history of cockfighting in the philippines
history of cockfighting in the philippines
history of cockfighting in the philippines
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After 12 months of big hitters such as Helldivers 2, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Dune: Part 2 and Shogun, it’s not unreasonable to consider 2024 a good year for pop culture. But the smooth always comes with the rough, and the past year really has been a rocky one for the things we love and the people who make them. From layoffs and studio closures to costly consoles, underwhelming adaptations and struggling sequels, these are the biggest disappointments in 2024. The games industry found itself facing a crisis in 2023 as many publishers and studios, both large and small, made scores of staff redundant in an effort to cut costs. But the pains of that year would be repeated in 2024, which has seen an estimated 14,600 job losses - a 39% increase year-on-year. The cuts have seen thousands of talented studio staff thrown into the most difficult job market the games industry has ever seen, with developers attempting to find new roles in a landscape where companies are slimming down. That is if their studio still exists. Adding to the dismal picture are several studio closures. Perhaps the most prominent among them is Arkane Austin, Bethesda’s immersive sim specialist responsible for the acclaimed Prey. Sadly its most recent release, Redfall, was a critical and commercial bomb – a situation that seemingly sealed its fate. Arkane Austin was shuttered by parent company Microsoft, along with Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Games, and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks . Somewhat miraculously, Tango was rescued by Krafton in a last-minute turn of fate, but such good news is rare. Also suffering closure this year was PlayStation’s London Studio , Galvanic Games, Avalanche Studio Group’s New York and Montreal studios , as well as others. To say it's been a tough year is an understatement. Another developer closed for good is Firewalk Studios , the team behind what is certainly PlayStation’s biggest disaster of the generation: Concord . A PvP hero shooter, its long and costly development meant it arrived long after the genre had peaked in popularity. But, despite being developed by many FPS veterans hailing from the likes of Bungie and Activision, what could have been PlayStation’s next big multiplayer phenomenon struggled to stand out from the likes of Overwatch and Apex Legends thanks to its lacklustre character kits and standard fare objective design. From the outside Concord simply looked like another typical hero shooter, which meant few wanted to see what was going on inside. It’s not an exaggeration to say that almost no one turned up for its August release – it achieved a high of just 697 concurrent players on Steam during its first week. Less than two weeks later, Sony pulled Concord from sale , refunded players, and shut the game down. By the end of October, Firewalk Studios was closed for business. It all sadly means Concord is gone without a trace. Well, almost – an episode of Amazon’s Secret Level animated series serves as a prequel to the ongoing Concord in-game story that never happened. A similar, thankfully less tragic story also happened earlier this year with Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. After months of poorly-received marketing, Sucide Squad launched as a critical and commercial bomb . As with Concord, much of Kill The Justice League’s failings were due to chasing trends that players have long since largely tired of – in this case, the Destiny-style live-service shooter grind . It didn’t help that Suicide Squad resembled Crystal Dynamics’ ill-fated Avengers game from a few years back, which similarly annoyed players for being a repetitive multiplayer PvE game. In Suicide Squad’s case, it was a shattering fall from grace for a studio that previously made beloved single-player Batman games. Many of us just wanted more of that best-in-class superhero action with a villainous twist, but sadly Warner Bros’ chase of live-service revenue seemingly got in the way. Not that it paid off - an initial lack of sales and dwindling players has contributed to a significant revenue decline for the company. The time-compressing effect of the pandemic years has disguised the fact that, yes, we’re already at the midpoint of the current console generation. Right on cue, Sony delivered its mid-cycle refresh PlayStation 5 Pro, and it’s safe to say that practically no one was pleased by its $700 price tag . That’s not just down to the cost of living squeezing everyone’s wallets – Mark Cerny’s presentation that apparently showcased the console’s ability to render The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered so much better than the base console was basically the “They’re the same picture” meme from The Office in action. While there’s definitely time for the PS5 Pro to prove why it costs $200 more than the regular PS5, the initial results have been pretty disappointing. Rather than eliminate the need to decide between quality and performance modes, developers have added even more options to Pro-patched games, with confusing names such as ‘Fidelity Pro’ and ‘Versatility’. Remember when you just plugged in a console and it worked? Halcyon days. Plus, all the Pro’s extra power can’t even make Bloodborne look any better . At least Sony fans got a console, though. After months of rumours that Nintendo was due to announce its successor to the Switch, the company announced a brand new piece of hardware: an alarm clock. Yes, the Alarmo is a $100 clock with game-themed alarms and a motion sensor that can detect when you’ve got out of bed. It’s hardly the Switch 2 we were hoping for. And even when it comes to Nintendo’s history of weird hardware , Alarmo is far from the most interesting or bizarre. A true disappointment from the house of Mario. Over in the realm of television, things have largely been bright thanks to the likes of Arcane, Shogun, and Fallout. But 2024 also saw some traditionally reliable shows struggle to maintain their quality. Season 3 of The Bear certainly wasn’t bad – it once again provided some solid character drama and beautifully-shot kitchen nightmares. But, compared to the incredible highs of the first two seasons, this third chapter fell significantly short. Its frustratingly slow pace clashed with the lightning speed of previous years, and the focus being almost entirely on Carmy’s inner crisis forced valuable characters like Sydney into the sidelines. Similarly, we saw this year’s Star Wars project struggle to hit the highs of The Mandalorian and Andor. The Acolyte was built on a fascinating premise that delved into the galaxy’s past, exploring the late High Republic era. It was packed with Jedi and featured one of the coolest lightsaber battles in the entire franchise, but even that couldn’t save the series from its sloppy and often infuriating storytelling. The Acolyte’s saving grace could have been Manny Jacinto’s Sith lord The Stranger, who sports one of the most menacing helmets in all of Star Wars. But while deeper exploration of his character could have resulted in a much-improved season two, we’ll never get to see that thanks to Disney axing the show entirely. This isn’t just a Disney problem – Netflix has also continued its habit of cancelling shows after barely giving them a chance to realise their full potential. 2024’s Netflix cull included Kaos and Dead Boy Detectives, which join last year’s Lockwood & Co in the “cancelled after a single season” club. This year’s Fallout was a stellar exercise of how to adapt a video game for television, with Amazon’s wasteland show being among our TV highlights of 2024. But it seems like Fallout’s success isn’t a guaranteed indicator that every Amazon video game show will be fantastic, as proven by the dreadful Like a Dragon: Yakuza show that landed on the service several months later. Featuring no karaoke, far too little Majima, and far too much melodrama, Like a Dragon totally failed to capture the stark contrast between serious and silly that the Yakuza games thrive on. It wasn’t just Japanese RPGs that were treated poorly for TV this year, though. Famed Japanese manga Uzumaki also received its long-awaited animated adaptation, and the results couldn’t have gone any worse . The four-part Adult Swim show turned Junji Ito’s monochrome horror into a rushed mess that sprinted to the finale, undermining plot points, character arcs, and scares on the way. The biggest disappointment, though, was the severe drop in animation quality following a visually rich episode one . Uzumaki transformed from beautifully chilling into a low-budget nightmare in the space of a week – it was a rug-pull scarier than anything Junji Ito could write. Unfortunately, terrible adaptations weren’t limited to the small screen. One of the biggest box office bombs of the year came in the form of Borderlands . Gearbox’s wacky looter shooter was transformed into a hideously miscast Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off for its live-action big screen adventure. Many of the games’ best-know qualities, such as its sweary sense of humour and love of turning humans into piles of goopy gore, were toned down to the point of vanishing completely. The result was bland, recycled MCU-ish ideas geared toward mass marketability. In short: a complete disaster. Unsurprisingly it died an unceremonious death when it launched in cinemas – with Lionsgate’s CEO saying “nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong.” It’s arguable that an FPS like Borderlands was never going to survive the transition to cinema. A sequel to the most profitable comic book movie of all time and the first R-rated film to pass a billion-dollars at the box office, though? Surely a second Joker was going to be an easy win. Not so much. Joker: Folie à Deux turned out to be a miserably dull follow-up , with director Todd Phillips undoing almost all the good he established in the first film. When not even Lady Gaga can save your kinda-sorta musical from its snoozefest courtroom drama scenes, you know you’re in trouble. For the classic-mould movie buff, though, almost certainly the biggest disappointment of the year is Megalopolis. The years-in-the-making, self-financed magnum-opus from The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola was (perhaps, if we’re honest, somewhat predictably) an indulgent catastrophe. Some people have seen method in the madness (including our own reviewer, who gave it a 9/10 ) but for many this opulent fable set in a futuristic, Rome-like New York City was a bloated, pretentious, dull mess. Quite how the creator of the quintessential Mafia movie got here may prove to be one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. From studio closures to box office catastrophes, 2024 has had some real low points. It’s hard to find a silver lining in some of them, and we continue to hope that the industries that make our favourite things will turn a better corner in 2025. But in other instances it’s the downs that make the ups shine brightly – and you can find many of those bright stars in our roundup of the best reviewed games of 2025. Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.Heat say Jimmy Butler will miss 2 more games before rejoining team next week
Anytime there are murmurings of an entirely new Apple product, our ears perk up. Apple’s not immune to its own flops, but most of the news these days tend to center on versions of long-running product families, such as the Mac, iPhone, and Watch. It’s comparatively rare to hear news of a version one of Apple anything. That’s why we’ve been sniffing around ever since we heard rumors from a historically credible source that Apple is bringing a new device early next year to its smart home family. Apple’s HomePod family hasn’t much impressed us to date, but if this new device can successfully integrate everything it promises to, Apple’s smart home just might finally get some respect. Videos by VICE “homepod” smart display Without a name yet by which to call it, us tech journalists have been simply referring to it as the “HomePod” smart display in the meantime, since it’s expected to occupy a space in Apple’s existing HomePod ecosystem . As a smart-home-unifying “AI wall tablet” that promises to link cameras and doorbells and run Apple apps, it’s an entirely new product. So new, it doesn’t even yet have a name, at least outside of Apple’s (semi) whisper-proof walls. Reporter Mark Gurman is noted for the accuracy of his insight into Apple rumors, and over at Bloomberg he details Apple’s efforts at introducing a new device in its smart home space. With the device about the size of two iPhones side by side, he reports, its six-inch touchscreen will reportedly allow it to run a variety of Apple apps such as Safari, Apple Music, and Notes, but without access to the official App Store you ostensibly won’t be able to swap out the stock Apple apps for your favorite third-party apps. So no Google Keep for you. look and listen, but don’t touch. ok, you can touch. Despite the touchscreen, Gurman reports that the new device will be primarily controlled by voice through Apple Intelligence’s App Intents framework , proof of just how committed Apple is to using Apple Intelligence as a pan-device-and-service tool to integrate Apple’s full lineup more tightly than poor, jealous Siri ever could on its (her?) own. Siri is coming along for the ride, though, and will be integrated into the device. After splintering iPadOS from mobile’s iOS, which from the beginning has been distinct from the computer’s macOS (after it used to be OS X), and developing from iOS the watchOS, we thought Apple was done creating new operating systems. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The new operating system for this device, per Gurman, is a blend of watchOS and iOS StandBy mode. It shifts between them based on how far the user is from the device. There are devices, from smartphones to screen-possessing smart home hub displays, that shift what they display (and how large they display it) based on whether their users are looking at the screen or not, but switching operating systems entirely based on distance is rather interesting and unique. We can’t wait to see more of how that’ll work. a base to build on if you don’t want to hang around There’ll be a speaker base so that the device can be placed on surfaces, as well as a wall mount. There will almost certainly be speakers in the device itself, and you won’t need a speaker base to get audio from it. If it truly wants to integrate functions like the rumored Apple smart doorbell , and to reportedly integrate with other devices to work as an in-home video and audio intercom, it’ll surely have to have built-in speakers regardless of a separate base. Of course, that means it’ll have a built-in camera for FaceTiming. And supposedly there’s a battery, too. Whether it’s meant to be used regularly without having to plug a power adapter into the wall or if it’s just meant to be a battery backup in the event of a power outage is unknown yet. I’m banking heavily on the latter. So how long do we have to wait for this supposed unifying device? Until March, per Gurman , although there are some reports that software issues could delay that further . We’ll continue to follow this story with a surfeit of interest, especially once we have a name for it.Trump touts tariffs, mass deportations, Nato skepticism in TV interviewStock market today: Wall Street slips as the 'Magnificent 7' weighs down the market
FOBI AI Inc. Announces Proposed Private Placement and BCSC OrderThe team that President-elect Donald Trump has selected to lead federal health agencies in his second administration includes a retired congressman, a surgeon and a former talk-show host. All could play pivotal roles in fulfilling a political agenda that could change how the government goes about safeguarding Americans' health — from health care and medicines to food safety and science research. In line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services secretary is environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine organizer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.
