Latest Articles (Page 3337)

No Pat, it's not a joke. Rare's GBA team is planning to turn out a puzzle game based on its Mr. Pants mascot at some point this year, with THQ on board to publish. Dubbed "It's Mr Pants", it's basically a retooled version of a game called DK Coconut Crackers, which appeared on Nintendo's E3 stand as long ago as 2001, then disappeared. Only now it has squiggly animations, crayon backgrounds and, er, Mr Pants sings the odd song between levels.

id Software's next game will be a first-person shooter with a single-player focus and a simple multiplayer component, engine supremo John Carmack told the audience at the annual QuakeCon event this weekend, also commenting on the new game engine and some of his aspirations for the project.

The Rock will not play the central role in the forthcoming Doom movie, id Software reps confirmed over the weekend, although it's possible that he will figure in some way.

Halo 2 will allow four people to connect to Xbox Live on the same Xbox at the same time. That's just one of many closely guarded details that a cheeky beta tester announced to Microsoft's Xbox.com forums last week before his posts were summarily deleted by moderators.

LucasArts has laid off a small team attached to the early stages of development on Knights of the Old Republic 3, according to a report on GameSpot, as part of what the Californian firm has described as "a major restructuring" of its development studio.

Empire Interactive has released a trailer of its forthcoming Starship Troopers game, in development at internal studio Strangelite. You can download the 40MB file from Eurofiles here.

Electronic Arts has secured the services of veteran dance and electronic music DJ Paul Oakenfold to contribute to its GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and FIFA Football 2005 games, the publisher announced this week.

Sports Interactive likes your face. The chaps in Islington and their friends at Sega Europe love it so much, in fact, that they want to put it in Football Manager 2005.

After a couple of successful turns at Earls Court alongside ECTS, Sony is planning to transplant its consumer PlayStation Experience showcase event to the Alton Towers theme park this September.

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Thanks to bubbles that pop (and probably terrorism), it's not uncommon for web journalists to feel redundant in this day and age. But even so, this column feels especially redundant today in its remit of providing buying advice to the EG-reading public. [Hang on. That's what this thing is meant to do? -Ed] Because, see, chances are that you're buying Doom III whether you're particularly interested in it or not. We actually bought it subconsciously and woke up covered in cacodemon bites this morning (it probably won't surprise you to learn that we sleep with pure evil). And, despite mountains of hype for id's long awaited FPS, we can't imagine there's an informed Xbox owner out there who isn't busy tracking down a copy of The Chronicles of Riddick at this point - it does more for the genre than the last few years of PC output cobbled together have managed. And it has a bald man with milk bottles on his face slapping Chesney Hawkes around in it. Who can match that?

Sega is planning to release Sonic Mega Collection Plus on Xbox in addition to the previously announced PS2 version. The original Sonic Mega Collection is already out on the GameCube, but it doesn't feature as many games as the 'Plus' edition. Xbox seems to have the same line-up as the PS2 SKU, but just to recap, players can expect to find the following titles on the disc: Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic Spinball, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, three Sonic lock-on games, The Ooze, Comix Zone, Flicky, Ristar, and six hidden Game Gear games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Drift, Sonic Labyrinth, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Sonic Blast. SMC Plus should ship in the US on November 2nd.

The Matrix Online developer Monolith Productions is to become part of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment after Warner Bros. exercised its option to buy the company. Terms of the deal, which will close on October 1st, were not discussed.

Security experts have quashed reports that a pirated mobile videogame was host to the world's first malicious mobile phone virus, after it emerged that the supposed 'Trojan horse' component was originally inserted as a copy protection measure by the game's developer.

The Getaway: Black Monday is still on track for a November release in the UK, a Sony Computer Entertainment Europe spokesperson confirmed this morning, despite news overnight that the game won't make it to the US until January 2005.

Iridion developer Shin'en Multimedia is working on a Nintendo DS title called Nanostray, judging by a product page on the German developer's website. Its set to be published by Majesco in Q1 2005. See that? Eh? That's a screenshot. Possibly several.

Konami is planning to release a special edition version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater alongside the vanilla version in Japan this October, according to the latest sales schedule from Japanese retailer Ichibankan.

In one of his trademark low-key, almost viral marketing-esque forum posts this week, Valve Software's Gabe Newell seems to have indicated that Half-Life 2 will begin preloading to users of the developer's content delivery service Steam as early as 17th August.

We've already seen one of the films he scripted make the jump from silver screen to games machine this week in Scarface, but now one of Oliver Stone's more contemporary productions - and something he directed - looks set to make the transition thanks to Ubisoft, which this week announced a PC real-time strategy version of his forthcoming film Alexander.

Perhaps inspired by Electronic Arts' decision to mine the timeless Godfather movies for a few videogame-related dollars, Vivendi-Universal Games has now announced its intention to make a third-person shooter based on 80s epic Scarface, in which you get to play as Al Pacino's Tony Montana - and probably mumble, "Say hello to my little fwren!" whenever you pull the trigger. And now, the leg.

Ubisoft has released slightly more information about Prince of Persia 2's vaunted Free Form Fighting System, including a video interview with creative director JC Guyet, which lasts just over three-and-a-half minutes and features quite a bit of gameplay footage. You can download the video interview from Eurofiles now, assuming 18MB isn't too much to ask.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has declined to comment on reports that a successor to first party survival horror title Siren is in development. According to various websites, the sequel to Siren - known as Forbidden Siren in Europe - will be unveiled in the next issue of Japanese games magazine Famitsu. If it is, we'll be sure to let you know. In the meantime, you can remind yourself about Forbidden Siren by reading our review here.

With Counter-Strike: Source rolling out at the various cyber cafés that make up Valve's Cyber Café Programme today, we thought you might find it useful to know that a number of these venues are dotted around the UK and Europe.

Publisher Majesco has told US website GameSpot that Oscar winning thesp Ben Kingsley has signed on to play vampire overlord Kagan in Uwe Boll's movie adaptation of BloodRayne.

Xbox Live owners can finally get their hands on downloadable content for Ninja Gaiden this week, as Tecmo's "Hurricane Pack Volume I" muscles in to swallow our bandwidth.

Activision's movie licensed Spider-Man 2 has taken the number one spot in the UK software sales charts for a fifth week, making it the title with the longest innings at the top since Need for Speed Underground last Christmas.

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Time is an abstract concept when there's work to be done. For example, take this feature. A whole hour has just disappeared into the ether in the blink of an eye counting the raindrops outside. By the time you've finished reading this sentence you'll probably have grown a beard. When there's work to be done and the deadline's looming, you can be sure some pesky officer of time has pointed his remote control at our faces and pressed fast forward while putting our hands on pause. Must. Break. Free. Actually, we blame Microsoft for sending us an early playable demo of its latest stab at platforming in the shape of Blinx 2.

The Army Men brand may well apply to the toy soldiers we played with for all of ten minutes at some point in our youth, but as we've grown older it's become far more synonymous with mediocre videogames. Ubiquitous and generally half-arsed, they became something of a joke amongst the hacks over the years, particularly with those who'd followed the franchise from the very start of 3DO's ill-fated plastic putsch.