Tag Archives: Jeff Goldblum

Technology

Game Pass Gets Vampire Survivors, One Of 2022’s Best Games

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Image: Poncle

Sony might have made a splash with its recently-detailed PS Plus revamp, but Game Pass continues to grow its library. The park-builder Jurassic World Evolution 2 is obviously a main draw and—bonus!—out today. Later this week, Game Pass will also get one of the best games of the year: Vampire Survivors. Here’s everything coming to Xbox Game Pass in the coming weeks:

May 17

  • Her Story (PC)
  • Jurassic World Evolution 2 (Cloud, Console, PC)
  • Little Witch in the Woods (Console, PC)
  • Skate, via EA Play (Cloud)
  • Umurangi Generation Special Edition (Cloud, Console, PC)

May 19

  • Farming Simulator 22 (Cloud, Console, PC)
  • Vampire Survivors (PC)

May 24

  • Floppy Knights (Cloud, Console, PC)
  • Hardspace: Shipbreaker (PC)

May 26

  • Sniper Elite 5 (Console, PC)

May 27

  • Cricket 22 (PC)
  • Pac-Man Museum+ (Cloud, Console, PC)

Jurassic World Evolution 2—which, fun fact, was announced by Jeff Goldblum himself at last year’s Summer Game Fest—is the follow-up to one of the quietly-excellent planning games of 2018. Despite its many variables and room for creative designs, Jurassic World Evolution was a little clunky and lacked details. But the thrill of designing a park for freakin’ dinosaurs was unmatched. Fans say the sequel plays like a more robust, polished version of the first one. Vampire Survivors, meanwhile, is a can’t-miss top-down bullet hell with clear Castlevania inspiration. It is tough, but like the best roguelikes, you get better and better without even realizing it, until you eventually become unstoppable. Really hard to put down.

As ever, Game Pass can’t add without taking away. The following go away at the end of the month:

  • EA Sports NHL 20 (Console)
  • Farming Simulator 19 (Cloud, Console, PC)
  • Knockout City (Console, PC) EA Play
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Cloud, Console, PC)
  • SpellForce 3: Soul Harvest (PC)
  • Superhot: Mind Control Delete (Cloud, Console, PC)
  • Yes, Your Grace (Cloud, Console, PC)

Most curious here is the imminent departure of Knockout City, the dodgeball-themed competitive arena game that was played by a gazillion people and then instantly lost its steam. In February, developer Velan Studios announced it would take the Rocket League approach and make the game free-to-play. Velan also said it will start self-publishing the game, assuming responsibilities from EA, which has been the game’s publisher so far. Representatives for Velan Studios told Kotaku that character progression will carry over seamlessly, and anyone who played via Game Pass will get a handful of free cosmetics.

Update: 5/17/22 11:05 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include a comment from Velan Studios.

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Entertainment

Will Smith almost wasn’t cast in Independence Day

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The cast of Independence Day (and director Roland Emmerich, second from the right) at the film’s premiere in 1996.
Photo: JEFF HAYNES/AFP via Getty Images

It’s not hard to peg Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s Independence Day as the moment Will Smith went from “Will Smith, well-known rapper and potentially promising sitcom actor” to “Will Smith, no further qualifiers needed.” Building off the previous year’s Bad Boys, Independence Day transformed Smith into the go-to Hollywood blockbuster star of the next several years, comfortable with comedy and action alike. But, as revealed in a new Hollywood Reporter oral history of the film, it almost didn’t happen—because studio executives were convinced that international movie markets wouldn’t respond to a Black lead.

Or, as remembered by Devlin: “You cast a Black guy in this part, you’re going to kill foreign [box office].” But the writer-producer and his directing partner put their feet down, stating that they just might take their project over to Universal (which had bid heavily on the film’s explosive script) if they didn’t get their choice of leads. (It eventually turned out that, hey, international audiences would go see a movie with a Black man in the lead part, to the tune of a record-shattering performance.) It’s one of several fascinating stories from the oral history, which also includes Jeff Goldblum waxing nostalgic about talking jazz with Brent Spiner, early ideas to have Kevin Spacey play the film’s heroic president, and a number of odd asides from Randy Quaid (including that the film “had no press tour” and that he won a bundle playing at a casino during the shoot).

The primary focus is on Devlin and Emmerich, though, who track the whole history of the project, from the rush to beat Tim Burton’s similarly-themed Mars Attacks to theaters, to the fight to use the movie’s big White House explosion in commercials, to eventually sitting in the White House, hanging out with Bill and Hillary Clinton as they watched the film. (Also, apparently Bill Pullman’s big speech was a placeholder; Devlin always assumed he’d re-write it, but never got around to it before it had to be shot.)

All in all, it’s a fantastic read, culminating in a recounted conversation with Steven Spielberg, who praised the duo’s film, declaring—correctly, as Steven Spielberg so often has been—“You guys reinvented the blockbuster. After this movie, nobody can do a normal blockbuster anymore.”

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