Latest Articles (Page 3162)

In the space of three home console releases, Tom Clancy's lone Special Forces agent has advanced the mechanics of a genre, coated it in incredible visuals and set a benchmark by which all stealth games are measured. Splinter Cell should never be mediocre; it should never be simply 'okay', it should never be anything less than fantastic. That's the bar it set itself, and that's the measure by which we judge all future iterations of the series. In that respect, Splinter Cell Essentials might come in the right packaging but it's not a Splinter Cell game.

Game Republic's quite busy, it seems. Yoshiki Okamoto's already said his Japanese studio's working on an unnamed Xbox 360 game, and now Famitsu's revealed that it's also handling the PSP version of Brave Story.

There's not long to go now until Sam Fisher's latest adventure sneaks out of the shadows, and judging by what we saw of Splinter Cell Double Agent recently it's shaping up really rather well.

Poor old Sam Fisher. Anyone would think the Splinter Cell developers don't like him much, judging by the amount of danger they've put him in over the last few years. And now things are about to get a whole lot tougher, since the latest instalment in the series, Splinter Cell Double Agent, is all about pushing Sam to his limits.

No change at the top of the charts this week, as Tomb Raider Legend clings on to first place for the third consecutive week, despite sales dropping by more than half over the Easter break.

Killer 7 creator Suda Goichi is working on a PlayStation 3 title called Kurayami, which means "Darkness" in Japanese.

Oblivion fans who've exhausted the Orrery quest and have had enough fun with their shiny horses can now get their hands on The Wizard's Tower quest.

Having made good on its promises of PGR3 and Kameo downloadable content, Microsoft's preparing to release a demo, some new multiplayer maps and some new bot personalities for Perfect Dark Zero.

Sony has released a US and Japanese firmware update for PlayStation Portable, adding support for Macromedia Flash 6 and Apple's AAC music format among other things.

(From the start, it's probably best to establish that this is a single-player review of World Poker Tour, despite its online capabilities. There are two good reasons for this. First, I played it on PS2 and I'm not a witch. Second, if you want to play online poker, there are ridiculous numbers of far easier ways to do it, with infinitely more appropriate interfaces, making the online options of WPT entirely defunct from the off.)

Fans of seesaw-based international conflict (and PC-based real-time strategy games) will be pleased to learn that there's a demo of Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War out at the moment - and on Eurofiles.

Discussing the impending launch of the Revolution console, Nintendo of America's SVP marketing and corporate communications, George Harrison, stressed the importance of third party publisher support.

Activision has signed key actors up to its new X-Men film tie-in, which is due out on May 19th on a whole host of formats including Xbox 360.

Game Republic is working on another Xbox 360 game, according to charismatic front man and former Capcom type Yoshiki Okamoto.

Eidos' World War II title Battlestations: Midway will debut on Xbox 360 and PC this autumn, the publisher's announced, while current-gen console title Urban Chaos: Riot Response has been given a solid release date of May 19th on PS2 and Xbox.

Polarium Advance is designed to be played every day. Not just "for as long as it's fun"; every day. The idea is to stick it in your GBA cartridge slot and turn it on every so often. Every day is filled with dead time; Polarium Advance's goal is to fill it. It's the Times crossword. It's a Sudoku puzzle. It's picking at the flap of your shoe. It's concentration and deduction rather than instinct, persistence or digital agility.

Those of you still undecided about Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter have another chance to try it out on Xbox 360.

Datel's announced a pair of Nintendo DS peripherals capable of running homebrew software applications.

Turbine's inviting MMO fans to try out Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach for seven days free of charge.

Microsoft is set to move the manufacturing of the Xbox 360's CPUs to a more advanced 65 nanometre process, and has signed a new agreement with Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor to build the chips using its advanced Silicon-On-Insulator technology.

Fire! Fire! Fire the developers responsible for taking such a promising premise (firefighting RTS) and turning it into such a mediocre game. Perhaps sacking is a bit harsh; Fire Department 3 does have its moments, but the problem is you are usually far too busy to enjoy them.

I'm going to prove that you're a really sick puppy: You want serial killers to kill again.

If you tried counting how many games Megaman has appeared in, your head would explode in a messy shower of pink goo. That's a fact. It's likely that not even Capcom knows exactly how many there have been, preferring instead to deal in highly technical terms such as 'shitloads'. And considering just how much Little Boy Blue puts himself about on the console scene, his strike rate is pretty low - for every truly great game that bears his name, there are at least five or six titles that try too hard to be 'modern', simply don't work properly or involve kart racing. One of the few current Megaman franchises that actually commands some degree of respect is the much-overlooked Battle Network series and while you'd have to be some kind of nutcase to have collected all five versions in little over four years (the last three having two versions a piece a la Pokémon Red/Blue), this DS debut for the series marks the perfect time to grab a piece of the action.

Vivendi's announced that you'll soon be able to trade drugs with your friends, ride around on speedboats and generally undercover it up in the world of Miami Vice on PSP.

2K Games' Family Guy game will put players in the shoes, nappies and fur of Peter, Stewie and Brian, apparently, each of whom will have his own storyline to work through.

When it comes to football management games, one developer is in a league of its own. Sports Interactive has consistently managed to enrapture a nation of armchair managers for over a decade via its Championship Manager and latterly Football Manager titles, with the domestic wreckage wreaked well-documented. That heritage has now been distilled, shrunken down and injected into the PSP, which if you think about it is the ideal format for the game.

That the Dreams development studio (the one set up by Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado) chooses to dust off Taito classics appears to be some sort of curiously sadistic plan to reinvent enduring properties and crush all of our hopes, dreams and memories in the process. Since it all kicked off last summer with Space Invaders Revolution, it's been a head-scratching, harrowing, depressing exercise in grave-robbing that seems to miss the point entirely. Both the Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble remakes were about as far from 'revolutionary' as you could possibly imagine - and the 2/10 spankings we dished out to both were being kind.

Who'd want to be a farmer? Foot and Mouth, Mad Cow, Bird Flu - these are only some of the epidemics that threaten them. Crop farmers aren't exempt from suffering either, as supermarkets demand the best quality produce at the lowest cost, while consumers bitch about pesticides and genetically engineered food.

MMORPGs are comfortably the most hated of games for a reviewer to critique. This is partly because, even if you do spend one whole month of your life playing solely this game (during which time you can earn no money from other work to feed yourself or your family) everybody that is currently playing the game moans and bitches that you haven't played it enough yet and it's only 600 days in when your ninja character with thief sub-job reaches level 75 and completes his set of AF armour that the game really begins to make sense.

Konami's confirmed that the next Castlevania DS game will be called Portrait of Ruin, and that it's due out this November - lending credence to a release schedule uncovered last week that listed a number of new, unannounced games from the Japanese publisher.