According to Blizzard, these changes will help reduce the amount of on-screen chaos (thus making it easier to follow the action) and streamline the style of the average match. They also hope the change will result in players better utilizing the unique strategies presented by each map rather than relying on the same basic playstyle. Furthermore, many characters will be altered in response to this new format, and classes will now include unique benefits that apply to every hero in that class....

The very first image you see in Peaky Blinders season five is a lone green weed growing in a field of mud. In most dramas, that’d be a symbol of rebirth and recovery – a representation, say, of Tommy Shelby’s gradually returning conscience years after war blasted it to pieces. Peaky Blinders though, isn’t most dramas, and in the season finale, the symbol is revealed to have darker meaning. Identifying with Tommy Shelby as a fellow WWI soldier, Winston Churchill says that whenever he hears British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley MP speak, he can see “the green shoots of another war growing up around his feet....

When Picard season two found the title character and his crew going back to 2024 after being sent to an alternate universe by Q, fans expected to see some surprising faces. Thus far, the most notable has been a younger Guinan, with Ito Aghayere filling in for Whoopi Goldberg. But some TV fans may have recognized another familiar face in Guinan’s Los Angeles bar, one usually found behind the chaos and not in the center of the action....

Netflix’s thriller Pieces of Her is based on a novel by the aptly named best selling author Karin Slaughter. Though it’s set in America, the whole of the series was shot in Australia with the majority of filming taking place in 2021, and many of the cast are Antipodeans and Brits as well as Americans. It’s a twisty tale of a mother who carries out an act of bravery which suddenly exposes her to a world she had long since left behind, and a daughter who discovers she really doesn’t know her mum at all....

Rick and Morty Season 5 Episode 1 The season premieres of Rick and Morty’s second and third seasons were unique in that they followed cliffhanger finales, so—even if the second season’s didn’t turn out all that great—those premieres felt like epic reintroductions to the show’s world that had to get the characters out of a previously-established sci-fi pickle (not a literal one this time) in a way that was satisfying and cool....

Riverdale Season 5 Episode 17 “People believe what they want to believe.” It’s no secret that Riverdale has trouble sticking the landing. With the notable exception of the debut season’s finale, each year has seen the resolution of its respective core mystery solved in an acceptable, yet not entirely satisfying manner. (Please don’t get me started on how things wrapped up with the Gargoyle King). Alas, this trend has been broken by the latest episode “Dance of Death....

Riverdale Season 2 Episode 2 Oh man. That ending. Wow. Before I tackle that shocking final scene, let’s go back to the beginning. The start of this week’s installment is a seemingly simpler (though still kind of shitty) time for Archie and the gang compared to where we are when the credits roll. As the episode opens, Jughead’s narration informs us that Pop Tate’s Chok’lit Shoppe is the “heart of Riverdale....

Riverdale Season 5 Episode 8 “It is better to know the truth and make peace with it.” In a bit of selfless wisdom, Cheryl states the above words to Betty in tonight’s bonkers installment. The context being that Betty doesn’t want to tell her mother that it looks like Polly is a goner. So she goes to Cheryl basically to inquire whether she feels that her cousin’s life would have been better had she not known Jason’s true fate....

If you haven’t tuned into the films of S.S. Rajamouli yet, it’s time to get your mind blown. The Indian filmmaker’s cinematic events are outrageously entertaining, filled with eye-popping cinematography and over-the-top action sequences. The spectacle is so over-the-top, in fact, that you’ve got to park your brain way outside the theater. Heck, give your keys to the valet with a fat tip, or else Rajamouli’s flagrant disregard for the laws of physics might offend you....

But what is a weirdo? The word has its etymology in “wyrd,” which means “fate” or “destiny.” And a weirdo is one who is in control of their own destiny. Hat tip to weird researcher John E.L. Tenney for reminding me of that. Yet “weird” also means “strange” or “bizarre.” There’s a bounty of that in “America’s Finest City,” too. San Diego is considered a hotspot for UFO activity. One of the more well-known recent videos of a UFO is the “Flir1” capture, filmed by a fighter pilot in 2004 from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the city’s coast....

News concerning the future projects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe might have been thin on the ground at this year’s D23 Expo, but at the Marvel Studios panel audiences got their first glimpse of the exciting Disney+ show Secret Invasion. Described as a ‘televised crossover event,’ the series takes its name and elements of its narrative from the original comic book arc. Not everyone will be familiar with the story of the alien invasion on the page, though....

Well dear, reader, you are not crazy. The soundtrack for Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings does, in fact, slap. Marvel apparently agrees as it was sure to release the 18-track album the moment the film premiered in theaters on September 3. The soundtrack is available now. You can check out the full tracklist via Spotify below. Marvel is fairly conservative about which soundtracks of its films it chooses to hype up....

And just like that, Hulk is off-planet again. Midway through the second episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jen phones her cousin Bruce to get his blessing on taking a new job, which would require her to defend Bruce’s old nemesis from The Incredible Hulk, Emil Blonsky aka Abomination. Bruce of course agrees but then reveals that he can’t do more because he’s on a spaceship headed for Sakaar, the same ship whose sudden appearance in episode one caused the accident that led to Jen getting Bruce’s gamma-irradiated blood in her system....

You can see the full 25-minute Q&A session courtesy of Sherlockology. It’s a warm, nostalgic chat, peppered by jokes, filming memories and affectionate ribbing of their host. Questions ranged from the creators’ favourite Holmes and Watson other than their own (as ever, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, though several incarnations were fondly name-checked), most challenging scenes to film (the gushing cold Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Abominable Bride’), what Irene Adler is doing now (‘something naughty’), and how Sherlock Holmes would react to lockdown (‘Sherlock would quarantine himself for three months without knowing that he had!...

Currently, Conan Doyle Estate Ltd is suing Netflix in regard to the upcoming Sherlock Holmes spin-off, Enola Holmes. Here’s why their claims are baseless, why the history of Sherlock Holmes pastiches proves them wrong, and why Arthur Conan Doyle would hate what they’re doing in his name. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd is suing author Nancy Springer, Netflix, and pretty much anyone else associated with both the Enola Holmes books and upcoming Netflix TV adaptation....

The aliens of Solar Opposites are like a classic sitcom family, sort of. They try to learn a lesson at the end of each episode, but they’re also opportunistic jerks with access to all manner of overpowered sci-fi technology, so the path to learning is always paved with a lot of human corpses. They’re also very stupid aliens, so all they usually end up learning is that they’re stuck together on Earth....

It’s generally considered to be the worst Spider-Man story ever written; a contrived and hideous editorial exercise, engineered solely to erase Peter and Mary and Watson Parker’s marriage after 20 years of existence; a four-issue monument to everything that is awful and cynical about comic book storytelling and the laziness of retconning previous events. One More Day, penned by J. Michael Straczynski, but penciled and truthfully masterminded by then-Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, is a narrative monstrosity that betrayed everything good about the Peter Parker and MJ characters in service to a woefully misguided commercial decision from upstairs....

You’d think that a new Star Trek series set centuries and centuries beyond any of the shows and movies wouldn’t have that many references to the series and films that came before, right? Well, Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 might be set in a brand new time period — the year 3188 to be precise — but the narrative is built atop the layered history of Trek’s future history super carefully....

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 Episode 2 At this point, asking whether or not Lower Decks is “real Star Trek” is nuts. Not only does the series capture the warm and fuzzy TNG-vibe nearly perfectly, it also talks about the meaning of Star Trek, quite a bit. In the Season 2 debut, Lower Decks examined the old TOS trope of a mortal suddenly having “god-like” powers, and looked at what that meant from at least three different ways, in three different storylines....

There’s a lot to look forward to in Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2, which picks back up on August 12th after the surprisingly high-stakes drama of the Season 1 finale. What happens after Captain Riker and the U.S.S. Titan swoop in to save the Cerritos after their encounter with the Pakleds? Paramount+ just dropped a trailer for the upcoming second season as part of its Comic-Con@Home “Peak Animation” panel, and it includes a major reveal for Season 2, specifically the unexpected return of a character assumed to be dead after the Season 1 finale....