Latest Articles (Page 2540)

Monster Hunter Tri's coming to European Wiis in April, and there will be three ways for you to buy the game.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said that development of Zelda games is traditionally "an exercise in suffering" - but recognised that one game in the series, made in a completely different style and atmosphere, had a major influence on those that followed.

Xbox Live developer NinjaBee has confirmed A World of Keflings will release this year.

Warner Bros. has sent word that LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1 - 4 will arrive here in May.

Back in the giddy early years of the British home computer revolution, like so many of my generation I was lured into the world of BASIC programming by the ZX Spectrum and those voluminous type-in listings from Sinclair User and Your Sinclair. My enthusiasm for coding petered out before my 12th birthday, but I did manage to save two wonky homebrew efforts to a C30 tape before my interest in the mystic runes of GOSUB and INKEY waned.

BioWare's galactic PC and Xbox 360 RPG Mass Effect 2 has entered the UK all-formats chart at number one.

Widower Courtney Love's changed her tune; she now reckons her late husband Kurt Cobain would have been okay with his digital likeness singing other people's pop songs in Guitar Hero 5.

The original Aliens vs. Predator has been updated to support Steam-powered multiplayer.

Mature games may be prohibited on Microsoft's new online PC and Xbox 360 platform, Game Room. To avoid laboriously rating hundreds of retro titles individually, MS has decided to classify Game Room itself. The ESRB has deemed the service suitable for anyone aged 10 or over, and any game falling within those perameters can be sold at publisher's and platform holder's leisure.

The PC version of the free Overwatch pack for Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is now available for download as a 244MB patch from publisher Codemasters' website.

Valve has announced that over 25 million people now own Steam accounts, while 10 million users also have Steam Community profiles.

Epic plans to reward the Gears of War 2 community for its loyalty with a special Valentine's Day event that increases bonuses for friends who work together in-game.

Bungie has said once and for all that Halo: Reach doesn't use Project Natal.

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has made a heartfelt apology for the delay to the Japanese release of the latest entry in the series, the PSP's Peace Walker.

BioWare has finally released the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the Return to Ostagar downloadable content for Dragon Age: Origins.

I've always been more concerned with improving my Street Fighter skills than keeping up with the latest Marvel or DC adventures, but when X-Men vs. Street Fighter hit the arcades - eventually evolving into the adrenaline-pumping Marvel vs. Capcom 2 - there wasn't a fighter fan in the land who could resist its crossover charms.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said he's not convinced that the new Apple iPad is actually going to be all that.

"Whether we were developing the game for Save the Children or a puppy-killing Evil Mega Corp is irrelevant to me." Ste Curran, creative director at Zoe Mode, is adamant. "I still want to make something that people think is awesome. The aim wasn't to make a game as a half-hearted thank-you to people for donating money to charity. It was to make a game that's worth every one of your 400 Microsoft Points, with the added warmhearted glow that comes with gaming philanthropy after purchase.

News over the weekend that iPhone hacker George Hotz has "hacked the PS3" has been met with shock, surprise and incredulity. Sony's console is undisputedly the most secure games machine ever made, yet Hotz claims to have achieved a full hack in just five weeks. PS3's security fail is generating incredible interest both inside and outside of the games industry, to the point where an interview he gave to the BBC became the most popular news story on the site last night.

In this era of ubiquitous online connectivity, finding a decent split-screen game is much harder than it used to be. Despite studios spending boatloads of cash on fashioning a fully-fledged online multiplayer experience, and despite them working with technologically advanced systems, good old-fashioned split-screen multiplayer appears to have fallen by the wayside.

There are few things in this line of work more beautiful than genuine enthusiasm. It inspires you as a writer - not quite so much as to fool you into giving a shoddy product a critical reach-around, but certainly enough to make you want to commend its creators for giving it a try. And when the enthusiasm accompanies a genuinely excellent piece of interactive craftsmanship, well, that's when you stop regretting the fact that you didn't get a real job with regular pay and overtime and superannuation and everything.

Spoiler alert: We've tried not to give much away here, but if you haven't finished ACII and don't want so much as a hint of what's to come, best come back when you're done.

"Playing this game is almost like taking a holiday from gaming," I wrote when reviewing the first Endless Ocean a couple of years ago. Nintendo and Arika's mild-mannered scuba diving sim was so dreamy, so dull, you could almost have called it the world's most involved screen saver. It seemed to be designed to fill the space on the TV when you didn't want a game to be there: it was pretty, relaxing, untaxing and completely unexciting. It was a lovely respite, but as holidays go, it was a few days on a good beach with a bad airport novel.

It's a classic Rockstar moment. The nocturnal calm is shattered by the shrieks of a prostitute bursting out of a saloon as a man chases her down and assaults her in the street. I move swiftly to her aid but, still acquainting myself with the controls, succeed only in kicking her in the face as she writhes helplessly on the ground.

In videogames, bigger has always equalled better. Marketing men spray ever-greater numbers at us like schoolboys competing to see who can pee furthest up a wall. 'Wonder at how many colours a Mega Drive can display!' they say. 'Marvel at how many minutes of cut-scene you can store on a PlayStation disc!' 'Quiver at the number of polygons that now comprise Lara Croft's cleavage!'

This week's biggie is Mass Effect 2, at least for those people that own a PC or Xbox 360. I'm not going to bang on about it, as we've done quite enough of that in our shambles-slash-podcast. Check out our 10/10 Mass Effect 2 review if you really must know more.

This week I was given the privilege of blasting a brand new Yamaha R1 around the Stowe circuit at Silverstone. Although it was on a cold morning where I couldn't get any heat into the tyres, for those brief 20 minutes of amateur riding I was reminded of all the reasons I love biking.

The cat's out of the bag. Apple's much-vaunted tablet isn't the premium-priced touchscreen MacBook that many thought it would be, it's a completely re-engineered bigger brother to the iPod Touch, running an enhanced iPhone OS and featuring brand new applications with a typically stunning user interface.

Namco Bandai has slapped a 16th April release date on its PS3 and 360 action game, Dead to Rights: Retribution.

It's easy to look upon the DSi LL with questioning eyes, but it would be wrong to claim that a fourth version of the same Nintendo handheld device is unprecedented. As illustrated by last week's Nintendo handheld retrospective, the humble Game Boy went through much the same thing.