Latest Articles (Page 1439)

Last month a quintet of ex-BioWare developers based in Austin, Texas announced a role-playing game called Mooncrest. They intended to combine the combat of a Souls game with the puzzles of a point-and-click adventure and the story-driven nature of a BioWare title.

On September 3, 1998, Metal Gear Solid was released for the Sony Playstation, and games changed forever. Though an early 3D title, MGS was not the first third-person game influenced by cinema, nor was it Hideo Kojima's first time as director, and it wasn't even the first game in the series. It was a direct sequel to Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, 8-bit top-down games which had pioneered stealth mechanics, but also a fresh start - the moment when technology could realise these ideas anew.

The most viewed video game video on YouTube is not a scream-filled Let's Play by PewDiePie or a trailer for League of Legends.

Grip, the Rollcage spiritual successor we reported on last month, has launched a Kickstarter.

Michel Ancel, creator of Rayman, has built a level for Super Mario Maker.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 multiplayer beta, which starts on 19th August on PlayStation 4, includes three maps, seven modes and eight Specialists, developer Treyarch has confirmed.

First we had the Iron Man mod for Rockstar's open-world epic Grand Theft Auto 5. Now, the natural next step: a Hulkbuster mod.

Rodea the Sky Soldier comes out on 13th November 2015 in Europe and 10th November in North America, publisher NIS America has announced.

Destiny developer Bungie was forced to replace Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage due to the actor's availability, the developer has said.

UPDATE 11/8/15 5.32pm: Rockstar has offered the following explanation as to why it's banned the folks behind the FiveM mod (via Kotaku):

UPDATE 11/08/2015: Vote to Play begins this Thursday, 13th August, Sony has said.

Cities: Skylines saw its first expansion revealed at last week's Gamescom and it's looking like something we'd rather like to play. It's called 'After Dark' and introduces a whole list of changes including a day/night cycle, leisure and beach specialisations, and most importantly, BUS LANES.

There's been some confusion: you cannot talk through all boss encounters in the new Deus Ex, Mankind Divided. There are debates with key figures, such as the one shown in the 25-minute E3 gameplay video, but they're a separate thing. Boss encounters require some form of action. Boss encounters and 'debates' are two distinct types of gameplay.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a narrative-driven exploration game to enjoy at your own leisure. Some players are finding it a bit too leisurely, however, since the PlayStation 4 exclusive has a fairly slow walking speed and no apparent option to run.

Grin, the studio behind Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries, has filed for bankruptcy.

30 games from one of the world's most celebrated developers packed into a collection for just £19.99 - Rare Replay represents remarkable value, with a range of titles spanning early Spectrum hits such as Jetpac and Sabrewulf to modern releases such as Perfect Dark Zero and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. One of the key selling points of the package is the inclusion of the majority of Rare's N64 line-up, with the likes of Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini available on console for the first time since their launch in 1997. But the big takeaway is this: Rare has delivered each and every one of its N64 offerings at full 1080p resolution, though overall results are a little mixed.

One of the most dexterous words in English literature is things. Being flexible and useful is the entire point of a word like things, of course, but still: watch it sing in a book like I Capture the Castle or Cold Comfort Farm. Shall I clear away the tea things? That, I would argue, is the Early 20th Century English Novel Sentence par excellence. I didn't even look it up: I'm just assuming that Dodie Smith and Stella Gibbons will have both landed on it through sheer cultural resonance. How could they not? There will be tea so there will be tea things, and it's only polite to ask when you're thinking about getting rid of them, isn't it? And look what the word things is doing in that sentence! It is creating a friendly out-of-focus clutter of everyday objects, a nimbus of impedimenta. It is suggesting that even the most mindless of routines like serving a pot of Earl Grey will have a quiet exactitude to it, often requiring the use of tools. Life is ritual. Brew up.

Sony is set to charge more for its one and three month PlayStation Plus subscriptions in the UK.

For the most part, I feel like I've got a good handle on what the Internet is all about. I've been on Reddit today, I tell myself. I'm up to date with this week's online controversy and I've got an opinion about it! I'm plugged in. I'm current.

Don't be fooled by the bragging, wisecracking pilot, the soaring Saturday morning cartoon soundtrack, or that evocative scarlet spaceship - the kind that has flown through countless boyhood dreams, turning aliens to green mush and asteroids to fine space dust. All of that can be found in 17-Bit's anime-inspired heroic space shoot-'em-up, Galak-Z: The Dimensional. But beneath the paint, this is, in Christian Donlan's enviable phrase, a catastrophe game. In other words, it comes to life not when you're laying waste a squadron of Imperial fighters to the sound of a Joe Satriani-esque guitar solo, but when you're trembling in the nook of some space cavern, health bar blinking on a sliver, wondering how the hell you're going to make it back to the Axelios mothership in one piece.

We're used to mainstream media not quite getting eSports. Most reports revolve around the "OMG people get paid to do this?!" angle and the inevitable "this isn't a real sport" quip.

Rare retro game compilation Rare Replay is the developer's first game to grace the top of the UK charts in nearly 17 years.

Last month I took the plunge and bought Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, after the traditional probationary period of looking on resentfully while people rhapsodise about it on Twitter. Amongst other things, this has meant wrestling once again with my launch model 3DS's lack of a second analog stick. Can you recall console gaming before the advent of analog stick controllers? I genuinely can't imagine how we pulled it off. Strafing around corners must have felt like feeding your hand through a vending machine in search of a reluctant Snickers. Moving the cursor in an RTS must have felt like steering an F1 car with your feet.

In 1989 Charles Cecil's computer could often be found in a white Ford Fiesta XR2, speeding along the 200-mile stretch of English motorway that separates Hull and Reading. The PC, a custom-built 386, was so valuable that Cecil would insist it be wrapped in blankets and secured in the back of a car with a carefully arranged seat belt. Cecil, who was 27 at the time and working as head of development at Activison, had blown his savings on the machine, which he intended to use as a dedicated flight simulator. But when the US side of the company collapsed and took his office down with it, Cecil decided to set up his own game studio with a programmer friend, Tony Warriner, who lived in Hull. The pair began working on a demo together, which they intended to pitch to publishers, shuttling themselves and their newly employed PC between the two cities each week.

Energy Hook, the new swinging game from the creator of the swinging mechanic from Spider-Man 2, launches on Steam Early Access this week.

Among the many, many things that Robert Zemeckis' 1985 film Back to the Future got right was the exact length of a pop culture nostalgia gap: 30 years. It was 30 years into the past that the teenage Marty McFly travelled, to 1955, when his parents were his age and when rock'n'roll was born. Viewed from that distance, a song like Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode was old enough to acquire the warm glow of childhood nostalgia; to recall simpler, purer times. But, with its primitive energy, it also expressed something primal and exciting that felt like it had been lost in the course of rock music's 30-year journey into the cultural mainstream - something that begged to be reclaimed by the young.

After surviving the difficult months following the release of Halo: the Master Chief Collection, 343 Industries is just about ready to unleash Halo 5 - the first full-blooded new-gen outing for the franchise. In addition to a revamped multiplayer, the campaign's set to last twice as long as its predecessor, with missions spread across three worlds built on an entirely new graphics engine - so we could well be looking at the most dramatic change in series history. This is not the Halo you know and love, but this new creation still has a lot of potential, with 343i intent on winning over and expanding the series' dedicated fanbase. We were given a chance to check out the latest Halo 5 code behind closed doors this year at Gamescom and walked away impressed by what we saw.

It's alarming how swiftly Gamescom came and went this year. It feels like we only just shipped Ian and Chris out to Cologne and yet, by the time this article goes live, they'll already be home.

I may be a city-boy, but I'm still a fan of The Great Outdoors. I've conquered all three of the national peaks, surviving only on service station flapjacks and chocolate Yazoo. I've enjoyed failing to make campfires as much as any modern half-man. Nostalgia for the romantic bucolic? I've felt those pangs, too. I'm particularly fond of the Yorkshire Tea 50-pack because of the stone walls and green-pastel fields printed on its foil bag; it reminds me of a more innocent time. Not one that I remember personally, mind - I was brought up in Birmingham.

Galak-Z developer 17-bit's turn-based strategy game Skulls of the Shogun is getting an animated series.