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AAA video game get put in the spotlight during this time of year. We all clamor to see what PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo has coming, or what major project is coming out of studios like EA or Ubisoft. However, while those major companies take up a lot of the oxygen, there are usually tons of indie showcases for fans to check out.

On Saturday, Guerilla Collective and Wholesome Games both put on showcases of indie games that will come out in the near future. We saw way too many games to possibly highlight all of them, so here are 10 that stuck out.

Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms

Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms has the look of a game that is going to put the player on a grand adventure. Every detail of the environments shown is similar to how someone might view their personal DnD campaign. It’s an action RPG with an overhead view. It feels similar to something like Diablo or the recentl- released Lost Ark. It’s going to appeal to a certain kind of player so be sure to check out some gameplay footage before getting it for yourself. We’ve seen this game at a handful of summer games showcases so far, but this latest trailer gave us a release date for the end of the month so we won’t have to wait too much longer to finally play it.

Boundary

What if you gave astronauts guns and had them fight in space? That is the entire premise of Boundary and it honestly sounds really fun. We’ve had plenty of games take place in space stations, but what about actually happening in space? That is what Boundary is offering us and that small hook is all we need to be intrigued. Most of the trailer showed us multiplayer gameplay, so this might be a PvP only experience. That’s fine, because the premise feels unique enough to justify not having a single-player option of some kind.

The Last Worker

The Last Worker is going to be one of those games that makes people think about the world. The player takes on the role of the lone human in a packaging plant. You have never once made a mistake, and that’s why you’re the only one who has kept their job, and this has led to a lot of pride. However, as a resistance group contacts you for assistance in figuring out a deep mystery involving the plant, you’re forced to dive deeper into areas you’re not supposed to be in. The game has promised commentary on capitalism, horror elements, and some comedy thrown in for good measure. It has a strong voice cast to support it, which adds to the game’s potential.

Slope Crashers

Remember how fun Snowboard Kids was? Okay so take that, make all the characters animals instead, and we have Slope Crashers. Everything that an arcade snowboarding game needs to be successful is present throughout this trailer, like cartoonish characters, fun power-ups, and over-the-top level design. It even has split-screen multiplayer to invoke that classic feeling of playing on a Nintendo 64. There’s a demo available for anyone who wants to give it a try, and we can’t wait to see more from this game in the future.

Alterium Shift

If there were any JRPG fans not already paying attention to Alterium Shift, they definitely are now. This game takes direct inspiration from classic JRPG’s like Final Fantasy but adds some of its own twists to the formula. The big hook of Alterium Shift is how the player can choose three different characters, each with a unique class, and all of them will go on their own separate adventure. Of course, since this is a JRPG, we’re sure there will be a lengthy story full of twists and turns along the way.

A Frog’s Tale

A Frog’s Tale is another turn-based RPG, but instead, it stars a frog battling against enemies like flies, snakes, and owls. It feels like the kind of adventure that is much more down-to-earth and meant to tell a more personal story. Since the trailer was shown during the Wholesome Direct, we’re assuming the stakes never get too big, and that’s okay! A nice easy RPG is exactly what you want sometimes. As long as it plays well and has a good hook, we’re gonna put the time in.

Kitori Academy

Kitori Academy! is a wholesome game where the player is able to go on a magical adventure in a school for magic. It has a really cute art style and looks like an all-around good time. A lot of us have been wanting to experience what it’s like to be a witch or wizard, and this is going to give us that opportunity. We’re excited to play this one.

The Spirit and the Mouse

The Spirit and the Mouse lets players take on the role of a mouse exploring a city, finding collectibles, and completing quests. However, the trailer shows that the player is no ordinary mouse. They have electrical powers that will help the mouse complete these quests and all of that just sounds delightful. What was maybe the most impressive about the trailer was how everything looked. There’s a beautiful shade to everything that really makes colors pop in a way that other games don’t try to do sometimes. This is going to be a great world to explore and get into the tiny details through the eyes of a random electrical mouse.

SCHiM

SCHiM is a game where the player takes on a little shadow creature and gets them from place to place. What’s really unique about this game is the art style and how the game incorporates that into its gameplay. Everything has a hand-drawn style and the shadows are created through shading and movement. Part puzzle game, part platformer, SCHiM looks like a really fun time. We’re interested to see how deep this game goes. Is it going to just be a bunch of individual puzzles or is this an adventure with a heartfelt story behind it? We can’t wait to learn more.

Lonesome Village

Lonesome Village is a puzzle game but also a social simulation game — think Stardew Valley but with more puzzles. The game stars a fox and has a really adorable art style to it. We’re really excited to see what this game looks like when it launches, but for now, we can be enraptured by how cute it looks. Of course, as with any social sim you need a good hook to keep players invested and we assume that’s where the puzzles come in. A strong set of puzzles and some cute villagers to talk to in our downtime sounds really relaxing.

When Disney+ aired Loki last summer, the spin-off show had a lot of surprises. One of them was about the nature of the trickster god: It was revealed he was bisexual and gender fluid, making him the first openly queer lead character in the MCU. They didn’t show him getting any kind of action, which caused some critiques, but it was still a milestone, and the actor who plays him is fully behind the move, even saying it has basis in Norse mythology.

“Back from my early days of researching the character in the ancient myths, the identity of Loki was fluid in every aspect and in gender, in sexuality,” Hiddleston told Lily James during Variety’s Actors on Actors (as caught by IndieWire). “It’s a very ancient part of the character and I think I thought about it. … It hadn’t emerged in the stories we’ve told. And I was really pleased and privileged, actually, that it’s came up in the series.”

Hiddleston called the move “a small step,” and that there’s “so much more to do,” but that the MCU “has to reflect the world we live in.” He added, “So it was an honor to bring that up. It was really important to me. It was really important to [director] Kate Herron and [showrunner] Michael Waldron, and I’m pleased that we could bring it into our story.”

So perhaps the next time you see the semi-villain, he’ll do a little more than simply acknowledge that he goes both ways.

(Via Variety and IndieWire)

Draymond Green has come under some criticism for his performance in the 2022 NBA Finals. Whether those critiques are fair (he has struggled, particularly on offense, against the Boston Celtics’ defense) or not (his penchant for podcasting after games), Green has objectively not looked like the kind of guy whose ability to influence games on both ends of the floor was crucial to Golden State’s success for years.

The criticism has come from all over, and on Friday night, Green had an up-and-down game during the Warriors’ Game 4 win in Boston. In the aftermath, Green’s mother, Mary Babers-Green, speculated on Twitter that his performance made her ask if he had been replaced by a clone.

The whole thing was pretty funny, and in his postgame podcast, Green addressed his mom’s tweet by saying that she had a point.

“I saw my mom tweeted that it’s been a tough series for me,” Green said. “Absolutely, it definitely has, but figure it out how you gotta figure it out. It’s not the toughest thing I’ve had to deal with in my life thus far, but I’m sure I’ll have a tougher challenge in life.”

Give Green credit for both taking this on the chin and appearing to have fun with the whole thing. As the saying goes, mother knows best.

Michael Jordan‘s basketball playing career is defined by a whole lot of performances and moments that can be referenced by even the most casual of sports fan. One such performance came in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, when an ill Jordan led the Chicago Bulls into Utah to take on the Jazz. The series was tied at two games each, and Jordan — who looked like he was having an extremely bad time — scored 38 points in a 90-88 Bulls win.

Chicago would go on to win the series, 4-2, while Jordan’s performance in Game 5 became affectionately known as the “Flu Game.” Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of that game, and as a way to celebrate it, the official SportsCenter Twitter account posted the highlights, as ready by the late, great, Stuart Scott.

Thanks to The Last Dance, we learned that calling this the “Flu Game” isn’t quite right — Jordan, longtime trainer Tim Grover, and his friend George Koehler revealed that the Hall of Fame inductee got really weird over having an entire pizza to himself, to the point that he spit on it so no one else would eat it. The pizza, as they claim, ended up giving him a particularly nasty case of food poisoning. Whatever it’s called, this is high on the list of the best games of Jordan’s career.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot kicked off its hearings on Thursday, to big ratings. Among the bombshells was this: Ivanka Trump, the former president’s eldest daughter, agreed with his former Attorney General Bill Barr that he lost in the 2020 election. She said it as sheepishly as possible, so as not to over-enrage her father. It didn’t exactly work. The next day, Trump himself claimed on Truth Social that she didn’t know what she was talking about as she had ”checked out” by then.

The following night, Jimmy Kimmel weighed in on the hearings and the responses from the GOP, including Trump. “I love his argument that Ivanka, his senior White House advisor, had checked out,” joked Kimmel. “In the Trump family, that’s called being thrown under the Access Hollywood bus.”

Kimmel also zeroed in on Fox News, which refused to air the night’s hearing, at least on their main channel. Instead, it was business as usual, with one alteration: Tucker Carlson’s show was aired without commercials, as though viewers couldn’t have a break to check out what everyone else was airing.

“Fox News is so intent on burying their viewers’ heads in the sand [that] not only didn’t they show the hearing last night, they went commercial-free for two-and-a-half hours so their viewers wouldn’t switch the channel to see what is actually going on,” Kimmel said. “They went into overdrive trying to make it seem like what happened was just a rowdy group of party people sneaking into the movies or something.”

Kimmel didn’t mind showing the footage. “It looks like a coup,” he said about scenes of Trump supporters violently storming the Capitol building and assaulting police officers. “Five people were killed on that day by those nutty goofball protesters.”

To him, the “worst part” was that the former president surely loves being back in the news, saying, “you know Trump is at home so thrilled to be back in primetime he can’t stop pullin’ his nipples. He’s crazy. He loves it.”

You can watch Kimmel’s opening monologue in the video above.

The last time that Beyonce dropped a solo album was back in 2017 with her sixth release Lemonade. Since then, fans have received The Carters’ Everything Is Love album, some loose singles (mostly tied to movies like King Richard), and her The Lion King: The Gift soundtrack. Still, her extremely faithful Beyhive fanbase is exercising as much patience as possible as they wait for album No. 7. Beyonce recently wiped her social media accounts clean, leading fans to believe that the album was finally on the way, but after some new moves from the singer, they’re not too sure now.

A day after Beyonce wiped her social media accounts clean, fans notice that a placeholder for her seventh album shows up on her website when “June 11” is searched on the website. Future searches of “June 11,” bring up three results: “B7,” B8,” and “What’s a B7?” As a result, fans couldn’t tell if the singer was truly teasing the upcoming release of her seventh album or just trolling them for thinking it was on the way.

If Beyonce is trolling them, it would be similar to what Rihanna has done to her fans over the last couple of years. Rihanna once said that she “lost” her long-awaited ninth album, and after that, she trolled a lookalike by asking about her upcoming album.

You can view tweets from fans who think Beyonce is teasing or trolling about her next album below.

Considering how he played and the stakes of the game, Steph Curry might have had the best performance of his decorated NBA career on Friday night in Boston. Curry led the Golden State Warriors into a hostile TD Garden and went for 43 points and 10 rebounds in a 107-97 win. It tied the series up at two games each, and after the game, Draymond Green praised Curry for how he “willed us to a win.”

Two of the best players of all time think Curry deserves his flowers after what he did on Friday. Dwyane Wade tweeted that he believes much of the conversation surrounding Curry focuses on what he cannot do, but that game was an example of how he’s a “BAD MFer.”

Noted fan of Curry’s game LeBron James saw Wade’s tweet and chimed in by saying that people don’t appreciate how rare it is to have a player who can do the things Curry can do on the basketball court.

There is certainly an element of the famous “but I was told Steph Curry wasn’t a good shooter” tweet to this (and the composer of that tweet, noted Bar Rescue enthusiast @killakow, has chimed in on this conversation), but regardless, it’s interesting to see how two all-time greats believe Curry is viewed by the basketball watching universe.

Last month, it was announced that J. Cole was signing with a professional basketball team for the second time in a year. After his stint with the Rwanda Patriots last summer, Cole decided to take his talents to Canada as he signed with the Scarborough Shooting Stars. Cole played five games with the team, which is a part of the Canadian Elite Basketball League, and during his time with them, he was able to serve as contributing player off the bench as he knocked down a few threes while earning some steals and rebounds in the process.

Despite this, Cole’s time with the Shooting Stars might have just come to an end. After the team’s 99-81 win on Wednesday, in which Cole scored a career-high of six points, the rapper announced that he would be stepping away from the team for an unknown amount of time to fulfill his tour duties. “I was telling the guys in there like, ‘I’m going for these shows, I’m not sure if I’ll be back,’” Cole said in an interview that was shared on the team’s Instagram account. “But just in case, I had to let them know how incredible this was. The players, the coaching staff, the organization, the league, it’s a crazy thing when you see it on paper, when you see what’s actually happening, and they made me feel so welcome.”

Cole also took a moment to show love to the people of Scarborough for the love they showed him over the last few weeks. “I gotta shout-out the people of Scarborough because coming from America, I didn’t really know,” he said. “So I’ve learned so much that the people there feel seen with this basketball team and this league highlighting them.”

He continued, “The people there feel seen and I’m assuming that was not always the cause, so I’m proud to be able to add something to Canada and to this talent that’s in Canada. Those guys are incredible so to be able to get some extra eyes on them is a pleasure.”

You can watch the full interview above.

Fox News is very busy right now trying their best to ignore the Jan. 6 hearings, despite them being a ratings boon. (Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s Truth Social is going so far as to boot anyone who mentions them.) They desperately need counterprogramming. Perhaps that’s why they wound up airing a segment on a subject that many of their viewers do not like: an empathetic portrayal of a trans teen.

The right-leaning segment highlighted a 14-year-old, described by correspondent Bryan Llenas as a “typical California teenager.” It goes on to portray how his family came to accept him after he came out as transgender at five years old. They were “confused” at first, confessing that they thought “gender and sexuality were the same thing.” But they eventually realized “those two things are different” and supported his transition.

It’s a heartwarming segment, and it will help lots of other families. But it naturally enraged prominent conservatives. Among them were Matt Walsh, who recently released an anti-trans documentary. “I have appeared on Fox News many times. I appreciate the platform they’ve given me. If what I’m about to say ruins that relationship, so be it,” he wrote. “Everyone involved should be fired immediately.”

Ben Shapiro, head of the rightwing The Daily Wire and noted “WAP” critic, was also incensed. “This would be absolute despicable insane lunacy if I saw it on CNN or MSNBC,” he wrote. “To see it on Fox News is a complete betrayal of anything remotely resembling conservatism or decency.”

There was more raging on Truth Social, not that you need to see any of that. Congrats to the family and may their story inspire others.

(Via The Daily Beast)

The Jan. 6 hearings began on Thursday night, and they were a big Nielsens hit. Almost 20 million people tuned in to watch the House select committee make public their findings into the Capitol riot, which ended Donald Trump’s presidency in disgrace. Fox News, meanwhile, tried, badly, to ignore it, while Trump’s social media service is infringing on its users’ free speech. Among the revelations was that the former president seemed perfectly fine with his supporters wanting to hang his vice president, Mike Pence.

As it happens, Trump’s longtime counselor, Kellyanne Conway, was booked on Real Time with Bill Maher, there to promote her low-selling memoir. Maher repeatedly offered her a chance to redeem herself, namely by condemning her old boss. And, as always, she refused.

Conway began by brushing off the hearings, pointing out, however rightly, that it’s not a “courtroom,” i.e., that the committee can’t actually prosecute anyone. (Though they can offer plenty of evidence for others to do that.) Maher pushed back, saying that “doesn’t mean it wasn’t valid” and that “the footage is the footage.”

Conway agreed that the “footage is appalling,” but tried to steer the conversation to other issues: inflation, high gas prices, etc. Maher called her a “spin doctor,” which she denied.

At one point Maher brought up claims that Trump okayed the idea of Pence being murdered. He asked Conway, “How do you spin that?” Then she gave it a try.

“That’s, those are reports I’ve seen that people are saying that,” she said. “And if people were threatening the life of the Vice President, I’m sure there are great federal laws against that. Let’s use them.”

Conway also brushed off the idea that Trump actively encouraged his supporters to storm the Capitol. When asked about telling them to “fight like hell,” she claimed that’s ‘What every college football coach says to the guys that are taking the field.”

Eventually Conway wondered aloud why people persist in talking about her old boss, who’s been accused of attempting a coup. “You’re always talking about Donald Trump,” she said. “He hasn’t been president in a year and a half.”

You can watch the exchange in the video above.

(Via The Wrap)