Latest Articles (Page 1229)

My wife has just finished GTA 5 again. The third playthrough, I think, and it seems an awfully long time since, crouched in front of the old PS3, she turned to me while fumbling through the wintry farming country of the prologue and said, "Oh, God. Is there going to be a lot of shooting?'

Midway through last year, I moved house. That's not hugely interesting in itself I know - everyone moves house at some point - but this was a big one, out of my old, rural family home and into a place of my own. Little country boy Chris in the big city, fresh off the tractor, all dewey-eyed and open-mouthed at the bright lights and bustling noise of the metropolis.

This week, we reviewed the Core i5 7600K, the latest mainstream gaming processor from Intel. The verdict? In line with every Intel Core i5 release since 2012, it's the fastest offering available in its price bracket and therefore the best buy. However, Intel has effectively had no rival for years now, leading to only small jumps in performance from one year to the next while graphics power has moved on from strength to strength. Genuine advances in CPU power are lacking to the point where Ars Technica wonders whether the desktop CPU is dead. We'd prefer to be a little more optimistic, and there are some promising signs that the processor market will get the shake-up it needs over the next 12-18 months. For starters, AMD is returning with a new 'Ryzen' CPU - and it's looking very promising.

2016 was an exhausting year, wasn't it?

A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a deals site run by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. We've invited the Jelly Deals team to share a weekly roundup of (mostly) gaming-related bargains with us, so we can pass their tips on to you. Full disclosure: if you make a purchase from one of these links, we may receive a small commission from the retailer. Hopefully you'll find it useful!

Welcome back to Outside Xbox, where this week we were playing Resident Evil 7. In spite of its new first-person perspective, it feels like Resident Evil of yore, packed as it is with happily familiar Resident Evil tropes, such as minimal ammunition, a mansion full of weird door puzzles and the sinister presence of the Umbrella Corporation.

Is this the year we can finally begin an editorial on Xbox's fortunes without referring to the catastrophic consequences of Xbox One's botched launch in 2013? I guess I've answered my own question there, but at least I feel a little bad about it. Phil Spencer and the rest of the Xbox management team deserve better than having past mistakes raked over yet again, because they have achieved what at one time seemed impossible. They start the new year no longer on the back foot, with some notable successes under their belt, and with, for the first time in years, a strategic advantage over their rivals at Sony. (They even bloodied their nose on Twitter.)

Now that Baby New Year has kicked Old Father Time to the kerb, it's time to start getting excited about all the brand new games we'll be able to play in 2017.

During my 15 years as a video games journalist, I have repeatedly been accused of nicking my writing style straight from the pages of classic computing mags Zzap! and Crash. I wholeheartedly refute this spurious and frankly outrageous accusation. I've actually been ripping off Amstrad Action.

We all have that game, don't we? The one that, while yes, the years have shown you that other games may have done it differently and better, and that while - eesh did those textures always look like that? - some elements may not have been as polished or as groundbreaking as you remember them, your fondness is tied to more than just the mechanics or even the characters. I know we have a tendency to overhype or overexaggerate just how brilliant/influential a game FF7 was, but I'll always regard it as a favourite because of summer evenings spent huddled up against the TV screen, conferring with friends over rumours of secret characters and items, getting midi themes stuck in a loop in my head for weeks on end.

If you haven't played it already, this week's Tavern Brawl event in Hearthstone is a neat nod to Blizzard's sister series Diablo.

Square Enix's European Twitter has recovered its follower count after being hacked this morning.

UPDATE 6TH JANUARY: The console versions of Dreamfall Chapters will be enhanced editions, featuring changes to gameplay, art, animations, music, sound-effects, shaders and lighting. There will be a Final Cut (enhanced edition) released for PC and Mac at the same time as well as a free update for existing game owners. Developer Red Thread said specific Dreamfall Chapters Final Cut features will be detailed at a later date.

Could Funcom be onto something with Conan Exiles? The survival game due end of January on PC early access, and Xbox One Preview in spring, looks pretty good.

Super Mario Land has been recreated in its entirety within Super Mario Maker.

A long time ago, on an internet far, far way, Jim "Twinbeard" Crawford released a free browser game called Frog Fractions. Its absurdist humour and unpredictable string of non-sequiturs allowed the curio to go viral, resulting in a successfully crowdfunded sequel, Frog Fractions 2.

EverQuest Landmark has been cancelled and servers will close 21st February. It follows the cancellation of EverQuest Next nearly a year ago.

Mass Effect 2, one of the best games of all time, is now available to download on PC via Origin for absolutely nothing.

Firaxis has confirmed that a Long War 2 mod is in development, as many of us had hoped. Obviously, XCOM 2 just wasn't difficult enough already.

UPDATE 5/1/17: PlayStation 4 owners will be able to play The Flame in the Flood on 17th January.

Someone is making an officially-licensed Resident Evil 7 candle for you to burn while playing the game.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks like it's back on for a March release, alongside the launch of Nintendo Switch - at least in Japan and North America.

If you've played World of Warcraft, there's a sound effect that'll forever be embedded in your brain. A wooshing noise that triggers an immediate fight-or-flight response as you scan your screen for the stealthed rogue or druid that's about to ruin your day. It's a fantastic tell. It was also, it turns out, a mistake.

The Turing Test will launch for PlayStation 4 on 23rd January.

On 1st January, Sony put out a video showing off the PS4 console exclusives coming out in 2017. I spotted 23 games, a mix of Sony-made games coming only to PS4 and games from external developers coming to PS4 as console exclusives. It's a tidy list of titles. Let's have a look:

For years, World of Warcraft players have wondered whether the gargantuan MMO houses a secret Cow Level, despite Blizzard insisting THERE IS NO COW LEVEL. Well, now there is.

UPDATE 5/1/17 8.30am: Last night's CES opening keynote brought two minutes of brand new Mass Effect Andromeda gameplay footage.

Nvidia has announced a substantial revamp of its GeForce Now cloud-based streaming service. The system is set for a March relaunch, allowing you to stream your existing PC games library from the cloud. On stage at the CES keynote, Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang showed Rise of the Tomb Raider running from Steam on a Mac, streamed from a datacentre running GPUs based on the firm's latest Pascal-based architecture.

2015 was a pretty sweet year for video games, and 2016 has the potential to be something truly special. Both Xbox One and PS4 have hit their stride, and this year we should begin to see some of the big-hitters stepping outside their comfort zones with bold titles like Crackdown 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn, while smaller developers delight with the likes of Firewatch and Tacoma. There's also the almost incomprehensible possibility that we'll have played both The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy 15 by year's end. But, as ever, there's a good chance that many of this year's most exciting titles aren't to be found in the list we've compiled below, for the simple reason that we don't know about them yet. There'll be unexpected pleasures to be found in quiet corners of Steam; there's whatever Nintendo has in store for the end of the year, potentially on a new console; and there are the uncharted territories that the realisation of virtual reality in the home will bring. For now, though, in (very) rough order of release date, these are the 50 titles coming in 2016 that we're most excited for.

The HDMI forum has announced the full HDMI 2.1 specification at this year's CES, revealing support for 4K, 8K and even 10K video up to 120Hz. These new higher resolution modes will require the use a new 48G cable, backwards compatible with current HDMI devices. There's also support for 'dynamic HDR', which apparently "ensures every moment of a video is displayed at its ideal values for depth, detail, brightness contrast and wider colour gamuts - on a scene-by-scene or frame a frame-by-frame basis."