Take-Two Wins NBA 2K Lawsuit Involving LeBron James’ Tattoos
Take-Two Interactive has won a case regarding its depiction of LeBron James’ tattoos in NBA 2K. While James himself was not involved in the case, his tattoo artist, Jimmy Hayden, was.
Hayden sued Take-Two by alleging that the use of James’ tattoos in NBA 2K violated his rights as he was not compensated despite being the one who inked them onto the basketball star. However, an Ohio federal jury rejected those allegations. Since Take-Two had an agreement to use James’ likeness in the game, the studio also had an implied license to also depict those tattoos onto his character.
As a result, the jury determined that Hayden’s rights were not violated. Take-Two’s attorney, Dale Cendali of law firm Kirkland & Ellis, praised the decision. He told Reuters that it was an important decision for the entertainment industry and “anyone who has ever gotten a tattoo and might have otherwise worried about their freedom to share their bodies with their tattoos.”
This isn’t the first time Take-Two was sued for this issue. In past cases, Take-Two both won and lost. In 2020, Take-Two settled another lawsuit involving the NBA 2K series from Solid Oak Sketches. In 2022, Take-Two lost a lawsuit related to WWE 2K and its depiction of pro wrestler Randy Orton’s tattoos. The federal jury in Illinois awarded the tattoo artist $3,750 in damages.
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Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 – Minimum PC Specs, Download Size, And More
Microsoft is starting to rollout some of its biggest games this year, and Hellblade 2 is just the start of it. Ahead of the upcoming action game’s release, Developer Ninja Theory has revealed the system requirements to play the game on PC as well as its download size.
Ninja Theory has provided a handy chart with graphics presets to show you what you’ll need in order to play the game at certain settings. While Hellblade II’s SSD requirement at 70GB isn’t as high as Starfield’s at 125GB, it’s still a sizeable amount. Across all settings, the game requires 16GB of system ram, 70GB SSD, and Windows 10/11 64 bit.
On the low-end the game requires an Intel I5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 processor, as well as a GPU of NVIDIA GTX 1070, AMD RX 5700, or Intel Arc 1580. For recommend specs, you’ll need an Intel I7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor and a GPU of NVIDIA RTX 3080, AMD RX 6800 XT, or Intel Arc A770.
On the high-end, you’ll need an Intel I5-12600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5700X processor, and a a NVIDIA RTX 4080 or AMD RX 7900 XTX GPU. Higher framerates and resolutions can also be achieved by using DLSS 3, FSR 3, or XESS 1.3.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II system requirements
Minimum specs
- Graphics Preset: Low 1080p
- OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
- Processor: Intel I5-8400, AMD Ryzen 5 2600
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070, AMD RX 5700, Intel Arc A580
- VRAM: 6GB
- System Ram: 16GB
- Storage: 70GB SSD
Medium specs
- Graphics: Medium 1080p
- OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
- Processor: Intel I5-9600, AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- GPU: RTX 2070, AMD RX 5700 XT, Intel Arc A580
- VRAM: 8GB
- System Ram: 16GB
- Storage: 70GB SSD
Recommended specs
- Graphics: High 1440p
- OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
- Processor: Intel I7-10700K, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- GPU: NVIDA RTX 3080, AMD RX 6800 XT, Intel Arc A770
- VRAM: 8GB
- System Ram: 16GB
- Storage: 70GB SSD
Very High specs
- Graphics: High 4K
- OS: Windows 10/11 64 bit
- Processor: Intel I5-12600K, AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4080, AMD RX 700 XTX
- VRAM: 12GB
- System Ram: 16GB
- Storage: 70GB SSD
Ninja Theory has also confirmed that Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II only has one 30fps cinematic graphics mode setting on Xbox. The game is developed on Unreal Engine 5 and features dynamic scaling.
In GameSpot’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II preview, we said, “With Hellblade II, Ninja Theory seems to be building on the first game in all the right ways, doubling down on atmospheric locales and tense duels.”
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on May 21.
New Fast & Furious Roller Coaster Heading To Universal Studios Hollywood In 2026
Universal Studios Hollywood is about to get a little more furious as it announced the park’s first-ever, high-speed outdoor roller coaster, Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift. The ride will join the theme park in the summer of 2026.
The state-of-the-art ride system is designed to take guests to the high-speed Fast & Furious universe with groundbreaking full 360-degree rotation of the individual ride vehicles as they speed down an elaborate track that creates the sensation of drifting cars with Dom and the family.
“As a premier entertainment theme park destination with a rich history in immersing guests in incredible rides based on today’s most inspiring movie, television, and gaming properties, we are excited to introduce our very first, high-speed outdoor roller coaster,” said Scott Strobl, Universal Studios Hollywood executive vice president and general manager in a statement.
“As Universal Studios Hollywood continues to evolve, the arrival of Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift will be a powerful game-changer that will infuse a new level of thrill into our already dynamic theme park,” he continued. “We look forward to welcoming guests when it races onto the scene in 2026.”
The Fast & Furious franchise arrived in the parks as Fast & Furious: Supercharged, which hit Universal Hollywood in 2015, and Orlando three years later. The Orlando version is consistently ranked as one of the worst rides in the park. Even Thierry Coup, Universal’s creative senior vice president and CCO, admitted that the Florida attraction’s approval was the biggest mistake of his career.
Hollywood Drift joins other big-name Universal rides like Jurassic World, The Secret Life of Pets: Off the Leash, Despicable Me Minion Mayhem, The Simpsons Ride, Transformers 3-D, and Revenge of the Mummy.
In Super Metroid, No One Can Hear You Scream
Super Metroid recently celebrated its 30-year anniversary. Below, we look back at how it used and helped to create horror game tropes.
It begins with a benign pulse over black. An otherworldly synth shriek interrupting. Random shots of dead scientists in a pitch black laboratory. The only thing alive is an unknowable entity under a class capsule. Somehow, that isn’t the start of a new Resident Evil DLC, but the very first thing you see in a first-party Nintendo game in 1994. The game was Super Metroid.
Because there are entire generations of full grown adults who don’t understand the enormity of such stark horror imagery in a Super Nintendo game, we should go back to the early 90s a minute. While it’s now pretty commonplace to see M-rated games on the Switch, back in 1994, Nintendo was still trying to hold onto its innocence. Their Sega rivals had been bathing in digital blood for years, but Nintendo was trying to remain the place where everyone could play safely, and without invoking the ire of, say, Congress. As such, they were still regularly censoring arcade ports, and hesitant to put anything out that could court too much controversy, frighten children, or spill too much of the red stuff–though Mortal Kombat II was a major exception.
Super Metroid is still a product of that era, but even with the restrictions of its publisher at play, it’s not an experience to be trifled with. The Alex Garland Annihilation vibes of the Spore Spawn boss. The deep, bone-chilling mood of Brinstar Red’s soundtrack, and its alien chants as a driving beat. An entire level in a sunken, haunted spaceship, ruled over by the ghost of a kraken. Maridia making Zebes’ oceans feel utterly cursed. That’s to say nothing of the premise in general, with Samus forced to relive the haunted, hollowed out ruins of her 8-bit adventures in higher, grimmer fidelity.
Replaying Super Metroid in 2024 is striking when you realize that even with all the other ways the game is a masterpiece–it’s half the reason the term “Metroidvania” exists, after all–what we don’t talk about are the ways in which it was elevating digital horror in a way nothing else was at the time. And make no mistake, Super Metroid is not just horror, but it is uniquely horrific, even now.
Much has been said about Metroid as a fundamentally lonely experience over the years, especially in contrast with every misguided attempt to insert more human connection into Samus’ adventures, but that’s a tradition that begins with Super, reinforcing that loneliness through sound and stage design. Where the original games are all driven by courageous marches, and the tiny blips of Samus’ jumps, Super is immediately a different beast. The events of the previous games are retold as a hunter’s journal right at the start, the first time we’ve truly seen Samus’ thoughts on screen, and, as it turns out, the last we’ll see in this particular game. The first time the player gets control of Samus, it’s onboard the derelict space station from the title screen, utterly silent except for the unfeeling industrial hum of the ship.
We get to the room of the title sequence, and the bodies are still there, but the metroid inside the glass case is gone. When we find it, the silence of the scene breaks only as we see a glowing red eye in the dark, and Ridley fades into view. Storytelling through gameplay wasn’t a new concept in 1994, but it was very much an outlier when it came to establishing tension, and without the aid of cutscenes or voiceover, or even text to do any heavy lifting. Right away, Super Metroid is a game of not just constant discovery, but discovering time and time again that something is horribly wrong.
The same magic trick of narrative happens when Samus lands on Zebes. Years of training had us expecting to fire on the first thing that moves when Samus steps out of her ship. Except there’s nothing to fire on. Zebes is a dead planet when Samus arrives, battered with rain, with caves seemingly leading to nowhere, funneling Samus down through the labs where she fought Mother Brain in the original Metroid. No one has cleaned. No one has tried to reopen the place. It’s just dead, until Samus grabs her morph ball upgrade somewhere in the depths, and there is something so primally unsettling about the single spotlight that then shines on her, following her every move. Whatever is happening on Zebes, she’s absolutely not alone.
There are few examples of that simplicity of storytelling around this era–off the top, the long walk to Dracula’s staircase in Super Castlevania IV eerily lighting up candles to guide the way comes to mind, but that’s also an exception proving the rule. There’s such a unique patience to those first minutes in Super Metroid, for a game where the protagonist goes in with a cannon strapped to her arm, and even once the enemies start coming out of the woodwork, Super Metroid returns to that silence and patience when it has a new enemy or a boss to establish. It does it right away in fact; the first boss you fight on Zebes is one of the Chozo statues holding the Missile upgrade. What should be a place of safety is suddenly a fight to the death with a deadly bird-like goliath. And with that, Super Metroid teaches the valuable lesson so many games fail to impart: Samus is not just truly alone, but even the boons that help her may not actually be of of help. Souls games have brought that danger back, but of all the things the glut of Souls-likes try to copy, that’s not typically one of them.
There are a few titles that have attempted to deftly instill that peril upon the player. Axiom Verge, a game that feels like one of the most direct and blatant progeny of Super Metroid, performs those tricks admirably. The thing to remember is that at the time, Super Metroid represented a series unshackled from the NES. This is what series director Yoshio Sakamoto did with the freedom afforded by the Super Nintendo. And it’s telling that the 2D games he’d helm after all carried that element forward, albeit with far more narrative conceits to fall back on, like animated stills, and mission-giving AIs. The series has always done more with less. “More with less” isn’’’t necessarily uncommon in AAA gaming, but it is an ethos that’’’s too easy for creatives to ignore when they have more elaborate tools at their your their disposal. Given more horsepower, the approach has typically been to attempt realism or the look of cinema, while failing the things that games can do that cinema can’t. There are full fledged horror games that can’t accomplish across 20 hours what Super Metroid pulls off with just a single room with a Cronenbergian statue of the four main bosses and a low drone. It’s a difference between a game that’s trying to scare you rather than just being scary.
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The Complete Metroid Timeline Explained
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The bosses, in particular, are Super Metroid’s showcase for using the conceit of gaming for mood rather than challenge. That’s not to say Super Metroid’s bosses aren’t challenging, but aside from Kraid, there is always a more dramatic touch to these fights. They’re usually less about stopping the player from proceeding; rather, they focus on the abomination that is Samus’ enemy and encourage the player to consider the enemy to a greater degree than another piece of cannon fodder. The Crocomire fight is the obvious example: You don’t actually kill this thing, you just force it backwards to fall into a pool of acid. Try to exit through the other side of the room afterward, however, and the still-flailing corpse makes one last lunge at Samus before dissolving into a skeleton. There is a straightforward way to beat Maridia’s corpulent flying baddie, Draygon, but that way makes him one of the hardest bosses in the game. The “easier” way is a dare straight out of a Saw movie: Destroy a turret to expose the electrical conduit underneath, and then–then–when Draygon grabs Samus–, –fire the Grappling Beam into the wreckage to electrocute you both. It’s a strategy that, if you haven’t found enough energy tanks to upgrade her health to upgrade her health, can kill Samus in the process.
The final area in Tourian is the ultimate example: A metroid- -infested hellhole utterly hostile to Samus’ presence on sight, until suddenly, it isn’t. Samus comes to a room full of her most powerful enemies turned into lifeless piles of sand. This is, as it turns out, the realm of a massive, overgrown metroid sucking the life out of everything it sees… until it latches onto Samus and realizes it’s the first person it saw upon birth in Metroid II. This, ultimately, is not the final boss. That distinction goes to Mother Brain, who (alongside Kraid) delivers the full on giant monster type of horror, a boss that is fully just ugliness personified. Samus legitimately almost loses to Mother Brain, only saved by the famous deus ex metroid.
There have been multiple Metroid games at this point, and while the aptly titled Metroid Dread comes awfully close, Super Metroid’s legacy remains secure when it comes to committing to something more subtle whenever possible. 30 years on, it still has plenty to teach the new breed of exploration action titles about how to do more with less. What this genre can do can be utterly terrifying if a studio gives the game enough space to let the terror breathe. Surviving that terror is what makes Samus Aran’s triumphs all the more gratifying.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Console Deluxe Editions Hit Another Production Delay
Larian Studios has announced that it has encountered production issues with the console Deluxe Editions of Baldur’s Gate 3, and is delaying their shipment.
The studio stated that the production issues are out of its control, and that all Xbox orders, as well as PS5 orders in North America, were affected. As such, there’s going to be a bit of a wait for them to ship out. Larian also clarified that all Deluxe Edition orders for PC have been shipped out, and PS5 orders for Oceania and Europe will start shipping this week.
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In some more good news, all Deluxe Edition orders are expected to ship within the month of May, and Larian will provide an update on additional shipping dates next week.
The Deluxe Edition includes a digital soundtrack, artbook, and character sheets along with in-game items like a dice skin, Divinity item pack, Paintings from Rivellon, an Adventurer’s pouch, and the Bard song pack. The game itself ships on two discs for PS5 and three discs for Xbox.
Larian has confirmed that it’s not working on Baldur’s Gate 4, but CEO Swen Vincke believes that the next two separate projects could be the studio’s best work ever. Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are looking to continue the series and find the right partner for the next game, even if it takes a while.
Razer Face Mask Didn’t Meet N95 Requirements, Company Fined Over $1 Million
The Razer Zephyr face mask might have looked cool–especially for Bane stans–but it wasn’t protecting you from contracting COVID-19 to the degree Razer claimed. As such, the US Federal Trade Commission has come to a proposed settlement with the company that will see the peripheral maker paying over $1 million in fines.
PCGamesN reported that the main issue was Razer advertising the Zephyr product as a N95-grade face mask, which means it would remove 95% of airborne particles. That wasn’t the case. “These businesses falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified respirator,” said the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection director Samuel Levine in a press release.
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In early 2021, Razer unveiled the Zephyr face mask as a N95 concept product that also featured RGB lighting. Shortly thereafter, the company confirmed it was moving forward with making the accessory, with the Zephyr officially launching in October 2021 for a starting price of $99. There were also packs of filters being sold for the face mask, with 10 costing $30.
However, just a few short months later in January 2022, Razer removed the N95-grade claims about the Zephyr face mask. Additionally, the company scrubbed a website FAQ section that originally referred to the face mask as a medical device.
Razer sent the following response to PCGamesN about the settlement: “We disagree with the FTC’s allegations and did not admit to any wrongdoing as part of the settlement. It was never our intention to mislead anyone, and we chose to settle this matter to avoid the distraction and disruption of litigation and continue our focus on creating great products for gamers. Razer cares deeply about our community and is always looking to deliver technology in new and relevant ways.”