Latest Articles (Page 3394)

British publisher SCi has rescued Pivotal Games from the ignominy of parent company Kaboom Studios' receivership, paying receivers Ersnt & Young a cool £2.36 million for the developer's trade and assets, the company announced today. Pivotal is expected to continue much as it did before, with no lay-offs planned for any of the 70 staff - an altered payment structure the only real evidence of new ownership.

Vivendi has released details of a title in development by new Japanese team Tranji. Red Ninja: End of Hono[u]r is set in Japan in the 1500's during fierce power struggles, a time when the Samurai have lost their clout thanks to years of clan conflict and warlords are turning to the Ninja to aid them in their political gains.

Nintendo plans to launch a wireless link-up adapter for the Game Boy Advance and GBA SP next year, according to a press release from Motorola, who will be providing the wireless chipset. The adapter is expected to be small enough "for convenient mobility", and will boast interference protection and low power consumption, which is obviously crucial for the GBA, whilst enabling link-up play for up to five players.

Good afternoon, and say hello once again to your good friend on the new-fangled typing machine. We should really change that image... Anyway, this week we are, as ever, compiling some of your least rubbish splutterings, and then offering you a special prize to make you go away. Although we do still have copies of Madden NFL 2004 coming out of our helmets, we will instead be offering a superior prize this week - a copy of Freedom Fighters for a platform of the winner's choosing. This is somewhat dependent on that turning up early next week (come on, postie!) but if it doesn't we'll make arrangements. We always do our best for you.

We love voting sites. We have a longstanding, platonic relationship with them, particularly the ones with "rack" in the title. Great sites. However we never really got on with Are You Hot Or Not because, well, we're ugly as sin and about as attractive to the opposite sex as a kickabout in the park with lacy underwear for goalposts.

Gaming can be expensive [hold the phone... what? -Ed]. Why, I remember a day not so long ago when brand new, triple-A carts for a 16-bit platform cost £59.99. In fact, didn't I pay seventy frickin' quid for Diddy's Kong Quest? Don't pity me - save your sympathy for my Neo Geo owning friend who now lives under a railway bridge with King of Fighters '95.

Japanese console giant Nintendo is set to become the first of the current platform holders to launch a games system in China, with a new console sporting strong anti-piracy systems set to arrive next month.

When Gran Turismo 4 slipped to 2004, we were upset, but the widespread reaction wasn't quite what we'd expected. Given the enormous excitement generated by GT3: A-Spec, we rather thought everyone would be up in arms, complaining bitterly and generally rising up in the streets and toppling governments. It didn't happen.

Jade Empire, BioWare's long-awaited first party exclusive Xbox RPG has finally been revealed, and numerous juicy details about the project have emerged, firstly via a fairly unrevealing press release, and secondly via a Gamespot interview with BioWare's joint CEOs, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

Creative Assembly has released three high resolution MPEGs of its forthcoming strategy epic Rome: Total War. The enormously impressive videos are just over a minute in length, with each one depicting in-game footage of battles with Barbarians, Egyptians and Greeks. You can pick them up over at 3D Gamers by following the respective links. We recommend making use of BitTorrent and the 3D Gamers torrents instead of the HTTP and FTP mirrors though, because they're more likely to work - these are them: Barbarian (57.7MB), Egyptian (41.6MB), Greek (48.9MB).

Square Enix has officially confirmed the existence of Kingdom Hearts II for PS2, along with a new GBA adventure dubbed Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Although frustratingly few details have emerged so far, we do know that Sora will return as the hero of Kingdom Hearts II, with Donald Duck, Goofy and Mickey Mouse amongst his companions. The Magic Box has scanned shots of both games, so go here for PS2 and here for GBA.

Sony is to make the first move in the console price war this Christmas, slashing the cost of its PS2 console by £30 to £139 from October 1st.

The stock of World War II has never been higher by the look of things, with Breakthrough, Rising Sun, Hidden & Dangerous II and now Call Of Duty staggering into the Eurogamer surgery for their routine check ups.

One of the most popular RPGs of all time, Final Fantasy VII, is set for a revival, with Square Enix unveiling a new title set after the events of the first epic story - but only in the form of a CG movie.

Feel like spoiling a good walk? EA can help you. Although the 2004 edition of its stick wiggling and button mashing golf series appears at the start of the Christmas rush, flanked on either side by a collection of what must be worryingly saleable alternatives, it's a good place to start. Newcomers are certainly most welcome, and should be warned that this is no tap-tap-smack PC golf sim, but a more organic version in which players use analogue sticks to swing clubs, and furiously mash the shoulder buttons like a Curling scrubber to add spin.

I came to review Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight from the standpoint of a casual gamer, and without having played a game in the series since Flight Simulator 2000. Despite that, after skipping through the introductory videos as if they were a passenger's emergency information card, I found that I immediately knew the key sequences to release my brakes, drop the flaps and apply some throttle, and none of the other controls had changed a great deal either. It wasn't until about half an hour of déjà vu that I realised what a great metaphor for the whole Flight Simulator 2004 experience that would be. There are several good improvements over previous versions, but to the eyes of the casual gamer at least, this is an iterative improvement. Maybe the subtitle should have been A Decade of Flight Simulators?

Ahead of the Tokyo Game Show later this month, Capcom has shed some light on Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition, which will launch for PS2 in Japan this December to celebrate 15 years of Street Fighter II.

The Xbox is significantly outpacing its rivals in the console market in growth terms, with both hardware and software sales growing faster than the PS2 or Cube according to the latest figures from Microsoft.

Sony has announced that I-Ninja, developed for Namco by UK-based Argonaut, will be released in Europe during Q1 2004, and will be a PS2 exclusive. With the stylish platform adventure due out on PS2, Xbox and Cube in the US, the European move comes as something of a surprise.

Effective today, American punters can go out and buy a GameCube for a mere $99 - $80 less than either PS2 or Xbox - as part of Nintendo's big pre-Christmas promotional push - perhaps lending some credence to the €99 price point rumour flying around earlier this week. With the US price drop now in place, seasonal big-hitters like Mario Kart: Double Dash (due out in the US on November 17th) should help the Cube limp back into contention, and perhaps even force Nintendo to fire up those foundries again and start moulding more of its purple joyboxes. The platform holder originally ceased production of the console because there was a mounting surplus in retail channels - which would have at least encouraged the new price point.

When we first got our hands on XIII back at ECTS 2002, it was an interesting mixture of stealth, classic FPS action, cel-shaded visuals and a richly detailed story borne out of a series of Belgian comics. Sending crates plummeting onto nameless henchmen evoked memories of scripted death in Half-Life, and the boxouts, on-screen captioning and Unreal-driven cartoon visuals left us with high hopes. Fast forward to this year's trade show and the game picked up the coveted 'Best of Show' award from a panel of top games journalists. With so much going for it, it must be good, right?

GameSpot caught up with god game mogul Peter Molyneux at last week's X03 event in France and threw some questions in his general direction. The transcript is in the guise of a Q&A on The Movies, Lionhead's intriguing movie management and creation title which Kristan investigated last month.

Empire has signed an exclusive licensing deal with Sony Pictures to develop a follow-up to its Starsky & Hutch videogame. Kristan will be thrilled. We were going to give him a funkectomy until we saw this.

As we've been telling you for a while [now now Tom, this isn't you-know-who.com -Ed], Project Gotham Racing 2 is due out on November 28th in Europe. Microsoft officially confirmed the release date this morning, lending plenty of credibility to the various other MS dates we brought you earlier this month. PGR2 was key amongst those for 2003, with Top Spin and Amped 2 appearing earlier in November and Counter-Strike following on December 5th.

Ubisoft will be bringing us not one, but two distinctive Fame Academy games this year, thanks to an agreement with French producer Monte Cristo. Based on the UK TV show of the same name, in which a bunch of variously hopeful wannabe musicians are propelled through a - yes - Fame Academy and played off against one another for telephone votes in a Saturday night BBC One special, the games will attack the competitive rhythm-action and management sim genres on PS2 and PC respectively.

Half-Life 2 has been slipped to the "holiday season", Valve officially confirmed last night. Rumours had been emanating from various retailers and publisher Vivendi for some months, but Valve - as late as last week - still insisted the release date would not move.

While everyone has been getting their knickers caught up in the will-they-won't-they illusion that a certain shoot 'em up based in the ruins of Eastern Europe is going to be released on September 30th, lauded Eastern European coders at Illusion have been busy putting the finishing touches to their long-awaited follow-up to Hidden & Dangerous.

According to the ECTS press panel, XIII is the best game in the room, something Ubi Soft seems keen to emphasise. We can only assume organisers CMP came round with a few Velcro-strip “Best of Show” placards, because a perky French lass was busily attaching several to the demo pod we were playing on yesterday afternoon barely an hour after the awards...

Pivotal Games' Conflict: Desert Storm II has gone straight in at number one in the UK, displacing LucasArts' epic RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic after only a week in the top spot.

Vivendi last night launched a two-level single-player demo of Lord of the Rings-based real-time strategy saga The War of the Ring. As of this morning, it's available from numerous outlets, weighing in at 120MB. The full game is due out in November this year.