After a number of delays, Top Gun: Maverick was supposed to finally arrive in theaters in November. Not so. Paramount has pushed back the release date once again, and the long-awaited sequel is now set to arrive another six months later, on May 27th, due to COVID-19 and delta variant concerns. The decision has also affected the planned Top Gun expansion for Microsoft Flight Simulator, as Asobo Studio has delayed that too.

"Paramount Pictures recently shifted the release date of Top Gun: Maverick to Memorial Day weekend, May 27, 2022," the studio wrote in a brief blog post. "As we have previously announced, the Top Gun: Maverick expansion for Microsoft Flight Simulator for Windows 10 PC, Steam, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox Game Pass will be released alongside the movie. We look forward to sharing more information in the future."

The news might be disappointing to those who were looking forward to darting around the virtual skies in Maverick's jet over the Thanksgiving holiday. Still, given the marketing synergy between the expansion and the movie, it's not too surprising that Asobo made this call.

The studio hasn't revealed too much about what the free expansion will entail. An announcement teaser showed off fighter jets and an aircraft carrier, so you might be able to take off from and land at sea.

The Nintendo Switch Online subscription service may give you access to games newer than NES and SNES titles in the near future. According to the latest Nate the Hate podcast, Nintendo might be adding Game Boy and Game Boy Color games to Switch Online in the coming weeks. As the hosts discuss in the show, some people found back in 2019 that the the service has four emulators, and of two of those are still unused. They believe that those emulators are for Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles — and both Nintendo Life and Eurogamer corroborated the report with sources of their own.

Nintendo's Switch Online service turns three years old in a few weeks. It launched on September 18th, 2018, offering members access to retro games for two of the company's oldest consoles. Since then, the company has been regularly adding more and more SNES and NES games to its selection, including beloved classics like the Super Mario Bros. series, The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II and Donkey Kong. Adding Game Boy titles to the mix means Nintendo won't be running out of games to add in the foreseeable future.

Nintendo Life's source isn't optimistic about the possibility of the company rolling out Game Boy Advance titles for the service in the near future. According to Eurogamer, though, "other retro platforms are also on the cards." As you'd expect, Nintendo refuses to comment about the rumor. It told The Verge: "We have nothing to announce on this topic."

Facebook has apologized after its AI slapped an egregious label on a video of Black men. According to The New York Times, users who recently watched a video posted by Daily Mail featuring Black men saw a prompt asking them if they'd like to "[k]eep seeing videos about Primates." The social network apologized for the "unacceptable error" in a statement sent to the publication. It also disabled the recommendation feature that was responsible for the message as it looks into the cause to prevent serious errors like this from happening again.

Company spokeswoman Dani Lever said in a statement: "As we have said, while we have made improvements to our AI, we know it's not perfect, and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations."

Gender and racial bias in artificial intelligence is hardly a problem that's unique to the social network — facial recognition technologies are still far from perfect and tend to misidentify POCs and women in general. Last year, false facial recognition matches led to the wrongful arrests of two Black men in Detroit. In 2015, Google Photos tagged the photos of Black people as "gorillas," and Wired found a few years later that the tech giant's solution was to censor the word "gorilla" from searches and image tags.

The social network shared a dataset it created with the AI community in an effort to combat the issue a few months ago. It contained over 40,000 videos featuring 3,000 paid actors who shared their age and gender with the company. Facebook even hired professionals to light their shoot and to label their skin tones, so AI systems can learn what people of different ethnicities look like under various lighting conditions. The dataset clearly wasn't enough to completely solve AI bias for Facebook, further demonstrating that the AI community still has a lot of work ahead of it. 

Fans of Neil Gaiman could soon see another of the author’s creations get the TV treatment. According to a report from Variety, WarnerMedia has ordered a pilot for a potential HBO Max series featuring the Dead Boy Detectives. The two characters, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, first appeared in issue 25 of Gaiman’s TheSandman comic. They’re ghosts who investigate supernatural crimes.

The interesting thing here is that Rowland and Paine will appear in the upcoming third season of HBO Max’s Doom Patrol. However, Variety reports it’s unclear whether Sebastian Croft and Ty Tennant, the two actors who play Rowland and Paine in Doom Patrol, will also play the detectives in this new pilot. Steve Yockey, best known for his work on The Flight Attendant, is penning the episode’s script.

Following the success of Good Omens, streaming audiences have wanted to see more of Gaiman's unique brand of fantasy. That’s led to an influx of projects linked to the author, including an upcoming Netflix adaptation of The Sandman.

When Firaxis announced Marvel’s Midnight Suns last week, the studio’s Jake Solomon promised the game would share “zero mechanics” with XCOM, but said little else about how its gameplay systems would work. Now we have a better idea following a trailer the developer shared on Thursday.

In short, Midnight Suns has more in common with deck-building games like Slay the Spire and Griftlands than XCOM. Battles still unfold over the course of multiple turns, but instead of each hero bringing the same set of abilities to every battle, you’ll have to draw for cards every turn. 

Some grant straightforward attacks, while others allow you to reposition enemies. According to Solomon, battlefield terrain and the positioning of adversaries play a critical role in Midnight Suns since you force your opponents to collide with obstacles and each other to damage them. As you progress through the game, you’ll have the chance to upgrade your cards to make them more powerful and create new synergies between different heroes.

Following the reveal, Firaxis clarified on Twitter you won’t have to buy loot boxes or pay for any other microtransactions to unlock additional cards. However, Midnight Suns will include character skins you can buy, though those don’t affect the balance of the game.

Outside of combat, there’s a hub called the Abbey where your custom-made character, the Hunter, can interact with the other members of the Midnight Suns, including Blade, Doctor Strange and Iron Man. And much like in Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series, that’s something you’ll want to do since it will make them a more effective team on the battlefield.

Midnight Suns Publisher 2K plans to release the game to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in March 2022.

Amazon has shared the first trailer for its long-awaited adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. If you’re a newcomer to the fantasy series, the clip sketches out the basics of the world the author created before his death in 2007. 

In the Wheel of Time, only women known as Aes Sedai can channel magic. A powerful sorceress named Moiraine (played by Gone Girl and Hostiles actor Rosamund Pike) comes across a small town called Two Rivers where she finds five young men and women. One of them she believes is the Dragon Reborn, an entity that could be either the savior or destroyer of humanity.

Amazon first announced it was working on a live-action adaptation of Robert Jordan’s 14-volume fantasy back in 2018, but like with the company’s other big-budget fantasy adaptation, filming was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first three episodes of the Wheel of Time will debut on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, November 19th, with new episodes to follow every week thereafter until December 24th when the season finale starts streaming.

How do you build on a filmography that includes disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day? If you’re Roland Emmerich, the answer is, quite simply, to drop the Moon on the planet. In the first trailer for his latest film, Moonfall, Earth’s natural satellite has decided to do humanity a solid favor and put it out of its misery by crashing into its anchor.

You might think its title says almost everything you need to know about Moonfall, but, sorry, the end of the world is only part of the story here. According to the film’s official synopsis, a “mysterious force” is what sets the Moon on its collision course with Earth. It’s up to a NASA executive, former astronaut and conspiracy theorist — played by Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley, respectively — to save the world. “These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to find out that our Moon is not what we think it is,” the film’s official summary says.

I’ll say it now. I hope it’s not aliens that are behind everything. Either way, Moonfall looks like it will be a fun and trashy way to spend an hour or two forgetting about all the real problems haunting humans at the moment. The film will debut in theaters on February 4th, 2022. We can't wait.

Facebook Gaming is letting more creators play licensed music in the background while streaming gameplay. Streamers who have partner status have been able to spin tracks from a broad range of publishers and labels since last September, and now Level Up creators can do so too.

Level Up is a step below partner status. Creators in the former group can monetize their streams with Facebook's Stars currency, ads and paid subscriptions. They also get access to tools to build their audience and features like being able to stream in 1080p at 60 frames per second. Partners get extra perks, such as a partner badge, early access to new products and more personalized support from Facebook.

Streamers in both categories can play songs from hundreds of music labels, publishers and societies, including big hitters like Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. As well as live broadcasts, the deals cover archived streams and clips viewers make from streams.

Creators aren't limited to predetermined playlists, so they can play almost any song they like. Facebook notes that streamers don't have the right to use certain songs, though, and it'll flag those to creators with a notification. The streamer can remove that restricted song from their playlist to avoid running into trouble.

Elsewhere, Facebook says its systems are better at detecting the difference between having music in the background while you're playing games and having music as the focus of the stream, like hosting a radio show, which isn't allowed.

To mark the expansion, Facebook is hosting several streams in which celebrity DJs will select the background tracks while creators play games. DJ Khaled and Diplo are among those taking part in the special streams, which take place throughout this month.

In 2018, Disney fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn over tweets he wrote between 2008 and 2012. While the company later rehired Gunn, he’s just one of many people for whom an old social media post came back to haunt him. In recent years, some Twitter users have turned to tools like TweetDelete.net to avoid something similar happening to them. Twitter could soon also offer its own solution to the problem.

Sharing part of its product roadmap with Bloomberg, the company said it plans to eventually test a feature that would allow people to automatically archive their tweets after a predetermined amount of time. The tool is currently in the concept phase and doesn’t have a release date, but Twitter said it’s considering a number of time options, including 30, 60 and 90 days.

The decision to give people the ability to archive their tweets is part of a broader “social privacy” push Twitter told Bloomberg is about giving people more control over their identity on the platform. To that end, the company plans to test a feature this month that will allow people to remove followers. By the end of the year, it will also trial a tool that gives individuals the option to remove themselves from public conversations people mention them in.

Twitter told Bloomberg many of the above tools come in response to creative workarounds its users have found to make up for missing features. For instance, people have found you can remove someone as a follower by blocking and unblocking them. Building on a concept it shared back in July (seen above), the company also plans to prompt people to review whether their accounts are public or private.

It will be interesting to see if Twitter decides to only give some users the option to archive their tweets. After all, the platform acts as a kind of public record, giving people a way to keep politicians accountable for things they said in the past.

It didn't take long for YouTube to claim another milestone for its music services, although its significant isn't quite so clear. The Google-owned brand said it had racked up a combined 50 million YouTube Premium and Music subscribers roughly a year and a half after reaching the 20 million mark. It's also the "fastest growing" music subscription service, according to YouTube's music chief Lyor Cohen.

Certain markets were stronger than others. Cohen touted "impressive growth" in Brazil, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. He didn't provide numbers for those countries or the US. 

That figure still makes YouTube smaller than Spotify, which claimed 165 million Premium subscribers as of June 2021. Apple hasn't divulged its Music subscriber numbers since June 2019, when it had 60 million, while Amazon last touted 55 million Music customers (only some of them paying for Unlimited) in January 2020. Still, these figures in isolation would suggest YouTube is quickly becoming a major force in music streaming.

There are concerns about the claims, though. YouTube didn't indicate how many were Music or Premium subscribers, or how they used it. While you get YouTube Music with a Premium subscription, that doesn't mean you're using Premium for music — you might just want to get rid of ads and download videos. YouTube's tally also includes people using free trials, so the number of paying customers is likely lower. Samsung offers two to four months of free YouTube Premium access with new phones, for instance, but many of those users will drop Premium after the trial is over.

The data still hints competition in the music streaming world is heating up, with relatively small outfits like YouTube and Amazon Music posing more of a threat to incumbents like Spotify and Apple. However, it could take a long while before YouTube is large enough to make the heavyweights nervous.