Google is partnering with National Public Radio to bring the broadcaster’s podcasts to YouTube. On Thursday, the two announced that more than 20 NPR shows, including Up First and Throughline, are now available on the platform. NPR is no stranger to YouTube. Its Tiny Desks concert series has been a hit on the platform for a few years now, with a recent Ludovico Einaudi performance amassing nearly 900,000 views and counting.

The addition of NPR podcasts comes just as YouTube recently added an Explore page dedicated to the format. While it’s only available to some people, the section highlights popular channels, episodes and playlists as well as categories and recommended shows. It may not explicitly market itself as a podcast platform, but both the page and its new partnership with NPR show YouTube getting serious about the medium.

Dead Island 2 is coming. The long-awaited zombie-slaying role-playing game is set to hit PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Google Stadia and PC via the Epic Games Store on February 3rd, 2023. Deep Silver showed off the blood-soaked sequel with a cinematic trailer and a gameplay video during Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase.

Dead Island 2 will feature six playable characters with unique voice acting and traits, and it all takes place in Los Angeles. The game is designed as a love letter to cult-classic horror films and old Hollywood vibes: It has a pulpy narrative to follow, classic RPG elements and a co-op mode for up to three players. All six of the main characters are customizable, and a brand new skill system allows players to adjust their specs on the fly. There are dozens of individual zombie types to slay, too.

Dead Island 2 is the full follow-up to the 2011 hit Dead Island, though there have been smaller installments in the series. The game was announced in 2014 and it's essentially been in development hell ever since, lost among a handful of studio sales and team swaps. It's now in progress at Deep Silver's Dambuster Studios, which worked on Homefront: The Revolution.

Fans of The Expanse will have to wait about another year to play Deck Nine's interpretation of the popular sci-fi series. The studio, best known for its work on Life is Strange: True Colors, and Telltale Games shared a new behind-the-scenes gameplay trailer during Gamescom 2022 and revealed that the title would come out sometime in the summer of 2023. While not revelatory, the clip does show off something we hadn't seen before. The Expanse: A Telltale Series will feature sequences where you'll need to navigate zero-gravity environments. 

Set before the TV series, which concluded at the start of this year, the game stars Camina Drummer. After her introduction in the show's second season, Drummer, played by actress Cara Gee in both the TV series and upcoming game, went on to become a fan-favorite character over subsequent seasons. The Expanse is one of two new projects Telltale Games is working on after coming back from financial insolvency. In 2023, the studio also plans to release The Wolf Among Us 2. 

Sometimes, a game trailer just catches your eye. Phantom Hellcat is the first title in an original hack-and-slash universe from Ironbird Creations, a new studio under Ghostrunner and Chernobylite publisher All in! Games. Phantom Hellcat is a perspective-shifting action game that blends fantasy and pop culture, starring a young woman named Jolene on a mission to save the world from an encroaching evil force. You know, classic action fare.

The interesting bit of Phantom Hellcat is its shifting perspective, which transitions from 2D platforming to 3D close-quarters battling. The game has a skill tree, upgradeable masks with varying abilities and secrets to find in each level. Developers at Ironbird drew inspiration from the Nier series, which is a fantastic starting point for this type of experience.

Phantom Hellcat is coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC at some point — there's no solid release date yet, but it's available to wishlist on Steam.

After a 20-year drought, Dune fans suddenly have more than one game to look forward to playing. After announcing Dune: Spice Wars in 2021, Norwegian publisher Funcom revealed at this year's Gamescom that it's creating a new MMO set in Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi universe. The trailer the company shared during the event didn't showcase gameplay. 

Instead, we see a character, possibly the game's version of Paul Atreides, watch a sandworm devour a spice harvester while reciting Dune's famous "fear is the mind-killer" mantra, with the eventual title card promising an open-world survival experience. The game's Steam page provides a few more details about the project. Players will have the chance to explore the desert planet while in search of spice. You'll need to protect your harvester from opportunistic raiders and the occasional sandworm. Funcom did not announce a release date for Dune: Awakening, but the game's website invites fans to sign up for a forthcoming beta.

Gearbox Software announced several months ago that a new Tales from the Borderlands game was coming this year, and its title is exactly that: New Tales from the Borderlands. CEO Randy Pitchford made an appearance at Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase to reveal more details about the game.

Pitchford said he was a big fan of the original game, a narrative-driven point-and-click title set in the Borderlands universe developed by Telltale Games. Pitchford said Gearbox brought in some of the writers who worked on the first game for New Tales from the Borderlands

The latest title has three new main characters (Anu, Octavio and Fran) and a fresh storyline. As you might expect from a Borderlands game, the trailer suggests it will have offbeat humor and lots of guns. It seems there'll be a minigame or two as well. While New Tales from the Borderlands retains the series' distinctive art style, it looks like the visuals have been given an upgrade after Gearbox switched to Unreal Engine.

Gearbox is making New Tales from the Borderlands in-house at its Quebec studio. It will release the game on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Epic Games Store on October 21st.

Gamescom 2022 opened with the reveal of Everywhere, a new game from Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies. "We want the community to build this. We want it to be their world. We want them to tell their stories in our game," Benzies said before sharing a trailer that seemed to show off two very different games.

At first, we see an experience that looks similar to Fortnite. There are multiple characters shooting, jumping and driving across different biomes, with an obvious metaverse-like social component built into gameplay. However, in the final third of the trailer, the game's art style changes and we're treated to more photo-realistic graphics. In an interview after the clip played, assistant game designer Adam Whiting didn't provide many other details about the project, but did say developer Build a Robot Boy hopes to release Everywhere sometime next year.  

It's Gamescom time once again, and the big Opening Night Live showcase kicks off today at 2PM ET. It'll all be streamed on YouTube, Twitch and Twitter, and it's scheduled to last two whole hours. Video game king Geoff Keighley will host the show, just like he does with The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest, and he's already teased a handful of titles that'll make an appearance.

Today's show is set to include new footage and news about Hogwarts Legacy, The Callisto Protocol, Gotham Knights, High on Life, Borderlands, Sonic Frontiers and more games. Many of these titles are set to come out at the end of this year or early next, so expect plenty of gameplay hype.

Gamescom takes place in Cologne, Germany, and it runs from August 24th to 28th. The entire festival will include about 1,100 exhibitors from around the world, and the indie arena is particularly packed this year. We'll have all the news from ONL and the wider show this week, so stay tuned.

HBO Max has swung the ax on another six animated projects, according to Variety. One of them is Batman: Caped Crusader, a series produced by J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves and Batman: The Animated Series co-creator Bruce Timm. The show, which was announced last year, is a spiritual successor to Timm's classic '90s series.

Unlike some of the other shows and movies HBO Max has canned in recent weeks, production is continuing on these projects. The production teams will seek another home for them. The other projects in this wave of cancellations are Merry Little Batman, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Bye Bye Bunny: A Looney Tunes Musical, Did I Do That to The Holidays: A Steve Urkel Story and The Amazing World of Gumball: The Movie.

HBO Max is deprioritizing kids and family content. Last week, it yanked dozens of shows, including several animated series. It also removed hundreds of Sesame Street episodes in an apparent move to save on licensing fees.

On top of that, HBO Max canceled exclusive movies Batgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt and took down other notable original shows and movies in recent weeks (one of Batgirl's directors seemingly tried to capture some footage from the movie on his smartphone to no avail). What's more, the streaming service and sibling HBO laid off several employees from the family programming division this month.

Parent Warner Bros. Discovery is removing certain shows and movies from HBO Max ahead of merging the service with Discovery+ next year. "As we work toward bringing our content catalogs together under one platform, we will be making changes to the content offering available on both HBO Max and Discovery+," it said.

The decisions to cancel and remove content come amid border cost-cutting efforts at Warner Bros. Discovery, which formed after the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery earlier this year. CEO David Zaslav and his team are trying to make $3 billion in cuts, but the moves have had an impact on the company's stock price, which has fallen by 25 percent since August 4th. The company's valuation has dropped by billions over the last month. That footage from The Last of Us sure looks good, though.

After nearly 10 million people watched the premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon, Amazon wants to remind you it too has a high-fantasy series that’s coming out soon. On Tuesday, the company shared a new trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. More than anything, the clip is a showcase for the $465 million Amazon spent to produce the show’s first season.

Dialogue from characters like Galadriel and Elrond set the stage for the Second Age conflict that’s about to unfold, but it’s almost secondary to the spectacle of the visuals on display. Every scene oozes with the money that went in to create the show’s cinematography, costume design and CGI. The Rings of Power will borrow some elements from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. As the title makes clear, the series will recount the forging of the Rings of Power and Sauron’s return to Middle-earth. Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have outlined a five-season story. The first one will debut on September 2nd.