Latest Articles (Page 3298)

Nintendo DS virtual pet title Nintendogs (known as Puppy Times in the States) will be released in Japan on 21st April in three different packages, each featuring five distinctive breeds of puppy. Players will be able to collect the other ten by linking up with friends' copies of the game.

One million units of the PlayStation Portable console will be made available to US retail for the system's March 24th launch, Sony has confirmed, allaying industry fears that as few as half that number could ship in the launch window.

Fans of The Sims 2 - and we understand a few people did buy it - will be pleased though totally unsurprised to learn that another expansion is planned to follow next Friday's release of The Sims 2 University. In fact, news actually comes to us from the back of University's American packaging, which declares: "BRING on the NIGHT! Send your Sims out for a night on the town in The Sims 2 Nightlife Expansion Pack. Will they stay out late on a romantic dinner date or dance 'til dawn at a nightclub? Find out what else the night has to offer starting Fall 2005!" EA has yet to respond to our requests for comment, but we weren't really that interested anyway if we're honest...

Japanese RPG giant Square Enix is set to branch out into yet another area of the media - with the launch of a new TV show on popular station TV Tokyo in early April, hosted by popular idol Yoko Kumada, called Heavy Metal Thunder.

Microsoft tells us that BioWare's Eastern-themed Xbox exclusive action-RPG Jade Empire will be released in standard and limited editions versions this spring, confirming US retail reports last month.

Sony Computer Entertainment has confirmed its Japanese ICO development team's second game, known to you and us as Wanda And The Colossus, will be released in Europe during 2005.

Manhunt was psychotic. Actually literally. Rather naughtily, it had you lurk in the shadows hesitantly, heaping on the tension by refusing (mechanically) to show you the whole threat, and then letting you drain the pressure at intervals through brutal, gruesome fell swoops that through their close-up framing and unpleasantly squishy sound effects gave the lie to any claim that it was about the play experience rather than the experience of, you know, carving people up. It was a murder sim, really, and a pretty morose one at that.

LucasArts president Jim Ward has said that he'd like to "reinvigorate the Indiana Jones IP," arguing that the whip-cracking archaeologist could become as recurrent a character as James Bond.

US rapper 50 Cent is set to star in a Max Payne-esque interactive odyssey through the criminal underbelly of New York City, judging by a computer-generated teaser trailer released on MTV.com this week.

It's a bad time to be a fanboy.

Xbox and PS2 action title Mercenaries has stayed in the number one place in the UK software charts for a second week, with the critically acclaimed title actually boosting its sales by 33 per cent over its first week on the shelves.

Hideo Kojima will make an appearance at HMV in Oxford Street, London next Wednesday to sign copies of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which is finally released in Europe this coming Friday.

Yesterday I described myself as a latent human being. (Something to do with discovering I had a front door at the age of 21.) Today I find myself writing about somebody of whom it's a pretty accurate description. Hyakkimaru was stripped of arms, legs, facial features and a good number of other things at birth for a total of 48 ransacked body parts. Blood Will Tell charts his blood-soaked odyssey to retrieve them from the demons that hoodwinked his opportunistic power-hungry father into signing them over in the first place.

They may not have escaped with enough gusto to avoid capture in every game they've featured in, but Sony's mischievous monkeys have certainly escaped generic classification over the past year or so, following up an enjoyable PS2 platform romp with an EyeToy title before popping up for a cameo in Metal Gear Solid 3, of all games, and now springing up in this - the first of what we reckon will be a good few mini-games packages for the PlayStation Portable.

Tecmo's charismatic Tomonobu Itagaki, head of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden dev studio Team Ninja, has taken a pop at Namco's Tekken series, describing the developers as "a pretty weird bunch", labelling the game "prehistoric" and even having a dig at spin-off title Death By Degrees.

Microsoft has confirmed that the Dead or Alive Ultimate tournament currently underway in the USA and Canada "will not be happening in Europe".

Sony Online Entertainment plans to release the first "Adventure Pack" for EverQuest II on 21st March, - an e-distributed expansion pack - featuring "countless hours of new content" in a new story-based realm beneath the surface of Norrath. And it sounds like a positively charming place, home to virtually every conceivable flavour of undead. It couldn't just be an underground car park or something.

Eidos has announced that Championship Manager 5, the publisher's first foray into PC football management since its split with Sports Interactive 18 months ago, will be released in the UK on 18th March and internationally on 1st April.

Clearly unfazed by EA's dominance of the genre and the toll its financial and marketing might has taken on its pursuers, Ubisoft has revealed that it plans to produce a number of sports games for current and next-generation consoles and PC.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said Nintendo needs to "expand the definition of games" to catch people's attention. He also spoke about new DS game concepts that will do that, writing in a comment steeped in the company's "Revolution" rhetoric for a Japanese website.

This 17th April, dedicated gamer and Eurogamer regular David "kincaide" Howlett is to repeat his feat of running the London Marathon, and we'd very much like you to pledge a few quid to help him achieve his target of £1500 sponsorship money for the Vision Charity, which raises funds to help blind, visually impaired and dyslexic children. You can sponsor or pledge money on David's fundraising webpage here.

Sony is reportedly working on a trio of PlayStation Portable titles for release in Japan this May. The first of these is Gagharv Trilogy: A Tear of Vermillion, the follow-up to December's Gagharv Trilogy game on the same format. We suspect there may be another yet to come. The second, from Now Productions, is called Intelligent License and is an IQ-measuring puzzle game, which, in making its calculations, presumably overlooks the fact that the player spent 30 quid on a service freely available to anybody who can type "IQ test" into Google. The third, meanwhile, is a first-party horse-breeding game called Derby Time, although we would have called it "NeighneighneeeeeiiiiiEEEEEEEEEEEE! Slump. Flick. Drag. Aaaaah."

There's doubly good news for fans of Football Manager 2005 this evening as Sports Interactive and SEGA have just announced that next Wednesday, 2nd March, will see the release of the game's final patch along with a substantial free data update.

17 years ago, Uematsu wrote the score for a NES role-playing game being developed by Japanese publisher Squaresoft. Final Fantasy went on to become one of the industry's biggest selling franchises - and Uematsu became one of its first musical stars.

Atari has signed on to publish Quantic Dream's PlayStation 2 and Xbox title Fahrenheit after the game was seemingly dropped by previous publisher Vivendi. The developer's crime-thriller is due out in September.

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last 15 years, there is a very good chance that have played it at some stage. Super Mario World was a launch title for the SNES, and easily the best game available at launch.

Massively multiplayer game specialist Funcom has announced that the free version of its online RPG Anarchy Online is set to feature dynamic in-game advertising billboards, thanks to a new deal with Massive Incorporated.

Nintendo has begun a Japanese nationwide test of its content download service for the Nintendo DS. Taking advantage of the handheld's onboard wireless networking capability, the service will allow gamers to wirelessly download demos and bonus game content from special kiosks in locations all over Japan.

News Corp sources have today flatly denied that the company is in any kind of buyout talks with Eidos, despite several sources from within the British publisher this week boasting that a deal between the two companies was imminent.

Specialist RPG developer Troika Games has shut its doors, with final confirmation of the closure coming from co-CEO Leonard Boyarsky after weeks of industry rumour-mongering about the fate of the studio.