Latest Articles (Page 2691)

Former World of Warcraft lead designer Jeff Kaplan told a Game Developers Conference audience last week that, on average, 16.6 million quests are completed on WOW's North American servers every day.

Disney is making a G-Force game to launch alongside the big-screen animated film this July.

At his talk at last week's Game Developers Conference, Namco Bandai's Keita Takahashi revealed that he intended his first game, cult hit Katamari Damacy, to be a comment on consumer culture.

Working for Electronic Arts since John Riccitiello returned "feels good", according to DICE creative director Lars Gustavsson, and the chief executive's focus on quality over quantity is "definitely the right direction".

After watching and reading about Volition's Red Faction: Guerrilla earlier this month, you could be forgiven for turning your nose up at Battlefield: Bad Company 2's "Destruction 2.0". It goes further than the first game's technology, allowing you to flatten whole buildings, but it rather pales next to the insane calculations going on in Guerrilla, where legend has it that designers had to be given structural training because their unrealistic buildings kept falling down under the weight of real physics.

Rising Star has told Eurogamer that PSP sequel Valhalla Knights 2 will be released here on 25th May.

gPotato has announced that it has opened pre-registration for the closed beta test of its new free-to-play arcade MMO for PC, Dragonica.

While most of the digital distribution plaudits routinely go to Valve's Steam platform, with its unrivalled catalogue of modern games from a raft of supposedly competitive publishers, retro-minded PC gamers could do worse than switch their attention to GOG.com every now and then. Run by the same mother-company that houses The Witcher studio CD Projekt RED, GOG.com reworks old and relatively recent PC games like Duke Nukem 3D, TOCA Race Driver 3, MDK and Fallout 1 and 2 so they work on Windows XP and Vista, and distributes them DRM-free for cheapo prices.

Over at Digital Foundry, we often like to take a hardcore look at new technology, and worthy of our attention is Crytek's CryEngine 3 trailer, released during GDC. We've prepared an annotated video that you'll find embedded below. There is a lot to discuss (so be prepared to pause the video to read the comments!) and if the technical terms confound and confuse, take a trip to Wikipedia or just sit back and enjoy the shot.

Resident Evil 5 has held on to the UK All-Formats chart top spot for the third week running.

Now that Darkfall Online is actually out (albeit still somewhat elusive), the mantle of world's most delayed MMO must pass to the Korean massively multiplayer FPS, Huxley.

It may be back from the dead, but the prospect of a full-scale Marvel superheroes MMO is a long way off, according to GamesIndustry.biz.

Square Enix has said FFXI mini-expansion A Crystalline Prophecy - Ode of Life Bestowing will launch on 8th April.

Genre mash-ups are nothing new, of course. Many games attempt to drum up interest by splicing the popular elements from different gaming styles, and the result can either be refreshing or desperate, depending on how compatible the transplanted parts are. However, few mash-ups are as ambitious, or as acronym-unfriendly, as Battleforge. Borrowing bits and pieces from World of Warcraft, Warcraft III and Magic: The Gathering, it's the first ever massively-multiplayer online real-time strategy collectible card game. Call it an MMORTSCCG, if you must. Just don't blame me if you cough up a hairball trying to pronounce it.

BioWare showed GDC crowds two videos of Mass Effect 2 gameplay and unveiled the first details of the space opera sequel.

Oblivion and Morrowind lead designers Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson have opened up and talked about their current RPG project in development at Rise of Nations studio Big Huge Games.

CCP has announced the dates for the sixth annual EVE Online Fanfest convention.

Eidos's shareholders have voted by an overwhelming majority to accept the bid by Square Enix.

Rockstar has sorted out Midnight Club: Los Angeles' South Central expansion and uploaded it to Xbox Live.

Seems the iPhone is really is the flavour of the month with, well, everybody, but especially eccentric Japanese videogame creators. Hideo Kojima told the aduience at an Apple Store signing during last week's Game Developers Conference that he is thinking of following up Metal Gear Solid Touch with another iPhone game.

Side-scrolling shooter Alien Hominid HD will be available for half the usual price on Xbox Live Arcade this week.

During a Dead Rising 2 session at GDC last week, Capcom quietly and perhaps accidentally revealed that the zombie hack-'em-up will include multiplayer.

Guerrilla Games says patch 1.21 will go live for Killzone 2 this week.

Bad news for those looking forward to the release of Braid for PC tomorrow - it's been delayed.

Does anyone remember Greenclaws? He was a corpulent, anthropomorphic maggot beast, reminiscent of the protagonist from Fat Worm Blows a Sparky, who hung around with a retarded woman and a mechanical owl on his own TV programme in the late 80s. Each episode involved a contrived disaster, which forced the couple to open Greenclaws' box of special magic seeds, selecting a gaudy, intriguing little kernel and germinating it over the course of the show inside a hollow tree. At the end, the tree would open and there would be a plant inside, invariably bearing crushingly disappointing fruit, such as shoe polish or dusters. I think once it was cake, but it was carrot cake, so it doesn't count.

Despite being one of the most recognisable names in gaming, there's a sense in which the Final Fantasy moniker can do as much harm as good to a new game. The words call to mind images of interminable, winding adventures, capricious random battles, protracted cut-scenes, juvenile philosophising and hermaphrodite heroes. As a result, Square-Enix's increasingly regular habit of slapping the brand on products that have little resemblance to their flagship series risks seeing these games dismissed by swathes of gamers. How many readers chose not to click on this review simply because it bears the words "final" and "fantasy" and so couldn't possibly be relevant to them, for example?

Games can be a cruel medium. There aren't many other things in life that so encourage the donning of the rose-tinted spectacles, yet which have progressed so rapidly as to render our memories naught but cruel twists of hindsight. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a member of the camp that thinks retro's place is under the stairs, but revisiting an old classic often serves to remind that we've moved on, in much the same way as trying to entertain yourself for an hour with a stick and a puddle.

Never mind Bad Company - welcome to Dimwit Company. Nobody's talking to one another - hardly surprising, since the guys to either side of me are Italian, French and Spanish - and once the landing craft hit the beach, we've all regressed by about seven years. Italy's landed a biplane upside down on an anti-aircraft gun, and I'm stuck fast in a trench. In a tank.

Hot on the GDC-heels of award-winning independent games comes a batch of creations from the Experimental Gameplay Sessions.

NCsoft - or, we should say, NCsoft West - is in a rather odd position with Aion. Its first major MMO launch since the ill-fated Tabula Rasa has already debuted in Korea, and is proving to be a major draw. The company isn't talking total player numbers, but not long after launch it saw a peak concurrency (number of people online simultaneously) of 200,000, a huge headcount by anyone's standards.