Latest Articles (Page 623)

The Epic Games v Apple trial is continuing to surface interesting titbits of information about the inner workings of the games industry, and the latest is that Microsoft has never made profit from the sale of console hardware. This may not be the most surprising news of all time, given consoles are in the games industry have traditionally been sold at a loss - but you rarely hear companies admit this out loud.

Ahead of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition's launch on 14th May, BioWare has made a treasure trove of bonus content available to freely download.

A buried treat in the Apple Arcade launch line-up, the paper plane "metaphorical journey" Lifeslide is headed to Steam on the 6th of August.

Patch 1.3.3 for PlayStation 5-exclusive roguelite Returnal was pulled by developer Housemarque last night after it was found to have corrupted saves.

There's been a recent rise in Afrofuturist stories. Authors such as Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin and Rivers Solomon have become wildly popular, and Marvel's Black Panther celebrated an African perspective on science fiction on the big screen. Games are set to follow - Furi by The Game Bakers and Beautiful Desolation by the Brotherhood are two examples of games interested in the culture and visuals of a continent that too often gets overlooked. Similarly, We Are The Caretakers, which entered Steam Early Access on April 21 (and which will also be released for Xbox Series X|S), actually isn't set in Africa, but a whole new world called Shadra, an analogy for real places and events, that focuses on telling a story about poaching and conservation efforts, a hitherto unique topic for a game.

Nintendo's 2020 was one for the record books. The company earned its best ever operating profit of $6bn, and its second-best year of revenue, at $16.6bn.

Nodon. I'm sorry? Nodon. Not Monad. Nodon. Funny word - a palindrome, which is always money in the bank. I picture a sort of spring, for some reason, a springy, chewy, bouncy thing, each side contracting inwards to that central D, that pivot. Nodon is a brilliant word. It sounds like the sort of thing you might have filling a useful drawer somewhere in the back of the shed. "Could you get me the portable hot-plate? It's next to the Nodons." It sounds like the ambassador from an alien race who has already promised to help with our whole carbon emissions thing. All considered, I hope whoever came up with Nodon got a day off in lieu.

What is it about fire that compels us? Why do human beings find it hard to look away from even the smallest flame? Some anthropologists put it down to simple inheritance: the hominids who became our ancestors were those most susceptible to fire's charms, for all its peril. Fire gave us cooking and tool-making; it freed us from the tyranny of the sun, allowing people to gather and work after dark; the ability to control it conferred status and thus, a foundation for more elaborate social structures. It was both an everyday tool and a terrible supernatural force to worship and wield against enemies. Small wonder that, thousands of years later, we seek its likeness in artworks of all kinds, from the hellish radiance of Francisco Goya's El Incendio to the smouldering poltergeists of The Sims.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition - which bundles up remastered versions of BioWare's beloved space opera trilogy - is a little over a week away from release, and, ahead of its arrival, the studio has detailed frame rate and resolution options for all platforms.

Back 4 Blood isn't shying away from comparisons to co-operative zombie FPS classic Left 4 Dead - developer Turtle Rock Studios is responsible for both, after all - but the team is aiming to deliver more than a carbon copy of its earlier game. And one of its innovations comes in the form of an intriguing deck-building card system, which it's now detailed in its latest trailer.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, last year's well-received remaster of the skateboarding classics, will finally be making its way to Switch on 25th June.

Returnal, as you won't need telling if you've been braving its trials this week, isn't an easy game. But it turns out a little bit of help (albeit not of the entirely above-board kind) has been left lingering within the game in the form of some newly discovered debug cheat codes - just don't expect them to stick around for very much longer.

The arrival of hardware-accelerated ray tracing has seen developers mostly adopt a hybrid approach, combining standard rasterisation techniques with carefully deployed RT features. Fully ray traced games are few and far between, but revisiting decades-old classics and delivering them with a full RT upgrade is within the power envelope of today's graphics hardware. We've already seen Quake 2 RTX and today we can reveal early work on a fully ray traced version of the N64 classic, Super Mario 64.

At least half a dozen more Google Stadia staff have found a new home at Haven Studios, the developer set up by former Stadia games exec Jade Raymond.

Total War: Warhammer 3 gameplay details and images have leaked online ahead of the game's big reveal.

The people behind Gamescom have ditched plans for a hybrid event and announced its 2021 show will be digital only.

Resident Evil Village isn't out yet, but its mod scene has already kicked off.

The name is dumb, of course, but I'll take it. Thanks to a certain long-running JRPG series the word Final has lost most of its meaning around these parts, but when R-Type took it on as a suffix back in 2003 it really meant it. R-Type Final was intended as a grand farewell to a genre seen to be on its last legs, and a send-off from one of the all-time greats at that. A funereal air hung heavy over its slow, stately missions, and when Irem turned away from games development in 2011 it felt like part of R-Type Final's prophecy might have come to pass. A gaming legend was no more.

The much-anticipated Legacy update for Apex Legends arrived last night, and while Apex saw record numbers of Steam players and a huge audience on Twitch, it wasn't exactly a smooth launch. The high demand meant many couldn't get into matches, while players also reported problems with the in-game menus and marketplace.

Housemarque has warned Returnal players to turn auto-update off on their PlayStation 5 ahead of the release of the game's first big patch tonight.

Plans for a Detective Pikachu film sequel were in the works following the successful launch of Pokémon's live-action big screen debut but now, on the film's second anniversary, we have our clearest indicator yet we won't see a Detective Pikachu 2 after all.

Blizzard has lost another two million players across its titles.

Activision has committed to an autumn 2021 release for this year's Call of Duty game.

The way the world discovers its new favourite musician is changing. Gone are the days of finding the next One Direction, Camila Cabello or Susan Boyle on popular television programming. It's been a while since we've had a breakout star from the world of televised reality competitions. The last ones were arguably Louisa Johnson who won The X Factor in 2015 and Becky Hill who made it to the semi-finals of The Voice in 2014.

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who served as game director on CD Projekt's acclaimed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, has resigned from the company following an investigation into workplace bullying.

Developer Microids has revealed it's working on a direct sequel to 16-bit sci-fi classic Flashback - something of a surprising announcement, given it already has one.

Arcane, the animated League of Legends spin-off series, debuts on Netflix this autumn.

The Dark Portal is reopening soon and thanks to Blizzard, we have a chance for 125 of you to try World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic before it's officially released!

Microsoft has announced that another 74 games have been given the FPS Boost treatment, bringing the total number of boosted titles up to 97.

If you want to team up with friends on both PlayStation and PC, there's good news for you, as Sony has announced a partnership with Discord to put the voice chat system on PlayStation Network.