball’s shadow should so end up being eclipsed by her in a story about the two of them. Then again, Lucy and Desi’s 103 minutes zip by so quickly, so vivaciously and so purposefully, that you may not have the time to notice.
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This could be a real lead forward for personal gaming... Revolutionise gaming
