Is the Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham and LittleBigPlanet 3 PS4 Black Friday bundle worth buying?20 Most Underrated Open-World Video Games Of The Decade (So Far)EVEN WHEN he’s only molded plastic, you just can’t outdarken the Dark Knight. In a battle of toy-laden sequels, “The Lego Batman Movie” topped “Fifty Shades Darker” to win the box-office weekend in North American theaters, according to studio estimates released Sunday. Warner Bros./DC’s “Lego Batman” performed slightly below expectations but still grossed $55.6 million — the biggest domestic debut so far this year. “Fifty Shades” finished with $46.8 million, followed by the opening of another sequel, “John Wick 2″ ($30 million). [The top 10 Batman actors ever, from George Clooney to Will Arnett] “Fifty Shades” led “Lego Batman” after opening night, grossing $21.5 million on date-friendly Friday to “Batman’s” $15 million. The DC superhero’s margin of victory, though, was almost entirely earned on Sunday, as “Lego Batman” grossed $17.6 million to “Darker’s” $9.5 million.
The audience for “Lego Batman” split nearly evenly among females and males, and slightly more viewers were younger than 25. “Lego Batman” has scored both commercially and critically, receiving an “A-minus” CinemaScore; “Lego Batman” also scored better among critics than WB/DC’s past three superhero films: “Suicide Squad” (40 on Metacritic); “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” (44); and “Man of Steel” (55). “Lego Batman,” however, still fell short of its forerunner, 2013’s “Lego Movie” (Metacritic score: 83), which opened to $69 million en route to grossing $258 million domestically (and approaching the half-billion-dollar mark worldwide). The first two Lego films have grossed a combined $562 million globally. And the bottom line for WB/DC is that the Lego franchise is staying strong ahead of the studio’s release of “Lego Ninjago” in September. Read more: Adam West on being a Bat-ambassador: “I get a great pleasure delivering the laughs” Tim Burton on making personal animated films Remembering pioneering Batman artist Jerry Robinson
New content arrives on iTunes all the time. Here you can see what’s new this week and browse the top 100 songs, albums, TV shows, movies, apps, and more. Shop the iTunes Store nowI didn't really appreciate the vastness of space until I tried to travel anywhere in Elite: Dangerous ($39.99 GPB, or approximately $60 USD). This PC game by Frontier Developments is a crowdfunded follow-up to the classic Elite series of space sims. It's a game that gives you a ship, a handful of equipment, and a full tank of fuel, then sets you out on your own in the vast cosmos. It's huge, slow, deliberate, and open, and it will reward players with the patience stay with it. Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions (for PC) Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (for PC) Resident Evil HD Remaster (for PC) Do Whatever You Want The concept isn't much different from the original Elite, related in 1984. It's the thirty-fourth century. You're the pilot and captain of a ship. You can fly through space. There's no epic story told where you're the main character and the universe is at stake.
You're just a guy trying to make his way in space. Once you leave stardock for the first time, your actions, goals, and destinations are entirely up to you. And the galaxy has 400 billion star systems (the vast majority of which are procedurally generated, and yet to be explored) to see while you do it. View All 6 Photos in Gallery That isn't to say the galaxy is empty or static, though. Elite: Dangerous is a persistently online game that automatically lets you encounter other players online if you're in the same part of space; you can optionally play solo without the player interaction, but that mode still needs an Internet connection. Politics and economics are the lifeblood of the galaxy, and every cargo run, government crackdown, and pirate raid influences the price of goods in a given system. Larger, overarching events take place in the background, letting players work en masse to back different factions in certain systems, running missions for them in the hopes of overthrowing the ruling government or protecting the status quo.
Careful Controls Like most space sims, Elite: Dangerous is ideally played with a flightstick. However, they're increasingly rare these days, and the game is perfectly playable on a gamepad, which is how I played it. The default settings covered nearly everything I needed, though I had to turn to my keyboard for a few more-specific ship functions, such as lowering my landing gear or extending my cargo scoop. The dual analog sticks of my controller gave me yaw, pitch, and roll controls, plus helpful up-and-down thrust maneuvering, along with easy access to targeting, throttle, weapons configurations, and system power-balance levels. Everything in the game is slow, careful, and deliberate. Jumping between stars requires charting a course to your destination and making a series of warp jumps that will take your ship several minutes to go any significant distance. Even when you get to your target star system, you have to navigate to your destination at slower-than-interstellar speeds, throttling up and down to get within a million meters of it at less than a million meters per second before you can drop out of sublight speeds and dock, mine, or attack.
After that, docking takes a few minutes, as you fly into starbases and land carefully on a landing pad. Mining requires careful shooting of asteroids and then even more careful scooping up the minerals by aligning your ship at a specific angle and very slowly flying into them. Even combat is as much a game of cat and mouse as it is dogfighting, with jumps, chases, and jockeying for position. If you're hoping for frantic space opera action, look elsewhere. There certainly is combat in Elite: Dangerous, but it's a relatively small part of a much bigger-picture. You can make your way as a pirate or mercenary, fitting your ship with tons of weapons and going after targets. You can also avoid battle entirely and outfit your ship to be a deep-space exploration vessel with advanced sensors, selling information about your discoveries. Or you can get a mining laser and an onboard refinery and mine asteroids all day, scooping up and processing ore into usable material. You can also simply travel from star to star, buying and selling commodities to make a profit.
You might get attacked by the very pirates you would otherwise be chasing. It's usually better to evade them than fight them if your ship can't handle it. Some Minor Direction You very much make your own fun in Elite: Dangerous, but there are plenty of ways to do it. You won't ever find your hand held as you make your way through space, but most starbases have bulletin boards with missions you can undertake, and there are three major space factions and several minor ones you can ingratiate yourself with in various ways. Elite: Dangerous isn't technically an MMO game, but it does have several persistent online elements that require a constant Internet connection. You can play online and encounter other players in the vastness of space or play on your own, but you need to be connected regardless, as mentioned. This lets the game keep a persistent and complex system of economics, politics, and cartography throughout the galaxy. Prices go up and down depending on the cargo runs players make.
Political factions gain influence and can even get control over certain systems if enough players do missions for them. It keeps the galaxy active and consistent, so players can work together as they wish and share useful information. It's not the deep, cooperative experience EVE offers, with massive economic factions waging war with each other, but it gives the sense of a living, active galaxy. Lost in Space I initially spent many hours drifting aimlessly through space, trying to find my way. I tried skirmishing against pirates, making cargo runs, and mining asteroids. Eventually, I loaded my ship up with a fuel scoop and advanced sensors and pointed myself in the direction of "away." A few hours of jumping to new systems, scanning everything of note in them, sitting in the corona of the sun for a few minutes to refill my fuel, and jumping further off got me fractionally closer to the galactic core. I started to take damage from flying too close to stars, so I made my way back to known space and sold my sensor data.