Latest Articles (Page 3382)

French developer Nadeo has released a final playable demo of TrackMania (reviewed today), which weighs in at 55.9MB and features ten racing and ten puzzle tracks.

Namco has announced that R: Racing Evolution has gone gold, and that the publisher aims to ship 500,000 copies for the game's November 27th launch in Japan on PS2, Xbox and Cube. The game is then due out in North America on December 9th, with the publisher's European plans still unknown.

According to a report from Dengeki Online (which we read about at 1UP), Koei has told attendees at its midterm strategy meeting in Japan this week that the company is working on three launch titles for Sony's PSP handheld device.

Nokia has announced that EA will bring Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 to N-Gage during the first half of 2004, and that the game will be the first sports title to incorporate features from online service N-Gage Arena. Players can apparently expect to post high scores to a leader board through N-Gage Arena, as well as download new courses and other bonuses.

Nintendo is giving fans another chance to get their hands on the Zelda Collector's Edition disc that shipped with the Mario Kart: Double Dash bundle last Friday thanks to its recently relaunched Stars Catalogue at www.nintendo.co.uk. The bonus disc will join the Stars Catalogue collection on December 1st.

It's Wednesday November 19th - the day Square Enix unveils Final Fantasy XII to the world - and whether you're an avid fan or just a casual sympathiser, you can't help but feel a little green about anybody standing in a particular room in Tokyo right about now. This guy, for example, commands much of our jealousy.

Ramps. Everyone loves ramps. When you had a bike or a skateboard as a kid, most of the fun was going up and down ramps. When you got bored in GTA, ramps were there for you, fuelling endless hours of cunning stunts. The key to TrackMania's brilliance is clearly ramps - they make the difference between a bunch of matchbox cars zooming around in an entertaining physics demo and the most addictive precision-racer in ages. And racing isn't even the point! Although TrackMania is devilishly addictive to race around, and completing the developer's opening salvo of 24 sometimes fiendish tracks to gold medal standard will happily swallow an evening and leave you gasping for more, the gimmick that makes the headlines is the construction element, which gives you a point A and a point B, a few pieces of track and a target time.

Ubisoft's Raven Shield expansion Athena Sword is a budding contender for "Half-Life 2 of the Week", a new award I just made up to celebrate release date confusion (with special bonus points for publisher/developer misinformation).

Nintendo's biggest hope for Christmas has had a strong debut, but has failed to displace FIFA 2004 from the top spot in the UK charts, coming in at number three behind Activision's True Crime.

Sony's Studio Cambridge may still be licking its wounds after Primal suffered a mauling in the press, having seemingly got caught up in its own hype thanks to a procession of artsy marketing ideas and folks dressed up as gargoyles on Oxford Street - none of which stopped it from tanking at retail and being reduced to £20 almost from day one - but the BAFTA award-winning MediEvil developer has obviously found a stash of industrial elastoplast, because it's already on the rebound with Ghosthunter, a sort of Se7en meets Ghostbusters tale of malformed monstrosities, the macabre and a wisecracking cop on a quest to put a spectral uprising back to bed.

Although Project Gotham Racing did have a radio/CD player feature to highlight its extensive musical catalogue, we certainly never felt like we could have done with a tape for the car or a hard copy for the stereo. To be honest, those tracks we did like we ended up playing on an endless loop to avoid the others. Likewise this May when we flew back from E3, one disc that curiously never made it into our walkmans was the PGR2 soundtrack sampler we found in our bags at the end of day three.

PC gamers yet to be wooed by Remedy's attempt at a noir love story shoot-'em-up would do well to check out the playable demo released this week, which gives you the first two levels (Prologue and Elevator Doors) and a significant chunk of the third (A Criminal Mastermind) to play around with. The demo even includes an unlockable Dead Man Walking map, Manor Yard, and if you aren't hooked on Remedy's particular brand of slow-motion slaughter and Havok physics-based death animations now, you probably will be after a spell behind the furrowed brow of the game's eponymous anti-hero.

Paradigm Entertainment, developers of Spy Hunter and Terminator: Dawn of Fate, are busy working on a new Terminator game for Atari called Redemption, and PS2 and Xbox demos of the as-yet unannounced title have actually shipped with copies of Terminator: Rise of the Machines in the US - and will presumably do the same thing over here when ROTM finally lands later this month.

Following the relatively low key release (for Rockstar, anyway) of the PS2 edition of the Grand Theft Auto Double Pack recently, interest has now turned to the as-yet unreleased Xbox edition, which despite appearing in the US has yet to be given a definite European date.

EA has released a demo of Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup, a game inspired by the broomstick-based sport that runs through the Harry Potter books. Last time I tried to get away with sounding knowledgeable on the subject though, I got caught out on the amount of points a snitch is worth, so I'm not going to bother this time (though I have read and enjoyed all the Potter books).

According to a missive thrust our way over the weekend, NovaLogic is busy sharpening Black Hawk Down expansion Team Sabre for its release in early 2004 (sources say mid-February), sprucing things up for fans of the cinematic and entertaining albeit rather soulless original.

Japanese publisher Capcom has announced a profit for the first half of fiscal 2003, turning around a loss last year, and has given unit software sales guidance for each of the hardware platforms in the current year.

Hip Games, the North American publisher of the PC port of Dead to Rights, has issued a patch to fix an issue affecting certain gamers unable to make progress beyond the tutorial.

Following on from last month's release of four new cars, Digital Illusions and Microsoft have finally rolled out some juicier downloadables for Midtown Madness 3 - a selection of new Blitz and Checkpoint tracks for Washington DC fans.

True Crime: Streets of LA - a successful composition of substandard elements if you believe the things I say - could be on its way to the PC in March 2004, according to a suspicious listing on EBGames.com which has since been deleted.

Final Fantasy XII producer Yasumi Matsuno has commented on some of the broader themes that will run through the next instalment of Square's famous RPG series.

You know this: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a benchmark. It has defined the standard that the majority of skating titles have aspired to since its release in 1999. Though the core concept of the title has stagnated a little with each subsequent rehash (a rot Neversoft hope to stop Tony Hawk's Underground), revisiting the PSone original again on a handheld feels... right. Well, almost.

EA will publish Spawn: Armageddon in Europe for the PS2, Xbox and GameCube as part of its long-standing relationship with Namco. Previous fruits of their union have included Soul Calibur II and Dead to Rights. EA plans to publish Spawn: Armageddon in PAL territories in March 2004.

Warren Spector is a black woman.

Japanese publisher Konami has reported a large rise in its profits for the first half of the 2003 fiscal year, with the boost attributed largely to the success of its video games and trading card games in the USA and Europe.

Details of Final Fantasy XII have appeared on the net this week thanks to the notoriously leaky Shonen Jump magazine, which has been scanned ahead of time to great delight once again, with Square Enix's official unveiling of the game still planned for November 19th in Tokyo.

Ubisoft's comic book-based first-person shooter XIII ("thirteen", rather than "ex-three") has gone gold and will be released on PC, PS2, Cube and Xbox in a peculiar order over the next month or so, starting with the PC version next week if Ubi's latest schedule is still accurate.

Buying games shouldn't be such a [fluffing] mission. I don't care that it's Friday morning and you haven't unpacked the games boxes yet and nobody usually comes in for the lesser stuff on Friday morning you slack minimum wage monkey. And, hang on, lesser stuff?! Get outside, find the box that has Beyond Good & Evil in it, and ring that [kitten] up! [Got my work cut out today -Moral Decency Ed] I've got forty quid in the palm of my hand, there's a line of angry mothers behind me and I want to buy the game! I'm going to buy that game!

As a game, The Two Towers took a lot of us by surprise. No one seriously expected EA - purveyor of many a movie licence disaster in the past - to produce a title capable of impressing the critics almost as much as the Lord Of The Rings-hungry consumers. In terms of cinematic excellence it broke new boundaries, seamlessly morphing key movie sequences into deliciously rendered real-time hackandslash gaming action that fitted perfectly with the more pacey elements of the film.

It's not often we find ourselves actually looking forward to licence-based games, but EA Redwood Shores surpassed itself with The Two Towers and its immensely slick and enjoyable take on the hack and slash genre.