Latest Articles (Page 1528)

Here's your litmus test: Ego the Living Planet is bobbing around in the corner of the start screen for the latest Lego game. Ego is a deeply obscure 1960s Marvel character, a giant sentient planet with a moustache. And he's in this game, if only fleetingly. That's the level of silly Silver Age nerd bait on offer here. If this news makes you grin like an idiot, then this game is for you.

At some point, we'll all probably hit rock bottom, be it through a break-up, divorce, death, poverty or physical injury. Whether we've hit that point in our life or not, we all sort of know it's coming. Eventually. The threat of tragedy hangs over our lives as a curious thing, a distant idea we toy with when we're feeling particularly masochistic. Always Sometimes Monsters is about those moments and the things people can or will do when backed into a corner and left to wallow in their desperation.

Transistor isn't the first game to put its soul into its sword, but it is the first to be quite so transparent about it. Hundreds of action RPGs have already made it clear that the heft and feel of a blade is the focal point for so many loving tweaks and balances, yet Transistor also allows its eponymous weapon to narrate the storyline and play a crucial role in how it unfolds. In the city of Cloudbank, silenced songstress Red stands over the body of a man whose life has been transferred into the perspex skewer that now sticks out of his chest. Draw the sword and start the adventure. Hundreds of games do this stuff too, but none do it in quite this way.

It might seem strange for a pastime so often stigmatised for its nerdishness, but video games' defining moments have often been touched by the testosterone musk of sports. From William Higinbotham sparking a game of tennis to life on the phosphorus of his laboratory oscilloscope to the well-worn paddles of a Pong machine, and through to the swings and thrusts of Nintendo's Wii Sports, there's something primal and pure in the competitive, social element of games.

With the exception of Firaxis, there's no-one left that makes expansion packs like Blizzard. In an age of bite-sized downloadable add-ons, their premium price tags raise eyebrows, even with the generous supply of new content - but that content is usually less than half the story. In these expansions, the new ideas and hard graft that have been poured into the renewal, rebalancing and restructuring of the original game usually exceeds what goes into your average blockbuster sequel.

Luftrausers is, above all other things, a 2D shooter of ferocity and focus. And yet - look at this - I've just constructed a Luftrausers plane that doesn't shoot. Well, I've constructed one where shooting isn't the main strength, anyway. Being a submarine is the main strength of this particular beauty - an unusual agenda for an aircraft, granted, but then, Luftrausers is a gloriously unusual game. Testify!

Digital assistant Cortana will soon be available within Microsoft Office on mobile and desktop platforms.

By the time of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Kojima Productions' series - often thrilling, sometimes tiring but never anything less than fascinating - had twisted itself into a dead end. In the creaking fatigue of the ageing Snake, a battle-weary individualist at odds with wars fought by faceless corporations and their automatons, it was hard not to see some of creator Hideo Kojima himself; a man with a singular vision lost in the broad, mundane chaos of contemporary games development, slowly tiring of the very thing that had forged his own legend.

It is, quite simply, all about the catch. All the great multiplayer games have that one special hook - the mechanic that elevates them above the pack and fires even the most jaded of competitors up into a fist-pumping roar. Countering an Ultra in Street Fighter 4; lobbing the keeper in Pro Evolution Soccer; a last-second, final-bend banana in Mario Kart. And now you can add another to the list - catching an arrow in TowerFall Ascension.

Grab a Ferrari 458 Italia and hit up Need for Speed: Rivals' Redview County and you can find yourself in a pretty decent approximation of what a contemporary, open-world OutRun would look like. You'll see traces of AM2's magic in the languid powerslides that send sweet white smoke pluming from wheel arches, and in the long drives that take you through sinewy roads darkened by the thick canopy of pines, on to snaking snowy mountain passes, and climaxing in full-throated blasts through wide, parched desert.

From Software's Dark Souls was a masterpiece with a deceptively hope-filled heart - celebrated for its bitterness and hostility and still played today because of its extraordinary world design, sublime combat and enigmatic systems. But while it was more successful than its predecessor Demon's Souls, many people still found it too intimidating. Working under new directors, the developers of Dark Souls 2 have tried to bridge that gap while remaining faithful to the series' strange heart. Can it be done?

The Banner Saga is a tactical RPG that's been pushing its way into my thoughts even when I'm occupied with other things. Its epic tale tells of a sun that no longer sets, the death of the old gods and a land on the brink of war - but it is the more mundane burdens of leadership that weigh most heavily on my mind.

Klei Entertainment's survival sim is a tricky one. That title seems so helpful, pretty much doubling as a minimalist player's guide, but it misleads you, dear reader. It makes you start the game thinking that your main concern will be acquiring ample food reserves, but that's not the case. Not really.

Nintendo tried to get exclusive multimedia rights to Harry Potter video games back in the late 1990s, a new Unseen64 report has revealed.

The Definitive Edition of Tomb Raider is released for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this week. Digital Foundry will be looking at these versions in detail, starting with today's performance analysis. In addition, here's Ellie's review of the Xbox 360 version, first published on 25th February 2013. The game itself is largely unchanged, save for the inclusion of some minor DLC and voice and motion control options, so we're confident that this review applies to the Definitive Edition, too.

Typically, I don't get on with Japanese RPGs. I don't like the melodrama, the stilted writing, the often turn-based menu-battles - and I don't like that I seem to spend more time watching the game than playing it. I can't ever shake the feeling that my participation is incidental to the story that the writers want for me.

I've long been in the market for a game that contains the following:

TxK, a PlayStation Vita shooter that's as crisp as a phosphorous vector line in both style and design, is probably the most high-profile outing for Jeff Minter and Llamasoft since 2007's divisive Space Giraffe - but don't call it a comeback. It's a throwback, sure, a follow-on from Minter's own improvisations upon Dave Theurer's towering 1981 arcade game Tempest with the cult duo of the Atari Jaguar's Tempest 2000 and the Nuon's Tempest 3000. It's a continuation, too, of Llamasoft's fascination with retooling and rebuilding the monolithic classics of the early 80s, an obsession that peaked several times throughout the wonderful iOS games released under the umbrella of the Minotaur Project in recent years.

It was somewhere around the time we were having a microtrip through technicolour tunnels that made us levitate that my friend said, "WE SHOULDN'T HAVE EATEN THAT PIG." My character bouncing around off fluorescent triangles, mangling my hand on WASD, I said "I'M GETTING NAUSEOUS," and she pointed to some microchips on a floor made of formulae and greek symbols and I put the chips in the computer's head. The next sick-making tunnel opened before me.

To be born in a cloud of dust, to die in an explosion of blood - this is the way of the Samurai. Oh, and to do all of that very quickly, too. Samurai Gunn is a game about little else, really: you spawn, you fight, you fall, and then you spawn again - and fall again.

The wait's over! Finally, after three years, confused PC gamers the world over can actually buy Nidhogg, the legendary 2 player duelling game first commissioned by New York University's Game Centre. This commercial release is a robust thing, boasting four levels, rudimentary single player, mostly-functional online play, tournament mode and a host of comedic variants. I can't recommend boomerang swords highly enough.

A Runescape player was swatted in front of 60,000 viewers on Twitch.

In the space of three weeks, EA is set to release two separate multiplayer-only, Xbox exclusive (well, not available on PS4 anyway) squad-based shooters. Neither are free-to-play, and amazingly neither feature nefarious microtransactions. EA's decision to unleash Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare mere weeks before the all-conquering Titanfall is a curious one indeed, but then, this is a curious game.

As the credits roll on South Park: The Stick of Truth, the big question isn't why Ubisoft would choose to censor certain scenes for tender European eyes, but how they censored it. This is a game that doesn't so much cross the line as utterly erase it in a blitzkrieg of piss, poop, farts, profanity and over-the-top violence. In the midst of such gleefully offensive mayhem, working out how far constitutes "too far" is an utterly pointless exercise.

It's the 22nd Century and, as those of us alive at the start of the 21st Century might have predicted, things aren't going so well for humankind. Earth is exhausted, grown pale and plundered by its dominant species' greed and unchecked procreation. But there's another pressing issue for Out There's protagonist, one of the astronauts sent into space to locate more resources for the folks back home: his missing CD collection.

Talk about pressure. The first game from a studio headed up by the co-creator of Call of Duty. The first big third-party exclusive of the new console generation. The game that arrives pre-anointed with 80 awards from journalists dazzled by trade show demonstrations. And all in a stifled genre crying out for a breath of fresh air. Yes, there's a lot riding on Titanfall's shoulders. Good thing those shoulders are made of reinforced steel.

"All rise!"

Hit the coloured dots and avoid the black ones: there are probably a thousand iOS puzzlers that have a comparable agenda. And yet Blek seems like something new. It's a toy as much as a game, and the solution to each challenge feels creative and oddly personal. Let me give you a clue: the answer to puzzle 23 is my middle name. It was for me, anyway. Who knows what it will be for you?

It's the dead of night on the CSAT-occupied island of Stratis, and the peaceful darkness is about to explode into chaos. I'm leading one of two spec-ops teams on a mission to liberate the leader of a local guerrilla faction and return him to the much larger island of Altis. A British squad is in charge of the actual rescue. Our job is to cause as much trouble across the island as possible to distract the CSAT forces and give the British the opening they need.

Great games demand their own vocabulary - a personal vocabulary. David is a case in point.