Latest Articles (Page 126)

When my daughter was learning to write her own stories at school - learning composition, I guess, in the language of education - she'd come home with poetry and essays about animals and little bits of this and that, all of which she was fine with, but never more than fine. When it all clicked is when they wrote stories - specifically silly, scary stories with ghosts and people falling on their butts and all that kind of jazz.

I've wondered for a while how best to explain my time with Flock's demo. The whole experience was a testament to the joy of flight - much as developers Richard Hogg and co intended - and I relished being able to glide effortlessly over the world. It felt free and easy. Yes, the flying in Flock was certainly a joy.

As Microsoft opts to launch at least some of its Xbox exclusives on rival consoles, the company's gaming boss Phil Spencer has reflected on Sony's recent, hugely-successful launch of online, cross-platform shooter Helldivers 2 on PC and PlayStation 5.

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week: tombs, maps, and bats.

Alan Wake 2 is developer Remedy's fastest-selling game to date, but the studio is still to recuperate the project's development and marketing costs.

I've always found the concept of immortality to be horrific. How, as the years churn by, new memories and experiences drown the ones which lie at the foundations of your personality, eroding them until a new person inhabits your skin. You are not yourself anymore. Vampire mythology adds a physical stake to this curse - to be a vampire is to be a monster in body and appetite, but whether you become one in spirit is up to you. Do you try to preserve your humanity or indulge in the hedonism your new form makes so easy? Or become a creature trapped between the two? It’s these questions Cabernet, an upcoming narrative RPG, seeks to explore through its protagonist Liza - recently deceased.

Microsoft has shared updated Game Pass membership figures for the first time since January 2022, saying the on-demand gaming service now has 34m "fully paid" subscribers, with "significant growth" coming from PC and cloud.

As part of a 'business update' confirming four first-party Xbox exclusives are coming to PlayStation 5 and Switch, Microsoft has moved to assuage fan fears it might be considering abandoning the console market, saying it's planning a new Xbox that will deliver "the largest technical leap...ever seen in a hardware generation."

Diablo 4 is coming to Game Pass this March.

Following mounting reports Xbox is preparing for some kind of multiplatform future, Microsoft has confirmed it'll be bringing four previously Xbox-exclusive first-party titles to PlayStation 5 and Switch later this year, with more likely to come in the future.

Welcome to our live coverage of the big Xbox business update, where Microsoft laid out its plan to launch four first-party Xbox games on Nintendo and PlayStation platforms.

Post-apocalyptic RPG fans are in luck; the next batch of freebies coming to the Epic Games Store have been revealed, and two bonafide RPG classics - Fallout and Fallout 2 - have made the list alongside Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel.

When Forever Skies leaves PC early access later this year, it will also arrive on PlayStation 5 as a console exclusive.

"Baba…help me Baba…I need you Baba…." So says protagonist Zau at the start of Tales of Kenzera, his voice shaking. That's the voice of Abubakar Salim (Assassin's Creed: Origins), who founded Surgent Studios to create this game as he deals with the loss of his own father.

After a protracted production, a developer swap and several delays, Granblue Fantasy: Relink has finally been released, some eight years after its initial announcement. This is a bold, colourful action RPG that combines compelling storytelling with a bombastic and exciting combat system. It's one of the more original RPG efforts I've seen in a while, but its protacted development raises questions about its visual quality and performance on PS4 and PS5 systems.

Xbox has rolled out a new update for February, adding touch controls in remote play and more.

It's been fairly quiet on the No Man's Sky front since its previous big update, Echoes, introduced the world to a mysterious new robot race known as the Autophages last August, but all that changes today with the release of its new Omega update - which coincides with a first-ever free weekend for the exploratory space sim on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC.

Making good on their word, People Can Fly and Incuvo have released a rather chunky patch for Bulletstorm VR on PlayStation VR2 and Steam VR. This follows an earlier update on Meta Quest sets, which took aim at crashes and more.

Following a rocky launch, Payday 3 developer Starbreeze said its sales and player activity are "currently at significantly lower levels than [it] would like". However, the studio hopes to turn this around in the future, stating it will focus efforts "to ensure that the game lives up to expectations" for players.

The PS5 is the first PlayStation to come with an internal SSD slot, making it easy to add a super-fast drive for tons of extra game storage for either the standard PS5 or PS5 Slim model. Here's how to identify the best drive for you, Sony's recommended specs and our top choices for the money in the US and UK. Prices may have risen in recent months, but a powerful NVMe drive is still a reasonably affordable and worthwhile upgrade for your PS5.

Helldivers 2 will "never" include a PvP mode in order to reduce toxic play.

Xbox president Sarah Bond reportedly told staff that "every screen is an Xbox". These words come ahead of Microsoft's business update later today, in which the company is expected to lay out its plans to publish some Xbox games on PlayStation and Nintendo platforms.

UPDATE 15/02/24: Sony has insisted Rise of the Ronin was never intended for release in South Korea.

Embracer has laid off eight percent of its workforce as its restructuring programme reaches "mature stages".

A report by the French video game workers union has raised concerns from staff at Life is Strange and Vampyr developer Don't Nod.

Commitment can be scarier than any ghost story. When I got married, I spent a lot of time leading up to the wedding borrowing grief from my future self. The prospect of 'til death do we part' brought forward the stark idea that one day one of us would have to say goodbye to the other. I was suddenly and unexpectedly wracked with anxiety about the mortality of my loved ones, and playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden reminded me of this uncomfortable feeling. Antea and Red have each other, to hold and confide in and joke with – but Antea is a ghost, and they have to get ready to say goodbye. That's the commitment they make to each other.

Digital Foundry's tools of the trade is a new series looking at the tools - physical and virtual - that DF members use to carry out their work analysing video games and hardware. In this first episode, Will Judd shares his thoughts on digital callipers, specifically the Hozo NeoCaliper.

Sony president and PlayStation chairman Hiroki Totoki has spoken of the opportunities available in its approach to releasing first-party games on PC, saying it's "proactively [working] on" bringing more titles to other platforms as part of an "aggressive" profit margin growth plan.

Satirical sci-fi shooter sequel Helldivers 2 is off to a flying start, and now its creator Arrowhead Game Studios has put out a call for fresh development talent so it can "accelerate and beef up" its post-launch content plans.

The Pokémon Company is bringing its hugely popular Pokémon Center pop-up store back to London for four days this April, with promise of more exclusive Pokémon merchandise.