The next Mortal Kombat game might not be what you expect. NetherRealm and WB Games have unveiledMortal Kombat 1, a "reborn" take on the series that promises new fighting mechanics and game modes. While most details are under wraps, you'll see many well-known characters as well as "Kameo Fighters" to help you mid-battle. And yes, the gore remains intact — as the teaser trailer below indicates, you can expect plenty of fatalities.

Mortal Kombat 1 arrives September 19th for PC (via Epic and Steam), PS5, Switch and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-order customers get access to a beta in August. A $110 digital Premium Edition will offer early access to the game (September 14th), a Johnny Cage skin made to resemble actor Jean-Claude Van Damme and early access to playable characters and Kameo Fighters when they arrive post-launch. If you're truly devoted, a $250 physical Kollector's Edition will include a 16.5-inch Liu Kang sculpture as well as a matching in-game skin, art prints and a special case.

The reboot is in line with the ending of Mortal Kombat 11 and its Aftermath add-on. However, it's also clearly positioned as an opportunity to rethink the gameplay and story. It's just a question of how much has changed. Not that this reinvention comes as much of a shock given what rivals are doing — Capcom is also shaking up its formula with the World Tour mode in Street Fighter 6.

Skynet. Ultron. HAL-9000. These are but a few artificial intelligence systems that have gone rogue in films. Whether The Creator can produce a fictional AI that would make a mark on popular culture remains to be seen, but it is another movie that pits humanity against artificial intelligence. Its official website says the movie is about Joshua, an ex-special forces agent recruited to hunt down the Creator. That's the architect behind the advanced AI that was developed to protect humanity only to detonate a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. 

The Creator apparently also developed a weapon with the power to end all war and all of humanity, and Joshua and his team were tasked to destroy it. They then discovered that the world-ending weapon is an AI in the form of a young child. Of course, Joshua couldn't kill it and ended up taking it places and letting it do kid things like playing with other children. Is it evil or not? We don't know at this point. The trailer released by 20th Century Studios, New Regency and Entertainment One only shows the AI as a playful, inquisitive child. 

The film was directed and conceptualized by Gareth Edwards, the same director behind Rogue One. John David Washington (Tenet) plays Joshua, the protagonist grieving the disappearance of his wife played by Gemma Chan. Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson and Allison Janney also play roles in the movie, which will arrive in theaters on September 29th.

Nicolas Cage will soon appear in Dead by Daylight. The actor will bring his delightful eccentricity and Billy Mays-style beard to the multiplayer survival game, developer Behavior Interactive announced on Twitter. “There is nothing more powerful than imagination,” Cage says in the appropriately campy teaser. “It can shape the fabric of reality, transforming everything you may think you know.”

Cage will play himself in the role of a Survivor, according toEurogamer. “After countless awards and over one hundred movies shot across the globe, Nicolas Cage had seen it all and done it all — or so he thought,” a brief announcement reads. “While on set filming the role of a lifetime, his performance summoned The Entity, a malevolent being of incomprehensible power. The actor soon found himself cast in otherworldly Fog, forced to Survive a host of terrifying Killers deadlier than even the most scathing film critic.”

It’s the latest quirky / campy addition to the popular horror game, following a K-Pop star, Freddy Kreuger, Leatherface, Evil Dead’s Ash Williams and a pro-surveillance tech executive. (It even has a dating-sim add-on for some reason.) The game’s developers, who describe Cage’s appearance as “the performance of a lifetime,” say we’ll hear more about the Oscar winner’s contribution on July 5th.

The first episode of The Expanse: A Telltale Series at last has a release date. You'll be able to jump in to the game on July 27th on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PC via the Epic Games Store.

Unlike previous Telltale titles, which often left fans hanging for months between episodes (sometimes due to external issues), you won't have to wait long for more installments. Telltale says that a new episode will drop every two weeks until all five are out in the wild. The standard version of the game costs $40 and the deluxe edition is $45. Pre-order either on PlayStation or the Epic store and you'll get to play a day early, while the deluxe edition will include access to more content that's on the way in the future. Expect to learn more about that at a later date.

The game acts as a prequel to The Expanse, a TV show that originally ran on Syfy for three seasons before Amazon Prime picked it up and produced another three seasons. Cara Gee reprises her role as Camina Drummer, the game's playable character.

The Expanse is said to have the "largest and most immersive exploration" of any Telltale game to date. Drummer, who helps run a scavenger crew, will scour shipwrecks, walk on ceilings and walls using mag boots and use zero-gravity thrusters to float through open space. You'll need to deal with the threat of a mutiny and, since this is a Telltale game, make difficult decisions that impact the future of The Artemis' crew.

Get ready to deal with things that go clank in the night on the big screen. A Five Nights at Freddy's movie is on the way later this year, and Universal Pictures has revealed the first teaser for the long-gestating adaptation. The clip doesn't seem to hold too many surprises for those who are familiar with the jump scare-laden FNaF games, but it captures the aesthetic well enough.

It focuses on a character played by Josh Hutcherson as he starts a new gig as a night-time security guard at a family entertainment center. However, the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear's pose a terrifying threat to anyone still in the building after the doors close. The animatronics look spot on, which isn't exactly a shock given that Jim Henson's Creature Shop brought them to life.

Five Nights at Freddy's will arrive in theaters and on Peacock on October 27th. If you can't wait that long and simply need to watch a movie in which possessed animatronics go on a killing spree, check out Willy's Wonderland. It has both a similar concept and Nicolas Cage, and it's enjoyable enough.

Blizzard has revealed the Overwatch 2 roadmap for the rest of 2023, including details on when the first story missions are coming to the game. They'll be available in season six, which should start in mid-August.

Story missions are part of the long-awaited co-op side of the game. When Blizzard released Overwatch 2 last October, the player vs. environment (PvE) aspects of the game that it first showed off at BlizzCon in 2019 were not available. That's because the team needed more time to work on the PvE modes. 

The studio didn't want to keep fans waiting much longer for an overhaul of the traditional, competitive (or PvP) side of Overwatch 2 after what was effectively a two-year content drought. So, Blizzard split development of the two halves so it could get the sequel out faster. There have been PvE experiences in Overwatch 2, but so far they've been constrained to limited-time events.

It's worth noting that this won't be the full PvE vision that Blizzard laid out almost four years ago. "Development on the PvE experience really hasn't made the progress that we would have hoped," Overwatch 2 executive producer Jared Neuss said. The team had created "a bunch of amazing content," including "ridiculous" gameplay augmentations for heroes. "Unfortunately, the effort required to pull all of that together into a Blizzard-quality experience that we can ship to you is huge," Neuss said. "With everything we've learned about what it takes to operate this game at the level you deserve, it's clear that we can't deliver on that original vision for PvE."

Hero missions have been cut in order to not pull too many resources away from the live game, which is the priority for Blizzard. As such, talent trees, an RPG-style feature of hero missions that would have enabled players to customize hero abilities, have been scrapped. 

That's not to say there aren't intriguing PvE features coming. A single-player version of a PvE experience with a leaderboard is in the works. A ton of co-op features are planned and Blizzard will continue to add content on a frequent basis, including more story missions.

Before the story missions debut in a few months, there's a whole new season in between. Season five will arrive in June with what appears to be a fantasy theme. Fans can expect a new limited-time event called Questwatch, a new cinematic, the Summer Games event and updates for the Workshop mode, in which players can create custom games. The On Fire system, which lets everyone in a match see when certain players are performing especially well, will return in season five too.

Story missions aren't the only big change on the docket for season six. The developers say this season will mark the biggest update since launch. Blizzard will add another support hero, a firing range and an overhauled player progression system. The Anniversary event will return as well. Perhaps most intriguingly, there will be a new map type for the PvP modes called Flashpoint, which will debut with two new maps.

There will be a bigger focus on building out the story of Overwatch 2 as well. For one thing, seasons will be named and, with the help of in-game cinematics, season six will "push the narrative arc of Overwatch forward for the first time since the original game release."

Looking ahead to season seven and beyond, Blizzard is promising reworks for Sombra (yes, another one) and Roadhog. Also in the pipeline are another collaboration following the One-Punch Man crossover, a fresh tank hero, a control map, a winter event, a lore database and, most excitingly for me, the return of competitive Mystery Heroes.

Apple wants to go beyond streaming live music to helping you find it in real life. The company has added concert discovery features to both Apple Maps and Apple Music. In Maps, you'll find over 40 curated "Guides" that spotlight hot concert venues in 14 major cities around the world, such as a techno club in Brooklyn and symphony halls in Vienna. This could help you decide where to go when you're new in town, or highlight an unfamiliar scene. You can also browse upcoming shows at those venues through a Shazam discovery module that taps info from Bandsintown.

Apple Music, meanwhile, also includes the Shazam module to let you browse a musician's upcoming shows. If a favorite artist is playing soon, this could help you land tickets. There's also a Set Lists section where you can listen to tracks played at certain tours (such as Sam Smith's and Kane Brown's) while learning about the productions.

Both experiences are available today. The additions aren't completely surprising. Apple has long emphasized human curation in Music, such as many of its custom playlists and DJ mixes. The integrations expand on that strategy to cover in-person gigs. Maps has also had curated Guides for food, shopping and travel. A coordinated push for Maps and Music is relatively unique, though — the company is clearly betting that it can raise interest in both services by using concerts as a hook.

Horror collection ‘Layers of Fear’ has a concrete release date of June 15th, which is just around the corner. This news follows the official launch of a Steam demo that went live today. The forthcoming title includes remakes of the original Layers of Fear and Layers of Fear 2, including various DLC content and a brand-new chapter to provide a new perspective on the first game’s narrative. It launches on PC via Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

These are not simple upscales, as each game was completely recreated in Unreal Engine 5, so they include all kinds of modern graphical touches like ray-tracing, HDR and volumetric lighting. In other words, this collection is pretty easy on the eyes, though the eerie atmosphere may not be good for the old ticker.

Developer Bloober Team is also busy crafting a Silent Hill 2 remake, so there’s that to look forward to. The original Layers of Fearcame out back in 2016 and is widely considered one of the better horror titles of recent years, thanks to an expertly crafted narrative and psychedelic thrills and chills. The sequel was equally revered, though it shifted locations from a creepy Victorian mansion to a, well, creepy ocean liner.

Avatar: The Way of Water will be available to stream on both Disney+ and Max (the new name for HBO Max) on June 7th. It's a bit unusual to see a major, recent movie land on two platforms at the same time, but there was a deal in place between 20th Century Studios, which Disney has owned since 2019, and HBO for streaming rights to certain theatrical releases.

The sequel to 2009's Avatar hit theaters in December and it went on to become the third highest-grossing movie of all time (as long as you don't factor inflation in). Director James Cameron made intriguing use of high frame rates in The Way of Water, with action-filled scenes typically playing at 48 frames per second to make them look smoother. More tranquil scenes appeared to run at 24 fps. The frames were doubled in those parts of the movie to make it seem as though they played at the frame rate we're used to seeing in theaters.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that there will be an option to stream the film at higher frame rates at home anytime soon. Still, those who've been waiting for Avatar: The Way of Water to pop up on Disney+ or Max only have a few weeks longer to wait.

The new wave of Lord of the Rings games isn't stopping with this month's Gollum and Heroes of Middle-earth. Amazon has struck a deal with Embracer Group to release a massively multiplayer online (MMO) title based on the stories of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. Development is in the "early stages" at New World studio Amazon Games Orange County, which will ship the game for PCs and consoles at an unspecified date.

The move isn't surprising when Amazon is also behind The Rings of Power TV series. However, Amazon stresses that the show is set in Middle-earth's Second Age and is "unrelated" to the MMO. The synchronicity is certainly convenient, but there's no direct tie-in other than the underlying universe.

Amazon's in-house game development has had its share of problems. New World faced multiple delays, and its active user base is well below the launch-era peak. and the company shelved Crucible just a few months after the online shooter's debut. The tech giant has had more success in publishing, with deals to release Lost Ark and the upcoming Tomb Raider game.

The announcement comes as Amazon is refocusing its overall gaming strategy. It recently cut over 100 game-related jobs that included its San Diego studio, and is now concentrating on its teams in Orange County and Montreal. It's now clear why Amazon is committed to expanding that first studio — an online RPG in a major fantasy franchise is bound to get attention.