During Renegade Ops' first moments, it's tempting to think you're in Panau. The opening level's shimmering sea, perfect beaches and lush foliage sell the game as a sort of top-down Just Cause 2; the return of developer Avalanche's signature explosions merely reinforces that feeling. While Rico Rodriguez's adventure was all about his grappling hook, however, the focus here is on bouncy vehicle physics.
UK retailer Game Group's financial woes continue following today's announcement of its latest fiscal results, which saw losses more than double and turnover fall by over ten per cent.
In the six months to July 31, turnover fell fom £624.6 million to £558.8 million, a drop of 10.6 per cent. Its pre-tax losses rose by almost 140 per cent, from last year's £21.5 million to a miserable £51.5 million.
For a preview in our issue that is now out in the UK, we sat down with Braid designer Jonathan Blow to play and discuss his new game, The Witness. An surreal and beautiful open-world puzzle game, developed by Blow and a small team of two core developers, it's a fascinating experiment in player freedom and non-linear game design.
While Just Cause 2 developer Avalanche Studios' top-down shooter was released on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network two weeks ago, publisher Sega has remained tight-lipped about the PC version's release date. Until now: Renegade Ops will be available from Steam on October 14.
To make up for it, PC buyers will be able to choose a fifth playable character: Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman. Naturally, he'll be driving the Half-Life 2 buggy, and his special ability sees him unleash the Antlions, as you'll see in the video below.
While games arrived on Google's social network, Google+, back in August, support from social gaming titan Zynga was limited, with only Zynga Poker available on the service. That has now changed with the launch of CityVille, the most successful social game on Facebook.
Sony has announced Bootleggers, a free-to-play FPS due on PlayStation Home before the end of the year.
The game will launch as part of a thorough overhaul of the PlayStation 3 social network, which will see Home split into hubs, dubbed "districts", according to genre. Bootleggers will sit in the Action district, with avatars facing off against each other in a basic multiplayer shooter.
With its Xperia Play exclusivity deal expired, Minecraft will be available for all Android devices when developer Mojang releases it on the Android Market this Thursday.
Bethesda Softworks was last week denied a request that would have forbidden Masthead from continuing development on the Fallout MMOG.
A Los Angeles district judge denied Bethesda's motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Masthead, the Bulgarian developer which was contracted by Interplay to develop the MMOG, provisionally titled Fallout Online, before Masthead had even had an opportunity to state its case.
Radiangames' Luke Schneider has announced that Super Crossfire, his first iOS game, will be published by Chillingo.
Speaking to Official Nintendo Magazine, vice president of PR and marketing Pete Hines said that, while there was a "possibility" of Bethesda developing for Wii U, the amount of work involved in porting and localising games for multiple platforms presented something of a stumbling block.
"Boobs and horror are like spaghetti and meatballs - they work better together," says Marc Bell at Digital Romance Lab (don't worry, entirely SFW), because it enhances a feeling of vulnerability in the viewer, but games don't seem to deal with nudity anything like as well. He brings out the less than stellar examples of Splatterhouse and Shadows Of The Damned, asking why they fail to make the skin they show mean anything.
In news that may come as a relief to those frustrated by the boss battles in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the game's upcoming DLC The Missing Link was designed and coded in-house at Eidos Montreal.
Nintendo's two most beloved characters arrive on the 3DS eShop this week with the releases of The Legend Of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.
The work of Charles Dickens frequently illuminated society’s dark side. In A Tale of Two Cities, he examined the French revolution – on its face a noble rebellion against a dispassionate, entitled ruling class – and portrayed in kind the ugliness of the bloodthirsty revolutionaries who manned the guillotines. Dickens wanted readers to understand the complexity of rebellion, and that even those who act for just causes can be capable of as much injustice as the institutions they protest.
EA, like Sony, has taken advantage of a recent ruling by the US Supreme Court, and updated its online terms of service to forbid disgruntled users joining together in class-action lawsuits.
Gears Of War 3 is the new number one in the UK all-formats software chart, almost outstripping the launch sales of the first two games in the series as the best-selling new release of the year so far.
Codemasters racer F1 2011 enters the chart at number two as Dead Island, number one for the last two weeks, slips to third after its sales fell 54 per cent.
Crytek's 2007 PC shooter Crysis will be released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on October 4, publisher EA has confirmed.
The game will only be available as a digital download: for 1600 Microsoft Points from the Xbox Live Marketplace, or £15.99 from the PlayStation Store. The 2007 original has been remastered, runs on CryEngine 3 and supports stereoscopic 3D.
Crytek's 2007 PC shooter Crysis will be released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on October 4, publisher EA has confirmed.
The game will only be available as a digital download: for 1600 Microsoft Points from the Xbox Live Marketplace, or £15.99 from the PlayStation Store. The 2007 original has been remastered, runs on CryEngine 3 and supports stereoscopic 3D.
Star Wars: The Old Republic will be released on December 20 in North America and December 22 in Europe, publisher EA has announced.
Buying a copy of BioWare's long-awaited PC MMOG will net you a 30-day subscription. Access to the game thereafter will cost $14.99/£8.99/€12.99 per month or $41.97/£25.17/€35.97 for three months, with six months costing $77.94/£46.14/€65.94.
How is it that many of the prehistoric creatures staring back at us from biology textbooks – species that never survived to populate our modern world – invariably seem the most interesting? The world today is a more impoverished place for not having aquatic creatures with five eyes and a long flexible proboscis with a claw at the end. Arguably, the genetic deck was stacked against these oddballs from the moment of their inception.
How is it that many of the prehistoric creatures staring back at us from biology textbooks – species that never survived to populate our modern world – invariably seem the most interesting? The world today is a more impoverished place for not having aquatic creatures with five eyes and a long flexible proboscis with a claw at the end. Arguably, the genetic deck was stacked against these oddballs from the moment of their inception.
Microsoft's unique take on the slider smartphone comes from a USPTO filing which covers a "mobile communication device having multiple, interchangable second devices."
YoYo Games, creator of Game Maker, has launched a new version of its drag-and-drop game development tool that outputs games in HTML5-compatible Javascript.
The release of Game Maker: HTML5 means that users can export their creations to a webserver from which it can be playable in-browser on PCs, smartphones and tablets, without the need for any additional plugins. A new feature, Team Collaboration, lets multiple users work on a project at the same time.
In a post on the Eve Insider Dev Blog, senior producer Arnar Hrafn Gylfason cuts a contrite figure as he assures disgruntled Eve Online players that CCP has listened to their concerns about the direction the game has taken in recent months, and will reveal its response in the weeks to come.