Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

GTA 6 - all you need to know about Rockstar's blockbuster game The latest instalment in Rockstar's blockbuster game franchise, Grand Theft Auto, is set to be the biggest games launch of the year. Details are still scant, although we do now know that GTA 6 will be available to pre-order on 25 June, the developer has announced . Analysts believe Rockstar's action adventure could become the most expensive game ever made, with estimates putting development costs at more than $1bn (£866m). We're still awaiting some crucial information about the game - but here's what we do and don't know about GTA 6 so far. When is GTA 6 coming out?

A new James Bond is about to make his debut - not on the big screen, but in a video game. It presents Bond before he's earned his 00 status, offering a fresh take on a character that's seen continual reinvention for more than six decades. The new game arrives at a moment of transition for the franchise, with no actor yet confirmed as the next cinematic Bond following Daniel Craig's final appearance in No Time to Die in 2021. The casting process for the live action film has only just officially started, about 15 months since Amazon MGM Studios took control of the Bond franchise. Gibson's portrayal focuses on a more vulnerable, less experienced version of the character.

The billion-dollar action film series John Wick is being turned into a video game, featuring the likeness and voice of star Keanu Reeves. Untitled John Wick Game, as it is currently known, will be made by Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive and include input from film franchise director Chad Stahelsk. A trailer for the game, which is expected to be a prequel to the series, was unveiled at PlayStation's State of Play showcase on Thursday. The Sony event also revealed several remakes of major game franchises, including the God of War trilogy, as well as a 30th anniversary edition of platformer Rayman. The John Wick film franchise, which has earned more than $1bn (£735m) worldwide, follows the story of the retired assassin played by Keanu Reeves on a path of bloody vengeance.

A new report shows that only 7 percent of new-car buyers in the US completed their purchase online, despite a major push by automakers, Amazon, and others to move past the dealership. In the US, cars follow only housing as the most expensive purchase consumers make. So it makes a lot of sense that, according to recent buyer surveys, very few of them want an Amazon-style, one-click approach to getting a new set of wheels. "People want to see, feel, and touch the car," says Erin Lomax, the vice president of consumer marketing at Cox Automotive, a research firm that also makes digital auto sales products that allow dealers to initiate transactions online. Not to mention test-driving the expensive thing they'll probably use every day.

The Avatar Game Is So Good, They Don't Need to Make the Movies Anymore See the new movie if you'd like. But if you really want to experience the big blue world of Pandora, the video game is where it's at. The Avatar video game is better than the movies. I say this as someone who has dumbly adored James Cameron's Avatar movies for a long time. The original 2009 film was my first ever midnight premiere, which I attended along with a friend who sat in the theater shirtless with his entire body painted blue.

Gaming may be turning players into conspiracy theorists, but so is everything else. For nearly 20 years, the video games have presented themselves as sprawling works of historical fiction. They cast players as noble assassins during big inflection points in history--the French Revolution, Ptolemaic Egypt, the end of Japan's Sengoku era--and give them freedom to romp around stunning re-creations of these eras, interacting with historical figures along the way. You can do secret missions for Cleopatra, you can get Socrates out of a jam after he pisses a mob off, that sort of thing. They're extremely popular to the point of being taken for granted, the way a ubiquitous CBS procedural might be.

A new video game sparked fury and accusations of wokeness in entertainment. But we've played this game before--and it's boring. Back in the summer of 2020, during the first year of COVID lockdowns, two first-party PlayStation games were released back-to-back, just a month apart: and . Upon release, was pretty beloved by a specific right-wing culture-war gamer crowd, who placed it on a pedestal specifically as a way to directly attack . While is far from perfect (for example, Neil Druckmann, the game's creator and co-director, took inspiration from the Israel-Palestine conflict that was criticized for both-sidesism), but the game's sin on release for many on the political right was that it took a series whose lead was previously a man and continued its story with one lead who was a lesbian and another whose appearance was deemed too masculine for these players to be attracted to her.

The new owners could erase that legacy. The legend goes like this: In 1999, a programmer named Patrick Barrett joined the video game studio Maxis to help develop the video game that would become . Working from an out-of-date design handbook, he coded the game to allow for same-sex relationships--even though the studio initially decided to include queer relationships for fear of backlash. The game was demoed to press with a wedding scene at E3 1999, and during the demo two female Sims kissed. Suddenly the game was the talk of the event, and any attempt to walk queer content back would be impossible to do quietly.

After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? The description "genre-defying" gets thrown around a lot these days - it is a convenient sticking plaster for any film or series that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. That said, it is an apt term for the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien, in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is part of a crew trapped on a spaceship with a salivating, scorpion-like "xenomorph", had such blood-curdling visuals that it made an indelible impact on both science fiction and horror films. But while the deadly parasite and its psychosexual torment were ever present, subsequent instalments tried their hand at being everything from a blockbuster to a prison flick to a philosophical drama.