Latest Articles (Page 746)

If you're curious to know what free game-shaped things your Xbox Gold subscription will be bringing you in August, kindly set your knowledge hat to receive immediately: August's Games With Gold are Red Faction 2, Portal Knights, Override: Mech City Brawl, and MX Unleashed.

Looks like you can take your clown makeup off - for now - as Red Dead Online has finally released a significant update, one that introduces legendary animals, a new naturalist role, and a fresh Outlaw Pass.

UPDATE 4.10pm UK: As announced in the latest Geoff Keighley Summer of Gaming announcement stream, Cuphead is coming to PlayStation 4 today.

PlayStation 5 has a planned feature which lets you load a specific mode or mission within a game directly from your console's home screen, and today we've heard a little more about it.

The concept of native resolution is becoming less and less relevant in the modern era of games and instead, image reconstruction techniques are coming to the fore. The idea here is remarkably simple: in the age of the 4K display, why expend so much GPU power in painting 8.3m pixels per frame when instead, processing power can be directed at higher quality pixels instead, interpolated up to an ultra HD output? Numerous techniques have been trialled, but Kojima Productions' Death Stranding is an interesting example. On PS4 Pro, it features one of the best checkerboarding implementations we've seen. Meanwhile, on PC, we see a 'next-gen' image reconstruction technique - Nvidia's DLSS - which delivers image quality better than native resolution rendering.

Ferrari is kickstarting its own sim racing series later this year, with the Ferrari Hublot Esports Series commencing this September, and with a place on the scuderia's own esports team up for grabs.

It's almost time for our next dose of much-needed Animal Crossing goodness, as the second wave of the free summer update is arriving this week, and it sounds positively dreamy.

Newly uncovered concept art for Star Fox 2 features an alternative menagerie of squadmates for Fox, Falco, Slippy and Peppy.

Sennheiser is one of the most legendary names in audio, a German firm that makes both well-regarded headphones for critical music listening as well as some of the best gaming headsets on the market. Its gaming division is set for a change though, as it is now set to de-merge from Sennheiser and become a new independent entity: EPOS.

Ubisoft has been shaken by a wave of sexual abuse and harassment allegations in recent weeks, leading to the resignation of several high-profile executives and a pledge from boss Yves Guillemot to reform Ubisoft's processes and editorial board. One of the executives who has since resigned, chief creative officer Serge Hascoët, has been accused of enabling and facilitating a culture of toxicity and misogyny - along with blocking plans for a solo female protagonist in the Assassin's Creed series.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic has doubled its donation to Black Lives Matter charities and initiatives, from a minimum of $5m up to a final total of $10m.

Last weekend's so-called gigaleak of Nintendo data continues to turn up treasure - and now fans have been poring over cut content from N64 Legend of Zelda games Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

The next Tetris 99 Maximus Cup event will feature Paper Mario: The Origami King - and another exclusive theme for the puzzle game.

Discussing the creature design in his gruesome 1982 adaptation of The Thing - a movie which, incidentally, opens with Kurt Russell losing his shit over a computer game - John Carpenter once observed that "I didn't want to end up with a guy in a suit". It's a pitfall many so-called "reverse-horror" games tumble into. You Are The Monster, goes the premise, but does that really mean anything beyond a squelchy skinjob, wrapped around the same old anthropocentric understanding of the world and what it means to act and thrive within it? Even the Alien, horror's apex killer, rarely seems that alien when you slip inside its head in Alien vs Predator, nimble and deadly yet reassuringly bipedal, a pack hunter with binocular vision and the usual appendages.

Like a lot of things based on Scandinavian folklore, Röki looks cute but isn't really. This is entirely to its credit - and to the enduring credit of Scandinavian folklore, I imagine. Röki's about woodland ponds, but it's also about pond scum. It's about sweet little animals, but it's also about the skulls of sweet little animals. And it's about magic, but what it's really about is the stuff that magic can't undo. I was gently moved for a few hours and then I was clobbered, gorgeously, over the head. This game hurts. I love it.

1sland moves slowly out of the fog and surf, a dreamy sort of game that has had me in a dreamy sort of spell these last few days. It sells itself as a "paddle royale", but any sense of violence or even urgency is swept away by playing it. Water laps at the hull of your little boat, ice dissolves quietly on impact. "Good morning," the game tells me when I first check in each day, soothing, like the greeting on arrival at a spa.

Two very different games will be available via PlayStation Plus in August: the gritty Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered, and the colourful Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout.

There's plenty of dogs to be found around Skyrim, but where are the cats? That's something that several mods have sought to fix over the years, yet the latest introduces some more complicated adoption and needs systems to make sure you're furry immersed.

Ghost of Tsushima owners will receive an update to the game today which allows you to make the experience easier - or more difficult.

Luigi being hidden somewhere in Super Mario 64 has long been an urban legend. It was something I remember hearing about at school, reading on old forums. If only you did this, I was told, Mario's missing brother might finally appear.

Analogue, the company behind the FPGA driven retro consoles, such as the Mega Sg and Super Nt, has finally shared additional details on the upcoming Analogue Pocket - its first foray into the world of portable gaming. As announced last year, the idea behind the pocket is to deliver an FPGA driven console capable of playing Game Boy family cartridges either using its high-resolution internal LCD or via a dock connected to another display. Support for Neo Geo Pocket Color, Game Gear and Atari Lynx is also possible via adapters. In recent years, new screens and mods have been developed for many of these original consoles but the Pocket seeks to combine everything into a stylish casing.

Everyone knows Majora's Mask is a sequel to Ocarina of Time - but what happened between the two games? The fan-made Zelda: The Missing Link stitches the two stories together, via a short game created within Ocarina's engine (thanks, Kotaku).

A few months ago, I thought 2020 might be the end of Pokémon Go. Here was this thing millions use as daily motivation to exercise, see friends, feel rewarded for playing, and all of it was suddenly impossible. Socialising and many in-game activities like raids and trading were out of the question. Events were cancelled or indefinitely postponed. A lot of people felt they could no longer play. I remember thinking, even when things did start to get better, if this game could ever fully recover.

I really enjoy not playing with anyone else in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which seems like a horrible thing to say given it's a massively-multiplayer online game, but it's what I've always done. It's not that I hate other people, or that I'm zealously role-playing a Sith Lord who hates people (though I am a Sith Lord who hates people), it's just I want to be the only hero in my Star Wars story, thank you. Everyone else can chuff off, and I love that Star Wars: The Old Republic gets that.

When a trailer for a fan-made remake of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas burst onto the scene earlier this month, many thought it was too good to be true. And it was, in a sense: as while the trailer displayed a "remade" version of San Andreas in Unreal Engine 4, the project was merely a tool to create Machinima videos, and the team behind the trailer announced they had no plans to release a fully playable remake.

Be still my beating heart! Lauren Hissrich, showrunner for The Witcher Netflix series, has announced a new six-part series called The Witcher: Blood Origin.

I'll be honest, regular 2D chess was already enough to sizzle my brain - but apparently that wasn't difficult enough, as someone has created 5D chess.

Dataminers were already knocking on The Red Door, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's leaked internal alpha test, but now it seems there's another leak in the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War ship, this time courtesy of what is reported to be a Doritos marketing campaign.

I have misplaced the book - I can at least tell you it's called Two Girls, One on Each Knee and it's by Alan Connor and it's wonderful - but I remember reading that a newspaper (I think the Telegraph) at one point (I think it was the 1990s) tried to meddle with the way Cryptic crosswords got made.

The second series of the hugely successful live-action The Witcher show on Netflix is the latest project delayed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.