Latest Articles (Page 3396)

Once the undisputed king of the Rally driving genre, Codemasters came in for a fair bit of flak with last year's slightly disappointing Colin McRae Rally 3. Although the core gameplay was still undoubtedly strong enough to please the faithful, some were disappointed about only being able to drive a Ford Focus, and the company found its flagship product desperately wanting in graphical terms, slipping behind Sony's WRC II on the PS2, and being firmly trounced by DICE's more arcade oriented entrant RalliSport Challenge on the Xbox.

By way of a story in Japanese gaming weekly Famitsu, Namco has released a number of details regarding a new action adventure title for PS2 called Nina; a Tekken spin-off focussing on the eponymous fighting lassie.

Gratuitous is a word most games industry folk will be familiar with, and it's certainly a word readily associated with Microsoft's penchant for salubrious press trips. For the third year on the trot the Redmond behemoth flew a gaggle of twisted, cynical journalists to a sunny locale, plied them with fine food, endless free beverages, put on a DJ and then waited for us to ungratefully moan about the standard of the hotel or being forced to get up at dawn's crack to blearily blink through the day. We didn't want to let them down.

Ubisoft has updated its Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow microsite with a number of new screenshots and a trailer, all safely tucked inside a Flash interface in which you have to "use" night vision and thermal goggles to locate them. Nyargh.

Fans of budget games scheduling their outgoings for October may want to consider Eidos' next batch of Premier Collection titles for the PC, which bring sun, sea, sand, soccer and Sicilian assassins together at last. The three titles due out in early October offer training in three diverse professions; guns for hire (Hitman 2: Silent Assassin), football managers (Championship Manager: Season 01/02) and holiday reps (Beach Life), and each is easily worth £12.99, even if we did think Beach Life was a bit on the average side.

This year's handheld Spyro platformer has been rebranded for Europe for reasons we can't quite gather. Due out towards the end of October in the States and dubbed "Attack of the Rhynocs," we can expect to get our grubby mitts on it when it bears the name "Spyro: Adventure" over here from November. Having been a bit confused before, we've now combined all our Rhynoc screenshots into one place for you.

Solid Snake has a lot to answer for. And not just from Liquid's point of view either. On the one hand, he introduced us to the fabulous world of 'stealth espionage' and gave us one of the best games ever made, in Metal Gear Solid. On the other hand, his success - like all success in this industry - spawned a hideous batch of apostles; average game designers that would attempt to cash in on the new stealth revolution.

We're going on a little historical diversion in a second, so if you're just here for an opinion take this one and run. "Knights of the Old Republic is the best Star Wars game since X-Wing and/or Tie Fighter, if not ever. Unless something entirely unbelievable descends from the heavens, it's the RPG of the year. If the remaining major players fumble even slightly, it's game of the year. Along with Halo, it's the reason to invite Bill Gates into your house". Got that? Great.

As we found out last night, Codemasters' Race Driver 2: The Ultimate Racing Simulator (or the phonetically worrying abbreviation "Race Driver 2: The URS") will be an Xbox exclusive when it launches in Spring 2004, and there's still no mention of a PC version in Codies' extensive morning press release. Or screenshots.

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, the American arm of Sony Computer Entertainment has revealed launch plans for the PS2's hard disk adapter. The 40GB HDD add-on will be released in the US next March, priced $99 (£62 / €89) and will ship with Final Fantasy XI "pre-installed". After Square Enix's ambitious MMORPG (which will support cross-platform PS2/PC play), SOCOM II and Syphon Filter will be the next games to take advantage of the HDD's storage capabilities, with downloadable content planned for both.

Mobile network provider O2 is offering a Nokia N-Gage for £99.99 - if you're prepared to sign on the dotted line for an O2 Pay Monthly Online Tariff before noon on October 6th.

For X01, before the console had even launched in Europe, Microsoft flew a section of the press out to Pierre Cardin's mansion, where Rob nearly fell off a cliff (true story) and the system was first put through its paces. A year on, Microsoft surprised us all again by flying hacks to a theme park in Seville, where they had free run of rollercoasters and Rareware.

Oh ho ho. Muahaha. Somehow, despite all the odds (and oodles of booze, as you can surely tell), your trusty correspondent guessed this one would be an Xbox exclusive. Why else announce it at X03?

Microsoft has announced a number of new Xbox Live initiatives, some of which we drew your attention to in our Xbox exposé [Xposé, surely? -Foreign Ed] the other week, including pricing options for renewals early next year, a two-months-free offer and a standalone headset for people who don't go for the Starter Kit (which will now include demos of MotoGP and MechAssault instead of Whacked! - a bit crap, given we wanted Re-Volt at least, but hey, we're not buying it anyway).

Microsoft has used its hour-long press conference in Nice, France this evening to unveil a new strategic agreement with Unreal designers Epic Games, who - along with recently formed subsidiary Scion Studios - will develop several new titles exclusively for Xbox (and the PC). Unfortunately said games weren't announced this evening, but they will be published by MS Games Studios.

And so it begins...

Nope. Not an X03 announcement. (We're anticipating those sometime after 9pm this evening as the press conference comes to a close in Nice.) Instead, here are some details on Phantom Dust, one of the Xbox games we didn't know about until recently when we heard that it was due out in June. Along with a whole load of other things.

Rockstar has popped a short Max Payne 2 trailer up on its website (here, dears), which shows off some of the noir-ish third person shooter's updated gameplay. Anybody downloading the 71MB (720x480) or 13MB (320x240) movie can expect to see Bullet Time, a haggard-looking Max and a bit of kissing. All set to a thoroughly rousing tune.

Microsoft has announced a wireless network adapter for Xbox as expected, allowing gamers to hook their Xboxen up to existing 11Mbps (802.11b) wireless networks or higher bandwidth 55Mbps (802.11g) networks, thus negating a lot of the cable clutter Live gamers must be getting sick of by now.

The last time we caught a glimpse of Worms in one of its very many iterations was in the multiplayer-focussed Worms World Party back in 2000, before Team17 decided to shut itself away and get to work on developing the inevitable 3D follow-up to the game that made turn-based strategy cool.

A lot has been said about Club Football. Mostly by Codemasters. But although the concept of 17 games individually tailored to a particular club's players, liveries and fixtures is an interesting one, it's the quality of the underlying football that we're interested in - and whether or not it can compete with Pro Evolution Soccer 3 or FIFA 2004 this Christmas. (And whether or not ELSPA will treat it as one game or 17 - the latter almost certainly keeping it away from the All Formats Top 40...)

We know we're a bit late with this, but what the heck - those talented fellows behind the Desert Combat modification for Battlefield 1942 have gone and released alpha 0.4. Fans of the mod will likely already be informed of this, but the update features a huge wad of fixes and some major additions to the game.

As previously stated here, the PC version of trendy shooting game Halo: Combat Evolved will be released on October 10th, after developer Gearbox finally finished it up this week.

Knights Of The Old Republic soared straight to the top of the UK's All Format chart today, ending Sony's Eye Toy summer residency after four straight weeks, and providing the Xbox with its first true blockbusting success since Splinter Cell late last year.

In a sign of things to come, Microsoft in the US has launched a Christmas Xbox bundle, consisting of a console, a two-month subscription to Xbox Live (Complete with Gamertag et al) and copies of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Tetris Worlds. The package will be available for $179.99 (£110 / €160) from some retailers as early as tomorrow, September 17th, but will appear in a specially packaged bundle from October 15th.

Publishing giant Electronic Arts is to provide a major boost for Sony's PS2 online service, with four of its biggest EA Games label titles set to support online play over the network adapter kit.

Project Gotham Racing was, as I'm sure we're all well aware, the third best game of 2002. What made it so good was not purely the racing model, which was arcadey with a touch of sim, but its alliance with a points-scoring system (known as Kudos) that made you fight for every last scrap of powerslide, risking as many time-consuming swerves and going as close to the kerb as you dared in order to maximise your Kudos.

When we first cast our eyes over PGR2 back at E3, it was obvious even at that early stage that Bizarre Creations had something very special on its hands. Given double the time to make the game, the Liverpool-based team has put the time to good use; 10 all-new cities painstakingly recreated, 103 cars, full Live play, 250 licensed music tracks, and an overhauled, fairer Kudos system. Could this be the street racing game to top them all?

Unlike so many of the benchmark products at E3, Bizarre Creations actually bothered to conjure up a playable demo of its latest baby, and we were only too happy to make a beeline for it. With four tracks on show across Florence, Barcelona, Edinburgh and Moscow, the demo gave us a chance to sample two races, a cone challenge and a Hot Lap trial.

Having picked up awards at E3 and danced its crazy war dance behind closed doors at ECTS, Pandemic Studios' Full Spectrum Warrior is now set to make its overt playable debut at Microsoft's X03 event tomorrow. A THQ person reckons "X03 is the perfect opportunity to give game industry opinion leaders their first hands-on experience with Full Spectrum Warrior." But then they would say that.