Latest Articles (Page 1401)

Is there such a thing as British industry any more? This important and difficult question is one I regularly find myself ignoring as I scroll through the headlines on the Guardian website, before clicking on a thing about tights. But I am vaguely aware we no longer mine coal or work steel or make cars, and that filthy foreign capitalists have ruined Easter by deciding Creme Eggs will now be made from glue and compost. What concerns me, though, is that I rarely see anything about the hidden threat to one of our greatest remaining homegrown industries: video game manual writing.

Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw has left Valve after 18 years at the company.

I never thought I'd see this: video game pirates admitting defeat. But that's what appears to have happened. Notorious Chinese game cracker 3DM warned that "in two years' time I'm afraid there will be no [illegally] free games to play in the world". That was alias Bird Sister speaking, the founder of 3DM (via TorrentFreak).

UPDATE 04/06/2015 10.22pm: PC developer Syber has joined Alienware in revealing its line-up of Steam Machines.

The creator of a Kickstarter for a Star Wars open world role-playing game has pulled the project after enduring a week of ridicule on social media.

Look at that picture. Those are bullets. Those are actual bullet casings for buttons and thumbsticks. Bullets!

Space Grunts looks a lot like Nuclear Throne, but there's much more going on here. This is, at heart, a transposition of temperament, like that Woody Allen short story that recasts the Impressionists as dentists. Space Grunts takes the cramped maps and screen shake and high explosives of Vlambeer's game and adds a surprising twist, switching the action from real-time to turn-based.

Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir, the HD remastering of VanillaWare's stylish PS2 action-RPG, will add a few new game modes upon its English-language release this spring.

UPDATE 08/01/2016 1.40pm: Minecraft: Pocket Edition 2 has been removed from the App Store for obvious reasons.

Ubisoft has released the following PC system requirements for Far Cry Primal ahead of its 1st March release on PC. (The PS4 and Xbox One versions are due 23rd February.)

Star Wars: The Old Republic's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion is getting a new chapter - the first of seven - with Anarchy in Paradise, due 11th February.

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2's open multiplayer beta will begin on 14th January for PS4 and Xbox One, publisher EA has announced.

What's your favourite? Ununtrium? Ununoctium? Ununpentium strikes me as a bit of a rogue. Those are three of the four new elements that have just been discovered - the four that finish the seventh row of the periodic table! It was strangely heartening news: actual progress! Now on to 119!

Yesterday Oculus announced the Rift virtual reality headset costs £500 / $600 - a higher price than many had expected.

Adr1ft, the first-person astronaut game, launches on PC on 28th March, creator Adam Orth has announced.

Out there somewhere is a warehouse home to all the forgotten follies that once followed in the wake of unloved hardware, where EyeToy: Groove shares shelf space with Kinect Adventures (its name, most likely, is CEX.) It's where you'd find Hardware: Online Arena, an early companion for the PlayStation 2's network adaptor and, when it launched in 2002, one of the console's very first online games. For some reason that's hard to parse, it's now the subject of a reboot in the shape of PlayStation 4 exclusive Hardware: Rivals.

Despite a cast composed largely of gangsters, and a plot centring on the machinations of various families, Yakuza 5 is not by any stretch of the imagination a game about organised crime. Oh it's dressed up like that, and amidst battling endless thugs and police officers you could be forgiven for the mistake. But really Yakuza 5 is really a game about saving puppies, obeying traffic laws, and losing yourself in hobbies.

Double Fine's much requested Psychonauts 2 has been funded on the crowdsourcing platform Fig, scraping past its $3.3m goal with over five days left before its 12th January deadline.

The 2016 Independent Games Festival has revealed the finalists for its upcoming awards ceremony to take place at this year's Game Developer's Conference.

UPDATE 06/01/2016 7.15pm: Final Fantasy 9's Steam release will offer "seven game boosters including high speed and no encounter modes," i.e. you'll be able to turn off random encounters, arguably one of the biggest bugbears of old JRPGs.

A couple of months back someone made a mod for Alien: Isolation that effectively removed the titular xenomorph from the game. Now someone has followed suit with Frictional's freaky subterranean sci-fi saga Soma, by modding it so the monsters don't harm the player.

Adult Swim's popular sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty is getting a free mobile spin-off next week with Pocket Mortys, coming to iOS and Android platforms on 14th January.

HAL Laboratory (of Kirby fame) has simultaneously announced and released a sequel to its 3DS puzzle game Boxboy! in Japan.

Oculus Rift costs £499 / $599 - without shipping.

Oculus Rift pre-orders open today at 4pm GMT and you won't be charged for reserving one of the virtual reality headsets until they ship. Think of it as getting in line.

Shinra Technologies, the Square Enix cloud gaming company with a Final Fantasy name, is being dissolved. Liquidated. Which makes it sound like some kind of new year smoothie.

Star Wars Pinball developer Zen Studios is launching a couple of new tables next week to commemorate the release of The Force Awakens.

Towards the end of last year Shenmue 3 developer Ys Net created a poll asking Kickstarter Backers whether they were in favour of PayPal backers receiving the same exclusive rewards as those who backed the original Kickstarter campaign. A majority of users voted in favour of these latecomers receiving the same offers, but the developer still chose to rescind its offer to make these exclusive rewards available once again.

Back in 2013 modder trainwiz perverted Skyrim by replacing its dragons with terrifying renditions of Thomas the Tank Engine. Now they're back and they've taken to Fallout 4's Commonwealth.

And its true nature was revealed: Thomas the Tank Engine, a hero to millions of children across the world, terrorising the poor people of Skyrim.