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GameOn, Amazon’s mobile gaming capture app, has come to iOS after dropping on Android last November, and Amazon is looking to make it big. As reported by TechCrunch, the app allows users to capture gameplay clips from mobile games, which can then be saved to a library and posted publicly on the GameOn sharing platform.

Despite also being owned by Amazon, GameOn is completely separate to Twitch, with different branding and seperate user accounts. With in-built capture, editing tools, and a public highlight feed, GameOn looks to be more like a gaming-specific take on TikTok than it is a mobile version of Twitch. Clips made within GameOn are also designed to be shared outside the app “via social media services or by sending direct links to friends.”

Amazon is hoping to build its userbase by partnering with streamers who will focus on mobile gaming content for the app. It’s also publicizing a series of “weekly challenges” for GameOn users, with the winners gaining more exposure on the app’s main feeds. An example challenge for PUBG Mobile reads: “Let’s see the most destruction with a vehicle in 1 minute!” You can check out GameOn’s highlight page here, without downloading the app.

Amazon says its app is integrated with over 1000 mobile games for screen capture, while users can also add an optional Facecam recording to their capture. GameOn is available now on both iOS and Android via Google Play or the Amazon Appstore.

Twitch has released the first Transparency Report of what is set to be many, with the streaming company promising to release the reports twice a year. The report gives a top-down look at Twitch’s safety and moderation systems, before looking into more granular data about enforcement on Twitch.

The report breaks safety into multiple tiers, with the broadest level being Twitch’s community guidelines, followed by site-wide moderation, then channel-specific moderation, then the small suite of safety tools that are given to viewers.

The role of channel mods and creators is emphasized in the site’s overall plan, and Twitch brags that 95% of channels now have either human moderators or AutoMod enabled–up from 93% in the first half of last year. It also shows an increase in messages being deleted, with the number per 1000 messages up from 3.2 to 4.

Twitch attruibutes much of the increase to changes it’s made in the last year, including the rollout of the ModView dashboard in March 2020, and a change in the second half of last year that enabled AutoMod by default for new channels without a human moderator assigned.

While these changes have made life a little easier for creators and their mods, it’s the Twitch-side moderation that most of the site’s users have questions about. Twitch says it has increased its number of “content moderation professionals” by four times in the last year, though it still doesn’t say how many are currently employed by Twitch–or specify whether they are in fact Twitch employees or contracted from an outside company as other social media platforms are known to do.

Twitch says that these professionals “work across multiple locations, and support over 20 languages, in order to provide 24/7/365 capacity to review reports as they come in across the globe,” and also devotes a small part of the report to outlining some of the systems in place to reduce the harm on those workers of constantly viewing harmful content for moderation.

The report goes into granular detail on Twitch-side enforcements, including warnings issued, temporary suspensions, and permanent bans for infringements including hateful conduct, harassment, violent conduct, nudity, adult conduct, spam, and terrorist activity. Overall, it says enforcements have increased from 0.099 to 0.114 actions per thousand hours watched.

While the report gives a huge amount of data, it’s lacking the answers to a number of questions streamers and viewers most wanted answered. Replies to Twitch’s tweet of the report showed many users didn’t think it was enough. Streamers asked to know why Twitch’s Community Guidelines were often unevenly applied, with others asking for transparency about why high-profile streamer Dr Disrespect was banned–with even the streamer himself allegedly never being given a reason for the ban.

The report is just one of a number of measures Twitch instigated last year, after the streaming community complained of abusers using their platform to harass others.

“This report is the first of its kind for Twitch so we will look closely at the feedback we receive to inform how we can refine these reports moving forward,” the blog post accompanying the report reads, directing users to UserVoice to submit their feedback. It looks like Twitch will get a lot of it on this report, so we’ll have to wait and see what changes are made in time for 2021’s half-year report.

Valheim‘s record-breaking success isn’t too surprising, even if you ignore outside elements like the current global pandemic and the game’s relatively low price point. There’s an obvious appetite for survival games on PC, as evidenced by the likes of Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved consistently butting heads on Steam’s most-played list. Yet Valheim also appeals to people like me, who aren’t particularly fond of the genre. There are a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that Valheim plays down all of the restrictive survival aspects that form the foundations of similar games.

The first structure my friends and I built in Valheim has now become known as our home base. In keeping with the game’s viking theme, it’s vaguely reminiscent of a Norse longhouse, complete with mead and a dining table. Colourful banners and trophies of the monsters we’ve slain adorn its wooden walls, and the outside courtyard features a smelter for refining precious ores and a kiln for producing the coal that powers it. Each person has their own bedroom with a place to sleep and chests to store their valuables, and there are also communal chests for everyone to contribute various resources like food, wood, and stone. Meanwhile, the house’s defenses consist of a spiked fence encircling the entire property and an improvised moat that’s proven surprisingly effective at keeping monsters at bay.

Can anyone argue that constructing our forever home would’ve been a better experience if we also had to worry about thirst and hunger meters while doing so? This has always been my main sticking point with most other survival games, and Valheim removes this prohibitive aspect completely. Food is still a factor, but you’re not going to keel over and die if you haven’t eaten for a few in-game hours. Instead, food provides you with health rather than acting as a ticking clock. You can eat up to three food items at any one time, and the combination of which will determine the size of your health bar and the speed at which it regenerates. My diet currently consists of cooked fish, sausages, and a slab of deer meat, but food sources are plentiful, with berries, mushrooms, and other meat-based treats all available to gather and consume.

If you’re simply building structures you don’t even need to engage with this system. Eating is something you do before exploring potentially dangerous areas, so in some ways the mechanic is more like Breath of the Wild than any other survival game. Speaking of which, weapon durability exists, too, but even this is largely hassle-free in Valheim. Tools and weapons will break through usage, but this is a non-issue unless you’re in the midst of a battle. As long as you have a workbench handy you can fix your equipment without using any resources. The same is true of your buildings as well. They can degrade over time, and enemies have a habit of hitting any structures they find, but as long as there’s a workbench in the vicinity you can simply repair walls and furniture so that they’re good as new.

You’re never required to gather crafting resources in order to fix what you’re already got, only to build brand-new equipment or upgrade what you currently have. This creates a satisfying loop where exploration often concludes with the option to expand your arsenal, whether that means crafting a new sword, piece of armor, or crafting station.

Eating, drinking, repairing structures, and fixing or replacing tools are little more than daily busywork in most other survival games. They’re often dull and tedious distractions as opposed to engaging mechanics, and Valheim doesn’t lose anything by disregarding them. It’s a better and more approachable game for it, where the emphasis and challenge come from embarking on risky expeditions and overcoming obstacles with friends, rather than ensuring you have enough sustenance to survive the day. Valheim focuses on the genre’s most attractive traits instead of trying to replicate a survival experience that only serves to add artificial difficulty and detract from your anecdote-worthy adventures into the unknown.

This is where Valheim introduces some of its own strengths rather than simply removing the genre’s weaknesses. The frankly gargantuan map is currently made up of six varied biomes, each with its own aesthetic, resources, and enemy types. It’s all procedurally generated, too, so no two game worlds are exactly the same. You can venture into any of the biomes right from the game’s outset, but you’re probably going to need a boat to reach some of them. Doing so isn’t the wisest of decisions, however, since Valheim gates your progress by ramping up the enemy difficulty in each successive biome. To aid your advancement through its world, a general path has been laid out in the form of a boss run of sorts.

The first boss, Eikthyr, is a large stag that presides over the Meadows biome. Defeating it rewards you with its powerful antlers, which can then be used to craft the antler pickaxe. This is a key tool in the next biome, as the pickaxe allows you to gather the copper and tin located there. These are the ingredients you need to craft bronze, thereby allowing you to forge stronger armor, weapons, and other tools.

Valheim focuses on the genre’s most attractive traits instead of trying to replicate a survival experience that only serves to add artificial difficulty and detract from your anecdote-worthy adventures into the unknown.

Valheim’s core gameplay loop revolves around this routine, whereby defeating a boss will reward you with an item that aids your progression into the next biome. It’s slightly more involved than this, of course, especially when it comes to discovering where each boss is located and figuring out the best way to defeat them. The second boss, Elder, is pretty self-explanatory in this regard, being that it’s a giant tree and wood doesn’t mesh well with fire. Bonemass’ weaknesses, on the other hand, aren’t quite as intuitive and require some experimentation if you’re going to vanquish the third boss. Fortunately, the penalty for dying isn’t too harsh. You still lose everything in your inventory when you perish, but as long as you can return to where you died, you can retrieve it all. This becomes a larger issue when you’re miles and miles away from where you call home, but that’s what teleports are for. If you have the required materials to make one, teleports give you an easy way to traverse large swaths of the map in an instant.

Preparing for a boss fight might actually be one of my favourite parts of Valheim. Upon discovering that Bonemass is weak to a specific damage type, we went to work gathering the iron needed to craft a weapon for everyone that would deal the requisite pain. This was an ordeal in itself as we had to venture into sunken crypts and fight through skeletons and draugrs in order to mine the amount of iron we required. While this was happening, we were also fermenting poison-resistant potions for everybody and gathering a lot of food to ensure everyone’s health was topped up. I was on fishing duty, while others hunted deer and used the cauldron to create unique meals. Once we felt suitably prepared, we tucked into bed for a good night’s sleep and then marched on the boss with Yggdrasil’s sacred branches looming above us.

Once you are face to face with an enemy, Valheim’s combat is decent if unspectacular. Weapons are diverse and attack differently depending on which type you’re using, and both parries and critical hits are met with an inherently satisfying sound cue that coincides with the enemy being sent staggering backwards. Stealth is an option as well, especially when combined with a bow, and Valheim adopts the Elder Scrolls method of leveling up, as different stats improve through use. If you’re using maces a lot, your skill with maces will improve, while the same rings true for physical activities like running, swimming, and chopping wood.

Beyond the boss fights and character progression, Valheim also succeeds in enticing you to explore its vast open world. This is partly due to its surprisingly beautiful visuals, as it adopts a deliberately lo-fi aesthetic that’s reminiscent of early 3D games. Pixelated and low-poly models are elevated by modern techniques such as realistic lighting, particle effects, and depth of field, and screenshots fail to adequately do it justice, especially when it comes to the ambience present in each forested hillside and snow-capped mountain top. This environmental variety is part of what makes exploring Valheim’s world such a joy, too. The procedural generation is particularly impressive, presenting cohesive and natural environments that feel like they were handmade.

The world of Valheim is already a wonderful one to inhabit, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

There are a few issues to speak of, including finicky building controls that arise when trying to connect pre-made building pieces in third-person. With that said, the pre-made pieces don’t stunt creativity at least, with plenty of examples of people constructing some frankly outlandish creations. The fact you can’t dismantle items is another inconvenience, since unwanted tools and weapons either end up polluting the landscape or filling up chests. The forging and fermenting process is also exceedingly slow, and there are a few instances where it can be overly grindy. Valheim’s grind isn’t bad in and of itself, but there are a few moments in the latter biomes where it can devolve into tedium. Crafting the Mountain biome’s unique helmet, for example, requires two Drake trophies to build. Drakes are fairly plentiful, but the drop rate for their trophies is only 15%, which means you’re likely to spend hours hunting the flying menaces in the hope two of them drop what you need. Normally you have a degree of control over Valheim’s grind, yet this is a stark example where you’re at the whim of the RNG.

Most of these are minor complaints in truth, and each one is an aspect that will hopefully be rectified and re-balanced in the coming weeks and months. Even as an Early Access title, Valheim is more fleshed-out than many finished games, and it’s going to be exciting to see how it evolves over the next year as systems are improved and more content is added. The world of Valheim is already a wonderful one to inhabit, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

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The heroes of any Dungeons & Dragons game are at a loss if they don’t have a villain to battle. Thankfully, the Dungeons & Dragons film has found a villain in British actor Hugh Grant, according to a report from Deadline.

Information about the Dungeons & Dragons film is scarce at the moment, aside from casting information. Along with Hugh Grant as the villain, actress Sophia Lillis (It) will join the previously-announced cast members, including Chris Pine (Star Trek franchise), Michelle Rodriguez (Fast & Furious franchise), Justice Smith (Paper Towns, Detective Pikachu), and Rege-Jean Page (Bridgerton).

Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley will direct and write the film. The duo directed Game Night and wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming, among other credits, and were briefly attached to the much-delayed The Flash moviet. Paramount and Hasbro are co-producing the film with eOne as distributor.

We’re most curious to see just what Paramount and Hasbro, the parent company of D&D maker Wizards of the Coast, imagine a Dungeons & Dragons movie to be. To the tens of millions of people playing the game, Dungeons & Dragons is a descriptor that has roughly as much meaning as “fantasy story setting.”

The official worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, including properties like Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft, bring a rich history of characters and places, while the greater concept is used by Dungeon Masters and players to tell any manner of fantasy-themed story. Unless Goldstein and Francis Daley give us something that uses a specific Dungeons & Dragons world or plays with the concept of a roleplaying game in meaningful ways, we may be in for fairly generic fare. That’s despite the encouraging casting, which already has more going for it than the Dungeons & Dragons film starring Jeremy Irons and Marlon Wayans released in 2000.

The Dungeons & Dragons film does not yet have a release date, and definitely won’t make the 2021 release that was going around way back in 2017.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Wrong Turn got a very different remake this year–moving away from cannibal hillbillies to focus on a more civilized people who live off-the-grid in the Appalachian mountains called The Foundation. However, there was one scene cut from the movie that landed it the infamous NC-17 rating.

During the Wrong Turn audio commentary from director Mike P. Nelson, he explained the exact moment where the MPAA slapped the naughty rating on it. “[The] execution scene with Adam here was the moment in the movie in which we got an NC-17 from the MPAA,” Nelson explained during the movie.

The scene in question features travelling city-boy Adam about to be executed in a bizarre court of law by The Foundation after Adam is found guilty of murdering another member of the hermit tribe.

“Originally, this scene played straight through, in which you saw Adam get his head bashed in, and it did not cut away, like it’s going to do there,” Nelson continued. “It keeps going and going, and you see his head break apart. But it was a little too much, I guess, so we had to cut that back.”

Nelson hoped there’s an uncut version of the movie that will be released in the future. As of this writing, there isn’t one. However, this ultra-gruesome moment was an important point for the movie. “Originally, my intention for that moment there was that we really haven’t seen that much violence on screen up into that point,” Nelson continued. “A lot of it’s off screen or hidden. And that was sort of the moment where you are supposed to be confronted with the most brutal form of violence in the movie yet. It’s probably still the most brutal piece of violence in the film, but the idea was to not cut away and to show it in its full glory.”

As the director mentioned, the execution sequence is still in the movie, but during the violence, it cuts to reactions from the cast. Nevertheless, it’s still effective at confronting the audience with pure brutality. This year’s Wrong Turn remake is quite a bit better than its 2003 counterpart, which is more a traditional early 2000s horror romp. The 2021 version has a bit more to say about morality, and there is a bit more ambiguity between “good” and “evil.”

Currently, Wrong Turn is for sale on Amazon for $17. The movie is also available at Best Buy for $17 as well. Additionally, digital versions are available at various retailers for purchase or rental.

The Rock’s Black Adam, which will introduce the Justice Society of America to the DC movie universe, is now expected to start production in April according to a recent interview. Speaking with ComicBook.com, Black Adam executive producer Hiram Garcia revealed that the film is gearing up and counting down the days to get started next month.

“We begin filming in April, we’ll be in Georgia, home away from home,” Garcia says. “We’re really excited, man. We have everything ramped up. We’re so fired up for this.”

During the conversation, Garcia also reflected on the silver lining of last year’s COVID delays to productions, noting that “we’re happy we’re able to pause, regroup, and now we’re going to be getting going.” The extra down time, says Garcia, enabled the creative team to add more depth to concepts that were in place before the coronavirus spread, and also allowed “high ambitions and such high hopes for this” to ratchet up even further, though was light on specifics on all fronts there.

Wanting to preserve the surprises and excitement Black Adam will have in store, Garcia only mentioned a detail we already know: “[The Rock] is a walking superhero… and if there was ever anyone born to play a character, it’s him.”

In addition to The Rock, it was recently announced that the film’s cast will also include Quintessa Swindell (Euphoria) as Cyclone and Aldis Hodge (The Invisible Man) as Hawkman. Black Adam will be directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who previously worked with Johnson on the upcoming Disney movie Jungle Cruise.