A new Ghostbusters game has been revealed and it's set to land later this year. Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is a four vs. one multiplayer title from IllFonic, the studio behind Friday the 13th: The Game and Predator: Hunting Grounds. If you're familiar with those two games or Dead by Daylight, the basic premise of Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed will feel familiar.

Four players will team up as the Ghostbusters. You'll use the PKE Meter to detect a ghost and take them on with the Proton Pack, Particle Thrower and Ghost Trap. You'll need to subdue the ghost before they make a museum, prison, hotel or other public location too haunted.

On the flip side, as you may have surmised, the fifth player will control the ghost. You can fly and teleport between rifts. The ghost can possess objects and summon minions. They are also able to slime and stun the Ghostbusters so they can continue their haunting ways.

In the Ghostbusters' firehouse, you'll be able to customize your ghost or Ghostbuster, upgrade their abilities and equipment and practice firing the Particle Thrower. Two of the original Ghostbusters reprise their roles. You'll get missions from Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and receive wisdom from Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) at his occult bookstore.

If you don't feel like playing online (or don't have a PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold membership to do that), you can play as a solo ghost or Ghostbuster with AI taking on the other roles. For everyone else, there's cross-platform multiplayer support across PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is scheduled to arrive toward the end of 2022.

Blue Origin's three previous crewed flights had taken familiar faces and people known in their fields to space. Those include William Shatner, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, Good Morning America host Michael Strahan and even company founder Jeff Bezos For its fourth mission with humans on board — and its 20th overall — one of the passengers was supposed to be Pete Davidson, SNL star and, well, the person who's recently been on the receiving end of Kanye West's ire. Turns out that won't be happening.

On Twitter, the aerospace company has announced that Davidson will no longer join the mission as a crew member. Blue Origin didn't reveal the reason why he's no longer flying with the rest of the crew to the edge of space and only said that the mission will launch on March 29th instead of on March 23rd as planned. Davidson was recently seen shooting scenes for horror movie The Home, but it's unclear if conflict of schedule was the reason why Blue Origin changed its lineup. It's also unknown at this point if Davidson will join another Blue Origin flight later on. 

The other passengers for the NS-20 mission are SpaceKids Global founder Sharon Hagle and husband Marc Hagle, University of North Carolina professor Jim Kitchen, President of Commercial Space Technologies Dr. George C. Nield and Marty Allen, a former CEO of Party America. Blue Origin said it will announce Davidson's replacement in the coming days.

The producers of Until Dawn are returning to their roots after years of Dark Pictures Anthology games. Supermassive Games and 2K have unveiledThe Quarry, a teen horror title that has you once again deciding the fates of frightened youth. You control nine camp counselors as a night of celebrating the end of summer camp quickly goes sideways — the trailer below hints at a Most Dangerous Game tale where someone appears to be hunting the counselors for sport.

Supermassive is leaning on star power as much as it is familiar narrative-driven game mechanics. The Quarry stars David Arquette (appropriately from Scream), Ariel Winter (Modern Family) and Lance Henriksen (Aliens), not to mention actors from productions like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Dollface and Jurassic World. And yes, any character can die. As with Until Dawn and similar games, you'll have to work hard if you want as many people as possible to survive.

Multiplayer is important, as well. You can have "couch co-op" where people control individual counselors, but you can also have as many as seven people voting on your decisions. While it won't be quite as pressure-filled as having a Twitch audience decide, it will help you share the thrill ride with friends. And don't worry if it's too nerve-wracking. On top of adjustable difficulty levels, there's a "Movie Mode" that removes the gameplay entirely and even lets you choose how the story plays out.

The Quarry arrives June 10th for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and Windows PCs. The gameplay and premise will be more than a little familiar (how many horror movies have summer camps?), but that may be part of the appeal. It's giving you a chance to "fix" well-worn genre tropes, if just by keeping everyone alive.

Instagram suspended Kanye West from the platform for 24 hours after the rapper and producer attacked Pete Davidson and others. The Saturday Night Live star and soon-to-be Blue Origin passenger has been dating West's ex-wife Kim Kardashian for several months.

West (who legally changed his name to Ye) reportedly violated Instagram's policies on hate speech, harassment and bullying. Some posts that broke the rules were removed from his account, according to HuffPost. Along with lashing out at Davidson, West is said to have posted a (now-deleted) racial slur aimed at Trevor Noah, who criticized him in a recent episode of The Daily Show.

The suspension temporarily prevented West from posting, commenting or sending direct messages on Instagram. A Meta spokesperson has said the company may take further action against West if he violates the rules again.

It remains to be seen whether West will show restraint when The Kardashians premieres on Hulu next month. Kardashian's relationship with Davidson will be a focal point of the reality show.

The fish-out-of-water sitcom Ted Lasso took home four major awards Sunday at the 27th annual Critics Choice Awards, a night that was dominated by the streaming platforms. The Apple TV+ original nabbed best comedy series, beating out other critically-acclaimed favorites like HBO Max’s Hacks and Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. Jason Sudeikis, who plays the show’s namesake character, won Best Actor in a comedy series for his performance in the show’s second season. It’s the second time Sudeikis has taken home that particular trophy for his role on the show, and he won it over the comedy legends Martin Short and Steve Martin, who were both nominated for Only Murders in the Building.

Brett Goldstein, the British actor who plays Roy Kent, the gruff but kindhearted former team captain, won best supporting actor in a comedy series. We’re about to see a lot more from him. Goldstein, who also serves as one of the show’s writers, recently signed a multiyear development deal with Warner Bros. TV, where he’ll develop, create and produce new projects for WBTV, including HBO Max. Finally, Hannah Waddingham, the British actress and West End veteran who plays Lasso’s boss, Rebecca Walton, won best supporting actress in a comedy series. Walton has also won an Emmy Award for her role in the series.

The night was a major victory for Apple TV+, which also scored nominations for CODA (Troy Kotsur won the best supporting actor in a film.) Ted Lasso scored the most awards this year of any nominated TV show. Thanks to the pandemic’s impact on the movie business, virtually every category included works from streaming platforms or premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. The night was also a major victory for Netflix, which nabbed Best Picture for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog.

The Critic Choice Awards have traditionally been overshadowed by the Golden Globes and SAG Awards. But thanks to some lucky timing and rescheduling, this year’s show makes it one of the last awards shows before both the Academy Awards and the Primetime Emmys, thus escalating its importance since it’ll be a likely forecast of future winners.

CNN has revealed exactly when its dedicated streaming service will debut. CNN+, which costs $6 per month or $60 per year, will arrive on March 29th. Those who sign up in the first four weeks and maintain their subscription will get 50 percent off the monthly plan for life (that works out to $36 per year for the foreseeable future).

The service will deliver live, on-demand and interactive news-driven programming. Subscribers of CNN's linear service can watch cable broadcasts and on-demand content through the app too.

CNN hired away Chris Wallace from Fox News to host a CNN+ show. Other daily launch programming includes shows anchored by Wolf Blitzer, Kate Bolduan, Sara Sidner and Bianca Nobilo, as well as a weekday edition of Reliable Sources. Viewers can also expect Anderson Cooper Full Circle to be available on CNN+, as well as a book-focused show with Jake Tapper, a show from Christiane Amanpour and much more.

Last Thursday to celebrate the closing of a new $400 million round, the venture capital firm M13 held an invite-only schmoozing opportunity in the former offices of Musical.ly, opening with a introductory chat on "the future of crypto, the decentralized web, and creators." Curiously, one of the guests was Cameo's Steven Galanis who, according to audio provided to Engadget by an attendee, took the opportunity to share a metaphor he apparently has deployed before: that the rampant speculation around Web3 is akin to the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. To be clear, he seems to think of both as good things.

Cameo, the service that hit unicorn status last May and allows anyone to book a short, custom video message from celebrities and pseudo-celebrities like Fran Drescher, Gilbert Gottfried or the guy who played Hagrid, is not a Web3 business in any sense — not that "Web3" itself is a particularly meaningful or well-defined piece of terminology. 

But Galanis seems to have become something of a booster for these loosely conjoined elements of emergent tech. His Twitter profile picture is of toga- and 3D glasses-wearing Bored Ape NFT, for which he seems to have paid 100 ETH — the equivalent of around $300,000 at the time. He steered Cameo toward minting its own set of NFTs (called "Cameo Pass") last month with the promise that proceeds would be reinvested into, among other things,"exploration of further Web3 projects focused on fan/talent interactions." 

Presumably this enthusiasm — a contrast to the oftenchilly reception towards NFTs at other tech companies — helped land Galanis on stage for M13's shindig, along with Lightning Labs's Liz Stark. But in the course of his enthusiastic boosterism he shared "the analogy that I like to give people" about Web3, which we've edited for clarity (emphasis ours):

"I actually think right now it's like 1493. Columbus has just gotten back from the New World. And he's going to the King of Spain and the Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, and he's like 'there's a whole world over there that like, there's literally just gold coming out of rivers.' And then the King of France hears about it, the Kingdom of England hears about it. And what does everybody decide? We need to start building boats. So right now we're in this age where everybody's building boats. Everybody's trying to go to this New World. [...] So everybody's going over, there's gonna mutinies on some boats. Somebody's gonna hit an iceberg. [...] But somebody is gonna end up on Manhattan, like in the digital world, and they're gonna pull a bunch of beads out of their pocket, and they're going to make the best real estate transaction of all time."

It boggles the mind that anyone could be aware of the colonization and systematic genocide of native peoples, and conclude that the moral is to not miss out on the opportunity to kill, steal and swindle again for personal gain. Or that if someone were to sincerely believe something quite so awful, they would at least have the good sense not to share that opinion, apparently, on multiple occasions.

Beyond the blunt insensitivity of the remarks, Galanis seems to have little to no grasp of the events he references. "Everybody is building boats!!!? This is a sort of 20th [century] arms race point of view," William Fowler, a professor emeritus of history at Northeaster, told Engadget via email. "England sent Cabot (1497) West, but that did not result in much. Not until Jamestown, 1607, did England, through a private company, establish a permanent colony in America. 

As for their naval power, England barely made it through the Armada, 1588, and did not have a first class navy until [the] mid 17th [century] ... France sent Cartier (1534), but it would be almost one hundred years before they got serious in Canada." All of this is to say nothing of the fact that Columbus was far from the first European to stumble onto the Americas (that distinction likely goes to the Vikings) or that he "went to his grave (1506) believing he had found a route to the Indies," according to Fowler.

The tale of Manhattan's land rights being bought out from under native people by the Dutch for baubles is, at best, highly exaggerated. Unlike Staten Island or other areas of land, the contract between the Dutch and native peoples for Manhattan is either lost or never existed, and according to the Gotham Center's Richard Howe "the extant evidence for the Dutch purchase of Manhattan is scant, indirect and circumstantial." 

While a letter claiming a transfer occurred, dated November 7 1626, does survive, it's both inconclusive and in no way mentions "beads" — rather that the land had been purchased "for the value of 60 guilders" (which is something like $1,000 in today's dollars.) Whether native tribes shared the same understanding of property, or could be said to have freely entered into these types of contracts is unresolved. Nor is it known if the people who allegedly signed over the deed were even the tribe primarily occupying Manhattan at the time.

Whatever the case, this "investment" was short-lived, and New Amsterdam was "taken easily by the British," according to Fowler, in 1664, less than 20 years after the rights were supposedly sold for a song. Let's not even get into how the metaphor fails on a structural level in that Web3 isn't a valuable resource simply awaiting discovery and exploitation. Its illusion of riches shares more in common with El Dorado than the "New World."

It might appear unfair to expect Galanis to have studied history, rather than basing offensive flights of fancy on colonialist myths. Then again, history was the man's area of study at Duke. Engadget made several attempts to contact Cameo to allow Galanis to explain precisely what he might have meant by this analogy, and have yet to hear back. "Trying to apply 21st [century] criteria to ages past should be done with great care," professor Fowler wrote, "[Galanis] may have something to say, but it is hard to dig through the rhetoric to get to his point, if he has any."

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Today is a good day for sci-fi and space fantasy lovers. Paramount+ has shared a teaser trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, its offshoot of Discovery. The video provides a brief but telling glimpse of Captain Christopher Pike's tenure aboard the USS Enterprise, including his return to service and (what else?) the worlds his crew will see. There's a clear attempt to recreate the wonder you might have felt watching early Star Trek as you encountered new aliens and planets for the first time.

There isn't much to see of the cast beyond Pike (Anson Mount), but you'll see Ethan Peck return as Spock while Rebecca Romijn once again serves as Number One. Celia Rose Gooding plays Uhura, Jess Bush will assume the role of Nurse Chapel and Babs Olusanmokun is Doctor M'Benga.

Strange New Worlds premieres in May. As indicated, the show's appeal may come as much from its format as its focus on the Enterprise. Unlike Discovery and Picard, SNW is expected to rely more on the single-episode storylines that defined the original series and much of the pre-streaming Star Trek franchise. Whether or not it reproduces those glory days is another matter, but Paramount+ at least appears to know its target audience.

Disney+ has finally offered a good peek at its Obi-Wan Kenobi series. The streaming service has released a teaser trailer for Obi-Wan Kenobi that documents the Jedi's life on Tatooine as he avoids the Empire and protects a young Luke Skywalker. As the clip makes clear, it won't be easy — Imperial forces are turning to Sith who'll look for "weaknesses" like compassion to track down the remnants of the Jedi order.

The limited-run series debuts May 25th, or 45 years to the day after the premiere of the original Star Wars movie. Ewan McGregor reprises his role as the titular Obi-Wan Kenobi, while Hayden Christensen returns as a younger Darth Vader. The Mandalorian alumnus Deborah Chow is directing the show.

Obi-Wan will arrive several months after The Book of Boba Fett, and represents a growing wave of Star Wars originals for Disney+ that will include Ahsoka, Andor and The Acolyte. Shows like this aren't rare, one-off projects — they represent a cornerstone of the Disney+ strategy.

Netflix has announced that it'll serve as home to a definitive documentary on Pamela Anderson's life, a month after the limited series Pam & Tommy debuted on Hulu. According to Entertainment Weekly, Anderson vowed never to watch the Hulu series, which focuses on the actress' short marriage with Tommy Lee and the theft and illegal distribution of their sex tape, or even its trailer. While the Hulu series was created without the involvement or even the permission of the actress, Anderson herself promoted the Netflix documentary on Instagram. 

"Not a victim, but a survivor and alive to tell the real story," she said in a handwritten note she posted on the app. The documentary film will feature interviews with Anderson, along with previously unreleased archival footage and journals. Netflix promises that the pop culture icon will "set the record straight" and that the movie, directed by Ryan White (The Keepers), will paint an "intimate portrait" of her. In comparison, the Hulu series was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article and fictionalized some parts of the actual events. 

Anderson's camp also reportedly took issue with the fact that the Hulu series used clips from the actual sex tape, which became one of the first ever viral sex videos. According to The Washington Post, that tape demonstrated how powerful the internet is, even during its early days, as a platform for the sex industry and content distribution as a whole. 

While Anderson's sex tape debacle went down in the '90s, the rivalry between streaming giants prompt them to find new ways to get into current discussions and events. Netflix and Hulu each released their own Fyre Festival documentaries in the past, for instance, as well as their own takes on Britney Spears' life and career.