Latest Articles (Page 1380)

London mayor Boris Johnson has announced Games London, a £1.2m programme to promote games and games development in the capital.

Diablo 3 makes an art of relentlessly gouging your time, but rarely your wallet. If the Auction House had persisted it would be a different story, but Blizzard's hectic smash-and-grab has maintained its flip-reversed trajectory to become one of the most lovingly-maintained games in recent memory.

If Konami ever gets around to remaking the first Metal Gear Solid game for the latest hardware, it might look something like this.

Wii U owners can download the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode from this Thursday, 21st January.

A possible link between Kylo Ren's Lightsaber in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the decade-old Knights of the Old Republic video games, has been found. If the link holds true it would seem to cement those games in Star Wars film canon.

I first heard about Oxenfree over the weekend when I saw a few developers chatting about it on Twitter. From what I can gather it's kind of like a 2D Until Dawn with a little bit of Life is Strange thrown into the mix as well.

In 1999 Iron Maiden released an album and video game of the same name: Ed Hunter. Now, 17 years later, the band's back with a new game.

Gone Home has many ways of pulling on the player's heartstrings - especially if you're of a certain age, and given to welling up at the sight of button badges, or the lush click of cassette player buttons - but one of the game's most affecting tactics is simply that it lets you put objects back, exactly as you found them, with a context-sensitive input.

There's a scene in the US TV show The West Wing where Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman, under pressure and about to lose a key Senate vote, is calmly reassured in the Oval Office by his boss, the President of the United States. "You know what the difference is between you and me?" President Bartlet asks. "I want to be the guy. You want to be the guy the guy counts on."

Ubisoft is promoting Stone Age open world game Far Cry Primal by inviting people to sleep in a cave in the middle of winter.

Mario Kart 64 will be downloadable on Wii U from this Thursday, 21st January, priced £8.99.

Ubisoft has finally nailed down the size of The Division's New York open world, which is set within the boundaries of Midtown Manhattan.

Remember when PlayStation Network fell over earlier this month? Sony has given Plus subscribers a one-day extension to make up for it.

Cool offer alert: if you're an Xbox Live Gold member and you have an Xbox One you can play all of the EA Access Vault games for free this week. The Vault games are normally locked behind EA's £4-a-month EA Access subscription service.

I'm not sure why it's taken two years since The Banner Saga's debut on computers for this handsome, world-weary tactical role-player to arrive on consoles [edit: Bertie points out to me that it's because the developer's original partner for the port folded]. But if, like me, you've let it pass you by, its appearance on Xbox One and PS4 this week presents a welcome excuse to catch up before a second instalment is released later this year.

Blizzard's latest Diablo 3 console patch 2.4 is understood to cause frame-rate issues not seen in the previous version. The update adds a range of compelling extras, like a new Greyhollow Island area, expanded zones, and a catalogue of tweaks per class and weapon. But reports on the game's official forums suggest performance has taken a serious a hit in the meantime, and controls are now laggier as a consequence - while menus suffer input delays. Also worrying are reports of more frequent in-game crashing.

Along with death and taxes, one of life's inescapable constants is that the setting of the new Assassin's Creed will be leaked long before the game is announced. The next instalment in the historical stab-'em-up franchise is no exception.

Looking back, it's a surprise that David Bowie was only involved in one game. It's somewhat less of a surprise that it was 1999's Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the game that introduced David Cage to the world, and still stands as an example of 90s gaming spirit. It's a genre-busting game with as many personalities as Bowie himself, flitting between first-person shooting, adventure, puzzling and fighting. It's bursting with ideas and birthed in a booming industry where anything suddenly seemed possible, without being weighed down by the experience to draw the line between what could be done, and what maybe shouldn't be.

After a legion of retro clones offering inconsistent performance on a tight budget, 2014's Retron 5 was a breath of fresh air. Positioned as an all-in-one solution for your vintage gaming needs, Hyperkin's Android-powered console covered a wide range of formats - including SNES, Mega Drive and Game Boy Advance - and came with a raft of emulator-specific features, such as save states and screen filters. It was almost inevitable that rivals would appear following the same approach, and the first out of the gate is the Japan-made Retro Freak, courtesy of a tiny company called Cyber Gadget. A cursory glance at the spec sheet reveals a close match for the Retron 5, but there are some key differences - some very positive, others less so.

What's a popular verb in games? I'm guessing a lot of you thought 'shooting', even though it's not that common, in the same way that if I asked you to name an animal, a lot of people would say 'a lion'. Shooting's not universal, but it is endemic. It's what non-gamers think games are about. It's what news outlets use to illustrate headlines about how the games industry is making more than Hollywood, again. It's the mechanic at the heart of Bioshock, Half-Life, Call of Duty.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak - i.e. the RTS game formerly known as Homeworld: Shipreakers (i.e. the game formerly known as Hardware: Shipbreakers) - has released a new story trailer and gameplay footage ahead of its 20th January release.

Fallout 4's hilarious headless glitch has been addressed on PC in the latest 1.3 beta update.

Cult-classic sci-fi horror adventure I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream has arrived on iOS and Android platforms.

Doom co-creator John Romero has crafted his first new Doom level in 21 years.

Last summer Bertie spoke to a young man named Richard Seabrook who sent his game to Valve head honcho Gabe Newell in a nifty briefcase. The fate of the briefcase remains unknown, but the game within - Prospekt, a sequel to the Gearbox-made Half-Life expansion Opposing Force - is now available for pre-order on Steam with an 11th February launch.

Dark Chronicle (aka Dark Cloud 2 in North America) is coming to PS4 next week, Sony has announced.

Pokkén Tournament, Bandai Namco's Tekken-like Pokémon fighting spin-off, is slated for an 18th March release in Europe exclusively on Wii U.

The late great David Bowie once played a principal role in a video game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, developed by Quantic Dream (of Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls fame). Now, David Cage's 1999 sci-fi adventure has been made free for a week to commemorate the passing of the legendary glam rock star who fell to earth.

Tom Clancy's The Division feels like it's been in development for a long time, mainly due to the fact it has been in development for a long time. With just two months until publication, Martin spent some time with The Division to see how it holds up (and work out what you actually do).

Since Ubisoft revealed The Division back at E3 in 2013, there have been plenty of questions whizzing around it - and when we first set eyes on it, we weren't quite sure whether the ambitious open-world shooter with MMO tendencies would be subscription-based or a boxed release.