Latest Articles (Page 1062)

A new Avoid as Teammate option is coming to Overwatch "as soon as possible", finally giving us some immediate power to prevent other people ruining our fun.

It is a question that has echoed down the ages ever since Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo strapped on metal jump-boots for Super Mario Bros in May 1993: will there ever be a good video game movie? The short but dispiriting history of gaming IP being repurposed for the big screen is like a high-score table filled entirely with clunkers, from the cheeseball flexing of Van Damme in Street Fighter to the constipated gothic grimace of Marky Mark's Max Payne. To make things worse, the whole sub-genre will forever be dragged down by slapdash cash-in king Uwe Boll and his unforgivably amateurish efforts at adapting games like Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and Far Cry. (Not even the mighty Jason Statham as a hardnut ploughman could salvage Boll's aggressively banal medieval epic In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.)

Rare's done it - Sea of Thieves has topped the UK games chart in a busy week for new releases.

Late Fiorentina captain and Italian international Davide Astori will remain in FIFA 18, EA has confirmed.

Ninja Theory's critically acclaimed action game and study of psychosis, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, is heading to Xbox. It had only previously been available on PC and PS4. And there isn't long to wait: Hellblade will be released on Xbox 11th April.

Sea of Thieves offers players a vibrant, cartoon world of stories big and small - but perhaps none of them are as significant as the tale of developer Rare itself. It's hard to believe that Kinect projects aside, it's been over nine years since we last saw a full game from the studio. Much has changed since then, with the studio's reliance on custom, per-game engines replaced by a shift towards Unreal Engine 4. But this game is a title quite unlike any other built on the Epic middleware - Sea of Thieves is beautiful and unique.

Editor's note: Once a month we're graced with the brilliant presence of Gareth Damian Martin, author of the zine Heterotopias, creator of upcoming game In Other Waters and, most recently, author of The Continuous City, a book of analogue photography of video games, which is now available for pre-order.

Over the last couple of months I've been falling in love all over again with Final Fantasy XII. I know I'm late to the Zodiac Age party, but I've been marvelling at how much this game has come into its own since its original release back in 2006. Certainly the remaster's smoothing-off of the original's (literal) rough edges helps, but I'm not the first to observe that it feels a bit like gaming has caught up with some of its ideas that weren't fully appreciated at the time like its distinctive automated battles. Or maybe it's just that I'm in a different place in my life, and FF12's peculiarly hands-off approach to monster hunting fits so much better into what a 30-something wants after a day at work than it did the long holidays of a student with time on his hands.

Nightdive Studios, the team behind the highly anticipated System Shock remaster, has offered further insight into where the project went wrong in the run-up to its recent development hiatus, and offered a speculative new release date as production resumes.

Oxenfree developer Night School Studio has offered the first proper look, via a new teaser trailer, at its upcoming boozy-night-in-hell adventure Afterparty.

A first look at PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' upcoming 4x4 map was revealed at this year's Game Development Conference.

In a callback to events from the previous game in the series, it is possible to complete Far Cry 5 in just 10 minutes.

Brilliant! There's a pub in Huddersfield which offers a £30 bar tab to anyone who can get a Victory Royale in Fortnite, there and then. Reckon you could do it on a projected screen with everybody watching?

To call Ready Player One - Steven Spielberg's new film, adapted from the novel by Ernest Cline - self-referential would be quite an understatement. It's a mind-warping cultural Möbius strip: a one-dimensional entity with no end and no beginning, permanently twisting in on itself. It's a futuristic work of science-fiction that is obsessed with nostalgia. It's a film about video games made by a director who was a huge formative influence on the medium, observing his own reflection in a funhouse mirror. It's what happens when fan fiction becomes dominant over the true works of imagination it pays homage to.

The developer of Skullgirls, the anime fighting game featuring an all-girl cast, believes those who accuse it of being sexist are displaying "misplaced and shallow chivalry".

Pirate simulator Sea of Thieves will be offline for five hours tomorrow, Saturday 24th March.

Pokémon isn't usually about stories. Well, it is - but it's usually the stories you create which take centre stage. The main Pokémon games hold just the loosest framework of a hero journey for you to play out, and fill in the blanks. They're about your own chosen team of monsters, your successes and losses in battles, your path of discoveries. To find a Pokémon game with its own, fixed narrative - and a surprisingly enjoyable one, at that - is a welcome surprise.

A successor of sorts to the brilliant Assassin's Creed Black Flag, Rogue was somewhat overlooked when it was released back in 2014. In that difficult 'cross-gen' period, Rogue was designed to take care of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners, but the key focus for the series was the technologically ambitious, but ultimately flawed, Assassin's Creed Unity - Ubisoft's series debut for PS4 and Xbox One. Rogue didn't really deserve its second tier status - it was a great game with a lot of visual highlights and with the release of this week's remaster, the game gets a second chance to shine.

Nintendo has launched its "Spring into Action" eShop sale for Switch, 3DS, and Wii U, and there are some pretty decent savings to be had all round.

Theme Hospital was brilliant - iconic, even - so it's understandable there's lots of excitement surrounding Two Point Hospital, a spiritual successor so like the original we're getting third degree sideburns just thinking about it.

Do you know what makes Monster Hunter: World's beasts so convincing? Motion capture. That's right, some of World's creature animations began life as a person in a moleskin suit flailing around the studio, rolling on the floor, flapping their arms like wings, and scurrying about on all-fours. Yes, we humans were the monsters all along. Boom! Plot twist.

Take one look at any shmup in full flow and it's no wonder that this remains the most intimidating of genres; cascading curtains of bullets, flotillas of enemy ships and somewhere, almost imperceptible, in all that chaos is you, the lone fighter ship taking on impossible odds. You can trace the genre back to the inky black void of the arcade from which modern video games were born, from Space Invaders to Scramble to R-Type, and sometimes all that's seemed to have really changed is those odds you face have become greater and greater still. Stare into the face of a modern shmup, and it can seem like so much colourful noise.

Monster Hunter World's first prototype didn't actually feature any combat, helping the team decide how well the sequel's new environmental focus would hold up.

Japanese peripheral maker Hori is poised to answer the prayers of Switch owners across the globe when it launches a special left-hand Joy-Con this July, featuring an old-school D-pad.

Psyonix has announced that Rocket League's highly anticipated Tournament Update, which introduces a new Tournament Mode among other things, will launch on April 3rd.

Konami has announced that its Zone of the Enders sequel remaster, subtitled The 2nd Runner - Mars, will be heading to PC and PlayStation 4 this September.

There's been the suggestion of multiplayer in CD Projekt Red's new game Cyberpunk 2077 for a while. In 2013, studio head Adam Badowski even told me "we're going to add multiplayer features", although he also said "it will be a story-based RPG experience with amazing single-player playthroughs". Regardless, that was five years ago, and a lot has happened since then.

Nintendo's newly-confirmed Super Smash Bros. for Switch will be playable at E3 in June. That's just three months away!

When I first saw Dragon Ball Legends, the new mobile title due out this summer for iOS and Android, pop up during a Google Game Developers Conference talk on how to make money from apps (perhaps a worrying foreshadow), I thought it looked like it could be a decent, surprisingly slick fighting game based on the hugely popular anime. After all, it features real-time player versus player online fights, teams of three characters you can switch between at will, combos, special moves and over-the-top super attacks. Bandai Namco, the company behind it, even mentioned plans to host tournaments.

Daydream a moment. Pause those critical voices in your head - we'll listen to them in a minute - and watch renowned actor Andy Serkis show us a character performance from a video game of the future.