Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Angry Birds, Dragon Quest, FIFA Soccer, and Silent Hill are the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026
- BAFTA Games Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books to Get a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- How a Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game – The New York Times (2026)
- Spore: An oral history – Design Room (2026)
- 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)
Most Recent: Articles
Warpback: What We Played in December 2015
Another year is in the books and so is another month of gaming with your friendly neighborhood Warp Zoned staffers! In addition to hiding from the (not-so) wintry weather to work on our backlogs, we also found our stockings overflowing with new games after hanging them from the chimney with care. If you’re looking for a few end-of-year recommendations, look no further than after the break. (more…)
Coldwood’s inspiration for Yarny and Unravel… “What if we could make a game about love?”
“What if we could make a game about love?”
This sentiment is expressed several times in the video above by Coldwood’s Creative Director, Martin Sahlin, as he talks about the inspiration behind Unravel, and its adorable main character, Yarny. The developer revealed that Yarny’s red string is meant to symbolize the “bond” between people and that its tethered to something very important at the start of the game. He also shared a nice story about creating the first concept art for Unravel on a family camping trip with a handmade Yarny doll (and with his kids serving as an impromptu focus group). Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye…
Unravel will be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One on February 9.
New trailer for Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India released ahead of January 12 launch
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India will be released tomorrow, January 12, for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. To get fans ready for the franchise’s next 2.5D installment, Ubisoft recruited Lead Designer Matt Duff to narrate this brand new gameplay trailer.
Prospective players will be able to see many of Arbaaz Mir’s stealthy secrets, including smoke bombs, sound darts, a grappling hook, disguises, and his trusty Trident Blade. There’s also a brief look at the game’s futuristic Challenge Mode, along with the tougher Plus and Plus Hard difficulty levels.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India
Insert Quarter: Does the Oculus Rift’s $600 Price Tag Make it a Platform?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
The general public was understandably blindsided when Oculus announced earlier this week that its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset would be priced at $600. That kind of financial outlay is usually reserved for a brand new game console or the latest and greatest iPhone.
GamesIndustry.biz’s Rob Fahey believes that this extravagant price tag repositions the Rift as a “platform” that must be supported instead of a “gadget” to be tried. Oculus will need to join the ranks of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to ensure the Rift has enough content to support a growing audience of gamers:
That brings us back to Oculus Rift and its $600 price point (which is $600 minimum – expect it to be significantly higher in other territories). Six hundreds bucks is a platform, in the eyes of the vast, vast majority of consumers. $300 may, for a fairly broad swathe of consumers with decent disposable income, be worth a punt just to “see what it’s like”, to own the latest thing, to show off to friends; $600 needs to justify its existence in far broader terms. Oculus Rift’s pricing pushes it squarely into the position of being a platform, and it must present and justify itself in those terms. In short, now that the price is on the table, Oculus has to prove itself on a harsh frontier that has often sunk even the toughest and most deep-pocketed of challengers; it has to deliver software, software and more software.
The full article is available for your perusal at GamesIndustry.biz.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC
Housemarque will release Alienation for PS4 in March
Housemarque has made quite a name for themselves over the last few years with the release of Super Stardust, Dead Nation, and Resogun on the PlayStation Store. And now the Finnish developer will potentially wow PS4 players once again with the release of Alienation this March. Writing on Twitter, a Housemarque representative has confirmed the game will be available in the United Kingdom on March 23:
@BiggCMan it's been moved to March 23rd, is the UK store still displaying the older date?
— Housemarque (@Housemarque) January 9, 2016
While Housemarque didn’t reveal a North American release date for Alienation, it’s likely the game will make its way to our side of the Atlantic in the same time period.
Posted in News, PS4
Tagged Alienation
Weekly Warp-Up: The Oculus Rift Finally Has a Release Date…
No, that’s not a typo. Welcome to the Weekly Warp-Up, your weekly wrap-up of the biggest and the best articles posted at Warp Zoned this week…
After being teased as “The Next Big Thing” practically my whole life, the virtual reality revolution is finally at hand as Oculus announced that the Oculus Rift will be available on March 28 for $600. The company is definitely asking for quite a large chunk of change to enter their new playground (the $1,000 PC you’ll need to power the Rift is a separate purchase), but thus is the price of being on the ground floor for “The Next Big Thing.”
In other 2016 news, Microsoft gave us a “snapshot” of its slate of PC/Xbox One exclusives for the upcoming calendar year. Most of the titles should look familiar to anyone who saw the consolemaker’s E3 2015 Press Conference, but they did confirm that Keiji Inafune’s ReCore has slipped from a Spring release into the Fall. Microsoft also delivered the not-unexpected news that Platinum’s Scalebound will be released in 2017.
Finally this week, we here at Warp Zoned want you to take a step back into 2015 for a moment as we reveal the winners of our 2015 Golden Pixel Awards. SPOILER ALERT… We liked Axiom Verge, Splatoon and Super Mario Maker a lot.
More news from this past week can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in News
Sony reconfirms 2016 release date for The Last Guardian as PS4 sells 6 million consoles during holiday season
We’ve waited… and waited… and waited some more… but it looks like Sony is finally ready to commit to a release date for The Last Guardian. The game appeared earlier this month in a Sony Europe sizzle reel that focused on “2016 PS4 Exclusives.” And this past week, Sony Computer Entertainment America also confirmed that the game will be released for the PS4 sometime this year, which should come as a relief to anyone who has been following the game’s epic saga since its 2009 unveiling.
In addition to delivering good news to the PlayStation faithful, this announcement was part of a larger look at the PS4’s continued retail success. According to Sony’s internal estimates, more than 5.7 million PS4 consoles were sold during the holiday season (which Sony defines as November 22 through January 3). On top of that, more than 35 million games were also sold in this time period. For those keeping score at home, the PS4’s latest sales surge has pushed the system’s worldwide install base to a little over 35.9 million, which is well ahead of where the PS3 was after two years on the market.
“We are absolutely delighted that so many customers have selected PS4 as the best place to play throughout this holiday season and that the PS4 community is growing more than ever,” said Andrew House, the President and Global CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to deliver innovative entertainment experiences, and look forward to bringing an unprecedented games portfolio from third party developers and publishers and SCE Worldwide Studios this coming year.”
Finally, Sony revealed that New Hot Shots Golf, which was announced during last month’s PlayStation Experience, will also definitely be released in 2016.
Posted in News, PS4
Tagged New Hot Shots Golf, The Last Guardian
Deep Silver might release Homefront: The Revolution on May 17
They say “war is hell,” but it might be just as accurate to say “developing war games is hell,” especially when you look at the sorted history behind Homefront: The Revolution.
After the massive success of the first game, Homefront 2 was announced by THQ and Crytek nearly five years ago. The game was set to be developed by Crytek UK, who revealed a plan to move the action to Europe, adding a second theater to the franchise’s US-Korea conflict. After THQ’s bankruptcy woes, the rights to Homefront 2 were purchased by the developer, who promptly shifted the story back to America (specifically, Philadelphia) and added the “Revolution” subtitle. Crytek went through their own financial crisis several months later and ultimately passed the game’s rights to Deep Silver, who also acquired the developer’s UK studio, which they renamed to Dambuster Studios.
While it seems like Homefront: The Revolution might be cursed, Deep Silver has carried on anyway, and it looks like they might release the game this Spring. Officially marked with a “TBA 2016” release date, XboxAchievements recently published a picture of a Target Pre-Order Card for Homefront: The Revolution that lists the game’s release date as May 17, 2016.
Obviously, we don’t know if Homefront: The Revolution will actually be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One on May 17, but the date is a Tuesday and the original Homefront did manage to find its fairly large audience after a Spring 2011 release. Deep Silver hasn’t commented on the release date leak, but I feel pretty confident that this could turn out to be true.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Homefront: The Revolution