Latest Articles (Page 3366)

Microsoft Game Studios has cancelled MMORPG Mythica, the publisher announced last night, "based on a careful evaluation of the competitive MMORPG landscape". Speaking to 1UP, an MGS spokesperson said that the publisher had two massively multiplayer titles in development - Mythica and another, as-yet unannounced project - and didn't want the bother of eventually maintaining two in an already crowded marketplace.

Electronic Arts' next foray into the James Bond 007 franchise will be based on the 1995 movie GoldenEye, in a move which sees the company returning to the film which inspired one of the most highly regarded console games of the nineties.

Yesterday we reported on Ubisoft's plans to release the European edition of glossy first-person shooter Far Cry exclusively on DVD-ROM. As expected, rather than backlash from Compact Disc advocates, this news was met with a resounding, collective "thunk". The sound a penny makes when it takes about five years to drop.

Like all the best footy transfers, Sports Interactive's decision to sign with Sega has been on the cards for months. And then finally, just when you thought the British developer was on its way to Japan last week, it all became unclear once again, with the players themselves redefining ambiguity on a daily basis and even throwing a bunch of red herrings out to swim the oceans of hyperbole.

How a game of the quality of Rallisport Challenge managed to only sell a pitiful 40,000 copies in the UK is beyond my poor shrivelled brain. Released during the same week that the Xbox was launched here back in March 2002, it got completely swept aside by the likes of Halo and Project Gotham Racing (in the former case being outsold by almost ten to one) but in my humble opinion deserves to be held up alongside these undoubted greats, boasting unmatched visuals, superb gameplay and the level of all round quality that leaves others in the genre trailing in its dust.

EA has officially confirmed that one of its UK teams is hard at work on a Catwoman game, despite speculation that Warner Bros.' new Interactive Entertainment division would publish the title itself. Although the publisher didn't name Argonaut specifically, the North London based developer is understood to be handling the adaptation under the auspices of EA Studio UK.

British development studio Sports Interactive, responsible for the hugely successful Championship Manager games, has announced the signing of a five-year exclusive deal with Sega and details of its next game, Football Manager.

Publisher Take-Two Interactive has signed a contract with Cartoon Network giving it "first look" rights to create games based on all new Cartoon Network branded properties, with one new title already licensed under the deal.

Nintendo has sent out its Q1/Q2 release schedule for the UK, which pretty much applies to the whole of Europe without much contradiction. The most significant change since the last instalment is the addition of a firm date for Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, which will be teeing off on June 18th - over nine months after its American release date.

EA is reeling Maxis in to one of the recently completed facilities at its Redwood Shores headquarters in California, the uber-publisher revealed this week. Apparently the 300-strong development team is getting rather cramped in its Walnut Creek offices 30 miles west of the EA stronghold, and the move also reflects the publisher's desire to bring internal studios together at hub locations so they can make better use of its expensive production facilities.

The PC version of Halo has been patched again this week to weed out a nasty little bug that could crash the whole shebang. In the words of the authors, the 1.04 patch "addresses a rare crash bug that could occur if a malicious individual (hacker) purposely tries to exploit the GameSpy CDKey SDK." There it is, folks...

Nintendo has announced that the Game Boy Advance has now sold some 20 million units in the United States, significantly outstripping sales of previous Game Boy systems at a similar point in their lifespans.

In the eyes of videogame publishers, Jerry Bruckheimer's summer blockbusters must seem like perfect license fodder, and Bad Boys II is one of the most obvious choices. After all, the film itself is little more than two hours of wisecracking cops raiding increasingly exotic locations and shooting everything in sight, while shifty characters lurk in the background masterminding drug deal clichés. What's more, director Michael Bay was such a pyromaniac that he was bound to create something memorable, even by accident, which he did with his Matrix-topping Ferrari/bridge chase sequence, complete with car transporters and projectile yachts. It's just a pity he had to spoil it by driving a Humvee over innocent Cubans for the last half an hour or so. Oh, and with the rest of the movie too.

They may have been overshadowed by widespread confusion over the future of Nintendo's next-generation hardware platform, but Satoru Iwata's comments in Nihon Keizei Shimbun that the platform holder is developing peripherals to expand the lifespan of the GameCube make for interesting reading.

Atari sends word that the promised demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 is due out this evening. Depending on when you read this, you may already be able to get hold of the demo from www.unrealtournament.com or any of your usual haunts.

Sony has announced that Namco's kill.switch, which it is publishing exclusively on PS2 in Europe, will ship with a demo of SOCOM II: US Navy SEALs and a preview movie of Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain.

Remind us to laugh heartily in the faces of any first-person developer foolish enough to make confident release date predictions in future. Last year was vintage for that kind of malarkey, with the likes of Breed, Doom III, Half-Life 2, Condition Zero (not to mention, cough, DNF, otherwise known as Did Not Finish) all falling by the wayside for various tenuous reasons, but still I found myself nodding enthusiastically when back at ECTS in August, Crytek's Frank Yerli assured me that Far Cry was "very nearly finished", and that a late November release date was a formality. But just like every first-person shooter ever created, our faith was misplaced and it got pulled back to its current slot of a late March release.

Last week, Tecmo representatives told a forum of eager Ninja Gaiden fans that the original three NES titles would be included as bonus unlockables. This week, the developer has moved to clarify that statement in a follow-up. Apparently it's the SNES versions of Ninja Gaiden, not the NES originals, which will be included in the package.

Far Cry fan site FarCryHQ.com reports this week that Crytek's forthcoming sun-soaked first-person shooter will only be released on DVD in Europe.

Nintendo continues to promote the Game Boy Advance SP like... like a product that it manufactures and wishes to sell... with new marketing gimmicks in Japan and Australia geared towards boosting brand awareness, keeping people interested, and, above all else, selling the little fella in ever-increasing quantities.

Michael Ironside will reprise his role as Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell sequel Pandora Tomorrow, while '24' star and confirmed Tom Clancy fan Dennis Haysbert will play NSA operative Irving Lambert, Fisher's control at the Agency. To give their words some spirit and vigour, Ubisoft has also hired Lalo Schifrin, the composer of the Mission: Impossible TV theme, to create an original piece of music for the game.

Nintendo will demonstrate the successor to GameCube, dubbed N5 by the media, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005. That's according to a report from the Japanese Mainichi Shimbun, backed up by quotes from a senior Nintendo spokesperson.

Kristan didn't like The Simpsons: Hit & Run in the end, but after tons of people called it "The Best Simpsons Game Ever", I decided to take the plunge this weekend as one of the show's most forgiving fans. I bought the PS2 version, and probably spent five or six hours just racing around Springfield on Saturday and Sunday, absorbing all the sight gags, catchphrases, soundbites and atmosphere of the place. And it turns out the pro-Hit & Run brigade were right. It is the best Simpsons game ever. It also turns out Kristan was right, too. It gets very boring when you realise that it's effectively just amusingly book-ended mini races, and this happens way too early on.

Sega's first European release of 2004 has gone straight in at number one in the charts, with Sonic Heroes displacing EA's Need for Speed Underground and taking the top spot across all three console-specific charts for good measure.

Kristan likes graphics. I've known the man for well over a year now, and it's clear to me that he is a great lover of eye candy. And physics. He loves knocking things over, banging things about, and generally watching things interact. I remember the first time he saw Half-Life 2 in Los Angeles. His little eyes were darting excitedly around his head as he struggled to absorb the unprecedented physicality of the world Valve had created, all the while his pupils were melting under the strain of so many perfectly placed pixels. Given that DRIV3R also combines his twin obsessions, I'm not overly surprised that I wound up digesting the fact sheets and poring over the fine details of Martin Edmonson's presentation last Friday, while he decided whether or not he liked playing it.

French publisher LSP has been bought out by one of its partners, Canadian firm Hip Interactive, in a move which will give Hip access to European markets for its range of games and gaming accessories.

Nintendo has not shelved its plans for another next-generation console, despite countless net-based reports that sprang up overnight after somebody dug out a copy of Nihon Keizai Shimbun and wet themselves.

The BloodRayne movie is a prequel to the storyline of the original game, and will be shot in Eastern Europe sometime in the next year after script development is completed. That's according to an interview with Liz Buckley, Majesco's product manager for Terminal Reality's vamp-infested series, who also confirmed that BloodRayne 2 will be playable on PS2, Xbox and PC at this year's E3.

They may have ballsed up the simultaneous launch due to an 11th hour bug, but Illusion Softworks and publisher Gathering (Take-Two) did eventually manage to release both single and multiplayer demos for tactical World War II-based shoot-'em-up Hidden & Dangerous 2 while we were catching forty winks.

PS2 Online and Xbox Live have been going head to head for sometime now in Europe, the USA and Japan, and the most successful online console game by far to date is Zipper Interactive's SOCOM: US Navy SEALs, one of the very first games to take the PlayStation 2 online. With the sequel already a best-seller in the USA and on track for a Q1 2004 release in Europe, we caught up with SCEA's Seth Luisi, producer on both SOCOM titles, to get the low-down on the 'console Counter-Strike'.