The long-awaited System Shock remake at last has a precise release date, but it's one that marks yet another delay. Publisher Prime Matter previously planned to release the game sometime this month. "We had hoped to bring the game to market by the end of March, but that turned out to be just beyond our reach; we are after all merely human (unlike Shodan!)," it said.

Now, the game is scheduled to hit Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store on May 30th. It will cost $40. Early buyers will get a copy of System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition at no extra cost when Nightdive Studios' port of that game arrives.

However, there's more disappointing news for those who've been waiting for the System Shock remake to come to consoles. It will land on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S sometime after May. Prime Matter says it will reveal more details when they become available.

The remake of the 1994 first-person RPG has been a long time coming. Nightdive first announced it in 2015 and we got our first look at it the following year. In early 2021, the studio said System Shock would arrive that summer, which obviously didn't come to pass.

According to Prime Matter, the latest version will retain the gameplay of the influential original game while upgrading the visuals, audio, controls and interface. Nightdive is overhauling the hacking feature and introducing fresh enemies, while the revamped combat includes a dismemberment system. You can check out a slice of System Shock now, as there's a PC demo available.

Meta is “winding down” its support for NFTs on Facebook and Instagram less than a year after its push to adopt “digital collectibles” across its platform. The update comes as the social network has laid off thousands of workers and shuttered numerous projects amid what Mark Zuckerberg has described as the company’s “year of efficiency.”

“We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses,” Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s Head of Commerce and Financial Technologies wrote in an update shared on Twitter. “We learned a ton that we’ll be able to apply to products we’re continuing to build to support creators, people, and businesses on our apps, both today and in the metaverse.” He added that the company would instead be focusing on “monetization opps for Reels” and “messaging payments across Meta.”

The update comes almost exactly a year after Zuckerberg took the SXSW stage to announce that Instagram was working on NFT support, which debuted last May. The company announced another significant expansion of the feature in November, when it revealed plans to allow creators to mint and sell the collectibles directly on Instagram.

Kasriel didn’t elaborate on why Meta was reversing course on NFTs, which Zuckerberg had suggested could play a role in the company’s metaverse plans. “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places,” he said during his SXSW appearance last year.

But it’s not the only once-ambitious initiative that has fallen flat in the last year. Meta also shuttered its crypto wallet, Novi, which was once rumored to have NFT support on its roadmap, last year. The company has also cut projects with its metaverse division, Reality Labs, and its program that paid bonuses to Reels creators.

The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us wrapped up on Sunday night, and the show's creators are already looking ahead to the challenge of adapting the second game. HBO swiftly greenlit a second season after the show became an immediate success, but that won't be enough to contain the events of The Last of Us Part II, as Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann confirmed.

"No. No way," Mazin said when GQ asked if the second season would explore the entire story of Part II (the interview contains spoilers for the season one finale). "It’s more than one season," Druckmann added, though Mazin declined to say whether they'd need two or three seasons to cover the events of Naughty Dog's sequel. In any case, The Last of Us is only officially renewed for season two, not a third or fourth one as yet.

As if the task of adapting the long, ambitious Part II didn’t already seem daunting enough, Mazin and Druckmann have an enormous new audience to appease. The show has been a huge hit so far. HBO said last week that almost 30 million viewers have watched the first five episodes across all platforms. We'll have to wait and see if those folks stick around after [spoiler] in the chalet basement, but the show's creators aren't too concerned.

"I don't care. How they react is how they react, that is completely outside of our control," Druckmann told GQ in response to a question about the TV audience's reaction to the events of Part II. "So how do we make the best TV show version of that story? That's the problem that we wrestle with every day." Mazin added that he'd rather viewers have a strong emotional response than an indifferent one.

Meanwhile (and here's where we'll get into some mild spoilers), the pivotal opening scene of the finale was originally conceived as part of an animated short, which didn't come to pass. According to The Verge, Druckmann said he then spoke with an external studio about making a separate game focusing on Ellie's mother, Anna, but that fell through as well. The show gave him a chance to revisit that part of the story, which features Ashley Johnson (who stars as Ellie in the games) as Anna.

Editor's note: This article contains heavy spoilers for season one of The Last of Us and minor spoilers for the game The Last of Us Part II.

Last night’s finale of the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us turned out to be a microcosm of everything that worked across the nine episodes, as well as a reminder of what showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann will want to work on when they pick things up for season two. Throughout the season, The Last of Us has been exceedingly faithful to the original story — but Mazin and Druckmann smartly expanded on the stories of everyone surrounding Joel and Ellie to make the world much richer. In a perhaps too-tight 44 minutes (the shortest episode of the season), the show wrapped up the first part of the story, ending with Ellie’s “Okay,” just like the game.

That single word that tells us Ellie accepts Joel’s lies about what happened between him and the Fireflies, that he’s being honest when he says that they stopped looking for a cure and that her immunity doesn’t mean anything. Joel’s ostensibly off the hook for his murderous rampage through the Salt Lake City hospital to save Ellie from having her brain dissected by the Fireflies. Of course, Ellie being a cure for the cordyceps infection was the whole point of their journey — but not the point for Joel. And the look on Ellie’s face throughout the episode’s coda tells us she’s not convinced, despite what she says before everything cuts to black.

Really, there was no other place it could have stopped. Throughout the season, Mazin and Druckmann made plenty of deviations from the game’s main story, but things always came back to the most important beats in the relationship between Joel and Ellie. The importance of these events in the Salt Lake City hospital cannot be overstated, as they form the basis for everything that follows in the game The Last of Us Part II. As such, some expected to get some hints of how the hospital bloodbath will tie into events to come, but the show stayed firmly focused on the events in the first game. That’s for the best, as Part II has a sprawling, complicated story of its own; shoehorning in a few teases of what’s to come probably would have taken away from the immediacy of what happened between Joel and Ellie.

Before Joel’s killing spree and Ellie’s acceptance of his lies, we were treated to another of the flashbacks that Mazin and Druckmann have masterfully dropped throughout the season, this one going all the way back to Ellie’s birth. People who checked out the many collectibles in the game surely found Ellie’s letter in her backpack from her mother, Anna, who writes to her newborn knowing that her life is about to be cut short.

Liane Hentscher/HBO

The game doesn’t make it explicit, but here we see that Anna (played by Ashley Johnson, who plays Elle in the games) is both infected and about to give birth. We also get to see Firefly leader Marlene promise to keep Ellie safe before ending her friend’s life. (Also, we now know that Anna gave Ellie her trademark switchblade, something I always assumed but wasn't explicit in the game.) Given how important Marlene’s presence is in this episode, it was the right time to see the very beginnings of her relationship with Ellie. And, as with every other supporting actor on the show, Johnson crushes her limited time onscreen – she’s much more than an easter egg for fans of the game. The glimpses of lives beyond just Joel and Ellie that we’ve seen throughout the season have made the world of The Last of Us feel far richer, whether they take up a whole episode (like Bill and Frank in “Long, Long Time” or Riley in “Left Behind”) or just a few minutes.

My only complaint about this flashback is that Johnson’s story eats into the precious little time we have left for Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey to share the screen together. Throughout the season, the two actors have had marvelous chemistry – but in episodes seven and eight, the story dictates that they spend very little time together. In the finale they share some of the strongest moments of the entire season, but there are so many plot points to get to that I wished for even just an extra five minutes to let things breathe a bit. But moments like the famous giraffe scene and Joel telling Ellie how he really got that scar on his head were just a couple more emotional high points between the two characters (and actors) in a season full of them.

With the first season (and adaptation of the first game) now in our rear-view, I can’t help but wonder how Mazin, Druckmann and the rest of their team will set about adapting The Last of Us Part II. While the first game told a fairly linear story, Part II is full of twists, flashbacks and changes in perspective – without getting too much into spoilers, the game devotes a third or more of its 24-ish hour playtime to a totally new set of characters. It’s an essential part of the story, but it should also present a major challenge for the showrunners to integrate it and keep the story’s emotional impact without leaving behind familiar characters for hours at a time.

Fortunately, Mazin showed his narrative chops in the first season, skillfully deploying a number of flashbacks — some new to the story and some straight from the game. As for the divergent stories, I’d have to imagine there will be a lot more intercutting between them than there is in the game. A good example is what director Peter Jackson did in The Two Towers and Return of the King. The original books both split time between two ongoing stories, and you stay with one set of characters for half the book before catching up with another group in the second half. Rather than leave Frodo and Sam for major chunks of screen time, he cross-cut between the stories as they progressed.

If Mazin does something similar, it’ll require some major re-thinking about how to make the game’s dramatic moments land, but that comes with the territory of being showrunner. Whether he can pull it off or not will be critical for future seasons of The Last of Us – the acting, set design, effects and everything else should continue to be top-notch, but it won’t matter if the narrative doesn’t hold up. Of course, a vocal subset of those who played Part II were intensely negative about the game’s story, so we’re likely to see future seasons be significantly more divisive than the first.

It’s also worth considering how the show will treat Ellie’s quest for revenge that makes up the bulk of Part II’s story. In the game, she’s as much an unstoppable killing machine as Joel is in the original game. But in season one, human-on-human violence was significantly curtailed compared to the game. That doesn’t mean Joel is shy about using violence to protect Ellie (see the infamous torture scene in episode eight or his calm dispatch of the Fireflies in the finale), but he's not an invincible video game superhero, a necessary change to ground the show more in reality. It seems inevitable that Ellie’s body count will be similarly scaled down once the show hits her John Wick phase, but it’s still going to be a tricky balance between showing her how far she is willing to go without the violence losing its emotional weight.

Regardless of how it all plays out, it’s going to be a while before we get to see how the HBO adaptation takes on the second game. Pascal recently said there was “a chance” filming starts before the end of 2023, and Mazin has hinted that the “remaining story” that they’re looking to adapt will take more than a season to tell. That means we’re likely to get a serious cliffhanger at the end of season two – even though I know where the story is going, I’m already preparing to yell at the screen when things cut to black.

Netflix took home six Oscars tonight besting all other streaming services, largely thanks to All Quiet on the Western Front, with only Apple TV+ in the mix taking a single award. However, the ceremony was dominated by Everything, Everywhere All at Once (A24) which took home no less than seven statues including three of four for acting, along with Best Director and Best Picture.

A German language take on the classic WWI book, All Quiet on the Western Front won Oscars for Best International Feature, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and yes, Best Original Score (despite some critics' complaints about said score). 

Netflix also took home the Best Animated Feature trophy for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, a strong feather in its cap considering competition from established studios like DreamWorks, Sony Pictures and Pixar. Apple TV+, meanwhile, made it a streaming animation sweep, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film with The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

Everything Everwhere All at Once took home most major Oscars, even though it was handicapped by its early 2022 release. Its haul included Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), Best Director (the Daniels) and Best Picture. The highlights of the night were perhaps the emotional speeches by Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh, who was the first Asian person to win Best Actress. "For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities," she said on the stage.

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson finally has a premiere date almost a year after Netflix announced that it's coming back for a third season. The streaming giant has announced on Twitter that the six-episode comedy sketch series will be available for streaming on May 30th. The show was created by Saturday Night Live alum Robinson, who also stars in it, and SNL producer Zach Kanin. They're not the only comics connected to the show, though: It's co-produced by The Lonely Island, the comedy trio composed of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. 

Each episode of I Think You Should Leave is only around 16 to 18 minutes long, so you can quite literally finish a season in one sitting. There are multiple sketches per episode, mostly revolving around somebody doing something absurd in an every day professional or social situation, as well as some pretty bizarre and over-the-top bits. Really, some parts are so weird, you don't know whether to cringe or laugh. 

The show's first season premiered on Netflix back in 2019, while the second season arrived in 2021. Alex Bach, one of the show's producers, previously told Variety that Robinson and Kanin write every single script and that they "wait for the sketches to come to them" so there have been "extended periods of time between seasons."

I’ve always found the major criticism against Ted Lasso, that it’s too saccharine, to be quite unfair. This is a series in the Frank Capra mold, where the sunny skies and primary colors sweeten the bitter pills being handed out. For every scene of wish fulfillment designed to get you pumping the air, there are meditations on suicide, betrayal and emotional neglect. It’s also funny – enough that Emmy voters gave it Best Comedy two years in a row. Now the third and, far as we know, final season of the show will return to Apple TV on March 15th.

It picks up after the summer break, in the run-up to Richmond’s return season in the Premier League (EPL) after winning promotion by the skin of its teeth last time around. It’s been a long while since the second season aired, the longer gap attributed to behind the scenes issues. Jason Sudekis, who became co-showrunner this time around, reportedly ordered a ground-up rewrite after becoming dissatisfied with the original direction this season was taking. On the basis of the first four episodes, which Apple made available ahead of broadcast, our patience has been well-rewarded.

Such is the nature of Apple’s restrictive covenant on spoilers that I can’t talk about many specifics about the third season. The first episode is the weakest of the bunch, taking time to re-establish where everyone is after their summer break. (Are placeholder episodes necessary given the nature of streaming these days?) Keeley is finding the rigors of running her own business to be harder than expected, while Rebecca has taken Ted’s pledge of winning the league to heart. Ted, meanwhile, is feeling just as emotionally stunted as he has been previously, moreso after spending a summer with Henry, clearly having not dealt with Nate’s betrayal, or the contrived reasons behind it.

As part of Lasso’s evolution from a sitcom to a comedy drama, the runtimes of each episode are now firmly measured in hours, rather than half hours. The narrative has broadened out to cover the personal lives of many of the main footballers, as well as giving Keeley a whole new team to work with. We even get our first proper glimpse of Michelle and Henry back home in Kansas, not to mention the storylines featuring Sam and, of course, the dreaded Nate. That’s a lot for a show to handle, especially one that – similarly unfairly – was described as unfocused and messy in its second season. (Blame must go to Apple for that one, given its late-in-the-day request to add a further two episodes to the order.)

There are more threads in the storyline, but Ted Lasso has refocused its episodic structure around the Premier League season. And two parallel narratives come to the fore: Ted’s struggle to access his emotions in a healthy way, and the battle over Nate’s soul. Rupert, played with evil relish by Anthony Head, is the devil lurking on the wonder kid’s shoulder, dangling temptation before him at every turn. I probably can’t talk about [ACTOR] playing [CHARACTER], either, a condensed version of every mono-named prima-donna footballer that is often idolized and hated in equal measure.

I was interested to see how the show’s newfound embrace by the footballestablishment would alter its customary lack of grounding in reality. This season sees plenty of filming at some big name stadiums, even down to the retention of the sponsor walls for post-match interviews. But don’t go in expecting a new-found commitment to footballing verisimilitude, with the opposition teams all played by actors with little resemblance to their real-world counterparts. Just remember that this is still Ted’s world, we’re just lucky enough to spend a little time watching it.

There was a time when movies based on video games tried to distance themselves from their source material. "This ain't no game," bragged the poster for the 1993's live-action Super Mario Bros. film. Times have changed: The final trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie by Illumination leans hard into its origins. This is absolutely a game, it says. See? Here's a scene that looks like New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and another one that looks just like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

If you were hoping to hear more of Chris Pratt's Mario voice, you won't find it here — but the final trailer does give viewers a clear look at the tone the movie is going for. We watch Bowser list off an army of familiar video game enemies. We watch Mario and Donkey Kong use power mushrooms and fire flowers as they run through a training course that looks like a traditional Mario level. We see Mario and Peach race through a brightly rendered Rainbow Road. It looks familiar. It looks fun. And it looks like a game, but with better graphics.

That's no surprise. According to directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, Illumination has worked closely with Nintendo to make sure the film feels right. The directors also say that Illumination has improved its lighting and rendering technology to help push Super Mario Bros. Movie to the next level "beyond anything Illumination has ever done."

As for that Mario voice? You'll finally be able to hear the full performance when the film hits theaters next month. The Super Mario Bros. Moviereleases on April 5, 2023.

Amazon has reportedly picked up Batman: Caped Crusader, the animated series Warner Bros. developed for HBO Max but scrapped last August to cut costs. Despite also drawing interest from Netflix, Apple and Hulu, the upcoming show will have a home on Amazon Prime.

First announced in May 2021, Batman: Caped Crusader sounds like a spiritual successor to Batman: The Animated Series, the beloved 1990s weekday afternoon staple. The upcoming show was created by executive producers JJ Abrams, Matt Reeves and Batman: The Animated Series developer Bruce Timm. In addition, celebrated comic-book writer Ed Brubaker is on the creative team for the 10-episode first season.

The Amazon sale was part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans to monetize content by selling it to third parties. The studio will now focus on the Batman IP as part of a 10-year DC Comics meta-story spanning film, TV, gaming and animated series. In addition, a sequel to Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman and spin-off series The Penguin on HBO Max are in the works.

“We are beyond excited to be working together to bring this character back, to tell engrossing new stories in Gotham City,” Abrams and Reeves said when Batman: Caped Crusader was announced. “The series will be thrilling, cinematic and evocative of Batman’s noir roots, while diving deeper into the psychology of these iconic characters. We cannot wait to share this new world.”

Warner Bros. has reportedly delayed Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice Leagueyet again. Rocksteady’s long-awaited spinoff / sequel to the Batman: Arkham series was most recently slated to launch on May 26th; it’s now coming “later this year.”

It was allegedly delayed “to fix bugs and improve aspects of the game that were lagging behind,” although Bloomberg’s source adds that the changes “won’t overhaul many of the core gameplay that had led to the backlash” it received at a February PlayStation event. Fans’ criticisms were directed mainly toward the game’s online requirement and purchasable cosmetic items.

The multiplayer shooter stars a group of villains tasked with stopping an out-of-control Justice League, which has fallen under the spell of the supervillain Brainiac. You can switch in the middle of the action between the four playable characters: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark. Unlike Warner Bros.’s most recent superhero game, the lackluster Gotham Knights, the upcoming title is set in the same universe as the Batman: Arkham series, the last standard installment of which launched nearly eight years ago.

The game will mark one of the last appearances of Kevin Conroy, the celebrated voice actor who died last year at 66. He will reprise his role of Batman, who appears (but not as a playable character) in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. In addition to voicing the Dark Knight in Batman: The Animated Series, he returned to the part in Rocksteady’s Arkham Asylum, Arkham City and Arkham Knight. (Roger Craig Smith voiced Batman in Arkham Origins and Arkham Origins: Blackgate, which different developers handled under the Warner Bros. Interactive masthead.)

When it finally arrives, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X / S and PC.