Latest Articles (Page 3354)

At first glance, 483MB might strike you as a rather unpalatable file size for a game demo. "You could get an entire game in there!" your modem can be heard whimpering in the corner. And, whether the squealing plastic bastard realises it or not, he's absolutely right. The Dead Man's Hand "demo" is actually a full-blown trial version, which lets you play the final version of Human Head Studios' Wild West-themed FPS for two whole hours before it spits you out and asks for some money. You can purchase a license key online to continue playing.

DoubleFine Productions' ambitious platform title Psychonauts will no longer be published by Microsoft Game Studios, the Xbox platform holder has confirmed to the press this week.

Although a price cut in Australia has followed yesterday's cuts in North America for the Xbox console, Microsoft UK has no imminent plans to change its pricing here - with the company adopting a "wait and see approach" on future cuts.

XSN Sports studio manager Kevin Browne has confirmed that Microsoft is pulling its line-up of sports titles for the 2004-2005 season, reportedly in order to stand a better chance of making critical and commercial gains in 18 months' time.

An entry on the EB World website has lent credence to recent reports that Nintendo is planning a 1019-block, 64MB memory card to accommodate increasingly vast tracts of save data. Players of a lot of recent sports titles are actually been driven to higher capacity third-party cards these days, and Nintendo seems to be reacting to this with the Memory Card 1019, which is reportedly due out on June 8th in the US, priced $29.99. Nintendo's European subsidiary has yet to offer any indication of its plans, but it's a safe bet that the 1019-block monster won't be far off, and you can of course make use of American memory cards on European consoles and vice versa, so it shouldn't be too big a problem.

Ahead of TOCA Race Driver 2 taking to the PC and Xbox track on April 23rd, Britsoft publisher Codies has released a demo of the game consisting of three tracks and three cars.

Ubisoft's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow has gone straight in at number one in the UK charts, making it into the third fastest selling Xbox title of all time - directly behind Halo and the original Splinter Cell title.

Connecting the dots on new Capcom titles is rapidly becoming something of a sport. Like Resident Evil 4, a trailer from Japanese Famitsu Wave DVD has given us a better impression of how enigmatic shoot-'em-up Cube/PS2 shooter Killer 7 will handle in gameplay terms, after details surfaced recently to go with the highly stylised cel-shaded visuals we've already absorbed at length since the original "Capcom Five" announcement way, way back in the day.

The transformation is complete and the bandages are coming off. Following last week's influx of new screenshots, a movie culled from the Japanese Famitsu Wave DVD magazine has given us a glimpse of Resident Evil 4 in motion, putting those deliciously detailed backdrops, mammoth boss encounters and promised real-time action moves into the context of the Evil we know.

Rockstar Games confirmed this morning that imminent cowboy action shooter Red Dead Revolver is the first in a series.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi has said that he plans to deliver a spiritual successor to Rez on either PlayStation Portable or Nintendo DS. Speaking on the last day of this year's Game Developers Conference, the veteran Japanese developer said that his newly formed independent studio Q Entertainment could make an announcement soon.

While some would like to think of Rez as genre-breaking (or even genre-forming), it's essentially a 3D shoot 'em up. There isn't really a lot more to it than that. It's not deep; there is no elegant, unfolding narrative; there's no character development or huge locales to explore. It's just a shoot 'em up.

Nicaraguan-born former boxer Alexis Arguello is reportedly suing Electronic Arts, Nintendo and Sony in Los Angeles Superior Court over failing to secure his permission to use his likeness in two Knockout Kings titles.

American gamers' portable 8-bit fantasies have become reality. As last Friday was petering out, Nintendo of America announced the "Classic NES Series", consisting of a Game Boy Advance SP with a NES controller colour scheme, and a selection of eight NES titles to choose from: Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Excitebike, Ice Climber, Xevious and Bomberman. The Classic NES Series will launch in the States on June 7th, with games priced $19.99 (about a dollar more than their equivalent price in Japan).

French publisher Ubisoft has announced that multi-million-selling strategy series The Settlers will be returning for its fifth instalment before the end of 2004 courtesy of German developer Blue Byte.

Microsoft has slashed the price of the Xbox in North America to US$149 in a move which will take effect as of tomorrow, while certain evidence suggests that the cut may also be extended to other territories.

Dark side gossip emerges from GDC, with pundits pointing a very big finger at LucasArts and a Star Wars game to end them all. According to sources at last week's Game Developer's Conference in San Jose, California, LucasArts is currently hard at work on a game based on the villainest villain on Planet Star Wars, Darth Vader.

Although we'd left for the pub by the time it landed in our digital laps, Ubisoft did make good on its promise last Friday to release a 1.1 patch for Crytek's tropical FPS Far Cry, which includes a number of key additions (not least of which, in gameplay terms, are toggle options for the aim and crouch modes) and minor bug fixes. It's 26.5MB, but with an install footprint of 4GB for the main game you've probably already got the kit to cope...

Following a series of threats of legal action over the past weeks, Florida-based broadband console proponent Infinium Labs has finally filed a lawsuit against technology news website HardOCP over an article written last September.

The website for next September's multi-platform consumer games show at ExCeL, GameStars Live, has gone online, offering the public a chance to pre-book their tickets for the event.

After months of speculation over Resident Evil Outbreak's future in Europe, Capcom has confirmed that the game will not appear on PS2 Online in the region, despite initially failing to rule it out when we called this morning.

"Looks aren't everything". These supposedly comforting words are usually reserved for the geeky teenage loner on a downer. The quiet one with the dodgy hair and the wonky teeth that has trouble looking anyone in the eye without burning up with embarrassment that anyone's even looking in their direction. But try telling yourself that looks aren't everything when you fire up Far Cry. Try not to feel a ripple of excitement run through you when the Cry engine starts showing off how much better a PC game can look than anything else now.

The first-person shooter, a long-time staple of the PC gaming diet, has come quite a way since its humble roots in the sort-of-3D stylings of the revolutionary Wolfenstein 3D. Never mind such frivolities as the move to real 3D or the discovery of the possibilities represented by allowing the player to jump; the real evolution has been the addition of ever new and interesting ways to kill your friends. Yes, indeed, we have come a long way from games where your only option was to unload rockets into people's faces until their sprite corpses were festering mounds of broken flesh on the pixellated floor, as the imagination of developers has given us ever new and interesting ways to slice 'em, dice 'em, smash 'em and bash 'em.

While Nintendo and Sony continue to play down the potential GBA/PSP market overlap, we couldn't help but chuckle at the latter's decision to use the Grim Reaper as a basis for its first public demonstration of PSP software. A subtle joke? Maybe not, but there's still plenty in Backbone Entertainment's "Death Jr." that will leave the Sony crowd smiling.

Id's legendary founder John Carmack has delivered the first tantalising details of its next project at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, having assured the audience "we ship Doom (III) really soon now".

An Ubisoft representative has told the Far Cry faithful on the publisher's official forum that a proposed patch for the game is currently on track for release later today. The same post also draws attention to the various problems that the patch aims to fix, including support for server-finding utility All Seeing Eye, integration of Punkbuster anti-cheat protocols and various other minor issues. Far Cry is of course out today across Europe and has been picking up very respectable review scores.

That blasted Bandicoot is crashing back towards PS2 and Xbox later this year, VU Games announced today. Crash Bandicoot: Unlimited is currently in development at Traveller's Tales and aims to reinvigorate the series with a new dual-character mechanic and creative input from Jordan Reichek of Ren & Stimpy fame.

Konami recently popped the lid on the mechanics behind Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for PS2, pointing to a blend of new stealth-action ideas that excited even those dulled by the exposition-heavy experience of playing MGS2. But Hideo Kojima was never going to release a standard, run of the mill stealth action game without his trademark whimsical storytelling, and this week we've seen the first signs of it thanks to a posting on an American casting website searching for actors to handle some key voice roles.

"Never judge a book by its cover." We've all encountered that expression. We've all probably come across it the same way, too. At a young age, some cardigan-wrapt and condescending geriatric has peered down their nose at us, and reeled it off with the sort of pride you can only get by imparting borrowed wisdom to a clueless child. See? You're nodding your head. And yet, how many times have we all looked at a bunch of screenshots of a new game, and found ourselves reaching for the black cap and gabble before we've even had a chance to snort in derision?

Games are like buses. They really are. Although a couple that were due out this week have now run off the road in search of petrol (stand up R: Racing and Mafia Xbox), we do feel rather like plebs at a bus stop, overflowing with transport options after literally months camped in the shadow of Dawn of the Dead posters and old grannies chattering about the bingo. It's good to see all these buses, of course, but we do feel a bit like socking a few of the drivers in the gob. Where the hell were you when Looney Tunes: Back In Action was the highlight of our entire week? Eh?