The Crew 2 is the video game equivalent of cross-eyed puppy waiting in a cardboard box marked “needs good home” abandoned on the side of the road. Here is a video game desperate to please, one that would love to let you do anything practically anything you can imagine with any vehicle on the planet — assuming it isn’t vulgar! I honestly can’t tell if this is a technical limitation of the game world (perhaps a seamless, perpetual moving map doesn’t allow for transitions?) We have an actual missio

The new update to Faction Rallies in Destiny 2 has been a bit polarizing for players. Thankfully, Bungie has come out and confirmed that catalysts — the most desirable Faction Rallies rewards — will still be achievable in Year Two of Destiny 2, although we don’t know how. If you don’t want to miss out on the three exotic catalysts for sale during season 3, you’ll need to turn in at least 3,000 tokens over the three different Faction Rallies — 1,000 for each faction. But one of Bungie’s community

The latest title in the Halo series isn’t for the Xbox. Instead, the long-running military sci-fi video game franchise is getting a live-action television show on Showtime. The show will run for a 10-episode season and Kyle Killen (Awake) will serve as executive producer, writer and showrunner. A live-action Halo television series for Showtime was first rumored back in 2013, with Steven Spielberg at the helm. There have been periodic updates since then, but this announcement is official confirma

Game developer Amy Hennig told Eurogamer today that she departed Electronic Arts back in January, just a few months after the publisher effectively canceled her team’s Star Wars project to make significant changes to the game. Hennig, who previously worked at Naughty Dog on the Uncharted franchise, joined EA’s Visceral Games studio in 2014 to work on a Star Wars game. That project was shown only in teaser form at EA’s E3 2016 press conference. At the Gamelab Conference in Spain, Hennig told Euro

Pokémon Go developer Niantic is making its augmented reality tech more like actual reality, as seen in a new demo that lets virtual versions of Pokémon like Pikachu and Eevee hide behind real-world objects. Using computer vision and deep learning we are able to develop techniques to understand 3D space enabling much more realistic Augmented Reality (AR) interactions than are currently possible. In the above AR experience of Codename: Niantic Occlusion, you can see Pikachu and Eevee weaving throu

Destiny 2 players have been waiting for the Prestige difficulty setting for the game’s raid lairs since December of last year. These can be any of the raid weapons, not just those that drop from that particular raid lair. The Prestige lairs will also get unique ornaments that change the look of the armor, which will presumably drop from encounter chests. Each raid lair — and the Leviathan raid itself — will also have a unique exotic catalyst that can only drop on Prestige difficulty. These new P

Next month, Nintendo’s latest Labo creation contest will award a really swell first prize, but that’s not the news. This (images via Tiny Cartridge) is the Nintendo Labo-themed Nintendo Switch, and it’s only available (so far) to the winner in one of two categories in the next Nintendo Labo Creators Contest. The grand prize (for winners in both categories) is a cardboard-themed Nintendo Switch, with a color so perfectly matched you’d swear it was corrugated. But, really, Nintendo, you can’t teas

The nominees for this year’s Game Critics Awards: Best of E3 have been announced. Chosen by a group of 51 global media and influence outlets (including Polygon! In order to qualify for nomination, games must have been able to play for at least five minutes during E3 2018. Below are the playable titles that were nominated for the Game Critics Awards. (Game Freak/Nintendo for Switch)Best Fighting GameDead or Alive 6 (Team Ninja/Koei Tecmo for PC, PS4, Xbox One)Jump Force (Spike Chunsoft/Bandai Nam

Any YouTube creator will tell you that choosing the right thumbnail is a big part of what drives views, and therefore success, on their channels. “We are running a small experiment where 0.3% of viewers will see an auto-generated thumbnail, instead of your custom thumbnail,” the tweet reads. That’s a lot of eyeballs seeing auto-generated thumbnails, and a large number of possible users who may skip over a video. There are no current plans to change or remove the ability to add custom thumbnails!

But before we wave goodbye to the superhero shenanigans, we have a couple more weeks of challenges to get through. This week’s trickiest challenge: “Follow the treasure map found in Haunted Hills.”As with all of these challenges, you could follow a complex series of clues to indicate where you should be heading, or we can skip all that and just show you. You’re going to want to head to Junk Junction in the northwest corner of the big map. Once there, you should orient yourself with the large-siz

The first teaser for Matt Groening’s new Netflix series, Disenchantment, doesn’t want anyone to forget his previous series. The teaser opens with references to Futurama and The Simpsons, two of the most popular cartoons in modern times, before showing a brief glimpse of Groenig’s new series. A brief synopsis of the series follows:From the mind of Matt Groening, comes the 10-episode adult animated comedy fantasy series, Disenchantment, launching on Netflix, August 17, 2018. Abbi Jacobson, Nat Fax

DC Entertainment has revealed details on its upcoming subscription-based streaming service, DC Universe, showing off a platform that the company hopes will be much more than a Netflix alternative. But DC Entertainment is also promising a well of classic DC Comics television and film adaptations, a curated selection of “thousands” of comics to read, fan forums, a canon encyclopedia, and exclusive access to DC merchandise and rewards. On the comics side, DC will offer a “rotating, curated selectio

Tempest 4000, a follow-up to Atari’s famous vector-graphics shooter series, launches July 17 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for $29.99, Atari announced this morning. The game is being developed by Llamasoft, which was behind Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar almost 25 years ago. Tempest 2000 programmer Jeff Minter returns to the series as executive producer. Tempest 4000 will feature 100 levels, three game modes and a “retro techno soundtrack” to complete the feel of the original. Minter also dev

After a few days of teases from the official Overwatch twitter, the newest hero has been revealed. The final teaser is here, and we finally get to see the face of hero 28. It seems pretty likely that this little guy is Hammond, the missing specimen off Horizon Lunar Colony. If that’s the case, he may be the third hero to come from Australia, along with Roadhog and Junkrat. A full reveal of Hero 28 should be incoming to the Overwatch PTR, confirming his identity and showing us his in-game kit.

Nintendo is getting an interesting variety of games on the eShop this week, including a port of the 2017 first-person shooter Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. We’ll have some thoughts on how well the game survived the transition later today, before it’s released on the eShop tomorrow, June 29, for $59.99. This is probably going to be the best way to kill some Nazis while waiting at the DMV for quite some time, so I’m pretty excited. The second big release this week is Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Tri

The list of free Xbox Games With Gold titles for July 2018, which Microsoft announced today, is led by Assault Android Cactus and Splinter Cell: Conviction. Xbox One customers will be able to download Assault Android Cactus free all month long. But it’s fairly new to the Xbox platform, having been released on Xbox One in November 2017. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction is the free game for the second half of the month. In the meantime, Xbox Live Gold subscribers can still pick up some of th

Summer Games Done Quick presses on today with 21 events over the next 24 hours (noon today until noon Friday). Tomorrow (Friday) morning, Catherine fans get a one-player/two-controllers run courtesy of Ghoul02 at 8:16 a.m., followed by a Double Dragon block featuring LRock in Double Dragon and sinister1 in Double Dragon 2: The Revenge. At 8:35 p.m. SuperSonic71087 (6th), RetroBob_ (24th), Kosmic (1st) and RoyLGamer (14th) in Super Mario Bros. (warpless, race). As always, Summer Games Done Quick

Let’s take a quick look back at Bethesda’s colorful history of legal shenanigans, stretching back 30 years. But Bethesda’s game was shelved, while EA went ahead with developing its own football game. Still, the deal included an agreement that Interplay could create a Fallout MMO, if the project met with certain fundraising criteria. They decided that the 2D strategy game should be called “Fortress Fallout.” Bethesda’s legal department disagreed. Dion DiMucci — 2017Rounding out our walk down Beth

For many Super Smash Bros. fans, E3 2018’s biggest announcement was what seems like a small surprise: Ridley will be playable in Super Smash Bros. The Metroid foe is a character that players have been loudly requesting since 2001’s Super Smash Bros. Melee. Character unlocks have always been one of Super Smash Bros.’ most exciting elements. It’s funny how one unexpected announcement can create such a wave of memories for us hardcore Smash Bros. fans. Super Smash Bros.

Jared Leto is trading in his Suicide Squad Joker make-up for something a little different. Leto is slated to join Sony’s upcoming film, Morbius, centered around the Spider-Man antihero of the same name. The film will be part of Sony’s new Spider-Man universe which includes this October’s Venom movie. Morbius the Living Vampire (aka Nobel Prize winner Dr. Michael Morbius Ph.D. and M.D.) Though Morbius started out as a villain, he shifted to more antihero tendencies in later comics.