Latest Articles (Page 657)

Innovation sparkles as brightly as diamonds in the games industry, and is lusted after in equal measure. For every polished gem promising a safe return - every Assassin's Creed 2, every BioShock 2, every FIFA 10 - there's a raw stone with exciting potential. These, more often than not, are mined from independent sources before big corporations trample over the top with their metaphorical tractors of industry [let's wind it up - Ed]. Zeno Clash, made by Chilean developer ACE Team, is one such source. Flawed, but brilliant; a unique world of bird people, father-mothers, brutality and Gaudi-like constructions.

5th Cell, the developer of handheld curio Scribblenauts, has announced its new game today, called Castlehold. It's a card-based tactics game - which is a bit of a surprise, given the sharp left turn from Scribblenauts. And it's also very good, from the brief bit of it that I've played - which, hands up, was maybe a bit of a surprise to me too.

EA has issued a lifetime ban to a FIFA player who racially abused Ian Wright after he lost a match while playing with the Arsenal legend's in-game version.

The plaintiffs behind a class action lawsuit that alleged EA was secretly adjusting the difficulty of FIFA Ultimate Team to get players to spend more money on packs have withdrawn their case.

FarmVille publisher Zynga has acquired Torchlight 3 developer Echtra Games for an undisclosed sum.

The Sims 4 already has a vast amount of DLC packs, ranging from bundles to large Expansion Packs, medium-sized Game Packs and smaller Stuff Packs, but now EA is introducing an even tinier type of DLC called Kits. And one of them will deliberately make your Sim's house dirtier.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic has apologised for the issue in the game's recent paid Kanto Tour event which let some players in for free, and detailed its bonus event for those who did purchase a ticket.

Beautiful, awful randomly generated poetry is coming to Medieval grand strategy game Crusader Kings 3 as part of its next update, and players will even be able to torture enemies into submission with the very worst of their verse.

Pokémon Unite - the new free-to-play MOBA from Tencent's TiMi Studios, which was also responsible for Activision's Call of Duty Mobile - has just launched its closed beta in Canada, and a heap of new details and footage have emerged as a result.

Microsoft has shown a Pokémon Go tech demo in which the mobile pocket monster phenomenon is playable via the company's Hololens headset.

UPDATE 3/3/21: The former developer of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has confirmed this week's layoffs, but said it would continue to operate and was developing multiple unannounced projects.

Apex Legends is making its long-awaited Switch debut next Tuesday, 9th March, and, in the run up to release, developer Respawn Entertainment has shared a brand-new trailer offering a closer look at the free-to-play shooter running on Nintendo's console.

For years I've been dreaming of a Left 4 Dead mod that features the cast of Frasier. Trapped between safe houses in an abandoned hospital, Niles caves someone's head in with a hardback copy of the ICD-9 codes, as Marty jams a door shut with his walking stick. Daphne - who's a little bit psychic - correctly predicts the arrival of a Jockey through a broken window while Frasier is lost in a panic, circling wildly and raging about his next trip to La Cigare Volant.

Fall Guys developer Mediatonic has been scooped up Epic Games, as part of the Fortnite and Unreal Engine developer's acquisition of the Tonic Games Group.

Harry Potter prequel game Hogwarts Legacy is planned to include a "trans-inclusive" character creator, as well as a transgender character, Bloomberg has reported.

There's a new Aliens game on the way.

We're finally getting a little closer to the release of Rust's elusive console version, as developers Double Eleven and Facepunch have released a new trailer - and opened up registration for a closed beta.

The PlayStation Store will remove the ability to purchase or rent movies and TV shows on 31st August 2021.

Nvidia's DLSS has gradually evolved into one of the most exciting technological innovations in the PC space. The idea is remarkably straightforward: the GPU renders at a lower native resolution, then an AI algorithm takes that frame and intelligently upscales it to a much higher pixel count. There's an instant performance win, but remarkably, also a quality advantage too up against native resolution rendering. In the past, we've wondered whether this quality win comes down to mitigating the artefacts of temporal anti-aliasing - TAA - but the recent arrival of a DLSS upgrade to Nioh 2 provides us with an interesting test case. Nioh 2's basic rendering lacks much in the way of any form of anti-aliasing at all. It's pretty much as raw as raw can be. So the question is: can DLSS retain its performance advantage and still provide an actual increase to image quality up against native resolution rendering? Remarkably, the answer is yes.

14 years after it came out, Halo 3 is getting back bling.

Nintendo has today released a new firmware update for... the Wii U.

If you've been playing the Outriders demo since it came out last week, you may have picked up on an annoyance: loading cutscenes.

Ariana Greenblatt, the actress who played Young Gamora in the Avengers movies, will play Tiny Tina in the Borderlands movie.

PlayStation 4 exclusive The Last of Us Part 2 has received 13 BAFTA Games Award nominations - the most for any single game in the history of the awards.

In Grand Theft Auto 5's final scene, protagonists Michael, Franklin and Trevor have odious billionaire Devin Weston trussed up like a turkey in the boot of a swanky car. It's time for some payback - Weston, a marauding tycoon of the Gordon Gekko school, has double-crossed Michael and attempted to hire Franklin to kill him. But first, a little speech from Michael on the subject of the "great evils that bedevil American capitalism". One of these evils, he says, is offshoring - the act of moving part of your business overseas to lower costs by, for example, paying less tax in the country where you're based.

So along with 4m other people, you're really enjoying Valheim at the moment - but perhaps there are a few quality of life improvements you'd like to see, or maybe you just want to turn the game into a building sandbox. Despite the lack of official support, the modding community has been hard at work on Valheim, and has already produced a number of mods to serve almost every community request. Here's a round-up of some of the most useful mods so far - along with a quick explainer on how to get started.

There are shooting games, and there are shooting games. Irem's 1987 R-Type can't exactly claim to be the first of its kind, and you could well argue there are more widely acclaimed shooting games, but you'd be hard pushed to find any as iconic as this stately sci-fi venture. Cold, composed and challenging, it's the archetypal 80s shooter, and a prime example of the genre in its pomp.

EA has announced it will be pushing back the release of Criterion's next Need for Speed game by a year so the studio can lend development support on DICE's next Battlefield game.

The developer of The Sinking City has accused its publisher of pirating the game and tricking Steam into uploading it for sale.

Another month means more new additions to Sony's PlayStation Now subscription service, with March set to bring co-op zombie shooter World War Z, aerial adventure Ace Combat 7, superhero romp Infamous: Second Son, plus time-manipulating FPS Superhot.