Latest Articles (Page 2018)

When you hear the word "safari" you probably get pretty distinct mental images: the savannah, lions and elephants, straw yellow and burnt earth. But this is not what Brisbane-based Defiant Development had in mind, at least if Ski Safari is any indication.

While I'd never stoop to the old "games cause violence" argument, there's little doubt that games teach us to treat death as a numbers game. Each individual demise isn't important: what matters is the body count, the chain reaction, the comforting tick of small numbers getting bigger.

With its massive scale online battles, sprawling environments and combination of vehicular combat and third-person shooting, Warhawk became one of the early highlights of PlayStation 3 gaming - released in late 2007 when there was nothing quite like it on either of the current generation consoles.

The one thing everyone remembers about P.N.03 is that it was the first game in the Capcom Five, the publisher's proposal to prop up the then-ailing GameCube with a set of third-party exclusives. Though the games turned out quite nicely, the plan wasn't exactly a roaring success: Dead Phoenix was canned, while Resident Evil 4, Killer7 and Viewtiful Joe were ported to PlayStation 2. Only P.N.03 remained loyal to the Cube, though that's less a case of a publisher attempting to stick to its guns so much as a total lack of interest in a new version.

Remember when we had to wait, really wait, for a new game in a beloved series to come out? I barely do. These days, while we're happy (and, if you ask me, correct) to moan at the annual overexposure that progressively washes the fun out of hits like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty, we also start looking pointedly at our watches when three years pass between BioShock games. It's become routine to assume that we'll get through three episodes of an Uncharted or a Gears of War in one hardware generation.

Coincidence or not, it was a warning to console makers of things to come. While the old games industry gathered in LA for its annual E3 pissing contest, a loud message was sounding 350 miles to the north.

While Nolan North is arguably most famous for lending his voice to Uncharted hero Nathan Drake, his gaming CV now includes well over a 100 titles.

EA is waiving Origin distribution fees for any game funded via a crowd-sourcing site like Kickstarter, the publisher has announced.

Beleaguered Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios seems to be in the clear - for now, at least.

Fictional Sony marketing exec Kevin Butler appears in some capacity in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, according to IMDB.

Rumours are circulating that lunatic WWII shooter Brothers in Arms: Furious 4 has been euthanised.

Most video games are just not stimulating enough for grown adults, so says Journey creator Jenova Chen.

A brand new Tekken movie, subtitled Rise of the Tournament, is currently in the works, according to production company Crystal Sky.

Downloadable off-road racer Mad Riders will launch for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 30th May, publisher Ubisoft has announced.

An ambitious Crysis mod titled CryZone: Sector 23 has made the jump to full game status, Russian developer Owl Game Studio has announced.

The main story in The Elder Scrolls Online will be "100 per cent solo" so that you feel like "you're awesome, you're the hero", game director Matt Firor has revealed.

This is ridiculous. I must've pressed the wrong button somewhere, selected the wrong option, because every time I step into the Torchlight 2 beta my experience is less akin to a game and more like an orgy of destruction, spiralling further and further out of my control until everything becomes a bloody mist of damage numbers and body parts. I feel like Caligula with a carving knife. I hope that's not my own voice I sometimes hear cackling.

Because We May is the name of a new indie campaign lowering the prices of some big name games later this month.

Landmark browser MMO RuneScape is soon to undergo one of its biggest changes ever. The Evolution of Combat project will "completely revolutionise the way players fight and interact in the game".

Remember space strategy game Conquest: Frontier Wars from 2001? There's a sequel - Conquest 2: The Vyrium Uprising. That is, there will be a sequel, if you fund it on Kickstarter.

"I'm like the guy with a drink in the corner of the party, just sipping on it and looking at who's here," says Kan Gao, hitting on the perfect analogy for his current situation. Everything, he quietly explains, is so different to how things were before he made To The Moon, the cult indie game about a dying man's last wish that launched to a rapturous reception back in November and left a trail of player tears in its wake. A year ago Gao was winding down his studies at the University of Western Ontario and building games in his spare time for kicks. Today the 23-year-old works under the banner Freebird Games and rubs shoulders with the game industry's great and good at shindigs across North America. "I've never travelled so much," says Gao. "It's been a fantastic experience, such a ride. I had no idea a year ago that I would be where I would be now. It is exhilarating but, at the same time, kind of nerve racking."

One of the beauties of smartphones, and especially tablets, is how beautifully they fit traditional board games. The daddy of them all is chess. It's been rather brutalised by technology in the past, one of computing's pre-emininent challenges being a program that could defeat a human grandmaster, until, in 1997, Deep Blue finally felled Kasparov. It's a mighty achievement, tinged with tragedy.

The Diablo 3 Secret Level - an evolution of the iconic Diablo 2 Secret Cow Level - has been found.

Buggy open world horror RPG Dead Island was an unlikely breakout new IP success last year. It became Polish developer Techland's most successful title.

The heavily-rumoured Battlefield 3 Premium service will offer subscribers early access to all of the game's upcoming expansions.

Here's one to file under 'lessons we probably should have learned from writing stuff on the internet for over a decade': if you're planning to publish a couple of different perspectives on a contentious issue, either publish them together or lead with the one that reflects the prevailing consensus. Otherwise everyone calls you a c***!

Diablo 3 is an online game. That's not an opinion, it's a fact - Blizzard requires you have an internet connection to play it, although previous Diablo games allowed offline play and many (most?) people enjoyed playing them solo. The controversy surrounding that decision has been intense, and so was fans' understandable frustration when server load made the game difficult to play on launch day this week.

In a battle to precede the war, both EA and Activision will debut new television adverts for their shooter mega-series Call of Duty and Medal of Honor during Saturday's Champions League final.

It seems Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios' problems are escalating following recent loan negotiations, with news today that it's not been able to pay staff this week.

Far Cry 3's multiplayer modes get a beta dry run on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this Summer, publisher Ubisoft has announced.