Netflix’s recent foray into video games continues. On Friday, the company announced the existence of Kate: Collateral Damage. Like Eden Unearthed, the VR experience we saw make the media rounds earlier in the week, the new game is a tie-in to a recently released Netflix original. In this case, it’s here to promote the release of action thriller Kate, which stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a deadly assassin.

Netflix describes Kate: Collateral Damage as an time-attack, action roguelike. If you’ve played games like Hotline Miami and Katana Zero, you have a good idea of the setup. Each enemy in Kate: Collateral Damage only takes a single hit or two to dispatch, but the same is true of your character. 

Much like in the movie, Kate is poisoned by a substance called Polonium 204, leaving her with only 24 hours to live. How that plays out in the game is that the more efficiently you can take out enemies, the more time you’ll have to complete a run. Since most firearms have limited ammo, you’ll also need to get creative and adapt your tactics to the moment.

Kate: Collateral Damage arrives on Steam on October 22nd. You can wishlist the game today.

A three-part documentary series on DC Comics is coming to HBO Max, according to Deadline. Warner Bros. Unscripted Television is producing the documentary, which will detail the influence and legacy of DC from the time it was established and the time Superman was born in the 1930s. The division is working with Leslie Iwerks (as co-director and executive producer) and Greg Berlanti (as executive producer) for the project. 

Iwerks is known for several other high-profile documentaries, including The Pixar Story that showed audiences what happens behind the scenes at the animation studio and The Imagineering Story, which gives viewers a look at how Disney develops rides and attractions for its parks. She will co-direct the documentary with Mark Catalena, who served as editor for The Imagineering Story. Meanwhile, Berlanti is a prolific writer, director and producer who'd previously worked on Doom Patrol, Supergirl, DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Superman and Lois, The Flash and Black Lightning.

Jim Lee, DC's Publisher and Chief Creative Officer, said in a statement:

"DC has a rich legacy of over 80 years of iconic storytelling: from the introduction of the genre defining Super Hero Superman in 1938 to the amazing movies, TV shows, cartoons, games and comics which have been synonymous with superheroism for generations thereafter. We are so excited to dive into this history and bring fans along this amazing journey."

The docu series doesn't have a release date yet, but it will expand HBO Max's DC offerings further when it arrives. WarnerMedia started migrating all DC Universe content to HBO Max last year, making the former streaming platform a comics-only subscription service.

During Thursday's latest Nintendo Direct event, acclaimed video game designer Miyamoto Shigeru announced that the company's upcoming feature length animation project — in conjunction with American film studio, Illumination — now has a firm North American theatrical release date of December 21st, 2022.

While release dates for Europe, Japan, and other markets have yet to be revealed, Miyamoto did share the studio's key character casting decisions. Chris Pratt will voice Mario. "He's so cool," Miyamoto commented. Anya Taylor-Joy, star of Netflix's hit series Queen's Gambit will portray Princess Peach while It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Charlie Day will voice Luigi. Jack Black will of course be the voice behind series villain, Bowser, while Keegan Michael-Key has been cast as Toad. And, for some reason, Seth Rogan will be in this too as Donkey Kong? The company is also bringing back long-time voice actor Charles Martinet — who has portrayed Mario and the rest of his cohort in a number of games to date — to fill in on various cameos throughout the film.

The following contains spoilers for episode three of 'Star Wars: Visions' and episode seven of 'What If...?'

Back in the days when DVD was king, I remember there was a trend of making animated tie-ins for live-action franchises. There were direct-to-video features for Chronicles of Riddick, Van Helsing and, the most famous project of them all, The Animatrix. Nearly 20 years later, streaming reigns supreme and services like Disney+ seem to be returning to the idea, but bigger and grander with shows like Marvel’s What If…? and Star Wars: Visions.

Visions, premiering this week, is probably the more ambitious of the two, enlisting talent from various Japanese anime studios to create short films about different aspects of the Star Wars universe. The list includes juggernauts like Trigger (Kill la Kill, Promare) Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Haikyu!!) and Science SARU (Devilman Crybaby, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!). Unlike The Animatrix, Lucasfilm was content to mostly hand over the reins to these studios, creating shorts that differ in tone, style and, most notably, continuity.

Robot Jedi? Sith twins? Intergalactic rock band whose members include a Hutt and a former Jedi padawan? It’s an intriguing array of concepts, but as a long-time Star Wars fan I couldn’t tell you how they fit into the timeline. If they fit in, at all. Visions is more about taking some base concepts — the Force, the Jedi, the Sith — and playing around with them in each studio’s unique style. It reminds me the most of Batman: Gotham Knight from 2008, a collection of shorts also by various anime studios, including Production I.G. The one thing that DC Entertainment has always had going for it is the variety of TV and movie adaptations it’s had going on independently of each other, where audiences just understood that these weren’t meant to be connected in any way.

Lucasfilm

However, even for DC things have been changing in that regard, especially after last year’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover. For years now, the TV “Berlanti-verse” has been flirting with continuity, not just in how The Flash was a spinoff of Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow was a spinoff of both, but even having the Flash and Supergirl meet up even though they were on different networks and in different universes.

DC

“Crisis” upped the ante by merging these separate worlds in the end, while also confirming almost every other DC-based TV show as part of the bigger multiverse. It was great for fans who obsessively watch every comic book program they can, but less so for people who would rather keep their viewing limited and compartmentalized.

On the other side, Marvel didn’t have the same deep catalog as DC did, with its live-action MCU franchise only taking off 13 years ago. Marvel Studios was perfectly happy to wipe the slate clean of everything that had come before, from the 1989 Punisher film to 2007’s Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage. Since then everything live-action has tied into the universe somehow, including Netflix shows like Daredevil, Hulu shows like Runaways and the Freeform show Cloak & Dagger. This was great for someone committed to the franchise, but could be daunting to casual viewers.

It also presented some creative constraints. Everything Marvel now had to fit in with the larger MCU somehow, so once a character appeared another movie or show couldn’t present its own take on the same person (alas, poor Inhumans). They couldn’t have world-shaking events outside of, say, the Avengers films — at least, not without making some kind of excuse why Captain America or Thor couldn’t just come charging in. Everything had to be carefully planned out as the universe expanded and connected internally.

That’s partly why the show What If…? exists. Sure, it’s based on a pre-existing comic series, but what both show and comic do is allow creators free rein with the characters and events of the Marvel Universe, experimenting to see what would happen if you change one or two things. Though this week’s is hardly a “slight” difference.

Marvel Studios

The point of divergence here is that Odin doesn’t adopt Loki as his son, leaving Thor to become an arrogant, spoiled child who prefers to party rather than take his duties as the would-be king of Asgard seriously. How is he still worthy of Mjolnir? We have no idea and the episode isn’t interested in telling us. Instead we’re shown how Thor likes to take the Warriors Three on long benders across the galaxy, with his next destination being the “backwater” of Earth. And everyone’s invited — Drax, Rocket, Howard the Duck, the Grandmaster and even Loki and the other ice giants who somehow, are friends with Thor anyway in this reality. When you consider why and how these characters got involved in the “main” timeline in the first place, it really doesn’t add up.

Marvel Studios

You could just try to enjoy it at face value, as just a silly story with no larger bearing on continuity. However, the point has been made repeatedly that this show is technically, in continuity, and not just in the sense that the Marvel Universe consists of many realities and everything is valid somewhere. While other comics and shows can be given an official universe “number” like 616 or 1,999,999 and just written off as a huge divergence from what we know, the concept of What If…? is that it shows us incremental changes from the MCU in particular. But the divergences shown in this week’s episode are far more than incremental, with an offbeat, cartoonish tone to match. It’s the least What If-like What If…? installment so far.

Unfortunately, like most of the episodes so far, it still ends on a downbeat, one that’s sort of rushed in and not explained. I can’t even imagine how we ended up with a Vision-Ultron hybrid in possession of the Infinity Stones and, unless this episode gets a sequel, it doesn’t really matter. The ending is just a non sequitur to affirm, as every episode does, that the regular MCU sequence of events is the “correct one.” It’s tacked on, and makes what was already a messy adventure even worse.

Lucasfilm

This is where the strength of Star Wars: Visions lies. There’s no attempt to tie the episodes to each other or the larger Star Wars universe. It lets each installment stand on its own as an homage to the larger “ideas” of Star Wars, while also showcasing the idiosyncrasies of each studio. The third episode, “The Twins,” is a great example of this in action. There’s a lightsaber fight on the hull of a Star Destroyer! No one is wearing environmental suits! They’re yelling at each other despite a lack of air! People’s clothes explode off their bodies! It doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, but it doesn’t have to, because it’s not meant to be more than a bit of fun.

This post contains major spoilers for season two, episode seven of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’

Artificial intelligence has been baked into the Star Trek universe since the original series. Kirk and his crew occasionally faced off against computers gone amok, including Nomad, Landru and the M-5. The only way to defeat these digital villains was to outwit them using logic, which caused them to self-destruct. But in The Next Generation, the franchise became more interested in exploring the personhood of artificial beings like Data and hisfamily, Voyager’s holographic doctor or the exocomps. This week, Lower Decks dredges up the old-style megalomaniacal AI and asks, are you really sure about those rights?

The USS Cerritos is once more called upon to help out a civilization enslaved by an evil computer, this one called Agimus (voiced by long-time Trek actor Jeffrey Combs). Disconnected from his network of drones, he’s actually pretty pathetic, desperately begging the organic beings around him to just hook him up to a computer. All that’s left for Starfleet to do is to drop him off at the Daystrom Institute, which isn’t the most glamorous of jobs, so of course Beckett Mariner and Bradward Boimler end up on this particular babysitting gig.

CBS

A gravimetric shear complicates things for the pair, forcing their shuttle to crash on a barren world with only the pleading voice of Agimus to keep them company. The computer uses this opportunity to pit the two against each other, continuing a plot thread that we thought had been settled two episodes ago. Beckett still doesn’t trust Brad's abilities despite all they’vebeen through. It feels like a regression or perhaps even a mis-scheduled episode, except that we the audience still see his growth while his supposed best friend doubts him. It’s a plot line unlikely to go away after a few episodes, reaffirming this show’s commitment to character-driven storytelling.

However, that breadth of characterization doesn’t really apply to Agimus. He’s really just… kind of a jerk, and he doesn’t have the ability to directly influence anything due to his lack of arms and legs. Boimler and Mariner spend the entire episode lugging his box around: a sentient MacGuffin. If you’re not familiar with that term, it means an item (or person) that moves the plot forward and motivates the characters, but is not actually important in itself. With Agimus’s reign over, he really just serves here to get Mariner and Boimler at each other’s throats.

CBS

His status as a sentient being is never in question, but the problem of what to do with him as his behavior worsens goes in directions that would never come up for an organic individual. Mariner suggests burying him, a suggestion turned down by Boimler because he’s a sentient being and that’s not what Starfleet does. So it seems we have made some progress from the ol’ “destroy them with their own logic” days of TOS. But then the two ensigns end up burying him anyway, while Agamus protests that “he has rights!”

And yet Star Trek has always been a bit sketchy about what those rights are. While episodes like “The Measure of a Man” and “The Offspring” have reaffirmed Data’s humanity, it’s been contradicted since by events on Voyager and Picard. The Doctor asserted his authorial rights to a holonovel he created and won, but wasn’t actually recognized as a person. The question remained unanswered nearly 20 years later on Picard, with us only being shown holograms of limited capabilities, or those based on the personalities of other sentient beings (Rios’ crew). And fully synthetic beings like Data, ones with brains and bodies, were illegal after the attack on Mars.

CBS

Lower Decks takes place a mere year after the end of Voyager, so it’s free to pick up and explore some of those plot threads without that later baggage. But without a synthetic crew member on the USS Cerritos it can only glance off the subject. Agamus is dumped in a storage facility as just another “self-aware megalomaniacal computer,” not too dissimilar from the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is dumped at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is it a prison? Did he get a trial? Are he and the other computers just going to sit there until the end of the Federation? From an ethical perspective it isn’t great, but it’s unlikely to ever be fully addressed, because who in Starfleet is really going to fight for the personhood of a computerized fascist dictator?

Netflix is acquiring the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC) and rights to the author's entire catalog, including classics like Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, the company announced. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed (and are subject to regulatory approval), but three years ago Netflix paid "nine figures" for the rights to 16 of Dahl's works, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In any event, it likely represents one of Netflix's largest acquisitions to date. 

News of the acquisition started bubbling up yesterday following a Bloomberg report. Netflix has big plans for Dahl's works, including "the creation of a unique universe across animated and live actions films and TV, publishing, games, immersive experiences, live theater, consumer products and more," wrote Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos and RDSC managing director (and Dahl's grandson) Luke Kelly. 

The companies revealed that director Taika Waititi and screenwriter Phil Johnston are working on a series based on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory world. Netflix is also working with Sony and Working Title on an adaptation of Matilda The Musical. 

The acquisition appears to go well beyond Netflix's past content deals, in which it simply licensed content from others. It famously did so with Marvel, then ended up canceling Daredevil and other Marvel shows when it couldn't come to terms with Disney, which was planning at the time to launch rival service Disney+. 

With Roald Dahl's catalog, it promises to "bring these timeless tales to more audiences in new formats... [while] maintaining their unique spirit and their universal themes of surprise and kindness," Sarandos and Dahl wrote. "These stories and their messages of the power and possibility of young people have never felt more pertinent." Last year, the company issued an apology on its website for Dahl's history of antisemitic statements, as Bloomberg noted.  

Facebook has just released a Billie Eilish pack for Beat Saber. Priced at $13 for the entire collection, the pack features 10 songs, including fan-favorites like “Bury a Friend” and “Bad Guy.” It also comes with a new environment inspired by Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” music video. If you want to buy specific tracks, you can do so for $2 per song. The DLC is available on Oculus Quest, Rift, PSVR and SteamVR headsets. 

If you own an Oculus headset, you can also look forward to watching the singer’s upcoming Governors Ball performance when it’s livestreamed through the platform’s Venues app on September 24th. Facebook acquired Beat Saber creator Beat Games in 2019. Since then, the company has used its robust music licensing deals to bring paid content from all sorts of artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Linkin Park and others. 

The Oculus Quest 2 impressed us last year with its improved hardware, versatility and reasonable $299 price. Those who have been eager to get their hands on one of these VR headsets can now get two at one of the best prices we've seen. Through September 27, Oculus is running a deal that knocks $100 off a second Quest 2 headset when you buy one at full price. That means you can get two of the 128GB models for $500, or two of the 256GB versions for $700.

Oculus improved its machine in nearly every way with the Quest 2, and the device ultimately earned a score of 89 from us. The headset itself is 10 percent smaller and more comfortable to wear for long stretches of time, although it does take a bit of fiddling to properly adjust its fit for your head. Powered by a Snapdragon XR2 processor, the Quest 2 includes fast-switching LCDs with a resolution of 1832x1920 per eye, and although it didn't launch with this, it will support 90Hz refresh rates. Its controllers are larger than before but still easy to hold, and they include a bit more space next to the gamepad buttons so you can rest your thumbs.

The slight design changes and the better processor help make the Quest 2 an improvement on its predecessor in nearly every way. It excels at being both a standalone and a desktop headset, delivering more realistic VR experiences. It does have some limitations when it comes to standalone games, mostly due to its mobile hardware, but that's to be expected. Also, you must sign in with a Facebook account to use the Quest 2, which is also to be expect, but nevertheless a bummer for those who don't use the social network.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Marvel and SiriusXM have opened a new Apple Podcasts channel, which includes a paid tier. The free Marvel channel includes Marvel's Wolverine: The Long Night and the sequel, Marvel's Wolverine: The Lost Trail. You'll be able to listen to Marvel/Method, in which Method Man interviews celebrities about Marvel, and This Week in Marvel, a weekly show about the latest news in the company's ecosystem.

Other podcasts on the channel includeWomen of Marvel, Marvel's Voices and Marvel's Pull List. In addition, you can check out the first episode of the Marvel's Wastelanders: Star-Lord podcast, which stars Timothy Busfield as Peter Quill, as well as Chris Elliott (Rocket), Danny Glover (Red) and Vanessa Williams (Emma Frost).

The paid tier, Marvel Podcasts Unlimited, offers early and exclusive access to a selection of shows. It features new scripted and unscripted podcast series, such as Marvel's Wolverine: La Larga Noche, a Spanish-language version of Wolverine: The Long Night, which is available today. You'll also be able to listen to exclusive programming, such as the documentary series Marvel's Declassified, which delves into the history of Marvel Comics.

On October 4th, subscribers will get early access to the first two episodes of Marvel's Wastelanders: Hawkeye, which features Stephen Lang as Hawkeye and Sasha Lane as his estranged 17-year-old daughter Ash. You'll be able to listen to future installments of Marvel's Wastelanders, including ones centered around Black Widow, Wolverine and Doctor Doom, before they're available elsewhere. Other podcasts are on the way too.

The new channels build on the partnership Marvel and SiriusXM forged in 2019. They've released original podcasts on other platforms, such as Pandora, Stitcher and, of course, SiriusXM. The companies say they'll share new episodes of podcasts elsewhere after they debut on Marvel Podcasts Unlimited.

The Marvel channel is available in more than 170 countries. You'll be able to subscribe to Marvel Podcasts Unlimited through the channel. The service costs $4/month (which may vary by country) after a seven-day trial. Marvel and SiriusXM are launching the channel and subscription three months after Apple rolled out paid channels in the Podcasts app.

Comcast has expanded Internet Essentials' coverage to include Federal Pell Grant recipients within areas where it's available. By doing so, it's giving undergraduates from low-income households access to low-cost internet connection at a time when they may have a huge need for it and in time for Internet Essentials' 10th anniversary. "These additional initiatives arrive as the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated far-reaching effects that disproportionately impact those who have traditionally lacked access to the tools, resources, and skills needed to get online," the company wrote in its announcement.

The Internet Essentials program launched in 2011 and has expanded its coverage several times since then until, according to the company, it has connected "a cumulative total of more than 10 million people to the internet." Earlier this year, the company doubled the package's speed, giving subscribers access to download speeds of up to 50 Mbps and uploads of up to 5 Mbps.

In addition to giving Pell Grant financial aid recipients access to Internet Essentials, Comcast has also pledged $15 million worth of internet service and equipment. Its pledge includes over 25,000 laptops that will be donated to low-income students, seniors and vets. The move is part of the company's Project UP, which is an initiative aiming to "advance digital equity." The laptops will be distributed in cities nationwide, including Houston, TX; Sacramento, CA; Seattle, WA; Philadelphia, PA; Hartford, CT; Baltimore, MD; Memphis, TN; Atlanta, GA; Detroit, MI; Chicago, IL; Jacksonville, FL; Minneapolis, MN; Oakland, CA; Boston, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; and Grand Rapids, MI.