Latest Articles (Page 3432)

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.

Titus Interactive has just released a demo of the spirit-crushingly dodgy looking Robocop, which you can pick up from the charmingly named GamersHell. We're not actually going to be able to tell you if it's worth the 25MB download just yet, because the PC being used to write this can barely run Minesweeper without a bit of a struggle, so do let us know if it actually turns out to be any good.

Console versions of Star Wars Galaxies have been put on hold according to LucasArts, something that various sources picked up on when they were removed from the PS2 and Xbox sections of the publisher's website. According to GameSpot, LucasArts has since confirmed that the games are on hold, whilst the PC version has progressed on to beta testing. "We are currently focusing all of our efforts on the successful launch of the PC version of Star Wars Galaxies," LucasArts said in a statement.

Unreal Championship fans can look forward to a new auto-update when they next log in, which fixes a number of problems identified by fans and the developer in the last few months. The fixes mostly consist of corrections to various known exploits (using weapons like the T.A.G. and Rocket Launcher) and map bugs, but it also takes care of some rather more basic stuff, like trying to load a map without checking if the server's full...

GameSpot is reporting that the third in the Fear Effect series, Inferno, is on hold. The game was first sighted at last year's E3 in trailer form, but nobody's seen nor heard anything about it until now, with Eidos ambiguously stating that the game is "on hold at the current time." Oh dear.

Infogrames has announced that Microsoft has assimilated action-oriented RPG Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes exclusively for the Xbox, and the October release will no longer see the game arrive on GameCube or PS2. "The full development team is extremely excited to be working with Microsoft and Wizards of the Coast to bring this product exclusively to the Xbox platform," said Scott Walker, vice president of product development, with the pistol dug into his back just out of shot.

EA has announced that Namco's overdue PS2 and Cube ports of Xbox noir-tacular Dead to Rights will both be released in Europe (and all other PAL territories) during August. Both are expected to resemble the tweaked PAL release of the Xbox version, which came out in February.

It may have sold diddly squat on both PS2 and Xbox, but the original Project Zero/Fatal Frame (as it was known in the US) was a survival horror game of gruesome beauty. Hopefully you'll bother to take notice of the recently announced sequel, which is coming to the PS2 late in the year in the US, most likely meaning an early 2004 release in Europe.

If you thought it was grim up North, you should try paying Silent Hill a visit. Fog, mutant dogs, slime, axe-wielding nurses and deranged paedophiles are just a few of the delights that will greet the unsuspecting traveller. For some strange reason, every psycho loser seems to end up going there at some point or other, and Silent Hill 3's lead character Heather (who looks spookily like the sister of James Sutherland, Silent Hill 2's lead) is no exception.

If there was one constant amongst the many, many World War II-based shooters on display at E3, it was each developer's attempts to downplay the brilliance of Medal of Honor, mostly citing its linearity and lack of story-based emotion. And in retrospect, it's easy to remember it their way. It was very much a shoehorned adventure through Private Ryan-inspired environments, shooting things in a particular order and then quick-loading to get a bit further through them, eventually escaping into the next, even more difficult Nazi-popping Allied excursion.