Latest Articles (Page 1410)

Rock Band 4 has just made it into the UK all-formats chart top 10.

When it comes to pushing hardware to its limits, Naughty Dog is one of the best in the business. Yet, more than any of its previous games, it was Uncharted 2 that really demonstrated just how much of a technical powerhouse the studio really had become. The PS3 original was a technical marvel in its time and a huge improvement over the first Uncharted, with sweeping changes made to lighting, animation, materials, and frame-rate.

There's a single-player story module in Star Citizen called Squadron 42, and it will be brought to life by an incredible list of Hollywood actors. Actors include Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Gimli sorry John Rhys Davies, Andy Serkis and Mark Strong. Craig Fairbrass from EastEnders is in there too. Wow! I don't recognise the others but you may.

Lego Marvel's Avengers covers story sections from six Marvel Cinematic Universe films, publisher Warner Bros. has announced.

The Martian, both the Ridley Scott film and the Andy Weir novel it's based on, has been quite the hit lately. The story of a marooned astronaut solving a series of nearly impossible science problems in order to survive and make contact with his homeworld is a charming mixture of inspirational perseverance and outright horror. It's also the basis for a pretty smart mobile game with The Martian: Bring Him Home.

Of all the gizmos Just Cause 3 adds to the toybox of grapple-happy hero Rico, the new rocket mine is our favourite. When triggered, this sticky explosive gives a few seconds of propulsion before going boom. This produces some bizarre physicsy spectacles, such as a human ragdoll firework, or the world's least reliable flying car.

When video games breached people's homes in the late 70s they were considered a toy for children. As time's moved on much of society has acclimated to the idea that they're for adults too. Nowadays with a smartphone in everyone's pocket it's not unusual to see a senior citizen engage in a quick game of Words with Friends or a toddler poking around with Tiny Wings. But why stop at humans? If games are truly for everybody, shouldn't we bring our cherished pastimes to our pals in the animal kingdom?

Last year, Microsoft finally allowed users to hook up an external hard drive to the Xbox One, providing the option to boost the limited 500GB storage capacity of the internal HDD with much larger and potentially faster drives. Partnering with Seagate, an officially branded 2TB Xbox-branded 'Game Drive' is now available, validated for use with Xbox One and Xbox 360. Priced at £79 in the UK and around $100 in the US, this licensed product is anything from £15 to £19 more expensive than Seagate's own USB 2TB portable drives, so the question is whether the price premium offers users anything extra over and above its rather striking Xbox-green plastics.

We're going to have to change our ways at some point. Year after year we collectively moan about the lack of innovation in first-person shooters, and then, when a game does come along that dares to be different, we shoot holes in it for not being more like those we purport to hate, but actually can't get enough of. Hence the annual updates masquerading as franchise sequels, while the more daring and interesting shooters are overlooked and promptly forgotten about.

As a culmination of Naughty Dog's work over the course of the PlayStation 3 generation, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception delivers a level of visual quality few games on the platform could hope to match. First released in 2011, Uncharted 3 remains the most divisive of Naughty Dog's PlayStation 3 games. In the wake of the spectacular Among Thieves, the hype surrounding the release of Drake's Deception was immense and in the eyes of certain fans, the game didn't entirely live up to those expectations. Yet, given a second chance, there's an adeptly-crafted game here, something that becomes clear when revisiting the title in 2015. When separated from the hype, Uncharted 3 really shines - especially on PlayStation 4.

Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, released today for PlayStation 4, has a few purposes. It makes Naughty Dog's trio of populist action spectaculars available to play on current consoles. It introduces them to what Sony estimates are the 50 per cent of PS4 owners who didn't have a PS3. And it presents these already exceedingly handsome games in a pristine, buttery smooth remaster by Bluepoint Games which, for its sheer polish and attention to detail, must go down as one of the finest game reissues ever.

UPDATE 10/10/15 11:37am: Rounding off our console coverage of the Star Wars: Battlefront beta, we thought we'd take a look at the survival mode two-player split-screen on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In this mode, DICE drops frame-rate to 30fps, with pretty decent results. The action is still plenty of fun, although we did notice that fluidity is compromised owing to some frame-pacing issues. We noticed something similar in Need for Speed: Rivals a couple of years back and it was fixed via a patch, so fingers crossed DICE can do the same here. One thing we can confirm after further testing is that both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions do run the split-screen component at full 1080p, with DICE effectively trading frame-rate for resolution - so a 1920x540 resolution per player window is confirmed.

UPDATE 10/10/15 11:37am: Rounding off our console coverage of the Star Wars: Battlefront beta, we thought we'd take a look at the survival mode two-player split-screen on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In this mode, DICE drops frame-rate to 30fps, with pretty decent results. The action is still plenty of fun, although we did notice that fluidity is compromised owing to some frame-pacing issues. We noticed something similar in Need for Speed: Rivals a couple of years back and it was fixed via a patch, so fingers crossed DICE can do the same here. One thing we can confirm after further testing is that both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions do run the split-screen component at full 1080p, with DICE effectively trading frame-rate for resolution - so a 1920x540 resolution per player window is confirmed.

There was once a virtual world called LambdaMOO. It began when a researcher named Pavel Curtis recreated his Californian house inside a virtual space in a Californian computer, but the space was open to other players connecting from around the world. You could connect with a named avatar, chat, walk around and punch things by typing text commands -

Various Transformers media - including video games, comics and toys - will be unified to tell the same story over the next three to four years.

UPDATE 09/10/2015 5.18pm: It appears that Apple has reversed its decision to remove delisted games from people's purchase history.

I'm a huge fan of Transformers. Not the Transformers featured in the crappy, slightly racist, poop joke-filled monstrosities that Michael Bay keeps guffing out though. Most definitely not. I'm talking proper, die-cast metal G1 bots - the ones that featured in the only Transformers movie that mattered - 1986's animated Transformers: The Movie.

Jessica Curry has quit her role as studio co-head of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture developer The Chinese Room.

Xbox One is selling and Microsoft has regained some of the momentum it lost back at the console's disasturous launch. But will it ever recover to the point where it beats sales of Sony's PlayStation 4?

Pool - but also a bit snooker - game Pool Nation FX launched in Early Access on Steam this week. Yes, this is the game given away free on Xbox One with Games With Gold, but it's better, improved.

There's a time and a plaice for a story like this, and that's Friday afternoon. Dovetail Games has renamed Dovetail Games Fishing to Dovetail Games Euro Fishing, and given it a release plate sorry date of 22nd October.

I wrote a bit about a game called Kingdom recently, a game I enjoyed because I had to work it out, and because it looks like a pixelated fairytale. Publisher Raw Fury has just given it a release date - 21st October - and a price: $10/€10/£7.

I walked the EGX 2015 floor among a sea of games and one bobbled to the top. It wasn't shouting at me like a blockbuster but quietly resting, a king on a horse, like a scene from a pixelated fairytale. I watched someone sit down and play it, gallop left and right, screen following them through foresty scenes. But after an aimless while they gave up, no idea what to do. I left, they left, but the game didn't leave me, and so another day I returned, this time to play.

There's a moment during Halo 5's story campaign when developer 343 teases us. Master Chief, grizzled super soldier and veteran of countless battles, prepares to lead yet another crucial mission on yet another mysterious spaceship full of even more dangerous aliens. He sits in the cockpit of his dropship, iconic dark green space marine helmet in his hands, and stares. As he moves to put the helmet on, the camera pans in such a way as to ensure part of the dropship obscures his face. Then the helmet is on, the tease complete. Almost, but no cigar.

Game-streaming subscription service PlayStation Now has launched in the UK, priced at £12.99 a month.

UPDATE 9/10/15 11.45am: Marketplace website G2A has hit back at League of Legends studio Riot for banning its eSports team sponsorship.

Yesterday, EA's Star Wars Battlefront beta support message was: "A lot of interest around the beta. We're bringing more PC servers online and appreciate your patience." That was 17 hours ago, and whatever EA DICE has done seems to be working - Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter, who couldn't find an online server to play on, on PC, most of yesterday, is now playing.

Destiny's overpowered shotguns are getting a second nerf in as many months.

As expected, Capcom has officially announced Laura for Street Fighter 5 at the Brasil Game Show.

Fallout 4 has slightly strange but achievable system requirements on PC, and occupies between 28-35GB hard-drive space on consoles. I say "slightly strange" as the recommended specs ask for a powerful processor and graphics card but are relatively easy on the RAM. Does it really need all that processing power? We'll see, I suppose!