Latest Articles (Page 2187)

As a title, Resident Evil 4 HD is either a lie or the most severe case of 'lost in translation' since the SNES era. What's on the block here would be most accurately described as Resident Evil 4 Upscaled or, if you're feeling saucy, "the PC version".

Top Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida was "shocked" to see Nintendo's circle pad add-on announcement and speculated that the peripheral is a result of a demand from Monster Hunter developer Capcom.

Syndicate developer Starbreeze Studios is making a new IP with Swedish director Josef Fares.

Gamers have helped scientists unravel the structure of an enzyme closely associated with HIV.

Cloud gaming service OnLive is heading to iPad, iPhone and Android tablets and smartphones this autumn, via a new app for the US and Europe.

Eurogamer is thrilled to announce that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 completes the line-up of playable games at this year's Eurogamer Expo.

OnLive boss Steve Perlman has countered criticism of his video game streaming tech from those who say it suffers from lag.

OnLive latency has finally been measured, and the results are pleasantly surprising. In Digital Foundry's independent tests, we achieved an optimum response of 150ms - similar to playing Killzone 2 locally, and in line with Rare's claims for lag when using the new Kinect camera controller.

OnLive. Hands-on. Away from controlled conditions, in the public domain, out of beta, and no longer covered by non-disclosure agreements, this article has been a long time coming.

Nintendo believes Wii U will change the way we play games, but according to OnLive boss Steve Perlman, everything it does UK gamers will be able to experience this autumn.

I love industry-shaking announcements. I love new, game-changing hardware, and I'm absolutely, almost literally exploding with excitement about the new OnLive gaming concept. I love that front-end, and I love the way OnLive uses video because video is what my company, Digital Foundry, specialises in, and what I spend a lot of my time experimenting with. I want this to be brilliant so much that it's almost painful.

Physics has given us many gifts. Paint cans that pelt across the room when you walk into them, fallen enemies who collapse into difficult yoga positions, see-saw puzzles, cowboy hats flying off, oranges you can throw at a soldier - physics has given us all these things. If the Large Hadron Collider does cough out a couple of black holes, on balance the end of the world will be acceptable payback for all the fun physics provided along the way.

Say what you like about Dawn of War and Company of Heroes - and if you're anything like us then what you will say is "they're awesome", in any case - but you can't deny that Relic knows and loves Warhammer 40,000.

How did you spend November 1998? I spent it having conversations like this.

Whatever the ins and outs are of Tomb Raider: Anniversary's protracted passage to the Xbox 360 [where's my house, Eidos?], there's plenty to celebrate about this tardy conversion. First up, Eidos has been smart enough to release the game at mid-price, with most UK retailers pricing it at just GBP 24.99 for the boxed version. Interestingly, owners of last year's Tomb Raider Legend also have the option of downloading the game in four separate 'episodes', each priced at 600 points. The latter option, in particular, offers superb value for the kind of gamers who never get beyond the first few levels - but forcing Eidos to restrict sales of the downloadable version to owners of Legend seems like another of those illogical Xbox Live rules that ought to be shot in the head. Like a bear.

Air combat games are contradictory beasts. They offer the most freedom of movement of any game genre, and yet are constrained by the emptiness of their aerial arenas into gameplay that can quickly become monotonous if you're not passionately excited by military technology. Fly to waypoint, shoot down enemies, rinse, repeat.

Imagine a modern day videogame in the mind of someone who has never played one. Imagine no longer, as Saints Row The Third is arguably that game; an overwhelming orgy of preposterous violence that would send a Daily Mail reader into paroxysms of indignant rage if they could ever grasp a sliver of what was happening.

If you want to talk about Saints Row 2 (right place to be, innit), you've got two different approaches open to you. You could talk, in technical terms and a tone reminiscent of a slightly disappointed maths teacher, about how the graphics aren't terribly impressive. It's got a huge city for you to explore, but compared with the deftly filtered visual richness of something like Grand Theft Auto IV (a comparison that's going to be hauled out a lot, I'm afraid), it looks dated.

The theme of underground resistance has always run through the Red Faction series, but it's never been so overtly political as it is in this third instalment - the first to ditch the traditional linear FPS format for a free-roaming third-person openworld adventure. "The liberators soon became an occupying force," declares our hero, Alec Mason.

It's been ten years since developer Volition first debuted its environment-trashing GeoMod technology in the original Red Faction. Over that period the series has fidgeted uncomfortably from first-person shooter to openworld adventure and now, with Armageddon, to third-person shooter.

Wine in a box, eBay, shower radios, Worcester sauce crisps. We can all think of at least one thing we wish we'd thought up first. Puzzle Quest is another one. Take the puzzle mechanic of Bejeweled and make it the basis of a turn-based RPG. Genius.

Remember the first time you ever rode a rollercoaster? The intoxicating, freefall terror of plummeting downwards into infinite doom; the feeling that you're surely going to die as your stomach flies past your ears. That's Pure's stock in trade.

Prince of Persia hasn't always spun a good yarn, but it's often overcome that with exotic locations and even more exotic acrobatics, and for the first few hours the new-look Prince threatens to do likewise. Having stumbled upon a Princess in peril while out hunting for his wayward donkey, the Americanised Prince falls into a divine battle between the forces of good and evil, and proceeds to wisecrack and Brendan-Fraser his way through an occasionally delicate story of restoring life to a corrupted fantasy world of epic palaces and Skies-of-Arcadian technology.

If you make a mistake, rewind and try again. That's been the implicit motto of the Prince of Persia series since 2003, but now it seems that life is imitating art as the ambivalently received 2008 reboot is unceremoniously ignored in favour of this "interquel", squeezed in between The Sands of Time and its angsty 2004 follow-up, Warrior Within, in the official canon.

There's a term currently bandied around in gaming discussion with wilful abandon. "Living city". It's something of a misnomer. If anything, the term is used to describe the most static of towns, where NPCs amble around with no fixed agenda, perhaps occasional unscripted scuffles of no consequence are used as set decoration. These cities aren't living. The reality is, the city only ever lives when you start changing it.

Even when a game is as gleefully stupid as possible, developers are sometimes smart enough to leave room for the player to make it even more so. It's almost inspiring. Case in point: Ninja Blade. The game opens with a unit of ninjas, one of which is you, being dropped from a transport plane into a city that's been infected by Alpha Worms from Space. Or something. None of the ninjas have parachutes. On the way down - slashing enemy flying things who have the misfortune to be passing by - you proceed to land by crashing through the side of a skyscraper and slow the impact by doing a forward roll. That's as sane as it gets. By the end of the level, you've kicked an enormous demolition ball into the boss' equally enormous tendril-covered face.

Ah, time to roll out one of my "meanwhile in capitalist Russia" anecdotes... A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to be out in Moscow visiting a developers' fair. While I was there I met up with one of the 1C Company bosses, and we had a chat about the apocalyptic theme that runs through Russian and Ukrainian gaming.

With production values to rival most full-price platform games, The Maw is certainly an eye-catching addition to the Xbox Live Arcade line-up. It's also an entertaining one, even if the amusement is rather short-lived.

The remarkable thing about Mafia II is not that it's bad, but that it masks its awfulness so well. The game opens with striking visuals: the backdrop of Empire Bay (Mafia's stand-in for New York City) is packed with World War II-era details, and the characters are authentic-looking, with a veneer of humanity. The nicely curated oldies soundtrack promises to immerse us in the culture and spirit of the period. Mafia II has the production values that players interpret as signs of quality. What comes next is cognitive dissonance.

One of the unsung strengths of the Lego games is that their reductive approach to plotting allows them to skip or gloss over the weaker elements of their inspiration. In the case of Pirates of the Caribbean, that's several hours' worth of storytelling bloat - and at times, TT Games punctures it perfectly.