Latest Articles (Page 763)

It's not long now until Square Enix reveals more details of Marvel's Avengers on 24th June, and while I imagine the company's PR department wanted to attract more attention for the event, a tweet yesterday evening attracted plenty - of entirely the wrong sort.

This week's big live event changed Fortnite forever - and now the game's new season has kicked off with a heavily waterlogged map.

Everything old is new again. That's Grounded, based on the short demo I just played as part of Steam's Summer Games Festival. A bit of exploration, a bit of crafting, some clumsy first-person combat. A world of interesting things to investigate that gradually expands in every direction. This is hardly new. But that world! Huge blades of grass rising overhead. Pausing beneath a canopy of clover. A building on the horizon, a sheer white wall, and when you approach it's a thing of Tic-Tacs dropped in the earth. The sell for Grounded is so simple: it's Honey I Shrunk the Kids, a bunch of you in the backyard suddenly no bigger than ants. But that simple sell is also completely transformative. The world of Grounded is magical.

Who are Bob and Prickle? Honestly I have no idea, but in the early days of Steam's summer Game Festival, when the store is filled with hundreds of new demos, it's Bob and Prickle I have been spending time with.

A few years ago, my brother took me to see his job. It was an exciting prospect, seeing as I had no idea what it was my brother actually did. My brother is a freelance stage manager and stage technician. Usually that term is used in theatre, but as job titles and responsibilities change and migrate, it's now a term that's also used for people like him who work in exhibitions and concert management.

Steam's increasingly frequent Game Festival event is back for the summer months, bringing a quivering heap of (mostly) indie demos and a week of developer livestream events.

Developer Skydance Interactive's celebrated VR zombie smasher The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is ratcheting up the tempo a little next month with the introduction of new arcade-style horde mode, arriving as part of its next content expansion, the Meatgrinder Update.

Developer Cloudhead Games' critically acclaimed rhythm FPS is finally making the jump from PC to PlayStation 4, and will be available on PSVR on 28th July.

A demo for Grounded, Obsidian's Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Kids-style bug-high survival adventure, launches today.

UPDATE 16/6/20: After a couple of delays, Star Wars Episode I: Racer is finally due for launch on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 next week, on Tuesday 23rd June.

I almost gave up on Those Who Remain halfway through. It was the lions, you see. A first-person blunderfest for horror obsessives only, the game's setting is split between a menacing night-time reality and a weed-choked, oceanic otherworld in which objects float and the puzzles are more, well, videogamey. One such puzzle is a labyrinth dotted with lion statues. The idea is to carry the statues to candlelit plinths. The problem is that there's a monster in your path, an oily personification of buried guilt and suffering. There's a lot of that kind of thing in Those Who Remain - accusing messages on walls, silver-masked demons chortling about sin and forgiveness - but for the most part, the emotions you're repressing are boredom and frustration.

EA has announced Madden NFL 21 is the first game in the series on Steam - and surely FIFA 21 will follow.

Surprise! AMD just announced three new Ryzen processors by uploading a video to their YouTube channel. The new models are improved 'XT' versions of existing 3000-series 'X' processors, rather than the Ryzen 4000 models we were expecting to debut at some point in 2020, but the promise of improved performance at the same (recommended retail) price point makes them worth talking about all the same.

Remember MicroProse? The once great American video game publisher and developer founded by Bill Stealey and Sid Meier in 1982 is back - and it's publishing a couple of war first-person shooters.

Warner Bros. and NetEase have announced a new The Lord of the Rings mobile game.

Last night's Fortnite live event, The Device, was a predictably explosive end to the game's current season - whether you were in-game or watching online due to its server capacity issues. But, perhaps more importantly, it was also a major staging ground for the game's immediate and longterm future.

A new Nintendo Direct-like Pokémon announcement broadcast will take place tomorrow, 17th June.

Planet Coaster: Console Edition launches simultaneously as an enhanced version for both Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, as well as Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

When I was growing up, I was always told that video games were detrimental to your health: addictive, "bad for your eyes", and a general waste of time. While some of those concerns may be true when taken to extremes, games are now also being recognised for their positive properties - and one game has been approved for prescription as a medicine in the US.

The Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has been a stunning success, raising $8.1m for funds supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

The sorry saga of Duke Nukem continues as Gearbox has launched a lawsuit against 3D Realms - again.

UPDATE 16/6/20: Fortnite developer Epic Games has issued a statement on the capacity problems which marred last night's live event.

Remember BloodRayne? Terminal Reality's early-2000s third-person shooter series was lying dormant ever since 2011 spin-off side-scroller BloodRayne: Betrayal flopped. But a company has bought the rights to the series and announced plans to bring BloodRayne back.

Nintendo has surprise-launched a new free Switch game on the eShop.

The most common joke about the difficulty video games have reconciling their storytelling impulses with the violent action so many of them depend on revolves around the character Nathan Drake. Star of the Uncharted series, Drake is famed for his easygoing, flippant charm - yet over the course of a single game he will typically kill hundreds of people. They call him the smiling psychopath.

Surprise! Stealth indie hit Invisible Inc. has received a stealth release today on Nintendo Switch.

Last year's Pokémon Go Fest events attracted around 300,000 ticket holders to the parks and city plazas of Chicago, Dortmund and Yokohama. This year? Well, 2020 is a little different.

After popping up a little early on the Microsoft Store, today we've finally been given some details on Motive's upcoming Star Wars title Star Wars: Squadrons, a starfighter game that promises players an "immersive, first-person space dogfighting experience".

The Isle of Armor, arriving this week as the first of two expansions to Pokémon Sword and Shield, sounds a lot like a new and improved Wild Area. It can be accessed as soon as you've reached the original Wild Area in the main games, meaning you won't have to beat the game's eight gyms or finish the story to get there.

Windjammers 2, the long-awaited follow-up to Data East's frisbee-tossing arcade classic, gets a demo tomorrow, 16th June as part of the Steam Game Festival.