Latest Articles (Page 611)

Square Enix will hold its E3 livestream on Sunday, 13th June at 8.15pm UK time.

In one of the countless ironies that make the sport so fascinating and frustrating, in what was always intended to be a stopgap year F1 in 2021 is shaping up to deliver a classic season. With F1's radical new ruleset put back a year while teams deal with the fallout of the ongoing global crisis, the field has bunched up while the inter-team rivalry that's been so sorely missing from the hybrid era is finally being delivered. If the Hamilton v Verstappen scrap carries on with this ferocity for the rest of the calendar, this really could go down as one of the all-time greats.

The World Ends with You came out in 2007 - I just checked - but it still feels a bit like the future. Or maybe it feels like a future. This was an action RPG from Square-Enix perfectly designed around the Nintendo DS, and using a lot of that wonderfully odd console's wonderfully odd features. You tapped the screen to move around and work your way through menus, sure, but when it came time for a battle you controlled different characters on different screens, hectically working away with different input methods as the action hockey-pucked back and forth between your allies. Even when you weren't battling, the game was unusual: an RPG set in modern-day Shibuya, and featuring a cast of stylish teenagers drawn into a deadly set of challenges. Each day a new hurdle: follow clues, solve puzzles and fight monsters if you want to stay alive. Quest givers wore hoodies. Your attack types revolved around pin-badges that you collected. Vital info was texted to you on your flip phone. You could read the minds of passing strangers, delving into a timely world of crushes and workday worries.

The RTX 3080 Ti is here, and I know what you're thinking - why even release an RTX 3080 Ti if the 3080 remains so hard to find? The official answer from Nvidia is binning: chips come off the production line with different levels of quality, and get sorted into different 'bins' based on the performance that each particular bit of silicon is capable of achieving. For the GA102 GPU that lies at the heart of the 3080, 3080 Ti and 3090, the lower tier parts turn into 3080s, better parts into the 3080 Ti and the best of all into the 3090 - and they've been holding onto these middle-tier parts to deploy the long-planned 3080 Ti for some time now.

Over the past few months, Apex Legends players have increasingly reported problems with DDoS attacks in their games: one moment they've been sliding their way around World's Edge, the next, their game has frozen and they've been booted out. It's become a particular issue in Ranked games, where miscreants have used DDoS attacks to artificially boost themselves up the leaderboards. Hoovering up a bunch of disconnected opponents is easier than actually playing the game, after all.

Lego will hold its first ever announcement livestream, Lego Con, on 26th June at 5pm UK time.

Sony is growing Team Asobi, the developer of the wonderful PlayStation 5 pack-in game Astro's PlayRoom.

Inkle, the developer of nuanced, writerly games like 80 Days, Heaven's Vault and Pendragon, has not only surprise-announced a new game, but released it. The game is Overboard! and as I've been finding out this week, it's a lot of fun to play.

Bend Studio, perhaps best known as the developer behind 2019's post-apocalyptic bikes-and-zombies adventure Days Gone, has revealed it's working on a new IP.

God of War: Ragnarok, which was originally announced for a PlayStation 5 release in 2021, has been delayed into next year, and will now also launch on PS4 .

Nintendo will hold its big E3 Nintendo Direct on 15th June at 5pm UK time.

The free-to-play smash hit Genshin Impact will be available to download from the Epic Game Store starting on 9th June.

Fortnite's storyline has kicked back into gear as its primal-themed season draws to a close. Today brings map changes, new challenges, extra-terrestrial warnings, and several hints at what next season may bring.

Fortnite's primal era has only five days left, and UFOs are now heralding the game's mysterious next season due on 8th June here in the UK.

Hello Games' ceaselessly evolving exploratory space sim No Man's Sky has just received another free update on all platforms; it's called Prisms, and brings sweeping visual enhancements to the already striking sci-fi sandbox.

Riot has announced Valorant Mobile.

Mass Effect 3 contains a hidden Mars rover Easter egg - and now, 10 years later, there's an "official" map showing how to activate it for yourself.

A small nod to internet imageboard 4chan has been quietly removed in Minecraft: Java Edition's latest update.

Biomutant developer Experiment 101 has, as promised, released an update for the game that makes significant changes.

Nintendo has announced plans to open one of its former production facilities to the public from 2024.

There's something about spawning in against opponents with identical hairdos and outfits that makes my heart sink.

Fans of the legendary Super Mario Bros. movie have restored a more adult version of the film, with 20 minutes of deleted scenes.

Dark Horse is getting into games.

Given that it's been nine years since we last saw the series - and some 15 whole years since the last mainline release in arcades - you might well be wondering why there's so much excitement surrounding this week's release of Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, a remaster that brings Sega's fighting series to modern platforms (or just one of them for now, at least). What is it exactly about Virtua Fighter that makes it so beloved?

SNK has delayed King of Fighters 15 to the first quarter of 2022, it's announced. The fighting game was due out at some point this year.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, the standalone-expansion-style next instalment in Sega's long-running free-to-play online action-RPG series, will - following its beta last month - be making its way to Xbox and PC next Wednesday, 9th June.

All three episodes of Life is Strange developer Dontnod's well-received supernatural mystery adventure Tell Me Why are currently free on PC and Xbox.

There's something kind of special about playing a new 4X game, especially a historical one. These games are about playing through history - all of history - which means that as much as they're about expanding, exploiting and the rest, they're really about discovery. This is the game: discovering your way through time, via The Wheel, or Irrigation, or Thermonuclear Weapons or whatever, until you reach the end of history and that game ends. And you do this over and over again, until you can fly your little towns through the neolithic age, a couple wars and a dalliance or two with Authoritarianism right the way to the future without really thinking about it.

Crytek has announced Crysis Remastered Trilogy, due out on PC and consoles autumn 2021.

EA will reveal Battlefield 6 on 9th June, it's announced.