Latest Articles (Page 3074)

As promised, Xbox Live Arcade fans can now get their mitty little grubs on this week's shoot-'em-up spectaculaaaar, Assault Heroes.

Electronic Arts has snapped up the rights to publish Sony Online Entertainment's PlayStation 3 launch title Untold Legends in Europe.

Guess what! Grandparents and baby boomers want tech products like Nintendo DS for Christmas, according to research commissioned by, er, Nintendo.

Reviewing add-on packs is always problematic. This one's thrown up special ones all of its own.

Funcom has started work on an Xbox 360 version of massively multiplayer title Age of Conan - The Hyborian Adventures.

Ubisoft has announced that another game in its CSI: Crime Scene Investigation adventure series, called Hard Evidence, will be with PC owners in spring 2007.

Interplay reckons that flogging some stock will help it finance a 75-million-dollar massively multiplayer game based on the Fallout RPG series.

With most shops already stocking little but air where their Nintendo hardware should be, the Japanese firm is silencing critics with its impressive sell- through, with both the shiny new Wii and the loveable DS Lite being about as easy to track down as hen's teeth this Christmas. So with the installed base of the DS flying up faster than Sony would like, we look to next year with just one word on our collective minds - Pokémon. Diamond and Pearl are undoubtedly the most anticipated portable titles of 2007 and we've spent the last few months ploughing through the Japanese versions to give you the low- down on just what to expect come Easter. Or whenever the hell Nintendo decides to let us have the games in English. Maybe next Christmas. We just don't know. But every day that passes without this game makes us a little bit sadder.

SEGA has revealed that Totally Games is developing a modern day version of old-days arcade title Alien Syndrome for Nintendo Wii and PSP.

Low budget film guru Roger Corman famously boasted in his autobiography that he made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime. He pulled off this impressive feat by using bigger movies to gauge what people were interested in, and served up more of the same, only faster and cheaper. When Spielberg made Jaws, Corman produced Piranha. When Star Wars exploded, Corman brought out Battle Beyond The Stars. When Jurassic Park dominated the box office, Corman gave us Carnosaur.

Whilst working through the first few levels of Red Steel, I kept being reminded of GoldenEye, and I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't the weapons, it wasn't the excellent level design (unfortunately that's something Red Steel cannot boast), it wasn't similar environments or familiar set-pieces or anything else immediately obvious. Then, suddenly, I realised that it was because it looked like GoldenEye - these were the same blocky characters, fuzzy textures and juddering framerates as I was seeing in 1998 with my N64 running through a blurry old RF lead. Obviously it's not quite as bad as that, certainly not when you remember to switch the Wii into 480p mode, but Red Steel's sheer ugliness is immediately and continuously noticeable. It looks half-finished, like a work-in-progress, linear levels punctuated by story-board sequences of stills that try to pass themselves off as cut-scenes.

It's not too difficult to understand why people like to ride rollercoasters. An illusion of danger is always addictive, as is the thrill of being thrown from axis to axis, brain sloshing as it bats away fight/flight conundrums from a spitting adrenal gland. Indeed, blurrily glimpsing your own high-speed death with nothing but a taut plastic harness and the promise of a flimsy hotdog bought from a man in a chicken suit on the ground for comfort, helps sharpen life's focus.

MotorStorm developer Evolution Studios is putting plans in place for PlayStation 4 development, according to chief executive Martin Kenwright.

Wanako Studios' Assault Heroes will be this week's release on Xbox Live Arcade, going live tomorrow after 8am GMT.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for Nintendo DS will be released on 15th October 2007 in the US, according to a report in US magazine Game Informer.

Reports from magical lands off beyond the seas suggest that Nintendo has quietly upgraded the flimsy Wii remote strap without telling anyone.

FIFA '07 is number one in the all-formats chart for a third week running, having seen off rival PES6 once again and beaten launch titles for Nintendo's new Wii console.

Microsoft has officially launched XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Creators Club, and announced a game design competition that will see one lucky person's creation published on Xbox Live Arcade.

Nintendo's official UK magazine has revealed that Gunstar Heroes, Super Contra, Super Castlevania IV and the TurboGrafx-16 version of R-Type will be among this month's Virtual Console releases for this territory's Nintendo Wii Shop.

I think I may have just played the most pointless and gratuitous game in the history of mankind. I say mankind, because, like, only men could make a game where the sole point of it is stooping to pitiful and pathetic levels of digital voyeurism.

Nintendo and Chart Track have confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that the Wii has become the fastest-selling videogames console ever, with 105,000 systems already sold.

Dragon Quest IX will be a Nintendo DS title, and is due out sometime in 2007, Square Enix has announced in Japan.

Valve has come up with a neat way for Steam users to introduce their friends to new games: they're going to, er, let Steam users introduce their friends to new games.

My name is Isobel. On Saturday I went to the zoo with my Daddy and Liam who is my brother. I don't think Daddy really wanted to go but he smiled a lot when he was there.

Microsoft has announced the "Xbox Live Arcade Challenge", set to run between 17th and 30th December, which will see players competing in Lumines Live! and Small Arms for big-screen televisions, Xbox hardware and other prizes.

You've probably scrolled down to the bottom of the page to see what score I've given it already, haven't you? Thought so. And if you haven't, you'll probably buy Sim City 4 regardless of what I've given it anyway. That's why Sim City is an important franchise. I'm sure you all realise this, and Maxis would have been fools to ruin it now. You'll be relieved to hear that they haven't.

Who would've thought there was still this much mileage in the 2D scrolling beat 'em up? Honestly. Anybody with more than five or six years of gaming pedigree will immediately recognise the model: little man walks from left to right kicking and punching other little men, occasionally battling a larger man and growing in strength and ability along the way. Apart from a few high platforms and a double-jump ability, on the surface this could be Final Fight. But while others are still unashamedly churning out that sort of game (Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake project springs to mind), it's taken beat 'em up masters Capcom to truly reinvigorate the scrolling beat 'em up, with simple, addictive gameplay, a combo system of untold depth and some of the most gorgeous cel-shaded visuals ever entrenched on a disc. But more on those later.

Although Activision will tell you that Tony Hawk's Underground (or THUG) is more than just the fifth Tony Hawk title in as many years, these days Neversoft's extreme sports skating franchise operates on much the same terms as any other sports game - you get a new version every 12 months and it'll probably have enough gimmicks and marketing devices on top of last year's feature list to hook you in. THUG is no different, offering more customisation options, more game modes, more online options and more tricks whilst relying on the same core technology and gameplay and arguably moving further sideways than it does forwards. Then again, that's kind of how skateboards work...

Though Maxis' post-release support for Sim City 4 was initially poor (the promised multiplayer facility took months to appear), the game was eventually patched with bug fixes, performance improvements and features that would have been nice out of the box. But is Rush Hour, potentially the first in a line of SC4 expansions, enough of a game out of the box, a glorified patch, or just an excuse for EA to print some more shiny DVD covers and banknotes?

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