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
- 2025 GOTY Scoreboard: In Progress
- 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”
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
Daily Scoop: May 28, 2014 – PAX Prime sold out already
Tickets to PAX Prime went on sale and sold out already, so if you were hoping to go and you happened to blink today, you’re out of luck. I mean, you’re out of regular luck – you can still try your luck on eBay, where you’ll probably end up paying more than three times the price. And, of course, there are three other PAXes to choose from now, so you’re much less limited than you used to be!
Anyway, let’s talk about deals! The Midweek Madness deal at Steam is Audiosurf, which is on sale for $8.99. Their Daily Deal is Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, which is down to $6.79.
If you’d rather snag a bundle, don’t worry – there’s one you can grab right now! Indie Royale‘s latest is called The Turing Bundle. Beat the current minimum for Eschalon: Book III, Eterium, 3 Stars of Destiny, Fractured Soul, and Motte Island. Pay $6 or more to unlock the bonus album.
And now, t-shirt time! (more…)
Posted in Daily Scoop
XBL Store Today: Watch Dogs
It’s time to talk about Watch Dogs again as Ubisoft’s highly anticipated open-world is now available through the Xbox Live Games Store for both the Xbox One and Xbox 360. Can you hack it?
Watch Dogs (Xbox One: $59.99, Xbox 360: $59.99)
In today’s hyper-connected world, Chicago has the country’s most advanced computer system – one which controls almost every piece of city technology and holds key information on all of the city’s residents. You play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker but also a former thug, whose criminal past lead to a violent family tragedy. Now on the hunt for those who hurt your family, you’ll be able to monitor and hack all who surround you while manipulating the city’s systems to stop traffic lights, download personal information, turn off the electrical grid and more. Use the city of Chicago as your ultimate weapon and exact your own style of revenge. In a world led by technology, hacking is our weapon!
Posted in News, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Watch Dogs
Mario Kart 8 director “not ruling out” Smash Bros.-like expansion of franchise’s roster
Nintendo is all set to give Mario Kart 8 the green light this Friday, May 30. But before you dig in to the Wii U debut of the series, you should check out this Nintendo Life interview with the game’s director, Kosuke Yabuki. Yabuki is proud of his work on Mario Kart 8, but he’s already thinking ahead to Mario Kart 9. And there’s a strong possibility that the racer lineup in the next entry could be expanded to include characters from other Nintendo franchises, Super Smash Bros.-style.
“We’re always considering ways to make the Mario Kart games more appealing, but I don’t think that just increasing the number of characters would make the game better,” Yabuki said. “Of course, I’m not ruling out the possibility of [a Super Smash Bros. approach to the roster] in the future though.”
Obviously, this is far from a done deal. If development on the next Mario Kart game has even begun, it’s likely still in the very early stages. But a Nintendo-wide expansion to the game’s character roster, a “Super Smash Kart” if you will, would be very interesting.
Yup… Very. Interesting.
Bethesda unveils BattleCry, a team-based melee combat game
Many people believe that kings of old used to wage war not with swords and soldiers, but on the battlefield of the chess board. Bethesda’s BattleCry Studios has taken this idea and expanded upon it with their debut project, a 32-player team-based melee combat game also known as BattleCry.
BattleCry’s distinctive visual look was created by Viktor Antonov, the Art Director responsible for Half-Life 2‘s futuristic locales and Dishonored‘s medieval steampunk vibe. For BattleCry, Antonov has created a world where “gunpowder [was] banned following a cataclysmic world war at the dawn of the 20th century.” Like the chess-playing kings, “traditional warfare is now a relic of the past and all conflicts are settled head-on by elite teams of chosen warriors in sanctioned WarZones.” However, unlike the carved chessmen, these battles take place between trained warriors that live for battle.
Be sure to check out some of BattleCry’s characters in the trailer above (and especially be on the lookout for a pair of mustachioed circus strongmen) as well as a stylized look at the game’s melee combat system:
Choose your faction and progress your warrior through the ranks. Each rank unlocks new abilities and effects allowing deep strategic builds for your warrior on every level. Risk life and limb as the powerful Royal Marines or the fearless Cossacks in imaginative WarZones each designed to combine positioning, spacing and verticality to redefine your core combat experience. Fight with transformative melee and ranged weapons that harness iron and energy and eviscerate your opponents with swords that transform into shields, bows that can punch an arrow straight through an armored skull or electrocute your foes with high-powered blades crackling with electro-static energy.
Bethesda will release BattleCry as a free-to-play title for the PC sometime in 2015 and will reveal more details about the game’s world at this year’s E3 Expo.
Watch Dogs, The Sly Collection Vita, Wolf Among Us Episode 4, more added to PS Store
This is not your typically massive update to the PlayStation Store. But this week’s new batch of games does include one of the most highly anticipated games of 2014: Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs. Players will be able to take control of hacker Aiden Pearce on the PS3 or PS4 as he hacks his way across Chicago performing hacks against the dangerous group of hackers that hacked up his family. Oh, and Pearce can also put his hack license to good use by hijacking a cab and driving it around. He does a lot of hacking is what I’m saying.
Also available this week is the latest episode of Telltale’s Fables adaptation, The Wolf Among Us: In Sheep’s Clothing. Bigby is huffing and puffing in search of a killer but he doesn’t even realize that he’s joined on the PlayStation Store this week by one of the greatest thieves of all time as Sly Cooper comes to the Vita in The Sly Collection. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Sly 2: Band of Thieves, and Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves have all been remastered, remade, and compiled for Sony’s handheld at a nice price ($29.99).
Speaking of the Vita… three other games are also available for Sony’s handheld this week. There’s the dungeon-crawling RPG Mind Zero from Aksys Games, the grid-based RPG Monster Monpiece from Idea Factory, and the lovable hijinks of Lemmings Touch.
More information about all of these games can be found after the break. And a full rundown of this week’s new game add-ons can be found at the PlayStation Blog. (more…)
Posted in News, PS3, PS4, Vita
Tagged Mind Zero, The Sly Collection, The Wolf Among Us, Watch Dogs
Samurai Warriors 4 and Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate will be released in NA, Europe this Fall
Tecmo Koei has made some pretty big announcements through Twitter these last few days in honor of the MCM Comic Con in London.
First up, the publisher confirmed that Samurai Warriors 4 will be available this Fall for Sony systems (PS3, PS4, and Vita) in North America and Europe. Not long after that, Tecmo Koei tweeted that Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate was also playable at the MCM Comic Con, and that it too would be coming to North America and Europe this Fall for the PS3, PS4, Vita, and Xbox One.
That’s a lot of Tecmo Koei coming in just a few months!
Posted in News, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One
Tagged Samurai Warriors 4, Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate
Internet sleuths discover police-themed Battlefield Hardline on EA’s servers
Battlefield Hardline is rumored to be the next game in the Battlefield series, according to a lot of research performed today by multiple Internet sleuths. Samit Sarkar over at Polygon packaged it all together nicely:
The leak began with the discovery on the Better Battlelog forums of an initialism for a Battlefield game, “BFH,” listed for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The forum poster also discovered four soldier classes: Enforcer, Mechanic, Operator and Professional.
After that, the logo above was posted on web developer Koen Vlaswinkel’s personal website, taken from the Battlelog website. He “and the Battlefield Daily Twitter account also posted artwork and icons that mention the two sides in the game, SWAT and Thieves, and modes such as Blood Money and Heist.” These images, including a riot shield, taser, handcuffs, money, and police vehicles, did nothing to dispel the rumor.
But wait – there’s more. Vlaswinkel also found proof that Visceral Games, the studio behind the Dead Space series, could be the studio developing the game. He “discovered an image of the word ‘visceral,'” which goes along with a report from earlier this year about a cops-and-robbers game codenamed Havana in development at Visceral.
I guess we’ll just have to wait until EA’s E3 press conference at 3:00 PM (Eastern Time) on June 9, and hope that the publisher will clear this up then.
UPDATE: EA has gone ahead and officially announced Battlefield Hardline. And it looks like we will learn more at this year’s E3 Expo.
Development on thatgamecompany’s next game gets a $7 million shot in the arm
It’s a good day for thatgamecompany, and for fans of their lovely, immersive games. The company has just announced on their website that they have raised $7 million in funding. “We are happy to partner with Capital Today and a team of other investors who share our vision in making meaningful interactive experiences that inspire, connect, and emotionally touch the hearts of players around the world,” Studio Manager Sunni Pavlovic wrote.
This means that the company’s upcoming project will now be entering its next development phase. They’ll also “begin laying the infrastructure to self-publish, market, and distribute on our own terms for this next project and beyond,” which is huge for a company whose games were once exclusive to Sony.
Thatgamecompany has already brought us Flow, Flower, and Journey, and I’m delighted to hear they have another game in development – though I’m sad to think of a game without Kellee Santiago on board. Either way, I’m still eager to hear more about it, but they don’t have much to tell us yet. “Since finishing Journey, the team has been hard at work to make an emotionally engaging experience centered around human connections for players of all ages and backgrounds. We’re eager to share more information with everyone as we get further into development.”
Here’s hoping the wait isn’t long.
Posted in News
Tagged That Next Game