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
Insert Quarter: Should Assassin’s Creed: Unity Be Recalled?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Can you recall a video game because it’s too buggy? It’s an interesting question. For the most part, a software purchase is considered an “as is” piece of property by publishers, retailers, and most of the general public. Whether you prefer to use “Buyer Beware,” or the classier sounding “Caveat Emptor,” a software program is considered yours as soon as you break the seal. But the bugs found in Assassin’s Creed: Unity aren’t like the average glitches found in your average game. And Erik Kain of Forbes wonders if it’s time Ubisoft issued a full recall instead of resorting to patch after patch after patch:
At this point we sort of take it all for granted, however. Another buggy game release? Color me surprised. We’ve done this so many times before it hardly makes us bat an eye.
But we wouldn’t stand for it in any other industry.
The full article is available at Forbes.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Assassin's Creed: Unity
New Releases: Persona Q, Geometry Wars 3, Akiba’s Trip PS4, More
Black Friday (and the more-or-less unofficial end to the Fall game rush) is just a few days away, but there’s still a handful of new releases to talk about this week.
For example, Atlus will bring its popular Persona series of RPGs to the 3DS with Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. The quirky Japanese publisher will also release Akiba’s Trip: Undead & Undressed, a brawler where teenagers strip down to battle vampires in the heart of Tokyo, for the PS4 this week.
But this week’s biggest new release (in my opinion, anyway) is Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions. Activision and Lucid Games will release the twin-stick shooter for the PC, as well as the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.
Finally this week, the Penguins of Madagascar will waddle over to the 3DS, Wii, and Wii U and IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, the latest game in the dogfighting sim series, will be released for the PC.
Posted in 3DS, News, PC, PS4, Wii, Wii U
Tagged Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
Nominees for the 2014 Game Awards have been announced
Geoff Keighley’s VGX Awards replacement, The Game Awards, got a little more real as the show’s advisory board announced its inaugural list of nominees. Dozens of games were nominated in 16 categories, with six titles (Dark Souls II, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Destiny, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) notching three nominations apiece. Dark Souls II, Hearthstone, and Shadow of Mordor are all competing in the Game of the Year category against Bayonetta 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition.
A complete list of nominees can be found after the break. The 2014 Game Awards will take place on December 5 at the AXIS Theater in Las Vegas. (more…)
Insert Quarter: Video Game Titles Have Gotten Ridiculous
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Video game titles have gotten ridiculous. I think I really noticed it earlier this year when Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix decided use Rise of the Tomb Raider as the title of the next game in the series. I’d gotten my fill of the word “rise” (and its variants) after being subjected to The Dark Knight Rises, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Hannibal Rising, and many others at the movie theater. Especially because very few of the people or groups who are supposed to rise in those movies actually do!
Destructoid’s Steven Hansen shares my pain and has put together his own list of words that need to be stricken from game titles. Unsurprisingly, it all loops back to Call of Duty:
Lords of the Fallen and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare just came out and they should be laughed out the damn building for their horrible, generic videogames names.
I originally typed “Armored Warfare” and was confused when Google failed to bring up results for our “Call of Duty: Armored Warfare” review. Then I realized it was “Advanced Warfare” after remembering I kept getting it confused with Advance Wars originally.
DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?
You can read the rest of the article at Destructoid.
Get a lesson in “Puzzles 101” in new Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris dev diary
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was one of 2010’s biggest surprises and I was shocked a second time when Square Enix announced that a sequel was being prepped for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One this Fall. With the December 9 launch of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris just a few weeks away, developer Crystal Dynamics has released a new Developer Diary delving into the game’s intricate puzzle mechanics.
Executive Producer Scot Amos and Lead Level Designer Jeff Wajcs discuss all the environmental hazards like boulders, floor spikes, and falling platforms while also focusing on the new challenges present in creating a puzzle fit for four players.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris
Geometry Wars 3 is out next week and here’s a new gameplay trailer
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is not a game I ever expected to play. After the dissolution of Bizarre Creations, the original developer behind the game, it looked like Activision would let the franchise rot for the foreseeable future. Instead, they recruited Lucid Games (which was founded by several ex-Bizarre employees) and set about making another sequel in the twin-stick shooter franchise. And the newly released gameplay trailer gives us our best look at the game in action yet.
Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions will be available for the PC, PS3, and PS4 on November 25 and on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One on November 26. I can’t wait, can you?
The Path Our Enemy Forges: Shadow of Mordor and Mimetic Desire
WARNING: This article will contain spoilers for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor.
Whatever we may think about the universe, it is clear that John Reginald Reuel Tolkien firmly believed in an objective good and evil. A Roman Catholic who took his faith seriously, he shaped his fictional world of Middle-Earth to broadly fit a Christian worldview. A good and all-powerful God created the world from nothing. The angelic powers, some of whom fall into evil, exist as part of the created order. The world’s future hangs on the moral choices of common people. Evil is characterized as a turning away from the objective good, not merely an action that is deemed destructive by the social norms of the dominating culture. In fact, evil must be identified and confronted even though the dominating culture approves it.
Tolkien’s understanding of objective moral good and evil is demonstrated in his meditations on temptation in The Lord of the Rings. Boromir, a valiant but weak man, contemplates the use of the One Ring against Sauron. Faramir and Tom Bombadil, bastions of moral goodness, are unaffected by its draw. The power of the One Ring to dominate and to change free beings into thralls is disdained by those who recognize its means as objectively evil.
However, in Monolith’s recent hit, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the player finds himself or herself doing battle with Sauron, not by taking the moral high-road and trusting good to overcome evil, but by wielding powers similar to Sauron himself. By dominating orcs and turning them against each other and their masters, players wield creatures with will and self-knowledge as pawns in a larger game. More than once, the high elf Celebrimbor states that the only way to overcome Sauron is to match him in determination, and to use his own powers against him. When the ranger Talion asks the Elven Lord how he can control the orcs, Celebrimbor states that when Morgoth (Sauron’s predecessor) created the orcs as a mockery of the elves, he made them to be dominated. Celebrimbor is merely walking the same path that his enemy forged. (more…)
See some of Evolve’s design changes in latest behind-the-scenes video
Evolve has changed quite a bit over the years and Turtle Rock Studios wants to share part of this process with us in their latest behind-the-scenes video: “The Iterative Process of Turtle Rock Studios.” The video includes early looks at the Hunters as well as Goliath’s initial appearance as a crab monster. Adam Sessler is your host once again and he gets the Turtle Rock team (who are all sporting some hefty beards) to open about those topics and the rest of the design process.
Evolve will be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One on February 10.