Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books Gets a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Wins “Game of the Year” at 2025-2026 GDC Awards
- Silent Hill, Dragon Quest, Skyrim, and More Announced as Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
- In 2005, games started rewiring our brains – The AV Club (2025)
Author: John Scalzo
Strogg and Peeker will be added to Quake Champions later this month
Over the weekend at PAX East, Bethesda confirmed that Strogg and Peeker will be added to Quake Champions later this month. Strogg is best known as the primary antagonist from Quake II and Quake 4. His diabolical personality will return in Quake Champions, and he’ll be joined on the battlefield by his constant companion, Peeker the Drone…
Strogg (Undying Infiltrator)
Half military-grade metal, half decaying flesh, and 100% ready to rage, the primary enemy from both Quake II and Quake 4 is back as Strogg fights to be freed from the Dreamlands and reestablish contact with his ruthless warlord Makron. Players will also be able to take control of Strogg’s sidekick Peeker, an airborne AI drone that shoots explosives. Enemy kills are turned into a nutritional paste called Stroylent that provides 25HP, but players need to act fast – other Stroggs can steal your Stroylent.
Strogg will be part of Quake Champions’s “April Update,” which will be available to download on April 26. It’ll also include a brand new map, “Awoken,” which Bethesda describes as a “misty labyrinth of tropical ruins.”
Posted in News, PC
Tagged PAX East 2018, Quake Champions
Boss Key brings the battle royale back to the 80s in Radical Heights… which launches on Steam Early Access tomorrow
Cliff Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions has decided to move on from LawBreakers, their entry in the burgeoning “Hero Shooter” genre, and will now compete with the big boys of the “Battle Royale” genre. But instead of dropping dozens of players on an island, the combat in Radical Heights takes place inside a sealed dome that should be familiar to fans of The Running Man.
The 80s-themed glitz and glamour of the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic (along with Midway’s Smash TV) is a clear inspiration for Radical Heights, and players will need to safely navigate the game’s neon-tinged environments if they want to survive. Thankfully, “Cash is King” inside the dome, and players will be able to spend their greenbacks on new weapons, “righteous” threads, or a BMX bike…
Welcome to RADICAL HEIGHTS, a free *X-TREME Early Access* BATTLE ROYALE shooter. Partake in high-stakes battle royale gunplay in a sunny SoCal dome as contestants drive-by on BMX bikes or stalk other contestants from the shadows in search for weapons and prizes… but also CASH that you can bank – win or lose! Whether you spend that cash on righteous customization in your personal prize room or pull it from an ATM to purchase weapons early in the next game — building a wealth of cash is as important as taking down the competition in this irreverent 80s-themed action game show where everyone wants to be rich and famous!
Radical Heights is a free-to-play game, and it’ll be available to download beginning tomorrow through Steam’s Early Access program. A Founder’s Pack with “exclusive items and bonuses” will also be available to purchase for $14.99.
Posted in News, PC
Tagged Radical Heights
New Retail Releases: Extinction
Another week… another new retail release that’s launching all by its lonesome.
This time, Iron Galaxy (the developers behind the Killer Instinct reboot) will bring Extinction to the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Published by Maximum Games, Extinction follows a soldier that might protect his kingdom from a rampaging horde of ogres:
Legend calls them the Ravenii, encroaching armies of bloodthirsty monsters standing 150 feet tall that once threatened to destroy humankind. Now the threat has returned, and only those trained in the ways of the ancient order stand a chance at defeating the ogres. You are one of the world’s last sentinels, a soldier named Avil equipped with the skills to battle the endless wave of Ravenii. Fight massive brutes and their minions across a sprawling countryside, defending cities and rescuing innocent villagers torn from their homes. This is no longer a war. It is an annihilation. And you are all that stands between humanity and extinction.
That’s all for now, but we’ll be back in a few days with a look at all the upcoming additions to the PlayStation Store, Xbox Games Store, and Nintendo eShop.
NIS America will bring SNK 40th Anniversary Collection to the Switch in Fall 2018
SNK has given NIS America a peek inside their archives, and the niche publisher has announced plans to bring the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection to the Switch this Fall.
Compiling “many of SNK’s classics from the 1980s,” the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection will include unlimited save points, a Rewind feature to replay tricky scenes, redesigned control schemes, and updated graphics at 1080p resolution. An SNK Museum will also feature unlockable “high definition artwork and original promotional assets.”
So far, NIS America has confirmed the inclusion of 13 games in the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection:
- Alpha Mission (Console/Arcade)
- Athena (Console/Arcade)
- Crystalis (Console)
- Ikari Warriors (Console/Arcade)
- Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road (Console/Arcade)
- Ikari Warriors III: The Rescue (Console/Arcade)
- Guerrilla War (Console/Arcade)
- P.O.W. (Console/Arcade)
- Prehistoric Isle (Arcade)
- Psycho Soldier (Arcade)
- Street Smart (Arcade)
- TNK III (Console/Arcade)
- Vanguard (Arcade)
More titles for the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection will be announced at a later date.
Posted in News, Switch
Tagged PAX East 2018, SNK 40th Anniversary Collection
Campo Santo will bring Firewatch to the Switch soon
Developer Campo Santo has announced (via their official website) that Firewatch is in the works for the Nintendo Switch. A launch date for the wilderness adventure has yet to be locked down, but Campo Santo is rebuilding the game from the ground up for the Switch, and they hope to release it “soon”:
Firewatch is coming to the Nintendo Switch!
When will it be out? All we can say is “soon!” Reengineering the sprawling meadows and towering trees of Firewatch’s wilderness to play perfectly on new hardware is no small engineering task. We’ve been hard at work stripping much of Firewatch’s tech down to the studs and rebuilding it to render the world more quickly, to stream and load faster, and to generally be more responsive. Nearly everyone in the Campo Santo office has a Nintendo Switch (and the rest want one). We know what a good Switch game feels like, and want to make sure Firewatch feels like one too.
Plus, we’re hoping to throw in a couple surprises just for the Switch release.
Campo Santo added that the “low-level optimizations and tech clean-up” that are being put into the Switch version of Firewatch will also find their way to the PC, PS4, and Xbox One in a future performance update.
Posted in News, Switch
Tagged Firewatch, PAX East 2018
Don’t Starve will make its way to the Switch on April 12
Klei Entertainment has announced that Don’t Starve, their procedurally-generated survival game, will be released for the Nintendo Switch on April 12. Hey… that’s next week.
The Don’t Starve: Nintendo Switch Edition will include a Switch port of the original game, as well as the Reign of Giants and Shipwrecked expansions.
An Announcement Trailer for Don’t Starve: Nintendo Switch Edition has been embedded above.
Posted in News, Switch
Tagged Don't Starve
You Don’t Know Jack will return in Jackbox Party Pack 5
Jackbox Games will bring back “You Don’t Know Jack” in this Fall’s Jackbox Party Pack 5 on the PC, consoles, and other “major digital platforms.”
An announcement on the developer’s official website lays out all the details, and it looks the trivia game will include many of the features and question types that fans have come to expect. But it’ll also get a change of scenery so that Jackbox can mock “binge” culture:
We didn’t want to do another YDKJ just because we could. We wanted to wait until we had a fresh take on the classic formula. This version sees the game (and Cookie) acquired by the friendly corporate overlords at Binjpipe, your premiere media bingeing streaming service. It’s a big scenery change that’s led us to update the game in really fun ways, and given us a ton of new stuff to make fun of.
“You Don’t Know Jack” will also include support for up to eight players, as well as “new question types, audience integration, brand new fart sounds, a lot of old fart sounds too, streaming features, begrudging meme references,” and “more than one Frasier joke for some reason.”
Like the previous Jackbox Party Pack collections, Jackbox Party Pack 5 will also include four other games that’ll be announced at a later date. For now, check out the C2E2/PAX East Trailer embedded above. It’s a hilarious takedown of binge-y buzzwords.
Impact Winter, The King of Fighters ’99, more added to Xbox Store
Microsoft has updated the Xbox Games Store with a handful of new Xbox One games on this fine Friday afternoon.
Impact Winter is a snowy survival game from Bandai Namco that asks players to help a team of people survive until help arrives. Also available to download today is The King of Fighters ’99, the sixth game in SNK’s fighting franchise, and the latest NeoGeo re-release from Hamster Corporation.
You can learn more about the rest of today’s additions to the Xbox Games Store after the break. (more…)