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
New Releases: Halo Master Chief Collection, AC: Unity/AC: Rogue, Lego Batman 3, More
With Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare‘s launch behind us, game publishers have moved forward with a massive amount of mid-November releases. Chief among them (that’s right, I went there) is Microsoft’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection, an Xbox One repackaging of Halo: Combated Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4. More Achievements than you could ever ask for and four of the best shooters to ever grace a gaming system. Not a bad deal. Also available this week is a double shot of Assassin’s Creed from Ubisoft. Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (PS3, Xbox 360) closes the book on the franchise’s “Americas” saga while Assassin’s Creed: Unity (PC, PS4, Xbox One) shifts the series to the French Revolution.
The remaining new releases can also be slotted into several long-running franchises including WB’s Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham (3DS, PC, PS3, PS4, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One), Sega’s Sonic Boom two-fer (Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric on the Wii U and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal on the 3DS), Bandai Namco’s Tales of Hearts R (Vita), and Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One).
Finally this week, Blizzard is back with another World of Warcraft expansion… World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor.
A complete list of this week’s new releases can be found after the break. (more…)
Don’t Leave… Take This Interview With the Developers of Guns, Gore & Cannoli
At first glance, zombies, mobsters, and a wonderful cheese-filled dessert don’t seem like they’d have much in common. But while Clemenza instructed a young mafioso to leave his gun and take the cannoli in The Godfather, players will need both if they’re going to find any success against the rampaging zombie hordes of Guns, Gore & Cannoli. Belgium-based Crazy Monkey Studios is currently seeking funding for the game through Kickstarter, and we recently talked to Benjamin Claeys, one of the game’s artists, about the Prohibition era side-scrolling shooter and its unique art style.
Naturally, the conversation drifted away from the cartoonish violence of the game towards an appreciation for really good cannoli… (more…)
Posted in Features, Interviews, PC, PS4, Top Story, Wii U, Xbox One
Tagged Guns Gore & Cannoli
Blizzard debuts team-based shooter Overwatch at BlizzCon 2014
Titan may be dead, but Blizzard marches on. To show that they’re not dwelling on the past, the developer announced a new game during the opening festivities of this year’s BlizzCon. Titled Overwatch, it’s a team-based shooter for the PC that has a very Disney/Pixar vibe to it. Or at least, as Disney/Pixar as a game about futuristic arena warfare can be.
The action of Overwatch takes place in a technologically advanced, highly stylized future earth. In a time of global crisis, an international task force of soldiers, scientists, adventurers, and oddities known as Overwatch had come together to restore peace to a war-torn world. After many years, the group’s influence waned, and it was eventually disbanded. Overwatch might be gone now . . . but the world still needs heroes.
With an emphasis on accessibility and pure fun, Overwatch brings Blizzard’s signature easy-to-learn, hard-to-master gameplay to the FPS genre. Harnessing the power of their hero of choice, players will join forces in teams of six and battle each other across a range of futuristic global locations, from the hologram-lit streets of London to a bazaar in the shadows of a high-tech Egyptian pyramid. Every battlefield is iconic and built to highlight each character’s unique abilities, and fights can shift from streets to rooftops to open skies within the span of a breath.
Overwatch is already in a playable state and Blizzard announced that a beta test will take place sometime in 2015. You can sign up for a chance to join the beta (and learn a bit more about the game’s ragtag group of heroes) at the Overwatch offcial website. I’d also recommend checking out Overwatch’s first gameplay trailer, which is available after the break. (more…)
Insert Quarter: A History of (Video Game) Violence
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
The video game industry’s fiercest critics will always say that games have never been more violent and that it is doing horrible damage to our children. But the game industry’s fiercest critics have always been saying that. In fact, many of them were children themselves when the first round of panic gripped parents during Death Race‘s 1976 heyday.
Vice’s Mike Diver examines this legacy of violence, citing everything from the obvious (Mortal Kombat and Carmageddon) to the obscure (Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior and Battle Chess). I never thought of Battle Chess as particularly gruesome, but your primer on pixelated gore awaits:
If you came to games fresh during the previous console generation, where once-grainy graphics made the switch to full HD, you don’t know how easy you’ve had it. There was a time, long before the gushes of crimson coloring contemporary offerings of extreme violence–Gears and God of War, Dead Rising, and the more recent Resident Evils, Max Payne 3, the Dead Space series, Bulletstorm, and BioShock (to name but a few)–where you had to lean on your imagination to bring scenes of disgusting dismemberment to life.
You can read the rest of the article at Vice.
PS4 version of Secret Ponchos will be released in December
We’ve been big fans of Secret Ponchos, an isometric arena shooter that takes place in a stylized Old West setting, since its PAX East 2013 debut. Ever since, we’ve been waiting for its release on the PS4 and PC but, according to a post on the PlayStation Blog, we won’t have to be waiting much longer.
If you’re a PlayStation Plus subscribers, Secret Ponchos will be available in December as part of the Instant Game Collection on the PS4. All other PS4 owners will also be able to purchase it separately at that time. As one of the game’s banditos might say, yee haw!
Secret Ponchos is also currently available on the PC through Steam’s Early Access program. It’s possible the game’s “full version” will be released in December, but nothing has been officially announced by developer Switchblade Monkeys yet.
Posted in News, PC, PS4
Tagged Secret Ponchos
Grand Theft Auto V is getting a first-person mode on PC, PS4, Xbox One
Rockstar hasn’t been shy in letting the world know that the PC, PS4, and Xbox One upgrade to Grand Theft Auto V will be no mere port. From “across-the-board graphical and technical improvements” to the wide range of bonus content for players who already own the PS3 or Xbox 360 edition, the latest version of GTA5 will be jam-packed with never-before-seen stuff. But Rockstar wasn’t finished as they recently told IGN that the game will also include a first-person mode:
Police cars are stacking up in the cul-de-sac below and a helicopter is hovering somewhere overhead. I can’t really see where it is, but I feel its presence, and the cops open fire. So I make a run for it, vaulting over a fence into a parking lot, where I jack a car, climb in, and as I look down to hot-wire it, I see there’s a bullet hole in my in my forearm and blood is running out.
I’ve never had a GTA experience like this before, and that’s because it’s all playing out in the first-person.
We’ve said before that Rockstar rebuilt Grand Theft Auto V for the new-generation consoles, but they really mean it now. Each animation in the game had to be redone to work in first-person mode. That kind of attention to detail is Rockstar’s trademark and they weren’t going to ignore it now. Of course, if you’d rather play in third-person mode, players can switch between the two views at any time.
Grand Theft Auto V will be released on November 18 for the PS4 and Xbox One, with the PC version following on January 27, 2015.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Grand Theft Auto V
Insert Quarter: Is Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel’s Season Pass a Good Value or a Rip-Off?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Gearbox supported 2012’s Borderlands 2 with a bevy of downloadable content including four campaign expansions (which were included as part of the game’s Season Pass), five Headhunter Packs, two level cap upgrades, and two additional playable characters. It was the most ambitious post-release DLC schedule for a game ever.
Perhaps it’s due to the developer switch or maybe it’s because the latest Borderlands game is still living on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in a new-generation world, but Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel‘s DLC schedule isn’t nearly as expansive. 2K Games is once again selling a Season Pass for The Pre-Sequel, but Destructoid’s Darren Nakamura is concerned that 2K is being intentionally vague in their promotion of the Pass to hide its less-than-stellar value:
So even though no promises are technically being broken, and 2K plans to deliver four digital additions to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel for the price of three through the season pass, I cannot blame any who bought it for feeling cheated. The content fits the requirements laid out, but the value is not there. Even if the plans were to change from here onward and the season pass ends up including one new Vault Hunter and three story DLCs, the value of the pass over purchasing content piecemeal hinges on the quality of all three packs, and the series does not have a perfect track record on that front.
You can read the rest of the article at Destructoid.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Tagged Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Last Year is another multiplayer slasher simulator where you can play as the killer
Is there something in the water? Besides the rotting corpse of Jason Voorhees, that is.
Just a few days after Gun Media announced Summer Camp, James Matthew Wearing has announced Last Year, his own asymmetric multiplayer game set within the confines of a slasher film. Wearing has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of Last Year’s PC release, which he wants to launch in Fall 2016. He is currently developing Last Year by himself and hopes to use a successful Kickstarter campaign as a means of attracting a team willing to help him complete the game.
Like Summer Camp, players in Last Year will take control of five teenagers being hunted by a masked Killer. The teens have been sorted into familiar multiplayer classes such as Nick the Nerd (Technician) or Chad the Jock (Assault). They will have to work together with the other teens (Amber the Scout, Sam the Medic, and Troy and Support) to survive the night against the Killer in 5v1 contests at Silver Lake Camp or East Side High.
However, in Last Year the Killer will have a special ability known as Predator Mode. Evoking the teleportation abilities seemingly held by Jason or Michael Myers, the Killer will be able to become invisible while in Predator Mode and pop up in just the right spot for the perfect jump scare. Boo!
A little more than 44 days remain on the Last Year Kickstarter campaign and Wearing is seeking $50,000 CAD (about $43,000 US) to make his game a reality.