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
Outbreak: The New Nightmare added to Xbox Store
There’s just one new game available to download as part of today’s Xbox Games Store update, and it’s Outbreak: The New Nightmare from Dead Drop Studios. Promising an “unforgiving survival horror experience,” players will explore a city absolutely overrun by the undead as they scavenge for supplies and search for other survivors.
You can learn more about the survival horror game right here:
Now Available on Xbox Games Store – 1/3/18 [Major Nelson]
Outbreak: The New Nightmare
Enter an unforgiving survival horror experience as you fight for your life against oppressive odds. The horrors of Arzt Memorial Hospital were just the beginning of the outbreak. As the infection spread across the city, local law enforcement fell quickly. You now find yourself trapped in a hellscape with only a few remaining survivors. Scavenge the environment for supplies, face off against the undead and do anything it takes to survive. You have only one life. Make it count!
Baba Is You, Night in the Woods, Getting Over It lead all nominees for the 2018 IGF Awards
The organizers of the Independent Games Festival have announced the finalists for this year’s IGF Awards ceremony.
Six games will compete for the “Seumas McNally Grand Prize” including Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (Bennett Foddy), Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall), West of Loathing (Asymmetric Publications), Into the Breach (Subset Games), Heat Signature (Suspicious Developments), and Baba Is You (Hempuli).
Baba Is You earned four total nominations, and will also be in the running for “Excellence In Design,” the “Nuovo Award,” and “Best Student Game.” Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy captured two additional nominations (“Excellence In Design” and the “Nuovo Award”), while Night in the Woods was also nominated for two other awards (“Excellence In Visual Art” and “Excellence In Narrative”).
Finally, Cuphead was a big winner at this year’s Game Awards, and the side-scroller is in line for more honors at the IGF Awards including an Honorable Mention for the “Seumas McNally Grand Prize,” as well as nominations in the “Excellence In Visual Art” and “Excellence In Audio” categories.
The IGF Awards will be held on March 21 during this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
A complete list of the nominees and honorable mentions for the 2018 Independent Games Festival Awards can be found after the break. (more…)
Tiny Metal, Vegas Party added to PS Store
It’s 2018, and the shelf stockers at the PlayStation Store are still mostly on vacation. But there’s still somebody working the registers, and a pair of new titles are now available to download through Sony’s digital storefront.
Tiny Metal, a tactical war game for the PS4 from Sony’s Unties publishing label, is one of this new week’s additions to the PlayStation Store. It’s joined by Vegas Party, a gambling game for the Vita.
You can learn more about both games right here:
The Drop: New PlayStation Games for 1/2/2018
Tiny Metal
PS4 — Digital
It’s WAR in Tiny Metal, the revival of Japanese arcade war gaming! Outfight the enemy with your own army of foot soldiers, tanks, helicopters, tactical vehicles, and fighter jets. Capture rival territories and extend your military power over the sprawling map of Zipang. Follow the gripping story of Nathan Gries and answer for yourself what is — and what isn’t — worth fighting for.Vegas Party
PS Vita — Digital
Welcome into the gambling-friendly universe of this over-the-top version of Las Vegas city. Played as a race, the goal is to reach the end of the Strip before anyone else. Manage your token account, avoid the dangers, take advantage of your gaming skills and your insolent luck, trust no one and forget the meaning of the word “mercy” because it does not apply here!
Blizzard will bring more maps, a new Hero, and encore events to Overwatch in 2018
2018 will probably be a pretty big year for Overwatch, especially because the game’s eponymous epsorts league launches next week. But Blizzard is also planning to add another hefty batch of new content to the game, and we got a sneak peak at some of it earlier this week during Game Director Jeff Kaplan’s latest Developer Update.
First, Kaplan confirmed that the “Blizzard World” map should be available “very soon.” He also said that more “great new maps” will be released this year.
Next, Kaplan said that Blizzard will launch this year’s Lunar New Year event in the very near future. The “Year of the Dog” event should operate fairly similarly to last year’s “Year of the Rosster” event. Players should also look forward to encores of the “Uprising” and “Anniversary” events.
Finally, Kaplan revealed that Overwatch’s 27th Hero is currently undergoing internal testing at Blizzard, but he couldn’t say anything more than that.
Ideally, we’ll learn more about all of these Overwatch updates soon. And in the meantime, be sure to watch Kaplan’s Developer Update, which has been embedded above.
Someone recreated the last five minutes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi using 16-bit graphics
Taking a blockbuster movie and recreating it in the style of a Super NES is a popular pastime for animators and artists, but this adaptation of the last five minutes of Star Wars: The Last Jedi is quite literally out of this world.
If you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I implore you, don’t press that Play button.
But if you have, give it a watch and be sure to congratulate animator John Stratman and the Mr. Sunday Movies YouTube channel on a job well done.
PUBG Corp. wants to put PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on “every platform”
PUBG Corp. CEO CH Kim has big plans for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The executive recently sat down with Inven Global and said that he wants to bring the battle royale game to “every platform”:
[I]t’s going to be an exclusive title on Xbox One for some time, we’d like to focus on completing the Xbox One PUBG for now. If we have the opportunity, the final goal would be to launch the title on every platform.
Obviously, Kim is referring to the pending PS4 launch of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which is currently on the backburner because of the console’s lack of a “Game Preview” program like the Xbox One. But could Kim’s statement mean that PUBG might one day also make its way to the Nintendo Switch? That would certainly be an interesting outcome.
However, it sounds like PS4 owners might have to wait quite a while before they get the chance to play PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds:
Early Access on Steam and Game Preview on Xbox One are like pre-release, so they don’t have a restriction on quality. However, PS is very strict about this. There were cases where a game took 6 months more to launch even when it was already completed. We are still in the stage of learning the console development environment and console gamers’ taste. We need to think about other platforms after evaluating and completing the Xbox One version first.
Towards the end of the interview, Kim also revealed that his long-range plans for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds include turning it into a “universal media franchise” that encompasses an esports competition, as well as a film adaptation:
I’d like PUBG to become a universal media franchise based on the game. We want to take part in diverse industries including Esports, movies, drama, cartoons, animation, and more. In fact, we received a couple of love calls from a number of developers in Hollywood and Netflix. Our dream is to build a new game-based culture through various ways like this, and have the lead of that culture.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is now available in Version 1.0 for the PC and as [art of the Xbox Game Preview program on the Xbox One
Mutant Mudds developer will release “at least” three games for the Switch in 2018
Atooi launched the Mutant Mudds Collection (which includes Mutant Mudds Deluxe, Mutant Mudds Super Challenge, and Mudd Blocks) for the Switch on December 14, but the developer has even bigger plans for Nintendo’s newest console this year.
Writing on Twitter, founder Jools Watsham has said that Atooi will release “at least” three games for the Switch in 2018:
Mutant Mudds Collection might be @AtooiLLC's first #NintendoSwitch game, but it certainly isn't our last! At least three Switch games planned for 2018! Keep your eyeballs locked here for more news soon. https://t.co/Qv8GrJI5Yj ? pic.twitter.com/xcpk1BGOFD
— Jools Watsham (@JoolsWatsham) December 30, 2017
There’s only 364 days left in the year, so presumably, we’ll learn more about these games soon.
Platinum Games will self-publish two original games in the near future
Platinum Games has been cozying up to big-name publishers like Nintendo, Activision, and Square Enix in recent years. These partnerships have produced an interesting (and critically-acclaimed) slate of games, including Bayonetta 2, Transformers: Devastation, and Nier: Automata.
The developer will continue working with Nintendo in 2018, and they recently confirmed that Bayonetta 3 is coming to the Nintendo Switch. But Platinum is also independently working on several other projects, and they have plans to self-publish a pair of original titles in the near future.
Atsushi Inaba, Platinum’s Head of Development, recently sat down with Game Informer, and described the company’s process for creating these original titles alongside their more high-profile work:
Over the last year we’ve pretty much opened the company up to “Anybody can pitch a game,” and so over the last year we’ve gotten about 70 design documents from different people. And if you’re going list out the other random ideas, the scratched stuff on paper, that’s a hell of a lot more. So this year has been about us basically diluting which stuff we wanted to focus on and not focus on, and drilling down to the point where we now have two designs that we’re genuinely focused on.
According to Inaba, fans can expect an experience that’s positioned somewhere between a smaller indie game and a larger AAA project like Bayonetta:
We can’t put together a AAA, $10 million-plus game, because we just don’t have that sort of cash as an independent developer. However, we don’t plan to go the indies route with just a few people on a team making a game, so it’ll be somewhere in the middle, looking at probably about 20 people on the staff making the game, so that’ll still be a healthy [size].
Neither game currently has a release date, but Platinum is known for working fast, and (at the very least) we’ll probably learn more about both games this year.
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