Latest Articles (Page 3364)

Despite a number of irritating delays, Raven Shield expansion Athena Sword has officially gone gold this past Friday, and is on track for a March 19th showdown with, er, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Battlefield Vietnam. Wow, Ubi really knows how to pick a release date!

Ah, the start of a fresh week. The sky is bright, the bare trees are frozen solid and everybody wishes they were back in bed. Especially me. However mine is a position laced with possibilities - after all, when the postman eventually staggers into view he may well have a sack of nostalgia to deposit. As mentioned on Friday, I've been rebuilding my SNES cart collection, and already I'm expecting the likes of Earthbound (Mother 2), Super Mario RPG, Earthworm Jim, Plok and Equinox. As you might expect, I've one ear cocked towards the door. And one eye peering out the window...

Earlier this week, Sony showed off a PlayStation 2 using a USB webcam to run a video-conference across the Internet at a business summit in Tokyo, prompting all manner of excited claims about the future of the console as a video communication device.

The company behind the forthcoming Phantom game platform, Infinium Labs, has stated that it may file a lawsuit against news website HardOCP over an article in September 2003 which cast doubt on the firm's real intentions.

As must be apparent to those who frequent these pages, I'm not one for time off. Worse for me, even on those occasions when I am legally obliged to stop working, I tend to get dragged off to exciting places by relatives (You know - Bognor, York, Eastbourne - places like that), which doesn't leave me with much time for the things I'd ideally like to be doing. As a result of this over the years I've developed quite a large pile of "must-play games" that lies unchecked in a corner of the living room - partly because I horde things like crazy, and partly because I seldom manage to set any time aside. For much of anything.

Publisher Acclaim has announced its results for the quarter ended December 31 and the first nine months of its financial year, revealing a $9 million loss in the December quarter on falling revenues.

Although we rather thought this was already out, Microsoft has been in touch today to announce the launch of the Plantation Course at Kapalua - the latest premium download available via Xbox Live.

EA seems to be developing a penchant for the reinvention of classic franchises. Just last week we reported on the publisher's plans to bring back GoldenEye for its next Bond project, and this week we've learnt that the one of the firm's UK studios is busy at work on a new multi-platform Desert Strike game, also set to be unveiled at E3 this year.

Killzone developer Guerrilla's "other game" has been unveiled this week. Eidos now looks set to publish ShellShock: Nam '67, which is due out on PS2, Xbox and PC this June, and claims to be the first game to depict the true horrors of the Vietnam War. Quite some claim given the number of alternatives - Vietcong, Men of Valor, Battlefield Vietnam, etc.

Mythic Entertainment has announced the development of Dark Age of Camelot: New Frontiers, a free downloadable expansion pack for its Arthurian MMORPG which aims to reinvent the game's Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat system.

Codemasters this week announced the development of MTV Music Generator 3: This Is The Remix, due out on PS2 and for the first time also on Xbox in June 2004.

The Sony America press event we mentioned yesterday has thrown up some new details on the platform holder's plans for Gran Turismo 4 - and it's not the best news.

UK-based Brat Designs is busy working on a sci-fi FPS called Solar, which sounds a bit like a cross between that Paul W.S. Anderson flick Soldier and Battlefield 1942. Utilising the developer's own brand new Mercury II engine, Solar locks up to 32 human or AI-controlled players into battle over the war and pollution ravaged hulks of Earth, the Moon and Mars.

Danny Elfman, a man who needs little introduction, has composed the theme tune for Big Blue Box and Lionhead's ambitious Xbox RPG Fable, the UK developers announced yesterday.

Let's get something out of the way: Singles is very similar to The Sims. In fact, at a glance it's actually quite difficult to tell the two apart. The interface is very similar, everybody's jabbering away incomprehensibly, and most of your time is spent manoeuvring a camera through translucent walls in a spacious penthouse apartment, watching a pair of flatmates squabble over their silly little lives while you worry about whether they have enough televisions.

Namco's Kill.switch, as we've dealt with elsewhere, is a pretty enjoyable but largely clichéd and unspectacular shoot-'em-up designed to do one thing and do it well. Although it makes a good rental, there are plenty of other games that take ideas like this and do them a great deal better, and spread them over the course of a game that lasts longer than half a Rings trilogy.

At first glance, X2: The Threat hardly seems a likely candidate for a console port. It's a massive, sprawling space epic along similar lines to Elite, designed by a small team with help from thousands of eager fans who contributed ideas, items - even entire sectors of space - and it focuses on the sort of empire building pursuits normally confined to a strictly PC audience. It's an MMORPG without other people, some claim, which should just about clarify the vastness of the experience for most people.

BBC Multimedia has announced plans to make TV series Spooks into a PS2/Xbox/PC game, which will launch this autumn to coincide with the broadcasting of the third series of the BBC's BAFTA-winning drama. It's the first time that a BBC drama has been made into a videogame.

Level 5's anticipated follow-up to Dark Chronicle will be unveiled at a press event this week, according to 1UP. Citing sources close to the game's development, the report stats that the game will be entitled Dark Odyssey, in-keeping with the developer's whimsical naming convention - rather than Dark Cloud 3 in-keeping with publisher SCEA's own approach.

We're seeing reports this week about "Tsunami", a, er, wave of new features that should be, er, washing over Xbox Live in the coming months. According to the contents of a readme file for the Xbox Development Kit (XDK), a lot of the functionality that was being mooted ahead of last year's pre-E3 conference is now finally ready to deploy, including voicemail, clan features, MSN Messenger integration and user mod storage systems.

Retro gamers might prefer the more prestigious table option when it comes to reliving past greats, but a far more manageable (not to mention portable) alternative already exists in the shape of the "Classics" arcade sticks. Atari has one, featuring the likes of Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, Breakout, Pong and more, as does Namco, whose 5-in-1 bundle is made up of Pac-Man, Bosconian, Dig Dug, Rally X and Galaxian. They're remarkably simple little gadgets, too - effectively joysticks, except with a bulkier base housing the on/off button, all the techno gubbins and the various cable outputs.

Two months after it secured $18 million in venture capital and bought back the rights to the Asheron's Call series from Microsoft, MMORPG developer Turbine Entertainment has hired former Atari veepee Jason Bell to head up a new LA studio aimed at tapping into the lucrative Asia-Pacific marketplace.

Once again the mainstream media has latched onto a forthcoming game and found a handful of people keen to blame it for the moral decline of society - Hurrah! Whiplash, due out on PS2 and Xbox next Friday, is a cartoony adventure starring a pair of lab animals - Spanx the weasel and Redmond the rabbit - shackled together by three feet of chain. By smashing up their test centre home on the way to freedom they've earned lashings from the RSPCA, the Research Defence Society, the Police Federation and - of course - a Labour MP. Quite a feat - even for Eidos.

Publisher BAM! Entertainment has announced plans to acquire Scottish developer VIS Entertainment in an all-stock deal. BAM! will also buy SOE Development Ltd, a company set up to fund the development of State of Emergency 2.

Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward is inviting fans to download a level-editing toolset for its World War II themed first-person shooter and submit their finest hour's work by March 26th in order to stand a chance of winning top end PC hardware and a trip round the developer's LA studio.

You know how, sometimes, you read something on a website and you just think "Oh for f...'s sake"? Of course you do - you just read the above headline! That's right. Despite the last game being critically mauled by everybody who played it (with the exception of those folks who had exclusive/world first reviews, unsurprisingly), and the dismal failure of the second movie, which was so completely devoid of entertainment that it didn't even inherit the cheesily engrossing popcorn flick feel of the first release, producer Lloyd Levin has told the US Official PlayStation Magazine that international returns more than justify a concluding part in what is now being referred to as a "trilogy". Damn you international returns!

We'd just like to clarify before we launch into the debate - this is by no means a confirmation that Sega/Amusement Vision is developing Super Monkey Ball 3, nor is it stone cold confirmation that it plans to. This is what it is.

Blue Fang Games is developing a sequel to Zoo Tycoon, which it aims to deliver in time for Christmas, publisher Microsoft Game Studios announced this week.

Xbox Live Europe is closing in on its first official birthday (it was actually born in November, but like the Queen prefers to celebrate post-beta), and in keeping with tradition Microsoft has announced plans to celebrate - by giving away €330,000 worth of cash and prizes to the owners of randomly selected Gamertags.

Annual updates to videogames tend to be greeted with a fairly generous dose of cynicism from more hardcore gamers. At best, many would argue, they are simply feature creep updates, which would be better addressed by mission packs. At worst, they are nothing short of shameless cash-ins. There's no breed of gamer more hardcore (in a soi disant fashion if nothing else) than PC first-person shooter fans, either. Ask most of them their opinion of EA Sports' regular-as-clockwork release schedule and you're unlikely to hear very many positive words.