Latest Articles (Page 2796)

A warning to all trend-conscious Wii owners: rubbishy mini-game compilations are so last season. The latest fashion for autumn Y2K8 is rubbishy driving games, preferably with a futuristic twist. Or so suggests the latest pile of wretched old tat to land on my desk, of which 75 per cent consists of rubbishy driving games. Two-thirds with a futuristic twist.

Microsoft has ruled out a price cut for the Xbox 360 in Europe in light of significant movement in the US, where the Arcade, Premium and Elite models are all reduced as of 5th September.

Nippon Ichi is busy making more Disgaea for PSP following the runaway critical success of tactical RPG Hour of Darkness.

Harmonix and MTV will charge 400 Microsoft Points (GBP 3.40 / EUR 4.80) to transfer 55 on-disc songs from Rock Band 1 into Rock Band 2.

Activision Blizzard has announced that Call of Duty: World at War will be released in the US on 11th November for PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PC and DS.

Take-Two has sold over 10 million copies of Grand Theft Auto IV to shops around the world.

Rockstar has punted Midnight Club: Los Angeles for PS3 and 360 and its little PSP cousin, LA Remix, a couple of weeks into the future in search of "a more favourable market window" in the words of CFO Lainie Goldstein.

Sony has or at least is updating the SingStar SingStore with a bunch of new downloadable songs today, according to Three Speech.

Nintendo has updated the Wii Virtual Console with four new games hot from a dusty Japanese shelf, where in some cases they have been lying around untranslated for over a decade. Yes, the Hanabi Festival continues! Dance! Rejoice! Pay inexplicable premiums!

EA has pulled the release of Dead Space forward another week in the US, and now plans PS3 and 360 releases on 14th October, followed by the PC version on the 20th.

What a relief. It makes a change to play a 2D platformer these days, rather than a 3D action-adventure set in a post-apocalyptic American city. There are no crumbling skyscrapers and fallen telephone poles here, just pyramids and pirate ships. Everything's pink and yellow, not grey and brown, and when you attack enemies they don't explode, they just get dizzy. The plot isn't about government conspiracies or science experiments gone wrong; it's about the kidnapping of some giggly pixies and a magic bag that never runs out of coins. It's a good, old fashioned run-and-jump-em-up, just like your Miyamoto used to make.

Afrika almost became king of the Japanese chart-jungle this week, but was beaten to the throne by quirky DS music game Rhythm Tengoku Gold (Rhythm Heaven here).

Sports Interactive plans to release brand new Football Manager games for PC and PSP on 14th November.

UK studio Traveller's Tales has insisted it will not "take the piss out of the consumer" in further expanding its licence-to-print-money LEGO mega-franchise.

Ninja Gaiden developer Team Ninja apparently has three action games ready to unveil at the Tokyo Game Show, which takes place in early October.

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the offbeat, offline MMO Saga of Ryzom was back from the dead, and former subscribers were being offered free VIP access.

Fans of The Saga of Ryzom, the unusual science-fantasy MMO created by the Nevrax studio in France, have been informed via a newsletter that the game is set to return.

The developer of the MMO Saga of Ryzom, Nevrax, will go into receivership in December, but officials from the company are confident the game will continue to be supported.

The DS version of Will Wright's galaxy-spanning evolutionary epic was always going to follow in giant footsteps, but there was no reason to think the game couldn't retain some of its creative sprawl when transitioning from PC to DS. After all, it's not like the diminutive handheld hasn't hosted similarly open-ended games in the past. Mix up Animal Crossing with The Sims and sprinkle on a dash of Nintendogs and you've got a winning recipe. Strange, then, that Maxis has instead opted to turn Spore Creatures into a frustratingly linear and repetitive action-adventure.

It's 10 years since Rare turned out the original Banjo-Kazooie on N64, in a blummin' marvellous platformer that rivalled Mario 64 in the gameplay stakes while charming us with the Britsoft studio's irresistibly quirky humour.

Ninja Gaiden developer Tecmo has rejected the takeover bid made by Square Enix, deciding instead to concentrate efforts on a possible merger with Koei.

Koch has clarified to Eurogamer that Sacred 2 will launch on 7th November across all three platforms: PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

You'd assume that a union of two cultural giants like Square Enix and Apple would be of such earth-shaking significance that it would buckle pavements, bring skyscrapers sighing to the ground, and trigger mass extinctions around the globe. But, as a downloadable iPod game, Song Summoner is not built with posterity in mind. Wisely, it's built with bus journeys in mind instead, and as such it will have to leave the pomp and circumstance for other titles. That's not to say Song Summoner is a bad game - it's actually quite a good one most of the time - but it is, by design, fairly slight, and it's also home to an uneasy mix of the gimmicky and the traditional.

The internet has spotted what appears to be a leaked list of upcoming Achievements for Halo 3.

Multiverse has announced plans to release an MMO based on tip-top TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sony will stuff more content onto the PS3 Store today, lead by a demo for exciting quad-bike racer Pure.

Microsoft has slashed the price of Xbox 360 in the US - meaning the Arcade unit is now cheaper to buy than a Wii.

The big questions. Sometimes we don't think of them in advance, so we end up with an oil crisis, a housing slump and Nicotine gum. Sometimes we don't ask the right people, so we end up being told this isn't a newsagent sir it's a chemist. And sometimes we don't spend enough time on the answers, so we end up going into games journalism.

At the heart of Spore, say some, lies a fascinating, amusing, baffling contradiction: you're the Creator in the ultimate God game, in which you can succeed by imposing your beliefs on others, and yet Maxis' universe - a convincing mishmash of procedural and many-user generated species - is, as the game puts it, "an epic journey of evolution". One tends not to get on with t'other.

Activision has announced that MC5's Wayne Kramer, Motorhead and The Sex Pistols have all re-recorded songs for Guitar Hero World Tour.