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
The Amazing Race asked its contestants to play Street Fighter V last night
The Amazing Race sent the remaining four teams to South Korea last night, and host Phil Keoghan pitted them against professional Street Fighter V players for the chance to move on.
It’s easy to assume that racers wouldn’t have a chance against Seon-Woo “Infiltration” Lee and Chung-Gon “Poongko” Lee, but The Amazing Race found a way to make it a bit more fair. After ten wins, the pro players had to play with one hand behind their back. And after 20 wins, they were blindfolded. Even with these handicaps, it took quite a while for the racers to beat the pro players.
Clips from the episode are available after the break, and be on the lookout for London’s impressive button mashing style. The finale for this season of The Amazing Race will air on CBS on June 1. (more…)
Posted in News, PC, PS4
Tagged Street Fighter V
The Video Game Canon – Street Fighter II
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at Hollywood’s influence on Street Fighter II (and it’s influence on Hollywood). Here’s a teaser…
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior wasn’t the first fighting game ever released, but it single-handedly helped shape the genre for decades to come.
Capcom’s masterpiece rose to prominence by replacing the small and stiff characters of previous fighting games (including its predecessor, 1987’s Street Fighter) with highly detailed characters that seemed to fly around the screen. Instead of generic fighters clad in traditional karategi uniforms, Street Fighter II starred a diverse group of characters with fantastical “special moves.” And young fans lined up around the block to do battle with “World Warriors” like E. Honda, a sumo wrestler with a lightning-quick Hundred Hand Slap; Zangief, a Russian giant who fought bears; Blanka, a green-skinned prince who controlled electricity; and Dhalsim, a yoga master who breathed fire.
Rather than rest on their laurels, Capcom refined Street Fighter II’s controls and added more characters to the select screen through the release of four subsequent revisions. This parade of improvements (and Street Fighter II’s eventual release on home consoles) helped ensure the game’s status as the biggest fighting game of the early 90s arcade renaissance. By the late 90s, a loosely-connected group of enthusiasts for Street Fighter II began building a “Fighting Game Community” online, which eventually grew to include organized tournaments (like the annual Evo gathering) and a dedicated fandom that could rival any professional sport.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, PS3, Retro, Switch, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Xbox 360
Tagged Street Fighter II
Quake Champions adds Sorlag, a dinosaur with a gun, to its character roster
Quake Champions‘s “Large Scale Technical Test” came to a close this past Sunday, but id Software still has more new characters to unveil, including the deranged dinosaur known as Sorlag.
Excuse me, I should amend that to add that Sorlag is a deranged dinosaur who also carries a gun and spits acid. You can learn more about Sorlag by reading up on her vitals right here or viewing the Character Trailer that’s been embedded above:
Sorlag (Sorg Flesh-Trader)
Her clan harvested the most warmbloods; they gorged themselves and had flesh-stock left over. Many credited the Haruspex, who could open terrifying windows to the Other Place using the warmbloods’ steaming guts. As their best hunter, Sorlag credited herself. She would expose him by using the warmblood’s forcefield devices to spill his “sacred” bowel-bowl. Morning came, the ritual began, and all saw the Other Place—dark, metal, cold. Sorlag leapt with the device. But her claws had crossed the window. She saw the bowl topple as she was pulled in, screeching.Active Ability – Acid Spit: Have an enemy pinned in an corner or want to protect the Obelisk in Sacrifice? Sorlag’s Acid Spit is the perfect added weapon to finish off foes or help control key pathways and locations. Spray it on enemies, on the floor, or on the walls and anyone who passes through will take immediate damage as well as become poisoned, taking additional damage over time.
Passive Abilities: Sorlag has two Passives. First, Bunny Hop allows her to gain speed while jumping forward in a straight line and grants her a great deal of maneuverability while in the air. Second, her Acid Fiend ability means that she’s protected from her own Acid Spit, as well as the Acid Spit of enemy Sorlags.
The full version of Quake Champions will be available for the PC sometime later this year, but a new beta session for the game is expected to begin this weekend. If you still need to acquire a beta key, you can grab one now at Quake.com.
Posted in News, PC
Tagged Quake Champions
Beyond Good & Evil 2 won’t be at E3 2017, but Ubisoft will reveal it sometime this year
Ubisoft’s Michel Ancel recently got into a discussion with some fans on Instagram, and he confirmed that Beyond Good & Evil 2 won’t make an appearance at this year’s E3 Expo. However, he added that progress is being made on the sequel to his cult action/adventure, and we should finally see it sometime this year:
Not sure that E3 would be the best place to showcase [Beyond Good & Evil 2] but we’re working on the game so sometime this year, you should hear about it!
Beyond Good & Evil 2 was first announced all the way back in 2008, and Ancel has been delivering small teases connected to the game ever since. It was officially re-announced in October of 2016, and the latest rumors say it could become a Switch exclusive.
A 2017 launch seems out of the question, but hopefully we’ll learn more about the game before the end of the year.
Nintendo Download: Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers, Disgaea 5 Complete, more
The Switch is about to become a more exciting place this weekend as Nintendo has added a number of new games to the Nintendo eShop as part of this week’s Nintendo Download…
First up is Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers, a brand new re-release of 1991’s most popular fighting game. Featuring enhanced graphics courtesy of Udon Entertainment, Capcom will also add two characters (Evil Ryu and Violent Ken) to the game, as well as a first-person “Way of the Hado” minigame, and other new features. Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers will be available to download for the Switch beginning tomorrow, May 26.
But if you’re looking to pick something up today, Disgaea 5 Complete is available to download through the Nintendo eShop now. NIS America’s tactical RPG is the newest entry in the Disgaea franchise, and the Complete edition brings it to the Switch for the first time, along with eight bonus scenarios, four extra characters, and three character classes that were originally only available as downloadable content.
You can learn more about both of these games, and the rest of the new additions to the Nintendo eShop, after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, News, Switch, Wii U
Tagged Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, Street Fighter II
Far Cry 5 box art hints at a story involving a religious cult and a lot of guns
Ubisoft will pull the curtain back on Far Cry 5 with a special “Worldwide Announcement Trailer” on Friday, May 26. But first, they’ve unveiled the game’s box art, which provides a few big hints as to what the title will be about.
With the Montana setting and the Last Supper-esque posing of the characters, it’s easy to assume that a religious cult will play a major part in Far Cry 5’s plot. And the amount of guns strewn around the table is probably meant to invoke comparisons to David Koresh’s Branch Davidians or Jim Jones’s Jonestown. Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but the cult leader is very likely getting ready to feed his prisoner to that wolfhound on the right.
If all goes according to plan, Far Cry 5 will be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One sometime this year.
Xbox Game Pass launches June 1 but Gold subscribers can try it out now
Microsoft has announced that their Netflix-like game subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, will be available to all Xbox One owners on June 1. But if you’re an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, you can sign up for a free trial right now at Xbox.com.
Unlike Sony’s streaming-based PlayStation Now service, the Xbox Game Pass gives subscribers the chance to fully download any of the games on offer. Players will also be able to earn Achievements with these full-game downloads, and they can even be played offline for up to 30 days.
All Xbox One and backwards compatible Xbox 360 games available with the Xbox Game Pass can be purchased at a 20% discount (so you can keep playing them if they’re ever delisted from the service), and Microsoft is currently offering more than 100 games to subscribers. Some of the first games available include big hits like Halo 5: Guardians and the BioShock trilogy, as well as smaller games like Mega Man Legacy Collection and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. The full list can be found at the Xbox Game Pass’s official website.
After your free trial expires, Xbox Game Pass will be available for $9.99 per month.
Netflix’s Castlevania series will debut on July 7… and here’s the first teaser trailer
For quite a while now, all we’ve really known about Netflix’s Castlevania series is that it’s an animated adaptation of one of the franchise’s best games, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, and that it was penned by the award-winning Warren Ellis. But today, we finally got our first peak at a teaser trailer and confirmation that it’ll premiere on the streaming service on July 7.
After watching the teaser, we still don’t know much about Netflix’s Castlevania, but we did get this rather awesome exchange:
Woman: “Who are you?”
Alucard: “The man who’ll kill Dracula.”
The first season of Castlevania will include four 30-minute episodes, and a second season is said to be in production for release in 2018.
Posted in Etcetera, News, Retro
Tagged Castlevania