Latest Articles (Page 1842)

Although Spring might not have arrived in any meaningful sense, I suspect a lot of people spent the long Easter weekend engaged in the traditional spring cleaning session nonetheless. I certainly did - vacuuming down cobwebs, removing stray pieces of wallpaper, and blinding ghosts with my flashlight.

The votes have been counted and the Classic FM Hall of Fame 2013 compiled. Soundtracks from The Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy series are in the top five.

Full Torchlight 2 mod support has arrived. Developer Runic has released its in-house tools, named Guts, to the public.

Brilliant BioShock Infinite has flown to the top of the UK video games chart.

There's a good chance DayZ will make it to console, provided the PC launch of DayZ Standalone isn't a disaster.

David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake for the last 15 years, has waved an emotional goodbye to the Metal Gear series.

Square Enix has released the first trailer for its new Thief game.

There once was a time when if you wanted to sample the most exciting and thrilling games, you had to leave the comfort of your sofa and venture to the nearest smoky amusement arcade, where you would rub shoulders with other like-minded players and watch slack-jawed as the local Street Fighter 2 expert took on all challengers, or gasp in amazement at the lush 3D visuals showcased by Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Ridge Racer. These days, the closest most people get to a traditional arcade gaming experience is the battered Sega Rally and Time Crisis cabinets which sit awkwardly in the local bowling alley - their 3D prowess now looking considerably muted compared to the latest iOS titles you can carry around in your trouser pocket.

Want to know which games are big in Kenya these days?

Release a game simply called Zombies today - as this Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive title was named in Europe - and the best reaction you could expect is a weary roll of the eyes as an undead-saturated medium groans at the very prospect of more shambling cadavers to wade through. The world was different back in 1994, though. Resident Evil didn't even exist back then, and the prospect of thinning the reanimated horde was still fresh. Or as fresh as a mobile carcass of rotten meat can be.

Ah, Easter weekend. Four glorious days off, free to spend some quality time with your family. Oh who am I kidding, most of us are going to be barricaded in a darkened room marvelling at the spectacular world of BioShock Infinite's Columbia. It's a bit like a flying Disneyland only the food is much cheaper, as you'll discover in our Show of the Week.

Like a punch-drunk boxer struggling to get back on his feet, HTC's fortunes have been pretty dire since Samsung launched the Galaxy S2. HTC had previously been the poster child of the Android scene, working with Google to produce such defining handsets as the Dream and Nexus One, but it had nothing in its arsenal capable of challenging Samsung's world-beating device. Since then, the company's fall from grace has been difficult to watch, with 2011's ill-fated acquisition of Beats Audio and the failure of the HTC Flyer tablet causing its position in the market to tumble. Last year's well-designed but commercially lacking HTC One X couldn't stem the tide either, and the Taiwanese firm has recently announced that its 2012 Q4 profits are down 91 per cent year-on-year.

SPOILER WARNING IN CAPITAL LETTERS: Do not read this until you have finished BioShock Infinite. Seriously. This is not a drill. I discuss the ending.

Riccitiello: gone. Wada: gone. There's a lot of director-level games industry talent out of a job this month, and between the silver-haired fox's departure and the events at Square Enix earlier this week that we're now referring to as 'Wadagate', there are gaps that need filling.

This week at the Game Developers Conference Creative Assembly announced Total War: Arena, a new free-to-play multiplayer spin-off that, on the face of it, sounds very much like a MOBA.

Having powered five of the ten most highly-rated games on Xbox 360, it's no exaggeration to suggest that the Epic Unreal Engine 3 middleware played a unique role in shaping the visual make-up of 21st century video gaming. With Unreal Engine 4, the company is hoping to take point in defining next-generation rendering once again, and at GDC it revealed a brand new, breathtaking showcase that it hopes will help extend its advantage, giving us our first look at UE4 running in real-time on PlayStation 4 hardware in the process.

While Western indie devs get fancy functions like GDC, IGF and Gamescom to show off their wares (and crowd-funded movies telling the story of their struggles), the indie scene in Japan is scattered at best. It's not that there aren't any small studios or one-man teams making exciting games - there are loads, as fans of La-Mulana, Cave Story or Tokyo Jungle will attest. But unified and strong the scene is not.

If there's any developer ready to give brand new console hardware a fair shake, it's Criterion Games. From Burnout Paradise to its celebrated reinventions of the Need for Speed series, the studio has an impeccable record turning in tightly matched games on 360 and PS3 platforms alike, with no-one left wanting. With the hotly anticipated Wii U version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted it aims to go one better. By no means a straight port, the boat is being pushed out much further this time with its suite of unique GamePad features, improved PC-grade textures courtesy of the console's 1GB of RAM, and a greatly revamped approach to its night-time lighting.

Fluxx is a game about rules - making, breaking and ultimately winning with them. It's a tricksy thing, a party game with a dash of the parlour that runs on luck but is decided by skill. Who plays what, and when, acquires a new importance when anyone can change the rules afterwards.

One of gaming's oddities is that enormous numbers of people enjoy puzzle games, yet there's far less interest in games that are puzzles. Starseed Pilgrim is an enigmatic game, one that could be easily spoiled by a few explanatory lines or a diagram - part platformer and part memory challenge, it hinges on the player's ingenuity and love of discovery. It's one of those that gives back what you put in.

In July 2010, ahead of the release of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, one of the key developers behind the game told Eurogamer that the stealth action series needed a "breather".

The War Z executive producer Sergey Titov claimed that he gets a lot of fans who say they'll stop playing the zombie MMO if the developer removes the system that causes players to lose micro-transaction items every time they die.

Total War house Creative Assembly has announced a new game called Total War: Arena. It's a free-to-play online MOBA-style spin-off.

As of the year 2000, the X-Com franchise had sold 470,000 games and made just over £1 million smackaroos, creator Julian Gollop revealed at GDC today. Consider that the original cost just £115,000 to make, and it was "a very profitable game" both for Julian Gollop and his brother as well as ye olde publisher Microprose.

Crytek has confirmed it will make a bid for the Darksiders IP when it comes up at auction on 1st April.

Got any bank holiday weekend plans? Well cancel them right now. Yes, we've all got four days off in a row - Friday through Monday, for anyone reading this who either hasn't remembered or lives in a country where they don't recognise BioShock release week as a national holiday - but that doesn't mean we won't be giving you loads of stuff to read.

Sony is lifting the lid on PlayStation 4 development, finally revealing detailed technical information on its powerful new platform along with the philosophy that drives it. At GDC yesterday, SCEA senior staff engineer Chris Norden spoke to game developers about the core architecture that powers the new console, going into depth on the controller and camera while giving us some insight into what makes the PS4's x86 64-bit architecture a cut above your typical gaming PC.

Wii U social network Miiverse will finally be accessible from PC and smartphones by the end of May, Nintendo has announced.

Highly-praised indie adventure Terraria will be released on PlayStation Vita this summer, publisher 505 Games has announced.

APB was an ambitious MMO built by Crackdown dev Realtime Worlds but it flopped, hard. The game died but was resurrected by Reloaded as a free-to-play MMO. We reviewed APB Reloaded last year and it wasn't very good.