Latest Articles (Page 1715)

The latest Resident Evil 6 trailer does not pull any punches. In fact, unless all of this stuff happens within the game's first five (what would be incredibly confusing) minutes, I'd say we're venturing fairly deep into spoiler territory. Now, admittedly, playing Resident Evil for story is a bit like calling customer service to avoid gouging your own eyes out in sheer spittle-soaked frustration, but fair warning nonetheless. Also on the docket: volumes of cryptic dialog, Leon Kennedy's mesmerizingly shiny hair, and a (playable) man who brings fists to a zombie sword fight. No, it doesn't seem the least bit scary, but Resident Evil 6 looks big and dumb in the best way possible. Besides, we have the Amnesias and Lone Survivors of the world to make us turn on all the lights and jump ten feet in the air when the cat affectionately brushes against our legs. So then, watch the biggest-budget B-movie you're likely to ever see after the break.

Those remarkably un-froglike people at Frogster have sent over their latest story trailer for "action" MMO TERA, and by gum it looks pretty, as you can see below. I've also added in the most recent in-game footage for good measure, as TERA lands in Europe on 3rd May, and beta sign-ups are now taking place on the site. I suspect it will be hard pressed against the popular choice of Guild Wars 2, but it's got a lot going for it with genuine in-game collisions, dodging and hit-detection making it quite unlike other MMOs. I'm intrigued to take a look.

I'm amazed Warhammer Online hasn't gone free to play yet. Amazed! I say as much to everyone I meet. "I'm amazed Warhammer Online hasn't gone free to play yet" I said to my dad on the phone only yesterday. "Son, is that you?" he replied. "Is something wrong? What do you need a free hammer for?" Then I hung up.

Mythic's underwhelming MMO may be resisting microtransactions, but as an alternative it's releasing side-project Wrath of Heroes, a free-to-play PvP game featuring quickie battles and pre-made heroes, with more emphasis on the bashing than the levelling. That's now in open beta, which means you can right now and for free.

I may be the one of the few men in England who cares that the new baseball season has just begun over in UnitedStatesVille, USA but I'm surely not the only sports simulation fan to be intrigued by the release of Out of the Park Baseball 13. As with many sports games, the annual releases tend to involve incremental improvements, roster changes and the addition of minor features rather than radical alterations.I'll list the tweaks to the formula below but, more importantly, I'll tell you why the series matters and why baseball itself is such a wonderful gift to lovers of all things simulated.

Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers - much like the FIFA games, except without any fantastical beasts quite as inhuman as Wayne Rooney. The vaguely long-running PC adaptation of the world's most famous collectible card game (presuming you're not counting lovely Top Trumps. Man, I used to know loads about motorbikes and aeroplanes thanks to Top Trumps) gets its latest more-or-less annual iteration in this Summer's confusing-named Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013. DotP continues to the major source of business for Carmageddon devs Stainless Games, so hopefully this being a success might mean a shinier, bloodier, sadisticer Carmageddon: Reincarnation.

R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet is the single greatest cultural artifact of the 21st Century to date. And at last, mere mortals like you and I can be involved in this incredible hip-hopera, thanks to Jeremy Penner's Lasertube project (found via FreeIndieGam.es). Your role is simple - click on Mr Kelly's face whenever he sings 'oh shit' or assorted other foul language, otherwise the game will end.

Ssh, ssh, ssh you don't need to understand why. You just have to do it. The show must go on. It's just a terrible shame that, so far, it only covers the recap, not the full 22 part saga of Kelly's rap Wheel of Time.

If you are somehow unware of Trapped In The Closet, then oh boy am I about to improve the quality of your life a thousandfold.

As infamous adventure creator Al Lowe puts it, the Kickstarter craze kicked off by Tim Schafer has, for many, been a lot like getting the band back together. So many names most famous for their games released in the 80s and early 90s are reappearing, some even coming out of retirement, with the promise of crowd-sourced funding. Many, stung by their experiences with publishers in the past, are being wooed back in, and not least among them is Al Lowe. Creator of Leisure Suit Larry, and a programmer on many of the classic Sierra adventures, Lowe hasn't released a game since 1996, purported to have been in retirement since '98. He's popped up here and there since, and continues to send out jokes every day to his loyal mailing list, but at 65 years old he's officially back, and there's a Kickstarter to prove it. We spoke to Lowe, and colleague Paul Trowe, a man who began his gaming career at 12, play-testing for Sierra, to find out why they think now is the time to remake the Larry games.

Could Roberta and Ken Williams be about to come out of retirement? Speaking to Al Lowe and Paul Trowe for an interview due later today, RPS learned that the company remaking the Leisure Suit Larry games is also in talks with other Sierra adventure alumni about bringing back their classic series. Replay Games' Trowe revealed that they're currently in negotiations with both Sierra On-line co-founders Ken and Roberta Williams, as well as Space Quest creators, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, with an interest to see King's Quest and Space Quest brought back. With the added obstacle of Activision to manoeuvre around too.

I only played Elemental: War of Magic around a week after it was released so I'm not going to comment on how patches have or haven't improved the game, but the release of Fallen Enchantress, the standalone sequel/apology is certainly something that interests me. A great deal actually. Along with Warlock: Master of the Arcane, there are now two delightful fantastical beauties vying for my strategic attentions, their turn-based ruminations inspiring powerful ponderlust. If you bought War of Magic in 2010 you can download the beta of Fallen Enchantress now and will receive the final release for free. Waited 'til 2011 to buy War of Magic? You may still be eligible for a discount. Check here and if you've forgotten your login details, the email address you registered with should retrieve what's needed.

It's probably horribly sensationalist to suggest there's a cold war on between Firaxis' XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Goldhawk Interactive's more mechanically purist X-COMlike Xenonauts, but then again it is the battle to end all battles, one shall stand and one shall fall and the Earth itself will be left in smoking ruins by the time this apocalyptic conflict is over.

Xenonauts has been smartening itself up since the announcement of Firaxis' official reimaginging, as lead dev Chris England chatted to me about a few weeks ago. More detailed environments, and the 'evil alien sheds' have now been replaced with suitably dramatic crashed UFOs. Images of its newly endetailed look are now available for all to clap eyes upon. Which is only so much preamble, innit? Here you are...

Do you care about anti-aliasing? Do you dream of snuggling up to its sort of crisp edges and mild performance hit? Or are jaggies an acceptable compromise in the name of RAW INCREDIBLE SPEEDY SPEED? It's one of those things I find it increasingly hard to go without (though not as much as anisotropic filtering, missus) yet it's always the first thing to go if a game's not running so well on my ageing PC. Also, so many games don't include a decent/any option for it in their settings, requiring me to have a fiddle in driver settings with variable results. Both NVIDIA and AMD are trying to change that, with newer anti-aliasing tech and the option to force it on globally in driver settings.

At this time of resurrection and rebirth, it seems apt to look at yet another Kickstarter project that aims to roll back both a stone and the years in order to bring glories from the past to walk our digital hallways once more. Bionite: Origins, already two years in the making, is an attempt to revive the play style of Battlezone '98, a hybrid of first person hovercrafting and strategic base building. I'm sure there are other much-loved properties in need of a successor, spiritual or otherwise, but I reckon by summer, Kickstarter will have them all covered. What makes Bionite a little different to many projects is that funding isn't being sought to begin development, but to continue it. A working alpha of the game already exists and the beta testing phase is imminent. Video evidence of the team's work is nestled below.

Court-martialed officers are given the chance to redeem themselves by signing up to fight alongside their fellow condemned in the bloodiest battles of a bloody great war. It sounds like it could be a science fiction concept, with electrified manacles, guns that are also handcuffs and remote controlled explosive dogtags that bark out orders in the abrasive tones of an angry prison warden played by Malcolm McDowell. No such thing. Men Of War: Condemned Heroes tells the story of a soviet penal battalion during World War II. To the Eastern Front then and a slightly more unusual story of that many-storied war to discover. Trailer below, game due on April 12th.

Epic Games may be best known for the awesome Jazz Jackrabbit, but it seems like they're ready to move on to other things. Other things on the PC, apparently. Epic's newly teased PC-only project has, in all seriousness, been a long time in coming. "We might be working on a PC-only title," Epic president Mike Capps said during a PAX panel (via Joystiq). Bleszinski then drove the point home in his trademark chainsaw-gun-like fashion. "Let me say that again: we are working on a PC game." Apparently, it's an unannounced project, so that probably rules out the Minecraft-inspired Fortnite. Epic's staying tight-lipped beyond that, but for now "existent" is a step in the right direction.

Free-to-play Unreal Tournament? Why, that would just be wild speculation...

For those in need of a refresher: Defiance is a sci-fi shooter MMO from Trion Worlds that's going to tie in with a Syfy television show on a weekly basis. And I think I may be one of the people in need of said refresher, because according to the trailer, Defiance is a gun game about guns and aliens and guns and that quick cut thing movie trailers use to make aliens scary - only that's kind of hard here because the aliens are exploding into extremely dead goop. Dan's preview from last year's GamesCom made Trion's latest dish sound a bit more appetizing, so I'm definitely interested in seeing big talk translate into something other than big explosions. For now, though, watch extraterrestrials catch their death of germs, water, and the odd bullet here or there or everywhere after the break.

Borderlands 2 is going to have all the guns. Hundreds of thousands of the things. 87 bazillion! Probably. Gearbox's unabashed ode to all things projectile will - as it turns out - also have five character classes to wield them. There is, however, something of a catch: the Mechromancer (which I was crushed to discover in no way involves candle-lit dinners) won't be working its robotic voodoo on day one. Instead, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford is estimating the robo-armed girl and her controllable robo-everything-ed sidekick will be finished "60 to 90 days" after launch. On the upside, she'll be yours for free if you pre-order and join the shadowy Premiere Club. Otherwise, though, you'll have to fork over 87 bazillion dollars. Or, you know, a fee "comparable to most DLC."

Dan fights against the inexorable tides of history to bring traditionalism back to the the Japanese archipelago. Part One. Part Two. And now:

Months have passed. Togichi and Fukushima have become relative havens of tranquility - but Hitachi is a permanent wreck; I’ve fought at least a battle there every month, the first three months recapturing it from another rebel force I bribed into existence to kill off the Jozai, and then twelve months of defending it from the huge armies of new enemies; Odawara and Nagaoka, who have changed sides to Imperial, ostensibly to piss off the shogun, but mainly from realpolitik, and Kakegawa.

Oh dear, it turns out I was just too busy with eating eggs for the Rabbit God yesterday. How about we try the compilation of links and game-related reading today? I know it's radical, but it might just work.

• A proposal for Lego X-Com: "The basic idea was to have two teams of LEGO figures pitted against each other, and it’s around here that I started seeing an analogue, LEGO version of XCom for my inner eye (in the turn based squad game with destructible environment sense). We built a scene using a regular LEGO baseplate and put together a squad of three LEGO figures each, where each one could choose one ‘weapon’ (only variants non-lethal sleep lasers allowed I’m afraid) and one special ability that we agreed upon before hand."

It's happening. An astounding $2.1 million later, Obsidian Entertainment is getting the Black Isle band back together with Brian Fargo to make Wasteland 2. It's like some kind of Cinderella fairytale comeback story, only everyone dies in a radioactive pain puddle at the end. Or the beginning, really. But anyway, happier things! Shortly before the big news broke, I had a chat with Obsidian chief creative officer Chris Avellone about what sort of hand he and his team of burly brained wordsmiths will have in the game. Also, Kickstarter, nostalgia, and bugs and glitches - because those are sort of a thing for the Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, and Dungeon Siege III developer.

A thread over on NeoGAF has spotted that the German magazine PC Action is previewing Dark Souls for PC, unofficially confirming the release of Namco's hardcore melee RPG on the PC. There will apparently be new bosses for PC, but with everything else having parity with the console version. A release in August.

I... I don't... Um. OK, let me start again. Vidiot Game is far-and-away the strangest thing I've ever played. It's kind of like Nintendo's madcap WarioWare series I guess, but things just happen and the floating face asks me all these questions and I fuse with bees to gain their powers and I killed a space-time void with a backflip. Also, a three question multiple choice prompt randomly asked me where I was from, and the one non-fictional option was my actual, incredibly obscure hometown. So I'm pretty sure Vidiot Game is also magic. It's a giddy, nonsensical trip through utter silliness that probably counts as a hallucinogenic drug in whatever terrifying rainbow moon dimension it's from, but I couldn't stop. Also, it's free! So try it and uh... I... words and stuff. Thanks, Free Indie Games. I think.

Yes, that's right: multiple players. Not singular players or angular players - which are, of course, works of incredibly esoteric modern art. Mass Effect 3's Resurgence DLC is arriving on April 10, and - somewhat amazingly - it's totally free. For the price of nary a nickle, dime, or duplicitous Citadel store endorsement, you'll nab two new maps, six new characters, and three new weapons. Among them are brand new races (Batarians and Geth) and a positively delightful-looking harpoon gun, which is so worth the time I spent sending complaints to the FTC attached to precision-targeted harpoons. Take the mass relay across the break for a trailer of every character, weapon, and map in action.

In much the same, incredibly depressing way we're all destined to become our parents, I tend to believe gaming's spiritual successors slowly but surely inherit oddly specific qualities of their forefathers. For instance, Serious Sam riffed on Duke Nukem, only for Serious Sam: BFE to spend years in uncharacteristic silence with nary a peep as to its development progress. As time passed, I began to worry that Torchlight II would suffer the same fate, ultimately following in Diablo's languid footsteps. But then I felt an odd fluttering sensation in my Anger Regions. Is this... optimism?

After a number of ventures that took him from an ill-fated N-Gage Red Faction spin-off to an ill-fated Gauntlet sequel, Doom co-creator (with locks that flow like choruses from the mouths of angels) John Romero is eyeing his old-school bread-and-butter. Speaking with Eurogamer, he described his previously hinted at shooter as a "MMO-ish" and "PC first." I like both of those things. Let us hope his new game is fated to be ill in the colloquial, "that was totally ill" sense and not the one that's, er, more commonly come to be associated with John Romero.

Dan Gril returns to continue his inevitably doomed attempts to restore traditionalism to an increasingly modernised Japan in Total War: Shogun 2: Fall of The Samurai. Here's part 1 in case you missed it.

It’s misty out there. A thick old pea souper soaking into the old Japanese wood. Did you know that a Japanese wood called Aokigahara is the world’s second worst suicide hotspot (after the Golden Gate Bridge)? Apparently, the police have a yearly trawl of the forest for any bodies they’ve missed. It’s got so bad that they’ve stopped publishing the numbers, for fear of encouraging people.

Anyway, knowing that makes me feel much worse. Somewhere in the fug of this digital wood is a huge rebel army, comprising about 1500 gunners and 200 sabre-toting horsemen, all after my blood.

Let there much be rejoicing. Go on, rejoice. Well, at least smile. No? Well, how about a smiley instead? You won't have to use your face at all. You only have to press two buttons. Come on, let's do it together. On three. One, two, three : And again. One, two, three )

There now, that wasn't so hard, was it? The reason for this rejoicing is that Wasteland 2 just hit its latest crowdsourcing bonus target, $2.1 million - and as well as meaning it's now accrued some 231% of its original target, it confirms that Obsidian's Chris Avellone is coming onboard to co-develop Brian Fargo's post-apocalyptic RPG.

Emergency! Emergency! The world is running out of words to put after 'indie' when coming up with new pay-what-you-want bundle titles. Gamersgate have opted for 'fort' as theirs, with that perhaps unintended sideeffect that when I think IndieFort I picture a castle wearing a checked shirt and some black-framed plastic spectacles. Oh well! The roster of included games is fairly impressive in this one, and has a bit of a roleplaying skew rather than the usual barrange of faux-vintage platformers and shmups. We get 2D space sim Black Market, hardy roguelike Cardinal Quest, free-roaming samurai roleplaying Kenshi, hovertank shooter Steel Storm: Burning Retribution, hardcore dungeon-crawler dungeon-crawling Devil Whiskey, and high-speed co-op RPG Wanderlust: Rebirth.

I've been celebrating Easter by watching hundreds of cute ickle yellow chicks die horribly. And in the game. By which I mean Kyle Pulver's avian-abusing puzzle-platformer Offspring Fling.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, this would have been on a magazine cover. Several magazine covers, in fact. People would have forked out £40 or £50 for it. It would have been the creation of sizeable team, with a corporation's annual finances resting on its shoulders. In 2012, a game of Offspring Fling's cleverness and completeness is $7.99, made by one man and snuck onto the internet with little-to-no fanfare. This isn't news to anyone, I realise, but occasionally I glance back at how things have changed over the last few years and shake my head in happy disbelief.

Offspring Fling, then, is a puzzle platformer of the sort that used to abound in the early 90s, of the sort where you're there to rescue the helpless alongside dodging danger yourself. You're in the feather frame of a mother-bird, collecting her scattered chicks from around cartoon levels occupied by platforms and assorted vicious wildlife then fleeing to the exit.

Being an adventure fan isn't always easy. Only the other week, I had to endure Pendulo Studios' Yesterday - a game of dark mystery and devilry whose general quality is probably best summed up by this tweet. Luckily, for every low, there's a high, and while I've only played the opening act of Wadjet Eye/xii's upcoming Resonance, it's more than washed the bad taste out of my mouth. Here's a few reasons for your mouse finger to look forward to it...

With the Easter weekend coming up and my family poised to descend upon me in an inexorable tornado of baked goods and idle gossip, I realise with a heavy heart that I won't have much time for games in the next few days. That's okay, though, because I know I'll make time soon. I'm also comfortable in the knowledge that I live a relatively charmed existence, blessed with leisure time and technology, always poised to flip open an electronic hatch and escape into something pixellated.

Looking back, I realise that I've dedicated the best part of a life to precisely that. And it is a strange joy.