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
- With Grand Theft Auto 6 poised to take over the world, I reached out to Jack Thompson and it did not go well – PC Gamer (2026)
- Vib-Ribbon: An oral history – Design Room (2026)
- How a Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game – The New York Times (2026)
- Spore: An oral history – Design Room (2026)
- Diablo IV PC Cooled With Real Human Blood Is Still Going Strong Two Years Later, Says Guy Who Won It – Aftermath (2026)
Most Recent: PC
Blizzard will announce sixth World of Warcraft expansion at Gamescom 2015
Blizzard has announced they will reveal the sixth expansion to World of Warcraft at this year’s Gamescom expo.
According to a post on Battle.net, the expansion will makes it worldwide debut as part of a presentation will take place on Thursday, August 6 at 12:00 PM (Eastern Time). If you’re not going to be in Cologne, Germany next week for the expo, don’t worry, Blizzard plans to livestream the entire event at BlizzGC.com.
Blizzard will host a second presentation during Gamescom on Sunday, August 9 at 11:00 AM (Eastern Time). This “World of Warcraft developer chat” will reveal more information about the MMO’s next expansion.
If you do find yourself in Cologne, Germany next week, Blizzard will have a booth at Gamescom in Hall 7.1 and they’re encouraging all their fans to stop by.
Posted in News, PC
Tagged Gamescom 2015, World of Warcraft
Comcept signs publishing deal with Fuze as Red Ash Kickstarter campaign struggles
With just three days to go, Comcept’s Kickstarter campaign for Red Ash: The Indelible Legend is struggling. The developer has only reached 60% of their $800,000 goal and things look bleak. However, a new development deal with Fuze Entertainment, a publisher based out of China, will allow Comcept to complete the game. Not only that, but the deal allows the team to also bring the game to the PS4 and Xbox One, in addition to the PC.
According to an update posted to the Kickstarter campaign, all money pledged towards Red Ash will go towards the development of additional content. While reaching their Kickstarter goal is far from a certainty, Comcept also said they will retain all franchise rights to Red Ash.
Comcept has also decided to go on the offensive and give their fans a small taste of Red Ash with a short mock-up demo. Instructions on how to download (and play) the demo can be found in a recent Kickstarter update.
Red Ash was pitched as a spiritual successor to Mega Man Legends by Comcept’s Keiji Inafune, and I’m sure fans are excited that the game is now assured to be completed.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Red Ash: The Indelible Legend
ZombiU drops the “U” and will be available to download on PC, PS4, Xbox One on August 18
Ubisoft has announced that ZombiU, one of the best games available during the Wii U’s launch window, will be available to download on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One beginning August 18. While it’s the same ZombiU that Wii U players fell in love with, the game’s new destinations have necessitated a name change to Zombi.
After being one of the Wii U flagship titles in 2012, Zombi returns to challenge gamers on multiple new platforms to find out how long they can survive in the dilapidated, infected London. For the second time in history, a great plague has shrouded the city in a fog of death and thousands have died, or worse, been infected by a sickness more gruesome than death. Once again, this fear-fueled first-person shooter invites all players to dive into the horror, chaos and tension found in the best of the genre.
Zombi’s permadeath mechanic will once again force players to think strategically to survive (or to risk it all to regain their loot if they don’t). The “bug-out bag,” which was only accessible through the Wii U GamePad, will also be back in some form. Probably through a pause screen that doesn’t pause the action or a second screen app.
London Bridge is falling down…
It’s Always Blocky in Minecraft… because Rob McElhenney is directing the movie
Have you heard? Word on the Internet is that there’s going to be a Minecraft movie coming out… sometime. There’s really no information on it just yet. But here’s one thing we do know, the director of the film has been announced to be It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s Rob McElhenney.
McElhenney has mad credits on Sunny for creating, writing, producing, directing, and starring as Ronald “Mac” McDonald… not to mention snagging colleague and funny lady Kaitlin Olson. The announcement was made in a succinct blog post from Mojang, which offered no other information about the project. While McElhenney’s ascension to the position remains a temporarily confusing but delightful mystery, we have noticed some fun similarities between Minecraft and several recurring Sunny characters.
Minecraft aficionados will certainly remember the Creepers, which are very reminiscent of the infamous Green Man (Charlie Day’s Charlie, high out of his mind, in a full-body green spandex suit), who first debuted in the season three episode “The Gang Gets Invincible.” And who can forget Day Man and the creepily suggestive Night Man, which viewers may recall from Charlie’s weird musical, “The Nightman Cometh,” from the end of season four. Both characters seem to parallel the protagonist “Steve” and the mysterious Enderman.
With these concurrent elements in mind, McElhenney now seems like a natural fit for the film. It almost begs the question, was Notch just a huge Sunny fan all along?
Final Fantasy Type-0 HD will be available through Steam on August 18
Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy Type-0 HD will be available for the PC (through Steam) on August 18. More than a mere port, Final Fantasy Type-0 HD on the PC will include “an improved in-game battle camera, full Steam Achievements and trading cards, scalable motion blur settings, and a customizable dynamic screen shot mode.” Expanded resolution options will also make the game’s graphics better than ever before.
The publisher has also teamed up with Valve to offer a special pre-order promotion that will reward DOTA 2 players with some Final Fantasy-inspired gear. All players who pre-order Final Fantasy Type-0 HD before its release will receive a Master Chocobo Courier and Moogle (Class Zero) Ward in DOTA 2. A special Final Fantasy Type-0 HD loading screen for DOTA 2 will also be included.
Square Enix has also released the minimum and recommended system requirements for Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, which are available after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, PC
Tagged Final Fantasy Type-0
Bethesda literally CANNOT make any more Fallout 4 Pip-Boy Editions
Bethesda set off a fanboy frenzy when they announced Fallout 4‘s special Pip-Boy Edition. The limited edition, which was priced at $120, will include a smartphone cradle shaped like a Pip-Boy. Best of all, the publisher is also developing a Pip-Boy app which will control various in-game functions. But I hope you’ve already placed your order because Bethesda literally can’t make any more.
Bethesda’s Vice President of Marketing, Pete Hines, told GameSpot that the factory they contracted with to produce the Pip-Boy Edition has reached manufacturing capacity. While the company would love to produce more, they literally can’t.
“We reached a point where we’d go back to the factories and they were like, ‘[G]uys, this is it, sorry. This is as long as we can run the lines and as many of them as we can make.'”
He continued: “They’re being made today, it’s not like they’re done and sitting in a warehouse. [The factories would tell us,] this is what the yields say. I mean, we don’t make [the Pip-Boy Editions], and we’d go back to [the factories] and say, ‘Demand for this is insane, we’ve got to make more.’ And they’d move other projects off or shift stuff to other factories and it just came to [them telling Bethesda], ‘Final answer: sorry, this is as many as we can make.’ And we sold every single one of those that we could.”
Hines wouldn’t elaborate on exactly how many Pip-Boy Editions will be produced, but he did say that “a shitload” are currently being manufactured. In fact, Hines is confident that more Pip-Boy Editions will be produced than any other collector’s edition Bethesda has published.
Fallout 4 will be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One on November 10. If you missed out on the Pip-Boy Edition, I’m sure they’ll appear on eBay before too long.
Capcom postpones first Street Fighter V beta test
Street Fighter V‘s first beta test began last Thursday, July 23, but players struggled with poor connections and server issues. Yesterday, Capcom announced (via the Capcom-Unity blog) that they would postpone the rest of the test due to these issues:
Capcom offers its sincerest apologies to everyone who participated in this first beta test. While the purpose of a beta is to work out these type of issues, it was very clear that the issues we faced were more severe than we were prepared for. After three days of testing, while we were making progress and collecting valuable data, we felt the majority of players were not having a good experience, and the best course of action would be to take the servers offline for extended maintenance. We will be postponing our first beta phase until we believe the experience is going to be a positive one for players.
After they get the kinks worked out, Capcom plans to offer at least three more beta tests before Street Fighter V’s Spring 2016 release. As a further apology, Capcom will also offer every player who missed out on the beta a “worthwhile in-game incentive.” Capcom will announce dates for future beta tests and more information about the “worthwhile in-game incentive” sometime in the future.
Posted in News, PC, PS4
Tagged Street Fighter V
The Frames Per Second Fight is Just the Return of the Bit Wars… We All Need to Move On
Unlike many in the video game community, I don’t have fond memories of gaming as a child. It wasn’t until I was 13 or 14 when I got a PS2 for Christmas that I got serious about my gaming. Before that, video games were an entirely foreign concept to me, though I did play my sister’s Super Nintendo from time to time. We’d play Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Country, and Paperboy 2; it was the only time when we weren’t trying to kill each other. My dad was into games back then too, playing old adventure games like Riven and Myst.
As my interest in gaming grew, so too did my interest in gaming’s history. Time and time again in my halfhearted and aimless research I became aware of the fanboy subculture. In those days, I was a Sony fanboy, but the art of emotionally investing in a multi-million dollar company that didn’t care about its individual customers was more refined in the height of the Sega and Nintendo wars. (more…)