Latest Articles (Page 1413)

"There's this guy, right, called Major Nelson." This was my friend Stu talking, back in the early days of the Xbox 360, which was also, I think, the early days of podcasts. Stu was more technologically advanced than me, so he would download podcasts and then - I cringe at this - burn them onto CD for me so that I could hear them too. (This is a bit like getting someone to do you an oil painting of a newspaper.) Whatever. I remember listening to Gaming Steve with a growing sense that I was listening in to the future. And I remember listening to Major Nelson Radio with - well, some kind of fascination that was harder to pin down.

It may not seem like it now, but Super Meat Boy was one of the Xbox 360's most surprising success stories - indeed, one of the most surprising success stories of the last generation. An enhanced, expanded version of developer Team Meat's free flash game, Meat Boy, the odds were firmly stacked against it.

The Xbox 360 turned 10 this week and there's a lot to admire about how Microsoft's second console forever changed the gaming landscape. It brought us all sort of neat goodies like a multimedia dashboard, the almost definitive gamepad, and loads of influential titles like Gears of War, Mass Effect and Crackdown. But my favourite aspect of the Microsoft's decade old console was Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA for short), a digital service archiving older titles as well as offering new and exciting independently made adventures at budget prices.

Lost Odyssey might be one of the most touching games I've ever played. I remember meeting that dying woman in the village who turned out to be my - lead character Kaim's - long-lost daughter, even though we looked roughly the same age. Then there was the gnarled old pirate your team meets (and recruits) who turns out to be the son of a lady in your party, who looks much younger than he does. This is possible because Kaim and a few others are immortals and have lived for hundreds of years.

Xbox 360 is 10 years old this week - in fact, it turned 10 yesterday, 22nd November. We'll be running articles about this remarkable console, and about some of our favourite 360 games, all week.

One of the first and most spurious misuses of my university student loan was a Halo 3 Master Chief edition Xbox 360. It was a disgusting olive green with hideous decals and a questionable shiny gold disc tray and I absolutely adored it. But, even though I played Halo 3 multiplayer and Assassin's Creed to death, my first memories of the 360 are actually somewhat hazy.

You could point to the console's library of games or Microsoft's groundbreaking technological spine of Xbox Live. You could even point to Xbox 360's Kinect (though it probably won't pick you up for a few seconds). In my mind, however, there's one thing every single Xbox 360 user could not fail to forget.

Project Cars latest batch of DLC may well be its finest yet, with a fine selection of Classic Team Lotus cars matched up with a handful of new period tracks to take them to.

Bethesda has a thing for skeletons, and so do I.

PES 2016 finally gets the latest transfers for use in offline modes on 3rd December, Konami has said.

Jon Hare has cancelled the Sociable Soccer Kickstarter after it got off to a slow start.

A group of modders is remaking Fallout 1 in Fallout New Vegas.

How strange that a game where the happiest player wins should have made so many people so very angry. Only it's not really strange at all, is it? It's hard to think of another publisher whose games are so regularly resented for simply existing, but such is the way with Nintendo. If Nintendo doesn't release exactly what its fans want, boy does the internet make sure it knows. Like Metroid Prime: Federation Force, Amiibo Festival has attracted a disproportionate amount of vitriol for what it isn't rather than what it is. It's not a proper Animal Crossing game, therefore it has no right to be released.

There's something about the speeder bike chase segment in Return of the Jedi that proves utterly irresistible to game developers. It's got to be the sheer speed and exhilaration of the sequence, plus its heavy reliance on first-person viewpoints to frame the action. Along with the Death Star trench segment, it's one of the few movie experiences that should translate almost seamlessly into gameplay. The only problem is - as countless titles over the last 32 years have demonstrated - gaming technology just doesn't have the raw power available to bring that iconic battle into playable life. Until now, perhaps.

What a lot of tempting deals there in Steam's 2015 Thanksgiving sale, the Exploration Sale. It's like having a bowl of cold roast potatoes in front of you at 11pm: you know you shouldn't but oh go on maybe just one.

Three-and-a-half years after it came out on Xbox 360, Fez will be available for the first time as a physical release.

Bungie will up the difficulty of its most recent raid with the introduction of a new raid challenge mode.

Fallout 4 does a great job of immersing you in Bethesda's post-nuclear Commonwealth, but pretty much everyone agrees it does a horrible job of explaining how base-building works.

December's batch of PlayStation Plus games have been announced. PlayStation 4 gets Gauntlet: Slayer Edition and King's Quest - Chapter 1: A Knight to Remember.

Total War games are made up of two major parts: one part is battles, armies clashing against each other; the other, a strategical campaign map of the world that you push your pieces around - pieces representing armies or special characters. We've seen what a battle will look like in Total War: Warhammer but, until now, we haven't seen the campaign map.

Dying Light's The Following DLC has grown so big the developer will now charge extra for it.

Long-running UK game studio Codemasters has closed the Malta-based developer that made virtual card game Battle Decks.

Sony's stealth announcement that it can emulate PS2 games on the PlayStation 4, as revealed by the bundle of retro Star Wars games included with the Battlefront-branded console, has quite rightly resulted in a lot of excitement and anticipation. Surely the floodgates must soon open, releasing hundreds of beloved classics back into the PlayStation ecosystem?

It looks like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 will not be released in the west.

Gabe Newell has invested in a new cookery company.

We all know about the Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass - I even italicised it for effect. Forty bloody quid: that's a lot of dosh. No one has to buy it and the add-ons will be available separately, but that's not the point: the point is perception. Battlefront needs those extra maps and Heroes and modes and things, and even before launch we were being primed to pay again for it.

Fighting game Divekick now has its final playable character: The Fencer from the wonderful Nidhogg.

Retro City Rampage, the 8-bit Grand Theft Auto-inspired indie shooter, is getting an open-world follow-up named Shakedown Hawaii.

PlayStation 4 has now sold over 30m units worldwide, Sony has announced.

Star Wars: Battlefront's upcoming free Battle of Jakku DLC will bring a new 40-player Turning Point experience to the sci-fi shooter.