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Right now in my apartment sits something that, to be completely honest, I never thought I would have: an arcade machine for NBA Jam. But this machine doesn’t only have NBA Jam on it — there is also NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, and the not as well-known but just as fun NBA Hangtime. Arcade 1 Up, a development studio known for creating home editions of popular arcade machines, has taken all three games and combined them to form NBA Jam: Shaq Edition. It turns out Shaq is a huge fan of NBA Jam, so Arcade 1 Up partnered with him to put his name on the machine.

As for the machine itself, it’s kind of difficult to review a game that everyone knows is great. Everyone loves NBA Jam and its sequels, so me telling you that all three games on here are fun would be stating the obvious. Let’s instead focus on what this machine offers and if it’s worth the pricey $700 tag for your home.

NBA Jam: Shaq Edition is designed for the at-home experience. That means you’re not going to find very many of this specific machine at many of the Barcades that are popping up all over the place right now. It also means there are some really fun perks that only an at-home machine is going to offer owners, such as the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and play against other machines online. It’s a really simple process to connect, but finding games is a little difficult because not everyone out there possesses one of these machines.

The real fun of the machine, and all arcade machines, still comes from playing shoulder to shoulder against your friends. That experience was recreated perfectly and this edition of the machine, in particular, offers a few extra perks to make it more fun for owners. For example, you can turn on bighead mode straight from the main menu, adjust the difficulty, and many classic cheats are still within the game. Want to unlock a few secret characters? This definitely is not a link to a whole bunch of them. Everyone knows cheats are part of what makes classic games fun and it was absolutely the correct decision to keep them as part of the experience.

On the downside, the process of putting it together was a lengthy one and a second person is essentially required. The box the machine came in was extremely heavy and the instructions for putting it together were entirely image based. Also, it didn’t come with any hardware, so make sure you have a basic toolkit on hand. Also, as mentioned earlier, a $700 price tag is a lot for what really comes down to three arcade games. This is a big ask for anyone who is not a huge fan of NBA Jam and also has the money to throw around.

At the end of the day, it’s a great machine and if you are someone who is capable of buying this, then it’s a definite recommendation. You can even argue that it’s a must-have for fans of the NBA Jam franchise, but at the end of the day, it’s a total novelty purchase. If you’re like me and have always wanted an NBA Jam machine, then this is definitely the one to get. Everyone else, go find a friend who has it and mooch off them. After all, arcade machines are best when played with friends.

Kanye West can be nitpicky when working on an album; we know this after Donda got delayed many times. But producer Mike Dean, in a recent conversation with Nile Rodgers for Deep Hidden Meaning Radio, revealed that the rapper/producer scrapped a whole album’s worth of material while working on Ye.

When asked if Kanye is precious about his parts in productions, Dean answered, “You can’t be. You’d get your feelings hurt like every day. Especially working with Kanye or Travis [Scott], where sh*t changes and everything’s real malleable.

“‘Til it’s over, anything can happen, especially Kanye,” he continued. “In Wyoming, for the Ye album, we had 10 songs, I guess. And we were trying to do a seven-song album. I came in one day and he’d erased the whole board and said, ‘We’re starting over.’”

Kanye has been making lots of headlines recently, especially with Kid Cudi refusing to denounce his beef with him. “With all due respect, I’m not Drake, who’s about to take a picture with him next week and be friends again, and their beef is squashed,” he said. “That’s not me. What I say, I mean. I will be done with you. It’s gonna take a motherf*cking miracle for me and that man to be friends again. I don’t see it happening. He gon’ have to become a monk.”

Listen to the conversation below with Mike Dean below.

Mark Zuckerberg may have helped invent social media as we know it, but that doesn’t him from being dragged online. Like Jack Dorsey, he’s a frequent figure of mockery. Last week, he inadvertently threw some red meat to the Internet hounds, posting an impossibly crude image, including a boyish avatar, from the metaverse he’s been trying to foist on a so-far resistant world. After it was met with heaps of mockery, Zuckerberg quickly rushed out a replacement.

Admittedly, it’s an improvement. Where the first avatar drew comparisons to the Miis on Nintendo Wii — which is to say, technology from over 15 years ago — the new one is more detailed and professional looking, giving the Facebook co-creator a more realistic animated look. In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg even acknowledged the blowback, writing that “the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic,” claiming “it was taken very quickly to celebrate our launch.” (The image commemorated the launching of Horizon Worlds, Meta’s VR game, in the U.K. and Spain.)

Alas, even the Horizon Worlds launch was an agent of chaos, with developers neglecting to translate it into Spanish for Spanish players. Whoops! The slip-ups have only served to remind people that Zuckerberg has poured billions and billions into this metaverse mishegoss. And honestly, even the newer avatar looks like it could have come from the Bush II years. Then again, unlike some old colleagues, at least he hasn’t started a cover band.

(Via Insider)

Since it was announced, the Marvel show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law has earned inevitable comparisons to another show about a single female lawyer: Ally McBeal, the late ‘90s/early aughts hit starring Calista Flockhart. There’s been vague reboot talk for ages, including earlier this year. But perhaps the debut of a superhero spin on the same general premise has caused such efforts to be fast-tracked.

Sources tell Deadline the ABC is in “early development” of a new take on the legal comedy-drama. Flockhart has reportedly been approached about reprising her role, but it sounds like it won’t be a straight revival. Instead, it will follow “a young Black woman who joins the law firm from the original series (or its current incarnation) straight out of law school. The young woman is believed to be the daughter of Ally McBeal’s (Flockhart) D.A. roommate Renée Raddick, who was played by Lisa Nicole Carson on the mothership series.”

So if it’s centered around a new character, with good ol’ Ally as a supporting player, will it still be called Ally McBeal? And will they bring back to Dancing Baby or Robert Downey Jr.? Whatever happens to it, it may fulfill a wish the original show’s creator, David E. Kelly, made clear when discussing a possible reboot back in 2018, who said it should be done not by him but by a woman. Lo and behold, the revival is said to be written and directed by Karin Gist, of Girlfriends, Revenge, Mixed-ish, and the new Mike Tyson series Mike.

(Via Deadline)

Gorillaz played a set at All Points East in London last night, August 19, where they debuted a new song with Tame Impala and Bootie Brown called “New Gold.” Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn introduced it by saying, “It’s kind of a mad song, to be honest with you,” and then welcomed Tame Impala and Bootie Brown, making the crowd roar. The trippy track is an eclectic, exuberant journey, as Gorillaz songs often are, but even moreso with the different collaborators.

In 2020, Albarn discussed plans for a Gorillaz movie. “Well, we are supposed to be making a film while we’re doing season two [of ‘Song Machine’]. We signed contracts, we’ve begun scripts and stuff,” he said. “Making an animated film that’s kind of abstract is quite a big risk for a movie studio because they’re very expensive. If you’re telling a slightly obtuse, weird story that only sometimes makes any sense, it’s quite difficult. That’s what we’ve discovered. But we will do it, we are doing it. I see a lot of people doing animated videos these days but I don’t think they really touch the quality of ours. We’re more in the world of Studio Ghibli.”

Watch the performance of “New Gold” above and pre-save it here.

Gorillaz is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Meta has spent the last few years working to get more into video games. It started this with the launch of Facebook Gaming back in 2018, it bought Oculus so it would have naming rights on the Oculus Quest VR headset, and even its recent emphasis on the “Metaverse” is, in a way, another avenue to get into video games. An example of this is the late-2021 release of Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality game for the Oculus set in the “metaverse.” It’s basically their answer to the extremely popular VRChat that almost everyone with a VR headset has played before.

Of course, to build up a large platform, Meta needs a large user base and there’s no better way to do that than offer the game all over the world. Earlier this week, Meta announced that it would be launching Horizon Worlds in France and Spain. There was one very important detail though that anyone reading the announcement probably thought was odd, and it’s that the game would be in English only.

Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced we’re making Horizon Worlds available to people aged 18 or older in France and Spain in English only. This is part of our ongoing plan to roll Horizon Worlds out to more people in Europe this year.

Even if there are plenty of people in France and Spain perfectly capable of playing a game that is English only, all the people who do not speak the language or aren’t fluent enough to play a game in English pretty much can’t play the game or have to ignore all the in-game instructions and tutorials. According to Gizmodo writer Jody Serrano, there is a horrible attempt at mixing Spanish and English within the game that leads to confusion for everyone.

“Things get worse when once you actually enter the game. Some sections offer a mix of Spanish and English, while others offer bad Spanish translations that even Spanish speakers like me can’t understand.”

Serrano goes on to explain the multiple ways that they mistranslated English words into Spanish and even went so far as to point out that Google Translate does a better job than the official in-game translation attempts. This is all a reminder of how important having an actual localization team is when shipping a game overseas, something Meta seems to have not placed much value in.

The 1975 made their grand return with “Part Of The Band,” a fittingly weird track that contained the line, “I like my men like I like my coffee / Full of soy milk and so sweet, it won’t offend anybody.” They’re set to release their next LP, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, in October. They’ve also released the single “Happiness,” and now they’ve debuted another track called “I’m In Love With You” at the Summer Sonic Festival.

“I’m In Love With You” is a sparkling, jaunty song, bright and simple. Matty Healy repeats the title in a catchy melody over warm, upbeat rhythms. A release date hasn’t been shared for the song yet, nor has it been confirmed that it will even be a single, but for now fans can listen to the live version on repeat on Soundcloud.

The album is rumored to be pretty funny. Healy recently addressed the omnipotence of his penis on the album, saying, “There’s so much of it [laughs]! There are so many good d*ck jokes on the record. It’s all about my d*ck. I’m obsessed with my d*ck for some reason. I’m trying to figure out what that represents. I think it’s because there’s such potency to the idea of the d*ck, and so much fragility in modern masculinity, and my masculinity. I’m obsessed with that duality, of just, like, having a d*ck.”

Being Funny In A Foreign Language is out 10/14 via Dirty Hit. Pre-order it here.

Only one lower-seeded team won their first game in the 2022 WNBA playoffs, and it came as quite a shock. The seventh seeded New York Liberty were relentless in Game 1 of their series against the defending champion Chicago Sky and managed to pick up a stunning win, putting the Sky on the ropes ahead of Game 2 of the best-of-3 series.

On Saturday afternoon, Chicago responded with a champion’s effort, getting the fans at Wintrust Arena engaged from the very beginning en route to the most emphatic WNBA playoff win we’ve ever seen. The game seemed over by the time the two sides went into the locker room for halftime, and when the dust settled, the Sky forced a Game 3 with a 100-62 win that set the WNBA record for the largest margin of victory in playoff history.

Chicago came out angry to start Game 2, winning the first quarter 31-10 while ending the frame scoring 10 unanswered points. Kahleah Copper, in particular, was magnificent early on, scoring as many points in the first than the Liberty as a team.

The Sky’s defense, meanwhile, was relentless from the jump. No New York player scored more than two points in the quarter, they turned the ball over eight times, and as a team, the Liberty shot 4-for-16 (25 percent) from the field and missed all of their attempts from three. They just could not get anything going with how Chicago blitzed them on that end of the floor, something that carried on for the remainder of the game.

By the time the two teams went into the locker room at half, the Sky made it clear they had no plans of seeing their season end on Saturday. They found themselves up at the break, 52-28, behind 12 points from Copper, nine points and four boards from Courtney Vandersloot, and 17 points off the bench from Rebekah Gardner and Azura Stevens.

This came despite Chicago shooting 2-for-11 from three, as they managed to dominate basically everywhere else. As a team, New York shot 9-for-30 from the field, turned it over 13 times, and got outrebounded by nine boards. Their leading scorer in the half, Sabrina Ionescu, had seven points, but the team was outscored by 18 points in the 17 minutes she was on the floor.

The second half was much of the same. Chicago led by as many as 42 points in the third quarter and never let New York get within 35 in the fourth. Between the defensive effort and their ability to get shot after shot at the rim — the Sky nearly had as many points in the paint (60) as the Liberty had as a team — it’s hard to imagine how this game could have gone any better for the home side.

Copper’s 20 points led all scorers, while Vandersloot went for 16 points, nine rebounds, four assists, and three steals. Candace Parker had a double-double with 12 points and 12 rebounds, while Stevens had 14 off the bench. It was an afternoon to forget for basically everyone on New York, as no one in the starting lineup reached double-digit points.

If there is a silver lining for the Liberty, it’s that they get to host the win-or-go-home Game 3 at the Barclays Center. That is slated to tip off on Tuesday, Aug. 23, while the tip time and television information are to be announced.

Despite being president for four years, it’s not clear if Donald Trump ever read the job description. For one thing, he didn’t seem to understand how the military worked. On top of calling fallen soldiers “losers,” he also reportedly wished they acted more like the German soldiers during World War II, aka the Nazis. Now a veteran is calling him out for allegedly thinking they were only there to do his bidding.

As caught by Raw Story, Theodore Johnson, a Navy vet and Brennan Center for Justice fellow, wrote a column for The Bulwark in which he torched the former commander-in-chief for thinking the military was an “apparatus for personal use.” Comparing him to Louis XIV, who infamously declared, “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”), Johnson claimed that Trump “and his acolytes acted as though the Constitution meant whatever he said it meant, and thus, the oath military members took to it was received as fealty to the president (the person) and not the presidency (the office).”

Johnson cited a number of disturbing actions Trump took. One was using soldiers to teargas protesters in Lafayette Square during the George Floyd protests of 2020, which caused Gen. Mark Milley to draft a resignation letter he never sent. Another was him taking classified documents, allegedly including nuclear secrets, down to Mar-a-Lago, leading to a search by the FBI, from which he’s now fundraising off of his cash-strapped supporters.

“These occurrences,” Johnson writes, “bring to the fore a troubling issue usually lurking in the background of civil-military relations: When a president believes his interests supersede the nation’s — or, worse, that his interests become the nation’s — the democratic principle of ‘civilian control of the military’ exposes the armed services to co-option as a partisan tool for domestic politics.”

Trump may run again, even if it’s from jail. But even if he doesn’t, “dangers remain,” writes Johnson. “If our country’s toxic polarization, hyperpartisanship, and intentional stoking of social tensions for political ends are not sufficiently addressed,” he wrote, “we may find ourselves dangerously close to the precipice once more—and if Trump or someone following the Trump model comes to power again, we may well tumble over the edge.”

Perhaps Johnson is referring to a certain governor who punishes corporations that disagree with him and bullies kids.

(Via Bulwark and Raw Story)

It was reported earlier this week that Swizz Beatz and Timbaland are suing Triller for $28 million after the company never paid up for their rap battle show Verzuz. Now Diddy is speaking up to express solidarity with the two rappers.

On a joint Instagram live with So So Def founder Jermaine Dupri, Diddy said, “Since we ain’t f*ckin’ with [Triller] no more, since they’re f*ckin’ around with our boys, we don’t need to be going against each other. Let’s come together and do that Bad Boy-So So Def in Atlanta. It ain’t no Verzuz, it’s just hit-for-hit.”

He added after, “We’re not f*ckin’ with Triller until they take care of Swizz and Tim for Verzuz. Nobody f*cks with Triller until they take care of Tim and Swizz for Verzuz, ’cause Tim and Swizz is Verzuz.”

The suit, filed Tuesday, said that Triller “unequivocally and unconditionally guaranteed to Mosley and Dean the payment and performance of Triller Hold’s obligations under that agreement and related agreements.” Triller allegedly paid them in January and April 2021, but then defaulted on the next required payment.

March of this year marked the two-year anniversary of Verzuz and they celebrated with a documentary. Since its inception, it has held numerous duels between the likes of The Lox, Dipset, Nelly, Ludacris, Keyshia Cole, Ashanti, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, E-40, Too Short, Gucci Mane, Jeezy, and many more.