Latest Articles (Page 3348)

Interplay's not-altogether-brilliant-but-quite-enjoyable-in-a-hackyslashy-sort-of-way Xbox title Hunter The Reckoning is set to relaunch on Xbox this May priced £19.99, giving those of you who ignored it the first time around a chance to pick up on it - that is, if you fancy the idea of hacking away at the undead with groups of friends. Also arriving on budget at the end of May is another Interplay title - survival-horror-in-space Run Like Hell, which boasts a bunch of new features (aside obviously from improved graphics) in its Xbox incarnation.

The camera always lies. If it's not making us look like the latest zombie half-breed candidate for www.ishaggedaminger.co.uk then its mood swings bizarrely round to the other flattering extremes. What a lovely backhanded compliment it is when someone says you're photogenic, when what they really mean is 'you don't look anywhere near as good as that in real life'. Sigh. Project Zero 2, for us, merely reinforces the principle that some things in life really shouldn't be photographed.

Movie licenses generally don't do much for, well, anybody with any knowledge of movie-based videogames, but every once in a while we do come across an exception to the rule, and judging by the preview code we took on last week, Van Helsing could well prove to be one of those exceptions.

Prepare to kick open doors and bring down terrorists and other wrongdoers whilst pretending to be chain-smoking and boozing Irish actors! That's right, folks, Vivendi has announced SWAT 4, the latest game in the tactical PC FPS series, currently in development under the madly tapping fingers of Tribes Vengeance scribes Irrational Games, and due for release in Q1 2005.

Sitting down with Carve, it's hard not to recoil at the sheer naivety of it. It's a very pretty game, it's easy enough to pick up, and it has an extremely well implemented online mode, but it's going to sell about four and a half copies (this being the half), and given Take-Two's royalty-only deal with developer Argonaut, that's not going to carve the mustard. Which is a shame, really, because everybody ought to own one good jet-ski game, and Carve is highly polished and enjoyable and challenging enough to last you the best part of a weekend. At £15-20, surely that isn't a bad deal?

Lots of delays to take note of today, most notably Reflections/Atari's DRIV3R on PS2 and Xbox, which has reportedly tumbled three weeks from June 1st to June 21st on both formats (the PC version is due out sometime later, and the Cube one was canned). Obviously it's not the end of the world, but it's worth noting anyway for any Tanner fans planning to take some time off to accommodate it...

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has officially announced plans to release Gran Turismo 4: Prologue Signature Edition next month priced £24.99 (about €37). The game will be made available in limited numbers across Europe, but sounds like a must for Gran Turismo fans eager to get a taste of the forthcoming fourth title in the driving simulation series.

Fighting fire with fire. Sometimes it's the only thing to do when a game turns up the heat on its customer and decides to do everything it can to pour cold water all over your fun.

The noble art of the button-mashing hackandslash - an ancient art almost as old as old as gaming itself. Plug in joypad, turn on console, disengage brain, mash those buttons until you can see the dents coming through your nails. Perfect after a hard day of soul crushing desk job brain death. Ok, so maybe it's not quite that simple, but Starbreeze's obscure recent release Knights Of The Temple presumably aims to be slightly more interesting than that.

Half-Life 2 - it's rare these days that we get to fire up a word processor to actually write something about the game, and not just the circumstances surrounding its ongoing development. However, amidst speculation that it might not even hit until 2005, and apparent confirmation that the adjusted "summer 2004" shipping target is more to do with development delays than the source code leak, we do finally have some new screenshots to digest, and it continues to paint a pretty picture, even if it's starting to look a bit more like a real game and not some sort of magical voodoo concoction as it did when we first slobbered over it at the start of 2003.

Dualstar Entertainment, the company which manages twin teen celebrities Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, has filed a lawsuit against Acclaim Entertainment alleging that the publisher breached its contract to develop games based on the Olsens.

Yay Midway! After the original Shadow Hearts failed to capture the hearts of supposedly RPG-loving Judases and Landos up and down the land (come on! It was great!), we had very little hope of ever seeing the sequel here in Blighty, or even in the States for that matter. However, perhaps spurred on by the game's success in Japan, perhaps because of some unspoken love of Japanese developer Aruze, or perhaps because the people at the top are just plain friendly (though we doubt the last one), Shadow Hearts 2 is coming out in Europe - under the banner of Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Expect to see it in the shops in late autumn.

Publisher THQ has signed a deal which will see the it acquiring Vancouver based development studio Relic Entertainment, which is currently working on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War for the company.

According to senior UK sources, speaking under strict conditions of anonymity, British publisher Codemasters and UK development darling Free Radical are on the verge of sealing a publishing agreement regarding Second Sight.

So there I was, crouched down behind the banks of Kingsmill and Toffee donuts, just watching the trolleys zoom past. Up ahead was my prey - a wiry looking chap in a white fleece. It doesn't matter what his name was. It never did. He hadn't seen me; he was too busy ordering a double-cheese and pepperoni from the deli counter. I'd bribed the old woman to take her time, and she was earning every penny. I'd top her later to iron out the creases.

Following last week's news that Doom III Xbox would feature co-operative online play despite the lack of split-screen options, a series of screenshots of the Vicarious Visions-penned Xbox version have popped up this Wednesday, confirming something else that our sneaky source in the States told us: that it's "very, very faithful to the PC version," and looks great.

Vivendi has announced a new Spyro game in development at Eurocom. Dubbed Spyro: A Hero's Tail, it's due out by the end of the year on PS2, Xbox and Cube and - oh I just got it! - scripted by Emmy Award winner J. Stewart Burns. He has been employed seemingly to breathe life into the story, which sees Spyro the purple dragon of justice setting out to save the Dragon Realms from the Evil Red Dragon, who has distributed light-sapping Dark Gems all over the world. The bastard.

Reality TV is obviously a big load of bollocks, but games about wacky reality TV shows we can just about put up with, particularly when they're as bizarre as JoWooD's Neighbours From Hell. You may recall we rather liked the first one up to a point (the point at which it became hideously repetitive), in which you had to torment an irritating neighbour for the hidden cameras, and we're certainly looking forward to seeing how the second one updates the formula. And, via the magic of the webformation interhighway, now we can! All thanks to a 30.9MB playable demo, which gives you a taste of the sequel, in which wily trickster Woody follows his neighbour onto a cruise liner and attempts to irritate him and his mum for as long as possible.

Sega is preparing two new games in the Shining Force strategy-RPG series, according to a teaser site which sprang up earlier this week. "Up ahead lies a new Sega RPG," it reads on the left, as we look past a sign with a dragon on it, down a bendy road and over the hills towards the towers of a shiny castle in the distance.

Late last year, as The Return of the King was reverberating around cinemas up and down the land and EA was toasting the success of its spin-off game of the same name, a producer on the title told sections of the US press that EA still had big plans for the franchise - beyond the scope of the PC-only MMORPG The Battle for Middle-Earth in fact - and to watch out for a console RPG called The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Hip Games has announced CT Special Forces: Fire For Effect for PS2, Xbox and PC, due out in early 2005, and promises the game will feature "unique missions in the fight against worldwide terrorist networks," in case it wasn't obvious.

Rumours of Tekken 5's development have been circulating for a little while now, and the buzz seems to indicate that it will make a splash at E3 next month (as with every other game in the Western world by the looks of it). Well, now it looks more or less certain, unless the Flash movie on the front page of Yamasa Slot World is some sort of elaborate fake, or something else entirely.

US publisher / developer LucasArts has confirmed that it has made 29 staff at its San Rafael offices in California redundant, bringing the head count at the company, which has cancelled several projects in recent months, under the 400 mark.

Eidos has released a new trailer for ShellShock: Nam '67, the new Vietnam-based third-person shooter from Killzone developer Guerrilla Games, which is set for a showing at E3 next month. And it's Guerrilla's last multi-platform (PS2/Xbox/PC) game before the Amsterdam-based developer dives into a deal to develop exclusively for Sony platforms, so Xbox and PC owners might as well enjoy it while they can.

Codemasters grabbed its first number one since August 2002 with the Xbox and PC release of TOCA Race Driver 2, but the good news for the Britsoft publisher was tempered by the news that the fifth in the series was the lowest-selling chart topper since EA's Medal Of Honor: Frontline in week 33 of 2002.

Halo designer and Bungie co-founder Alexander Seropian has formed a new development studio, Wideload Games, which has started work on a new PC/Xbox title based on the Halo engine technology.

With Gran Turismo 4 appearing at E3 next month for the second year running, you could say some of the gloss has come off its mixture of realistic and online racing options. However, anybody peering at the four new replay videos uploaded to the game's Japanese website this week will agree that none of the gloss has come off the game's splendid visuals, which remain very impressive even a year after the last time we played it. With GT4 Prologue due out in Europe sometime this summer, consider these a taster of the taster you could well be taste-testing as early as next month!

Sega has taken the wraps off one of the six new titles it plans to show off at E3 next month, and it's certainly an interesting proposition - aiming to combine one of the PS2's most mainstream pursuits with some of the firm's hardcore properties. Sega SuperStars is, quite simply, an EyeToy mini-games package built around Sega's best-known properties, including Sonic the Hedgehog and Samba de Amigo.

Vivendi this morning announced the sequel to Empire Earth, currently in development at Mad Doc Software for release in the first half of 2005, which promises to build on the first game by adding all sorts of features requested by fans of the original.

Following last week's announcements in the US press, Capcom has revealed slightly more about the forthcoming Viewtiful Joe 2 on PS2 and Cube, and blessed us with the first in-game screenshots of both VJ2 and of Dante making his unlockable appearance in the PS2 port of the original.