Latest Articles (Page 3388)

When Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank was first announced, we were among many who simply didn't know what to think. Here was a platform game obviously borrowing heavily from Naughty Dog's fabulous Jak & Daxter, right down to using chunks of the same technology, now "with weapons". But surprisingly enough, not only did it work but it worked really, really well. So well in fact that, apart from a short demo at this year's E3 and PSEx shows, Sony has been keeping very quiet about the sequel. Fortunately, we've been playing it solidly now for a couple of weeks, and not content with just telling you what we think of it elsewhere today, we also tracked down Insomniac Games president Ted Price to answer a few questions about the game...

Despite being one of the buggiest games in history, the original Hidden & Dangerous had so much going for it that, somehow, Illusion Softworks got away with it.

The PS2 and Xbox versions of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel have reached gold status, meaning the console debut for the much-loved series is well on its way to its November release.

The ex-Blizzard fellows collectively responsible for the company's crowning glories Diablo, Diablo II, WarCraft and StarCraft have unveiled their new development team, Flagship Studios. The company was founded by former executives of Blizzard North David Brevik, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, Bill Roper and Kenneth Williams, and they are joined by various other ex-Blizzard employees responsible for some of the most popular PC titles ever made.

IGN is reporting today from an "NVIDIA Editors' Day" that DOOM III will be capped at 60 frames per second. If that sounds odd to you (given some of the framerates thrown around in connection with Quake 3 benchmarks at least), then this is what Doom engine overlord John Carmack had to say about the matter:

It's difficult to know when to buy an expansion pack. Even for the best games. If it's good, then you've just bought yourself more time with an old favourite, maybe reliving some of the experiences that made you go for it in the first place and even taking in a few more. On the other hand, if it's bad or just a glorified patch then you could be stuck wondering why you didn't get this in the first place, or for free. A genuine reaction to the healing properties of one recent expansion was thus: "What! I don't have to glitch my way through that mission any more and now it takes five minutes? That took me two hours to beat!"

Will humans ever colonise space? It's a question that has plagued at least one person (me) since... well, a few days ago, when I first got my hands on Firefly's Space Colony. It's a game that raises a lot of important questions: When we colonise Mars, will there be giant space spiders and hideous plants that give birth to swarms of giant bees? Will we be able to remotely control big robots that eat rocks and farm ugly little space chickens? And most importantly: is Space Colony actually any good?

With the game due out in Europe tomorrow, boxed copies basking in cellophane glory atop our PC towers and a review brewing for today or tomorrow, it's fair to say Hidden & Dangerous 2 is on our minds, and now it can be on yours too!

Sega is planning one final swing of the Phantasy Star Online sabre next month, with the release of a GameCube package comprising the first "two" games of the previous Episode I & II release and a selection of new features.

Magazine publishing giant Future Network plc has extended its dominance of the games magazine market in the UK by acquiring Computec Media UK, whose titles include PSW and Xbox World, for £3.2 million.

The Korean GP32 handheld will not be released in Europe, according to reports from chief proponents Lik-Sang, who stock the Korean version on their website.

Ubisoft's UK representatives have been in touch to correct a previous story about Raven Shield add-on Athena Sword. Despite issuing a statement to the US press pointing to a 2004 release and claiming "This later release date will allow for us to develop the top quality game we know our fans have come to expect from Ubisoft," Athena Sword is still on schedule for a November 28th release in Europe and always has been. It's not altogether obvious where this bizarre communications mix-up originated, but here's that statement from the US again just so you know what to ignore in future:

Sonic Team's first original character in ages is set to join us a little bit sooner than expected, as Sega has announced that Cube-exclusive Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg will be released on October 31st in Europe, and not November 7th as had been planned.

Former 3DO frontman Trip Hawkins is planning to start a new company. There's a surprise. What is perhaps interesting about startup Digital Chocolate is that, unlike games publisher and failed platform holder 3DO, it'll see Trip dabbling in wireless entertainment for mobile handsets.

Given that Ford owns everything with four wheels and many things without, we're guessing some of you drive their cars, and will perhaps be interested in seeing how they handle on a PC. After all, how many of the cars in your GT3 garage are actually waiting outside for you to take 'em for a spin? The rest of you... well, you can feign interest and we'll give you a mark out of 10. Deal?

Remedy has released a little patch to, er, remedy a few problems in the shipping version of Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne. According to the brief readme file, patch 1.01 fixes crashing to "Exception: Bad Allocation" messages in Windows 98 or Millennium during loading of certain levels, and improves load times on low-end computers. Good news all round then, and it's only 5.2MB to boot. Get it here and then plug it in right after you get back from the shops on Friday evening.

Namco Hometek is working on a follow-up to Dead to Rights, their third-person bullet and knuckle sandwich with added grisly cop drama cheese, which first appeared on Xbox at the end of March and subsequently on PS2 and GameCube in August.

If we were to compile a list of the greatest gaming injustices ever brought upon European gamers, many of the most heinous offences would date from the PSone's golden era of RPGs - a golden era which we only saw tantalising glimmers of in Europe, being denied almost all of the key releases of the genre. Admittedly, Sony, Namco, Bandai et al are seemingly conspiring to make sure that the PS2 repeats this PAL-shunning feat, but current crimes aside, it's hard not to be bitter about the small-minded foolishness that denied European gamers the likes of Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Wild Arms 2 and Parasite Eve... And, of course, Final Fantasy Tactics, Square's fascinating turn-based strategy RPG which is still rated as one of the best games of all time by its many devotees.

It's been a busy year or so for PC strategy fans, hasn't it? All three of the genre's big hitters rolled out their latest incarnations, to varying degrees of success - there was the excellent and genre-breaking WarCraft III, the solid and enjoyable Age of Mythology, and the frankly disappointing Command & Conquer: Generals. As if that wasn't enough, there were plenty of other strategy stunners to be found outside the established series offerings, allowing you to conquer Europe in the dark ages in Medieval: Total War, lead the Roman legions to victory in Praetorians or take command of the Allied campaign to victory in World War II: Frontline Command.

There was cause for cautious celebration at Nintendo of Europe this morning when it emerged that GameCube sales in the UK have dramatically overtaken the Xbox by a ratio of almost two to one - and almost ten times the level they were at before the recent £50 price cut.

Konami scored its first All Formats No.1 for a year this week, following the storming success of Pro Evolution Soccer 3 on PS2, which displaced EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 after its two-week stint at the top.

Japan's largest game publisher, Nintendo, has purchased a significant amount of stock in toy and media giant Bandai, causing many Japanese media sources to speculate that a buy-out may be on the cards in the near future.

According to numerous reports, Ubisoft has delayed Raven Shield expansion Athena Sword until early 2004 citing feedback from fans. "This later release date will allow for us to develop the top quality game we know our fans have come to expect from Ubisoft," the publisher said in a statement.

Vivendi-Universal Games plans to revive Al Lowe's saucily comical Leisure Suit Larry character for a new adventure dubbed Magna Cum Laude, according to the December issue of the American magazine Computer Games.

If you were one of the many people who bought a copy of Jak II over the weekend, then the chances are you're starting to get close to the tougher meat of the game - we wish you particular good luck with the respawning guard sections - and may be in need of a helping hand.

A UK demo of Empire's VEGA$: Make It Big, developed by UK-based Deep Red Games, has made it onto the net by way of PC Zone's cover disk. Remember Andy Garcia in Ocean's Eleven? It's a game about being him, or at least someone like him, and building a gambling empire on the strip, with hotels, casinos, clubs, rollercoasters and other attractions, competing with up to five rival entrepreneurs.

I don't know about you, but Christmas at my house was always a battery-fuelled orgy [ouch -Ed] of high-pitched racing cars. Forget cranberry jelly, stuffing, Peggy Mitchell and dreaming of snow, our afternoon activity of choice was weaving bits of plastic track through an Amazon of chair legs, discarded wrapping paper and crumpled Christmas cards - eventually tugging on a flimsy plastic trigger control and watching a toy racer catapulted halfway across the room and into Uncle Biggles' [no-one has an uncle called Biggles -concerned Ed] house of cards.

Konami has released a 142MB playable demo of first-person shooter Apocalyptica, developed in the UK by Extreme FX, which is set after armageddon has "been and gone" as Neo-Satan runs rampant and requires filleting. How do you kill Satan? Fortunately it's a question you won't have to answer in playing the demo, because it only features the first level of the game and two of the four religious soldiers on a quest to put matters to right.

Digital Illusions has released its Battlefield 1942 Mod Development Toolkit beta for testing, which you can pick up from 3D Gamers for the price of 1.6MB hard drive space. The kit features a menu editor, an animation import/export tool, a sound script editor, plus mesh, skeleton and skin import/export tools, as well as a wealth of tutorials on how to make use of them to edit the relevant aspects of Battlefield 1942.

Rainbow Six 3 for the Xbox has infiltrated the manufacturing plant, bumped off the night-time security and slipped quietly inside the duplication machines, which means the game should quite happily clamber onto shop shelves in time for November 14th.