Latest Articles (Page 3177)

Some people insist that you make your own luck in this life. If that's the case then poor Max Payne is a supreme architect of ill fortune; a man so down that you wonder why he even bothers getting up in the morning. Welcome back, Mr grim, we've missed your constipated grimace.

For all the emotional hand-wringing over Manhunt's gratuitous violence and total absence of morals, it's actually quite a simple game - and not one with a great deal of longevity either.

The leafy avenues and posh boutiques of Windsor are a far cry from the grimy streets of 1930s America, but lurking in an unassuming office block hidden behind the shopfronts and narrow cobbled alleyways is the UK front for Take 2 Interactive. When our man on the inside suggested we drop by to check out the latest build of Mafia, it was an offer we couldn't refuse...

One of the many computer games companies to emerge from the former Soviet Bloc in recent years is Illusion, who scored the Czech Republic's first big international hit with their World War II tactical combat game "Hidden & Dangerous".

If ever there were ever a reason to ban porting PC games to consoles, Mafia is the textbook example. Having already suffered the indignity of a less than impressive PS2 port, we held out one final hope that Illusion Softworks would use the extra power and similar architecture of the Xbox to produce the definitive version of this oft-misunderstood game. Instead what we've ended up with is a six month-late conversion that to all intents and purposes is functionally and technically identical to the scarily compromised PS2 version that disappointed us so mercilessly earlier this year.

I have a confession to make - I'm a gangster movie fanatic. Anything from Hollywood classics like Goodfellas and Donnie Brasco to oriental films like Sonatine and the Young & Dangerous series finds a special place in my heart (and my DVD collection). On the face of it then, Mafia should be the perfect game for me, melding an excellent prohibition era storyline with third person action, a wide range of driveable vehicles and a whole city for players to explore. Unfortunately, while it's a great concept, the implementation is lousy.

Like everything else Illusion Softworks is responsible for, Mafia is a flawed classic. For many, the ever-present niggles and frustrations are too much to bear, and they'll shout from the rooftops about how much they despise it. You never have to look too deeply to recognise the fundamental design issues that conspire to ruin its chances of being remembered as a masterpiece. So how is it that an equally vocal band of loyal supporters rank this mission-based driving epic amongst their favourite ever games? Is it the grand cinematic atmosphere, or are they just blind in their praise and more forgiving than a priest?

Order yours now from Simply Games.

Games often affect us in strange ways. Tetris changed the way we organised things in our car boots, Gotham left us veering dangerously close to parked cars for fear of losing Kudos, and, today, Full Spectrum Warrior has us throwing ourselves up against the corners of walls, and judging everybody we meet based on how much cover they have [I still got a headshot -Ed]. It's just as well we don't buy into the whole gang culture thing that's quite prevalent down our way, or we might be writing this review from a hospital.

Order yours now from Simply Games.

Order yours now from Simply Games.

It's hard to figure out what's more hellish. Being trapped indoors on a hot, sticky, humid London summer day at 32 degrees C, fighting off your body's desire to dissolve into a pool of salty ooze, or being trapped on a base on Mars in the future, fighting off an endless respawning succession of Satan's minions. The fact that we had to do both at the same time in order to get a review out on time simply made the experience all the more authentic. In our spare time, we sin for fun, so hell seems like our natural home; it's like playing tourist to your future.

Mario Kart has always been the king of kart racers. Having played the DS version via Wi-Fi Connect the other day, and now Crash Tag Team Racing, we can confirm that this is not something which is about to change.

We've come a long way in the eight months or so since we last played Conflict: Desert Storm on the PS2. We've seen a few more tactical action titles come our way - some succeeding admirably, and others flopping pathetically. Conflict always sort of sat somewhere between the two, but hopefully the long-coming GameCube port can resurrect our faith.

It's tricky to pinpoint exactly what makes a good tactical action shooter. Is it the tension as you guide your troops into hostile environments, completely outnumbered with the odds against them? Is it the ability to command like a professional and think on your feet instead of watching the action from afar? Or is it the sheer excitement of sweeping through the most closely guarded enemy installations without making a sound? In an ideal world, a good title has an excellent command of all of these and then some - how about Conflict: Desert Storm?

Microsoft has launched a new feature on Xbox.com that allows you to manage your friends list on your PC.

A month after losing his Enzo Ferrari in a crash on a Californian highway, former Gizmondo executive Stefan Eriksson has been forced to say farewell to another luxury car after police impounded his Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren.

Videogames never cease to surprise. If before playing this you asked me to bet what I thought my introduction would contain, I'd have put serious money on some manner of the usual leftist pinko Guardian reading nonsense that Walker and I end up crowbaring into our reviews much to everyone's embarrassment. Evens odds on it featuring the line "We'll stop putting politics into our reviews when developers stop putting politics into their games". But no.

The point's been made before on these pages, but OutRun2 draws it out again: SEGA is brilliant at five-minute racing games.

Our old pal Beowulf is finally set for a comeback! Having bided his time a bit for the last 1000 years or so, he's about to make a bloody splash in 4HEAD Studios/3D-IO's forthcoming next-gen action-adventure.

Got Quake 4? Planning to install the new beta patch 1.1? Well, er, DON'T, unless you want to risk messing up your PC.

Nintendo Power magazine is hinting at a new Castlevania game for the DS.

Sony plans to leverage hip-hop's fourth core to support PlayStation 2 and PSP owners who "can't stop freezing".

Blizzard has issued a new patch for World of Warcraft which will bring weather effects to Azeroth for the first time.

Microsoft has released a new set of stats for Xbox Live which reveal that gamers have spent more than 1.5 billion hours online since the service launched in November 2002.

Four games in the same series within five years is likely to prove a test for even the most ardent fan's enthusiasm, but it's not much of one for Capcom, which has been testing the laws of diminishing returns for as long as we can remember, and does so again here with an extensive but no-frills update to its hackandslash series.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, RedOctane CEO Kelly Sumner has admitted that the eagerly awaited Guitar Hero is likely to be in short supply when it launches in Europe next month due to manufacturing constraints on the innovative guitar controller.

SEGA's bringing its Japanese PS2 football management game with the brilliant name - Let's Make a Soccer Team! - to Europe. No word on when yet, but there are screenshots and of course some factimajigs for budding touchline masticators to grind their brain-jaws over.

Just in case you missed it during the rush of news that, well, emerged from the Game Developers Conference last week, Ritual's said that SiN Episodes: Emergence will be released via Steam and possibly retail in May.

As the Nintendo DS Lite continues to prove hugely popular with Japanese consumers, Nintendo has announced plans to step up production of the redesigned handheld.