Latest Articles (Page 1234)

Is it a spoiler to say there are ghost houses in Super Mario Run? If so, my apologies. Consider yourself spoiled. And yet, because this is Mario - and because these are ghost houses - the spoiler does not really spoil very much. I only mention the ghost houses at all because the first one - level 2-1 - was the moment at which I first sat up and started really paying attention. It's the first level where you glimpse once again what makes Mario special: not that he basically invented the trappings of the platformer, to the extent that playing through the opening few levels of his new iPhone autorunner puts you into a kind of cognitive tailspin as you realise how much it reminds you of all other iPhone autorunners and, in turn, how much all other iPhone autorunners remind you of Mario. What makes Mario special is that, even deep within the clutch of genre conventions that he created - a clutch so few perfectly good games ever escape from - he wriggles free and shows you something new.

Lovely things can happen at Christmas. Which other time of year could result in a spontaneous truce between enemy soldiers on the frontline of a war?

The HTC Vive launched with two pack-in games: Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption. The first also arrived on PlayStation VR at the PS4 peripheral's launch and now the latter will follow suit in "spring 2017".

A new Nintendo patent hints at what could be VR support for its upcoming handheld/console hybrid, the Nintendo Switch.

Nintendo wishes us all a happy holiday with new The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild footage wherein Link uses his shield as a makeshift snowboard. 'Tis the season!

Android users feeling left out of the Super Mario Run launch, don't despair! Google's mobile platform just received a very different but very good game today with historical drama 1979 Revolution.

Telltale's The Walking Dead Season Three is launching next week, 20th December, and here's how you can import your data between devices, regardless of platform or generation (Editor's note: Unless you're playing on Vita).

Over the last seven month Ubisoft has been giving away a free PC game every month to commemorate the publisher's 30th anniversary. This weekend all seven games are back up for grabs.

A new Fallout-themed pack is heading to Minecraft's console versions, bringing fan favourites from the post-apocalyptic universe to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Vita and Wii U editions of the game. I think that's pretty much all of them.

Somewhat improbably, my culinary adventure through the realm of video games has been allowed to continue - turns out people quite like watching me blunder about in a tiny, rubbish kitchen. No accounting for taste, I suppose.

Sony's £130 Platinum Wireless Headset comes out in Europe on 16th January 2017.

There's good news and bad news with Batman: Return to Arkham's latest 1.02 update. On the one hand, it's clear that there's been a big push towards optimising the product into the kind of game it should have been at launch, meaning that owners of standard PS4 hardware now get a solid game overall with just minor issues. On the other, the vaunted PlayStation 4 Pro support (officially flagged in the patch notes) is basically an affront to everything the system stands for - to the point where some believe it's actually a step back from the original Pro 'features' the game shipped with.

UPDATE 12/12/2016 11.10pm: The new Baby Pokémon have been spotted too! Now you can collect Igglybuff, Smoochum, Magby, Elekid, and Cleffa.

Dara O Briain's Go 8 Bit will return with a second and third series.

Can a £60/$99 smartphone really provide a decent Pokémon Go experience? On paper, this shouldn't possibly work, yet somehow... well, it does. Perhaps you're looking for a super-budget means by which to sample the game in order to see what all the fuss is about, or maybe your kids are badgering you for a phone so they can join in too. We set out to find the cheapest possible smartphone that meets the required specs, and then to test out the game using it. We went in prepared for a profound disappointment, but it's fair to say that the end results outstripped our expectations.

Ubisoft will put out a patch for Watch Dogs 2 later this week that addresses one of the more annoying aspects of the open world hacking game.

When Lionhead was developing the first Fable game back in the early 2000s, it attracted the attention of a determined group of trolls who managed to snag internal images and a list of planned future games that were never intended for release.

Forza Horizon 3 was good. Well, Forza Horizon 3 still is really, really good, and after some 30 hours I'm still having a great time fiddling around in its wilderness, and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Driving from the tip of its coastline deep into its sun-baked heart, taking in the many and varied sights as I made my way to Redstone Airport in order to be jetted out to the separate Blizzard Mountain map, I realised I wasn't quite ready to leave when there was so much in the main game left to do. Churlish, I know, and it's hardly Playground Games' fault that they created an open world that was so generous first time round.

No Man's Sky just received a new patch on PC and PS4 that will make space battles vary in size.

In other video game audio news, Microsoft's said Dolby Atmos sound is coming to Xbox One and Windows 10 in 2017. Xbox will be the first game console to feature Dolby Atmos.

Shenmue 3 continues to be a real actual thing that may even come out at some point soon, with ys.net updating Kickstarter backers this morning with new screenshots of the work in progress on the game.

Destiny's latest update The Dawning is more than just a Christmas event, Bungie has said, and after half a day's play I'm pretty happy to agree with that. There's more here than just a snow-capped Tower: Bungie has returned a fan-favourite activity, built yet more onto Destiny's core gameplay and responded to several important points of fan feedback.

The Assassin's Creed film's next publicity stunt involves an actual stunt: a 100 foot freefall to be exact.

Doom's final premium DLC, Bloodfall, is out now on all platforms for £11.99 / €14.99 / $14.99.

Yesterday our Ian Higton played through Hitman's seasonal Holiday Hoarders mission, which features a nod to a holiday classic that you may have missed. For its two targets, Harry "Smokey" Bognato and Marv "Slick" Gonif , are based on the robbers tortured by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.

Mistwalker's 2008 Japanese RPGs Lost Odyssey is free this month on Xbox Live.

The Order: 1886 developer Ready at Dawn's competitive multiplayer physics-based brawler De-formers will launch 14th February on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

Google Trends just released its Year in Search report for 2016 and the most searched for term globally was "Pokémon GO".

Dishonored 2's highly requested New Game Plus mode is now in beta for PC and will arrive on all platforms Monday, 19th December.

Ubisoft has confirmed that any future maps and modes making their way into For Honor will be free to download for all players.