“It’s like night and day,” the White House worker told The New Yorker.
Susan Collins Will Vote For Interior Secretary Nominee Deb Haaland
The Maine senator is the first Republican to support Biden’s historic pick.
Covid: Joe Biden promises vaccines for all US adults by end of May
The US president also insists the “fight is not over”, as some states move to relax Covid rules.
Valheim: How to Find and Get Core Wood
Amazon Launches GameOn App On iOS
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.
Twitch Releases Its First Transparency Report, But Streamers Still Have Questions
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.
‘If the others go I’ll go’: Inside China’s scheme to transfer Uighurs into work
A high-level Chinese study says a massive work scheme is reducing Uighur population density in Xinjiang.
Valheim Succeeds By Not Starving You
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.
New Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Update Is Live, Balances Zombies’ Outbreak Mode
Treyarch Studios has released the full patch notes for the latest update for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The update is currently live–it’s primarily geared towards implementing bug fixes and objective tuning to Zombies.
The update focuses on Zombies’ new Outbreak mode, which is an open-world, co-op variation of Call of Duty’s traditional Zombies. Instead of fighting off hordes of zombies in a series of rounds, Outbreak tasks a team of players with accomplishing a series of objectives in any order they wish across a vast open space that’s filled with zombies.
Also in the patch notes, Treyarch details what players can expect in Rapid Fire Moshpit and Dead Ops Arcade: First Person, both of which are scheduled to go live in Black Ops Cold War on March 4. Rapid Fire Moshpit is a playlist composed of Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed, and Hardpoint but only on the game’s smallest maps. Dead Ops Arcade: First Person remakes Dead Ops Arcade 3–it’s just now played in first-person.
Hugh Grant To Menace The Heroes of the Dungeons & Dragons Movie
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.