Latest Articles (Page 3473)

Legend Entertainment has confirmed that Unreal II: The Awakening won't be with us until January 2003, and that may only be the American date. However, the developer, whose previous work includes the Unreal engine-based Wheel of Time, has apparently completed the game and is spending the festive season covering up bugs and other eccentricities in time for the game's post-Christmas release. A sensible plan, if you ask us - if you've as many leeching relatives as us then pre-Christmas finances simply don't permit this kind of extravagance...

I'm guessing that some sort of mass work-dodging web surfing exercise aside, most of you are reading this on your own PCs. Which means you have PCs. And you also have a pulse, which means you probably want to play Final Fantasy XI. Or you are at least a little curious about how it turns out, non?

Ukrainians GSC Game World have released a 42MB trailer for their impressive-looking, potentially radioactive Chernobyl-based first person shooter, Stalker: Oblivion Lost. Due for release in summer 2003, the game actually saw the development team delve deep into the forbidden area around the site of Chernobyl, as we revealed in an interview earlier this year.

When Tom Clancy's Raven Shield slipped to February 21st, it was so much Tom Clancy's as Ubi Soft's guts that punters wanted for garters. Fortunately, the French publisher has revealed that a multiplayer demo of the game will be released later this week on November 14th.

Good evening. As promised, we've been loitering about the internet this weekend waiting in anticipation of the MOHAA Spearhead demo release, and now you too can embark upon another tour of duty in Normandy, France, during the second World War. We'll bring you our considered thoughts on the entire expansion pack this coming week.

"Bored with the 'all clubs in one box' football management games?" questions the press release, effectively asking if we're bored of Championship Manager, a question to which the answer is a resounding 'no'. "Just Football is set to change this," we're told, by filling the niche or luring you to the other side, whichever's the case, thanks to its officially sanctioned club-specific management series.

This week's competition gave you the chance to win a pair of music software suites. Remember: you don't know you're a musician until you've flicked a few switches and made a modern masterpiece! Or something ear-shatteringly awful, but whichever way you look at it, unless you can already wield the odd guitar or caress the odd piano, a couple of music suites are bound to improve your output. And even if you do know what you're doing, surely a potload of samples to play with is a bonus?

EVE ONLINE: The Second Genesis, the highly ambitious massively multiplayer sci-fi strategy title being developed by Icelandic studio Crowd Control Production (CCP), is due to debut simultaneously in North America and Europe during March 2003.

CDV has released a 45MB trailer of American Conquest, a game they feel is one of the most complicated real-time strategy titles ever conceived. Described as 'an epic trailer for an epic game', this MPEG gives you a good idea of the battles you're likely to wage in the hope of conquering the Yanks. American Conquest is of course centred around historical conflict, and respects the importance of details such as troop morale, 3D terrain and rate of fire. Despite a few missing features in a build we played earlier this year, we found it one of the most enjoyable RTS titles since the original Cossacks. And if that sounds your kettle of fish, then by all means enjoy the trailer, which is available here or here (direct links).

Rockstar should be applauded for getting Vice City finished this quickly. Although you could (and, ahem, we did) spend more time playing GTA3 than most of the rest of the PS2's back catalogue put together, DMA Design's, sorry, Rockstar North's inspirational genre-blender was ripped to shreds by fans within a matter of months. They wanted more. We wanted more. Now we have more. And we'll make no pretence otherwise: Vice City lives up to the hype.

If Microsoft or Nintendo were hoping to spoil this particular Friday in November for Sony, they have singularly failed to do so. Microsoft made the stronger effort of the two, bringing us Blinx: The Time Sweeper (6/10, disappointing) and Sega GT 2002 (pretty ghastly), with MicroMachines (fairly decent) and a few other ports including EA's Lord Of The Rings game to mull over, but Nintendo's effort is virtually non-existent. Big Air Freestyle and Top Gun - Combat Zones fight over the scraps. Hardly impressive. Even the GBA is suffering this week, with Smuggler's Run Advance about the only thing to catch our attention.

As PS2 owners muddle their way through V-Rally 3, WRC II Extreme and Colin McRae Rally 3, Xbox owners can happily turn their noses up at all three; RalliSport Challenge beats them hands down. It loses a few seconds to Colin, perhaps, but it still firmly tops the leader board, and now Digital Illusions' masterful rally game is but days away from its long overdue launch on the PC.

TDK looks set to launch Robotech in the UK and Europe by the end of 2002. Robotech: Battlecry, the series' standard bearer, will appear on PlayStation 2 on November 29th, with Xbox and Cube versions following on December 13 and in the New Year respectively. But in the meantime, Robotech: The Macross Saga will be released on GameBoy Advance next Friday, November 15th.

AquaNox 2: Revelation has slipped to Q1 2003, publisher JoWooD has announced today. "Massive Development are well on their way to completing the truly stunning AquaNox 2: Revelation and we wanted to be 100 per cent sure that it will blow fans away when it is released next year," says JoWooD CEO and part-time spinster Andreas Tobler. "The extra time will ensure that we release a game that is highly polished and as close to perfection as possible." We'll see.

"Do yooo waaaaant suuuuuuuum?!" roared Jay Wilbur at X02 recently, before producing a flak cannon and fragging the entire 900 strong European audience as if to prove a point. The Eurogamer staff miraculously lived to tell the tale, having nipped off to the gents at that point, and returned to wade through the bloodied chunks of the industry's finest littering the Isla Magica theme park. Wilbur was naturally mortified; having assumed his cannon wasn't loaded, and is now serving a life sentence in a secure institution somewhere near Seville.

While sales of the PS2 continues to thrash everything out of sight, the battle for second place is where the real action is, with Microsoft forging ahead of Nintendo in the latest figures released.

The Xbox version of Serious Sam, which is an amalgamation of the first two PC games in the FPS series, is now set for release on December 6th according to publisher Take-Two, having previously been pencilled in for Q1 2003.

In what must rank among the stupidest and most pointless acquisitiones ever, international production and distribution outfit Crystal Sky has inked a deal with Namco for feature film rights to, er, Pac-Man, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Yes, Pac-Man. "There is no other game title bigger than Pac-Man," says the firm's president Steven Paul. "From children to their parents, Pac-Man is a name everyone knows and loves." Worryingly, there are plans afoot to squeeze a "live-action fantasy adventure" out of the harmless franchise. So, another aspect of our collective youth falls to money-flustered morons in suits. Shame.

Those of you who, like us, found 2015's Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault a rather splendid addition to the packed FPS genre, will be pleased to hear that a standalone demo of the expansion pack is due out this weekend. The Spearhead demo will be made available at mohaa.ea.com sometime on November 9th.

Sony's official PlayStation 2 website carries news that the European release of the seven-disc Vice City soundtrack set will includes bonus tracks exclusive to the region. The box set, which is quite reasonably priced at £29.99, features a bevy of 80s music perfectly suited to the on-screen carnage, based on our hours with the game thus far. After all, there's nothing better to sooth your nerves as you whiz, Uzi-wielding, down narrow alleys on a Faggio motor scooter than the sound of Billie Jean blaring out of your speakers.

Capcom has cautiously revealed more information about Resident Evil Online, the first PS2 game in the esteemed series since Shinji Mikami's high profile marriage to Nintendo. From the looks of screenshots which have been circulating since E3, it's a couple of steps back from the Cube versions, graphically, but the gameplay is vintage RE. Upsettingly, so are the mechanics.

Although it's growing increasingly old, Gray Matter's Return to Castle Wolfenstein has been patched once again, to version 1.4. The update is said to improve weapon balance, the multiplayer browser and adds a few in-game options, like auto-reload and a new voting configuration. A number of bugs have also been quashed since the last release.

Jester Interactive is set to enter the mobile games arena by bringing Manic Miner to Java-enabled mobile phones. Having already proven its popularity on the GBA, Manic Miner seemed like the obvious choice for Jester's first foray, with Jester's Martin Kitney commenting that "with the technology available from a Java enabled mobile phone, quality games are now a viable option."

Capcom will be at the forefront of Xbox Live activities with the arguably long-overdue release of Capcom vs. SNK 2: EO. EO, which stands for Easy Operation, brings simplified controls to a game that was released on the PS2 quite some time ago.

According to various Hollywood sources, film production company Mindfire Entertainment has picked up the rights to Sega's Shinobi franchise, with the aim of bringing it to the big screen for summer 2004.

Konami will release Winning Eleven 6 (which of course became Pro Evolution Soccer 2) in the US next March. Previously, Americans were told that they didn't like the sport enough to receive Konami's simulation of the beautiful game, but clearly the publisher has undergone a change of heart. "Soccer fans around the world have declared Winning Eleven as their favourite soccer game," says Robert Goff, product manager at Konami of America. "Now, North American soccer fans have a chance to see what they've been missing."

Revealed to the public with some fanfare at E3, Blinx is one of Microsoft's biggest hopes in the run up to the crucial Christmas period, but has already been simultaneously fawned over and damned by the specialist press, which always makes relatively late reviews such as this one an even tougher proposition.

First-person role playing games have something of a patchy history, with examples ranging from the superb Deus Ex through the arguably mediocre Morrowind to the lamentably bad Kings Field series. Created by continental developers Arkane Studios, Arx Fatalis is the latest addition to this genre; the question being whether it scales the heights of Deus Ex, or plumbs the depths of the execrable Kings Field.

Micro Machines! Well, no, it's "MicroMachines", apparently. Still, semantic naming issues aside, it's no surprise to see a modern day update to this classic miniature racer, although instead of "Codemasters", the byline now reads "Infogrames Sheffield". After some sort of licensing coup and a modest period of development, the next generation PS2 and Xbox versions of MicroMachines have appeared - but has the formula grown with the technology?

Nokia announced several new handsets at its annual mobile internet conference yesterday, but the most interesting of them from our perspective was a new entry in the Series 60 range, which has been dubbed 'N-Gage'. And despite a babbling, spectacularly incomprehensible press release, we've learnt that N-Gage will have a cartridge-type slot for memory cards, and will run on the Symbian OS. Nokia plans to position itself as a publisher and gatekeeper for those interested in using the platform.