Latest Articles (Page 3398)

Can you think of a single platform game - old or new - that could conceivably take place in the real world? Nope? We can't either. And doesn't it seem odd that a genre born entirely out of the imagination is so unimaginative? More on that another time, but the point is that upon firing up Sonic Adventure DX, it would be nice to say that things have come a long way since we first played it. Only they haven’t, have they?

Few at this stage would argue that Halo won the battle of bleeding hearts and severed minds that was the console FPS war, and Xbox Live is indisputably superior to PS2 Online, even if the subscription figures don't do it justice.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is due out on November 21st, to be followed by Unreal II: The Awakening on Xbox with added Live multiplayer on December 2nd, according to the latest Atari release schedules.

Panasonic has finally unveiled a GB Player peripheral compatible with its GameCube-based games console/DVD player, the Q. Unfortunately for Panasonic, when Nintendo first released the GB Player peripheral, it was the wrong size for the shapely Q to nestle on top of, necessitating this release. Like the official model, the Q's Player will handle any Game Boy game ever released, with configurable controller buttons, zoom modes and visual filters. Nice. However obviously you'll have to battle with the language barrier.

THQ has indeed altered the name of its Egyptian action title Sphinx and the Shadow of Set to - wait for it - Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, ending months of speculation inside at least two people's heads. About the name change, Pete Dille, THQ's senior vice president of marketing said, "Due to the popularity of the Mummy and his importance to the story of Sphinx, we decided to add his name to the title of the game". We couldn't agree more, Pete. When we asked Tom to comment for no particular reason, he firmly stated: "LET MY PIGEONS GO." Thanks Tom.

Software giant Microsoft has announced its financial results for the quarter and financial year ended June 31, revealing firm figures for the global installed base of Xbox and its targets for the coming year.

Microids (with the funny double dot over the "i"), has announced that XS Games (shrug) has signed a deal to publish Syberia on Xbox. Syberia, as you may remember, was an artsy adventure title that was much better on the PC than it was on the PS2.

In an email to a Republic fansite on Friday, Elixir's Demis Hassabis confirmed that "the game is done and the Gold Master candidate submitted (in 6 languages!)." Republic has been the subject of much speculation after it slipped from its June release date, but it now seems set to come out later this year. "It's now up to Eidos how fast they want to turn the manufacturing and distribution process around," according to Hassabis. "It's possible to do this turnaround in two weeks but they've decided to delay that to September to ensure a simultaneous worldwide release." Of course this is not the official Eidos 'gold' announcement, but it's good news for those looking forward to Republic, which just received a pretty positive review in PC Gamer here in the UK.

Eidos has popped out a new Legacy Of Kain: Defiance trailer. The movie squeezes in a fair amount of gameplay during its one minute and twenty three seconds, but special attention appears to have been paid to exhibiting the title's impressively bombastic combat effects. The trailer also includes biting, if you like that sort of thing. Vampires, see. The .mov file over at Eidos' website weighs in at a bite-sized 6MB.

Last week we told you about US firm VoodooPC's new M460 laptop with upgradeable graphics chip. Quite handy, you probably thought, but sending laptops away isn't much fun. Given the cost, it might even be your only PC, and if you're like us then net access is second only to oxygen.

The best and worst thing about the GBA is that it's given every publisher and developer the license to trawl back through the archives and revive some of the old classics. With the hundreds of classics released over the past twenty or more years to draw upon, the way is clear for a whole new audience to sample some simple, good old-fashioned gameplay in a an era when graphics didn't matter, blah blah, pure addictive one more go, blah.

When is a sequel not a sequel? When SSX Tricky hit the shelves late in 2001, EA representatives were at pains to explain that it was merely a remix of the original. And, of course, they were right, but now we've got some confusing history rewriting jiggerypokery to contend with, and EA now wants us to forget everything we know and welcome SSX 3 to our bosom.

Writing this column is usually one of my favourite bits of the week, and I like to think some of you enjoy it too. But even my directionless ramblings can't rescue July 18th, which is possibly the most boring Friday I've ever encountered. It's up there with Thursday now, and possibly even Wednesday morning. Still, up until today I was at least sure that two games were coming out: Darkened Skye and Piglet's BIG Game. Yes. Two.

Oh we do love our videos here at EG Towers. We got wind of another one to add to our collections here - a Dungeon Siege II trailer. First witnessed at E3, the "enhanced" trailer features a smidgen of additional footage and a new "symphonic soundtrack". Nice. It doesn't actually show any gameplay, but the cut scene stuff is certainly quite impressive. Swords and things. You can get the video in three flavours: low quality (4MB), medium quality (7MB) and high quality (18MB).

Games. Are they any good? Not that we're sick of answering the question ourselves of course, but as a number of you have expressed an interest in reviewing things for us, we've decided we'd be only too happy to surrender the office megaphone to a few of you.

Atari's Melbourne House dev studio is hard at work on Transformers Armada: Prelude To Energon for PS2, the once-French ET-burying publisher explained through a long-winded press release the other day.

Further to our story yesterday that a bunch of kids handy with a hex editor had managed to crack Steam's file storage system wide open and view unofficially released Half-Life 2 video content, one such video has now been whored across the interweb without so much as a sniff of involvement from Valve. We're not sure what the developer's position is on the accidental leakage of the 80MB Kleiners Lab footage, but we'd imagine they're not best pleased about it. Sorry Valve - but rest assured everyone thinks it looks amazing!

Buena Vista Games says that TRON 2.0 has "gone gold", and should be out in the US on August 26th and in Europe soon thereafter. Well, they didn't say anything about Europe, but we know that's what they meant. According to Steven Lisberger, "TRON 2.0 is truly a work of art." And you can see what he means for yourself by checking out the online demo released at the start of the month. A single player variant is set to follow in due course.

There's a Midnight Club II multiplayer demo out! The demo features three varieties of car for use in demo's single L.A. level, with four different play modes that can support up to eight players. Get the dirty great 175MB file at FilePlanet or, for the less sado-masochistic, at 3D Gamers, who we love dearly as if they were our own family.

Game publishers currently seem to be in the habit of re-announcing games in order to bring them to our attention again, so although we first heard about a sequel to the wonderful Vib Ribbon way back in the mists of time when the PS2 network adapter was but a twinkle in Ken Kutaragi's eye, the company has dutifully announced the title for a second time this week - with, thankfully, a little more information this time.

We'll get this way out of the bit first: there is new Half-Life 2 video content detailing a short 30 seconds or so of the docks scene from the E3 footage. The video is available on Steam, and it should also have made its way round various worldwide mirrors by now. That's not the really interesting part about this story though.

Like it or not, The Sims is the biggest selling PC game of all time by some margin. It's not a success, it's a bloody phenomenon, and each and every expansion pack gets snapped up faster than chocolate drops dangled over the jaws of a slavering canine.

Bigben Interactive is planning to reunite Taito's pixellated planetary raiders with PS2 owners' beams of interstellar justice, or something, 25 years after Space Invaders first hit the arcades in 1978. Relax, we wouldn't make you do a sum like that in your Thursday heads.

Atari has officially confirmed what we've all known for some time now: that soulless PC FPS Unreal II: The Awakening is on its way to Xbox later this year. The port is apparently underway at Tantalus and original developer Legend, and will be altered to include Xbox Live multiplayer support before its release this Christmas. You can read up on the single player section of the game in our extensive review of the multiplayer-deprived PC version.

Rockstar Games may be planning to sidestep its exclusivity deal with Sony and bring the multi-million selling Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the Xbox as soon as this Christmas, according to a news report yesterday.

Reflexive Entertainment's Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader has gone gold according to VU Games and Interplay in the States, and will presumably appear over here sometime after the game's August US date, courtesy of Avalon née Virgin Interactive. Word at our favourite pub, The Grapevine's Sewing Circle, is that it might have done so a long while ago if it wasn't for the state of the publisher at the time.

Dutch developer Lost Boys is no more. The studio, which is believed to be working on a PS2 first person shooter called Killzone, has undergone a name change and will henceforth be known as "Guerrilla". The change has apparently been made as Guerrilla has become part of the Media Republic group. So that's Guerrilla, and not Guerrilla Entertainment/Interactive/Studios/Productions as far as we can make out, which is a pleasant break from the norm. Let's hope Killzone, if that's what they're doing, also turns out to be. The press release confirms that the team is working on an exclusive PS2 title to be published by SCEE, and promises concrete details very soon.

No matter how many times you think you've seen the back of Eastern European first-person shooters, along comes another one attempting to convince us that, yes, this time we'll be convinced. This one will make up for the hordes of generic rubbish that preceded this title. This, my friends, will be the one that restores all your faith in first-person shooters. Come on down, Chaser, it's your turn.

We knew there was a reason we should have been paying attention in French class during our GCSE days, and the just-released French XIII demo is probably it. Upon streaming the game down via the irritating applet interface (also French) we found ourselves struggling to reconfigure the controls to a normal person's (normal as in not French... just kidding!) WSAD layout, but anyone out there with an ounce of common sense and only the teeniest of French knowledge should be able to figure out what's going on. We wish the same could be said for the storyline and mission objectives though.

Those breathless Frenchmen at Ubi Soft have been banging on our virtual door this lunchtime with news that Rainbow Six 3 will be an Xbox exclusive this Christmas. And apparently we're not talking about a faithfully recreated, rebranded version of Raven Shield with an "Only on Xbox" jpeg pasted on top. Oh no. As they hinted in May when they announced "upgrades", it's mostly new stuff.