Recently, I tried to replay GTAIV, but it felt too dated. Not the graphics, which are fine. Some of it is the controls, which are bizarrely maximal (hold A on foot to run, tap A to sprint? Hold X while driving to toggle high beams? You couldn’t ship anything more elegant than that?). Mostly it is badly directed, and given its success, it would seem direction isn’t a thing our medium cares much about yet.
Bethesda Softworks will next week release an "incremental update" for the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with console versions to follow, that fixes issues introduced in the patch it released earlier this week.
Electronic Arts has confirmed the acquisition of social RPG developer KlickNation, and made it part of the BioWare label.
In a press release, EA confirmed yesterday's reports that it was to buy the Sacramento-based developer. The studio will now join BioWare's existing San Francisco social team to form a new business unit, BioWare Social.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is number one in the Nordic chart, which collates sales data from Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.
Last week it was pipped to top spot by Assassin's Creed: Revelations, but Ubisoft's game slips back to fourth behind Skyrim and Battlefield 3.
There's just the one new entry this week: Lego Harry Potter Years 5-7, which makes its debut at number six.
Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment has revealed that it is working on South Park: The Game, an RPG for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
The studio is collaborating with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who are writing the script, performing the dialogue and overseeing the development of the game which will be published by THQ.
Players will be cast as a new kid in the town of South Park and will have to defend it from various threats. Further details on the game will be revealed in the January issue of Game Informer.
Electronic Arts has launched the T-Club, an "elite Tetris fan club", alongside a new version of Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzler which hits the iOS App Store today.
This latest version of Tetris sports touch controls, new game modes, and regularly delivered challenges through the Tetris Log. It also tracks players' total lines cleared to calculate their Tetris Rank.
Sony has announced The 12 Gifts Of Christmas, a promotion which will see 12 free games given away to members of the PlayStation Plus subscription service.
It kicks off today with a free download of the Mega Drive classic Sonic The Hedgehog 2. It will only be available until December 3, after which it will be replaced by the next game in the promotion which, in turn, will be available for 48 hours.
All the included games have been given away to PlayStation Plus members at some point in the last 18 months.
More than half of UK children own a toy based on a virtual world, according to a new study by youth research firm Dubit.
The company surveyed 500 children from around the UK, finding that 55 per cent owned at least one toy based on one of Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin, Build-A-BearVille, Poptropica or Webkinz. Seventy-three per cent had played at least one of the games in question.
Konami's head-spinning thirdperson action game NeverDead will be released for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on February 3, the publisher has confirmed.
NeverDead, developed by UK studio Rebellion Software, was created by Shinta Nojiri, a veteran of the Metal Gear Solid series. Immortal protagonist Bryce Boltzmann can reattach dismembered limbs or even use them as weapons.
Games have no idea who we are. But they try to ask. Often when we start a new game it will ask us would we like to play at Easy, Medium or Hard difficulty levels. But what is it really asking? Typically, the difficulty levels don't come with a description to differentiate between them, as if it’s somehow enough for the player to know that there are three levels available and some are harder than others. It’s all relative.
Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary about independent videogame development, will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Electronic Arts is to acquire social game developer Klicknation, according to reports.
Inside Social Games expects EA to announce the acquisition today. The studio, based in Sacramento, California, is relatively small, with just under 360,000 monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.
Ryutaro Ichimura is heading up development of an action-RPG, using Unreal Engine 3, for publisher Square Enix.
Ichimura, co-producer of 2009 DS RPG Dragon Quest IX, told Famitsu magazine that the un-named project is being made for a worldwide audience; 1UP's report says that concept art shown in the magazine more closely resembled Elder Scrolls than Final Fantasy.
The free-to-play gaming model has proved nothing short of revolutionary, moving within the span of only a few years from being perceived as the last-ditch model for desperately failing MMOGs to become a perfectly viable business model for all genres on all platforms. Yet despite its astounding success, F2P (to use the now-common shorthand) has not proved fully effective.
Nintendo has insisted that the Game Boy Advance games on offer to 3DS early adopters through the Ambassador Programme will be released this year.
Frank Pearce, co-founder of World Of Warcraft developer Blizzard Entertainment, has joined the board of directors at the Academy Of Interactive Arts And Sciences (AIAS).
Tandem Events has announced that it is launching F2P Summit, a new London-based free-to-play conference.
The one-day networking event will take place in London on March 28, 2012, and will explore free-to-play strategies such as user acquisition, customer retention, community management and monetisation.
The ten free GameBoy Advance games Nintendo promised to early adopters of the 3DS as part of the Ambassador Programme may not be available until next year.
Glitch, the charming browser MMOG developed by Tiny Speck with input from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, is returning to beta for what the developer describes as "fairly radical changes."
Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus director Fumito Ueda has left Sony, according to reports, and is finishing development of the long-awaited PlayStation 3 exclusive The Last Guardian as a freelancer.
The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the new number one in the Japanese all-formats software chart.
Link's Wii swan-song sold almost 195,000 copies in its first week on sale, comfortably beating two PSP new entries, 7th Dragon 2020 and Saint Seiya Senki, which have to settle for second and third respectively.
It was a busy week for new releases, with eight of the top ten making their debuts. 3DS was once again the best-selling hardware of the week, with 120,920 units sold, beating sales of all other platforms combined.
Circle Pad Pro, the attachment which adds a second analogue pad and set of shoulder buttons to Nintendo's 3DS, will be released in Europe on January 27.
The add-on, revealed alongside Monster Hunter 3G in September and set to launch in Japan next month, will be available either on its own or bundled with Resident Evil: Revelations, which is released on the same day.
German game developer Keen Games has won a Deloitte Fast 500 award, ranking it among the fastest-growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The Frankfurt studio has now been recognised by Deloitte twice in 2011; earlier this month it won a Deloitte Fast 50 award for being one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Germany with a growth rank of 600 per cent.
Our January issue, which is on sale December 20, will include a Post Script on how Nintendo has finally managed a return to the signature balance of the original game's power-ups.
Bethesda's latest patch for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim contains a bug that breaks resistance - and has caused some dragons to break with tradition by flying backwards.
Resistances are enchantments that reduce the damage the player takes from certain attacks. Players have found that not only are their enchantments having no effect on the damage they take after installing the patch, but it applies to every NPC, creature and enemy in the game.