It's the same every year. Like clockwork, both social media and real media clamour to do what they do best: moan. Not about politics. Not about the trains. Not even about the weather. No, it's Glastonbury Festival time, which means it's time for the annual whinge-fest over how much it costs and how bad the line-up is. It's a tradition as sacred as Glastonbury itself. Within minutes of the headliners being announced, someone somewhere will tweet "WHO?" as if that settles the matter. The tickets, they declare, are extortionate. The food is overpriced. The toilets are... well, they're not wrong there, to be fair. And yet Glastonbury sells out. Every. Single. Time. In minutes. Not hours, not days, but minutes; just 35 of them, this time around. A digital stampede of fans crashes the ticketing servers, elbows each other out of the virtual queue, and desperately parts with £373.50 of their hard-earned cash. If people really thought it wasn't worth it, why would that happen? Deep down, Glastonbury fans know it is worth it. Not just for the vibes. Not just for the bragging rights. In terms of basic maths alone, it remains a much cheaper way to see all your favourite bands compared with buying tickets to individual gigs. Let's break it down. From this year's stacked, genre-hopping, generation-spanning line-up, these are my 10 ride-or-die bands, the ones I'm determined to see come hell or high water at this year's Glastonbury. And next to them is a reasonable estimate of how much it would cost to see them individually on tour. Alanis Morissette: £60-£135 Charli XCX: £85-£200+ English Teacher: £25-£35 Gracie Abrams: £100-£400+ John Fogerty: £35-£130+ Lola Young: £25-£40 Olivia Rodrigo: £120-£200+ Raye: £50-£100+ Wet Leg: £30-£40 Wolf Alice: £40-£60 You can quickly see how these individual tickets would add up, and that's before the beer-soaked chips and £17 parking surcharges at the O2. But at Glastonbury, they're all included, alongside more than two thousand other acts. Plus five nights of camping, firewood, circus performers, standup comedy, theatre performers, secret gigs, DnB raves, late-night poetry slams, kids' clubs, drone shows, the visionary chaos of Shangri-La, a bloke dressed as a badger doing tai chi at 4am, and the very real possibility of watching Chris Martin duet with a kestrel. All for less than the price of one premium Olivia Rodrigo ticket at the Birmingham NEC with a half-decent sightline. © Amy Fern © George Harrison © Amy Fern No one involved with the festival will ever say this out loud... but in truth, this is underpricing. Glastonbury doesn't cost too much; it's that it's charging less than it's worth. The organisers know it, the scalpers know it, and deep down, so do we. Why else would the event remain massively oversubscribed year after year? The lesson for freelancers Herein lies the lesson for anyone who's ever said yes to a freelance gig, then immediately regretted it because the fee barely covers your oat milk habit. Every time you flinch at raising our rates, worrying, "What if they say no?" you need to remember that people will always complain about the price. But then they pay it anyway, if what you're offering is good. Just like a Glastonbury ticket, your work has value that goes beyond the sum of its parts. Clients might baulk at a day rate, grumble at a quote, or attempt the classic "Can you do it for exposure?". But if they really want you, they'll find the budget. Sure, you could try to undercut your peers. Offer the cheapest design package. Throw in extra concepts for free. Discount your fee before they even ask. But all that gets you is the creative equivalent of being the sad burger stand next to the rave tent: underpaid, undervalued, and slightly sticky. Here's the uncomfortable truth: clients don't always know what things should cost. They base their expectations on their last hire, a Fiverr ad, or what their mate's cousin paid a graphic design student in 2017. © George Harrison © Yushy Pachnanda © JodyHartley But it's not your job to price yourself within their comfort zone. It's your job to price yourself according to your value. If clients can't afford you, that's not rejection; that's redirection. Someone else—someone better, someone ready—will always pay you what you're worth. Just like someone always buys the last Glastonbury ticket. So ignore the noise. Just like the festival, you're not for everyone, and that's fine. Your rates should make you feel slightly nervous, not make your client feel overly comfortable. That's how you grow. That's how you stay booked. That's how you avoid burnout and build a business rather than a bargain bin. In other words, next time you feel the urge to knock 20% off your quote "just to be safe", picture yourself standing in a Somerset field surrounded by 200,000 sweaty strangers who all agreed—despite the price, despite the moaning, despite the toilets—that it was absolutely worth it. And then charge accordingly.

In 2025, it’s very difficult not to see gambling advertised everywhere. It’s on billboards and sports broadcasts. It’s on podcasts and printed on the turnbuckle of AEW’s pay-per-view shows. And it’s on app stores, where you can find the FanDuel and DraftKings sportsbooks, alongside glitzy digital slot machines. These apps all have the highest age ratings possible on Apple’s App Store and Google Play. But earlier this year, a different kind of app nearly disappeared from the Play Store entirely.Luck Be A Landlord is a roguelite deckbuilder from solo developer Dan DiIorio. DiIorio got word from Google in January 2025 that Luck Be A Landlord was about to be pulled, globally, because DiIorio had not disclosed the game’s “gambling themes” in its rating.In Luck Be a Landlord, the player takes spins on a pixel art slot machine to earn coins to pay their ever-increasing rent — a nightmare gamification of our day-to-day grind to remain housed. On app stores, it’s a one-time purchase of $4.99, and it’s $9.99 on Steam. On the Play Store page, developer Dan DiIorio notes, “This game does not contain any real-world currency gambling or microtransactions.”And it doesn’t. But for Google, that didn’t matter. First, the game was removed from the storefront in a slew of countries that have strict gambling laws. Then, at the beginning of 2025, Google told Dilorio that Luck Be A Landlord would be pulled globally because of its rating discrepancy, as it “does not take into account references to gambling (including real or simulated gambling)”.DiIorio had gone through this song and dance before — previously, when the game was blocked, he would send back a message saying “hey, the game doesn’t have gambling,” and then Google would send back a screenshot of the game and assert that, in fact, it had.DiIorio didn’t agree, but this time they decided that the risk of Landlord getting taken down permanently was too great. They’re a solo developer, and Luck Be a Landlord had just had its highest 30-day revenue since release. So, they filled out the form confirming that Luck Be A Landlord has “gambling themes,” and are currently hoping that this will be the end of it.This is a situation that sucks for an indie dev to be in, and over email DiIorio told Polygon it was “very frustrating.”“I think it can negatively affect indie developers if they fall outside the norm, which indies often do,” they wrote. “It also makes me afraid to explore mechanics like this further. It stifles creativity, and that’s really upsetting.”In late 2024, the hit game Balatro was in a similar position. It had won numerous awards, and made $1,000,000 in its first week on mobile platforms. And then overnight, the PEGI ratings board declared that the game deserved an adult rating.The ESRB had already rated it E10+ in the US, noting it has gambling themes. And the game was already out in Europe, making its overnight ratings change a surprise. Publisher PlayStack said the rating was given because Balatro has “prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling.”Balatro is basically Luck Be A Landlord’s little cousin. Developer LocalThunk was inspired by watching streams of Luck Be A Landlord, and seeing the way DiIorio had implemented deck-building into his slot machine. And like Luck Be A Landlord, Balatro is a one-time purchase, with no microtransactions.But the PEGI board noted that because the game uses poker hands, the skills the player learns in Balatro could translate to real-world poker.In its write-up, GameSpot noted that the same thing happened to a game called Sunshine Shuffle. It was temporarily banned from the Nintendo eShop, and also from the entire country of South Korea. Unlike Balatro, Sunshine Shuffle actually is a poker game, except you’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em — again for no real money — with cute animals (who are bank robbers).It’s common sense that children shouldn’t be able to access apps that allow them to gamble. But none of these games contain actual gambling — or do they?Where do we draw the line? Is it gambling to play any game that is also played in casinos, like poker or blackjack? Is it gambling to play a game that evokes the aesthetics of a casino, like cards, chips, dice, or slot machines? Is it gambling to wager or earn fictional money?Gaming has always been a lightning rod for controversy. Sex, violence, misogyny, addiction — you name it, video games have been accused of perpetrating or encouraging it. But gambling is gaming’s original sin. And it’s the one we still can’t get a grip on.The original link between gambling and gamingGetty ImagesThe association between video games and gambling all goes back to pinball. Back in the ’30s and ’40s, politicians targeted pinball machines for promoting gambling. Early pinball machines were less skill-based (they didn’t have flippers), and some gave cash payouts, so the comparison wasn’t unfair. Famously, mob-hating New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia banned pinball in the city, and appeared in a newsreel dumping pinball and slot machines into the Long Island Sound. Pinball machines spent some time relegated to the back rooms of sex shops and dive bars. But after some lobbying, the laws relaxed.By the 1970s, pinball manufacturers were also making video games, and the machines were side-by-side in arcades. Arcade machines, like pinball, took small coin payments, repeatedly, for short rounds of play. The disreputable funk of pinball basically rubbed off onto video games.Ever since video games rocked onto the scene, concerned and sometimes uneducated parties have been asking if they’re dangerous. And in general, studies have shown that they’re not. The same can’t be said about gambling — the practice of putting real money down to bet on an outcome.It’s a golden age for gambling2025 in the USA is a great time for gambling, which has been really profitable for gambling companies — to the tune of $66.5 billion dollars of revenue in 2023.To put this number in perspective, the American Gaming Association, which is the casino industry’s trade group and has nothing to do with video games, reports that 2022’s gambling revenue was $60.5 billion. It went up $6 billion in a year.And this increase isn’t just because of sportsbooks, although sports betting is a huge part of it. Online casinos and brick-and-mortar casinos are both earning more, and as a lot of people have pointed out, gambling is being normalized to a pretty disturbing degree.Much like with alcohol, for a small percentage of people, gambling can tip from occasional leisure activity into addiction. The people who are most at risk are, by and large, already vulnerable: researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that 96% of problem gamblers are also wrestling with other disorders, such as “substance use, impulse-control disorders, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders.”Even if you’re not in that group, there are still good reasons to be wary of gambling. People tend to underestimate their own vulnerability to things they know are dangerous for others. Someone else might bet beyond their means. But I would simply know when to stop.Maybe you do! But being blithely confident about it can make it hard to notice if you do develop a problem. Or if you already have one.Addiction changes the way your brain works. When you’re addicted to something, your participation in it becomes compulsive, at the expense of other interests and responsibilities. Someone might turn to their addiction to self-soothe when depressed or anxious. And speaking of those feelings, people who are depressed and anxious are already more vulnerable to addiction. Given the entire state of the world right now, this predisposition shines an ugly light on the numbers touted by the AGA. Is it good that the industry is reporting $6 billion in additional earnings, when the economy feels so frail, when the stock market is ping ponging through highs and lows daily, when daily expenses are rising? It doesn’t feel good. In 2024, the YouTuber Drew Gooden turned his critical eye to online gambling. One of the main points he makes in his excellent video is that gambling is more accessible than ever. It’s on all our phones, and betting companies are using decades of well-honed app design and behavioral studies to manipulate users to spend and spend.Meanwhile, advertising on podcasts, billboards, TV, radio, and websites – it’s literally everywhere — tells you that this is fun, and you don’t even need to know what you’re doing, and you’re probably one bet away from winning back those losses.Where does Luck Be a Landlord come into this?So, are there gambling themes in Luck Be A Landlord? The game’s slot machine is represented in simple pixel art. You pay one coin to use it, and among the more traditional slot machine symbols are silly ones like a snail that only pays out after 4 spins.When I started playing it, my primary emotion wasn’t necessarily elation at winning coins — it was stress and disbelief when, in the third round of the game, the landlord increased my rent by 100%. What the hell.I don’t doubt that getting better at it would produce dopamine thrills akin to gambling — or playing any video game. But it’s supposed to be difficult, because that’s the joke. If you beat the game you unlock more difficulty modes where, as you keep paying rent, your landlord gets furious, and starts throwing made-up rules at you: previously rare symbols will give you less of a payout, and the very mechanics of the slot machine change.It’s a manifestation of the golden rule of casinos, and all of capitalism writ large: the odds are stacked against you. The house always wins. There is luck involved, to be sure, but because Luck Be A Landlord is a deck-builder, knowing the different ways you can design your slot machine to maximize payouts is a skill! You have some influence over it, unlike a real slot machine. The synergies that I’ve seen high-level players create are completely nuts, and obviously based on a deep understanding of the strategies the game allows.IMAGE: TrampolineTales via PolygonBalatro and Luck Be a Landlord both distance themselves from casino gambling again in the way they treat money. In Landlord, the money you earn is gold coins, not any currency we recognize. And the payouts aren’t actually that big. By the end of the core game, the rent money you’re struggling and scraping to earn… is 777 coins. In the post-game endless mode, payouts can get massive. But the thing is, to get this far, you can’t rely on chance. You have to be very good at Luck Be a Landlord.And in Balatro, the numbers that get big are your points. The actual dollar payments in a round of Balatro are small. These aren’t games about earning wads and wads of cash. So, do these count as “gambling themes”?We’ll come back to that question later. First, I want to talk about a closer analog to what we colloquially consider gambling: loot boxes and gacha games.Random rewards: from Overwatch to the rise of gachaRecently, I did something that I haven’t done in a really long time: I thought about Overwatch. I used to play Overwatch with my friends, and I absolutely made a habit of dropping 20 bucks here or there for a bunch of seasonal loot boxes. This was never a problem behavior for me, but in hindsight, it does sting that over a couple of years, I dropped maybe $150 on cosmetics for a game that now I primarily associate with squandered potential.Loot boxes grew out of free-to-play mobile games, where they’re the primary method of monetization. In something like Overwatch, they functioned as a way to earn additional revenue in an ongoing game, once the player had already dropped 40 bucks to buy it.More often than not, loot boxes are a random selection of skins and other cosmetics, but games like Star Wars: Battlefront 2 were famously criticized for launching with loot crates that essentially made it pay-to-win – if you bought enough of them and got lucky.It’s not unprecedented to associate loot boxes with gambling. A 2021 study published in Addictive Behaviors showed that players who self-reported as problem gamblers also tended to spend more on loot boxes, and another study done in the UK found a similar correlation with young adults.While Overwatch certainly wasn’t the first game to feature cosmetic loot boxes or microtransactions, it’s a reference point for me, and it also got attention worldwide. In 2018, Overwatch was investigated by the Belgian Gaming Commission, which found it “in violation of gambling legislation” alongside FIFA 18 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Belgium’s response was to ban the sale of loot boxes without a gambling license. Having a paid random rewards mechanic in a game is a criminal offense there. But not really. A 2023 study showed that 82% of iPhone games sold on the App Store in Belgium still use random paid monetization, as do around 80% of games that are rated 12+. The ban wasn’t effectively enforced, if at all, and the study recommends that a blanket ban wouldn’t actually be a practical solution anyway.Overwatch was rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and 12 by PEGI. When it first came out, its loot boxes were divisive. Since the mechanic came from F2P mobile games, which are often seen as predatory, people balked at seeing it in a big action game from a multi-million dollar publisher.At the time, the rebuttal was, “Well, at least it’s just cosmetics.” Nobody needs to buy loot boxes to be good at Overwatch.A lot has changed since 2016. Now we have a deeper understanding of how these mechanics are designed to manipulate players, even if they don’t affect gameplay. But also, they’ve been normalized. While there will always be people expressing disappointment when a AAA game has a paid random loot mechanic, it is no longer shocking.And if anything, these mechanics have only become more prevalent, thanks to the growth of gacha games. Gacha is short for “gachapon,” the Japanese capsule machines where you pay to receive one of a selection of random toys. Getty ImagesIn gacha games, players pay — not necessarily real money, but we’ll get to that — for a chance to get something. Maybe it’s a character, or a special weapon, or some gear — it depends on the game. Whatever it is, within that context, it’s desirable — and unlike the cosmetics of Overwatch, gacha pulls often do impact the gameplay.For example, in Infinity Nikki, you can pull for clothing items in these limited-time events. You have a chance to get pieces of a five-star outfit. But you also might pull one of a set of four-star items, or a permanent three-star piece. Of course, if you want all ten pieces of the five-star outfit, you have to do multiple pulls, each costing a handful of limited resources that you can earn in-game or purchase with money.Gacha was a fixture of mobile gaming for a long time, but in recent years, we’ve seen it go AAA, and global. MiHoYo’s Genshin Impact did a lot of that work when it came out worldwide on consoles and PC alongside its mobile release. Genshin and its successors are massive AAA games of a scale that, for your Nintendos and Ubisofts, would necessitate selling a bajillion copies to be a success. And they’re free.Genshin is an action game, whose playstyle changes depending on what character you’re playing — characters you get from gacha pulls, of course. In Zenless Zone Zero, the characters you can pull have different combo patterns, do different kinds of damage, and just feel different to play. And whereas in an early mobile gacha game like Love Nikki Dress UP! Queen the world was rudimentary, its modern descendant Infinity Nikki is, like Genshin, Breath of the Wild-esque. It is a massive open world, with collectibles and physics puzzles, platforming challenges, and a surprisingly involved storyline. Genshin Impact was the subject of an interesting study where researchers asked young adults in Hong Kong to self-report on their gacha spending habits. They found that, like with gambling, players who are not feeling good tend to spend more. “Young adult gacha gamers experiencing greater stress and anxiety tend to spend more on gacha purchases, have more motives for gacha purchases, and participate in more gambling activities,” they wrote. “This group is at a particularly higher risk of becoming problem gamblers.”One thing that is important to note is that Genshin Impact came out in 2020. The study was self-reported, and it was done during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time when people were experiencing a lot of stress, and also fewer options to relieve that stress. We were all stuck inside gaming.But the fact that stress can make people more likely to spend money on gacha shows that while the gacha model isn’t necessarily harmful to everyone, it is exploitative to everyone. Since I started writing this story, another self-reported study came out in Japan, where 18.8% of people in their 20s say they’ve spent money on gacha rather than on things like food or rent.Following Genshin Impact’s release, MiHoYo put out Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero. All are shiny, big-budget games that are free to play, but dangle the lure of making just one purchase in front of the player. Maybe you could drop five bucks on a handful of in-game currency to get one more pull. Or maybe just this month you’ll get the second tier of rewards on the game’s equivalent of a Battle Pass. The game is free, after all — but haven’t you enjoyed at least ten dollars’ worth of gameplay? Image: HoyoverseI spent most of my December throwing myself into Infinity Nikki. I had been so stressed, and the game was so soothing. I logged in daily to fulfill my daily wishes and earn my XP, diamonds, Threads of Purity, and bling. I accumulated massive amounts of resources. I haven’t spent money on the game. I’m trying not to, and so far, it’s been pretty easy. I’ve been super happy with how much stuff I can get for free, and how much I can do! I actually feel really good about that — which is what I said to my boyfriend, and he replied, “Yeah, that’s the point. That’s how they get you.”And he’s right. Currently, Infinity Nikki players are embroiled in a war with developer Infold, after Infold introduced yet another currency type with deep ties to Nikki’s gacha system. Every one of these gacha games has its own tangled system of overlapping currencies. Some can only be used on gacha pulls. Some can only be used to upgrade items. Many of them can be purchased with human money.Image: InFold Games/Papergames via PolygonAll of this adds up. According to Sensor Towers’ data, Genshin Impact earned over 36 million dollars on mobile alone in a single month of 2024. I don’t know what Dan DiIorio’s peak monthly revenue for Luck Be A Landlord was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that.A lot of the spending guardrails we see in games like these are actually the result of regulations in other territories, especially China, where gacha has been a big deal for a lot longer. For example, gacha games have a daily limit on loot boxes, with the number clearly displayed, and a system collectively called “pity,” where getting the banner item is guaranteed after a certain number of pulls. Lastly, developers have to be clear about what the odds are. When I log in to spend the Revelation Crystals I’ve spent weeks hoarding in my F2P Infinity Nikki experience, I know that I have a 1.5% chance of pulling a 5-star piece, and that the odds can go up to 6.06%, and that I am guaranteed to get one within 20 pulls, because of the pity system.So, these odds are awful. But it is not as merciless as sitting down at a Vegas slot machine, an experience best described as “oh… that’s it?”There’s not a huge philosophical difference between buying a pack of loot boxes in Overwatch, a pull in Genshin Impact, or even a booster of Pokémon cards. You put in money, you get back randomized stuff that may or may not be what you want. In the dictionary definition, it’s a gamble. But unlike the slot machine, it’s not like you’re trying to win money by doing it, unless you’re selling those Pokémon cards, which is a topic for another time.But since even a game where you don’t get anything, like Balatro or Luck Be A Landlord, can come under fire for promoting gambling to kids, it would seem appropriate for app stores and ratings boards to take a similarly hardline stance with gacha.Instead, all these games are rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and PEGI 12 in the EU.The ESRB ratings for these games note that they contain in-game purchases, including random items. Honkai: Star Rail’s rating specifically calls out a slot machine mechanic, where players spend tokens to win a prize. But other than calling out Honkai’s slot machine, app stores are not slapping Genshin or Nikki with an 18+ rating. Meanwhile, Balatro had a PEGI rating of 18 until a successful appeal in February 2025, and Luck Be a Landlord is still 17+ on Apple’s App Store.Nobody knows what they’re doingWhen I started researching this piece, I felt very strongly that it was absurd that Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro had age ratings this high.I still believe that the way both devs have been treated by ratings boards is bad. Threatening an indie dev with a significant loss of income by pulling their game is bad, not giving them a way to defend themself or help them understand why it’s happening is even worse. It’s an extension of the general way that too-big-to-fail companies like Google treat all their customers.DiIorio told me that while it felt like a human being had at least looked at Luck Be A Landlord to make the determination that it contained gambling themes, the emails he was getting were automatic, and he doesn’t have a contact at Google to ask why this happened or how he can avoid it in the future — an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has ever needed Google support. But what’s changed for me is that I’m not actually sure anymore that games that don’t have gambling should be completely let off the hook for evoking gambling.Exposing teens to simulated gambling without financial stakes could spark an interest in the real thing later on, according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It’s the same reason you can’t mosey down to the drug store to buy candy cigarettes. Multiple studies were done that showed kids who ate candy cigarettes were more likely to take up smoking (of course, the candy is still available — just without the “cigarette” branding.)So while I still think rating something like Balatro 18+ is nuts, I also think that describing it appropriately might be reasonable. As a game, it’s completely divorced from literally any kind of play you would find in a casino — but I can see the concern that the thrill of flashy numbers and the shiny cards might encourage young players to try their hand at poker in a real casino, where a real house can take their money.Maybe what’s more important than doling out high age ratings is helping people think about how media can affect us. In the same way that, when I was 12 and obsessed with The Matrix, my parents gently made sure that I knew that none of the violence was real and you can’t actually cartwheel through a hail of bullets in real life. Thanks, mom and dad!But that’s an answer that’s a lot more abstract and difficult to implement than a big red 18+ banner. When it comes to gacha, I think we’re even less equipped to talk about these game mechanics, and I’m certain they’re not being age-rated appropriately. On the one hand, like I said earlier, gacha exploits the player’s desire for stuff that they are heavily manipulated to buy with real money. On the other hand, I think it’s worth acknowledging that there is a difference between gacha and casino gambling.Problem gamblers aren’t satisfied by winning — the thing they’re addicted to is playing, and the risk that comes with it. In gacha games, players do report satisfaction when they achieve the prize they set out to get. And yes, in the game’s next season, the developer will be dangling a shiny new prize in front of them with the goal of starting the cycle over. But I think it’s fair to make the distinction, while still being highly critical of the model.And right now, there is close to no incentive for app stores to crack down on gacha in any way. They get a cut of in-app purchases. Back in 2023, miHoYo tried a couple of times to set up payment systems that circumvented Apple’s 30% cut of in-app spending. Both times, it was thwarted by Apple, whose App Store generated $1.1 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2022.According to Apple itself, 90% of that money did not include any commission to Apple. Fortunately for Apple, ten percent of a trillion dollars is still one hundred billion dollars, which I would also like to have in my bank account. Apple has zero reason to curb spending on games that have been earning millions of dollars every month for years.And despite the popularity of Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro’s massive App Store success, these games will never be as lucrative. They’re one-time purchases, and they don’t have microtransactions. To add insult to injury, like most popular games, Luck Be A Landlord has a lot of clones. And from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like any of them have been made to indicate that their games contain the dreaded “gambling themes” that Google was so worried about in Landlord.In particular, a game called SpinCraft: Roguelike from Sneaky Panda Games raised $6 million in seed funding for “inventing the Luck-Puzzler genre,” which it introduced in 2022, while Luck Be A Landlord went into early access in 2021.It’s free-to-play, has ads and in-app purchases, looks like Fisher Price made a slot machine, and it’s rated E for everyone, with no mention of gambling imagery in its rating. I reached out to the developers to ask if they had also been contacted by the Play Store to disclose that their game has gambling themes, but I haven’t heard back.Borrowing mechanics in games is as old as time, and it’s something I in no way want to imply shouldn’t happen because copyright is the killer of invention — but I think we can all agree that the system is broken.There is no consistency in how games with random chance are treated. We still do not know how to talk about gambling, or gambling themes, and at the end of the day, the results of this are the same: the house always wins.See More:

News Anthropology Males of this ancient human cousin weren’t always bigger than females Proteins from a collection of fossils hint at sex and genetic differences in P. robustus A new analysis of proteins preserved in fossil teeth provides the first molecular assessment of size differences between the sexes and genetic diversity in an ancient African hominid, Paranthropus robustus (skull of own shown). Bernhard Zipfel By Bruce Bower 20 hours ago An ancient, distant human cousin from southern Africa called Paranthropus robustus has for the first time revealed molecular clues to its evolutionary status. Protein sequences preserved in four partial P. robustus teeth from different individuals that lived roughly 2 million years ago indicate that larger and smaller fossils of this hominid species cannot always be classed as male or female, as previously thought, researchers report in the May 29 Science. Sequences of a protein derived from a gene located only on the Y, or male, sex chromosome in present-day humans enabled the scientists to identify two teeth as having belonged to males, molecular biologist Palesa Madupe of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues say. One of those teeth was previously thought to have come from a female, based on its small size. Closer analyses of the two teeth lacking that male-specific protein indicated that those fossils, which are around the same size as the smaller male tooth, came from females. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

The Fearsome Megalodon Ate Basically Whatever It Wanted to Reach Its Daily 100,000-Calorie Need, Study Suggests Scientists previously assumed the giant, prehistoric sharks mostly feasted on whales, but it turns out they probably weren’t so picky An artistic reconstruction of the extinct megalodon. Scientists' ideas about how the megalodon looked are based on its fossilized teeth. Hugo Saláis via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0 Between 3 million and 20 million years ago, the largest predatory fish ever known hunted in Earth’s oceans. Called theOtodus megalodon), this giant shark grew up to 79 feet long, had teeth the size of human hands and could bite with the strength of an industrial hydraulic press. But what scientists know about the extinct creature has been almost entirely determined from fossil teeth—since paleontologists have yet to discover a complete megalodon, and the animals’ cartilaginous skeletons don’t preserve well. Now, new research on the mineral content of their teeth suggests megalodons ate pretty much whatever they wanted. Until recently, scientists assumed that megalodons satisfied their estimated 100,000-calorie daily needs by mostly eating whales. A study published Monday in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, however, suggests the prehistoric shark had a much more diverse diet than previously thought—akin to the great white shark’s “if it moves, it’s food” hunting strategy of today, writes Vice’s Ashley Fike. Jeremy McCormack with a fossilized megalodon tooth. Uwe Dettmar for Goethe University An international team of researchers reached this conclusion after analyzing the ratio of different variants, called isotopes, of the mineral zinc in 18-million-year-old megalodon teeth. Animals absorb zinc only through food, so this could offer a hint to their diets. Muscles and organs absorb more of the isotope zinc-64 than zinc-66, meaning that the higher up the food chain an animal is—or the more meat and fish it eats—the less zinc-66 it absorbs, and its ratio of zinc-66 to zinc-64 is lower, in turn. “Since we don’t know how the ratio of the two zinc isotopes at the bottom of the food pyramid was at that time, we compared the teeth of various prehistoric and extant shark species with each other and with other animal species. This enabled us to gain an impression of predator-prey relationships 18 million years ago,” Jeremy McCormack, a scientist from Goethe University Frankfurt and lead author of the study, says in a statement. Unsurprisingly, the isotope ratios in the teeth put the megalodon at the top of the food chain, alongside close shark relatives such as Otodus chubutensis. At the same time, however, the scientists noticed there wasn’t a huge difference between the megalodon and the lower-tiered animals, suggesting the sharks feasted on creatures from all rungs of the ladder. “They were not concentrating on certain prey types, but they must have fed throughout the food web, on many different species,” McCormack tells CNN’s Jacopo Prisco. “While certainly this was a fierce apex predator, and no one else would probably prey on an adult megalodon, it’s clear that they themselves could potentially feed on almost everything else that swam around.” The results also indicate that megalodon populations living in different habitats had slightly contrasting diets, potentially because of differing prey availability. More broadly, the study invites comparisons between the megalodon and its iconic extant relative, the great white shark. These comparisons, however, may have previously led to some overreaching assumptions. “Previous studies simply assumed that megalodon must have looked like a gigantic version of the modern great white shark without any evidence,” Kenshu Shimada, a vertebrate paleontologist at DePaul University and co-author of the new study, told National Geographic’s Jason Bittel back in March. He and colleagues had just published a different paper that reassessed the prehistoric shark’s size, suggesting that it had a more slender body than its smaller, modern cousin. The new study thus joins a host of research challenging widely held ideas about megalodons and their relatives, says Alberto Collareta, a paleontologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who was not involved in the research, to CNN. “These have led us to abandon traditional reconstruction of the megatooth sharks as ‘inflated’ versions of the modern white shark. We now know that the megalodon was something else—in terms of size, shape and ancestry, and of biology, too,” he adds. In fact, with both species eating generalist diets, great white sharks might have outcompeted megalodons for food and ultimately played a role in their demise. “Even ‘supercarnivores’ are not immune to extinction,” Shimada says in the statement. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Titans of industry cannot come to terms. Despite the literal gap between them being a matter of feet—maybe 30 or so by my count—when their two locomotives come to a standstill in a tunnel with miles of track in either direction, Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro, tyrannical, avuncular) is unable to bridge the final inches with Leland and Reagan (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston, stone-faced). It’s an odd situation that becomes odder still when all parties realize the fate of their multimillion-dollar venture must now come down to a game of chance: and this one a bet on whether a Middle Eastern prince (Riz Ahmed) can sink a granny shot from below his knees while playing basketball’s ugly, redheaded step-cousin, HORSE.  It was at this exact moment I realized Wes Anderson had returned to full, magnificently daffy form. As easily the prodigal Texan’s best film in over a decade, The Phoenician Scheme rekindles much of the mirth that informed so many of Anderson’s early films. It is also the first instance one has had any narrative propulsion or tension since his last masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel. While I would hesitate to place such lofty titles onto Phoenician, rest assured that it’s a balmy good time at the cinema where longtime fans get to again spend an evening with impeccably dressed cheats, droll scoundrels, and other variants on the unseemly father figure. Take del Toro’s Korda for instance. He begins the film by surviving what is jointly his sixth plane crash and assassination attempt. (The industrialist’s pilots fare less happily from his habit of falling out of the sky.) He isn’t sure who wants to kill him, but he seems confident it’s probably justified. Of his nine children, eight prepubescent boys live at home with him where their resentments already border on the homicidal. And the other offspring, a daughter he never really knew, wants nothing to do with him, even after he promises to bequeath her his entire fortune “on a trial basis.” Indeed, despite being a novitiate nun, Liesl (Mia Threapleton) has a tough time with forgiveness, especially when it comes to a would-be patriarch or patron. She does agree to at least get to know the old man, though, after he decides to gallivant around the world in a bid to save his empire (hence the aforementioned HORSE of fate). Rather boldly they even board plane after plane, alongside Korda’s ineffectual Swedish nanny-turned-attendant, Bjorn (a chipper Michael Cera doing an accent about three clicks south of the Muppets’ Chef). Together they meet a starry ensemble of walk-on cameos and eccentric business partners, my favorite of which is a preternaturally giddy Jeffrey Wright. Yet always operating beneath the surface is another tale of resentments between bad parents and their adult children. That plus a kooky murder mystery where Zsa-Zsa somehow keeps avoiding being the dead body. From the name of the protagonist alone, Anderson seems intent to signal to audiences with any degree of film knowledge that he is playing once more in the sandbox of his influences. It is hard to imagine a cineaste like Anderson, for example, hearing the moniker “Korda” and not thinking of anti-fascist Hungarian refugee-turned-British filmmaker, Alexander Korda, who directed aesthetic classics like The Thief of Baghdad (1940) and That Hamilton Woman (1941). Furthermore, Anderson pulls just as much from Korda contemporaries like fellow Hungarian ex-pat Michael Curtiz, particularly when Korda and Lisel wind up at a nightclub owned by Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric). And yes, another movie about traveling nannies and a precocious Liesl is alluded to as well. But the reason The Phoenician Scheme works so much better than Anderson’s last several movies is that while the filmmaker is visibly delighting in his references and what are almost assuredly private jokes between himself and co-writer Roman Coppola, the director also is avoiding the trap of becoming distracted by the aesthetics. Phoenician is still a beautifully designed world of straight lines and adroit square compositions, courtesy of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, where nothing feels natural. Not even the sun or tree vines discovered after Korda, Liesl, and Bjorn become lost in a jungle have any reality about them. But the simple pleasure of observing visual confections is not the be-all end unto itself that it previously was. The travelogue nature of the plot, in which a father and daughter go on an odyssey of unconventional boardroom meetings that include assassins, freedom fighters, and organized crime bigwigs, provides a skeletal structure where Anderson can graft on his increasing preference for narrative vignettes, but there is an emotional spine as well between Korda and Liesl that makes both the jokes and the pathos ebullient. Del Toro has never seemed bigger or more unshackled than as Zsa-zsa. Like most Anderson protagonists, Korda rarely speaks above a polite monotone, but his double-breasted confidence and adventurism provides del Toro with a refreshingly uninhibited floorspace. It also pairs nicely when bantering with Threapleton, a real discovery of a young talent who plays a nun with conviction, even as the twinge of curling judgment on her smile suggests she may never see Heaven. But then she dryly must channel the patience of Job when dodging the advances of a tipsy Bjorn (again, Cera is having too much fun) and the would-be buy-offs of an absentee father. The terrain of an unhappy adult and their aging parent is terrain Anderson has walked many times, but there’s a renewed vigor in his step in The Phoenician Scheme, perhaps because it is the first time he has crossed this territory where he is closer in age to the latter than the former. There is empathy for all parties, though, and new tricks to his whimsy, such as his elegant compositions repeatedly being shattered in close-ups where the camera is assaulted by various subjects filled with so much rage that they literally assail the fourth wall. The Phoenician Scheme is simply a lovely work from an artist with a fresh spring in his step. If you already count yourself among his admirers, it’s a return to form with moments of divine inspiration (just wait until you see who he cast as God). For the rest, it may not cause conversion, but it’s certainly worth sharing some communion wine over. The Phoenician Scheme premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18. It opens in limited release on May 30 and wide on June 6. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

After spending several months doing not much besides watching Tom Cruise movies, I now spend a lot of time wondering about Tom Cruise running. The Mission: Impossible star is a high-cadence runner. He’s famously short of stature, low to the ground and with short legs. But that build is perfect for cinema, because those arms swing and those legs churn and convey a viscerality, a violence, a constant labored activity that translates perfectly to the screen. What they convey is a man of action, a man summoning all of his energy and will in a single direction: to move as quickly as he can. What is he thinking about when he’s running? I like to think the answer is nothing. That Tom Cruise is able to empty his head when he runs, blanking out his career, his cultural meaning, his past and present personal relationships, and move in a state of pure being. Maybe he’s doing one of his infamous stunts, a run towards a large dangerous vehicle, or off the side of a cliff. Maybe that makes him run faster. Maybe he feels a drive toward oblivion (and for Oblivion), to make the ultimate sacrifice to cinema, resulting in a cultural afterlife even longer than eternal stardom allows. This, in many ways, has been Tom Cruise’s career-long relationship with action movies. They’re his port in the storm, a safe harbor, a place to go and find love and acceptance when there seemingly is none to be had elsewhere. When the press is digging into your religion or snickering about your failed marriages or accusing you of being awkward or crazy or scary, you can find refuge in a MacGuffin to track down, a bad guy’s plot to foil, a world to save. The challenge each writer and director must face is how to handle Cruise’s well-known persona. Do they lean in or subvert? And to what end? When gifted with perhaps the most charismatic, committed movie star ever, are you willing to grapple with this stardom, how it explains the actor at a given point in his career, and what our response to him means? Or do you run? The following is a ranking of Tom Cruise’s greatest action films. In the interest of gimmicky symmetry, we’ve once again capped ourselves at 26 titles. We didn’t cheat… much. The films below all contain shootouts, fistfights, corpses, and missile crises. Most importantly, they are (mostly) tense, suspenseful, violent, escapist popcorn, not to be confused with the other half of Cruise’s equation: the pool-playing, the bartending, the litigating, and the deeply felt character work with auteurs, intended to get him the ultimate prize, which has eluded him for nearly half a century. Let’s run the numbers. 26. Valkyrie (2008) Director: Bryan SingerWhere to watch: Free on Pluto TV, Kanopy, Hoopla You could make a decent argument that this piece of shit doesn’t even belong on this list. It’s mostly a plodding chamber drama about “good Germans” ineffectually plotting to not kill Hitler at the end of World War II. But there’s an explosion, a dull shootout, and a bunch of executions at the end, so it seems to qualify as an action movie. Making Valkyrie is one of the most baffling decisions in Cruise’s entire career. And yet it’s also one of the most important films of his career, one that arguably defines his late period, because it’s how he first met his future M:I steward Christopher McQuarrie. Run report: Ominously, Tom Cruise doesn’t run in this movie.   25. Oblivion (2013) Director: Joseph KosinskiWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Like Valkyrie, Oblivion technically qualifies as an action movie, but there’s little actual action or narrative tension to any of it. Cruise essentially plays the source code for a clone army created by a weird super-intelligence in space that runs Earth via killer droids, and the clones to service them. It comes out of a filmmaking period packed with sci-fi puzzlebox movies that were all atmosphere and often led nowhere, though this is probably the “best” example of that tiresome trend. The silver lining is that, like Valkyrie, this film led to Cruise meeting an important future collaborator: Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski. Run report: Cruise literally exercises by running on a giant sleek modern hamster wheel in this. It’s the physical manifestation of everything I hate about this film. 24. Legend (1985) Director: Ridley ScottWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple This 1985 fantasy movie has its defenders, but I am not one of them. The action is completely disjointed and chaotic, a fractured fairy tale composed of an incoherent, weird/horny unholy union of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jim Henson, Peter Greenaway, Ken Russell, and a handful of psilocybin mushrooms. Legend looks like something pieced together by Jack Horner on a camcorder, so it’s hard to fault Cruise for looking clunky and uncomfortable. Who knows what a good performance in that role would look like?  Run report: A lot of odd almost skipping around in this, which adds to the “high school play” quality of the film. Cruise has a proper run toward the end, but it’s not fully baked yet.  23. The Mummy (2017) Director: Alex KurtzmanWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Rewatching 2017’s The Mummy actually made me slightly disappointed we didn’t get the Dark Universe Universal Pictures briefly promised us. The setup had potential: Cruise as Indiana Jones, with Jake Johnson as Short Round and Courtney B. Vance as the archetypal no-bullshit sergeant? Potential. But Alex Kurtzman’s take on Karl Freund’s 1932 Boris Karloff Mummy needed less plot and more screwing around. This is an instance where Spielbergian pacing actually ruins a blockbuster, because it entirely lacks Spielberg Sauce. It becomes a horror movie after the first act, with Cruise as a largely personality-free, mentally unsound Black Swan/Smile protagonist. Then they spend all this time with Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, introducing this universe of monsters that never gets off the ground. No fun! Run report: Notable because co-star Annabelle Wallis did a ton of press speaking to how much thought Cruise puts into his on-screen running. She specifically said he initially didn’t want to run on screen with Wallis, because he doesn’t like to share his on-screen run time. He relented, to little effect.  22. Mission: Impossible II (2000) Director: John WooWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Folks, I rewatched this recently. I really wanted to love it because some close and valued colleagues sing its praises, and I love a good, hot contrarian take. Respectfully, I don’t know what the hell they’re on. The camera work in Mission: Impossible II is so berserk, it borders on amateurish. The series hadn’t figured out what it was yet, but not in an interesting exploratory way: This installment is more like trying on a pair of pants that are not your vibe. The idea that Ethan Hunt lost his team in Mission: Impossible and now he’s a broken lone wolf (plus Ving Rhames’ Luther and Thandiwe Newton’s Nyah), an agent with the weight of the world on his shoulders, is not a bad premise. But in the role that ruined his career, Dougray Scott is a wooden, toothless bad guy. And somehow, the stakes feel impossibly low, even with a world-killing bioweapon on the line. Mission: Impossible II does, however, get points for being far and away the horniest movie in the franchise. Run report: Unsurprisingly, Woo is great at filming running, and there’s a lot of clay to work with here: Cruise’s long hair flopping in the wind, slow motion, a rare mid-run mask-rip, the inevitable dove-release: It’s all good! A definitive ranking of love interests and partners in the Mission: Impossible movies 6. Claire Phelps (Emmanuelle Béart) in Mission: Impossible5. Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan) in Mission: Impossible III and Fallout4. Grace (Hayley Atwell) in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning3. Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandiwe Newton) in Mission: Impossible II2. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning1. Jane Carter (Paula Patton) in in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol 21. American Made (2017) Director: Doug Liman Where to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple It’s a funny idea: What if Top Gun’s Maverick was a schmuck pilot turned drug-runner? It’s clearly Cruise reaching for a Blow of his own, but decades into this type of narrative, we know the beats by heart. American Made is sorely lacking in depravity. Cruise’s affected good ol’ boy Southern accent both has nothing to do with the film’s disposability, and explains everything. It’s a sanitized drug narrative in which we never see Cruise blow a line or fire a gun. We don’t even see his death on screen — Cruise dying in a movie is a big deal, and has only happened a few times. It’s almost like he knew this nothingburger wasn’t worth the distinction. Run report: Not much running, which is indicative of a larger problem with this film. But at one point, Cruise runs after a car with Caleb Landry Jones in it, and it explodes, in arguably the highlight of the film, for whatever that’s worth.  20. The Last Samurai (2003) Director: Edward ZwickWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple The one’s a weird movie about a mercenary who, after participating in the genocide of Native Americans, goes native in 19th-century Japan, in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. But it’s a somewhat unusual approach to the standard Cruise narrative arc. In this, he begins as a broken, drunken husk, a mercenary arm of the growing American empire who belatedly regains his honor by joining up with some samurai. The aspects of that plotline which feel unusual for a Cruise movie don’t make up for all the story elements that have aged terribly, but they’re something.  Run report: Less running than you’d expect, but running with swords while wearing leather samurai armor. 19. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)  Director: Edward ZwickWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple A lot of the films in the lower ranks of this list suffer from the problem of filmmakers settling, simply putting Cruise on screen and letting his iconography do the heavy lifting, sans interesting backstory or dialogue. In this sequel, thanks to Lee Child’s blunt dialogue, the deep-state rogue-army plotting in the source material, and Cruise’s typical level of meticulous fight choreo, it’s simply really entertaining, solid, replacement-level action. This sequel to 2012’s Jack Reacher gives the title troubleshooter (played by Cruise) a surrogate daughter and a foil in Cobie Smulders, which is great. But its primary sin is replacing Werner Herzog, the villain from the first movie, with a generic snooze of a bad guy. Run report: Some running and sliding on rooftops with guns, as fireworks go off in the night sky. Impressive for some action movies, a bit ho-hum compared to the bigger hits on this list.  18. Taps (1981) Director: Harold Becker Where to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Fascinating film. A Toy Soldiers riff interrogating the military-school system, and suggesting that it’s probably not a bad thing that former American ideals like patriotic honor, duty, and masculinity are fading. It’s Cruise’s first major role (with George C.Scott, Sean Penn, and baby Giancarlo Esposito!), and you’ll never believe this, but he plays a tightly wound, thrill-addicted, bloodthirsty maniac. Run report: Great characterization via run here. Cadet Captain David Shawn is a hawkish conservative dick, and Cruise’s running reflects that. He’s stiff, carrying an automatic rifle that he looks like he’s going to start firing wildly at any minute.  17. Mission: Impossible III (2006)  Director: J.J. Abrams Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus In the last Mission: Impossible installment made before the filmmakers really figured out what the series was doing, J.J. Abrams assembles a mostly incoherent, boring clunker that has a few very important grace notes. It’s a film about Ethan Hunt trying to carve out a normal life for himself, with the great Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the bucket of ice water dumped on his domestic fantasy. Hoffman’s Owen Davian is the greatest bad guy in the Cruise filmography, and there’s really no close second. (I suppose, if there was a gun to my head, I would point to Werner Herzog in Jack Reacher, or Jay Mohr in Jerry Maguire.) There are many moments I could point to in Hoffman’s wonderful performance, but the one I’d recommend, if you want to feel something, is when Hoffman gets to play Ethan Hunt playing Owen Davian with a mask on for a few scenes during the Vatican kidnapping, roughly 50 minutes in. He was so fucking great.  Run report: A lot of running, but none of it is very good. No knock on Cruise, but Abrams is doing perfunctory work, shot poorly via shaky cam that has trouble keeping Cruise in the frame, from a perfunctory director making a perfunctory action film. There are two notable exceptions. “The Shanghai Run,” which we may have more on later, and Cruise running straight up a wall. A definitive ranking of Mission: Impossible villain performances 10. Dougray Scott in Mission: Impossible II9. Eddie Marsan in Mission: Impossible III8. William Mapother — that’s right, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV’s cousin! — in Mission: Impossible II7. Lea Seydoux in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol6. Sean Harris in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Fallout5. Jean Reno in Mission: Impossible4. Esai Morales/The Entity in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning3. Jon Voight in Mission: Impossible2. Henry Cavill in Mission: Impossible – Fallout1. Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III 16. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Director: Christopher McQuarrieWhere to watch: In theaters The franchise potentially falls with a thud — or is it an AI-generated death fantasy that plays out entirely in Ethan Hunt’s head when he gets trapped in a digital coffin early in the movie? Either way, the resulting film is something the McQuarrie-Cruise collaboration has never been before: clunky and imprecise, a disjointed watch that delivers some high highs, but is unfortunately thin on story. McQuarrie seems unconcerned with character arcs, or any substantive grand narrative that might land in any meaningful way. This movie plays out like an aimless succession of beats, allowing boredom to creep in. That hasn’t been a part of the franchise since M:I 3. It’s a Simpsons clip show masquerading as a Mission: Impossible film, signaling that this iteration of the franchise is exhausted, with little left to say or explore. Perhaps there was no other way for this series to go out than on its back.  Run report: A run through the tunnels to save Luther, oddly reminiscent of the run attempting to save Ilsa Faust, followed by the run out of the tunnels, allowing Ethan to escape the film’s first trap (or does he?) A definitive ranking of Ethan Hunt’s “best friends/allies” (non-love interest/boss division) 17. Wes Bentley16. Greg Tarzan Davis15. Aaron Paul14. Jonathan Rhys Meyers13. Maggie Q12. Shea Whigham11. Hannah Waddington 10. Katy O’Brian9. Pom Klementieff8. Rolf Saxon7. Vanessa Kirby6. Keri Russell5. Simon Pegg4. Jeremy Renner3. Emilio Estevez2. Bogdan (Miraj Grbić)1. Luther (Ving Rhames) 15. War of the Worlds (2005) Director: Steven Spielberg Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus A curious movie I liked better on a rewatch than I did on my initial watch 20 years ago. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is often misremembered as Spielberg’s darkest movie, but I’d argue that War of the Worlds beats it: It’s a divorced-dad-anxiety horror movie that has the most nightmare-inducing, traumatic, post-9/11 visuals in the master’s oeuvre. It can be read as Spielberg wrestling with his relationship with his son Max, who would’ve been around the age of Cruise’s disgruntled, estranged son in the movie. War of the Worlds has issues: Cruise never works when he’s cast in a “just some guy” role, as he’s meant to be here, and the plot goes off the rails in the third act. But it has some of the best set pieces Spielberg ever directed. What will haunt me for the rest of my life is a scene where Cruise’s character is forced to essentially make a Sophie’s Choice between his son and daughter (a great Dakota Fanning), and lets his son go. The ominous music at the end when he’s magically reunited with his son is completely bizarre and unsettling, and I don’t think is meant to be taken at face value.  Run report: This is why Cruise is the king. He’s playing a supposed normal, everyday schmoe in this movie. When you focus on the running, compared to other roles, you can see he’s running like a mechanic who is still a little athletic, but doesn’t know where he’s going, or what is happening from one moment to the next. It’s building character through running. Incredible. 14. Knight and Day (2010) Director: James Mangold  Where to watch: Free on Cinemax; rent on Amazon, Apple Knight and Day is a sneakily important film in the Cruise action canon because it’s the first time a movie really puts Cruise into the role of the creepy, charismatic, psychotically intense, beleaguered, put-upon invincible cartoon character he became in the Mission: Impossible franchise as of Ghost Protocol. This movie is based around a funny idea: It’s basically a Mission: Impossible movie from the perspective of a clueless civilian. It helps that the civilian is phenomenal, physical, funny, and fucking ripped: Cameron Diaz plays the world’s hottest mechanic, and makes me wish she had gotten her own Atomic Blonde-style vehicle. Run report: Some co-running with Cameron Diaz here, which is as you might imagine, is good.  13. The Firm (1993) Director. Sydney PollackWhere to watch: Free on Paramount Plus It’s easy to put The Firm on a pedestal because of Sydney Pollack, the jazz score, the ’90s outfits, Gene Hackman, and every other significant gravitas-oozing “That Guy” as a mobster, shady lawyer, or Fed in a great “They don’t make them like that anymore” legal thriller. But what really stood out to me on a recent rewatch is this movie is two and a half hours about the now laughably quaint notion of rediscovering purity in the law. It isn’t much more than a story about a shady law firm that gets hit with mail-fraud charges, plus several deaths and a few smartly tied up loose ends. Run report: A clinic in Tom Cruise running, a draft-version highlight reel of his running scenes. In my memory, this contains some of his most iconic early runs, and it signals the moment when “Tom Cruise running” became a whole cultural thing.  12. Top Gun (1986) Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus Top Gun set the template for Tom Cruise’s on-screen narrative, and it took a decade before filmmakers were willing to start subverting that narrative again. This is straight-up hero porn, without any of the humbling that the sequel eventually dishes out. Tom Cruise as Maverick is the best pilot on Earth. He loses his best friend and co-pilot Goose, due to a combination of a mechanical failure and another pilot’s fuck-up. He then has to find the courage to fly with the exact same lack of inhibition he did at the outset of the film, which he finally does, based on essentially nothing that happens in the plot. Scott makes the wise decision to center the action (or non-action) of the film on pure Cruise charisma and star power, and it works. Run report: Believe it or not, Tom Cruise does not run in this movie.  11. Days of Thunder (1990) Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus Scott and Cruise’s Top Gun follow-up is essentially Top Gun with cars instead of jets — but yes, it’s marginally better. Why? Because this is a quintessential “We didn’t know how good we had it” classic. It’s the film where Cruise met his future spouse Nicole Kidman on set. Robert Duvall is swigging moonshine. It’s Randy Quaid’s last performance actually based on planet Earth. Plus there’s John C. Reilly, Michael Rooker, Cary Elwes, Fred Thompson, Margo Martindale, and a rousing Hans Zimmer score. Need I say more? Run report: They cut the climatic race off, but Cruise’s character Cole potentially gets smoked by 59-year-old Robert Duvall?! 10. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023) Director: Christopher McQuarrieWhere to watch: Free on Paramount Plus The metaphor that the Mission: Impossible franchise is a manifestation of Tom Cruise’s deep-seated need to save blockbuster filmmaking and the Hollywood star system has never been more overt. Cruise is literally up against AI, which is always a step ahead of him, dismantling his every gambit. It’s an update/remix of Ghost Protocol’s premise: The only antidote to the world-spanning AI known as The Entity is becoming a refusenik anti-tech Luddite in the spirit of John Henry, and using the raw materials of humanity to defeat an invincible machine.  Run report: Cruise running in confined spaces is a lot of fun, but the heavily CGI’d running up the side of a train losing its battle with gravity isn’t.  A definitive ranking of Mission: Impossible MacGuffins 8. Ghost Protocol’s Russian launch codes7. Fallout’s plutonium cores 6. Rogue Nation’s $2.4 billion Syndicate bankroll5. M:I2’s Chimera Virus4. Final Reckoning’s Sevastopol3. M:I’s NOC list 2. Dead Reckoning Part One’s cruciform key1. M:I3’s rabbit’s foot 9. Jack Reacher (2012)  Director: Christopher McQuarrie Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus I loathe hyperbole: it’s a shortcut for unimaginative writers. I’ve never resorted to it in my entire life. So I hope you’ll take me at my word when I say that this movie is a fucking masterpiece. Amazon’s great Reacher series is made more in the image of Lee Child’s books, with a distinctive breakout lead in Alan Ritchson, who appears to have been designed in a lab to draw striking contrast to Tom Cruise in this role. But Reacher made us forget how good Jack Reacher gets. It’s a perfect elevated action programmer with a remarkable cast: David Oyelowo! Richard Jenkins! Rosamund Pike! A Days of Thunder reunion with Robert Duvall! Werner Herzog showing up in a completely brilliant, bonkers heel turn! McQuarrie made this one in vintage Shane Black ’90s style, with a dash of Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood. I totally get why Cruise decided to turn his career over to McQuarrie after this. I don’t understand why he didn’t let McQuarrie direct the sequel. Run report: There isn’t much running in this. At one point, Cruise is darting from shelter point to shelter point because a sniper is trying to pick him off, but that’s it. It’s because Jack fucking Reacher doesn’t have to run, which is simply good writing and filmmaking.  8. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)  Director: Christopher McQuarrieWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus This film famously opens with Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane as it takes off. But to me, the key moment comes when he’s broken into the plane, attached himself to a package which isn’t named, but looks like a crate of rockets the size of a minivan. He gives a final raised eyebrow and shrug to a gobsmacked henchman, who watches helplessly as Cruise deploys a parachute and falls out the back of the plane’s cargo bay with a ton of atomic weapons, and no plausible way to land without killing himself and creating a Grand Canyon-sized nuclear crater in Belarus. This scene was practically drawn by Chuck Jones, which sets the tone for a film that repositions Ethan Hunt on the border of superherodom, in a film about Tom Cruise as the literal manifestation of destiny.  It also marks the return of Alec Baldwin, the first (but not last) M:I handler who carried over from one film to the next. Evaluating the handlers’ position in the franchise (see below) is challenging: They’re constantly shifting allegiances, at times working in service of Hunt’s mission, at times in direct opposition to it, either attacking him with governmental red tape, or colluding with nefarious forces. Run report: A lot of different looks when it comes to the running in this. Shirtless running, running with Rebecca Ferguson, running across the wing of a moving plane. It’s all good. A definitive ranking of the “most fun” M:I handlers 6. Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) in Mission: Impossible III5. Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) in Mission: Impossible – Fallout and The Final Reckoning4. Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) in Mission: Impossible3. John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) in Mission: Impossible III2. Commander Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins) in Mission: Impossible II1. Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin*) in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Fallout * One of my only lingering complaints about the M:I movies is that aside from Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, we don’t get enough big family continuity. The Fast & Furious franchise is an exemplar/cautionary tale of how found-family dynamics can be a great source of fun and emotion — and also tank the series, if creators keep piling on new recurring elements. It sounds like Baldwin didn’t want to stay on board, but I would love to live in a world where he didn’t jump ship — or where, say, Henry Cavill’s August Walker joined Ethan’s team at the end of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, as he would have if he’d had a similar role in an F&F installment. 7. Minority Report (2002) Director: Steven SpielbergWhere to watch: Free on Paramount Plus I’m guessing this placement on this ranking will upset some people. I’m surprised it’s this low in the rankings too — but that’s how good the next six films are. And honestly, Minority Report doesn’t hold up as the masterpiece I remember it being. It’s a very cool story. It marks the first fantasy-team matchup of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg. They’re adapting a paranoid Philip K. Dick story, and largely delivering on the promise that implies. Minority Report is an inventive, dark, weird future horror movie, made with Spielberg’s standard stunning visual economy. But among the perfect elements in this film, I have to call out some aspects that didn’t age well. Janusz Kaminski’s lighting effects feel like the whole movie is stuck inside an iPod halo. and this dutch-angled high melodrama, sauced with a dash of Terry Gilliam dystopian/gross wackiness, which lends the film a degree of occasionally atonal, squishy gonzo elasticity you’ve likely forgotten.   Run report: Mileage may vary on white pools of light, but running through them in futuristic uniforms is decisively cool.  6. Mission: Impossible (1996) Director: Brian De PalmaWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Because MI:2 and MI:3 struggle with tone (and long, listless patches), and because it’s actually Brad Bird that sets the template for the McQuarrie era of the franchise, you could argue the first Mission: Impossible is the strangest, most personal vision of what this series is and what it can be. DePalma is asserting himself with every practical mask and stylized shot. Your mileage may vary with that approach to what has become this Swiss set piece machine, I love it. A few things stand out nearly three decades on: Of course, how ridiculously young Cruise looks, but perhaps crucially, how collegial, intimate, and even tender the first act is before his first team is eliminated and the movie becomes a DePalma paranoid thriller. It’s an element we never quite get from Mission: Impossible again, one that brings the arc of the franchise into focus and explains Ethan Hunt if you extend continuity: He’s a character betrayed by his father figure and his government in the first film, and spends the rest of the franchise running from this largely unspoken trauma, determined to never let that happen again. In the wake of this, he reluctantly pieces together a life, semblance of a family, and all the risks that come with those personal attachments. In honor of my favorite set piece in any of the films, one of DePalma’s finest taught masterpieces: A definitive ranking of the top 10 M:I set pieces  Honorable Mention: The Sebastopol Extraction- (Tie) The Train Fights– MI:1 & Dead Reckoning 10. The Plane Door- Rogue Nation9. The “Kick In The Head” Russian Jail Break- Ghost Protocol8. The Water Vault Ledger Heist Into The Motorcycle Chase- Rogue Nation7. The Handcuffed Car Chase- Dead Reckoning6. The Red Baron Plane Fight- Final Reckoning5. The Burj Khalifa- Ghost Protocol4. Kidnapping At The Vatican- MI:33. The Opera House Hit- Rogue Nation2. The Louvre Halo Jump Into the Bathroom Fight- Fallout1. The NOC List Heist- MI:1 Run report: Fitting that this franchise opens with Cruise putting on a running clinic, as that first op falls apart, then of course his run away from Kittridge and the massive fish tank explosion.  5. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol  Director: Brad Bird (2011) Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Nothing is working like it’s supposed to. Not the Impossible Mission Force, not the mask machine, not the radio comms, not the magnet gloves keeping Ethan Hunt tethered to the side of the world’s tallest building, not the Mission: Impossible franchise, and not Tom Cruise’s at-the-time fading movie stardom. But somehow, one incredible film made by a career animation director solves all of these problems, by stripping down, getting back to basics and reminding us what we always loved about these films and its star. It was supposed to be the beginning of a franchise reboot, with Jeremy Renner stepping in. Bird (and McQuarrie, in for a pass at the troubled screenplay and on deck to become Cruise’s Guy For Life) fights this decision off, gets away from trying to figure out the character Ethan Hunt and lets him be a superhero, more annoyed than concerned by the escalating difficulty of the impossible problems he has to solve. Through this, Bird correctly identifies the difference between Cruise and these other Hollywood candy asses: He’s a reckless warrior with a death wish who will do whatever is necessary to win, and he does. The team concept is back in full force with a genuinely showstopping stunt, and without the masks and tech, Cruise has to do it all with his wits, his hands, and his pure bravado. The series, and Cruise, never looked back.  Run report: Some of the most fun, imaginative set pieces built around running in this installment. A definitive ranking of who should replace Tom Cruise in the inevitable M:I reboot 10. Aaron Taylor Johnson9. Charlie Cox8. Sterling K. Brown7. Florence Pugh6. John David Washington5. Haley Atwell4. Miles Teller3. Jeremy Renner2. Aaron Pierre 1. Glen Powell 4. Top Gun: Maverick  Director: Joseph Kosinski (2022) Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus It’s a death dream, it’s red meat nationalist troopaganda, it’s the greatest legacyquel ever made that no one asked for and you didn’t realize you desperately needed, it’s nostalgia porn, it saved the movie going experience post-COVID, it’s a finely calibrated joy machine. Cruise is downright mystical, shimmering in the sun’s reflection off the surf, dominating an endless football game with no rules that doesn’t make sense. He has actual chemistry with Jennifer Connelly, and he has the grace to cede the floor to his old nemesis — both in the first Top Gun and as a once contemporary Hollywood star/rival — the late Val Kilmer, to drive home the crush of time and destroy everyone in the theater, no matter how many times they went to see this monster hit that first summer back in theaters.  Run report: Immediately coming off of the stunning, emotional high point of the film, we get Cruise running in salt water soaked jeans shirtless on the beach. Are you not entertained? 3. Collateral  Director: Michael Mann (2004) Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus An elemental, visceral faceoff that is radical in its simplicity of purpose. A film made by the second-best director on this list, and on a very short list of Cruise’s finest performances ever. He’s the salt and pepper terminator in a taxi, playing a pure evil bad guy, a classic Mann anti-hero samurai nihilist that also lives by a code and values being good at his job. Of course Cruise retains a kind of charm, but is also willing to get slimy and be deeply unlikeable and die on screen. Well worth the sacrifice.  Run report: Incredible running on display here. Once again he is running like a professional killer probably runs, almost always holding a gun, the hair matches the suit, so fucking bad ass.  2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout  Director: Christopher McQuarrie (2018) Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus As much time and energy as I just expended exalting Ghost Protocol, at a certain point you have to eschew poetic narratives and tip your cap, by the slightest of margins, to a fucking perfect movie. Ghost Prot is close, but you can feel its lack of a nailed-down shooting script at certain points towards its conclusion, as the action begins to wind down. McQuarrie becomes the first director in the franchise to get a second bite of the apple, and the result is a finely cut diamond. Fallout is about exhaustion and the impossibility of that manifestation of destiny idea from Rogue Nation. It makes the argument that you can’t actually save the day and save everyone without making any sacrifices forever, and because of that, sets up The Trolly Problem over and over again to try and get Ethan Hunt to compromise and/or give up. But, of course, he won’t, and neither, seemingly, will Cruise.  Run report: You can tell McQuarrie loves watching Cruise run as much as we do. He frames the runs in these wide shots and takes his time with them. It’s not conveying any additional information, a beat or two less would suffice, but the camera lingers and you get to just sit and appreciate the form and it really connects. It’s why he was the logical choice to take control of this franchise. He understands how a Tom Cruise action flick operates and what makes it special. And of course: A definitive ranking of the best runs in the franchise 10. The Opening Plane Run- Rogue Nation9. The Sandstorm Run- Ghost Protocol8. The Mask Rip Run- MI:27. Running through the alleys of Italy- Dead Reckoning6. Running Through the Tunnels for Luther (then out)- Final Reckoning5. Running down the Burj Khalifa- Ghost Protocol 4. Running from the fishtank explosion- MI:13. The Rooftop Run- Fallout2. The Shanghai Run- MI:31. The Kremlin Run- Ghost Protocol 1. Edge of Tomorrow  Director: Doug Liman (2014) Where to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Edge of Tomorrow is the best Tom Cruise action film had to be made in his late period of action stardom. You need the gravity and the gravitas, the emotional baggage earned through those decades of culture-remaking roles, the toll that exerted effort took on him, and the time spent and time passed on his face. The late, largely perfect Mission: Impossible films that dominate the top 10 of this list do much of that work: They feint, they allude, they nod to the realities of stardom, of life and death. But Ethan Hunt is a superhero, an inevitability, so the outcome is never in doubt — until, perhaps someday, it is. But for now, the masterpiece from Doug Liman — a director who either hits dingers or strikes out looking, with no in between — is a movie that punctuated Cruise’s post-Ghost Prot action renaissance: Edge of Tomorrow, or Live. Die. Repeat. It’s the unlikely on-paper melding of Starship Troopers and Groundhog Day, but in practice it’s the action film equivalent of Jerry Maguire, a movie that relies on your history with Maverick, and Mitch McDeere, and Ethan Hunt, and uses it to dismantle and subvert Tom Cruise, the infallible hero.  Liman is at the top of his game, particularly in editing, which uses repetition and quick cuts masterfully to convey the long and slow transformation of a public relations major named Cage — who becomes trapped in a disastrous, endless intergalactic Normandy scenario — from a marketing clown in a uniform to an alien killer badass while he falls in love and saves the world. We watch as Cruise has all his bravado and bullshit stripped away by “a system” (maybe the single best Paxton performance?!) with no time for that, a woman smarter and stronger than he is and immune to his charms, and an invading force that tears him to pieces over and over again. We watch the five-tool movie star — robbed of all his tools — regroup, rebuild, and in the process, grow a soul. It’s the platonic ideal of what a great blockbuster action film can be, one that only could’ve been made by one of its most important, prolific, and talented stars.  Run report: A beautiful physical metaphor for this film is watching the evolution of Cruise’s ability to move in that ridiculous mech suit. 

Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases June 10 Preorder at Amazon The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases August 19 Preorder at Amazon See at Amazon (2018 set) J.R.R. Tolkien fans can soon add two display-worthy book box sets to their collection. Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set, which features lesser-known original works and translations of classic English literature, releases on June 10. It will be followed up on August 19 by new editions of The Great Tales of Middle-earth, which is comprised of the final three prose novels set in Tolkien's iconic fantasy world. The new hardcover box sets feature lavish cover art and display cases. They are considered the fifth and sixth entries in a series of hardcover book box sets that debuted last year with the The History of Middle-earth, which was published by William Morrow in its entirety across four beautiful collections. Tolkien Myths and Legends Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases June 10 The Tolkien Myths and Legends Box Set is a unique collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, because it doesn't contain stories about Middle-earth. Instead, as the title suggests, it compiles classic myths and legends, two of which were written by the author, while the other two were personal translations of some of his favorite works that inspired him.Like the vast majority of his posthumously published work, these were pieced together and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Each hardcover book comes with a double-sided dust jacket. Just like The History of Middle-earth Box Sets, one side features elaborate artwork, while the other side has a more subdued aesthetic with solid colors. The four books come packaged in an eye-catching display case. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Orfeo / Pearl: Translations of a trio of classic epic poems juxtaposed with Tolkien's famous 1953 lecture on Sir Gawain.The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: An epic verse poem by Tolkien. It was inspired by classic poetry and Norse mythology. Along with Tolkien's composition, you'll find notes and commentary from Christopher Tolkien.The Fall of Arthur: A narrative poem written by Tolkien that chronicles King Arthur's final days. The book includes extensive notes made by Tolkien while drafting his only Arthurian legend. Fans of The Silmarillion will want to read this one, as it clearly inspired the plot of Tolkien's Arthurian-esque Middle-earth book.Beowulf: One of the most famous--and the oldest known---epic poem of Old English literature, Beowulf has received many translations. Tolkien wrote his translation in 1926 and then circled back later. In addition to the translation of the original poem, this book contains a plethora of commentary by Tolkien himself, which will give readers a glimpse into the mind of Tolkien the scholar.If you're interested in the Myths and Legends Box Set, you should also check out The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, a massive three-volume hardcover box that released last fall. The gorgeous box set, which is on sale for nearly 50% off, compiles Tolkien's life's work as a poet and clocks in at over 1,700 pages. Preorder at Amazon The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2025) $125 | Releases August 19 The Great Tales of Middle-earth is a must-read collection for all dedicated fans of The Lord of the Rings. Though understandably not nearly as well-known as The Hobbit, LOTR, or even The Silmarillion, the trio of novels in this set are the final pieces of prose fiction that take place across the author's iconic brilliant fantasy world. All of the stories take place during Middle-earth's First Age, so while written and published later than Tolkien's other books, these are the oldest full-length stories in Middle-earth.The new 2025 hardcover editions come with reversible dust jackets and feature special color plates, pencil drawings, and illustrated maps by Christopher Tolkien and beloved LOTR illustrator Alan Lee.Here are the three books you'll find in the beautiful display case, which features a fire-breathing dragon.The Children of Húrin (2007): Written after The Silmarillion as a standalone prequel story, The Children of Húrin takes place 6,000 years before the events of LOTR. The story follows the cursed son of Húrin, named Túrin, during an era of intense and constant war and widespread devastation caused by the Dark Lord Morgoth. If you've read The Silmarillion, you will recognize some of the names found in this novel.Beren and Lúthien (2017): Another very early tale set in Middle-earth, Beren and Lúthien was reworked and revised over time and eventually became part of The Silmarillion. This compilation of Lúthien and Beren's story was originally published in 2017. It shows the evolution of the love story between the mortal man Beren and immortal elf Lúthien.The Fall of Gondolin (2018): Founded by King Turgon, the eponymous city of elves was concealed for many years before Lord Morgoth's quest to destroy elven life across Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin's main protagonist is Túrin's cousin, Tuor, and his family. Tuor is married to Turgon's daughter, Idril. The story follows their attempt to save their child after the Gondolin (unsurprisingly) falls.It's worth noting that The Great Tales of Middle-earth is already available as a hardcover box set. While it won't match Myths and Legends or the four History of Middle-earth Box Sets, the 2018 hardcover collection is on sale for only $50 (was $100) at Amazon. Alternatively, you can purchase each book individually in hardcover or paperback.The Great Tales of Middle-earth Editions:The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2018) (3 Books) -- $50 ($100)The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2025) (3 Books) -- $125 | Releases August 19The Children of Hurin (Paperback) -- $10.70 ($19)The Children of Hurin (Hardcover) -- $14 ($35)Beren and Lúthien (Paperback) -- $13.69 ($19)Beren and Lúthien (Hardcover) -- $22.50 ($35)The Fall of Gondolin (Paperback) -- $11.69 ($19)The Fall of Gondolin (Hardcover) -- $14.41 ($35) Preorder at Amazon See at Amazon (2018 set) The Great Tales of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (2018) $50 (was $100) See at Amazon The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Sets (2024)J.R.R. Tolkien - The History of Middle-earth Box Sets (2024)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 1 (4 Books) -- $63.37 ($125)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 2 (3 Books) -- $57.18 ($100)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 3 (4 Books) -- $73.60 ($125)The History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set 4 (4 Books) -- $68 ($125)The Complete History of Middle-earth Hardcover Box Set (3 Books) -- $138 ($250)The History of Middle-earth Paperback Box Set (5 Books) -- $28 ($50)The History of Middle-earth was originally published over a 14-year stretch from 1983 to 1996. While creating his fantasy world, Tolkien took extensive notes, building a backstory for Middle-earth across three different ages and 6,500-plus years. You could argue that the author's dedication to crafting the setting that would become home to a pair of landmark fantasy novels turned Middle-earth into the most believable character Tolkien created. His mythopoeic writings formed what is commonly referred to as Tolkien's legendarium.At the time of Tolkien's death in 1973, the exhaustive backstory of Middle-earth remained unpublished. Over the next few years, his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, undertook the daunting project of editing, expanding, and curating the legendarium into publishable works. The legendarium would become a 12-volume series titled The History of Middle-earth.Continue Reading at GameSpot

PROS: Easy, tool-less RAM and SSD access and replacement Excellent performance and impressive cooling More refined, premium-looking design AniMe Vision matrix display for some gamer flair Stunning matte Mini LED display CONS: Slightly larger and heavier than previous gen Quite pricey RATINGS: AESTHETICSERGONOMICSPERFORMANCESUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITYVALUE FOR MONEYEDITOR'S QUOTE:The ASUS Strix SCAR 18 (2025) delivers a powerhouse of a gaming laptop wrapped in a design that's modern, mature, and premium. Typical gaming laptops come in thick, bulky chassis with flashy lighting. The former is a result of cramming as many high-performance components as possible in such a cramped space, while the latter is a product of boxing gamer aesthetics into a particular stereotype. As more people embrace video gaming, however, the variety of design tastes also grows, with some preferring their gaming gear to be a bit more discreet and subtle. Announced earlier this year, the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) is bringing more than just the latest and greatest in PC gaming technologies. It also arrived with a redesigned appearance, breaking away from its peers to some degree. But does the gaming laptop’s embrace of subdued aesthetics also mean it cuts down on its performance? We give this racing car-inspired powerhouse a spin to see if it manages to strike a balance between power and beauty that will appeal to a wider audience. Designer: ASUS Republic of Gamers Aesthetics You might be surprised by the sight that greets you when you remove the ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) from its packaging. You immediately behold a frame that looks premium, eschewing the shiny plastic surfaces and geometric details that deck most gaming laptops. Instead, the soft-touch matte black material on its back gives it a sleeker, more premium personality, a design language that ASUS seems to be adopting across its laptop line. That design continues inside, where the semi-transparent keyboard deck of last year’s model is replaced with an opaque, all-black case that is less distracting and, to be honest, looks more professional. If you turn all the RGB lights off, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) could easily pass off for a business laptop, though a rather bulky one at that. The one complaint we have with this smoother texture is how it easily smudges, so you’ll find yourself wiping surfaces more often to keep them looking pristine and presentable. Of course, a Republic of Gamers laptop is still designed for gamers, and those who do want some flair will find plenty of sliders and switches to play with. In addition to the lightbar that runs around the bottom of the chassis and the standard keyboard backlighting, the Strix SCAR 18 (2025) brings the AniMe Vision matrix display from the ROG Zephyrus line, providing 810 LEDs shining through 9,152 precision-milled holes that you can control to show off some lo-fi text or images, both static and animated. The ROG logo sitting in the corner also has its own RGB lights, though it might be a little too big for our tastes. The ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) delivers a design that successfully pulls off a tough balancing act, providing a sophisticated and premium look that can still flaunt all those bright RGB colors if wanted. It is distinctly gaming-oriented without having to shout it, preferring to let its performance do the talking. Ergonomics There’s no escaping the laws of physics, and until the day we can truly shrink hardware and develop some magical cooling technology, there will always be concessions when it comes to balancing power and portability. Gaming laptops are unsurprisingly the worst offenders in this matter, and this year’s ROG Strix SCAR 18 sadly takes a step back. Although the Strix SCAR 18 (2025) is an upgrade in almost every other aspect, it is also slightly larger and noticeably heavier than its predecessor. The good news is that it isn’t for naught, because the newer model does pack an improved cooling system as well as a more modular design, but it’s still something potential buyers will have to consider to manage their expectations, not to mention prepare their backs or shoulders when lugging it around. The SCAR 18 (2025)’s more streamlined design also has ramifications for its usability, particularly with the ports. Gone are the side exhausts, allowing the connectivity ports to be pushed backward a bit. ASUS also took the opportunity to add a third full-sized USB-A port, probably to the delight of many gamers and computer users whose favorite accessories haven’t yet moved to the age of USB-C. The power connector has also been redesigned with a new rectangular plug instead of a round barrel. Unfortunately, the power cable has also been changed to stick out from the side rather than at a 90-degree angle like last year’s charger. The ergonomics of the keyboard and the large touchpad are quite good, providing comfort and precision despite not having your ideal mechanical switches. One thing that might throw off new users, however, is the non-standard position of the cursor keys and the layout of the numeric keypad. It’s not a complete deal-breaker, but one that will require developing some muscle memory that you can’t carry over to other keyboards or laptops. Performance The ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) is an upgrade in every sense of the word, bearing the latest and greatest Intel chip, the Core Ultra 9 275HX. This is paired with a Series 5000 NVIDIA graphics card, which will naturally depend on what model you’ll have. Our review unit, the G835LW, comes with a GeForce RTX 5080, while there are also options for a 5070 (G835LR) and the highest 5090 (G835LX). Out of the box, you get 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD storage, but you can easily double that, as we’ll see later. Long story short, this machine is a beast, making short work of modern AAA titles. Of course, don’t expect to get desktop-grade performance that will let you crank up all the settings to 11, but you won’t be far off either. What’s more impressive than the benchmark numbers is how stable that performance is, particularly thanks to an improved cooling system this year. In addition to your typical high-capacity fans, which now number three, the Strix SCAR 18 (2025) features heatsinks that stretch across the whole width of the laptop. Also running from end to end is the vapor chamber sandwiched between these heatsinks. Completely new to this generation, however, is the Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal that replaces your typical thermal paste on the CPU and the GPU. All these work together to keep thermals down to a manageable level and keep the laptop running in peak condition for far longer. While performance is something you’ll only be able to feel when actually pushing the laptop to its limits, the stunning 18-inch Mini LED is a beauty that you’ll be able to immediately see and appreciate. It definitely has a laundry list of features that not only gamers but also designers will love, starting with the 2.5K resolution and 1200 nits of peak brightness. 100% DCI-P3 coverage ensures color accuracy, while 240Hz refresh rates mean your content will be able to keep up with the action. Vibrant, colorful, and fluid, this screen is pretty much the mouth-watering icing on top of the cake that is the laptop’s performance. Battery life, on the other hand, isn’t as impressive. It’s still the same 90Wh capacity from last year’s model, so its average expectancy isn’t that much. You’d be lucky to get even an hour of gaming with medium settings, which is quite average among gaming laptops. ASUS did upgrade the charger to 380W from 330W, so you have a shorter charging time. The bonus is that the ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) now supports 100W PD (Power Delivery) charging via USB-C, which expands charging options just a bit. Of course, it’s still slower and won’t be able to support heavy gaming compared to the official power brick, but it’s better than completely draining your battery dry in less than an hour. The ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) definitely doesn’t hold back when it comes to performance, making it an excellent portable workstation for designers and creators as well. There’s no denying that it offers one of, if not, the best options in the gaming laptop market, but the real question is whether that justifies the price that ASUS is asking for in turn. We’ll get to that in a bit, but first, we make a segue into what is probably the third-best thing about the laptop after its sophisticated beauty and unmatched performance. Sustainability At first glance, the Strix SCAR 18 (2025) is your typical mix of metal and plastic that you’d find in many gaming laptops. In fact, you might even be disappointed to find out that there’s still quite a lot of plastic, especially on the interior deck, rather than the aluminum that premium laptops have begun to flaunt. That said, the plastic does help with keeping things a bit cooler and even a little bit lighter, despite the laptop being quite a heavyweight. ROG added one feature that trumps all that, though. With a simple slide of a latch, you can easily remove the back panel to have instant access to SSD and RAM slots. Even better, ASUS has brought its Q-Latch system to easily remove and replace the SSDs with just a plastic hinge. The fans and battery are also quickly exposed, though those will require a bit more work to take out. The motherboard is also well protected with a special frame but is still just a few screws away. This tool-less access to the most commonly upgraded components ensures that the Strix SCAR 18 (2025) will last you a long, long time. Value Subtly sophisticated, impressively powerful, and easily upgradable, the ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) almost has it all. The combination of refined aesthetics and flexibility to show off your gamer DNA positions this laptop as a powerhouse not just for gaming but for any endeavor that requires extensive processing, which usually includes AI these days. It’s almost perfect except for one particularly thorny subject: the price. The G835LW with an RTX 5080 fetches a jaw-dropping $3,399.99, and the highest configuration easily goes for $4,449.99. That puts it close to luxury laptop territory, which isn’t something you might call such a gaming laptop, especially one that still has plenty of plastic to go around. Between these two, this G835LW model we’re reviewing seems to have the best balance, compromising just a little bit on performance for a huge cut in cost. Are there other options in this price range? Definitely. But are there other options in this price range that offer this trifecta of style, power, and longevity? Probably not. Verdict We’re entering an age where gaming laptops are no longer just hulking portable counterparts of their desktop cousins. As user tastes evolve, so too, do laptop designs. Those neon-lit futuristic slabs won’t disappear, but we’ll be getting an infusion of gaming laptops that cast their nets wider to appeal to a more diverse audience, some of which might not want to broadcast their gaming passion 24/7. The ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) manages to strike a balance that will probably satisfy a good number of gamers of different aesthetic preferences. It cuts a rather captivating image of a powerful portable machine that can handle any task without breaking a sweat. Yes when you turn the RGB lights on and bring the AniMe Vision display to life, it immediately transforms into a dynamic battle station that will carry you to victory. The price tag is definitely a bitter pill to swallow, but you can rest assured that you’re getting you’re money’s worth, especially in the long term. The post ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) Review: Subtly Sophisticated Performance Powerhouse first appeared on Yanko Design.

Princess Charlotte is Prince William and Kate Middleton's second child. Will Warr/Kensington Palace/Handout via Reuters 2025-05-22T12:42:01Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Princess Charlotte turned 10 in May. As Prince William and Kate Middleton's second child, she's third in line for the British throne. Although her life is mostly private, Charlotte shows peeks of her personality at royal engagements. The roles of "heir" and "spare" have haunted royal siblings for centuries.The very existence of secondborn children in the British royal family is tied to a crown they'll ideally never hold, as they serve as backups to the direct heirs to the throne. Still, spares can play a critical role in the monarchy, as was the case for King George VI, who became monarch in 1936 after his brother abdicated. Even as it adapts to the modern world, the heir and spare dynamic continues to shape the monarchy, as evidenced by the title — and contents — of Prince Harry's 2023 memoir.In the latest generation of royals, Princess Charlotte is the spare to Prince George's heir. However, at just 10, Charlotte is already breaking the mold she was born into, charting a new path for the royals.Here's everything to know about Princess Charlotte.Princess Charlotte joins the royal familyIn a press release on September 8, 2014, Kensington Palace announced that Kate Middleton was expecting her and Prince William's second child. The statement also said that Kate had hyperemesis gravidarum, as she did with her first pregnancy, and would be missing an engagement in Oxford that day as a result.Charlotte was born on May 2, 2015, at 8:34 a.m., at the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital in London, just like Prince George, Prince William, and Prince Harry were. Kate Middleton and Prince William posed with Princess Charlotte outside the hospital the day of her birth. Mike Marsland/Getty Images William and Kate debuted their daughter to the world during a photocall on the hospital's steps the same day she was born. Kate posed for photos on the hospital's steps after each of her children's births, following in Princess Diana's footsteps.Charlotte's full name is Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, and at the time of her birth, her title was Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte of Cambridge.Charlotte is the feminine version of Charles, her grandfather's name. Her middle names nod to her great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and her late grandmother, Princess Diana.At her birth, Charlotte was fourth in the royal line of succession, behind her grandfather, father, and older brother.Queen Elizabeth II ensured Charlotte's position in the line wouldn't be affected by her gender through the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013. The act changed a long-standing rule that male siblings superseded their female siblings' position in the line to the throne. If it hadn't been passed, Prince Louis' birth in 2018 would have moved Charlotte down the line of succession. Princess Charlotte began attending Lambrook School in September 2022. Jonathan Brady/Pool/Getty Images After Queen Elizabeth died in 2022, King Charles III made William the Prince of Wales, so his daughter's title became Princess Charlotte of Wales. Likewise, she moved up to third in line for the throne after her great-grandmother's death. Princess Charlotte's royal lifeAccording to the royal family's website, the princess was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury at St Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham in July 2015. Prince George was photographed peering into her stroller at the ceremony.Charlotte has five godparents, including Kate's cousin, Adam Middleton. Prince George looked into his sister Princess Charlotte's pram after her christening in July 2015. Matt Dunham/Reuters Kate and William released a few photos of the princess as a baby, but she didn't join her parents on an overseas tour until she was 16 months old, in September 2016, when she went with her family to Canada.Charlotte and Kate wore color-coordinating outfits throughout the trip, a tradition they've kept up throughout Charlotte's life.Charlotte became a big sister in 2018 when Prince Louis was born, completing the Wales family. The princess attended Thomas's Battersea school in London from 2019 to 2021, and she began attending the Lambrook School after the Wales family relocated to Windsor full-time in 2022. Princess Charlotte has appeared on the Buckingham Palace balcony during Trooping the Colour. Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty Images William and Kate have balanced their children's royal roles with their privacy as they've grown up, allowing them to attend only a handful of royal engagements each year and releasing photos of them for special occasions, like birthdays or holidays.Charlotte appears annually at Trooping the Colour and the royal family's Christmas walk at Sandringham. She has also been present for milestone moments for the royals, like Queen Elizabeth's funeral in September 2022 and King Charles' coronation in May 2023.Charlotte often appears to be the most comfortable of her siblings at royal engagements, speaking with members of the public and even correcting her brothers on royal protocol.The young princess has also been spotted attending less formal events from time to time, showing off a more authentic side of the royal family in the process.Kensington Palace shared photos of Charlotte at the Eras Tour in June 2024, smiling with William, George, and Taylor Swift. She also joined her mother at Wimbledon in July 2024, accompanying Kate to the first solo engagement she attended after announcing her cancer diagnosis. Princess Charlotte joined Kate Middleton at Wimbledon 2024. Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty Images Charlotte's comfort in the spotlight, even compared to her older brother, differentiates her from royal "spares" of the past, who are often relegated to the role of wild child in comparison to the heir's steadiness. She seems calm and competent at public events, and she may already be taking after her great-aunt Princess Anne, whose steadfastness is an asset to King Charles.At only 10, it's clear Princess Charlotte's future in the royal family is bright.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown Score Details “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown makes turn-based tactics feel as fast-paced as a John Wick brawl.” Pros Very original approach to TMNT Thoughtful characterization Fast-paced tactics Compact size is a plus Cons Repetitive missions A bit anticlimactic Buggy at launch “Why you can trust Digital Trends – We have a 20-year history of testing, reviewing, and rating products, services and apps to help you make a sound buying decision. Found out more about how we test and score products.“ Please link here Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a shining example of how the way a game plays can completely change what it says about its characters. Growing up, my perception of New York’s finest reptiles was shaped by beat-em-ups. GameCube drawlers like Battle Nexus taught me that the boys were a bunch of rowdy goofballs. They were deadly, but sloppy. They aren’t the same turtles I find in the turn-based action of Tactical Takedown. There, I meet hyper efficient assassins who don’t waste a single movement. They aren’t just members of a squad who need one another to take out waves of enemies; each is a one turtle wrecking machine. I’m left to wonder just how devastating they must be as one unified band of brothers. Recommended Videos Fast-paced strategy makes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown’s turn-based action feel as active as an arcade brawler. Each level offers a jolt of arcade excitement that gives each turtle their chance to shine rather than treating them as interchangeable heroes. Its small scope leaves it vulnerable to bugs and repetition, but Tactical Takedown’s best quality is how much it’s willing to break the mold and offer a new spin on a familiar TMNT power fantasy. Together alone Rather than revisiting a scenario that’s been done to death, Tactical Takedown tries its best to steer away from TMNT clichés. It pits the boys against a new Foot Clan leader who is filling a void left behind by Shredder. Rather than tackling that threat together with a carefree attitude, we’re left with four brothers who have grown distant as each comes to terms with impending adulthood. The big shock is that the four of them never appear together during their mission, as an attack on the Turtle Lair takes out their communication system. Each one sets off on their own solo objective, only interacting with their bros through interstitial dialogue between missions. A broken Turtlecom turns out to be a perfect metaphor for a more human kind of distance. That may sound a little sacrilegious at first, but it’s a purposeful swing. The physical separation drives home how much the team is growing apart through the story. It’s a little sad, like waking up one morning and realizing that you haven’t seen the cousins you used to play all night with on Christmas Eve in years. We’ve so rarely, if ever, gotten to see a version of the Turtles that feels this lonely and introspective. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I walked away from Tactical Takedown with a new appreciation of their dynamic. Tactical Takedown isn’t a big licensed project and shouldn’t be approached as such. That separation isn’t played as a bummer, though. Instead, developer Strange Scaffold uses it to shine a spotlight on each hero. Every level has me playing as a specific Turtle, as they all work towards the same goal using their own skills and expertise. Michelangelo attacks the problem at a street level, taking out goons with his nunchaku. Donatello sticks to the sewers, Raphael dashes over rooftops, and Leonardo sticks to the subway like a real New Yorker. In any other Turtles game, these would be locations that every turtle would explore by the end of the story. Here, each feels like one of the hero’s turf, giving them a specific home field advantage that their other brothers don’t have. That builds to a climax you can probably see coming, but not in the way you’re expecting. We’re never quite given a moment where all four heroes are playable together, sharing a pool of actions and synergizing their skills with one another. There’s a much different interpretation of their union here that undercuts their individuality. It’s functional enough, but the finale feels less like a natural conclusion and more like a concession to not mess around with the core tactics formula too much. That philosophy makes for some repetition as each of its 20 levels plays out the same with little variation aside from swapping the hero. Strange Scaffold Tactical Takedown isn’t a big licensed project and shouldn’t be approached as such. It’s a micro indie from a studio known for playing things fast and loose. Like every Strange Scaffold game I’ve ever played before launch, I encountered some form of game breaking bug that will no doubt be fixed by the time you actually play it. A broken special attack that I could spam multiple times by hammering a button, reset levels due to a glitched “end turn” button, and a loadout menu that I could not for the life of me figure out how to edit. It’s not that I hold those issues against it much, just as I didn’t mind I Am Your Beast’s few game-breaking issues that halted my progress for a few days. They’ll get fixed promptly by a nimble team, but sometimes I wonder what just a little more time in the oven could do for some of the studio’s best ideas, whether it’s polishing them to perfection or having time to build in one more creative twist that snaps everything into place. All action Though there are limits to its compact nature, Tactical Takedown’s focused scope is its greatest asset too. Each bite-sized level drops a turtle onto a small grid-based map. Every few turns, a new piece of the map forms while another goes away. It’s built to feel exactly like an old beat-em-up in that way, with the screen scroll of an arcade game stopping to frame a brawl before prompting players to move on. It’s an ingenious way to bring the feel of those games to an entirely different genre. That same philosophy extends to its brilliant spin on turn-based combat, which takes a genre known for careful decision making and makes it feel like John Wick. Each Turtle has five moves that they can use on each turn and a whopping six action points that can be spent in any way. When playing as Michaelangelo, my initial skill set is largely about leaping around enemies. I can skateboard over a foe and hit them on the way over or dash past a few enemies with my whirling nunchucks. Even my most basic attack, a simple bonk, moves me to the enemy’s square once defeated. With six whole points to spend per turn, and more if I equip moves that replenish AP, I’m able to do a whole lot of damage in one go. There’s a maturity to the boys here reflected in precise strategy rather than drunken brawling. There’s a strategy to each turtle and the brisk four hour runtime gives me just enough time to perfect each over time. With Michaelangelo, I learn to chain my way through enemies by knocking my way through one so that I can directly move to another without spending a movement point. Donatello is more about shocking enemies to keep them in place and create distance between them, allowing him to pick them off from afar or trap them in poison sewer pits. Leonardo is more about standing his ground, creating stacks of evasion that allow him to survive in tight subway car melees. And Raphael is all about yanking faraway enemies to reposition them and boot them away. Each strategy is distinct and rewards mastery. Once I got the hang of each, I couldn’t believe just how much I could do in a turn. Sometimes I’d be greeted with a screen full of ninjas and assume that I couldn’t possibly take them all out. With careful enough positioning, I’d realize that I could punt a foe off an edge here to instantly kill it, slash another weak one to finish it off and get its AP, jump over to a pizza box to heal, and still have enough actions left to take out a few more enemies. All of this happens quickly in my brain. I don’t need to think about what to do next; I reflexively fire off actions one after another, often taking out a whole screen full of enemies in seconds flat. It’s like playing a beat-em-up, but somehow faster and more precise. It’s through that ironclad combat hook that my perception of the Turtles changes. While most TMNT games hone in on the teenage part, Tactical Takedown is concerned with the anagram’s N. Each one truly feels like a ninja here, dispatching enemies in the blink of an eye. If you cut out the bits of decision making between move selection, you’d be treated to a thrilling little sequence on every single turn that plays out like Oldboy’s hallway sequence. Strange Scaffold I do wish that there were a few more ways to really drive that point home outside from the fairly static gauntlet of fights that never really changes. Some levels can feel long, throwing out waves of enemies with little pace until they just suddenly end. Perhaps some bosses or stage hazards could have given me a few more ways to think about the most efficient ways to use my moves, especially since the difficulty winds up feeling flat even in its enemy-filled finale. There’s more room to grow the great seed Strange Scaffold has planted here if the studio decides to take the team for another spin one day. Even if it’s destined to be a one-shot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a welcome little addition to TMNT’s storied video game canon. In just a few short hours, it gave me a new appreciation of each individual bro by deconstructing the team dynamic and showing how each part of the unit functions on its own. There’s a maturity to the boys here reflected in precise strategy rather than drunken brawling. You can break up a team, but the mark of a strong family is its ability to fight through hell and back to come together again. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown was reviewed on PC and Steam Deck OLED.