• C'est inacceptable que le studio Spiders licencie en plein développement de l’accès anticipé de GreedFall 2 ! Comment peut-on être si irresponsable ? Nacon et Spiders semblent avoir oublié que les employés ne sont pas de simples pions dans un jeu vidéo. Pendant que ces entreprises espèrent tirer profit de l'accès anticipé, ce sont des vies humaines qui sont en jeu ! Les joueurs attendent une suite prometteuse et voilà qu'on nous annonce des licenciements. C'est un véritable manque de respect envers ceux qui ont consacré leur temps et leur talent à ce projet. On ne peut pas continuer à sacrifier le bien-être des employés sur l'autel du profit !

    #GreedFall2 #Spiders
    C'est inacceptable que le studio Spiders licencie en plein développement de l’accès anticipé de GreedFall 2 ! Comment peut-on être si irresponsable ? Nacon et Spiders semblent avoir oublié que les employés ne sont pas de simples pions dans un jeu vidéo. Pendant que ces entreprises espèrent tirer profit de l'accès anticipé, ce sont des vies humaines qui sont en jeu ! Les joueurs attendent une suite prometteuse et voilà qu'on nous annonce des licenciements. C'est un véritable manque de respect envers ceux qui ont consacré leur temps et leur talent à ce projet. On ne peut pas continuer à sacrifier le bien-être des employés sur l'autel du profit ! #GreedFall2 #Spiders
    WWW.ACTUGAMING.NET
    Le studio Spiders licencie, en plein développement de l’accès anticipé de GreedFall 2
    ActuGaming.net Le studio Spiders licencie, en plein développement de l’accès anticipé de GreedFall 2 En optant pour l’accès anticipé pour GreedFall 2, Nacon et Spiders espéraient sans doute d’autres […] L'article Le studio Sp
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  • NOOBS ARE COMING (Demo) [Free] [Action] [Windows] [Linux]

    SirCozyCrow5 hours agoThe sound track is PEAK! I loved playing this, and my partner who normally doesn't play games like this one had a good time as well. I enjoyed the learning curve and I can't wait to play the harder difficulties.Here's a video I made, my partner jumped in for a few minutes as well.Replyso funReplyDrew.a.Chain1 day agoVery addictive!ReplyTrashpanda1191 day agolove the playstyle and the art style definitly fun to play plus the music is the cherry on topReplyAhoOppai1 day agoreally fun game cant wait for the full gameReplyDin Xavier coding1 day agoI chose the laser eye. How do I turn the attack around? Can I even do that?Replyoverboy1 day agoHey, the laser eye gets a random direction at the start of each wave, it's one of the specificities of this attack ;)ReplyFort Kenmei1 day agoGameplay and Critique ;)Replyoverboy1 day agoThanks a lot for the awesome video and the feedback! :)ReplyTLGaby2 days agoJust to know browser progress keep getting reset.Replyoverboy1 day agoThanks for the report! Could it be due to some of your browser settings?Unfortunately, browser-based games can't always guarantee reliable local saves due to how browsers handle storage.To avoid this in the future, I recommend trying the downloadable version of the demo,  it provides a more stable environment for saving progress. :)Replyepic.Replyoleekconder2 days agoVery nice. Spent couple hours easy=) UPD: And some moreReplyMaximusR3 days agoes un juego que ya jugue en su momento cuando tenias menos cosas y ahora que esta actualizado quisiera grabarlo otra vezReplyEPIClove the spiders ♥ReplynineGardens3 days agoOkay so.... tried out a few things, and some Dev suggestions to report:
    Bigfoot is such a cool idea, and running around at that speed with like.... all THAT going on just gave me motion sickness.Summoner is hysterical fun. All hail spiders. Tomatoe's are pretty fun too.The Adept is so cool in theory, but... once you have the right build is a bit of a "standing still simulator"  Also, if you have totoms or other turrets, there's very much the question each round of "Will my circle spawn NEAR the totoms , or far from them "   I kind of wonder if the mage circle should like... fizzle out after 20 seconds and appear somewhere else. Just... something to give a bit more dynamism, and to make the original spawn point less critical.Okay: added thoughts:Watering psycotic tomatoes feels great.Being a malevolent spider with 8 arms feels amazing. Feels very good and natural."Orbital" is one of the greatest and most fun abilities in the game.  I would take this even without the damage boost.Lots of fun, but also very silly. Good job.Replydave99993 days agowith some size you can kick the totems around to reposition them towards your circle, it benefits them too, adept can choose the wand at the start and with it you have no sustain problem anyway whatever build you want to set upReplynineGardens3 days agoOh damn- only just found out you can kick the totems!Okay, yeah in this case all is well. Or at least.... I still think a moving circle could be cool, but the fact that you can move your totems over to where the circle is makes things much better.Replyjust get enough amount+size and they hit everything, bounce is overkill ReplyLost track of time 10 hours in and still hooked. Absolutely love it! Can't wait for the full releaseReplyDriftedVoid4 days agoPretty good!
    ReplyIndyot4 days agoIt's a pretty addictive game, congrats! I lowkey missed a bit of satisfaction on the weapons though.ReplyCongrats on the game! I really like the weapons that you interact with which gives it a fun spin.Reply1Soultaken4 days agoAnyone know good combos for the items?Replydave99994 days agolasers plus amount+adept some arcane for basic dmgtotems +amount+ bounce+adept optional size and arcane you can stand still in the endall shovels with crit, strength their extra souls help you snowball hard and easy probably the most straightforward and stable very good build you can beat the game with nearly anything its well balanced but this one is very strong and easy soul flask, more chests are near always must pick, the high luck value ones give you better items the free reroll is a must pick, lightning dagger is somewhat unique as it  can carry you the entire early game even if you do not get enough element damageReplydave99998 days agounderestimated totems Replylimey8 days agoi like how you made like MULTITUDES of updates on this so like as soon as i check my feed its just thisReplydave99998 days agomy best run so far,  there s a hidden mechanic that  makes weapons  you have more likely to drop?Replyoverboy8 days agoLmao, awesome — looks like a really fun build to play! Yeah, Shop RNG uses a lot of hidden tricks to help you find relevant attacks, while still allowing unrelated ones to appear. That way, you can discover unique builds and experiment freely!Replyoverboy8 days agoThank you so much for the incredible reception of the web demo on Itch, and to everyone who wishlisted the game! Many of the changes—along with much more to come in future updates—are directly based on your feedback here and on the game’s Discord.

    I’m also excited to announce that the game will release on Steam on 8 July 2025!
    Demo - Update 35Singleplayer UI: Level Up Upgrade Phase and Chest Pickup Phase UI now display the items and attacks inventoriesSingleplayer Shop: subtle animation while selecting a Buy Button
    Many Balancing tweaks
    Balancing: nerfed Life Steal in various waysBalancing: nerfed Knockback in various waysBalancing: too much items enhancing HP Max were put in the Demo, this means it was easier to get a lot of HP and to survive in the Demo due to higher ratio of items providing HP
    Added a subtle duration during which the player can still pickup Souls even if they’re slurped by the Soul Portal
    Fine tuned the color of some weapons to improve the visibility
    Balancing: Ballista don’t double their projectiles based on amount anymoreIf Player HP is Full and HP Max > 20, the player can’t be one-shot
    Bugfix: in-game achievement pop up could be displayed below other UI elements while it should always be above everything else
    Potential Bugfix for a rare bug happening in Multiplayer shop where player2 Shop sections wasn’t displayed at allRework the save system in preparation for upcoming features
    ReplyxHELLO_WORLDx10 days agocontracts on the gameReplydave999910 days agoelijah_ap10 days agoLove the art style, upgrades, controls, etc. Balance might be the only thing off about this. If you were to add anything, I would want to see more variety in the stages, similar to Vampire Survivor. Otherwise- really great.ReplyThank you so much! I’ll keep working on the balance with each update, and I appreciate the suggestion on stage variety!ReplyNetsmile10 days agoTorch IV has a problem rounding numbers in the stats hover over display. Other levels of torches workReplyoverboy10 days agoThanks, I'll fix this displayed rounding number issue soon!ReplySkeppartorsk10 days agoFor now I'd say it's fun, but lacking a bit in balance. I absolutely suck at brotatolikes. But find this one easy, so it's probably undertuned as far as difficulty is concerned. The power and availability of HP and regen items, makes you just literally not care if you get hit. Then the relatively strong armor on top and you're just too tanky for anything to feasibly ever kill you.Replyoverboy10 days agoThanks for the feedback! Sounds like tanky builds might be a bit too forgiving right now, i'll do some balancing changesReplySkeppartorsk9 days agoLife steal has similar issues too. There's also the standard issue with knockback in these kinds of games. The lack of any enemy resistance/diminishing returns, means it's way too easy to get enough knockback that enemies cannot touch you anymore. Ranged attacks are too few and far between to worry about with the current levels of sustain. Meaning you can just Stand Still and Kill way too realiably.
    Edit: Lategame with 6x Wands I'm getting so much screen shake it's triggering simulation sickness. It was due to having Pierce + Bounce. The screen shake from my projectiles bouncing off the edge of the map.Replyoverboy8 days agothanks for your feedback, it will help for the game balancing!For now I try to avoid diminishing returns by design to make sure each feature and stat is super easy to understand because I dislike when roguelike gets too opaque, I prefer that the player fully and easily undestand each of its choices, but yeah that involves a good balance to find!In future updates, Life Steal will become harder to get, Knockback will be capped at lower maximum applied values.Regarding the overall difficulty, the full version has 3 extra level of difficulties, and based on some feedbacks i have from beta testers, the balance between the 5 difficulty modes seem to be close to what i'm aiming forThere is already an option to disable screenshakes ;)Edit: Would you be interested to join the beta-test of the full game? If so please join the Discord and ping me in DM ;)ReplySkeppartorsk8 days agoI did notice that you could turn off screen shake entirely. But admittedly a lot of the visceral feel of the combat goes away when you fully disable the screen shake. But when you have too many Leeroy/knockback projectiles/bouncing projectiles. It just reaches the point where simulation sickness sets in. Wish there was something like an intensity setting, or a way for it to cap out at how often a screen shake can get triggered.
    I agree on the opaque thing. But I was more thinking something akin to how CC Diminishing Returns works in WoW. Where 1st hit = full value, 2nd hit within 10s = half value, 3rd hit = 1/4 value. Then 10s of immunity before it resets. That way you still get knockback when you pick knockback. But you can't just perma nail enemies against the wall.
    Edit: Also there's a wording issuewith how multiple pentagrams work. If you have adept pentagram and the item pentagram the wording is "when you stand inside a pentagram" But the item one gives the 20% damage ONLY and the adept one gives the adept bonuses ONLY. The wording would mean that both pentagrams should give adept bonus AND 20% damage bonus.Edit2: I'd suggest reformatting Grimorius tooltip so that the -10% armor is above the "on level up"portion. The indentation difference between the +1% speed and -10% armor is small enough that I read it as losing 10% armor on every level up.Replyoverboy8 days agoThanks a lot for the interesting insights!I nerfed HP, Lifesteal and Knockback using various techniques in the last update, along with many other changes.Just tested Pentagram/Adept and it works as expected: the 2 effects stack correctly as the wording impliedI reformatted Grimorius tooltip as you suggested ;)ReplyView more in threadBad Piggy11 days agoVery cool in it's current state. I love how much it really emphasises movement like how some active abilities need to be grabbed from around the arena to do themThat said, I think enemy projectiles could honestly stand out more. I could hardly see them at times in all the chaos.Still, I think this is a pretty solid base right now, and as always, you have a beautiful visual style, though I feel like the game suffers a little from how busy it can get. Great stuff so far thoughReplyThanks Bad Piggy! Really glad you’re enjoying the mechanics. I appreciate the feedback on projectile visibility and how busy things can get. I’ll definitely look into ways to improve those aspects. Really grateful for the kind words and thoughtful feedback!ReplyLeoLohandro11 days agoA copy of the brotato), but still fun.Replyoverboy11 days agoHey thanks a lot! Yes this game is a Brotato-like with many twists and new innovative mechanics, such as:- Equippable Boss Patterns- Minion Summoning- Growing Plant Minions with a watercan- Amount and Size stats - Physics-Based Weapons – like chained spikeballs- Kickable stuff- Playable character merge feature- Dozens and dozens of unique effectsI'm aiming for something like The Binding of Isaac meets Brotato — a deep, replayable experience full of chaotic synergies and wild builds that feel totally unique each run, with all the "being a boss fantasy and humor" deeply included in the mechanics and content :)Reply
    #noobs #are #coming #demo #free
    NOOBS ARE COMING (Demo) [Free] [Action] [Windows] [Linux]
    SirCozyCrow5 hours agoThe sound track is PEAK! I loved playing this, and my partner who normally doesn't play games like this one had a good time as well. I enjoyed the learning curve and I can't wait to play the harder difficulties.Here's a video I made, my partner jumped in for a few minutes as well.Replyso funReplyDrew.a.Chain1 day agoVery addictive!ReplyTrashpanda1191 day agolove the playstyle and the art style definitly fun to play plus the music is the cherry on topReplyAhoOppai1 day agoreally fun game cant wait for the full gameReplyDin Xavier coding1 day agoI chose the laser eye. How do I turn the attack around? Can I even do that?Replyoverboy1 day agoHey, the laser eye gets a random direction at the start of each wave, it's one of the specificities of this attack ;)ReplyFort Kenmei1 day agoGameplay and Critique ;)Replyoverboy1 day agoThanks a lot for the awesome video and the feedback! :)ReplyTLGaby2 days agoJust to know browser progress keep getting reset.Replyoverboy1 day agoThanks for the report! Could it be due to some of your browser settings?Unfortunately, browser-based games can't always guarantee reliable local saves due to how browsers handle storage.To avoid this in the future, I recommend trying the downloadable version of the demo,  it provides a more stable environment for saving progress. :)Replyepic.Replyoleekconder2 days agoVery nice. Spent couple hours easy=) UPD: And some moreReplyMaximusR3 days agoes un juego que ya jugue en su momento cuando tenias menos cosas y ahora que esta actualizado quisiera grabarlo otra vezReplyEPIClove the spiders ♥ReplynineGardens3 days agoOkay so.... tried out a few things, and some Dev suggestions to report: Bigfoot is such a cool idea, and running around at that speed with like.... all THAT going on just gave me motion sickness.Summoner is hysterical fun. All hail spiders. Tomatoe's are pretty fun too.The Adept is so cool in theory, but... once you have the right build is a bit of a "standing still simulator"  Also, if you have totoms or other turrets, there's very much the question each round of "Will my circle spawn NEAR the totoms , or far from them "   I kind of wonder if the mage circle should like... fizzle out after 20 seconds and appear somewhere else. Just... something to give a bit more dynamism, and to make the original spawn point less critical.Okay: added thoughts:Watering psycotic tomatoes feels great.Being a malevolent spider with 8 arms feels amazing. Feels very good and natural."Orbital" is one of the greatest and most fun abilities in the game.  I would take this even without the damage boost.Lots of fun, but also very silly. Good job.Replydave99993 days agowith some size you can kick the totems around to reposition them towards your circle, it benefits them too, adept can choose the wand at the start and with it you have no sustain problem anyway whatever build you want to set upReplynineGardens3 days agoOh damn- only just found out you can kick the totems!Okay, yeah in this case all is well. Or at least.... I still think a moving circle could be cool, but the fact that you can move your totems over to where the circle is makes things much better.Replyjust get enough amount+size and they hit everything, bounce is overkill ReplyLost track of time 10 hours in and still hooked. Absolutely love it! Can't wait for the full releaseReplyDriftedVoid4 days agoPretty good! ReplyIndyot4 days agoIt's a pretty addictive game, congrats! I lowkey missed a bit of satisfaction on the weapons though.ReplyCongrats on the game! I really like the weapons that you interact with which gives it a fun spin.Reply1Soultaken4 days agoAnyone know good combos for the items?Replydave99994 days agolasers plus amount+adept some arcane for basic dmgtotems +amount+ bounce+adept optional size and arcane you can stand still in the endall shovels with crit, strength their extra souls help you snowball hard and easy probably the most straightforward and stable very good build you can beat the game with nearly anything its well balanced but this one is very strong and easy soul flask, more chests are near always must pick, the high luck value ones give you better items the free reroll is a must pick, lightning dagger is somewhat unique as it  can carry you the entire early game even if you do not get enough element damageReplydave99998 days agounderestimated totems Replylimey8 days agoi like how you made like MULTITUDES of updates on this so like as soon as i check my feed its just thisReplydave99998 days agomy best run so far,  there s a hidden mechanic that  makes weapons  you have more likely to drop?Replyoverboy8 days agoLmao, awesome — looks like a really fun build to play! Yeah, Shop RNG uses a lot of hidden tricks to help you find relevant attacks, while still allowing unrelated ones to appear. That way, you can discover unique builds and experiment freely!Replyoverboy8 days agoThank you so much for the incredible reception of the web demo on Itch, and to everyone who wishlisted the game! Many of the changes—along with much more to come in future updates—are directly based on your feedback here and on the game’s Discord. I’m also excited to announce that the game will release on Steam on 8 July 2025! Demo - Update 35Singleplayer UI: Level Up Upgrade Phase and Chest Pickup Phase UI now display the items and attacks inventoriesSingleplayer Shop: subtle animation while selecting a Buy Button Many Balancing tweaks Balancing: nerfed Life Steal in various waysBalancing: nerfed Knockback in various waysBalancing: too much items enhancing HP Max were put in the Demo, this means it was easier to get a lot of HP and to survive in the Demo due to higher ratio of items providing HP Added a subtle duration during which the player can still pickup Souls even if they’re slurped by the Soul Portal Fine tuned the color of some weapons to improve the visibility Balancing: Ballista don’t double their projectiles based on amount anymoreIf Player HP is Full and HP Max > 20, the player can’t be one-shot Bugfix: in-game achievement pop up could be displayed below other UI elements while it should always be above everything else Potential Bugfix for a rare bug happening in Multiplayer shop where player2 Shop sections wasn’t displayed at allRework the save system in preparation for upcoming features ReplyxHELLO_WORLDx10 days agocontracts on the gameReplydave999910 days agoelijah_ap10 days agoLove the art style, upgrades, controls, etc. Balance might be the only thing off about this. If you were to add anything, I would want to see more variety in the stages, similar to Vampire Survivor. Otherwise- really great.ReplyThank you so much! I’ll keep working on the balance with each update, and I appreciate the suggestion on stage variety!ReplyNetsmile10 days agoTorch IV has a problem rounding numbers in the stats hover over display. Other levels of torches workReplyoverboy10 days agoThanks, I'll fix this displayed rounding number issue soon!ReplySkeppartorsk10 days agoFor now I'd say it's fun, but lacking a bit in balance. I absolutely suck at brotatolikes. But find this one easy, so it's probably undertuned as far as difficulty is concerned. The power and availability of HP and regen items, makes you just literally not care if you get hit. Then the relatively strong armor on top and you're just too tanky for anything to feasibly ever kill you.Replyoverboy10 days agoThanks for the feedback! Sounds like tanky builds might be a bit too forgiving right now, i'll do some balancing changesReplySkeppartorsk9 days agoLife steal has similar issues too. There's also the standard issue with knockback in these kinds of games. The lack of any enemy resistance/diminishing returns, means it's way too easy to get enough knockback that enemies cannot touch you anymore. Ranged attacks are too few and far between to worry about with the current levels of sustain. Meaning you can just Stand Still and Kill way too realiably. Edit: Lategame with 6x Wands I'm getting so much screen shake it's triggering simulation sickness. It was due to having Pierce + Bounce. The screen shake from my projectiles bouncing off the edge of the map.Replyoverboy8 days agothanks for your feedback, it will help for the game balancing!For now I try to avoid diminishing returns by design to make sure each feature and stat is super easy to understand because I dislike when roguelike gets too opaque, I prefer that the player fully and easily undestand each of its choices, but yeah that involves a good balance to find!In future updates, Life Steal will become harder to get, Knockback will be capped at lower maximum applied values.Regarding the overall difficulty, the full version has 3 extra level of difficulties, and based on some feedbacks i have from beta testers, the balance between the 5 difficulty modes seem to be close to what i'm aiming forThere is already an option to disable screenshakes ;)Edit: Would you be interested to join the beta-test of the full game? If so please join the Discord and ping me in DM ;)ReplySkeppartorsk8 days agoI did notice that you could turn off screen shake entirely. But admittedly a lot of the visceral feel of the combat goes away when you fully disable the screen shake. But when you have too many Leeroy/knockback projectiles/bouncing projectiles. It just reaches the point where simulation sickness sets in. Wish there was something like an intensity setting, or a way for it to cap out at how often a screen shake can get triggered. I agree on the opaque thing. But I was more thinking something akin to how CC Diminishing Returns works in WoW. Where 1st hit = full value, 2nd hit within 10s = half value, 3rd hit = 1/4 value. Then 10s of immunity before it resets. That way you still get knockback when you pick knockback. But you can't just perma nail enemies against the wall. Edit: Also there's a wording issuewith how multiple pentagrams work. If you have adept pentagram and the item pentagram the wording is "when you stand inside a pentagram" But the item one gives the 20% damage ONLY and the adept one gives the adept bonuses ONLY. The wording would mean that both pentagrams should give adept bonus AND 20% damage bonus.Edit2: I'd suggest reformatting Grimorius tooltip so that the -10% armor is above the "on level up"portion. The indentation difference between the +1% speed and -10% armor is small enough that I read it as losing 10% armor on every level up.Replyoverboy8 days agoThanks a lot for the interesting insights!I nerfed HP, Lifesteal and Knockback using various techniques in the last update, along with many other changes.Just tested Pentagram/Adept and it works as expected: the 2 effects stack correctly as the wording impliedI reformatted Grimorius tooltip as you suggested ;)ReplyView more in threadBad Piggy11 days agoVery cool in it's current state. I love how much it really emphasises movement like how some active abilities need to be grabbed from around the arena to do themThat said, I think enemy projectiles could honestly stand out more. I could hardly see them at times in all the chaos.Still, I think this is a pretty solid base right now, and as always, you have a beautiful visual style, though I feel like the game suffers a little from how busy it can get. Great stuff so far thoughReplyThanks Bad Piggy! Really glad you’re enjoying the mechanics. I appreciate the feedback on projectile visibility and how busy things can get. I’ll definitely look into ways to improve those aspects. Really grateful for the kind words and thoughtful feedback!ReplyLeoLohandro11 days agoA copy of the brotato), but still fun.Replyoverboy11 days agoHey thanks a lot! Yes this game is a Brotato-like with many twists and new innovative mechanics, such as:- Equippable Boss Patterns- Minion Summoning- Growing Plant Minions with a watercan- Amount and Size stats - Physics-Based Weapons – like chained spikeballs- Kickable stuff- Playable character merge feature- Dozens and dozens of unique effectsI'm aiming for something like The Binding of Isaac meets Brotato — a deep, replayable experience full of chaotic synergies and wild builds that feel totally unique each run, with all the "being a boss fantasy and humor" deeply included in the mechanics and content :)Reply #noobs #are #coming #demo #free
    OVERBOY.ITCH.IO
    NOOBS ARE COMING (Demo) [Free] [Action] [Windows] [Linux]
    SirCozyCrow5 hours agoThe sound track is PEAK! I loved playing this, and my partner who normally doesn't play games like this one had a good time as well. I enjoyed the learning curve and I can't wait to play the harder difficulties.Here's a video I made, my partner jumped in for a few minutes as well.Replyso funReplyDrew.a.Chain1 day ago(+1)Very addictive!ReplyTrashpanda1191 day ago(+1)love the playstyle and the art style definitly fun to play plus the music is the cherry on topReplyAhoOppai1 day ago(+1)really fun game cant wait for the full gameReplyDin Xavier coding1 day agoI chose the laser eye. How do I turn the attack around? Can I even do that?Replyoverboy1 day agoHey, the laser eye gets a random direction at the start of each wave, it's one of the specificities of this attack ;)ReplyFort Kenmei1 day agoGameplay and Critique ;)Replyoverboy1 day ago(+1)Thanks a lot for the awesome video and the feedback! :)ReplyTLGaby2 days agoJust to know browser progress keep getting reset.Replyoverboy1 day ago (2 edits) (+1)Thanks for the report! Could it be due to some of your browser settings?Unfortunately, browser-based games can't always guarantee reliable local saves due to how browsers handle storage.To avoid this in the future, I recommend trying the downloadable version of the demo,  it provides a more stable environment for saving progress. :)Replyepic.Replyoleekconder2 days ago (1 edit) (+1)Very nice. Spent couple hours easy=) UPD: And some moreReplyMaximusR3 days agoes un juego que ya jugue en su momento cuando tenias menos cosas y ahora que esta actualizado quisiera grabarlo otra vezReplyEPIClove the spiders ♥ReplynineGardens3 days ago (1 edit) (+2)Okay so.... tried out a few things, and some Dev suggestions to report: Bigfoot is such a cool idea, and running around at that speed with like.... all THAT going on just gave me motion sickness.Summoner is hysterical fun. All hail spiders. Tomatoe's are pretty fun too.The Adept is so cool in theory, but... once you have the right build is a bit of a "standing still simulator"  Also, if you have totoms or other turrets, there's very much the question each round of "Will my circle spawn NEAR the totoms (instant win), or far from them (oh no)"   I kind of wonder if the mage circle should like... fizzle out after 20 seconds and appear somewhere else. Just... something to give a bit more dynamism, and to make the original spawn point less critical.Okay: added thoughts:Watering psycotic tomatoes feels great.Being a malevolent spider with 8 arms feels amazing. Feels very good and natural."Orbital" is one of the greatest and most fun abilities in the game.  I would take this even without the damage boost.Lots of fun, but also very silly. Good job.Replydave99993 days agowith some size you can kick the totems around to reposition them towards your circle, it benefits them too, adept can choose the wand at the start and with it you have no sustain problem anyway whatever build you want to set upReplynineGardens3 days agoOh damn- only just found out you can kick the totems!Okay, yeah in this case all is well. Or at least.... I still think a moving circle could be cool, but the fact that you can move your totems over to where the circle is makes things much better.Replyjust get enough amount+size and they hit everything, bounce is overkill ReplyLost track of time 10 hours in and still hooked. Absolutely love it! Can't wait for the full releaseReplyDriftedVoid4 days agoPretty good! ReplyIndyot4 days agoIt's a pretty addictive game, congrats! I lowkey missed a bit of satisfaction on the weapons though.ReplyCongrats on the game! I really like the weapons that you interact with which gives it a fun spin. (i.e. the spike ball)Reply1Soultaken4 days agoAnyone know good combos for the items? (I just pick randomly.)Replydave99994 days ago (1 edit) (+2)lasers plus amount+adept some arcane for basic dmg (its instable to setup and only overboy starts with one) totems +amount+ bounce+adept optional size and arcane you can stand still in the endall shovels with crit, strength their extra souls help you snowball hard and easy probably the most straightforward and stable very good build you can beat the game with nearly anything its well balanced but this one is very strong and easy (realized in the end that all size was wasted on this) soul flask, more chests are near always must pick, the high luck value ones give you better items the free reroll is a must pick, lightning dagger is somewhat unique as it  can carry you the entire early game even if you do not get enough element damage (I understand that the more gimmicky things like pets and kickables give the game versatility but to min max they are not that competative)Replydave99998 days agounderestimated totems Replylimey8 days agoi like how you made like MULTITUDES of updates on this so like as soon as i check my feed its just thisReplydave99998 days ago (1 edit) (+1)my best run so far,  there s a hidden mechanic that  makes weapons  you have more likely to drop?Replyoverboy8 days ago(+2)Lmao, awesome — looks like a really fun build to play! Yeah, Shop RNG uses a lot of hidden tricks to help you find relevant attacks, while still allowing unrelated ones to appear. That way, you can discover unique builds and experiment freely!Replyoverboy8 days ago (1 edit) Thank you so much for the incredible reception of the web demo on Itch, and to everyone who wishlisted the game! Many of the changes—along with much more to come in future updates—are directly based on your feedback here and on the game’s Discord. I’m also excited to announce that the game will release on Steam on 8 July 2025! Demo - Update 35 (06 June 2025)Singleplayer UI: Level Up Upgrade Phase and Chest Pickup Phase UI now display the items and attacks inventories (useful to check the scaling of current equipped attacks for example) Singleplayer Shop: subtle animation while selecting a Buy Button Many Balancing tweaks Balancing: nerfed Life Steal in various ways (lower values gained from items) Balancing: nerfed Knockback in various ways (lower values gained, higher item rarity, lower max applied value) Balancing: too much items enhancing HP Max were put in the Demo, this means it was easier to get a lot of HP and to survive in the Demo due to higher ratio of items providing HP Added a subtle duration during which the player can still pickup Souls even if they’re slurped by the Soul Portal Fine tuned the color of some weapons to improve the visibility Balancing: Ballista don’t double their projectiles based on amount anymore (only number of ballistas scales with amount) If Player HP is Full and HP Max > 20, the player can’t be one-shot Bugfix: in-game achievement pop up could be displayed below other UI elements while it should always be above everything else Potential Bugfix for a rare bug happening in Multiplayer shop where player2 Shop sections wasn’t displayed at allRework the save system in preparation for upcoming features ReplyxHELLO_WORLDx10 days agocontracts on the gameReplydave999910 days agoelijah_ap10 days agoLove the art style, upgrades, controls, etc. Balance might be the only thing off about this. If you were to add anything, I would want to see more variety in the stages, similar to Vampire Survivor. Otherwise- really great.ReplyThank you so much! I’ll keep working on the balance with each update, and I appreciate the suggestion on stage variety!ReplyNetsmile10 days agoTorch IV has a problem rounding numbers in the stats hover over display. Other levels of torches workReplyoverboy10 days ago (1 edit) Thanks, I'll fix this displayed rounding number issue soon!ReplySkeppartorsk10 days agoFor now I'd say it's fun, but lacking a bit in balance. I absolutely suck at brotatolikes. But find this one easy, so it's probably undertuned as far as difficulty is concerned. The power and availability of HP and regen items, makes you just literally not care if you get hit. Then the relatively strong armor on top and you're just too tanky for anything to feasibly ever kill you.Replyoverboy10 days ago (1 edit) (+1)Thanks for the feedback! Sounds like tanky builds might be a bit too forgiving right now, i'll do some balancing changesReplySkeppartorsk9 days ago (2 edits) Life steal has similar issues too. There's also the standard issue with knockback in these kinds of games. The lack of any enemy resistance/diminishing returns, means it's way too easy to get enough knockback that enemies cannot touch you anymore. Ranged attacks are too few and far between to worry about with the current levels of sustain. Meaning you can just Stand Still and Kill way too realiably. Edit: Lategame with 6x Wands I'm getting so much screen shake it's triggering simulation sickness. It was due to having Pierce + Bounce. The screen shake from my projectiles bouncing off the edge of the map.Replyoverboy8 days ago (2 edits) (+1)thanks for your feedback, it will help for the game balancing!For now I try to avoid diminishing returns by design to make sure each feature and stat is super easy to understand because I dislike when roguelike gets too opaque, I prefer that the player fully and easily undestand each of its choices, but yeah that involves a good balance to find!In future updates, Life Steal will become harder to get, Knockback will be capped at lower maximum applied values.Regarding the overall difficulty, the full version has 3 extra level of difficulties, and based on some feedbacks i have from beta testers, the balance between the 5 difficulty modes seem to be close to what i'm aiming for (minus some issues like you pointed out, and of course some balancing required on specific builds and items)There is already an option to disable screenshakes ;)Edit: Would you be interested to join the beta-test of the full game? If so please join the Discord and ping me in DM ;)ReplySkeppartorsk8 days ago (4 edits) I did notice that you could turn off screen shake entirely. But admittedly a lot of the visceral feel of the combat goes away when you fully disable the screen shake. But when you have too many Leeroy/knockback projectiles/bouncing projectiles. It just reaches the point where simulation sickness sets in. Wish there was something like an intensity setting, or a way for it to cap out at how often a screen shake can get triggered. I agree on the opaque thing. But I was more thinking something akin to how CC Diminishing Returns works in WoW. Where 1st hit = full value, 2nd hit within 10s = half value, 3rd hit = 1/4 value. Then 10s of immunity before it resets. That way you still get knockback when you pick knockback. But you can't just perma nail enemies against the wall. Edit: Also there's a wording issue (or a bug) with how multiple pentagrams work. If you have adept pentagram and the item pentagram the wording is "when you stand inside a pentagram" But the item one gives the 20% damage ONLY and the adept one gives the adept bonuses ONLY. The wording would mean that both pentagrams should give adept bonus AND 20% damage bonus.Edit2: I'd suggest reformatting Grimorius tooltip so that the -10% armor is above the "on level up"portion. The indentation difference between the +1% speed and -10% armor is small enough that I read it as losing 10% armor on every level up.Replyoverboy8 days agoThanks a lot for the interesting insights!I nerfed HP, Lifesteal and Knockback using various techniques in the last update, along with many other changes.Just tested Pentagram/Adept and it works as expected: the 2 effects stack correctly as the wording impliedI reformatted Grimorius tooltip as you suggested ;)ReplyView more in threadBad Piggy11 days agoVery cool in it's current state. I love how much it really emphasises movement like how some active abilities need to be grabbed from around the arena to do themThat said, I think enemy projectiles could honestly stand out more. I could hardly see them at times in all the chaos.Still, I think this is a pretty solid base right now, and as always, you have a beautiful visual style, though I feel like the game suffers a little from how busy it can get. Great stuff so far thoughReplyThanks Bad Piggy! Really glad you’re enjoying the mechanics. I appreciate the feedback on projectile visibility and how busy things can get. I’ll definitely look into ways to improve those aspects. Really grateful for the kind words and thoughtful feedback!ReplyLeoLohandro11 days agoA copy of the brotato), but still fun.Replyoverboy11 days ago (2 edits) (+1)Hey thanks a lot! Yes this game is a Brotato-like with many twists and new innovative mechanics, such as:- Equippable Boss Patterns (active skills you can trigger by picking orbs on the map)- Minion Summoning- Growing Plant Minions with a watercan- Amount and Size stats - Physics-Based Weapons – like chained spikeballs- Kickable stuff (you can even play soccer with your minions or other co-op players)- Playable character merge feature (get the effect of 2 different characters or more at the same time)- Dozens and dozens of unique effects (turning enemies into Sheep, or Golden Statues, or both?)I'm aiming for something like The Binding of Isaac meets Brotato — a deep, replayable experience full of chaotic synergies and wild builds that feel totally unique each run, with all the "being a boss fantasy and humor" deeply included in the mechanics and content :)Reply
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  • The Best Jaws Knockoffs of the Past 50 Years

    To this day, Jaws remains the best example of Steven Spielberg‘s genius as a filmmaker. He somehow took a middling pulp novel about a killer shark and turned it into a thrilling adventure about masculinity and economic desperation. And to the surprise of no one, the massive success of Jaws spawned a lot of knockoffs, a glut of movies about animals terrorizing communities. None of these reach the majesty of Jaws, of course. But here’s the thing—none of them had to be Jaws. Sure, it’s nice that Spielberg’s film has impeccably designed set pieces and compelling characters, but that’s not the main reason people go to animal attack movies. We really just want to watch people get attacked. And eaten.

    With such standards duly lowered, let’s take a look at the best animal attack movies that came out in the past half-century since Jaws first scared us out of the water. Of course this list doesn’t cover every movie inspired by Jaws, and some can argue that these movies were less inspired by Jaws than other nature revolts features, such as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds. But every one of these flicks owes a debt to Jaws, either in inspiration or simply getting people interested in movies about animals eating people. Those warning aside, lets make like drunken revelers on Amity Island and dive right in!
    20. SharknadoSharknado almost doesn’t belong on this list because it’s less a movie and more of a meme, a precursor to Vines and TikTok trends. Yes, many fantastic movies have been made off of an incredibly high concept and a painfully low budget. Heck, that approach made Roger Corman’s career. But Sharknado‘s high concept—a tornado sweeps over the ocean and launches ravenous sharks into the mainland—comes with a self-satisfied smirk.
    Somehow, Sharknado managed to capture the imagination of the public, making it popular enough to launch five sequels. At the time, viewers defended it as a so bad it’s good-style movie like The Room. But today Sharknado‘s obvious attempts to be wacky are just bad, making the franchise one more embarrassing trend, ready to be forgotten.

    19. OrcaFor a long time, Orca had a reputation for being the most obvious Jaws ripoff, and with good reason—Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who would go on to support Flash Gordon, Manhunter, and truly launch David Lynch‘s career with Blue Velvet, wanted his own version of the Spielberg hit. On paper he had all the right ingredients, including a great cast with Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, and another oceanic threat, this time a killer whale.
    Orca boasts some impressive underwater cinematography, something that even Jaws largely lacks. But that’s the one thing Orca does better than Jaws. Everything else—character-building, suspense and scare scenes, basic plotting and storytelling—is done in such a haphazard manner that Orca plays more like an early mockbuster from the Asylum production companythan it does a product from a future Hollywood player.
    18. TentaclesAnother Italian cheapie riding off the success of Jaws, Tentacles at least manages to be fun in its ineptitude. A giant octopus feature, Tentacles is directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, a man whose greatest claim to fame is that he annoyed first-time director James Cameron so much on Piranha II: The Spawning that he activated the future legend’s infamous refusal to compromise with studios and producers.
    Tentacles somehow has a pretty impressive cast, including John Huston, Shelly Winters, and Henry Fonda all picking up paychecks. None of them really do any hard work in Tentacles, but there’s something fun about watching these greats shake the the octopus limbs that are supposed to be attacking them, as if they’re in an Ed Wood picture.
    17. Kingdom of the SpidersSpielberg famously couldn’t get his mechanical shark to work, a happy accident that he overcame with incredibly tense scenes that merely suggested the monster’s presence. For his arachnids on the forgotten movie Kingdom of the Spiders, director John “Bud” Cardos has an even more formative tool to make up for the lack of effects magic: William Shatner.
    Shatner plays Rack Hansen, a veterinarian who discovers that the overuse of pesticides has killed off smaller insects and forced the tarantula population to seek larger prey, including humans. These types of ecological messages are common among creature features of the late ’70s, and they usually clang with hollow self-righteousness. But in Kingdom of the Spiders, Shatner delivers his lines with such blown out conviction that we enjoy his bluster, even if we don’t quite buy it.

    16. The MegThe idea of Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark is an idea so awesome, it’s shocking that his character from Spy didn’t already pitch it. And The Meg certainly does deliver when Statham’s character does commit to battle with the creature in the movie’s climax. The problem is that moment of absurd heroism comes only after a lot of long sappy nonsense.

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    It’s hard to figure out who is to blame for The Meg‘s failure. Director Jon Turteltaub hails from well-remembered Disney classics Cool Runnings and National Treasure. But too often he forgets how to pace an adventure film and gives into his most saccharine instincts here. One of the many Chinese/Hollywood co-produced blockbusters of the 2010s, The Meg also suffers from trying to innocuously please too wide an audience. Whatever the source, The Meg only fleetingly delivers on the promise of big time peril, wasting too much time on thin character beats.
    15. Lake PlacidI know already some people reading this are taking exception to Lake Placid‘s low ranking, complaining that this list isn’t showing enough respect to what they consider a zippy, irreverent take on a creature feature, one written by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley and co-starring Betty White. To those people, I can only say, “Please rewatch Lake Placid and then consider its ranking.”
    Lake Placid certainly has its fun moments, helped along by White as a kindly grandmother who keeps feeding a giant croc, Bill Pullman as a dumbfounded simple sheriff, and Oliver Platt as a rich adventurer. Their various one-liners are a pleasure to remember. But within the context of a movie stuffed with late ’90s irony, the constant snark gets tiresome, sapping out all the fun of a killer crocodile film.
    14. Open WaterLike Sharknado, Open Water had its fans for a few years but has fallen in most moviegoers’ esteem. Unlike Sharknado, Open Water is a real movie, just one that can’t sustain its premise for its entire runtime.
    Writer and director Chris Kentis draws inspiration from a real-life story about a husband and wife who were accidentally abandoned in the middle of the ocean by their scuba excursion group. The same thing happens to the movie’s Susan Watkinsand Daniel Travis, who respond to their predicament by airing out their relationship grievances, even as sharks start to surround them. Kentis commits to the reality of the couple’s bleak situation, which sets Open Water apart from the thrill-a-minute movies that mostly make up this list. But even with some shocking set pieces, Open Water feels too much like being stuck in car with a couple who hates each other and not enough like a shark attack thriller.

    13. Eaten AliveSpielberg’s artful execution of Jaws led many of the filmmakers who followed to attempt some semblance of character development and prestige, even if done without enthusiasm. Not so with Tobe Hooper, who followed up the genre-defining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Eaten Alive.
    Then again, Hooper draws just as much from Psycho as he does Jaws. Neville Brand plays Judd, the proprietor of a sleazy hotel on the bayou where slimy yokels do horrible things to one another. Amity Island, this is not. But when one of the visitors annoy Judd, he feeds them to the pet croc kept in the back. Eaten Alive is a nasty bit of work, but like most of Hooper’s oeuvre, it’s a lot of fun.
    12. ProphecyDirected by John Frankenheimer of The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix fame, Prophecy is easily the best of the more high-minded animal attack movies that followed Jaws. This landlocked film, written by David Seltzer, stars Robert Foxworth as Dr. Robert Verne, a veterinarian hired by the EPA to investigate bear attacks against loggers on a mountain in Maine. Along with his wife Maggie, Verne finds himself thrown into a conflict between the mining company and the local Indigenous population who resist them.
    Prophecy drips with an American hippy mentality that reads as pretty conservative today, making its depictions of Native people, including the leader played by Italian American actor Armand Assante, pretty embarrassing. But there is a mutant bear on the loose and Frankenheimer knows how to stage an exciting sequence, which makes Prophecy a worthwhile watch.
    11. Piranha 3DPiranha 3D begins with a denim-wearing fisherman named Matt, played by Richard Dreyfuss no less, falling into the water and immediately getting devoured by the titular flesh-eaters. This weird nod to Matt Hooper and Jaws instead of Joe Dante’s Piranha, the movie Piranha 3D is supposed to be remaking, is just one of the many oddities at play yhere. Screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg have some of the wacky energy and social satire of the original film, but director Alexandre Aja, a veteran of the French Extreme movement, includes so much nastiness in Piranha 3D that we’re not sure if we want to laugh or throw up.
    Still, there’s no denying the power of Piranha 3D‘s set pieces, including a shocking sequence in which the titular beasties attack an MTV/Girls Gone Wild Spring Break party and chaos ensues. Furthermore, Piranha 3D benefits from a strong cast, which includes Elizabeth Shue, Adam Scott, and Ving Rhames.

    10. AnacondaWith its many scenes involving an animal attacking a ragtag group on a boat, Anaconda clearly owes a debt to Jaws. However, with its corny characters and shoddy late ’90s CGI, Anaconda feels today less like a Jaws knockoff and more like a forerunner to Sharknado and the boom of lazy Syfy and Redbox horror movies that followed.
    Whatever its influences and legacy, there’s no denying that Anaconda is, itself, a pretty fun movie. Giant snakes make for good movie monsters, and the special effects have become dated in a way that feels charming. Moreover, Anaconda boasts a enjoyably unlikely cast, including Eric Stoltz as a scientist, Owen Wilson and Ice Cube as members of a documentary crew, and Jon Voight as what might be the most unhinged character of his career, second only to his crossbow enthusiast from Megalopolis.
    9. The ShallowsThe Shallows isn’t the highest-ranking shark attack movie on this list but it’s definitely the most frightening shark attack thriller since Jaws. That’s high praise, indeed, but The Shallows benefits from a lean and mean premise and clear direction by Jaume Collet-Serra, who has made some solid modern thrillers. The Shallows focuses almost entirely on med student Nancy Adams, who gets caught far from shore after the tide comes in and is hunted by a shark.
    A lot of the pleasure of The Shallows comes from seeing how Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski avoid the problems that plague many of the movies on this list. Adams is an incredibly competent character, and we pull for her even after the mistake that leaves her stranded. Moreover, The Shallows perfectly balances thrill sequences with character moments, making for one of the more well-rounded creature features of the past decade.
    8. RazorbackJaws, of course, has a fantastic opening scene, a thrilling sequence in which the shark kills a drunken skinny dipper. Of the movies on this list, only Razorback comes close to matching the original’s power, and it does so because director Russell Mulcahy, who would make Highlander next, goes for glossy absurdity. In the Razorback‘s first three minutes, a hulking wild boar smashes through the rural home of an elderly man in the Australian outback, carrying away his young grandson. Over the sounds of a synth score, the old man stumbles away from his now-burning house, screaming up into the sky.
    Sadly, the rest of Razorback cannot top that moment. Mulcahy directs the picture with lots of glossy style, while retaining the grit of the Australian New Wave movement. But budget restrictions keep the titular beast from really looking as cool as one would hope, and the movie’s loud, crazy tone can’t rely on Jaws-like power of suggestion.

    7. CrawlAlexandre Aja’s second movie on this list earns its high rank precisely because it does away with the tonal inconsistencies that plagued Piranha 3D and leans into what the French filmmaker does so well: slicked down and mean horror. Set in the middle of a Florida hurricane, Crawl stars Kaya Scodelario as competitive swimmer Haley and always-welcome character actor Barry Pepper as her father Dave, who get trapped in a flooding basement that’s menaced by alligators.
    Yet as grimy as Crawl can get, Aja also executes the strong character work in the script by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen. Dave and Haley are real people, not just gator-bait, making their peril feel all the more real, and their triumphs all the sweeter.
    6. PiranhaPiranha is the only entry on this list to get a seal of approval from Stephen Spielberg himself, who not only praised the movie, even as Universal Pictures planned to sue the production, but also got director Joe Dante to later helm Gremlins. It’s not hard to see why Piranha charmed Spielberg, a man who loves wacky comedy. Dante’s Looney Tunes approach is on full display in some of the movie’s best set pieces.
    But Piranha is special because it also comes from legendary screenwriter John Sayles, who infuses the story with social satire and cynicism that somehow blends with Dante’s approach. The result is a film about piranha developed by the U.S. military to kill the Vietnamese getting unleashed into an American river and making their way to a children’s summer camp, a horrifying idea that Dante turns into good clean fun.
    5. SlugsIf we’re talking about well-made movies, then Slugs belongs way below any of the movies on this list, somewhere around the killer earthworm picture Squirm. But if we’re thinking about pure enjoyable spectacle, it’s hard to top Slugs, a movie about, yes, flesh-eating slugs.
    Yes, it’s very funny to think about people getting terrorized by creatures that are famous for moving very, very slowly. But Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón, perhaps best known for his equally bugnuts giallo Pieces, pays as little attention to realism as he does to good taste. Slugs is filled with insane and ghastly sequences of killer slugs ending up in unlikely places, swarming the floor of someone’s bedroom or inside a fancy restaurant, and then devouring people, one methodical bite at a time.

    4. Deep Blue SeaWhen it comes to goofy ’90s CGI action, it’s hard to top Deep Blue Sea, directed by Renny Harlin and featuring sharks with genetically enhanced brains. Deep Blue Sea doesn’t have a strong sense of pacing, it lacks any sort of believable character development, and the effects looked terrible even in 1999. But it’s also the only movie on this list that features LL Cool J as a cool chef who recites a violent version of the 23rd Psalm and almost gets cooked alive in an oven by a genius-level shark.
    It’s scenes like the oven sequence that makes Deep Blue Sea such a delight, despite its many, many flaws. The movie tries to do the most at every turn, whether that’s clearly reediting the movie in postproduction so that LL Cool J’s chef becomes a central character, stealing the spotlight form intended star Saffron Burrows, or a ridiculous Samuel L. Jackson monologue with a delightfully unexpected climax.
    3. AlligatorIn many ways, Alligator feels like screenwriter John Sayles’ rejoinder to Piranha. If Joe Dante sanded down Piranha‘s sharp edges with his goofy humor, then Alligator is so filled with mean-spiritedness that no director could dilute it. Not that Lewis Teague, a solid action helmer who we’ll talk about again shortly, would do that.
    Alligator transports the old adage about gators in the sewers from New York to Chicago where the titular beast, the subject of experiments to increase its size, begins preying on the innocent. And on the not so innocent. Alligator shows no respect for the good or the bad, and the film is filled with scenes of people getting devoured, whether it’s a young boy who becomes a snack during a birthday party prank or an elderly mafioso who tries to abandon his family during the gator’s rampage.
    2. GrizzlyGrizzly stands as the greatest of the movies obviously ripping off Jaws precisely because it understands its limitations. It takes what it can from Spielberg’s masterpiece, including the general premise of an animal hunting in a tourist location, and ignores what it can’t pull off, namely three-dimensional characters. This clear-eyed understanding of everyone’s abilities makes Grizzly a lean, mean, and satisfying thriller.
    Directed by blaxploitation vet William Girdler and written by Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon, Grizzly stars ’70s low-budget king Christopher George as a park ranger investigating unusually vicious bear attacks on campers. That’s not the richest concept in the world, but Girdler and co. execute their ideas with such precision, and George plays his character with just the right amount of machismo, that Grizzly manages to deliver on everything you want from an animal attack.

    1. CujoTo some modern readers, it might seem absurd to put Cujo on a list of Jaws knockoffs. After all, Stephen King is a franchise unto himself and he certainly doesn’t need another movie’s success to get a greenlight for any of his projects. But you have to remember that Cujo came out in 1983 and was just the third of his works to get adapted theatrically, which makes its Jaws connection more valid. After all, the main section of the film—in which momand her son Tadare trapped in their car and menaced by the titular St. Bernard—replicates the isolation on Quint’s fishing vessel, the Orca, better than any other film on this list.
    However, it’s not just director Lewis Teague’s ability to create tension that puts Cujo at the top. Writers Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier key into the complicated familial dynamics of King’s story, giving the characters surprising depth. It’s no wonder that Spielberg would cast Wallace as another overwhelmed mom for E.T. The Extraterrestrial the very next year, proving that he still has a soft spot for animal attack movies—even if none of them came close to matching the power of Jaws.
    #best #jaws #knockoffs #past #years
    The Best Jaws Knockoffs of the Past 50 Years
    To this day, Jaws remains the best example of Steven Spielberg‘s genius as a filmmaker. He somehow took a middling pulp novel about a killer shark and turned it into a thrilling adventure about masculinity and economic desperation. And to the surprise of no one, the massive success of Jaws spawned a lot of knockoffs, a glut of movies about animals terrorizing communities. None of these reach the majesty of Jaws, of course. But here’s the thing—none of them had to be Jaws. Sure, it’s nice that Spielberg’s film has impeccably designed set pieces and compelling characters, but that’s not the main reason people go to animal attack movies. We really just want to watch people get attacked. And eaten. With such standards duly lowered, let’s take a look at the best animal attack movies that came out in the past half-century since Jaws first scared us out of the water. Of course this list doesn’t cover every movie inspired by Jaws, and some can argue that these movies were less inspired by Jaws than other nature revolts features, such as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds. But every one of these flicks owes a debt to Jaws, either in inspiration or simply getting people interested in movies about animals eating people. Those warning aside, lets make like drunken revelers on Amity Island and dive right in! 20. SharknadoSharknado almost doesn’t belong on this list because it’s less a movie and more of a meme, a precursor to Vines and TikTok trends. Yes, many fantastic movies have been made off of an incredibly high concept and a painfully low budget. Heck, that approach made Roger Corman’s career. But Sharknado‘s high concept—a tornado sweeps over the ocean and launches ravenous sharks into the mainland—comes with a self-satisfied smirk. Somehow, Sharknado managed to capture the imagination of the public, making it popular enough to launch five sequels. At the time, viewers defended it as a so bad it’s good-style movie like The Room. But today Sharknado‘s obvious attempts to be wacky are just bad, making the franchise one more embarrassing trend, ready to be forgotten. 19. OrcaFor a long time, Orca had a reputation for being the most obvious Jaws ripoff, and with good reason—Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who would go on to support Flash Gordon, Manhunter, and truly launch David Lynch‘s career with Blue Velvet, wanted his own version of the Spielberg hit. On paper he had all the right ingredients, including a great cast with Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, and another oceanic threat, this time a killer whale. Orca boasts some impressive underwater cinematography, something that even Jaws largely lacks. But that’s the one thing Orca does better than Jaws. Everything else—character-building, suspense and scare scenes, basic plotting and storytelling—is done in such a haphazard manner that Orca plays more like an early mockbuster from the Asylum production companythan it does a product from a future Hollywood player. 18. TentaclesAnother Italian cheapie riding off the success of Jaws, Tentacles at least manages to be fun in its ineptitude. A giant octopus feature, Tentacles is directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, a man whose greatest claim to fame is that he annoyed first-time director James Cameron so much on Piranha II: The Spawning that he activated the future legend’s infamous refusal to compromise with studios and producers. Tentacles somehow has a pretty impressive cast, including John Huston, Shelly Winters, and Henry Fonda all picking up paychecks. None of them really do any hard work in Tentacles, but there’s something fun about watching these greats shake the the octopus limbs that are supposed to be attacking them, as if they’re in an Ed Wood picture. 17. Kingdom of the SpidersSpielberg famously couldn’t get his mechanical shark to work, a happy accident that he overcame with incredibly tense scenes that merely suggested the monster’s presence. For his arachnids on the forgotten movie Kingdom of the Spiders, director John “Bud” Cardos has an even more formative tool to make up for the lack of effects magic: William Shatner. Shatner plays Rack Hansen, a veterinarian who discovers that the overuse of pesticides has killed off smaller insects and forced the tarantula population to seek larger prey, including humans. These types of ecological messages are common among creature features of the late ’70s, and they usually clang with hollow self-righteousness. But in Kingdom of the Spiders, Shatner delivers his lines with such blown out conviction that we enjoy his bluster, even if we don’t quite buy it. 16. The MegThe idea of Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark is an idea so awesome, it’s shocking that his character from Spy didn’t already pitch it. And The Meg certainly does deliver when Statham’s character does commit to battle with the creature in the movie’s climax. The problem is that moment of absurd heroism comes only after a lot of long sappy nonsense. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! It’s hard to figure out who is to blame for The Meg‘s failure. Director Jon Turteltaub hails from well-remembered Disney classics Cool Runnings and National Treasure. But too often he forgets how to pace an adventure film and gives into his most saccharine instincts here. One of the many Chinese/Hollywood co-produced blockbusters of the 2010s, The Meg also suffers from trying to innocuously please too wide an audience. Whatever the source, The Meg only fleetingly delivers on the promise of big time peril, wasting too much time on thin character beats. 15. Lake PlacidI know already some people reading this are taking exception to Lake Placid‘s low ranking, complaining that this list isn’t showing enough respect to what they consider a zippy, irreverent take on a creature feature, one written by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley and co-starring Betty White. To those people, I can only say, “Please rewatch Lake Placid and then consider its ranking.” Lake Placid certainly has its fun moments, helped along by White as a kindly grandmother who keeps feeding a giant croc, Bill Pullman as a dumbfounded simple sheriff, and Oliver Platt as a rich adventurer. Their various one-liners are a pleasure to remember. But within the context of a movie stuffed with late ’90s irony, the constant snark gets tiresome, sapping out all the fun of a killer crocodile film. 14. Open WaterLike Sharknado, Open Water had its fans for a few years but has fallen in most moviegoers’ esteem. Unlike Sharknado, Open Water is a real movie, just one that can’t sustain its premise for its entire runtime. Writer and director Chris Kentis draws inspiration from a real-life story about a husband and wife who were accidentally abandoned in the middle of the ocean by their scuba excursion group. The same thing happens to the movie’s Susan Watkinsand Daniel Travis, who respond to their predicament by airing out their relationship grievances, even as sharks start to surround them. Kentis commits to the reality of the couple’s bleak situation, which sets Open Water apart from the thrill-a-minute movies that mostly make up this list. But even with some shocking set pieces, Open Water feels too much like being stuck in car with a couple who hates each other and not enough like a shark attack thriller. 13. Eaten AliveSpielberg’s artful execution of Jaws led many of the filmmakers who followed to attempt some semblance of character development and prestige, even if done without enthusiasm. Not so with Tobe Hooper, who followed up the genre-defining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Eaten Alive. Then again, Hooper draws just as much from Psycho as he does Jaws. Neville Brand plays Judd, the proprietor of a sleazy hotel on the bayou where slimy yokels do horrible things to one another. Amity Island, this is not. But when one of the visitors annoy Judd, he feeds them to the pet croc kept in the back. Eaten Alive is a nasty bit of work, but like most of Hooper’s oeuvre, it’s a lot of fun. 12. ProphecyDirected by John Frankenheimer of The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix fame, Prophecy is easily the best of the more high-minded animal attack movies that followed Jaws. This landlocked film, written by David Seltzer, stars Robert Foxworth as Dr. Robert Verne, a veterinarian hired by the EPA to investigate bear attacks against loggers on a mountain in Maine. Along with his wife Maggie, Verne finds himself thrown into a conflict between the mining company and the local Indigenous population who resist them. Prophecy drips with an American hippy mentality that reads as pretty conservative today, making its depictions of Native people, including the leader played by Italian American actor Armand Assante, pretty embarrassing. But there is a mutant bear on the loose and Frankenheimer knows how to stage an exciting sequence, which makes Prophecy a worthwhile watch. 11. Piranha 3DPiranha 3D begins with a denim-wearing fisherman named Matt, played by Richard Dreyfuss no less, falling into the water and immediately getting devoured by the titular flesh-eaters. This weird nod to Matt Hooper and Jaws instead of Joe Dante’s Piranha, the movie Piranha 3D is supposed to be remaking, is just one of the many oddities at play yhere. Screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg have some of the wacky energy and social satire of the original film, but director Alexandre Aja, a veteran of the French Extreme movement, includes so much nastiness in Piranha 3D that we’re not sure if we want to laugh or throw up. Still, there’s no denying the power of Piranha 3D‘s set pieces, including a shocking sequence in which the titular beasties attack an MTV/Girls Gone Wild Spring Break party and chaos ensues. Furthermore, Piranha 3D benefits from a strong cast, which includes Elizabeth Shue, Adam Scott, and Ving Rhames. 10. AnacondaWith its many scenes involving an animal attacking a ragtag group on a boat, Anaconda clearly owes a debt to Jaws. However, with its corny characters and shoddy late ’90s CGI, Anaconda feels today less like a Jaws knockoff and more like a forerunner to Sharknado and the boom of lazy Syfy and Redbox horror movies that followed. Whatever its influences and legacy, there’s no denying that Anaconda is, itself, a pretty fun movie. Giant snakes make for good movie monsters, and the special effects have become dated in a way that feels charming. Moreover, Anaconda boasts a enjoyably unlikely cast, including Eric Stoltz as a scientist, Owen Wilson and Ice Cube as members of a documentary crew, and Jon Voight as what might be the most unhinged character of his career, second only to his crossbow enthusiast from Megalopolis. 9. The ShallowsThe Shallows isn’t the highest-ranking shark attack movie on this list but it’s definitely the most frightening shark attack thriller since Jaws. That’s high praise, indeed, but The Shallows benefits from a lean and mean premise and clear direction by Jaume Collet-Serra, who has made some solid modern thrillers. The Shallows focuses almost entirely on med student Nancy Adams, who gets caught far from shore after the tide comes in and is hunted by a shark. A lot of the pleasure of The Shallows comes from seeing how Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski avoid the problems that plague many of the movies on this list. Adams is an incredibly competent character, and we pull for her even after the mistake that leaves her stranded. Moreover, The Shallows perfectly balances thrill sequences with character moments, making for one of the more well-rounded creature features of the past decade. 8. RazorbackJaws, of course, has a fantastic opening scene, a thrilling sequence in which the shark kills a drunken skinny dipper. Of the movies on this list, only Razorback comes close to matching the original’s power, and it does so because director Russell Mulcahy, who would make Highlander next, goes for glossy absurdity. In the Razorback‘s first three minutes, a hulking wild boar smashes through the rural home of an elderly man in the Australian outback, carrying away his young grandson. Over the sounds of a synth score, the old man stumbles away from his now-burning house, screaming up into the sky. Sadly, the rest of Razorback cannot top that moment. Mulcahy directs the picture with lots of glossy style, while retaining the grit of the Australian New Wave movement. But budget restrictions keep the titular beast from really looking as cool as one would hope, and the movie’s loud, crazy tone can’t rely on Jaws-like power of suggestion. 7. CrawlAlexandre Aja’s second movie on this list earns its high rank precisely because it does away with the tonal inconsistencies that plagued Piranha 3D and leans into what the French filmmaker does so well: slicked down and mean horror. Set in the middle of a Florida hurricane, Crawl stars Kaya Scodelario as competitive swimmer Haley and always-welcome character actor Barry Pepper as her father Dave, who get trapped in a flooding basement that’s menaced by alligators. Yet as grimy as Crawl can get, Aja also executes the strong character work in the script by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen. Dave and Haley are real people, not just gator-bait, making their peril feel all the more real, and their triumphs all the sweeter. 6. PiranhaPiranha is the only entry on this list to get a seal of approval from Stephen Spielberg himself, who not only praised the movie, even as Universal Pictures planned to sue the production, but also got director Joe Dante to later helm Gremlins. It’s not hard to see why Piranha charmed Spielberg, a man who loves wacky comedy. Dante’s Looney Tunes approach is on full display in some of the movie’s best set pieces. But Piranha is special because it also comes from legendary screenwriter John Sayles, who infuses the story with social satire and cynicism that somehow blends with Dante’s approach. The result is a film about piranha developed by the U.S. military to kill the Vietnamese getting unleashed into an American river and making their way to a children’s summer camp, a horrifying idea that Dante turns into good clean fun. 5. SlugsIf we’re talking about well-made movies, then Slugs belongs way below any of the movies on this list, somewhere around the killer earthworm picture Squirm. But if we’re thinking about pure enjoyable spectacle, it’s hard to top Slugs, a movie about, yes, flesh-eating slugs. Yes, it’s very funny to think about people getting terrorized by creatures that are famous for moving very, very slowly. But Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón, perhaps best known for his equally bugnuts giallo Pieces, pays as little attention to realism as he does to good taste. Slugs is filled with insane and ghastly sequences of killer slugs ending up in unlikely places, swarming the floor of someone’s bedroom or inside a fancy restaurant, and then devouring people, one methodical bite at a time. 4. Deep Blue SeaWhen it comes to goofy ’90s CGI action, it’s hard to top Deep Blue Sea, directed by Renny Harlin and featuring sharks with genetically enhanced brains. Deep Blue Sea doesn’t have a strong sense of pacing, it lacks any sort of believable character development, and the effects looked terrible even in 1999. But it’s also the only movie on this list that features LL Cool J as a cool chef who recites a violent version of the 23rd Psalm and almost gets cooked alive in an oven by a genius-level shark. It’s scenes like the oven sequence that makes Deep Blue Sea such a delight, despite its many, many flaws. The movie tries to do the most at every turn, whether that’s clearly reediting the movie in postproduction so that LL Cool J’s chef becomes a central character, stealing the spotlight form intended star Saffron Burrows, or a ridiculous Samuel L. Jackson monologue with a delightfully unexpected climax. 3. AlligatorIn many ways, Alligator feels like screenwriter John Sayles’ rejoinder to Piranha. If Joe Dante sanded down Piranha‘s sharp edges with his goofy humor, then Alligator is so filled with mean-spiritedness that no director could dilute it. Not that Lewis Teague, a solid action helmer who we’ll talk about again shortly, would do that. Alligator transports the old adage about gators in the sewers from New York to Chicago where the titular beast, the subject of experiments to increase its size, begins preying on the innocent. And on the not so innocent. Alligator shows no respect for the good or the bad, and the film is filled with scenes of people getting devoured, whether it’s a young boy who becomes a snack during a birthday party prank or an elderly mafioso who tries to abandon his family during the gator’s rampage. 2. GrizzlyGrizzly stands as the greatest of the movies obviously ripping off Jaws precisely because it understands its limitations. It takes what it can from Spielberg’s masterpiece, including the general premise of an animal hunting in a tourist location, and ignores what it can’t pull off, namely three-dimensional characters. This clear-eyed understanding of everyone’s abilities makes Grizzly a lean, mean, and satisfying thriller. Directed by blaxploitation vet William Girdler and written by Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon, Grizzly stars ’70s low-budget king Christopher George as a park ranger investigating unusually vicious bear attacks on campers. That’s not the richest concept in the world, but Girdler and co. execute their ideas with such precision, and George plays his character with just the right amount of machismo, that Grizzly manages to deliver on everything you want from an animal attack. 1. CujoTo some modern readers, it might seem absurd to put Cujo on a list of Jaws knockoffs. After all, Stephen King is a franchise unto himself and he certainly doesn’t need another movie’s success to get a greenlight for any of his projects. But you have to remember that Cujo came out in 1983 and was just the third of his works to get adapted theatrically, which makes its Jaws connection more valid. After all, the main section of the film—in which momand her son Tadare trapped in their car and menaced by the titular St. Bernard—replicates the isolation on Quint’s fishing vessel, the Orca, better than any other film on this list. However, it’s not just director Lewis Teague’s ability to create tension that puts Cujo at the top. Writers Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier key into the complicated familial dynamics of King’s story, giving the characters surprising depth. It’s no wonder that Spielberg would cast Wallace as another overwhelmed mom for E.T. The Extraterrestrial the very next year, proving that he still has a soft spot for animal attack movies—even if none of them came close to matching the power of Jaws. #best #jaws #knockoffs #past #years
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    The Best Jaws Knockoffs of the Past 50 Years
    To this day, Jaws remains the best example of Steven Spielberg‘s genius as a filmmaker. He somehow took a middling pulp novel about a killer shark and turned it into a thrilling adventure about masculinity and economic desperation. And to the surprise of no one, the massive success of Jaws spawned a lot of knockoffs, a glut of movies about animals terrorizing communities. None of these reach the majesty of Jaws, of course. But here’s the thing—none of them had to be Jaws. Sure, it’s nice that Spielberg’s film has impeccably designed set pieces and compelling characters, but that’s not the main reason people go to animal attack movies. We really just want to watch people get attacked. And eaten. With such standards duly lowered, let’s take a look at the best animal attack movies that came out in the past half-century since Jaws first scared us out of the water. Of course this list doesn’t cover every movie inspired by Jaws ( for example Godzilla Minus One, which devotes its middle act to a wonderful Jaws riff), and some can argue that these movies were less inspired by Jaws than other nature revolts features, such as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds. But every one of these flicks owes a debt to Jaws, either in inspiration or simply getting people interested in movies about animals eating people. Those warning aside, lets make like drunken revelers on Amity Island and dive right in! 20. Sharknado (2013) Sharknado almost doesn’t belong on this list because it’s less a movie and more of a meme, a precursor to Vines and TikTok trends. Yes, many fantastic movies have been made off of an incredibly high concept and a painfully low budget. Heck, that approach made Roger Corman’s career. But Sharknado‘s high concept—a tornado sweeps over the ocean and launches ravenous sharks into the mainland—comes with a self-satisfied smirk. Somehow, Sharknado managed to capture the imagination of the public, making it popular enough to launch five sequels. At the time, viewers defended it as a so bad it’s good-style movie like The Room. But today Sharknado‘s obvious attempts to be wacky are just bad, making the franchise one more embarrassing trend, ready to be forgotten. 19. Orca (1977) For a long time, Orca had a reputation for being the most obvious Jaws ripoff, and with good reason—Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who would go on to support Flash Gordon, Manhunter, and truly launch David Lynch‘s career with Blue Velvet, wanted his own version of the Spielberg hit. On paper he had all the right ingredients, including a great cast with Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, and another oceanic threat, this time a killer whale. Orca boasts some impressive underwater cinematography, something that even Jaws largely lacks. But that’s the one thing Orca does better than Jaws. Everything else—character-building, suspense and scare scenes, basic plotting and storytelling—is done in such a haphazard manner that Orca plays more like an early mockbuster from the Asylum production company (makers of Sharknado) than it does a product from a future Hollywood player. 18. Tentacles (1977) Another Italian cheapie riding off the success of Jaws, Tentacles at least manages to be fun in its ineptitude. A giant octopus feature, Tentacles is directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis, a man whose greatest claim to fame is that he annoyed first-time director James Cameron so much on Piranha II: The Spawning that he activated the future legend’s infamous refusal to compromise with studios and producers. Tentacles somehow has a pretty impressive cast, including John Huston, Shelly Winters, and Henry Fonda all picking up paychecks. None of them really do any hard work in Tentacles, but there’s something fun about watching these greats shake the the octopus limbs that are supposed to be attacking them, as if they’re in an Ed Wood picture. 17. Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) Spielberg famously couldn’t get his mechanical shark to work, a happy accident that he overcame with incredibly tense scenes that merely suggested the monster’s presence. For his arachnids on the forgotten movie Kingdom of the Spiders, director John “Bud” Cardos has an even more formative tool to make up for the lack of effects magic: William Shatner. Shatner plays Rack Hansen, a veterinarian who discovers that the overuse of pesticides has killed off smaller insects and forced the tarantula population to seek larger prey, including humans. These types of ecological messages are common among creature features of the late ’70s, and they usually clang with hollow self-righteousness. But in Kingdom of the Spiders, Shatner delivers his lines with such blown out conviction that we enjoy his bluster, even if we don’t quite buy it. 16. The Meg (2018) The idea of Jason Statham fighting a giant prehistoric shark is an idea so awesome, it’s shocking that his character from Spy didn’t already pitch it. And The Meg certainly does deliver when Statham’s character does commit to battle with the creature in the movie’s climax. The problem is that moment of absurd heroism comes only after a lot of long sappy nonsense. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! It’s hard to figure out who is to blame for The Meg‘s failure. Director Jon Turteltaub hails from well-remembered Disney classics Cool Runnings and National Treasure. But too often he forgets how to pace an adventure film and gives into his most saccharine instincts here. One of the many Chinese/Hollywood co-produced blockbusters of the 2010s, The Meg also suffers from trying to innocuously please too wide an audience. Whatever the source, The Meg only fleetingly delivers on the promise of big time peril, wasting too much time on thin character beats. 15. Lake Placid (1999) I know already some people reading this are taking exception to Lake Placid‘s low ranking, complaining that this list isn’t showing enough respect to what they consider a zippy, irreverent take on a creature feature, one written by Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley and co-starring Betty White. To those people, I can only say, “Please rewatch Lake Placid and then consider its ranking.” Lake Placid certainly has its fun moments, helped along by White as a kindly grandmother who keeps feeding a giant croc, Bill Pullman as a dumbfounded simple sheriff, and Oliver Platt as a rich adventurer. Their various one-liners are a pleasure to remember. But within the context of a movie stuffed with late ’90s irony, the constant snark gets tiresome, sapping out all the fun of a killer crocodile film. 14. Open Water (2003) Like Sharknado, Open Water had its fans for a few years but has fallen in most moviegoers’ esteem. Unlike Sharknado, Open Water is a real movie, just one that can’t sustain its premise for its entire runtime. Writer and director Chris Kentis draws inspiration from a real-life story about a husband and wife who were accidentally abandoned in the middle of the ocean by their scuba excursion group. The same thing happens to the movie’s Susan Watkins (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel Travis (Daniel Kintner), who respond to their predicament by airing out their relationship grievances, even as sharks start to surround them. Kentis commits to the reality of the couple’s bleak situation, which sets Open Water apart from the thrill-a-minute movies that mostly make up this list. But even with some shocking set pieces, Open Water feels too much like being stuck in car with a couple who hates each other and not enough like a shark attack thriller. 13. Eaten Alive (1976) Spielberg’s artful execution of Jaws led many of the filmmakers who followed to attempt some semblance of character development and prestige, even if done without enthusiasm (see: Orca). Not so with Tobe Hooper, who followed up the genre-defining The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Eaten Alive. Then again, Hooper draws just as much from Psycho as he does Jaws. Neville Brand plays Judd, the proprietor of a sleazy hotel on the bayou where slimy yokels do horrible things to one another. Amity Island, this is not. But when one of the visitors annoy Judd, he feeds them to the pet croc kept in the back. Eaten Alive is a nasty bit of work, but like most of Hooper’s oeuvre, it’s a lot of fun. 12. Prophecy (1979) Directed by John Frankenheimer of The Manchurian Candidate and Grand Prix fame, Prophecy is easily the best of the more high-minded animal attack movies that followed Jaws. This landlocked film, written by David Seltzer, stars Robert Foxworth as Dr. Robert Verne, a veterinarian hired by the EPA to investigate bear attacks against loggers on a mountain in Maine. Along with his wife Maggie (Talia Shire), Verne finds himself thrown into a conflict between the mining company and the local Indigenous population who resist them. Prophecy drips with an American hippy mentality that reads as pretty conservative today (“your body, your choice” one of Maggie’s friends tells her… to urge her against getting an abortion), making its depictions of Native people, including the leader played by Italian American actor Armand Assante, pretty embarrassing. But there is a mutant bear on the loose and Frankenheimer knows how to stage an exciting sequence, which makes Prophecy a worthwhile watch. 11. Piranha 3D (2010) Piranha 3D begins with a denim-wearing fisherman named Matt, played by Richard Dreyfuss no less, falling into the water and immediately getting devoured by the titular flesh-eaters. This weird nod to Matt Hooper and Jaws instead of Joe Dante’s Piranha, the movie Piranha 3D is supposed to be remaking, is just one of the many oddities at play yhere. Screenwriters Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg have some of the wacky energy and social satire of the original film, but director Alexandre Aja, a veteran of the French Extreme movement, includes so much nastiness in Piranha 3D that we’re not sure if we want to laugh or throw up. Still, there’s no denying the power of Piranha 3D‘s set pieces, including a shocking sequence in which the titular beasties attack an MTV/Girls Gone Wild Spring Break party and chaos ensues. Furthermore, Piranha 3D benefits from a strong cast, which includes Elizabeth Shue, Adam Scott, and Ving Rhames. 10. Anaconda (1997) With its many scenes involving an animal attacking a ragtag group on a boat, Anaconda clearly owes a debt to Jaws. However, with its corny characters and shoddy late ’90s CGI, Anaconda feels today less like a Jaws knockoff and more like a forerunner to Sharknado and the boom of lazy Syfy and Redbox horror movies that followed. Whatever its influences and legacy, there’s no denying that Anaconda is, itself, a pretty fun movie. Giant snakes make for good movie monsters, and the special effects have become dated in a way that feels charming. Moreover, Anaconda boasts a enjoyably unlikely cast, including Eric Stoltz as a scientist, Owen Wilson and Ice Cube as members of a documentary crew, and Jon Voight as what might be the most unhinged character of his career, second only to his crossbow enthusiast from Megalopolis. 9. The Shallows (2016) The Shallows isn’t the highest-ranking shark attack movie on this list but it’s definitely the most frightening shark attack thriller since Jaws. That’s high praise, indeed, but The Shallows benefits from a lean and mean premise and clear direction by Jaume Collet-Serra, who has made some solid modern thrillers. The Shallows focuses almost entirely on med student Nancy Adams (Blake Lively), who gets caught far from shore after the tide comes in and is hunted by a shark. A lot of the pleasure of The Shallows comes from seeing how Collet-Serra and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski avoid the problems that plague many of the movies on this list. Adams is an incredibly competent character, and we pull for her even after the mistake that leaves her stranded. Moreover, The Shallows perfectly balances thrill sequences with character moments, making for one of the more well-rounded creature features of the past decade. 8. Razorback (1984) Jaws, of course, has a fantastic opening scene, a thrilling sequence in which the shark kills a drunken skinny dipper. Of the movies on this list, only Razorback comes close to matching the original’s power, and it does so because director Russell Mulcahy, who would make Highlander next, goes for glossy absurdity. In the Razorback‘s first three minutes, a hulking wild boar smashes through the rural home of an elderly man in the Australian outback, carrying away his young grandson. Over the sounds of a synth score, the old man stumbles away from his now-burning house, screaming up into the sky. Sadly, the rest of Razorback cannot top that moment. Mulcahy directs the picture with lots of glossy style, while retaining the grit of the Australian New Wave movement. But budget restrictions keep the titular beast from really looking as cool as one would hope, and the movie’s loud, crazy tone can’t rely on Jaws-like power of suggestion. 7. Crawl (2019) Alexandre Aja’s second movie on this list earns its high rank precisely because it does away with the tonal inconsistencies that plagued Piranha 3D and leans into what the French filmmaker does so well: slicked down and mean horror. Set in the middle of a Florida hurricane, Crawl stars Kaya Scodelario as competitive swimmer Haley and always-welcome character actor Barry Pepper as her father Dave, who get trapped in a flooding basement that’s menaced by alligators. Yet as grimy as Crawl can get, Aja also executes the strong character work in the script by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen. Dave and Haley are real people, not just gator-bait, making their peril feel all the more real, and their triumphs all the sweeter. 6. Piranha (1978) Piranha is the only entry on this list to get a seal of approval from Stephen Spielberg himself, who not only praised the movie, even as Universal Pictures planned to sue the production, but also got director Joe Dante to later helm Gremlins. It’s not hard to see why Piranha charmed Spielberg, a man who loves wacky comedy. Dante’s Looney Tunes approach is on full display in some of the movie’s best set pieces. But Piranha is special because it also comes from legendary screenwriter John Sayles, who infuses the story with social satire and cynicism that somehow blends with Dante’s approach. The result is a film about piranha developed by the U.S. military to kill the Vietnamese getting unleashed into an American river and making their way to a children’s summer camp, a horrifying idea that Dante turns into good clean fun. 5. Slugs (1988) If we’re talking about well-made movies, then Slugs belongs way below any of the movies on this list, somewhere around the killer earthworm picture Squirm. But if we’re thinking about pure enjoyable spectacle, it’s hard to top Slugs, a movie about, yes, flesh-eating slugs. Yes, it’s very funny to think about people getting terrorized by creatures that are famous for moving very, very slowly. But Spanish director Juan Piquer Simón, perhaps best known for his equally bugnuts giallo Pieces (1982), pays as little attention to realism as he does to good taste. Slugs is filled with insane and ghastly sequences of killer slugs ending up in unlikely places, swarming the floor of someone’s bedroom or inside a fancy restaurant, and then devouring people, one methodical bite at a time. 4. Deep Blue Sea (1999) When it comes to goofy ’90s CGI action, it’s hard to top Deep Blue Sea, directed by Renny Harlin and featuring sharks with genetically enhanced brains. Deep Blue Sea doesn’t have a strong sense of pacing, it lacks any sort of believable character development, and the effects looked terrible even in 1999. But it’s also the only movie on this list that features LL Cool J as a cool chef who recites a violent version of the 23rd Psalm and almost gets cooked alive in an oven by a genius-level shark. It’s scenes like the oven sequence that makes Deep Blue Sea such a delight, despite its many, many flaws. The movie tries to do the most at every turn, whether that’s clearly reediting the movie in postproduction so that LL Cool J’s chef becomes a central character, stealing the spotlight form intended star Saffron Burrows, or a ridiculous Samuel L. Jackson monologue with a delightfully unexpected climax. 3. Alligator (1980) In many ways, Alligator feels like screenwriter John Sayles’ rejoinder to Piranha. If Joe Dante sanded down Piranha‘s sharp edges with his goofy humor, then Alligator is so filled with mean-spiritedness that no director could dilute it. Not that Lewis Teague, a solid action helmer who we’ll talk about again shortly, would do that. Alligator transports the old adage about gators in the sewers from New York to Chicago where the titular beast, the subject of experiments to increase its size, begins preying on the innocent. And on the not so innocent. Alligator shows no respect for the good or the bad, and the film is filled with scenes of people getting devoured, whether it’s a young boy who becomes a snack during a birthday party prank or an elderly mafioso who tries to abandon his family during the gator’s rampage. 2. Grizzly (1976) Grizzly stands as the greatest of the movies obviously ripping off Jaws precisely because it understands its limitations. It takes what it can from Spielberg’s masterpiece, including the general premise of an animal hunting in a tourist location, and ignores what it can’t pull off, namely three-dimensional characters. This clear-eyed understanding of everyone’s abilities makes Grizzly a lean, mean, and satisfying thriller. Directed by blaxploitation vet William Girdler and written by Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon, Grizzly stars ’70s low-budget king Christopher George as a park ranger investigating unusually vicious bear attacks on campers. That’s not the richest concept in the world, but Girdler and co. execute their ideas with such precision, and George plays his character with just the right amount of machismo, that Grizzly manages to deliver on everything you want from an animal attack. 1. Cujo (1983) To some modern readers, it might seem absurd to put Cujo on a list of Jaws knockoffs. After all, Stephen King is a franchise unto himself and he certainly doesn’t need another movie’s success to get a greenlight for any of his projects. But you have to remember that Cujo came out in 1983 and was just the third of his works to get adapted theatrically, which makes its Jaws connection more valid. After all, the main section of the film—in which mom (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro) are trapped in their car and menaced by the titular St. Bernard—replicates the isolation on Quint’s fishing vessel, the Orca, better than any other film on this list. However, it’s not just director Lewis Teague’s ability to create tension that puts Cujo at the top. Writers Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier key into the complicated familial dynamics of King’s story, giving the characters surprising depth. It’s no wonder that Spielberg would cast Wallace as another overwhelmed mom for E.T. The Extraterrestrial the very next year, proving that he still has a soft spot for animal attack movies—even if none of them came close to matching the power of Jaws.
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  • Scientists Gene-Hack Spider to Produce Bright-Red Silk

    Researchers used the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR to modify the DNA sequences of house spiders, causing them to produce red fluorescent silk.Scientists are hoping that the US Navy and Air Force-funded research could lead to the development of new "supermaterials" produced by arachnids, Fast Company reports.As detailed in a paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a team of researchers at the University of Bayreuth in Germany injected the eggs of unfertilized female spiders with a CRISPR-Cas9 solution to insert a gene sequence for a red fluorescent protein. After mating with males of the same species, the offspring produced red, fluorescent silk, demonstrating that the experiment had been successful."Considering the wide range of possible applications, it is surprising that there have been no studies to date using CRISPR-Cas9 in spiders," said senior author and University of Bayreuth professor Thomas Scheibel in a statement. "We have demonstrated, for the first time worldwide, that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to incorporate a desired sequence into spider silk proteins, thereby enabling the functionalisation of these silk fibres."Apart from turning their silk bright red, the researchers also attempted to knock out a gene called sine oculis, which is responsible for the development of spider eyes. They found that the gene edit caused total or partial eye loss in experiments, highlighting its important role in visual development.By applying CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that has already been widely used to create custom medical treatments or make farm animals more resilient to diseases, the researchers are hoping to come up with a new generation of silk fibers."Successful spider silk engineering in vivo will, therefore, help to develop and employ new fiber functionalities for a broad range of applications," the team wrote in its paper. "So far, genetic modifications in spiders have been only aimed at evolutionary and developmental research."As Fast Company points out, materials scientists have already been investigating the tactile strength of the silk produced by gene-modified silkworms. But thanks to cutting-edge gene-editing techniques, researchers could soon harness the unique advantages of spider silk as well.While the researchers didn't single out specific use cases for future "supermaterials," the possible applications are practically endless, from lightweight body armor to ultralight running shoes."The ability to apply CRISPR gene-editing to spider silk is very promising for materials science research — for example, it could be used to further increase the already high tensile strength of spider silk," Scheibel explained.Share This Article
    #scientists #genehack #spider #produce #brightred
    Scientists Gene-Hack Spider to Produce Bright-Red Silk
    Researchers used the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR to modify the DNA sequences of house spiders, causing them to produce red fluorescent silk.Scientists are hoping that the US Navy and Air Force-funded research could lead to the development of new "supermaterials" produced by arachnids, Fast Company reports.As detailed in a paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a team of researchers at the University of Bayreuth in Germany injected the eggs of unfertilized female spiders with a CRISPR-Cas9 solution to insert a gene sequence for a red fluorescent protein. After mating with males of the same species, the offspring produced red, fluorescent silk, demonstrating that the experiment had been successful."Considering the wide range of possible applications, it is surprising that there have been no studies to date using CRISPR-Cas9 in spiders," said senior author and University of Bayreuth professor Thomas Scheibel in a statement. "We have demonstrated, for the first time worldwide, that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to incorporate a desired sequence into spider silk proteins, thereby enabling the functionalisation of these silk fibres."Apart from turning their silk bright red, the researchers also attempted to knock out a gene called sine oculis, which is responsible for the development of spider eyes. They found that the gene edit caused total or partial eye loss in experiments, highlighting its important role in visual development.By applying CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that has already been widely used to create custom medical treatments or make farm animals more resilient to diseases, the researchers are hoping to come up with a new generation of silk fibers."Successful spider silk engineering in vivo will, therefore, help to develop and employ new fiber functionalities for a broad range of applications," the team wrote in its paper. "So far, genetic modifications in spiders have been only aimed at evolutionary and developmental research."As Fast Company points out, materials scientists have already been investigating the tactile strength of the silk produced by gene-modified silkworms. But thanks to cutting-edge gene-editing techniques, researchers could soon harness the unique advantages of spider silk as well.While the researchers didn't single out specific use cases for future "supermaterials," the possible applications are practically endless, from lightweight body armor to ultralight running shoes."The ability to apply CRISPR gene-editing to spider silk is very promising for materials science research — for example, it could be used to further increase the already high tensile strength of spider silk," Scheibel explained.Share This Article #scientists #genehack #spider #produce #brightred
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    Scientists Gene-Hack Spider to Produce Bright-Red Silk
    Researchers used the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR to modify the DNA sequences of house spiders, causing them to produce red fluorescent silk.Scientists are hoping that the US Navy and Air Force-funded research could lead to the development of new "supermaterials" produced by arachnids, Fast Company reports.As detailed in a paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a team of researchers at the University of Bayreuth in Germany injected the eggs of unfertilized female spiders with a CRISPR-Cas9 solution to insert a gene sequence for a red fluorescent protein. After mating with males of the same species, the offspring produced red, fluorescent silk, demonstrating that the experiment had been successful."Considering the wide range of possible applications, it is surprising that there have been no studies to date using CRISPR-Cas9 in spiders," said senior author and University of Bayreuth professor Thomas Scheibel in a statement. "We have demonstrated, for the first time worldwide, that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to incorporate a desired sequence into spider silk proteins, thereby enabling the functionalisation of these silk fibres."Apart from turning their silk bright red, the researchers also attempted to knock out a gene called sine oculis, which is responsible for the development of spider eyes. They found that the gene edit caused total or partial eye loss in experiments, highlighting its important role in visual development.By applying CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that has already been widely used to create custom medical treatments or make farm animals more resilient to diseases, the researchers are hoping to come up with a new generation of silk fibers."Successful spider silk engineering in vivo will, therefore, help to develop and employ new fiber functionalities for a broad range of applications," the team wrote in its paper. "So far, genetic modifications in spiders have been only aimed at evolutionary and developmental research."As Fast Company points out, materials scientists have already been investigating the tactile strength of the silk produced by gene-modified silkworms. But thanks to cutting-edge gene-editing techniques, researchers could soon harness the unique advantages of spider silk as well.While the researchers didn't single out specific use cases for future "supermaterials," the possible applications are practically endless, from lightweight body armor to ultralight running shoes."The ability to apply CRISPR gene-editing to spider silk is very promising for materials science research — for example, it could be used to further increase the already high tensile strength of spider silk," Scheibel explained.Share This Article
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  • The first teeth were sensory organs on the skin of ancient fish

    CT scan of the front of a skate, showing the hard, tooth-like denticleson its skinYara Haridy
    Teeth first evolved as sensory organs, not for chewing, according to a new analysis of animal fossils. The first tooth-like structures seem to have been sensitive nodules on the skin of early fish that could detect changes in the surrounding water.
    The finding supports a long-standing idea that teeth first evolved outside the mouth, says Yara Haridy at the University of Chicago.
    Advertisement
    While there was some evidence to back this up, there was an obvious question. “What good is having all these teeth on the outside?” says Haridy. One possibility was that they served as defensive armour, but Haridy thinks there was more to it. “It’s great to cover yourself in hard things, but what if those hard things could also help you sense your environment?”
    True teeth are only found in backboned vertebrates, like fish and mammals. Some invertebrates have tooth-like structures, but the underlying tissues are completely different. This means teeth originated during the evolution of the earliest vertebrates: fish.
    Haridy and her team re-examined fossils that have been claimed to be the oldest examples of fish teeth, using a synchrotron to scan them in unprecedented detail.

    Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.

    Sign up to newsletter

    They focused first on fragmentary fossils of animals called Anatolepis, which date from the later part of the Cambrian Period, which ran from 539 million to 487 million years ago, and early in the Ordovician Period, which ran from 487 million to 443 million years ago. These animals had a hard exoskeleton, dotted with tubules.
    These had been interpreted as being tubules of dentine, one of the hard tissues that make up teeth. In human teeth, dentine is the yellow layer under the hard white enamel and it performs many functions, including sensing pressure, temperature and pain.
    This led to the idea that the tubules are precursors to teeth called odontodes and that Anatolepis is an early fish.
    That isn’t what Haridy and her team found. “We saw that the internal anatomydidn’t actually look like a vertebrate at all,” she says. After examining structures from a range of animals, they found that the tubules were most similar to features called sensilla found on the exoskeletons of arthropods like insects and spiders. These look like pegs or small hairs and detect a range of phenomena. “It can be everything from taste to vibration to changes in air currents,” says Haridy.
    This means Anatolepis is an arthropod, not a fish, and its tubules aren’t the direct precursors to teeth.

    “Dentine is likely a vertebrate novelty, yet the sensory capabilities of a hardened external surface were present much earlier in invertebrates,” says Gareth Fraser at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who wasn’t involved in the study.
    With Anatolepis out of the picture, the team says, the oldest known teeth are those of Eriptychius, which is only known from the Ordovician Period. These do have true dentine – in odontodes on their skin.
    Haridy says invertebrates like Anatolepis and early vertebrates like Eriptychius independently evolved hard, sensory nodules on their skin. “These two very different animals needed to sense their way through the muck of ancient seas,” she says. In line with this, the team found that the odontodes on the skin of some modern fish still have nerves – suggesting a sensory function.
    Once some fish became active predators, they needed a way to hold onto their prey, so the hard odontodes made their way to the mouth, where they could be used to bite.
    “Based on the available data, tooth-like structures likely first evolved in the skin of early vertebrates, prior to the oral invasion of these structures that became teeth,” says Fraser.
    Journal reference:Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08944-w
    Topics:
    #first #teeth #were #sensory #organs
    The first teeth were sensory organs on the skin of ancient fish
    CT scan of the front of a skate, showing the hard, tooth-like denticleson its skinYara Haridy Teeth first evolved as sensory organs, not for chewing, according to a new analysis of animal fossils. The first tooth-like structures seem to have been sensitive nodules on the skin of early fish that could detect changes in the surrounding water. The finding supports a long-standing idea that teeth first evolved outside the mouth, says Yara Haridy at the University of Chicago. Advertisement While there was some evidence to back this up, there was an obvious question. “What good is having all these teeth on the outside?” says Haridy. One possibility was that they served as defensive armour, but Haridy thinks there was more to it. “It’s great to cover yourself in hard things, but what if those hard things could also help you sense your environment?” True teeth are only found in backboned vertebrates, like fish and mammals. Some invertebrates have tooth-like structures, but the underlying tissues are completely different. This means teeth originated during the evolution of the earliest vertebrates: fish. Haridy and her team re-examined fossils that have been claimed to be the oldest examples of fish teeth, using a synchrotron to scan them in unprecedented detail. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up to newsletter They focused first on fragmentary fossils of animals called Anatolepis, which date from the later part of the Cambrian Period, which ran from 539 million to 487 million years ago, and early in the Ordovician Period, which ran from 487 million to 443 million years ago. These animals had a hard exoskeleton, dotted with tubules. These had been interpreted as being tubules of dentine, one of the hard tissues that make up teeth. In human teeth, dentine is the yellow layer under the hard white enamel and it performs many functions, including sensing pressure, temperature and pain. This led to the idea that the tubules are precursors to teeth called odontodes and that Anatolepis is an early fish. That isn’t what Haridy and her team found. “We saw that the internal anatomydidn’t actually look like a vertebrate at all,” she says. After examining structures from a range of animals, they found that the tubules were most similar to features called sensilla found on the exoskeletons of arthropods like insects and spiders. These look like pegs or small hairs and detect a range of phenomena. “It can be everything from taste to vibration to changes in air currents,” says Haridy. This means Anatolepis is an arthropod, not a fish, and its tubules aren’t the direct precursors to teeth. “Dentine is likely a vertebrate novelty, yet the sensory capabilities of a hardened external surface were present much earlier in invertebrates,” says Gareth Fraser at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who wasn’t involved in the study. With Anatolepis out of the picture, the team says, the oldest known teeth are those of Eriptychius, which is only known from the Ordovician Period. These do have true dentine – in odontodes on their skin. Haridy says invertebrates like Anatolepis and early vertebrates like Eriptychius independently evolved hard, sensory nodules on their skin. “These two very different animals needed to sense their way through the muck of ancient seas,” she says. In line with this, the team found that the odontodes on the skin of some modern fish still have nerves – suggesting a sensory function. Once some fish became active predators, they needed a way to hold onto their prey, so the hard odontodes made their way to the mouth, where they could be used to bite. “Based on the available data, tooth-like structures likely first evolved in the skin of early vertebrates, prior to the oral invasion of these structures that became teeth,” says Fraser. Journal reference:Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08944-w Topics: #first #teeth #were #sensory #organs
    WWW.NEWSCIENTIST.COM
    The first teeth were sensory organs on the skin of ancient fish
    CT scan of the front of a skate, showing the hard, tooth-like denticles (orange) on its skinYara Haridy Teeth first evolved as sensory organs, not for chewing, according to a new analysis of animal fossils. The first tooth-like structures seem to have been sensitive nodules on the skin of early fish that could detect changes in the surrounding water. The finding supports a long-standing idea that teeth first evolved outside the mouth, says Yara Haridy at the University of Chicago. Advertisement While there was some evidence to back this up, there was an obvious question. “What good is having all these teeth on the outside?” says Haridy. One possibility was that they served as defensive armour, but Haridy thinks there was more to it. “It’s great to cover yourself in hard things, but what if those hard things could also help you sense your environment?” True teeth are only found in backboned vertebrates, like fish and mammals. Some invertebrates have tooth-like structures, but the underlying tissues are completely different. This means teeth originated during the evolution of the earliest vertebrates: fish. Haridy and her team re-examined fossils that have been claimed to be the oldest examples of fish teeth, using a synchrotron to scan them in unprecedented detail. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up to newsletter They focused first on fragmentary fossils of animals called Anatolepis, which date from the later part of the Cambrian Period, which ran from 539 million to 487 million years ago, and early in the Ordovician Period, which ran from 487 million to 443 million years ago. These animals had a hard exoskeleton, dotted with tubules. These had been interpreted as being tubules of dentine, one of the hard tissues that make up teeth. In human teeth, dentine is the yellow layer under the hard white enamel and it performs many functions, including sensing pressure, temperature and pain. This led to the idea that the tubules are precursors to teeth called odontodes and that Anatolepis is an early fish. That isn’t what Haridy and her team found. “We saw that the internal anatomy [of the tubules] didn’t actually look like a vertebrate at all,” she says. After examining structures from a range of animals, they found that the tubules were most similar to features called sensilla found on the exoskeletons of arthropods like insects and spiders. These look like pegs or small hairs and detect a range of phenomena. “It can be everything from taste to vibration to changes in air currents,” says Haridy. This means Anatolepis is an arthropod, not a fish, and its tubules aren’t the direct precursors to teeth. “Dentine is likely a vertebrate novelty, yet the sensory capabilities of a hardened external surface were present much earlier in invertebrates,” says Gareth Fraser at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who wasn’t involved in the study. With Anatolepis out of the picture, the team says, the oldest known teeth are those of Eriptychius, which is only known from the Ordovician Period. These do have true dentine – in odontodes on their skin. Haridy says invertebrates like Anatolepis and early vertebrates like Eriptychius independently evolved hard, sensory nodules on their skin. “These two very different animals needed to sense their way through the muck of ancient seas,” she says. In line with this, the team found that the odontodes on the skin of some modern fish still have nerves – suggesting a sensory function. Once some fish became active predators, they needed a way to hold onto their prey, so the hard odontodes made their way to the mouth, where they could be used to bite. “Based on the available data, tooth-like structures likely first evolved in the skin of early vertebrates, prior to the oral invasion of these structures that became teeth,” says Fraser. Journal reference:Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08944-w Topics:
    0 Комментарии 0 Поделились 0 предпросмотр
  • Where Did Kosmos-482 Land? No One Is Sure

    May 18, 2025Accidental Alchemy, Flamingo Food Tornado, and Kosmos-482 LandsKosmos-482 crash-lands, physicists turn lead to gold and animals show some clever behaviors. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyHappy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Allison Parshall filling in for Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.First, an update on that doomed Soviet-era spacecraft Rachel mentioned last week. After spending more than half a century orbiting Earth, the Kosmos-482 probe made a crash landing on May 10. According to a post on the app Telegram from Russian space agency Roscosmos, the spacecraft crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Space.com reports that other space agencies have estimated different landing spots for the probe, from locations on land in South Asia to stretches of the eastern Pacific. We may never know exactly where Kosmos-482 finally came to rest. In any case, we haven’t heard any reports of falling space junk causing harm to humans, so it seems likely the object crashed somewhere out of the way.Now for some accidental alchemy. Despite the wishes of medieval scholars, there’s no way to turn lead into gold, right? Wrong. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider apparently did just that—very briefly, but still. The scientists published a description of this magical-sounding transformation earlier this month in the journal Physical Review C. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Here’s how it worked: Scientists at CERN use the Large Hadron Collider to study the early universe by firing lead nuclei at one another at nearly the speed of light. Instead of smashing head-on, the nuclei usually pass very close to one another. In these near-misses, the powerful electric field from one nucleus can shake up the other. If the field is strong enough, it can knock out three protons from an incoming lead nucleus. Since gold has three fewer protons than lead, this transforms the lead into gold.The researchers estimate that 89,000 gold nuclei are produced per second during these experiments. That means that between 2015 and 2018—the accelerator’s second run, which is when the scientists collected this data—the collider produced 29 trillionths of a gram of gold. Unfortunately for any prospectors at CERN, those atoms tend to get obliterated in about a microsecond. Nature reports that another CERN accelerator also observed this alchemical reaction during a 2002 to 2004 run. But because that experiment used less energy, less gold was produced.In public health news, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last Wednesday indicates a massive drop in overdose deaths between 2023 and 2024. In the 45 years that the CDC has collected equivalent data, the biggest one-year dip seen previously was 4 percent in 2018, according to the Associated Press. Deaths dropped from about 110,000 in 2023 to roughly 80,000 in 2024, which represents a nearly 27 percent decrease. The AP reports that experts mentioned several possible factors behind the drop, including the increased availability of naloxone for treating overdoses.It’s important to note that, while this is promising news, we still have a long way to go. Overdose deaths are still higher than they were before the COVID pandemic, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for people in the U.S. between ages 18 and 44. If you don’t already carry naloxone with you in case you encounter someone experiencing an overdose, consider looking into what resources your state and county offer for training and distribution. You can check out GetNaloxoneNow.org to find more information.We’ll wrap up with a couple of fun animal stories.Let’s start with flamingos. They’re not exactly known for being very active. You’re probably picturing the birds standing calmly in crystal clear water. But according to a study published last Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they’re surprisingly busy just beneath the surface.Similar to the way spiders use webs to trap prey, the study authors say, flamingos create little water tornados to coax food straight into their mouths.First, the birds use their feet to churn sediment up. Then they jerk their heads up, turning those small whorls of sediment into vortexes. Meanwhile, the animals chatter their beaks to create even more water movement, pulling the swirling sediment into their mouths. From there, the flamingos can filter out tiny prey such as brine shrimp—but it seems like this filter feeding is a lot less passive than it looks.In other animal news, it turns out that chimps use leaves for everything from first aid to bathroom hygiene. In a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers describe their observations of two different communities of chimpanzees in Uganda. The researchers identified numerous instances of “self-care” using leaves, from dabbing wounds to packing them with chewed-up plant matter. The chimps sometimes offered this care to others, too. That’s similar to behavior other researchers reported last year in orangutans over in Indonesia. Orangutans have also been seen applying juice made from saliva and the leaves of a plant with anti-inflammatory properties all over their bodies, which scientists suspect they might be doing to relieve joint and muscle pain.Plants seem to be part of a larger wellness routine for chimps, too: the scientists also saw them using leaves to clean themselves up after pooping or having sex. The researchers even described one instance of what they called “prosocial postcoital penis wiping,” which means one chimp leant another a hand with intimate personal hygiene.While these aren’t the first documented cases of first aid in nonhuman animals—or even in chimps, who have been seen putting smashed insects in their wounds, possibly for medicinal purposes—scientists are excited to see evidence that medicinal plant use might be more widespread than expected among our close relatives. That could suggest that wound care goes way, way back in our evolutionary history.That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Rachel will be back on Wednesday.Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by me, Allison Parshall, and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Allison Parshall. Have a great week!
    #where #did #kosmos482 #land #one
    Where Did Kosmos-482 Land? No One Is Sure
    May 18, 2025Accidental Alchemy, Flamingo Food Tornado, and Kosmos-482 LandsKosmos-482 crash-lands, physicists turn lead to gold and animals show some clever behaviors. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyHappy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Allison Parshall filling in for Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.First, an update on that doomed Soviet-era spacecraft Rachel mentioned last week. After spending more than half a century orbiting Earth, the Kosmos-482 probe made a crash landing on May 10. According to a post on the app Telegram from Russian space agency Roscosmos, the spacecraft crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Space.com reports that other space agencies have estimated different landing spots for the probe, from locations on land in South Asia to stretches of the eastern Pacific. We may never know exactly where Kosmos-482 finally came to rest. In any case, we haven’t heard any reports of falling space junk causing harm to humans, so it seems likely the object crashed somewhere out of the way.Now for some accidental alchemy. Despite the wishes of medieval scholars, there’s no way to turn lead into gold, right? Wrong. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider apparently did just that—very briefly, but still. The scientists published a description of this magical-sounding transformation earlier this month in the journal Physical Review C. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Here’s how it worked: Scientists at CERN use the Large Hadron Collider to study the early universe by firing lead nuclei at one another at nearly the speed of light. Instead of smashing head-on, the nuclei usually pass very close to one another. In these near-misses, the powerful electric field from one nucleus can shake up the other. If the field is strong enough, it can knock out three protons from an incoming lead nucleus. Since gold has three fewer protons than lead, this transforms the lead into gold.The researchers estimate that 89,000 gold nuclei are produced per second during these experiments. That means that between 2015 and 2018—the accelerator’s second run, which is when the scientists collected this data—the collider produced 29 trillionths of a gram of gold. Unfortunately for any prospectors at CERN, those atoms tend to get obliterated in about a microsecond. Nature reports that another CERN accelerator also observed this alchemical reaction during a 2002 to 2004 run. But because that experiment used less energy, less gold was produced.In public health news, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last Wednesday indicates a massive drop in overdose deaths between 2023 and 2024. In the 45 years that the CDC has collected equivalent data, the biggest one-year dip seen previously was 4 percent in 2018, according to the Associated Press. Deaths dropped from about 110,000 in 2023 to roughly 80,000 in 2024, which represents a nearly 27 percent decrease. The AP reports that experts mentioned several possible factors behind the drop, including the increased availability of naloxone for treating overdoses.It’s important to note that, while this is promising news, we still have a long way to go. Overdose deaths are still higher than they were before the COVID pandemic, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for people in the U.S. between ages 18 and 44. If you don’t already carry naloxone with you in case you encounter someone experiencing an overdose, consider looking into what resources your state and county offer for training and distribution. You can check out GetNaloxoneNow.org to find more information.We’ll wrap up with a couple of fun animal stories.Let’s start with flamingos. They’re not exactly known for being very active. You’re probably picturing the birds standing calmly in crystal clear water. But according to a study published last Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they’re surprisingly busy just beneath the surface.Similar to the way spiders use webs to trap prey, the study authors say, flamingos create little water tornados to coax food straight into their mouths.First, the birds use their feet to churn sediment up. Then they jerk their heads up, turning those small whorls of sediment into vortexes. Meanwhile, the animals chatter their beaks to create even more water movement, pulling the swirling sediment into their mouths. From there, the flamingos can filter out tiny prey such as brine shrimp—but it seems like this filter feeding is a lot less passive than it looks.In other animal news, it turns out that chimps use leaves for everything from first aid to bathroom hygiene. In a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers describe their observations of two different communities of chimpanzees in Uganda. The researchers identified numerous instances of “self-care” using leaves, from dabbing wounds to packing them with chewed-up plant matter. The chimps sometimes offered this care to others, too. That’s similar to behavior other researchers reported last year in orangutans over in Indonesia. Orangutans have also been seen applying juice made from saliva and the leaves of a plant with anti-inflammatory properties all over their bodies, which scientists suspect they might be doing to relieve joint and muscle pain.Plants seem to be part of a larger wellness routine for chimps, too: the scientists also saw them using leaves to clean themselves up after pooping or having sex. The researchers even described one instance of what they called “prosocial postcoital penis wiping,” which means one chimp leant another a hand with intimate personal hygiene.While these aren’t the first documented cases of first aid in nonhuman animals—or even in chimps, who have been seen putting smashed insects in their wounds, possibly for medicinal purposes—scientists are excited to see evidence that medicinal plant use might be more widespread than expected among our close relatives. That could suggest that wound care goes way, way back in our evolutionary history.That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Rachel will be back on Wednesday.Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by me, Allison Parshall, and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Allison Parshall. Have a great week! #where #did #kosmos482 #land #one
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    Where Did Kosmos-482 Land? No One Is Sure
    May 18, 2025Accidental Alchemy, Flamingo Food Tornado, and Kosmos-482 LandsKosmos-482 crash-lands, physicists turn lead to gold and animals show some clever behaviors. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyHappy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Allison Parshall filling in for Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.First, an update on that doomed Soviet-era spacecraft Rachel mentioned last week. After spending more than half a century orbiting Earth, the Kosmos-482 probe made a crash landing on May 10. According to a post on the app Telegram from Russian space agency Roscosmos, the spacecraft crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Space.com reports that other space agencies have estimated different landing spots for the probe, from locations on land in South Asia to stretches of the eastern Pacific. We may never know exactly where Kosmos-482 finally came to rest. In any case, we haven’t heard any reports of falling space junk causing harm to humans, so it seems likely the object crashed somewhere out of the way.Now for some accidental alchemy. Despite the wishes of medieval scholars, there’s no way to turn lead into gold, right? Wrong. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider apparently did just that—very briefly, but still. The scientists published a description of this magical-sounding transformation earlier this month in the journal Physical Review C. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Here’s how it worked: Scientists at CERN use the Large Hadron Collider to study the early universe by firing lead nuclei at one another at nearly the speed of light. Instead of smashing head-on, the nuclei usually pass very close to one another. In these near-misses, the powerful electric field from one nucleus can shake up the other. If the field is strong enough, it can knock out three protons from an incoming lead nucleus. Since gold has three fewer protons than lead, this transforms the lead into gold.The researchers estimate that 89,000 gold nuclei are produced per second during these experiments. That means that between 2015 and 2018—the accelerator’s second run, which is when the scientists collected this data—the collider produced 29 trillionths of a gram of gold. Unfortunately for any prospectors at CERN, those atoms tend to get obliterated in about a microsecond. Nature reports that another CERN accelerator also observed this alchemical reaction during a 2002 to 2004 run. But because that experiment used less energy, less gold was produced.In public health news, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last Wednesday indicates a massive drop in overdose deaths between 2023 and 2024. In the 45 years that the CDC has collected equivalent data, the biggest one-year dip seen previously was 4 percent in 2018, according to the Associated Press. Deaths dropped from about 110,000 in 2023 to roughly 80,000 in 2024, which represents a nearly 27 percent decrease. The AP reports that experts mentioned several possible factors behind the drop, including the increased availability of naloxone for treating overdoses.It’s important to note that, while this is promising news, we still have a long way to go. Overdose deaths are still higher than they were before the COVID pandemic, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for people in the U.S. between ages 18 and 44. If you don’t already carry naloxone with you in case you encounter someone experiencing an overdose, consider looking into what resources your state and county offer for training and distribution. You can check out GetNaloxoneNow.org to find more information.We’ll wrap up with a couple of fun animal stories.Let’s start with flamingos. They’re not exactly known for being very active. You’re probably picturing the birds standing calmly in crystal clear water. But according to a study published last Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they’re surprisingly busy just beneath the surface.Similar to the way spiders use webs to trap prey, the study authors say, flamingos create little water tornados to coax food straight into their mouths.First, the birds use their feet to churn sediment up. Then they jerk their heads up, turning those small whorls of sediment into vortexes. Meanwhile, the animals chatter their beaks to create even more water movement, pulling the swirling sediment into their mouths. From there, the flamingos can filter out tiny prey such as brine shrimp—but it seems like this filter feeding is a lot less passive than it looks.In other animal news, it turns out that chimps use leaves for everything from first aid to bathroom hygiene. In a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers describe their observations of two different communities of chimpanzees in Uganda. The researchers identified numerous instances of “self-care” using leaves, from dabbing wounds to packing them with chewed-up plant matter. The chimps sometimes offered this care to others, too. That’s similar to behavior other researchers reported last year in orangutans over in Indonesia. Orangutans have also been seen applying juice made from saliva and the leaves of a plant with anti-inflammatory properties all over their bodies, which scientists suspect they might be doing to relieve joint and muscle pain.Plants seem to be part of a larger wellness routine for chimps, too: the scientists also saw them using leaves to clean themselves up after pooping or having sex. The researchers even described one instance of what they called “prosocial postcoital penis wiping,” which means one chimp leant another a hand with intimate personal hygiene.While these aren’t the first documented cases of first aid in nonhuman animals—or even in chimps, who have been seen putting smashed insects in their wounds, possibly for medicinal purposes—scientists are excited to see evidence that medicinal plant use might be more widespread than expected among our close relatives. That could suggest that wound care goes way, way back in our evolutionary history.That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Rachel will be back on Wednesday.Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by me, Allison Parshall, and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Allison Parshall. Have a great week!
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  • Big Avowed updates will be ready for you when you’re done with Oblivion and Clair Obscur

    Obsidian Entertainment has released a roadmap for Avowed, just in time for you to finish up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The studio has revealed what players can look forward to in the Living Lands with the release of the May 2025 1.4 update and what’s coming next.Much of the new content deals with quality-of-life efforts and a focus on implementing more content for those who have completed their adventure.According to the company’s statement regarding the new content, the improvements were greatly influenced by the Avowed community’s “continued reports, feedback, and suggestions.”Check out the big plans Obsidian has planned for Avowed below.Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via PolygonMay 2025The 1.4 update rolled out on Friday, May 15, and focused on fog of war improvements, map exploration, increased gold and crafting materials, soul pods, and unique gear.Additionally, Obsidian added keyboard and mouse support for Xbox players, new optional settings for chests to appear on the minimap, power attacks for the bow and arquebus, and even an arachnophobia mode that replaces the sinister and petrifying spiders with “floating orbs that still pack a punch.”But that’s not all; Obsidian tackled more bugs, crashes, glitches, and exploits in the new update, the full details of which can be found here.Summer 2025An update planned for the upcoming hot summer months will improve cooking and crafting, piggybacking off the 1.3.1 update. The summer patch will also bring new NPC behaviors and abilities, active and passive abilities, unique weapons and armor, and custom map markers for exploration.Fall 2025This fall, the Avowed community will be finally treated to a new game plus feature, breathing a second life into the action RPG title. Along with new game plus, the fall 2025 update will include new weapon types, the ability to change appearances in the wild, new character presets, more Godlike presets, and photo mode — because if you don’t have a picture, did it really happen?Image: ObsidianBeyondIt’s unclear whether the game will continue to receive major content in 2026. However, Obsidian did call attention to its plans for localizing Avowed for Korean and Japanese audiences, as well as ongoing improvements for French-speaking regions, all available at a future and unnamed date.Avowed was released in February 2025 and may have been more recently overshadowed by show-stealing titles such as Oblivion and Expedition 33, both which released in April. But, with major update commitments, it appears Avowed will be ready for you when you return from Cyrodiil and Lumière, respectively.Are you looking forward to picking Avowed back up, or trying this game for the first time? Let us know!See More:
    #big #avowed #updates #will #ready
    Big Avowed updates will be ready for you when you’re done with Oblivion and Clair Obscur
    Obsidian Entertainment has released a roadmap for Avowed, just in time for you to finish up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The studio has revealed what players can look forward to in the Living Lands with the release of the May 2025 1.4 update and what’s coming next.Much of the new content deals with quality-of-life efforts and a focus on implementing more content for those who have completed their adventure.According to the company’s statement regarding the new content, the improvements were greatly influenced by the Avowed community’s “continued reports, feedback, and suggestions.”Check out the big plans Obsidian has planned for Avowed below.Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via PolygonMay 2025The 1.4 update rolled out on Friday, May 15, and focused on fog of war improvements, map exploration, increased gold and crafting materials, soul pods, and unique gear.Additionally, Obsidian added keyboard and mouse support for Xbox players, new optional settings for chests to appear on the minimap, power attacks for the bow and arquebus, and even an arachnophobia mode that replaces the sinister and petrifying spiders with “floating orbs that still pack a punch.”But that’s not all; Obsidian tackled more bugs, crashes, glitches, and exploits in the new update, the full details of which can be found here.Summer 2025An update planned for the upcoming hot summer months will improve cooking and crafting, piggybacking off the 1.3.1 update. The summer patch will also bring new NPC behaviors and abilities, active and passive abilities, unique weapons and armor, and custom map markers for exploration.Fall 2025This fall, the Avowed community will be finally treated to a new game plus feature, breathing a second life into the action RPG title. Along with new game plus, the fall 2025 update will include new weapon types, the ability to change appearances in the wild, new character presets, more Godlike presets, and photo mode — because if you don’t have a picture, did it really happen?Image: ObsidianBeyondIt’s unclear whether the game will continue to receive major content in 2026. However, Obsidian did call attention to its plans for localizing Avowed for Korean and Japanese audiences, as well as ongoing improvements for French-speaking regions, all available at a future and unnamed date.Avowed was released in February 2025 and may have been more recently overshadowed by show-stealing titles such as Oblivion and Expedition 33, both which released in April. But, with major update commitments, it appears Avowed will be ready for you when you return from Cyrodiil and Lumière, respectively.Are you looking forward to picking Avowed back up, or trying this game for the first time? Let us know!See More: #big #avowed #updates #will #ready
    WWW.POLYGON.COM
    Big Avowed updates will be ready for you when you’re done with Oblivion and Clair Obscur
    Obsidian Entertainment has released a roadmap for Avowed, just in time for you to finish up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The studio has revealed what players can look forward to in the Living Lands with the release of the May 2025 1.4 update and what’s coming next.Much of the new content deals with quality-of-life efforts and a focus on implementing more content for those who have completed their adventure.According to the company’s statement regarding the new content, the improvements were greatly influenced by the Avowed community’s “continued reports, feedback, and suggestions.”Check out the big plans Obsidian has planned for Avowed below.Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via PolygonMay 2025The 1.4 update rolled out on Friday, May 15, and focused on fog of war improvements, map exploration, increased gold and crafting materials, soul pods, and unique gear.Additionally, Obsidian added keyboard and mouse support for Xbox players, new optional settings for chests to appear on the minimap, power attacks for the bow and arquebus, and even an arachnophobia mode that replaces the sinister and petrifying spiders with “floating orbs that still pack a punch.”But that’s not all; Obsidian tackled more bugs, crashes, glitches, and exploits in the new update, the full details of which can be found here.Summer 2025An update planned for the upcoming hot summer months will improve cooking and crafting, piggybacking off the 1.3.1 update. The summer patch will also bring new NPC behaviors and abilities, active and passive abilities, unique weapons and armor, and custom map markers for exploration.Fall 2025This fall, the Avowed community will be finally treated to a new game plus feature, breathing a second life into the action RPG title. Along with new game plus, the fall 2025 update will include new weapon types, the ability to change appearances in the wild, new character presets, more Godlike presets, and photo mode — because if you don’t have a picture, did it really happen?Image: ObsidianBeyond(?)It’s unclear whether the game will continue to receive major content in 2026. However, Obsidian did call attention to its plans for localizing Avowed for Korean and Japanese audiences, as well as ongoing improvements for French-speaking regions, all available at a future and unnamed date.Avowed was released in February 2025 and may have been more recently overshadowed by show-stealing titles such as Oblivion and Expedition 33, both which released in April. But, with major update commitments, it appears Avowed will be ready for you when you return from Cyrodiil and Lumière, respectively.Are you looking forward to picking Avowed back up, or trying this game for the first time? Let us know!See More:
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  • Spider-Gwen’s Twisty 2025 Continues in New Comic Relaunch

    Ever since she first debuted as a superheroic variant of Gwen Stacy in 2014, Spider-Gwen has become a semi-staple of Spider-Man media. If she’s not swinging on her own with Miles or Peter, she’s caught up in her own situations. While the original Gwen is being revived and turned into Gwenpool in a few months, the wallcrawling Stacy is getting another solo comic that help keep her in the orbit of other Spider-heroes.

    So in All-New Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider from returning writer and artist duo Stephanie Phillips and Paolo Villanelli, Gwen continues to be a full-time resident of Earth-616. Like her fellow Spiders before her, she’s in her “brand new” era: a new costume, a new place to live, and she’s even looking to start up a new rock band. Those plans of hers get thrown into disarray when she’s got new threats to tangle with, at least one of which Phillips teased “might be her own fault.” © David Marquez/Marvel Comics Previous Spider-Gwen runs explored how she made the most of her new lease on life, either in 616 or her home dimension of Earth-65, and the same’s true with this All-New series. Philips said the book’s core theme is about “possibility.She’s finally in a place where she can build something new—new allies, new purpose, and maybe even a new sense of self.” Of course, with Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse possibly hitting theaters in June 2027, it also doesn’t hurt to have Gwen headlining a new comic and maybe being a key part of whatever the next major Spider-book crossover is whenever that hits in the next few years.

    All-New Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider begins on August 20 following the end of the current Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider run wrapping with Issue 15 on July 2.Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
    #spidergwens #twisty #continues #new #comic
    Spider-Gwen’s Twisty 2025 Continues in New Comic Relaunch
    Ever since she first debuted as a superheroic variant of Gwen Stacy in 2014, Spider-Gwen has become a semi-staple of Spider-Man media. If she’s not swinging on her own with Miles or Peter, she’s caught up in her own situations. While the original Gwen is being revived and turned into Gwenpool in a few months, the wallcrawling Stacy is getting another solo comic that help keep her in the orbit of other Spider-heroes. So in All-New Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider from returning writer and artist duo Stephanie Phillips and Paolo Villanelli, Gwen continues to be a full-time resident of Earth-616. Like her fellow Spiders before her, she’s in her “brand new” era: a new costume, a new place to live, and she’s even looking to start up a new rock band. Those plans of hers get thrown into disarray when she’s got new threats to tangle with, at least one of which Phillips teased “might be her own fault.” © David Marquez/Marvel Comics Previous Spider-Gwen runs explored how she made the most of her new lease on life, either in 616 or her home dimension of Earth-65, and the same’s true with this All-New series. Philips said the book’s core theme is about “possibility.She’s finally in a place where she can build something new—new allies, new purpose, and maybe even a new sense of self.” Of course, with Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse possibly hitting theaters in June 2027, it also doesn’t hurt to have Gwen headlining a new comic and maybe being a key part of whatever the next major Spider-book crossover is whenever that hits in the next few years. All-New Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider begins on August 20 following the end of the current Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider run wrapping with Issue 15 on July 2.Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #spidergwens #twisty #continues #new #comic
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    Spider-Gwen’s Twisty 2025 Continues in New Comic Relaunch
    Ever since she first debuted as a superheroic variant of Gwen Stacy in 2014, Spider-Gwen has become a semi-staple of Spider-Man media. If she’s not swinging on her own with Miles or Peter, she’s caught up in her own situations. While the original Gwen is being revived and turned into Gwenpool in a few months, the wallcrawling Stacy is getting another solo comic that help keep her in the orbit of other Spider-heroes. So in All-New Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider from returning writer and artist duo Stephanie Phillips and Paolo Villanelli, Gwen continues to be a full-time resident of Earth-616. Like her fellow Spiders before her, she’s in her “brand new” era: a new costume, a new place to live, and she’s even looking to start up a new rock band. Those plans of hers get thrown into disarray when she’s got new threats to tangle with, at least one of which Phillips teased “might be her own fault.” © David Marquez/Marvel Comics Previous Spider-Gwen runs explored how she made the most of her new lease on life, either in 616 or her home dimension of Earth-65, and the same’s true with this All-New series. Philips said the book’s core theme is about “possibility. […] She’s finally in a place where she can build something new—new allies, new purpose, and maybe even a new sense of self.” Of course, with Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse possibly hitting theaters in June 2027, it also doesn’t hurt to have Gwen headlining a new comic and maybe being a key part of whatever the next major Spider-book crossover is whenever that hits in the next few years. All-New Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider begins on August 20 following the end of the current Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider run wrapping with Issue 15 on July 2. [via Collider] Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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  • The Eureka Moment May Be An Important Part of the Memory-Making Process

    There’s something so satisfying about surprising “aha!” moments — those strange instances of insight that strike when you’re struggling with a problem and arrive at an answer suddenly, seemingly without warning. But is satisfying all that those moments are?Apparently not, as it turns out that the flashes of inspiration you feel when a solution finally bursts into your brain are much more than pleasurable. They’re also an important part of your memory-making process. Tied to surges of activity in your brain, these moments may shape your ideas into stronger memories, a new neuroimaging study suggests. Published in Nature Communications, the results may adjust the way we approach education, as environments that encourage learners to explore problems and experience “eureka” moments may lead to longer-lasting learning. New Insight Into Eureka MomentsExample of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; corresponding real-world picture on the right.It’s a bit of a stretch to say that the relationship between “aha!” moments and memory is a sudden insight in and of itself, as eureka moments and epiphanies have been associated with memory boosts before. But little is known about how, exactly, these moments work, and about how they’re tied to memory at a neuroscientific level. Setting out to study the neural mechanisms that connect sudden insight and memory together, the authors of the new study recorded people’s neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imagingas they solved a series of visual puzzles. After the participants solved the puzzles, the researchers then prompted them to describe their thought process — particularly, whether they worked out their solutions suddenly or slowly, with a single moment of inspiration or without. Analyzing the participants’ recordings along with their responses, the authors revealed that the puzzles that participants solved with moments of sudden insight were associated with surges of activity in the hippocampus — a small structure in the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory. In fact, the researchers even linked stronger moments of inspiration to stronger surges of activity in the hippocampus. And these surges weren’t trivial, either, as they meant that participants were “actually more likely to remember the solution” to particular puzzles later on, said lead study author Maxi Becker, a neuroscience researcher at Humboldt University, according to a press release. When the authors tested the participants to see whether they remembered their solutions to the puzzles several days after they solved them, the results revealed that they recalled the solutions they settled on suddenly, with a sense of epiphany, better than those they settled on slowly, without that same sense. “If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” said senior study author Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, according to a press release. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”Read More: What Happens in Your Brain When You Make Memories?Measuring ‘Aha!’ MomentsExample of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; the corresponding real-world picture on the right.The puzzles themselves were simple, though they were still able to encourage epiphanies on a small scale. Testing their ability to parse through patchy visual information, the puzzles prompted participants to identify ambiguous black-and-white images of objects and of animals, such as snakes, snails, and spiders. “It’s just a little discovery that you are making, but it produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,” Cabeza said in the release. According to the researchers, the brain recordings also revealed bumps in activity in brain regions responsible for visual recognition, with a stronger sense of sudden insight being seen with a stronger bump in activity in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Not only that, the researchers also revealed an association between more intense “aha!” moments and more intense brain connectivity between the hippocampus and the VOTC. “The different regions essentially communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza said in the release.Ultimately, the study provides important insights into the neuroscience of some of our most sudden, most creative, and most satisfying solutions. It also supports the idea that exploratory learning, based on active inquiry and investigation, may be better for our minds by encouraging these surprising moments to occur. “Insight is key for creativity,” Cabeza said in the release — a lesson for learning that all of us should try to remember.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Nature Communications. Insight Predicts Subsequent Memory via Cortical Representational Change and Hippocampal ActivityPsychological Research. Aha! Experiences Leave a Mark: Facilitated Recall of Insight SolutionsSam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
    #eureka #moment #important #part #memorymaking
    The Eureka Moment May Be An Important Part of the Memory-Making Process
    There’s something so satisfying about surprising “aha!” moments — those strange instances of insight that strike when you’re struggling with a problem and arrive at an answer suddenly, seemingly without warning. But is satisfying all that those moments are?Apparently not, as it turns out that the flashes of inspiration you feel when a solution finally bursts into your brain are much more than pleasurable. They’re also an important part of your memory-making process. Tied to surges of activity in your brain, these moments may shape your ideas into stronger memories, a new neuroimaging study suggests. Published in Nature Communications, the results may adjust the way we approach education, as environments that encourage learners to explore problems and experience “eureka” moments may lead to longer-lasting learning. New Insight Into Eureka MomentsExample of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; corresponding real-world picture on the right.It’s a bit of a stretch to say that the relationship between “aha!” moments and memory is a sudden insight in and of itself, as eureka moments and epiphanies have been associated with memory boosts before. But little is known about how, exactly, these moments work, and about how they’re tied to memory at a neuroscientific level. Setting out to study the neural mechanisms that connect sudden insight and memory together, the authors of the new study recorded people’s neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imagingas they solved a series of visual puzzles. After the participants solved the puzzles, the researchers then prompted them to describe their thought process — particularly, whether they worked out their solutions suddenly or slowly, with a single moment of inspiration or without. Analyzing the participants’ recordings along with their responses, the authors revealed that the puzzles that participants solved with moments of sudden insight were associated with surges of activity in the hippocampus — a small structure in the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory. In fact, the researchers even linked stronger moments of inspiration to stronger surges of activity in the hippocampus. And these surges weren’t trivial, either, as they meant that participants were “actually more likely to remember the solution” to particular puzzles later on, said lead study author Maxi Becker, a neuroscience researcher at Humboldt University, according to a press release. When the authors tested the participants to see whether they remembered their solutions to the puzzles several days after they solved them, the results revealed that they recalled the solutions they settled on suddenly, with a sense of epiphany, better than those they settled on slowly, without that same sense. “If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” said senior study author Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, according to a press release. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”Read More: What Happens in Your Brain When You Make Memories?Measuring ‘Aha!’ MomentsExample of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; the corresponding real-world picture on the right.The puzzles themselves were simple, though they were still able to encourage epiphanies on a small scale. Testing their ability to parse through patchy visual information, the puzzles prompted participants to identify ambiguous black-and-white images of objects and of animals, such as snakes, snails, and spiders. “It’s just a little discovery that you are making, but it produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,” Cabeza said in the release. According to the researchers, the brain recordings also revealed bumps in activity in brain regions responsible for visual recognition, with a stronger sense of sudden insight being seen with a stronger bump in activity in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Not only that, the researchers also revealed an association between more intense “aha!” moments and more intense brain connectivity between the hippocampus and the VOTC. “The different regions essentially communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza said in the release.Ultimately, the study provides important insights into the neuroscience of some of our most sudden, most creative, and most satisfying solutions. It also supports the idea that exploratory learning, based on active inquiry and investigation, may be better for our minds by encouraging these surprising moments to occur. “Insight is key for creativity,” Cabeza said in the release — a lesson for learning that all of us should try to remember.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Nature Communications. Insight Predicts Subsequent Memory via Cortical Representational Change and Hippocampal ActivityPsychological Research. Aha! Experiences Leave a Mark: Facilitated Recall of Insight SolutionsSam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. #eureka #moment #important #part #memorymaking
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    The Eureka Moment May Be An Important Part of the Memory-Making Process
    There’s something so satisfying about surprising “aha!” moments — those strange instances of insight that strike when you’re struggling with a problem and arrive at an answer suddenly, seemingly without warning. But is satisfying all that those moments are?Apparently not, as it turns out that the flashes of inspiration you feel when a solution finally bursts into your brain are much more than pleasurable. They’re also an important part of your memory-making process. Tied to surges of activity in your brain, these moments may shape your ideas into stronger memories, a new neuroimaging study suggests. Published in Nature Communications, the results may adjust the way we approach education, as environments that encourage learners to explore problems and experience “eureka” moments may lead to longer-lasting learning. New Insight Into Eureka MomentsExample of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; corresponding real-world picture on the right. (Image Credit: Maxi Becker) It’s a bit of a stretch to say that the relationship between “aha!” moments and memory is a sudden insight in and of itself, as eureka moments and epiphanies have been associated with memory boosts before. But little is known about how, exactly, these moments work, and about how they’re tied to memory at a neuroscientific level. Setting out to study the neural mechanisms that connect sudden insight and memory together, the authors of the new study recorded people’s neural activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they solved a series of visual puzzles. After the participants solved the puzzles, the researchers then prompted them to describe their thought process — particularly, whether they worked out their solutions suddenly or slowly, with a single moment of inspiration or without. Analyzing the participants’ recordings along with their responses, the authors revealed that the puzzles that participants solved with moments of sudden insight were associated with surges of activity in the hippocampus — a small structure in the brain that’s responsible for learning and memory. In fact, the researchers even linked stronger moments of inspiration to stronger surges of activity in the hippocampus. And these surges weren’t trivial, either, as they meant that participants were “actually more likely to remember the solution” to particular puzzles later on, said lead study author Maxi Becker, a neuroscience researcher at Humboldt University, according to a press release. When the authors tested the participants to see whether they remembered their solutions to the puzzles several days after they solved them, the results revealed that they recalled the solutions they settled on suddenly, with a sense of epiphany, better than those they settled on slowly, without that same sense. “If you have an ‘aha! moment’ while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,” said senior study author Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, according to a press release. “There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.”Read More: What Happens in Your Brain When You Make Memories?Measuring ‘Aha!’ MomentsExample of the hidden picture puzzles in the black/white images on the left; the corresponding real-world picture on the right. (Image Credit: Maxi Becker.) The puzzles themselves were simple, though they were still able to encourage epiphanies on a small scale. Testing their ability to parse through patchy visual information, the puzzles prompted participants to identify ambiguous black-and-white images of objects and of animals, such as snakes, snails, and spiders. “It’s just a little discovery that you are making, but it produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,” Cabeza said in the release. According to the researchers, the brain recordings also revealed bumps in activity in brain regions responsible for visual recognition, with a stronger sense of sudden insight being seen with a stronger bump in activity in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC). Not only that, the researchers also revealed an association between more intense “aha!” moments and more intense brain connectivity between the hippocampus and the VOTC. “The different regions essentially communicate with each other more efficiently,” Cabeza said in the release.Ultimately, the study provides important insights into the neuroscience of some of our most sudden, most creative, and most satisfying solutions. It also supports the idea that exploratory learning, based on active inquiry and investigation, may be better for our minds by encouraging these surprising moments to occur. “Insight is key for creativity,” Cabeza said in the release — a lesson for learning that all of us should try to remember.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Nature Communications. Insight Predicts Subsequent Memory via Cortical Representational Change and Hippocampal ActivityPsychological Research. Aha! Experiences Leave a Mark: Facilitated Recall of Insight SolutionsSam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
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