Latest Articles (Page 1147)

Editor's note: Once a month we invite the wonderful Gareth Damian Martin, editor of Heterotopias, to show us what proper writing about games looks like before we shoo him away for making the rest of us look bad. You can read Gareth's pieces on Dark Souls and Resident Evil - and you really should! - before settling into this month's piece about Bungie's delicious skyboxes.

"Anti-heroes" aren't supposed to look like Wario. Anti-heroes aren't really supposed to have preset characteristics at all - the whole point is that they're defined by negation - but in the course of countless Gothic vampire stories and cyberpunk adventures, the role has come to involve certain visual traits. Anti-heroes must be lean, sexy, glowering and little-spoken, with a regulation two days' worth of stubble and a variety of intriguing scars. Their lips must be curling, bleached, sardonic. The eyes? Glowing, slitted, bionic and/or bloodshot. The apparel? Trench coats, mirror shades, knee-high boots, flapping bandages and anything cut from dark leather with sharp angles that smells ever so slightly of S&M.

If you have any interest in the problem of accessibility in art, you owe it to yourself to consider the Golden Record. A gold-plated phonograph disc packed full of Earthly imagery and audio, from Peruvian wedding songs through genetic formulae to pictures of US supermarkets, it was launched into space aboard the Voyager probes in the late Seventies. You could call it "a message in a bottle" about Earth to hypothetical star-faring civilisations, in the words of leonine celebrity scientist Carl Sagan. You could compare it, a little less kindly, to the "cabinets of curiosities" owned by European oligarchs and aristocrats during the Renaissance - Earth's riches bagged and tagged by the reigning superpower for extraterrestrial appreciation. But the more appropriate term, perhaps, is "puzzle".

There were few highlights at Nintendo's 2003 conference - its lasting contribution to the annals of history is perhaps how it provided the dour set-up to the popular gaijin 4koma meme - but there were some flashes of inspiration. One of the more interesting announcements was Pac-Man Vs, Nintendo EAD's own take on Namco's long-running series that embraced the tangle of wires that was the system link, whereby Game Boy Advances could be tethered to a GameCube for a new kind of multiplayer.

Stylish procedurally-generated action-RPG Sundered launched today on PS4, PC, Mac and Linux.

Input lag - it's a crucial factor in defining the 'feel' of a game, and especially important for gameplay in the first-person shooter genre. Right now, two franchise giants battle it out for supremacy in this key market: Call of Duty and Battlefield. Which offers the fastest, most responsive controls? And in turn, how to do they compare with other key titles in this most competitive of genres?

Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age will make its western debut in 2018, Square Enix has announced.

Archaeology doesn't get a very good treatment in popular media, and games are no different. The public image of archaeologists is dominated by pulp fantasy heroes, swinging and scrambling their way through trap-infested ancient ruins, one hand clutching a priceless treasure, the other punching a Nazi in the face. Of course, pulp heroics make for much more entertaining movies and games than Indiana Jones and the Afternoon of Context Sheets or Newly-Qualified Archaeology Student Lara Croft Spends Four Years Trying to Get a Stable Job. Even archaeologists grasp this, for all our protestations. Like lapsed Catholics who can't quite give up their patron saint, many of the archaeologists I've known would admit to Indiana Jones being a bit of a guilty role model. While writing this piece I tried to find a photo of my hard hat from my days as a field archaeologist, a promotional sticker from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull emblazoned across the back, but sadly, all record of this sartorial triumph seems lost.

Infamously cheesy Sega CD FMV horror game Night Trap is coming back in style with its recently revealed 25th Anniversary Edition launching in a mere couple of weeks on PS4 and PC.

Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture's magnificent time-manipulating bullet hell shmup Sine Mora is coming to PC and current-gen consoles on 8th August as the remastered Sine Mora EX.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain may be nearly two years old at this point, but Konami is still supporting Hideo Kojima's essential swan song to his storied series by adding a new playable character to its FOB (Forward Operating Base) missions: Revolver Ocelot.

We've already had Fallout's rocket car make its way to the noble asphalt of the Forza series, but now there's an even more unexpected crossover that's about to make its way to Forza Horizon 3. The Regalia, Final Fantasy 15's elegant grand tourer, is coming to Playground Games' open world driving game.

The latest Overwatch patch aims to drastically reduce the amount of duplicates players get. Finally!

Here's a heads-up for Tekken 7 players: Eliza, the character reserved as a pre-order bonus for the fighting game's launch, is now available to buy as standalone DLC priced £3.99.

Now Sony's timed exclusivity for the standalone version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered has expired, the shooter has released on other platforms, including PC.

Blizzard has given us a new card to reveal from Hearthstone's next expansion Knights of the Frozen Throne. It's named Venomstrike Trap, and is a Hunter-class Secret.

Over the years, I've had many friends. Some of these friendships have been like bottles of fine wine - stored in ideal conditions in a temperature-controlled room, and slowly increasing in value every year. Other friendships have been fleeting  - a few beers thrown in the picnic cooler of life. And some friendships were little more than a couple of shots at the bar - a brief, fleeting flirtation that burned the throat with its intensity, but was forgotten within hours. This is a story about one such friend. A friend that I danced and fought with for with many hours, a friend who was surprisingly unreliable, and yet also a friend who was exactly what I needed at the time. But now his face only exists as a hazy half-developed Polaroid memory of a night elegantly wasted. His name was Negalmuur, and he was a necromancer in the Stilshrine of Miriam. 

A group of Pokémon Go Fest attendees have filed a class-action lawsuit against the game's developer Niantic.

Sony has announced a PlayStation Plus price hike for Europe.

You should see the elevators at Microsoft's big London office. No buttons in them. Not a one. I raced in, bound for the fifth floor, and realised after an awkward pause that this elevator was only going to the second floor. An elevator that only goes to the second door? It turned out that it was only going to the second floor because the person who called it was only going to the second floor. He was stood over by the window wondering what I was up to. Welcome to the future, where you can crash someone's elevator party.

Ultra Street Fighter 2 on Nintendo Switch - a game I panned in our review for being a disappointing package and a bit of a rip-off - has done the business for Capcom.

Jake Solomon was starting to panic. For the second time in his career as a game designer he'd been given a shot at making the one game he'd always wanted to make: a true successor to X-COM: UFO Defense, the 1994 turn-based classic. But he was facing a problem, a really major one, in fact. Because again for the second time in his career, he couldn't make it fun to play.

The Summer 2017 patch for Civilization 6 is now available, alongside the Nubia DLC. While the update includes necessary bug fixes, there is also a new feature which fans have been requesting for some time - a restart button.

Earlier this week, Nintendo detailed the amiibo functionality for Metroid: Samus Returns - and that you'll need four figurines to unlock everything the game has to offer, such as an extra difficulty mode and concept art/music galleries.

Tencent's investment in western video game companies continues - this time it's bought nine per cent of Frontier for £17.7m.

Mass Effect Andromeda came out at the end of March, with launch week sales stuffed into EA's 2017 financial year. As such, it was too early to tell how well the game would sell over time.

BBC Three has announced it will bring viewers four hours of live esports coverage every weekend for the next six weeks, in collaboration with BBC Sport.

The PC Destiny 2 beta begins 28th August, Bungie has announced.

Ubisoft has announced For Honor will finally get dedicated servers.

What Remains of Edith Finch, a surreal anthology of short stories centred around an eccentric, uniquely unlucky family, was borne underwater. Creative director Ian Dallas, best known for the whimsical PS3 curio The Unfinished Swan, previously told us that this follow-up effort was inspired by a scuba diving excursion.