Latest Articles (Page 3131)

A US district judge has dismissed claims by a Los Angeles strip club that Rockstar Games breached copyright by designing a similar looking virtual strip club for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

What a difference a week makes. Even as I wrote an editorial last week on the topic of the forthcoming Games Convention event in Leipzig, encouraging the industry to support it on its own merits rather than comparing it to the self-defeating concept of a "European E3", a vote was underway behind closed doors in the United States on whether E3 itself was to continue to exist as the industry's biggest annual event.

At first glance, Shinobido is to Tenchu what Saint's Row is to Grand Theft Auto. If you ask Volition, GTA is a genre, and Saint's Row is a game in it. If you ask me, that's nonsense - but you can understand why they'd want to make the argument. GTA is a wonderful template with room for improvement. Tenchu, you're expecting me to say, is not.

What the crivens is this? A Pixar game-of-the-movie not based on familiar kleptomaniaical platforming jolliness? Currently number one in the nation's charts, you say? Outselling Grand Theft Auto while borrowing its sandbox game structure? Someone cancel E3! What? They did? Hurrah!

Eidos has revealed to our sister site, GamesIndustry.biz, that it is currently considering whether or not to take legal action over Lava Kroft - a new game from Singaporean publisher Ozura Mobile.

Nintendo has identified $49.99 as the potential price point for its first-party Wii titles, according to Electronic Arts executives.

SNK Playmore could wait as long as four years before releasing a PlayStation 3 game, despite having already pledged titles to Nintendo Wii.

NCsoft and ArenaNet hope to garner new interest in their non-subscription massively-multiplayer Guild Wars series with a new, shop-shelf "pre-release bonus pack" that's effectively a demo of the first two games and some bonus items for the new one. If and when etc. etc.

The building of Tilted Mill's new city-builder Caesar IV is ongoing, but you can see for yourself how it's shaping up with a new two-minute trailer showing on Eurogamer TV.

Remember that scene in Friends where Ross and Mike (Paul Rudd) decide to try and "bond" while Rachel and Phoebe go out on the semi-lash, and what actually happens is that they turn out to be so complimentarily tedious that they just end up picking at the labels on their beer bottles and making funny noises in an increasingly desperate spiral of shared silent embarrassment and terror?

Good news for fans of quirky Japanese RPGs - DS title Contact is to get a Western release later this year.

Avatar Films has teamed up with Sekretagent Productions to secure the movie rights to Cold Fear, Ubisoft's survival horror adventure for PC, PS2 and Xbox, according to Variety.com.

Capcom's much-heralded Xbox Live Arcade version of Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting has finally made it out today.

Super Smash Bros. won't be the only way to stand triumphant over your toppled friends waving the Wii remote control around - Midway's admitted that the next Mortal Kombat will appear on the new Nintendo console too.

Still playing PGR3? Fancy one of those spangly PGR3 faceplates, but didn't win one in last month's competition? Never mind - here's another chance.

You are not unique. In a world of six and half billion, individuality is an increasingly rare commodity. You think you're the only person reading this review in your underpants, idly digging out earwax as the sun's rays harshly penetrate the gaps in your threadbare curtains? There's someone doing the exact the same thing twenty miles away. You think you're the first person to add tomato sauce to your ice cream? Well, someone's already written the recipe book. That idea you had for the movie where the grieving inventor downloads his dead wife's soul into a giant robot and embarks on a road trip with his sassy ex-prostitute lawyer and her pet grizzly bear? Even I've pitched that one. You've got an undercover agent hidden in their midst. Guess what? They've got one in yours!

You've seen it a hundred times before: "the most authentic and realistic [insert topic] experience ever!" We all want that to be true, but know it's just a handy sound-bite to slap on the back of the box. Even with our cynic dials whacked up, we still hope that there's going to be gargantuan amounts of fun attached to all this realism.

Koei is planning to bring Samurai Warriors 2 kicking, screaming and swishing swords to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 2 this September - and the 360 version will feature a two-player versus mode over Live.

E3 is dead. Finished. Well, it's changing anyway - but who can resist a bit of summery hyperbole? Not us. Organisers the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) have decided to reshape it into something more intimate and less vast, expensive and sweltering. The result will be a show that still draws the industry together in Los Angeles, but "the emphasis will be on press events and small meetings between media, retail and development". You can certainly kiss goodbye to the phalanxes of booth babes, burgers and the bewildering sight of America's Army rolling around the entrance press-ganging the press gang into gawping at its hardware.

As promised, THQ has popped a Saint's Row demo up on Xbox Live Marketplace. It's 904MB (!), and available everywhere except Germany and - you guessed it - Mexico.

With summer eating us alive, attention's turning to the first delights of the upcoming third and fourth quarter release schedules - and Dead Rising is chief amongst the early feasts.

The Championship Manager rebuilding effort continues apace, as Eidos unveils the PC's 2007 edition - promising myriad improvements to interface, tools and accuracy when it comes out this autumn.

Midway has confirmed that Unreal Tournament 2007 is due out in, er, 2007.

It's looking like a bit of a slow day, so we thought we'd draw your attention to a few videos chucked up in the dying stages of last week - an overview trailer and four gameplay videos from Introversion's exciting-looking Defcon.

Ubisoft has signed up the latest Tokyo Xtreme Racer title, Shutokou Battle X, and plans to release it in Europe and North America later this year.

Irrational Games boss Ken Levine has revealed that one of the reasons there was no System Shock 3 is that "EA just didn't give a s*** about that game".

The Entertainment Software Association has confirmed that the E3 Expo will no longer continue to be the biggest event in the games industry calendar, revealing that a "more intimate" event is now planned.

Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores campus has a lot in common with Middle-Earth. All right, not a lot, but it feels just as expansive, and it's populated by at least as many men with beards.

By the DS' very design, it should come as no surprise that its games catalogue is such a hit and miss affair. So while developers with vision and know-how put the second screen, touch control and even microphone to great use to create original and compelling games, others often throw caution to the wind to simply try something new, seemingly without really thinking through whether it will even work or not. Guilty Gear Dust Strikers represents Arc System Works diving headlong in the second category on Sammy's behalf and within mere seconds of starting up the game, it's worryingly apparent that this isn't Guilty Gear as we'd like.

The UK's Association of Chief Police Officers has slammed Eidos's forthcoming Reservoir Dogs game for glorifying violence against police.