Including if you don’t have a backyard.

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The Overwatch League is in the middle of their third season, a departure from its first two in a number of ways. New for 2020 was the traveling schedule of home matches in cities across the world, a scheduling decision cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the hallmark of Overwatch League’s third season is a return to online play, but that’s not nearly the biggest difference in the league.

This season has brought a distinct change in the meta, or overall strategy and the heroes that each team chooses to play with. Traditionally metas have dominated games like Overwatch. It’s impossible to perfectly balance a game and as such certain characters are going to feel more powerful than others. Bring them all together and you can create some unstoppable combos, which is why Blizzard-Activision is constantly updating and balancing the game to help shift it away from overused metas.

Despite Blizzard’s best efforts, the first two seasons were dominated by metas with most matchups turning into a six-on-six of the same heroes every single game. What wasn’t helping matters for the Overwatch League, in particular, was that while the main game played by ordinary gamers was constantly updated, Overwatch League would frequently play on older versions with older meta combos.

“This is actually one of the things that did not change in response to moving online.” said Jon Spector, vice president of Overwatch League. “In the first two seasons we had stages where the regular season was sort of broken up into quarters. In that structure we made a decision where we’d say ‘Hey stage one was going to be played on this version of the game.’ Even if throughout stage one the game got updated we wouldn’t update it on OWL.”

This year, however, the league shifted to a more traditional regular season with no mid-year reset, which meant as the game updates so will the league itself. This creates an exciting opportunity when it comes to new features being added to the game. Yes, there are constant balance changes that players have to adjust for, but if a new hero is dropped into the Overwatch universe it could completely alter the balance of the game itself. Someone like Echo.

New heroes are a huge part of the Overwatch experience. They’re an opportunity to play with a new set of skills and potentially change the game, and while it may take an ordinary gamer years to fully understand how best to utilize new characters, the pros have quickly figured out how much the new build changes the game itself.

“It was awesome seeing Echo,” Spector said. “From a viewership and a fan perspective we think it’s really important, and our fans appreciate seeing the pros play the same game that they do, and so the closer we can have OWL to what you and I play at home we think is for the better.”

Watching pros utilize Echo can also help regular gamers build strategies for play on their own time, an important lesson that can be taken from a league no longer competing on older builds of the game. Spector said this switch was intentional, and the results have been encouraging to say the least.

“We wanted to come up with a different logic that felt fair and consistent that the teams and players could prep for,” Spector said. “What we’ve done is basically outline for them typically when the game receives a new balance patch or in this case a new hero: ‘Here’s the process of the timeline by which we would then move that into the Overwatch League.’”

The addition of Echo has helped create a lot of excitement in these online-only matchups, as each team utilizes her ultimate ability — to copy a hero on the opposing team — in a completely different way. Do they want the bulkiness of a tank or the potential of an extra support ultimate? The flexibility has helped create more differences among the teams and disrupt matches from falling into the same patterns from earlier seasons and matchups.

Another concept helping to change things up are the Hero Pools, which “removes” four heroes — two damage dealers, one tank, and one healer/support — from the game for one week. The move has completely changed the strategies teams have to use in different situations. Even when teams use the same hero compositions they’re using different styles on different maps: One team might go with the Winston-D.VA tank combo to dive on to their opponents while another might use an Orisa-Sigma double shield combo.

“A lot of season two in 2019 was about teams racing to sort of perfect a specific meta or specific strategy for months on end,” Spector said. “The introduction of hero pools but also things like Echo, I think, shift the emphasis more toward rapid innovation and experimentation and trying to theory craft.”

The goal, Spector said, was to force pros out of the metas and strategies that seemed unavoidable and to experiment with something new. And through the league’s third season it’s been a clear success in both diversifying the strategies in-game and the entertainment value for fans watching at home. Seeing the pros adapt to the game’s changes has helped others playing to do the same because, as Spector pointed out, for many watching Overwatch League is part of their process in improving their own game.

“I think for eSports as well the goal generally is one of the most consistent reasons you see when you talk to fans” said Spector. “Why do you watch this sport? ‘I want to get better. I want to learn. I want to see what the pros do.’”

Following the record-setting battle between Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz’s Versuz platform returned on Saturday with their latest offering: Nelly vs. Ludacris. The 20-song battle found the southern legends duking it out with some of their best records, songs that also brought a sense of nostalgia to the more than 400,000 viewers that tuned in to watch. While the first half of the battle was riddled with connection issues on Nelly’s end, the two rappers got it together to bring the second half to a smooth close. Aside from the actual battle itself, Ludacris decided the platform and the large attendance would be a perfect opportunity to debut some new music.

While Nelly looked to fix his connection issues, Ludacris decided to pass the time by pulling from the vault to treat fans. The first song he played is titled “Silence Of The Lambs” which sees a guest appearance from Lil Wayne. The track is also produced by Timbaland, who attempted to get Ludacris to stop playing the song, but to no avail. On the song, Ludacris alludes to the problematic figures within the black community rapping, “The world’s screwed if they pourin’ drinks like Bill Huxtable / I love R. Kelly but around my daughters, I’m not comfortable / Stand for what you believe in like Kaepernick / You either in control or you gettin’ f*cked, no abstinence.”

The second record he previewed Saturday night remains untitled, but featured Chance The Rapper and was a bit more relaxed than the Timabalnd-produced first new track. Lastly, Ludacris played a version of his 2006 hit “Money Maker” which featured Nelly on the hook. The two hoped to release the remix at the time of its creation, but disagreements on an appropriate rollout halted its release.

Ludacris also revealed “there’s a project in the works” between him, Usher, and Lil Jon, which would explain the recent release of their “SexBeat” track.

It’s been nearly a month since the penultimate season of Better Call Saul ended, and I don’t think we as a society have collectively talked about Kim Wexler’s finger guns at the end of that episode enough. The final few episodes of this season of Saul turned the entire series on its head, and deftly illustrated how we have all been underestimating Kim Wexler since the beginning.

Speaking of Kim Wexler, Rhea Seehorn (who plays her) appeared on this weekend’s episode of Friday Night in with the Morgans, alongside Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Hilarie Burton, as well as Jim Gaffigan and his wife, Jeannie. In addition to talking about how she is faring in the pandemic (she feels like “a nutjob”), Seehorn also spoke to the fan theories surrounding her character on Reddit, though she admitted that hasn’t actually read any of them herself.

“Fan theories, they crack me up,” Seehorn said on the show. “I don’t go on Reddit, because I am chicken sh*t. I am always afraid that there is going to be a diatribe about how awful I am, so I don’t do deep dives into some of that stuff.”

However, Seehorn still gets wind of many of those fan theories. “There are people that are sure she works at Claire’s Accessories right next to the Cinnabon” during the Gene flash forward. “I always feel like I have to have my own combover and mustache,” Seehorn jokes.

Seehorn, however, has picked up on how the fan theories have evolved over the seasons. “They all used to be fan theories about how [Kim Wexler] dies, and now they are all theories about how she basically loses her sh*t.”

That tracks, because even here, we’ve been speculating on Kim Wexler’s death for years. However, while we were worried that Kim would be hurt or killed in Jimmy’s transformation into Saul, few ever predicted that Kim would be the one to break bad.

There is reason, however, to believe that Kim not only survives the series, but potentially reunites with Jimmy/Saul/Gene in the future, as Vince Gilligan has noted that Saul will likely have a “better” ending than Breaking Bad. “Better” doesn’t necessarily mean “happier,” but we can hope.

(Via Friday Night in with the Morgans)

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During the current worldwide pandemic, movie studios are no longer providing box-office figures because theaters have been shut down around the nation and the world. Because we are less interested in the actual figures themselves and more interested in what people are watching over the weekends, each week we will dive into Most Streamed and Bestseller Lists on Fandango, iTunes, Netflix, and Hulu to pinpoint the weekend’s most watched films.

With the “summer movie season” approaching, the “box office” is finding a “new normal,” and by that, I mean: each week, we seem to get at least one or two new VOD releases. This week, we received two of them, one for the family, Scoob!, and one for Tom Hardy fans, Capone.

Unsurprisingly, Scoob! opened in the top spot on Amazon Prime this weekend, and apparently, it rose to number one faster than even Trolls World Tour, the VOD success that has Universal rethinking its movie release strategy much to the consternation of AMC theaters. Again, we don’t know the exact numbers for Scoob!, but we do know that Trolls World Tour earned $100 million in its opening weekend.

We also know that Scoob! succeeded in spite of mediocre reviews (55 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). Honestly, however, a family movie in the middle of a pandemic is about as close to critic-proof as a movie can get. Kids don’t care about reviews, and if it means parents can get an hour and a half of quiet, many will be willing to pony up $20 to rent the film for two days no matter how good or bad it was (and encourage their kids to watch it many, many times).

On the Amazon Prime chart, the rest of the top five were all holdovers: Trolls World Tour is still doing well, even while still going for $20 for a rental. Trolls is followed by Vin Diesel’s Bloodshot, Bad Boys for Life and Sonic the Hedgehog, each of which go for around $6 for a 48-hour rental. Meanwhile, on the Fandango Charts, last week’s surprise hit, Arkansas, has fallen, but it’s still hanging in there at number 13.

Elsewhere, Tom Hardy’s Capone is number three on iTunes’ rental chart (it was number 2 on Friday), as well as number three on Fandango’s VOD charts. Again, we don’t know how much revenue that translates into, but it has to bode well for Josh Trank, the director trying to revive his career after Fantastic Four. It’s not a great movie (39 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but that has less to do with Josh Trank’s directorial talent and more to do with a story that’s just not that interesting.

There’s not anything of interest going on with the Hulu charts, but I did notice for the first time that they are streaming a movie called Once Upon a Time in Venice, which is about a Bruce Willis character who seeks revenge after his dog is stolen by local thugs. It’s impressive that it can knock off both John Wick and Quentin Tarantino at the same time.

I’d like to say it was an unusually quiet weekend on Netflix, but that’s not exactly true. David Spade and Lauren Lapkus’ Happy Madison film, The Wrong Missy, has been sitting atop the Netflix movie charts all week. It’s at 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and based on some of the reviews I have read, that sounds charitable. Weirdly, the second most popular film of the weekend is Public Enemies, the 2009 Johnny Depp biopic of John Dillinger, which became available on Netflix this weekend. It was followed by Terry Crews’ John Henry, which is doing so well on Netflix (despite a 0 percent on RT) that there is talk of a sequel.

In at number four is Have a Good Trip, Adventures in Psychedelics, a movie about celebrities and other figures recounting their psychedelic trips, which are then animated. This sounds like my nightmare. Finally, the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt interactive movie, Kimmy vs. the Reverend, comes in at number five followed by Extraction.

I would not call the Memorial Day holiday a big movie weekend this year. There’s a movie called Inheritance starring Lilly Collins and Simon Pegg coming out on VOD, as well as Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden joint, Trip to Greece, which will either make us feel nostalgic for vacations or angry that we can’t take vacations right now. Netflix, however, has Lovebirds, the romantic comedy starring Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani, which Netflix snatched up when its theatrical release was interrupted by the pandemic. That is the big Memorial Day ticket, especially for those still stuck at home.

Source: Amazon Prime, Fandango, iTunes, Netflix

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