Latest Articles (Page 3337)

DreamCatcher Games has announced puntastic FPS expansion pack Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, and plans to release it "well in time for the holidays". According to today's press release, Battle out of Hell picks up where the gung ho shooter left off, and offers ten levels, new multiplayer modes, maps and models, "an amplified arsenal of un-deadly weapons", huge bosses and a Software Development Kit. Painkiller was released earlier this year on PC, and an Xbox version is due out in early 2005.

Valve Software boss Gabe Newell has revealed a few more details of the forthcoming Half-Life 2 in a post on a popular web forum - including the fact that the company is currently aiming to finish work on the title in August.

Ubisoft has released a fourteen-minute trailer of Gearbox Software's World War II first-person shooter Brothers In Arms, and if you were sceptical of the need for another WWII shooter when you first heard about the game, we recommend you give this a watch. It's doing stuff that none of the others have even attempted. The file's available right now from Eurofiles.

Hi, my name is Jay Wilson, I'm the lead designer on the upcoming RTS game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and this is my designer diary. The role of the Lead Designer at Relic is to be the gameplay "vision-holder" for a game, to work with the team to establish the gameplay vision of the game and then make sure that vision is maintained through the development of the project. I'm in charge of the design team, which means I'm supposed to make sure the whole thing is fun to play as well! Given that role, I'm probably the ideal person to tell you all how Dawn of War came to be, and our strategy in utilising the Warhammer 40,000 universe to make an awesome RTS game.

We're not going to talk about DRIV3R. We would, because it's obviously a very thorny subject on this here old Internet at the moment, but with so many top quality games out this week, there simply isn't space to waste on games we don't like. No, actually, that's not it. (This thing wouldn't be fun if we didn't do that.) It's more to do with the fact that we've already said, at length, why we wouldn't buy it and why we feel you shouldn't, and we'd far rather talk about games like Full Spectrum Warrior, Champions of Norrath and Ground Control 2 instead.

Tecmo is planning to update Ninja Gaiden via Xbox Live this August ahead of the second round of the Master Ninja Tournament. Interestingly though, there's no restriction on who downloads the freely available update, and as well as toughening the game up in some areas and adding new equipment, it also serves as something of a patch - giving players full 360-degree control of the camera, for instance, in light of critical response from reviewers and fans.

In a brief but tantalising announcement this morning, Pool Paradise publisher Ignition Entertainment has announced a deal with SNK Playmore to release Metal Slug 3 for PS2 and Xbox and Metal Slug Advance on the GBA in Europe this October.

Digital Jesters has released a multiplayer demo of Chaos League, giving players a chance to get to grips with French developer Cyanide's American Football-esque future sports title online, and announced a demo tournament with a prize fund of some £2,000 to run next month. The full game should be released in August.

A new job posting on Sony Computer Entertainment's Synthesis careers site indicates that the company has started recruiting a team to build a common network platform for its PlayStation home consoles and the PSP handheld.

Key US retailers GameStop and EB Games have updated their web stores to indicate that id Software's long awaited Doom III will be on shelves in North America on August 3rd, with a large banner on the GameStop site proclaiming the "just announced" date.

2D platformers. Back in 1996, when DKC2 first graced these shores (that's Blighty, by the way - I'm sure it came out in other places beforehand), the Super Nintendo was rife with the things. They were to that generation what third-person action games are to this; ubiquitous, varying in quality, largely the same sort of thing, and generally flawed in all the same ways. It was inevitable then, that when Nintendo decided to re-release 400 of them on the Game Boy Advance, we were going to get cross with one sooner or later.

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Codemasters has decided to get a handle on the Nokia N-Gage this year, announcing that one of its most successful franchises will be downsized to fit the Finnish hardware. Colin McRae Rally 2005 is in development at Ideaworks3D, and when it's finished we can expect both single-player racing modes ala the bigger console versions, and competitions and ghost racing via N-Gage Arena. CMR2005 is due out in the fourth quarter of 2004. If it proves popular, we can probably expect to see more Codies games on the format - we'd certainly be interested to see how management title LMA Manager translated...

UK catalogue retailer Index has slashed the price of the GameCube by 50 per cent as part of a sale promotion, and is currently selling the console for £39.99 in high street stores - but it will not be dropping the console from its range, according to Nintendo.

Vivendi has announced plans to release console, PC and GBA titles based on Twentieth Century Fox's latest computer animated film, Robots. Eurocom will be handling the PS2, Xbox, Cube and PC versions, while Griptonite Games will work on the Game Boy Advance version. All are due out in Q1 2005, presumably in time to coincide with the film's cinematic debut on March 11th.

Noritaka Funamizu, best known for working as producer on the seminal Street Fighter II, has left his role as boss of Capcom's Research and Development Division 1 unit to found a new independent development studio.

Unprecedented! Anyway, following Monday's splurge, here's another selection of recently submitted reviews from you lot. It was difficult to think of a decent prize for a while, then I stumbled upon Kristan's box of old review code, so I reckon we can just feed off that for some time. Free games! Hurrah. And for this week's retro-obsessed winner, a copy of Midway's Defender remake for the PS2 seems ideal. Check back next week for more reader reviews. (I know, I know - what are the chances?)

Codemasters plans to release TOCA Race Driver 2 on the PlayStation 2 this October, the publisher announced yesterday, presumably following the expiration of whatever deal was tethering "The Ultimate Racing Simulator" exclusively to Xbox and PC.

Electronic Arts has released a 10MB QuickTime format trailer for GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, which originally appeared on the publisher's enormous cinema-dwarfing wide display at the Electronic Entertainment Expo this May.

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NHL Eastside Hockey Manager will be released in Europe on July 2nd, developer Sports Interactive announced today, and will be made available both at retail and via digital distribution online. The developer and publisher Sega also plan to roll (or perhaps skate) the game to market in the Czech Republic in August, with a North American release planned for September.

Nihilistic Software has "completed its contribution" to Blizzard's StarCraft: Ghost, the developer confirmed in a statement this week, adding that the decision to withdraw was partly on account of the game's latest delay, and partly due to contractual obligations elsewhere.

Media empire Viacom is investigating the possibility of making money through advertising and product placement in videogames, according to a presentation given by CFO Richard Bressler at the Global Digital Summit.

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Much as we like our plasma and wide screen TVs around here (if and when Security lets us near them), we're still forced to measure things in inches. Stroll into an IMAX theatre though and it's all feet. Hell, yards. And the thought of playing games on a screen the size of a five-a-side football pitch fills us with the sort of joy usually reserved for, well, watching the Italians go out of Euro 2004 thanks to some mathematically improbable Scandinavian goalscoring. Tee hee!

Britsoft developer Climax has spoken out about the cancellation of Warhammer Online announced earlier this week by rights-holder and project partner Games Workshop. In a statement released late on Tuesday, CEO Karl Jeffery expressed sadness but admitted the firms had "little choice" following a review of the costs involved in bringing the game to market.

Valve Software head crab Gabe Newell has given us another update on the whole Half-Life 2 release date situation. Speaking in an interview with US site Home LAN Fed about the recently released 2D side-scroller Codename: Gordon, which is a free mod based on Half-Life and its as-yet unreleased sequel, said the game was "in great shape".

Vivendi Universal Games has announced that 350 staff have been laid off as part of the firm's restructuring efforts, representing some 40 per cent of its US workforce - with the toughest cuts coming at the Sierra operation.

The PS2 version of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow has helped propel the Ubisoft title back up to the number one spot (No.1 PS2, No.4 Xbox, No.10 PC, and No.18 GBA) - almost two months since it dropped from the summit after its initial Xbox and PC launch.

Disney/Square crossover RPG sequel Kingdom Hearts II will not appear until 2005, although GBA pseudo-sibling Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is still on track for release this year. That's according to the latest issue of Japanese Shonen Jump magazine, which also reports that developer/publisher Square Enix will be demonstrating the two games for the first time at a gathering in late August.