Latest Articles (Page 3261)

Out of all of Square Enix' impressive catalogue of RPGs, Kingdom Hearts ranks as perhaps the most surprising. Few fans could help groaning when the company announced that it was to create an action RPG mixing up characters from across the Final Fantasy series with environments and characters from Disney movies. Disney, after all, has a fairly unimpressive track record in videogames, and the company is noted for being incredibly precious about how its franchises are used. A tame, bland, kiddy-focused RPG seemed inevitable. Fanboys spat their derision on web forums the world over before the first screenshots had even appeared.

If you're going to try and compete in a genre as saturated as the sci-fi shooter, it's a good idea to make your game stand out.

Yoshi's Touch & Go isn't really worth buying at its current price. I know that's a bit of a downer to come in on, but the key point I want to make about is that it's easy to confuse why it isn't worth buying at its current price.

Guild Wars is my favourite game of the year so far, but I'll get back to that.

Bandai is to bring Tamagotchi to the Nintendo DS according to a posting on its Japanese website. It'll be out in September according to this page.

I'm on an epic quest. I mean that very seriously. This is a truly Epic Quest, deserving of not one but two capital letters. We're not just talking about personal revenge here, although there's a healthy dose of that involved, of course. No, this is altogether more serious. Someone's only gone and screwed up the natural balance of all creation. Ghouls walk the earth in a downright distressing way, places are getting firebombed left, right and centre, and there's a bloke with really, really bad fashion sense marching around in black armour, which can never be good. And who's got to clear up this mess? Muggins here, that's who.

It was a Star Wars one-two at the top of the UK games charts this week, with LucasArts' Revenge Of The Sith holding on for the fourth straight week, and Eidos/Giant's Lego Star Wars moving up two places to number two.

Koch Media has signed a deal with BattleBorne Entertainment to publish PC and console shooter Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers in Europe under its Deep Silver publishing label.

Bizarre Creations has revealed more details of Gotham TV, a new feature designed to enhance online play for Project Gotham Racing 3 on Xbox 360.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 will be priced at $299 when it hits shelves later this year, according to analysts at major investment bank UBS, with Microsoft subsidising each console to the tune of $75 in order to meet that price point.

Retailers struggling to deal with the poor supply of current-gen Xbox consoles could have more problems when the Xbox 360 launches later this year, according to UK Xbox boss Neil Thompson.

Not for the first time, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto - creator of Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong - has taken a pop at new-fangled games and the people who make them.

"Money-makin', money-money-makin'," a random MP3 just spat at me.

Two years is a pretty long time for PS2 and Xbox owners to wait for a conversion by anyone's standards, but Black Hawk Down appears to be one of those rare instances where it's worth the wait. Rather than just lovelessly shovel a straight-up conversion onto each system with all the compromises that go with that, NovaLogic has employed two separate UK studios to produce versions tailored specifically to each platform - both significantly different in approach from the PC original, it turns out.

Former Ion Storm COO Michael Wilson is taking book publisher Random House to court over allegations that a biography of id Software contains lies about him.

Following a bit of confusion over exactly which platforms Final Fantasy XII will be appearing on [grr, I said this would happen - Tom], Square-Enix has confirmed that it's a PS2 exclusive and slated for a European release next year.

Those who remember N64 shooter Perfect Dark with fondness may be interested to know that some new screenshots for the forthcoming Xbox 360 sequel, Perfect Dark Zero, have emerged on developer fansite Rare-Extreme.

While Sony's lawyers have been issuing Cease and Desist orders to UK online retailers who attempt to sell imported American and Japanese PlayStation Portables, the MD of one of the companies targeted claims that even Sony staff members have been buying import PSPs through his website - some of them using Sony company credit cards.

Speaking exclusively to our sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Dan Morelle - managing director of online store ElectricBirdLand - has claimed the European launch of PSP could be delayed as Sony has yet to register vital trademarks.

Blizzard Entertainment has reasserted its aggressive stance against cheating in its online games, permanently shutting down over 50,000 user accounts this week.

For a game that isn't even available yet, World of Warcraft is remarkably popular. Indeed, when Blizzard decided to open up beta applications to Europe earlier this year, the developer received ten times the number of expected sign-ups.

Blizzard likes to get things right. Whatever the game, if it has a Blizzard logo on the front end then the Californian developer won't let it out the door until it meets its own expectations - and frequently betters them. Indeed, only recently has the firm started to follow industry trends and farm out development of certain titles to other companies, and in doing so has been extremely cautious about who it works with, and equally mindful of their progress - you need only look at Starcraft: Ghost for evidence of that. So, in a sense, the "surprise success" of the American version of World of Warcraft - Blizzard's first MMORPG - has been nothing of the sort. The only disappointment, from our perspective, was that we were expected to wait several months longer in Europe than anywhere else in the world to get our hands on it.

Sony has made some free downloadable content available to owners of the American version of PSP racer WipEout Pure, which people who can access the Internet wirelessly may now get hold of through the in-game Download menu.

Forget Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Acid (reviewed here) has surely been the most divisive of Konami's recent forays into the world of Solid Snake. Loved and reviled almost in equal measure, it was nothing if not fascinating, strapping card game rules to a traditional Metal Gear scenario - with player and computer actions determined by the type of cards available at any given time. Speaking to Eurogamer at E3, director Shinta Nojiri (who, along with his Kojima Productions cohorts, can lay claim to the best business cards of the show, trivia fans) spoke about the game's development, its strengths, weaknesses, and of course the sequel, which had just been announced as we went into the interview. And we couldn't resist asking which of the new console systems at the show most impressed him, although his answer might surprise you. Read on.

More than three years after the game was first announced, Activision and Raven Software have revealed a few details of the latest instalment in the Quake series.

For those of you whose necks don't turn more than half an inch left or right of centre, and whose eyes tunnel straight to the point without worrying about what's going on in the periphery - in other words, for those of you who haven't bothered looking at the news column today - you'll be interested to learn that screenshots of both Quake IV and Half-Life 2: Aftermath have now emerged. One of each.

id Software has announced Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, a class-based PC multiplayer shooter that lets you choose whether to fight for Earth Defense Force or invading alien hordes, the Strogg.

The first details of Raven Software's plans for Quake 4 have snuck out this afternoon after subscribers to PC Zone in the UK and the American edition of PC Gamer received the latest issues of the magazine and scanned in screenshots and preview information.

Back in April, you may recall, Playboy announced plans to offer downloadable content for PSP - mainly comprising clips of a chesty woman dressed up as some kind of videogame heroine and going "Oooh yeah."

Team Ninja's Tomonobu Itagaki has revealed a few more details of Dead or Alive 4 for the Xbox 360 to Japanese magazine Famitsu, before going on to take a pot shot at his fellow developers.