Month: April 2021

Navigating YouTube’s rules for monetization can be a big headache for content creators, but YouTube is expanding its policies for profanity and sensitive content.

Previously, YouTube allowed for light profanity like “hell” or “damn” in monetized videos. Now, though, YouTube will allow moderate profanity like “s**t” and “b**ch” in the first 30 seconds of a video, as well as infrequent strong profanity and censored profanity (the f-word, etc.) further into the video.

In addition to expanded allowances for profanity, YouTube will let content creators monetize videos about “recreational drugs and drug-related content,” “documentary or news content that may include violent interactions with law enforcement,” and “controversial issues where non-graphic, objective discussions of controversial issues are in the video.” Creators will also be able to monetize more videos that feature adult themes “delivered through the context of humor,” such as romance and dating jokes. The site also provided more specific examples for content that still cannot be monetized, including Adult content, harmful or dangerous acts, and firearms-related content.

“Based on creator and advertiser input, we’ve updated our guidelines to allow more content to become eligible for full monetization (green icon) while continuing to maintain advertiser industry standards,” YouTube said in a policy update on Tuesday.

These changes come as the United States continues to grapple with sensitive issues like police brutality and drug legalization, both of which may have pushed aspects of this policy change.

Dead Space 2 – The “Eye Scene”

Outriders is a game that isn’t defined by big new ideas, but rather a variety of familiar elements mixed together in experimental ways. It’s a role-playing game with loot-shooter elements; it’s a serious, dark sci-fi outing with a big dose of goofiness and humor; it’s a cover shooter that demands you rush out and smash enemies with your ludicrously lethal magic powers. Whether this mixture works for you will determine how much you’ll enjoy exploring the war-torn planet of Enoch and the last desperate vestige of humanity clinging to life there.

Outriders blends well-known video game elements into something new and challenging, and while it takes itself seriously, it isn’t self-serious. The world of Enoch seems huge and strange, and while the game is literally about the last gasp of the human race that has ripped itself apart, its heavy themes are always lightened up by a general blockbuster goofiness and characters defined by their gallows humor. Your place within it is as an accidental superbeing with space magic powers, and you’re mostly just annoyed that irritating people are wasting your time with their gopher chores. It’s a fun, self-aware fit.

Though Outriders looks like a live game of the loot-shooter persuasion, it’s actually much more Mass Effect 3 than Destiny 2–like Mass Effect, RPG progression and cover-shooting are more the engine of the game than chasing the next new gun. Outriders is, in fact, a cover-shooter RPG with a hearty dose of gear progression, leaning heavily into an epic story told with tons of dialogue, cutscenes, character interactions, and collectible lore.

Developer People Can Fly draws a lot from its past work on the Gears of War series in creating Outriders, and the influence is easily identified. Rifle-sporting enemies take fortified positions to unload on you at a distance, backed up by shotgunners that try to close the gap, armored troops carrying chainguns who plod toward you through the open, and cleaver-wielding sprinters who charge straight at your face to drive you out of cover.

The gameplay core of Outriders is shooting, and you’ll have a mess of guns at your disposal. Though you can only have two main weapons and a sidearm equipped at any given time, you’ll have lots of options thanks to the loot-shooter half of the Outriders formula. That means you can pair a sniper rifle with a shotgun or assault rifles and SMGs, and since you’re constantly searching for weapons with better stats, you’ll cycle through a lot of different loadouts in a short amount of time. What makes them especially fun are the myriad different properties and status effects they can have, like dispensing poison, blowing enemies up, freezing people solid, and more. Recalling Gears of War again, Outriders’ shooting is reliably solid, fun, and feels good–but finding synergies between your weapons’ weird properties is a lot of what makes the shooting part of the game rewarding.

Things get weirder in its merging of space superpowers with the cover shooter core. You can choose from one of four ability classes early in the game: Devastator, Trickster, Pyromancer, or Technomancer. These each have the general roles of tank, rogue, damage-focused mage, and debuff-focused mage–the Devastator uses gravity attacks for close-range kills, the Trickster teleports around to get the drop on enemies, the Pyromancer is a mid-range fire-flinger, and the Technomancer can summon turrets and rockets that also poison or slow targets.

Each class has a different way of replenishing health through combat, generally by focusing on their specific strengths. The Devastator, for instance, heals you for every close-range kill, encouraging you to get in close to enemies to hit them with powers like a short-range earthquake. Combat becomes a constant calculus between when to cut the distance and take down an enemy and when to take cover, bide your time, and protect yourself.

That combination can be a bit confusing and, as a result, combat is a place where Outriders can both sprint and stumble. You’re playing a shooter where you use cover to keep yourself alive, but you’re encouraged to leave cover to keep yourself alive. That push and pull of avoiding incoming damage and taking the fight to the enemy means you have to be constantly managing the battlefield, as well as your ability cooldown timers. If you jump out of cover and go wild with all your powers on an approaching enemy, you’ll leave yourself exposed for all their friends and quickly find yourself cut down by incoming fire.

That means having an earthquake ready to stun incoming fighters is essential to saving your life, since it allows you to grab kills while keeping your head down. Similarly, abilities like the Trickster’s teleport, which instantly puts you behind enemies in cover, are just as useful for dramatically repositioning yourself across the battlefield as they are for eliminating foes. But you can rarely just go all-out with your guns and abilities–you really have to think about where you are, where your enemies are, and how you can best eliminate them without exposing yourself.

It can feel unintuitive for a while, but when you do find the balance between using your powers, healing yourself, and staying out of fire, Outriders can create some pitched, frantic battles that use cover just enough to give you a second to breathe, without nailing your shoulder to a single chest-high wall and leaving you there for minutes on end. But there are also times when you find yourself surrounded or cut off, trapped between enemies, unable to kill anything fast enough to heal or escape the onslaught to save yourself. Sometimes a situation is just unwinnable, but luckily, Outriders generally only sets you back a bit when you die, so you can re-enter a fight quickly and try a new approach. Facing tougher Altered enemies, who have powers similar to yours, can result in battles of attrition where you have to cheese the situation by scurrying out of the arena so enemies don’t all chase you down at once. Sometimes, even careful management of powers, cover, and your spacing on the battlefield aren’t enough to save you, and it’s these moments when Outriders can get frustrating because it doesn’t feel like you’re losing for lack of skill.

There are ways to deal with that issue, however. Outriders is largely pretty open and has liberal fast travel, so you can bail on a mission to go do a side-quest without much difficulty, allowing you to grab rewards that can boost your gear and character. The difficulty of enemies is also determined by the overall World Tier level, which rises as you earn experience points alongside your character. World Tier also determines loot drops, so there’s an incentive to keep it on the highest level you can, but if you’re in a particularly annoying fight, you can always back it down a touch to keep yourself from stalling. The World Tier is a smart solution to the difficulty problem, and since it can be adjusted at any time, it gives you a lot of freedom to avoid frustration at key moments.

I’m only about 10 or so hours into Outriders, so it’s difficult to say how all its elements gel over the long term. So far, though, I’m intrigued by the way it blends disparate ideas to create new flavors. While the combat can be tough to wrap your head around at first, the frenetic balancing act has created some heart-pounding moments–more fun and intense battles than annoying ones. You can also play all of Outriders cooperatively, which seems like it could also go a long way to lessening combat irritations, and while I haven’t had a chance to team up with anyone else yet, I can already see how powers, abilities, and gear might work together on teams to create fun strategies and synergies.

Outriders’ story also has me pretty hooked in. People Can Fly has obviously put a lot of time and thought into the game’s lore, and there’s a lot of interesting writing to be found in journal entries and side-quests. What I’m liking most, however, is the unexpected mixture of desperation and humor. Enoch, the planet where Outriders takes place, was meant to be an idyllic new world for the remnants of humanity to colonize. Instead, it’s a war-torn hellscape where the last vestiges of the human race are literally ripping each other apart. The misery and torment of the situation is exacerbated by the Altered, like your character, who have gained godlike powers. How those people choose to use them is an ongoing moral question and I’m interested in the ways the game is attempting to explore it.

Coupled with the dark, serious, and gritty sci-fi take are the moments of levity that make Outriders feel human. One mission I played found a group of cultists sacrificing soldiers to the Anomaly, the weird Enochian storm that destroys electronics, rips apart buildings, disintegrates people, and sometimes bestows superpowers. Rather than plead with the Anomaly worshipers for his life, the soldier attempted to reason with them, explaining that there was nothing supernatural in the strange storms. “It’s just electromagnetic … scientific … sh-t!” the guy yelled before they kicked him over a cliff, and I couldn’t help but laugh. If I were trying to disabuse some fanatical cultists of their misplaced and lethal worship of a colorful electrical phenomenon, I’d likely say something similar.

There are a lot of these moments where Outriders strikes a delicate balance between being serious and being light, developing its world and recognizing that it’s dealing in some fairly absurd concepts. These moments likely won’t land for everyone–it can feel a touch edgelord at times, although rarely so far–and the tone can pingpong between extremes, especially jumping off the main quest to explore side content.

Those swings are also where Outriders excels, if you meet it where it is, though. Its story is often funny but similarly intense; its combat requires you to take cover and to charge; its abilities make you phenomenally powerful but prone to overestimating yourself. If you can find the balance in Outriders, People Can Fly’s RPG-shooter finds ways to combine well-worn video game ideas into something new and fun. Whether those new combinations will carry it all the way through its seemingly expansive runtime remains to be seen, but I’m excited to see what’s still waiting in the wilds of Enoch–and to smash it with seismic earthquake magic.

Sega has some big savings available on its site to celebrate April Fools’ Day, and it’s not a joke. You can score a discount on everything you purchase from the Sega online shop by using the code FOOL, and it’s a great chance to stock up on merchandise like shirts, coffee mugs, hoodies, and more. But there isn’t much time to take advantage of the deals, as Sega’s April Fools’ Day sale ends at midnight PT.

By using the FOOL code at checkout, you’ll get 15% off your entire order. The sale encompasses cheaper items like patches and shirts as well as puzzles, figures, home decor, pillows, and basically anything else you can think of having Sonic the Hedgehog’s face on. You can even get some face masks to switch up your look, and both Sonic and Tails variants are available.

If you haven’t purchased the Sonic the Hedgehog movie on DVD or Blu-ray, these are available via the shop, as well. There is even a 4K UHD version available so you can see every spine on his head.

Sega April Fools’ Day sale – 15% off sitewide

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Anthony Ramos is in talks to star in the new Transformers movie. The Hamilton and Trolls World Tour star will take the lead role in the film, which will be directed by Creed II’s Steven Caple Jr.

According to Deadline, Ramos is in “final negotiations” to lead the next film in the Transformers franchise, which has been written by Joby Harold (John Wick Chapter 3, the upcoming Army of the Dead). The movie was announced in November last year, and Ramos has reportedly been the first choice to star since then. The site also states that Ramos has been testing with potential co-stars, including Kiki Layne (The Old Guard) and Dominque Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah).

The film is one of two new Transformers movies in the works at Paramount. Last week, it was reported that Charm City King director Angel Manuel Soto and The Defenders writer Marco Ramirez had been hired to make another film that would be separate from the main universe of Transformers movies featured in Michael Bay’s five films and the spin-off Bumblebee.

There are several animated Transformers projects on the way too. In May last year, it was reported that Toy Story 4’s Josh Cooley was making a new animated movie, and there’s also a 26-episode Nickelodeon series in production. The final season of the animated Netflix show Transformers: War For Cybertron is also expected later this year.

For more, check out GameSpot’s guide to the biggest upcoming movies of 2021.

CW’s live-action adaptation of the Cartoon Network’s Powerpuff Girls series is gearing up for its pilot, and that means tons of casting news. The latest actor to join the cast is Nicholas Podany The Cursed Child), who will play the live-action version of frequent Powerpuff foe Mojo Jojo, Variety reports.

Podany will play the part of Joseph “Jojo” Mondel Jr., who Variety says was a “nerdy, power-hungry, insecure” kid obsessed with the Powerpuff Girls. Interestingly, there’s no word on whether Podany will be getting into a chimp costume for the series or if he’ll be simply playing a villain with the same name. By giving him a full name, though, the writers seem to be taking a page from the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure anime, which gives characters names like “Joseph Joestar” and “Kujo Jotaro” and shortens them to “JoJo.” It also seems to suggest that he’ll be playing the character as human, but that’s pure speculation. He could wear some chimp-themed prosthetics, or be all CGI like The Flash’s Gorilla Grodd.

The previously-announced cast includes Chloe Bennett (Agents of Shield), Dove Cameron, and Yana Perrault as Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. Donald Faison (Scrubs) will play the part of Powerpuff creator Professor Utonium. The show, titled Powerpuff, will follow the now-grown Powerpuff Girls as they contend with losing their childhood to crime fighting and try to navigate relationships in the wake of that trauma. Of course, something will happen that forces the trio to re-unite.

Powerpuff is in the “pilot” stage right now, with Maggie Kiley set to direct and executive produce. Heather Regnier and Diablo Cody (Juno) are writing and executive producing the show. Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, and David Madden will produce the pilot, too.

The future of the DC movie universe is changing. Following the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and with James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad on the way, two movies in the works have been canceled As revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, Ava Duvernay’s adaptation of New Gods, as well as James Wan’s Aquaman spin-off The Trench, will not move past the development stage.

A statement from Warner Bros. and DC reads, “As part of our DC slate, some legacy development titles including New Gods and The Trench will not be moving forward. We thank our partners Ava DuVernay, Tom King, James Wan, and Peter Safran for their time and collaboration during this process and look forward to our continued partnership with them on other DC stories. The projects will remain in their skillful hands if they were to move forward in the future.”

With the projects not moving forward, DuVernay took to Twitter to offer her thoughts, thanking writer King. “Tom, I loved writing NEW GODS with you,” she tweeted. “I’m upset that the saga of Barda, Scott, Granny, Highfather, and The Furies ends this way. Diving into Kirby’s Fourth World was the adventure of a lifetime. That can’t be taken away. Thank you for your friendship. And remember… #DarkseidIs”

That hashtag refers to Darkseid, a villainous character that appeared in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, as portrayed by Ray Porter, that was also going to play a role in New Gods. DuVernay even tweeted Porter about the news, writing, “I’m told the studio will be speaking about their recent decision about NEW GODS characters soon. I hope our paths cross one day, sir. If not in the Fourth World, then in another.”

At this point, we know of five other planned movies in the DC Extended Universe that are still happening. The Suicide Squad, as previously mentioned, releases in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6. After that, Black Adam starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson arrives in 2022. There are also a Flash film, and sequels to both Aquaman and Shazam! in the works.

Image credit: Getty Images/Rich Fury/VF20