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
Retro Studios confirms they’ve got a new Wii U game in the works
Retro Studios recently completed development on and released Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. The developer has yet to announce their next move, but they have confirmed (via GameSpot) that they’ve got a new Wii U title in the works and that production began after development on Tropical Freeze was completed in November. However, Retro’s President and CEO, Michael Kelbaugh, couldn’t reveal any specifics about the unannounced game. And he purposely attempted to downplay its identity by stating how fun all of the company’s previous projects were:
“We love working with Donkey Kong. It’s a great character. It’s a lot of fun. We love working with Metroid Prime, with Mario Kart; those are fun, fun games to work on. So, you know, you can’t lose,” he said. “Every one of those IPs have been a lot of fun to play with and work on and [we’d] love to come back to them sometime.”
So is Retro working on the oft-rumored Metroid Prime 4/next Metroid game? Or perhaps that “American Legend of Zelda” is more than just wishful thinking. There’s even the possibility that they’re helping put a last-minute shine on Mario Kart 8. Whatever Retro’s next project is, Kelbaugh sees a lot of untapped potential in the Wii U and believes the system is a “powerhouse”:
“Unfortunately, the perception is that it’s not a very powerful machine,” Kelbaugh said about the Wii U. “That’s just not true. It’s a powerhouse. It’s more than adequate to make great games on.”
With any luck, Retro’s next game will hopefully be announced at this year’s E3 Expo.
Weekly Warp-Up: No Candy For You! Edition
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…
Ding dong! The witch is dead! Which old witch? The Bubble Witch! Look at that, it even scans correctly! King, the developer behind Candy Crush Saga has given up their crusade to trademark the word “Candy.” While I’d love to celebrate, the mobile game behemoth is still attempting to put a stranglehold on the word “Saga” (which is used in all of their other games such as Bubble Witch Saga and Pet Rescue Saga). Playing Tetris until you see the shapes in your dreams is worthy of the word “Saga,” matching three peppermints is not.
Also this week, UK Correspondent Andrew Rainnie has rooted out another group of crowdfunding projects that show some promise in the latest edition of Kickstart This! And Nicole Kline has reviewed the latest Borderlands tie-in novel, Borderlands: Gunsight. Spoiler alert, it stinks!
We’ve got more news from the week that was after the break. (more…)
Posted in News
New Releases: South Park: The Stick of Truth
Just one game will be added to store shelves this week, but it’s a big one… South Park: The Stick of Truth.
If you recall, South Park: The Stick of Truth has been in development at Obsidian Entertainment for a long time. Originally a THQ production, the game shifted to Ubisoft after THQ went bankrupt. Then it was delayed multiple times to ensure that it lived up to all the hype. Does it? You can find out for yourself this week on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
A few more new releases will make their way to the PlayStation Store, Xbox Live Store, and Nintendo eShop this week. We’ll talk more about those titles over the next few days.
Posted in News, PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Tagged South Park: The Stick of Truth
343 Industries has “a great plan” for Halo at E3 2014
Microsoft’s Phil Spencer has confirmed, via Twitter, that the consolemaker has big plans for the Halo franchise at this year’s E3 Expo:
@MarvelousJoJo Halo news will be coming at E3. 343i has a great plan in place, will be cool to share with everyone.
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) February 28, 2014
Interestingly, what Spencer did not do was confirm that Halo 5 would make an appearance at E3 2014. A persistent rumor continues to circulate among industry insiders that states Halo 5 will miss its planned 2014 launch. Instead, so the rumors says, the currently unannounced Halo 2 Anniversary would take its place on the release calendar. Halo 5 would move to 2015, or possibly beyond.
Of course, Spencer could also be referring to that live-action Halo series that Steven Spielberg is involved with. Microsoft has been uncharacteristically mum about their original programming initiative and we haven’t heard anything about Halo: The Television Series since last May.
Posted in News, Xbox One
Tagged E3 2014, Halo 5: Guardians
Daily Scoop: February 28, 2014 – It’s finally Friday!
It’s Friday at last! What are you doing to be doing all weekend? Anthony Amato and I are finally going to play some Dungeons & Dragons after a hiatus of something like four months. It should be fun! I’m looking forward to that, and sleeping. Oh, the sleeping I’ll do.
Let’s talk about deals, shall we? There are lots of sales happening at the Humble Store. You can get Shadowrun Returns for $14.99, Planetary Annihilation for $29.99, Waking Mars for $1.99, and Power-Up for $2.39, among others. Other than that, all you’ve really got is the Daily Deal over at Steam, which is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Retribution for $7.49. Scoop ’em up!
The last t-shirts of the week are good ones!
Posted in Daily Scoop, Etcetera, News
First Shin Megami Tensei game coming to iOS next month
“The struggle between law and chaos… what is right and wrong?”
For the first time, the original Shin Megami Tensei will be available in the United States! Atlus is bringing the first game in the series to the iOS App Store, giving mobile gamers a chance to get addicted to these games. Now you can start from the very beginning and spend 40-60 hours with your favorite device: your phone.
For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, here’s a synopsis:
Step away from clear notions of good and evil, right and wrong. There are demons in the world, but whether they are ally or enemy depends on player actions. In Tokyo 199X, a mysterious murder leads to the emergence of demons and an escalating global conflict thanks to the rise of a charismatic rebel leader in possession of a demon army, and external forces that wish to crush such threats with extreme measures. As the protagonist, players have an unusual ability (via computer program) to communicate with and recruit demons to fight for them. As they collect demons, the program will allow you to store, summon, and fuse them to create the right team to negotiate the ever-changing balance of powers, and fight for the kind of world you ultimately wish to live in.
Shin Megami Tensei will be available on the App Store on March 18 for $7.99.
Outlast: The Whistleblower DLC will be available in April
Warning: If you want to play Outlast and you haven’t yet, this DLC description has major spoilers!
Outlast developer Red Barrels has announced via its Facebook page that “The Whistleblower,” the first DLC expansion for the game, will be coming to PC and PlayStation 4 this April.
In “The Whistleblower,” you’ll get to play as Waylon Park, the man who sent the email to Miles Upshur, and many other journalists around the world, at the beginning of Outlast. Park was a software engineer at Murkoff, and “developed a deep-seated distrust of the profit-motivated scientists and doctors leading dangerous and irresponsible experiments on their patients” while he was working at Mount Massive. He was driven to blow the whistle on Mount Massive, and here you can play out those events – though the developer promises that the DLC “will actually stretch past the events of the first game to show the final chapter in Mount Massive Asylum’s story.”
Keep an eye out for “The Whistleblower” this April on the PC and PlayStation 4.
Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition coming to PS4 next week
It’s no secret that I love Housemarque, the amazing studio behind Super Stardust HD, Dead Nation, Outland, and Resogun. Anthony Amato and I played a ludicrous amount of Dead Nation on the PlayStation 3, and now that it’s been announced that Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition is coming to the PlayStation 4, well… let’s just say I really need to get that second DualShock 4.
In case you don’t know what Dead Nation is, it’s a top-down, twin-stick, shoot-em-up zombie game, where you’re fighting through hordes of the undead with tons of amazing weapons. You can play it alone or with a friend, local or online multiplayer, at night with the lights off or in the middle of the day with all the blinds up. Apocalypse is an upgrade visually – “you can now play in full 1080p HD, with improved textures, rendering, and effects,” according to the PlayStation Blog – but that’s not all. They’ve also “improved the controls, adding in a quick weapon select so your favorite zombie decimator is never out of reach.”
Not only is the DLC, Road to Devastation, included in this version of the game – and not only can you submit challenges to your friends and others on the leaderboard to beat your score – there’s also Broadcast+ Mode, which blew my mind:
In this mode, you can stream your game to the masses interactively, and your viewers can influence the difficulty of your game. Periodically all your viewers, whether they be on PS4 or a web browser, have the option to vote between a positive and negative effect that occurs in your game. There are a total of 30 different voting effects that can occur, ranging from spawning zombie packs to giving the player ammo, or even disabling the player’s ability to sprint. But don’t worry; as a player you can get back at the masses, because voters will appear in your game as named zombies for you to exact your revenge on.
Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition will be available on the PlayStation 4 next week, March 4, for $14.99 for regular users, and free for PlayStation Plus members. Oh, and they also dropped a hint that there will be an upcoming announcement about the Vita version. It’s like zombie-killing Christmas in here.
Posted in News, PS4, Vita
Tagged Dead Nation