Latest Articles (Page 3409)

The full release of the standalone Return to Castle Wolfenstein expansion (although, if it's standalone, it isn't an expansion is it? Oh I don't know... it's free anyway) Enemy Territory has finally been released endowed with six maps and a full campaign mode.

Back in the early 90s, you couldn't move for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the sanitised Saturday morning cartoon "cowabunga", Hero Turtles version, that is. There were lunchboxes, sticker books, hilarious "pop records", movies based around scary-looking animatronics, snack foods and pizza branding, and even videogames. Well, now that the franchise is undergoing something of a forced revival in living rooms up and down the land (whether we like it or not), Konami is keen to saddle the bandwagon (or bandsurfboard) and bring our vintage "heroes in a half-shell" well and truly up to date. Or not.

Atari's movie tie-in Enter The Matrix is at number one in the UK sales charts again this week, and there are new top ten entries for EA's The Sims Superstar and Def Jam Vendetta, and Konami's Silent Hill 3.

Reuters is reporting that Sony plans to launch a new games machine in Japan this year. But don't get your hopes up; this is not the long-awaited PS3 announcement.

NovaLogic has just activated its one-millionth NovaWorld multiplayer account, and the publisher adds that as many as a million battles are fought on the service every week.

NVIDIA has responded angrily to claims that it employed underhand tactics to inflate benchmark scores in 3DMark03. Their response is posted in full and unedited:

Sega's latest Sonic title is using RenderWare in order to speed up the game's multi-platform development, Criterion announced yesterday. All three versions of the game were seen at E3, and described as 20 per cent complete at the time.

We've heard via GamerFeed that Veteran developer Hudson is remaking a few of its old classics to celebrate the Famicom's 20th anniversary, to be published in Japan by Konami on GameCube at a budget price of 3200 Yen.

Ubi Soft is stressing the differences between the PC and upcoming console ports of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3. The first major difference is the shedding of the Raven Shield sub-title, for which there seems to be no real reason.

Ah the wonders of interviews via a translator. While we were indeed privileged to be invited to chat with Yuji Naka, the legendary creator of Sonic The Hedgehog, and chief of Sonic Team, we really wish the man spoke English, or that we could speak Japanese. You see, the journo collective asked several decent probing questions, but half the time the poor woman could barely understand what we were on about, and delivered us often inappropriate or overly concise answers that seemed to bear little relevance to the actual question.

PlayStation 2 looks set to retail at €199 across Europe this week, but anybody darting off to the shops in the UK is sure to be disappointed. For some reason, we've been left hanging with an immovable £169.99, something that Sony doesn't seem all that keen to comment on. Throw in the requisite memory card and a game of your choice and the console still represents some £240, loads more than either of its competitors.

One of the star games of E3 2003 was undoubtedly Illusion Softwork's excruciatingly long-awaited sequel to Hidden & Dangerous - not that you'd have known about it even if you were lucky enough to attend the show. In its ultimate wisdom, Gathering decided to keep the game well and truly under wraps, and was only showing it off to a select few behind closed doors. Eurogamer was one of the lucky few to be lured into a padded white leather cell, tied up, gagged, and forced to watch an impressive demonstration of the Czech developer's current labour of love [I don't remember most of that -Tom].

Russobit-M has released a couple of DivX trailers for upcoming titles Xenus and Neuro.

Epic has released the first public beta of its Unreal Tournament 2003 spectator proxy "UTV 2003" via its Unreal Technology diary. You can download the Win32-only file direct here. UTV is a proxy that allows multiple spectators (running UT2003 version 2225) to connect to a game without having a massive impact on the game server.

The Magic Box briefly reports today that Konami Japan is developing Silent Hill 4 on a new game engine, after Silent Hill 3 borrowed technology from the previous title. Surprise surprise, there's no confirmation of platform or release date, but it's good to know that the game is in development. No source is quoted, but TMB isn't usually that far off with this sort of thing.

Czech Republic-based publisher Cenega has delayed Shade: Wrath of Angels until 2004, citing the need to "ensure the other elements of the game live up to a great level of detail, as well as gamers' high expectations for this title".

We reported a little while back that Raven Shield map designer Benoit Richter had released a couple of maps for the game on his tod, and now the man's gone and done it again. Here is a free map officially recognised as "official" by Ubi Soft and created by Benoit that was originally intended for a training and multiplayer map in Raven Shield. Off you go then, have fun!

Wanadoo has patched the European release of its "World War I never ended" first person shooter IronStorm to version 1.041. Click here to download direct. The patch includes all the previous patch optimisations, and even activates a couple of cheat codes (press Esc then type "cheat", then typing BLINDAX gives your more ammunitions and LATOUNGA gives you more life).

The second expansion pack for Bethesda's Morrowind has gone gold. Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon, which will be shipping next month, sends players off to the frozen island of Solstheim where they'll naturally be able to take part in a collection of new quests, battle new monsters, gape at the new weather effects, and also revel in opportunity to "be" a werewolf. Also, Bethesda says it'll be including the two PC expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, in the forthcoming Xbox Game of the Year edition of Morrowind. How nice!

Benchmark firm Futuremark has uncovered extensive cheating by NVidia in its 3DMark03 suite.

GameSpot is reporting that Blizzard has extended the development of StarCraft: Ghost beyond the end of the year, putting the release of the tactical action title into sometime in 2004 instead of the fourth quarter of 2003. A Blizzard spokesperson has said that the reasons behind the delay were to "deliver the outstanding gameplay experience our customers have come to expect from Blizzard products", which roughly translates to: "It wasn't anywhere near ready, but we can't patch PS2 and Cube games. Shame it wasn't Xbox exclusive really, or even just on the PC or something."

Once upon a time, you'd be hard pushed to find any decent console RPGs in English. To this day, many 16-bit classics remain translated only by enthusiasts, who have hacked the original ROM files to add the gaming equivalent of anime "fansubs". Even now, Europe still gets treated like a redheaded stepchild when it comes to this genre (Suikoden III? Xenosaga? .hack?), but at least for those willing to import, there's an English language version of most games out there.

Ooh, look! There's a single player Breed demo! Leaked from a some magazine coverdisk somewhere, 3D Gamers are now hosting a 142MB demo of the apparently Halo-esque sci-fi shooter. We're not sure what the demo contains or how it plays just yet but we've been interested in this for a fair while, so rest assured we're squeezing it down our pipes just as fast as we can.

Excitement abound! It's a brand new Sims expansion pack! No doubt stuffed with the sort of ten-minute-long burst of compressed (and possibly repressed) entertainment we've come to expect from these little booster packs. This time you'll be able to give your Sims celebrity trimmings, keeping their comfort levels in check with back-of-the-limo fornication and all sorts of "boutique" visits. Stellar.

There are lots of films that deserve a good videogame adaptation, and The Matrix is definitely near the top of that list. It's got hacking, dark shades, skin-tight leather outfits, fast cars, kung fu and Bullet Time, and the sort of acrobatic action sequences that game developers have been cooking up without inspiration for over a decade. And the twist is that the "real world" is basically just a videogame anyway.

The Game Boy Advance is a modern miracle and truly should be cherished. Long haul flights, boring train journeys, or even those irritating tube journeys go in a flash once you fire up one of the many classics available for the system. But once in a while, wouldn't it be nice to continue those long sessions of Advance Wars or Mario Kart Super Circuit on your fat TV?

C&VG is reporting that the Xbox version of Konami's Apocalyptica has been canned, leaving just the PC version in development. Apocalyptica, in development at Extreme FX, was set to be one of Konami Europe's first big home-baked titles (and their first Xbox Live title to boot), combining eight-player deathmatch and voice comms ala Unreal Championship, according to a recent press release. Konami has since confirmed that "the PC version will release as planned," but nobody is keen to talk about the reasons behind the Xbox version's demise.

The PS2 version of Winning Eleven 7 is due out on August 7th in Japan, Konami has announced, and will feature online support via the broadband unit. Whether this is online play or merely downloads is difficult to say - the PS2 Winning Eleven 6: Final Evolution supported the broadband unit without letting you actually play online, after all. As anybody familiar with the series will have figured out, this one is another vague improvement, with most of the gameplay changes too subtle to pick out ahead of the game's release. That said, we do know that player animation has been updated again to emphasize injuries and floppy hair amongst other things.

Swanning off once more to demoland, JoWood has let Neighbours From Hell out of the bag. The 19MB demo features a tutorial and two levels in which you're the star of a reality TV show who has to create elaborate traps and attempt to be as vindictive as possible to your neigbour. Seeing as Big Brother is about to spread like some kind of horrific parasite throughout the airwaves this evening, it might be the perfect chance to take our your frustrations on the predictably banal, uninteresting pack of fame-hungry weasels they're about to stuff into that particular goldfish bowl. Ooh, where did that come from?

Capcom claims that despite not showing the game at E3, Red Dead Revolver has not necessarily died in the fallout from recent financials, claiming that the game's future is still "to be determined", with a formal decision on the its fate perhaps still some way off. Not exactly good news if you were looking forward to it, but hardly the worst.