Latest Articles (Page 3377)

Nadeo's snap-together racing construction kit TrackMania has been patched to version 1.1, correcting a number of niggling problems that slipped into the retail release and adding a number of improvements - like showing the time offset between the player's vehicle and the ghost car when passing through checkpoints.

Gaming can be such a contradiction. One minute you're sporting the intense expression of immersion, caught up in a thickening plot that's spinning out of control in a breathtaking web of conspiracy, built around the solid frame of creeping stealth tension and manic action, and the next you're a foul-mouthed sea of rage with veins bulging out of your temples in throbbing sympathy as you're forced to repeat the same section for the 50th time. Welcome to XIII, a game that so easily could have been game of the year.

As expected, the penultimate New Games Day of 2003 (December 26th doesn't count) yields very few surprises. But it's good news for anybody after something new with Harry Potter written on it for that troublesome niece or nephew, as the next-gen console versions of EA's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone arrive on cue. Although EA did release a Philosopher's Stone game originally - the hugely successful PSX title developed here in the UK by Argonaut - this is the first time Potter's original adventure has graced screens hooked up to PlayStation 2s, Xboxen and GameCubes. (Unless you're a cheeky so-and-so who played the PSX game on the PS2 and plans to ambush me with such wit in the comments thread.)

Platformers, extreme sports, football, tennis... say what you like about the N-Gage, but its launch line-up has at least been pretty varied. And now, with Red Faction, the handheld can add a notch on its bedpost for first-person shooters. After the Game Boy Advance's fumbled attempts at the FPS genre, it would at least prove quite interesting to see what kind of performance John Romero and Tom Hall's Monkeystone Games could pull out of Nokia's console.

ISP Bulldog has launched a couple of Xbox-oriented online gaming bundles to encourage sales of its ADSL-based broadband services. The bundles, headed by the £329.99 Bulldog Xbox Live Wireless Package, offer an all-round solution for anybody who's just ordered ADSL and is wondering about the next step.

Eurogamer's Daren Chandisingh has narrowly missed out on being named the UK's Sexiest Gamer, as Gamer.tv this week concluded its nationwide search for the sexiest guy and gal in gaming. After two months, 1,000 submissions and something like 4.7 million votes cast, TV presenter Vernon Kay crowned the winners at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on Thursday, following a day of gruelling tests to weed the Angels of Darkness out from the Princes of Persia.

EA this week announced a new boxing game, Fight Night 2004, which should be released in spring 2004 on PS2 and Xbox. Obviously this being EA it's decked out with a suitably recognisable cast - Roy Jones Jr., Lennox Lewis, Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard will amongst the rank and file fighters - and like EA's other sports franchises of late the game aims to make clever use of analogue sticks.

It's turning into a rather bad week for Rockstar Games. Following a significant hullabaloo over a scrap of dialogue from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one of the publisher's most recent endeavours, Manhunt, has now been banned in New Zealand, with the classification office there ruling that its availability was likely to be injurious to the public good, and chief censor Bill Hastings citing its likely effect on "players of any age".

Activision CEO and chairman Robert Kotick has personally confirmed (whether deliberately or accidentally) that a sequel to the publisher's nigh on chart-topping True Crime: Streets of LA is on the publisher's cards.

Earlier this week, Rockstar Games caved in to pressure from minority groups in the US and decided to censor the multi-million unit selling Grand Theft Auto: Vice City by removing an instruction to "kill the Haitians", issued by one of the city's rival drug lords.

Since Nintendo confirmed plans to continue with the Kirby series despite the departure of creator Masahiro Sukurai, we've been busy wondering just what sort of game the versatile pink blob would turn his hand to this time. But perhaps unsurprisingly in the end, and despite his regular forays into random genres, the first details of the game's next outing give us Kirby in his most recognisable get-up - as a platform game hero.

In the story A Christmas Carol, an old miser named Scrooge is haunted by the ghost of Christmas past. The apparition conjures up imagery of Scrooge's history, trying to show him how the mistakes he made affected others, and how he can avoid them in the future. I'm not sure if the ghost of Christmas past has yet paid a visit to Sony Cambridge, but if he did then it clearly wasn't on one of his better nights. Because, in Ghosthunter, the developer has obviously tried hard to rectify the mistakes it made with Primal - but in doing so has only created a handful of new problems.

Good news at last for console RPG fans - one of the many games we'd almost given up hope of seeing on European shores is set for release over here early next year, with Atari performing publishing duties on Bandai's excellent .hack four-part series.

Online sources are reporting that as many as 70 employees at Vivendi Universal Games have been laid off in the past week, following the announcement of another poor set of quarterly results for the division.

Sammy president and CEO Hajime Satomi has told Bloomberg Japan that he wants Sega to concentrate on the arcade games business and be more strict about pouring money into loss-making home console releases, news which is likely to further inflame Sega's loyal fanbase at the end of a tumultuous week for the venerable games publisher.

Konami of Europe has announced plans to produce various mobile games as part of a content partnership deal with Vodafone, starting with Castlevania, Frogger and Gradius.

Nintendo's one-plumber flagship, Mario, has been inducted, or moulded rather, into the Hollywood Wax Museum at 6767 Hollywood Blvd. - the first videogame icon ever honoured with a figure at the museum - where he replaces Matrix stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in the museum's lobby. "My fans always said that no one could hold a candle to me," Mario told reporters. "Now they'd better not!" Indeed they mustn't - for these days more than just his moustache will crumble in the face of concentrated heat!

PC owners keen to play Ubisoft Montreal's magnificent Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time might be interested to hear that the game is being bundled with a swanky gamepad in certain quarters.

Publisher Take Two Interactive has announced that it is to remove several contentious phrases from future copies of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, following an ultimatum from New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Renowned PC developer Relic Entertainment (Impossible Creatures, Homeworld 2, etc) has signed on the dotted line with THQ to develop a real-time strategy game based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

The magnificently disappointing Unreal II has, at last, a reason to be dusted off and housed on your hard drives once more. The reason? Multiplayer! And we know how much you needed another multiplayer FPS.

Microsoft has released its first proper patch for Gearbox's PC Halo port since the game went retail. Remember that the previous update to the game merely enabled support for dedicated servers, and the update before that was released before the game had even hit the shelves. Halo 1.03 is set to be the first comprehensive update of the FPS, fixing a wealth of issues that almost exclusively deal with the game's multiplayer elements.

First-person shooters do not work on the Game Boy. There. I've said it. Yes, you can dial down the texture detail until the whole things looks like a Picasso, and sprites are clearly your best friend, but it's like playing DOOM using a keyboard on a 386. It's funny how people don't do that any more, isn't it?

Those Red Storm chaps eh? They do like their patches. Not being satisfied with releasing a patch for Raven Shield… not long ago, here's another one! So then, what does this one fix/add/ruin?

Long-time readers of the site will be well aware of my 'love' affair with the utterly risible FPS Postal 2 - a title which, given the opportunity, will launch me into tirades of abusive language and possible violence directed at surrounding machinery and/or furniture such is the horror of having to experience anything associated with that pathetic, impotent attempt at attention seeking. Which, I suppose, makes me no better than Running With Scissors themselves. Ho hum.

Keeping games interesting and frustration free is no easy task, and many a promising game has been stopped in its tracks by sudden spikes in the difficulty level that have us inventing new and interesting swear words on a daily basis. Sometimes the game is so good you plough through those multiple restarts, and curse as hours of your life are lost to often hatefully exacting design. Often, though, it's a showstopper, and you spare yourself the high blood pressure by hitting the eject button and moving onto something more fun.

Amidst the filthy, crime-ridden corporate concrete monstrosities of Grant City, human beings aren't born; they're forged from broken bones and blood money. Which is rather poetic really, because Dead to Rights was forged from third-person action games and 3D beat-'em-ups. Murderous, sultry looking Jack "Of All Trades" Slate has always felt like an amalgam of cop clichés, most notably Max Payne with the revenge theme and Bullet Time (and you can easily imagine a sweaty, balding police chief snarling that "he breaks balls, but he gets results"), and in truth he's never sat comfortably for it.

Rather unfairly, if you ask us, Project Gotham Racing 2 began sliding backwards down the charts this week, dropping ten places in Chart-Track's countdown to appear at No.27 in the All Formats Top 40 - and failing even to take the top spot in the Xbox Top 20, where EA's Medal of Honor: Rising Sun brushed it aside with a tornado of high profile marketing and TV spots. Then again if Microsoft went as far as EA and made a fancy advert that bears little or no resemblance to their game, maybe they'd be reaping the rewards - but we're kind of glad they haven't.

According to numerous reports and a handful of staff forum posts, Interplay has closed renowned RPG developer Black Isle Studios, shut down the Van Buren (Fallout 3) project and laid off around 14 development staff.

Sony comprehensively trounced the opposition in the console hardware market once again this week, with the PlayStation 2 selling at its highest level all year.