Latest Articles (Page 3469)

The GameBoy Advance is like a breeding ground for these damn things. Platformers, that is. While it has its fair share of innovative and distinctive games, developers seem keen to exploit the system's 16-bit gaming roots, so we're stuck with an endless stream of cheap, uninteresting rubbish. Spyro 2, at first glance, would appear to pander to this very trend.

The 1.2 patch for EA's Battlefield 1942 will fix a number of issues with the game, hopefully patching up its creaky frame rate, the publisher has announced. Updates will also affect a variety of gameplay issues and improve hit detection for handheld weapons, vague reports suggest. There is currently no scheduled release date for the patch, but you can bet that EA is working hard to expedite things.

GT Advance, the GBA's first real racing game, is to receive its second sequel by spring 2003, series publisher THQ has revealed. GT Advance 3: Pro Concept Racing will include more than 90 of the world's top cars, 46 tracks spanning various weather climates and other totally unsurprising features.

Third party console peripherals are something we're often scornful about. Let's face it - most of them are tacky, badly made cheap plastic knock-offs of the real thing which, amazingly, manage to sabotage any inherent usability and leave sharp-edged etchings in your palm. Light guns are often the worst, and even the 'official' options are sometimes terrible. I still have trouble explaining the Dreamcast light gun to visitors...

Relic Entertainment's Impossible Creatures needs stress testing, the developer has announced in conjunction with publisher Microsoft. For this reason, 20,000 gamers can get their hands on a multiplayer test version of the game at this location. Despite launching yesterday, it seems that some places are still available. Or at least, that's the impression we get.

MOHAA (what a charming abbreviation that is) creators 2015 are working on a secret "action" game according to reports from the US. What's more Vivendi is so impressed by the idea of 2015 working on an "action" game that they've picked the title up to be published by Sierra. "Medal of Honor clearly illustrates the degree to which 2015 can create exciting and successful games," according to VU Games CEO Ken Cron. "By leveraging our global sales and distribution network, we look forward to bringing 2015's newest release to gamers around the world."

"What is your major malfunction?" is probably something the QA testers on America's Army hear day in, day out, without it ever really becoming funny... Still, they do a good job, and the latest fruits of their labours have finally arrived as part of today's America's Army patch.

GTA3 was the first title ever to receive an ELSPA Diamond for over one million sales. Now, GTA: Vice City has become the fastest ever to claim an ELSPA Gold.

Konami of Europe will publish Hudson Soft's hugely derivative Mario Kart rip-off, Bomberman Kart, in Q1 2003. Having recently acquired Japanese developer Hudson, Konami will also be releasing additional titles in Europe including Pinobee for PSone over the course of 2003.

Microsoft has happily confirmed that Xbox Live starter kits will go on sale for the first time in the UK, France and Germany on Saturday, November 30th as planned. Gamers will be able to buy a place on the Test Drive, which lasts until March 13th, 2003, also securing a further 12 months' access which will take them all the way through to March 2004.

We don't normally cover this sort of thing, but with Dance eJay 5 due out pretty soon, publisher Empire was good enough to offer us (and by extension, you) a rather spangly new desktop wallpaper. So, if you fancy seeing the lass on my right dancing it up on your hardware, take your pick of the 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x960 download options. Or for a smaller 640x480 image, simply prod her with your mouse button. Enjoy!

No One Lives Forever 2 has been patched to version 1.2, in a move which adds deathmatch support and a number of deathmatch maps to the game. However, despite leaking out in an incomplete form last week, the patch and map pack finally appeared on Sierra's FTP yesterday evening.

We don't normally bother you with PR-centric website launches, but Eidos' latest web-based TimeSplitters 2 offshoot is actually quite useful. Appallingly uncharacteristic, we agree.

Square and Enix surprised a lot of people today by announcing plans to merge. The two companies will begin operating as one from the start of the next business year on April 1, 2003. Either that or they'll take the wraps off the biggest and most elaborate April Fools ever, and we're not sure that's in their character.

Sources close to Activision state that Rally Fusion for the GameCube has been canned, IGN is reporting. No explanation is offered. The Climax-developed title shipped on PS2 and Xbox last week to respectable critical acclaim. The delay in the Cube version making it to market had been absently put down to Nintendo's lengthy mastering process, which has held up the likes of TimeSplitters 2 in the past.

Carbon6, the Hollywood-based studio founded by American McGee, has finally announced its first project, an Xbox and PC project due for release in 2004, called American McGee's Oz. Like Alice before it, Oz is set in the world of the author (L. Frank Baum)'s classic novels, but during an earlier, darker period dreamt up by McGee and co.

Capcom has released five movies showcasing their recently announced GameCube-exclusive fivesome. Each movie is available in two peculiar sizes, 320x280 and 160x128, and you can view them (as well as early screenshots of each game) by following the links below.

Final Fantasy XI Ziraat no Gen'ei, or Vision of Ziraat, is the name of the official FFXI expansion due out in Japan sometime soon. The recently announced expansion will include plenty of cosmetic changes but also adds at least one new character class (the summoner), whose arsenal of summoned monsters includes Ifrit and Carbuncle, and potentially more. According to a report on IGN (by way of Dengeki Online), new areas include a desert, a volcanic island covered in jungle and a fishing village populated by the Mithra race.

Namco's Dead To Rights is due out on Xbox on January 31st, and publisher EA has been in contact to let us know that the PAL release has been tweaked extensively since its release in the US, where the game was subject to a degree of critical acclaim.

Ubi Soft has delayed the release of cel-shaded first person shooter XIII until Q3 2003. "Because quality is always our priority, we have decided to take additional time to ensure that this game is as close to perfect as possible," the company said in a statement. "The extra time will allow us to introduce new elements of gameplay and integrate specific features for each platform."

Today's launch of Microsoft's new multiplayer game - Asheron's Call 2 Fallen Kings - in the US and Canada has been mired in controversy after the giant software company admitted that the game is only available to subscribers in nine countries.

Since we posted news of the German-language AquaNox 2 demo earlier today, the game's publisher JoWooD Productions has been in contact with news of a brand new trailer for those not adventurous enough to brave the language barrier, and they were kind enough to send over some brand new, exclusive screenshots while they were at it, which you can see here.

Xbox Live launches in less than a week, with Test Drive kits set to go on sale from November 30th. That, and the extremely interesting four-game-bundle keeping today's headline-writers busy, should see Xbox in a significantly more influential position after Christmas, and if MechAssault is an example of the quality of Xbox Live game we can expect, then perhaps it's no surprise.

Xbox Live launched in the US on November 14th, and amassed 150,000 registered users within its first week on sale. Microsoft estimates that thanks to the guest account feature, more than 200,000 people have already played online. Merely passing the 100,000 subscriber milestone makes Xbox Live the most popular subscription-based broadband service in existence, so Microsoft are understandably chuffed!

GameSpot reports that Ubi Soft's Splinter Cell is bound to Xbox until the end of the year. Evidently the developer is free to plonk the game onto competing formats (so far namely PC, PS2 and Cube) at the end of 2002, when the deal with Microsoft expires. The PC version of the game is due out on January 31st in Europe.

German gamers (and those willing to brave the language barrier) can finally try out the second AquaNox game, Revelation, via a 230MB and a larger 380MB demo (which includes the first mission and full cinematics in addition to the chunk of game found in the 230MB download). The demo is available from a number of mirrors, listed on the game's official website. Visually, the original AquaNox was a spectacle to say the least (we quite literally did say the least about its bug-ridden state, however), so it should be well worth checking out, particularly if you have one of the current range of nippy graphics cards under your PC's bonnet.

A 118MB playable demo of Data Becker's Highland Warriors has been released. You can download it from 3DGamers. Highland Warriors was recently picked up by Novalogic for release in Europe, and should be available on Valentine's Day (that's February 14th, for the unattached), and lets you re-enact the Scottish battle for freedom from the English. The demo gives you one mission (level two of the English campaign, which seems an odd taster for a Scot-centric RTS) set between normal and hard difficulty levels. Beware though, you'll need a PIII 800 or equivalent and at least 128MB of RAM to do it justice.

Codemasters has released a 1.90 patch for Operation Flashpoint, which fixes a number of bugs (as detailed in the readme files, if you're interested) and allegedly adds new content, although we reckon they're talking about all the gubbins stuffed into the recent 1.85 update.

We've been teasing you about a new Xbox bundle this week, one which stands to 'own' Christmas, and finally someone's broken the silence and placed pre-orders on their website (retailers just eye us suspiciously when we mention it to them). And that someone is UK-based Gameplay, with whom you can now swap £194.99 (plus shipping) for an Xbox, copies of Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT 2002, and copies of Halo and Splinter Cell.

As reported by IGN and others in September, THQ is planning to release Summoner 2 on Nintendo GameCube during Q2 2003, going by the name of Summoner: The Prophecy. This after the PS2 version of the game failed to make the console's Top 40 here in the UK - quite a spectacular bombing (source: ChartTrack).