Latest Articles (Page 3362)

Happy Easter, March is over. Rather like October, March is an incredibly busy period for the average gamer as publishers both great and small inexplicably attempt to cram as many titles as possible into our laps, like Laurel and Hardy faced with a narrow tar-lined doorway and a pot of gold on the other side. April, meanwhile, is a graveyard strewn with minor titles, tardy ports and would-be triple-As that sort of fell off the March bandwagon as the party on the back got a bit rowdy, and April 2nd does a rather good job of emphasising this.

Yesterday we brought you the first part of our transcription of John Carmack's GDC keynote address. In this second part, the Id Software supremo discusses AI, game development cycles and how new technology is forcing the developer to think of new ways of speeding up production - such as a Quake II remix...

Nintendo of America has restated its first party plans for the States this year, and pending slippage it looks like the Cube could be in for its first respectable Christmas line-up, with Geist, Mario Tennis, Metroid Prime 2, Paper Mario 2 and Star Fox 2 all down for release between October and December, with the inevitable Mario Party 6 rounding things off.

"Gathering", one of Take-Two's daftly named publishing labels, sends word that it has united with Destineer Publishing (okay, that clearly tops 'Gathering') to bring two new Close Combat games to PC and Xbox; Close Combat: First to Fight and Close Combat: Red Phoenix.

It's taken a while to get here, but F-Zero: Falcon Densetsu finally has a UK release date. It's set to appear on the shelves of your local gaming emporium this June 4th under the banner of "F-Zero: GP Legend". This is obviously a crap name, but still manages to beat "F-Zero: Maximum Velocity" for acceptability without using a single recharge pad.

Polyphony Digital's Gran Turismo 4 will include a driving school along with revised licence tests, more European cars, and a handicapping feature that punishes you for ramming opponents to gain an advantage, according to new details on the web this week. The game will also reportedly make use of the PS2 HDD, which launched in the States last month as part of a Final Fantasy XI bundle. It's unclear how the new peripheral will be used by GT, but downloadable content would seem to be the most obvious option.

Vivendi-Universal Games today announced that Van Helsing, Hugh Jackman's big-screen turn as Bram Stoker's fabled monster hunt, will be making its way to Game Boy Advance on May 14th. We're not quite sure why they didn't mention this when they announced the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game last October, but never mind. VU Games will be hoping that the Van Helsing movie lives up to its billing - "think of it as a sort of Wolverine-done-darker with vampires and crap," our resident film buff offers - and that the games can capitalise on its success this May. On the GBA however it faces some strong competition in the vampire hunting, er, stakes, courtesy of Konami's Castlevania titles. We never get sent GBA games these days so if you want to know if it's any good you'll have to extrapolate from these screenshots.

April 1st is a difficult day for the likes of us. So often in the past we've woken, forgotten what day it was, stumbled wearily in the direction of the nearest newswire and put our trust in some truly enchanting spoof, only to recoil in horror a few seconds later when a red-eyed jester popped up and danced a merry jig on our humbled faces.

EA has renewed its courtship with the Def Jam music label in order to deliver another Def Jam Vendetta game on PS2, Xbox and Cube later in the year, the two companies announced today. Def Jam Vendetta 2 (working title, screenshots) is being developed by EA Canada in conjunction with Japanese AKI Corporation.

Flight sim fans will be pleased to hear that Oleg Maddox's IL-2 team is busy working on a new and even more expansive dogfight and bomb-'em-up in the shape of Pacific Fighters, announced by publisher Ubisoft early yesterday evening. It's due out before the end of 2004.

Following revelations earlier this month concerning Metal Gear Solid 3's Camouflage Index, Konami Europe has this week released details concerning the game's context-sensitive Close Quarters Combat system, and confirmed that the game will appear in playable form at E3, if only behind closed doors.

Ubisoft and Microsoft have released a minor auto-update for the latest Splinter Cell title, which addresses a show-stopping multiplayer bug that managed to infiltrate the final build of the game ahead of its release last Friday.

NovaLogic has released its promised demo of Joint Operations, an ambitious multiplayer FPS set in near-future Indonesia. The demo features one map (Twin Island), and lets you choose from five different player classes and wield up any of 27 weapons whilst pootling around in a variety of vehicles. As with the full game, the Joint Ops demo is also capable of hosting over 100 players at a time - no mean feat.

Kuju Entertainment has quashed rumours that it is developing a Castlevania title for the GameCube, telling the UK press there is "categorically not one iota of truth in this story". The rumour began life on a big American website (you know the one; it sounds a bit like "gaijin") after an individual claiming to be Kuju QA manager Asad Habib said something ambiguously enthusiastic like "Castlevania for GameCube!" on a forum thread. This seems to have been taken by some as confirmation that Kuju is working on such a product, and, rather unhelpfully, Kuju representatives in the UK were all fast asleep when the Americans started chasing the story. Still, Kuju is working on a first-party title for Nintendo GameCube, and has also announced a collaboration with Castlevania leash-holders Konami in the past year, so it's easy to see where all the confusion came from - although apparently not for everyone, as there's plenty of pot/kettle/black action doing the rounds elsewhere in the online press today...

One of the undoubted highlights of this year's Game Developer's Conference was John Carmack's hour long keynote address at the San Jose Civic Auditorium. Billed as "A candid look at the issues and rewards of bleeding edge engine development," Carmack didn't disappoint, giving a rare and unique insight into the challenges facing Id Software and other bar-raising developers in today's demanding era of increasing realism, and the associated issues with lengthening development cycles, ever increasing team sizes and of course costs.

Gimmicks in games, as with most things in general, are as welcome as Osama bin Laden at chez Dubya Bush's annual Thanksgiving ho-down. Take food gimmicks. Take cheesy strings. Everyone sees the advert and sits in embarrassed silence, squirming in the knowledge that even though it's going to taste revolting, you want to buy it because you can pull it to pieces. It's the hideous, compelling world of capitalism thrown into grimly sharp relief by processed milk products. The same applies to football games. Without the cheese.

Following the closure of a number of Capcom's studios outside of its Osaka headquarters, the Japanese publisher has announced the formation of a new subsidiary in Osaka with Viewtiful Joe producer Atsushi Inaba at the helm.

It's slightly odd that it should happen on the sunniest day in recent memory, but we were still pleased to find some Downloadable Content for Amped 2 waiting for us atop the imaginary piste this morning.

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.