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
- 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)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
Most Recent: PC
Bethesda wants you to help choose Doom’s alternate cover
The Internet had a bit of a meltdown when Bethesda revealed the official boxart for Doom last month. The rather generic-looking space marine and the garish yellow background didn’t provide the thrill that most longtime Doom fans were expecting. Especially since we grew up with this image.
Thankfully, Bethesda and id Software have seen the error of their ways and will offer an alternate cover on the reverse side of the sleeve. Fans will even get the chance to vote for their favorite in a Twitter poll that’ll be open until Monday, March 7. Option A depicts the dreaded Icon of Sin from Doom II: Hell On Earth, while Option B is a new take on the original Doom‘s cover:
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- Option A: The Icon of Sin
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- Option B: Remixed Original Cover
So what are you waiting for? Vote now:
Help us choose the reverse sleeve for #DOOM. Poll is open for 4 days #VoteLikeHell
— DOOM (@DOOM) March 3, 2016
Doom will be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One on May 13. And don’t forget, if you pre-order Soom through the Xbox Games Store, you’ll receive the first two games in the series for free.
UPDATE: Voting has closed and the people have overwhelmingly picked Option B!
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Doom (2016)
Tetropolis resurfaces as Refactor and it’s coming to PC, PS4 in 2016
Refactor originally popped up on our radar back in 2014 (more specifically, at PAX East 2014), when it was known as Tetropolis. Even back then, the action took place within a Metroidvania-style world that players explored through the eyes of a shape-shifting tetromino. The little guy was deemed inadequate to appear in “The Game,” but his powers gave him the perfect chance to escape.
Fast forward to today, and developer NextGen Pants has announced a partnership with Sony to bring Refactor to the PS4 and PC. Writing on the PlayStation Blog, lead developer Bob Webb expounded a bit more about the game’s mechanics:
For example, the square shape can be used to combat enemies or the line shape to leap great distances. These shapes can be further augmented by special abilities found throughout the world. While these powers are fairly standard for the metroidvania genre, we’ve turned it up a notch and have given you the ability to rearrange the map in a puzzle-like manner.
Set in a world that is a puzzle itself, you can literally turn the world upside down by rearranging the map. The rooms that make up the map can be reordered, moved around and even rotated, all in real time. It is up to you to construct new pathways to previously inaccessible areas, to solve mind-bending puzzles, and to uncover secrets in the world of Refactor.
Refactor will be released for the PC and PS4 sometime later this year.
EA CFO confirms that Mass Effect: Andromeda has officially been pushed to Early 2017
Earlier this week, Electronic Art CFO Blake Jorgensen spoke to investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference. During his presentation, the executive revealed that Mass Effect: Andromeda is officially slated for release in the fourth quarter of EA’s fiscal year, which runs from January 1, 2017 to March 31, 2017:
“So, we’ve got a great year ahead. For the first time I’m trying to tamp down Wall Street expectations than build it up. Good position to be in, I guess. We’ve got our Battlefield first-person shooter game coming in the third quarter, and our third-party title that Respawn, our partner, built, it’s called Titanfall, it’s the second title that they brought into that brand. Both of those are first-person shooters and will be targeted around both the fast, action-driven shooter market, as well as the strategy-driven market in the quarter. We have all our sports games. We have our Mirror’s Edge runner game, that’s first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect, which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter. So, big year ahead and we’re pretty excited.”
Executives from Electronic Arts previously discussed Mass Effect: Andromeda’s release date during their quarterly financial report at the end of January. At that point, the game was expected to launch in late 2016/early 2017, so this isn’t really a delay, but more of a clarification.
Whatever happens, we know one thing for sure, Mass Effect: Andromeda won’t star Commander Shepard and is said to take the franchise in wild new directions.
[Source: Polygon]
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Mass Effect: Andromeda
Disney Infinity 4.0 won’t be released in 2016, but we will get four new Play Sets this year
With Assassin’s Creed already set to sit out 2016, another major franchise has announced plans to skip 2016. The Disney Interactive Blog has revealed the publisher won’t release Disney Infinity 4.0, opting instead to expand last year’s Disney Infinity: Star Wars (AKA Version 3.0) with four new Play Sets throughout the year.
On that note, the publisher launched the “Disney Infinity Next” webseries today to discuss the new adventures for characters from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars found in this year’s Play Sets. But also be on the lookout for new figures based on the upcoming Zootopia (Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde) and the classic Jungle Book (Baloo), which will be released this Spring.
The first Play Set we can expect to see in stores will be Marvel Battlegrounds, a four-player brawler that’ll introduce Ant-Man, Black Panther, and Vision to the Disney Infinity universe. Black Suit Spider-Man, previously a Vita-exclusive figure, will also be released individually alongside Marvel Battlegrounds.
A trailer for Marvel Battlegrounds can be found after the break. (more…)
Killer Instinct Season 3 will launch on March 29 for Xbox One and PC with four characters
Iron Galaxy has announced (via the Official Killer Instinct Blog) that Killer Instinct Season 3 will make its debut on the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs on March 29. The latest update to the free-to-play fighting game will include four new characters (Rash, The Arbiter, Kim Wu, and Tusk), along with a number of tweaks and fixes to the original game. Additional characters will be released as part of Season 3 in the coming months.
For Killer Instinct’s PC debut, Microsoft plans to make it cross-compatible with its Xbox One sibling as, “Everything you own and have earned in Killer Instinct is available to you on Windows 10.” Support for Xbox 360 fightsticks will be available on March 29, and Iron Galaxy is working on a patch to also provide support for Xbox One sticks.
We also got a look at the minimum and recommended system requirements for Killer Instinct, which are available after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, PC, Xbox One
Tagged Killer Instinct
Call of Duty 2016 will make its debut at E3, but Activision will skip the show floor this year
Activision has announced that Call of Duty 2016, which is in development at Infinity Ward, will make its public debut at this year’s E3 Expo. The highly anticipated new game will receive a prime showcase during Sony’s E3 Press Conference, where developers from Infinity Ward plan to provide a gameplay walkthrough and reveal some of the game’s new features.
However, Activision also said they won’t have a booth on the E3 show floor this year. That makes them the second major publisher to drop out of the show after EA’s similar departure in January.
Even without a presence at the year’s biggest gaming event, Activision’s Scott Lowe also found the time to talk about the Call of Duty World League’s Challenge Division and the Call of Duty Championship over at the Activision Games Blog.
Tharsis Review: Survival is a Dicey Affair
Five weeks ago, my ship was struck by a micrometeoroid storm that killed two of the six crew and irreparably damaged the ship. Since then, two more crew members have died and been cannibalised (we ran out of food), and many of the ship’s systems have gone offline. The two remaining crew members are hungry, tired, very badly injured, and still five weeks from Mars. Relatively speaking, things are going pretty well.
Tharsis is a board game with teeth. Every decision you make will feel the best of a bad bunch, and even then you might roll snake eyes and be locked out of making that decision. Tharsis is really, really hard, and the fact that your ability to act is based on dice rolls means that even if you are a strategic genius, you can still end up with a dead crew seven weeks away from Mars. (more…)
The Behemoth’s Pit People will get a Closed Beta this Summer
We still don’t when The Behemoth’s Pit People will be released, but the Xbox Wire has revealed that the turn-based strategy game will receive a Closed Beta sometime this Summer.
Microsoft held a special press event in San Francisco last week, where The Behemoth talked a bit more about the game’s many characters, including “a particularly memorable foe that fired a pair of Uzis while mounted atop a giraffe that floated onto the battlefield via a bouquet of helium balloons.” That’s a bit insane, but thankfully, players will be able to recruit more than 100 characters to do battle with these foes. Production Coordinator Ian Moreno added: “You can get robots… we have stuff like trolls, zombies and vampires. There’s also this weird spider lady that you can actually ride, and she will shoot webs and create walls.”
Somebody tell George Miller that the bar has been raised for the next Mad Max movie, and don’t forget that Pit People is in development for the PC and Xbox One.
Posted in News, PC, Xbox One
Tagged Pit People