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: PS4
Latest Horizon: Zero Dawn trailer offers a look at Aloy’s allies and enemies
We’re just a month-and-a-half away from the launch of Horizon: Zero Dawn, and developer Guerrilla Games is back with yet another look at the game’s story. We’re still no closer to figuring out the circumstances behind the mixture of primative humans and high technology found in Aloy’s world, but it does introduce us to some the other people that’ll populate it.
In this gameplay trailer, we meet the “Masked Men,” the mysterious force seemingly behind the techno-organic animals that roam the land, along with a few of Aloy’s friends and neighbors.
Horizon: Zero Dawn will be released exclusively for the PS4 on February 28.
Posted in News, PS4
Tagged Horizon: Zero Dawn
Earthlock: Festival of Magic will be released for PS4 on January 27
Snowcastle Games originally released Earthlock: Festival of Magic for the PC and Xbox One last year. Yesterday the Norwegian developer took over the PlayStation Blog and confirmed that their RPG will also be released for the PS4 on January 27.
Lead Artist Fredrik Dahl also shared a few secrets about how Snowcastle tried to “honor and exceed” old-school RPGs with Earthlock:
Strategy is key to survival, not the grind.
“In the traditional turn-based RPG, I don’t think it’s a big secret that there’s a lot of grinding going on — to level up in order to beat a boss, for example. We’ve tried to limit that by focusing more on a tactical experience. Usually you can get through the bosses in Earthlock by choosing the right strategy, getting your talent board set up, and having the right character pairings. Getting wiped out is more often than not a case of having the wrong party setup.”
Earthlock: Festival of Magic is also in development for the Wii U, but it’s currently unknown when, or even if, it’ll reach Nintendo’s console.
Posted in News, PS4
Tagged Earthlock: Festival of Magic
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone, Fatal Fury, more added to PS Store
It’s the first PlayStation Store update of the year… so let’s kick things off with a big dance party!
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone, the Virtual Diva’s latest starring role, is now available to download for the PS4. According to Sega, Future Tone is the biggest game in the series (if you download both expansion pack), and it’s amped up speed and energy will provide fans with the most intense rhythm game experience yet.
Also new this week is Fatal Fury, a PS4 recreation of the classic arcade game from 1991. As one of SNK’s earliest games, Fatal Fury helped lay the groundwork for the dozens of fighting games the developer would produce over the next two-and-a-half decades. Fatal Fury will be available to download through the PlayStation Store beginning tomorrow, January 12.
More information on all of this week’s new additions to the PlayStation Store can be found after the break. (more…)
You should watch this great Shovel Knight speedrun race from Awesome Games Done Quick 2017
Awesome Games Done Quick is hosting their first speedrunning marathon of the year this week, and some of the best players from all across the world have descended on the Washington D.C. area to play through a huge number of games as fast as they can. In addition to putting on an excellent show, the AGDQ2017 participants are also raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
It’s a pretty fun week of gaming, and for further proof, just look at this year’s Shovel Knight race. Not only is it an extremely competitive contest, but you can watch two experts masterfully pick apart the new side-scrolling classic. The two players going head-to-head are “Smaugy” and “Munchakoopas,” and they provide a great match featuring plenty of platforming acrobatics, multiple lead changes, and an amazing photo finish.
Yacht Club Games will release the next expansion for Shovel Knight, Specter of Torment, sometime this year.
Thunder Lotus’s Sundered will be released in July 2017
Thunder Lotus Games has announced that Sundered, their upcoming MetroidVania-style side-scroller, will be released for the PC and PS4 in July 2017. The developer also confirmed plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign on Monday, January 16, to help with development costs and to gather feedback from their fans.
Sundered will include a procedurally-generated world map and random monster placement to encourage replayability. And like Thunder Lotus’s last game, Jotun, it’ll feature hand-drawn art for both the characters and the environments.
In case you missed it, you can get a sneak peek at Sundered’s visuals by viewing its Announcement Trailer, which was first revealed by Thunder Lotus last September.
Tetsuya Nomura says we’ll have to wait “a little longer” for release of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Kingdom Hearts III
Like Valve and Blizzard, Square Enix is well-known for taking their sweet time with projects they have in development. Not surprisingly, the publisher is using the same deliberate pace to produce Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy VII Remake, which have been in the works since 2013 and 2015, respectively.
Director Tetsuya Nomura recently offered an update on both titles to Famitsu (translated by Siliconera), and while progress is being made, it might be quite a while before either is released:
Famitsu: What’s the development status on Kingdom Hearts III?
Nomura: The production process is different than what we’ve had up until now, so I can’t just give you a general idea, but I can say that there are worlds that still remain untouched. We’ve advanced on the production of worlds that have yet to be announced, so we can’t show them for now. As far as development status goes, there’s still a ways to go.
Famitsu: What’s the development status on Final Fantasy VII Remake?
Nomura: We’re making steady progress on its production. While we are indeed working on it, I think we’ll have you guys wait a little longer for both Kingdom Hearts III and Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Nomura apologized for the delays, but assured fans that it takes time to create “something that will meet expectations.” Hopefully, we’ll get the chance to see how both games are progressing later this year, as the Director also said he’s looking forward to showcasing both games at at least one event in 2017.
It sounds unlikely that Kingdom Hearts III or Final Fantasy VII Remake will launch in 2017, especially after Nomura said, “[Square Enix has] many titles releasing this year,” implying that neither game will be available by the end of the year. Though he did say that fans should look forward to some “surprises.”
Posted in News, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts III
Square Enix has shipped six million copies of Final Fantasy XV so far
After shipping more than five million copies at launch, Square Enix continues to make Final Fantasy XV available to consumers in a big way.
In a press release this morning, Square Enix announced that shipments and digital sales of Final Fantasy XV have now reached more than six million copies total. The publisher didn’t release any additional information about this latest milestone, so we can’t make any comparisons for physical versus digital or PS4 versus Xbox One.
But Square Enix wants fans to stay excited about Final Fantasy XV in 2017, and they plan to make a large amount of post-launch content (both free and paid) available to players. They recently kicked off the game’s second life with the launch of the Holiday Pack and Holiday Pack Plus expansions, which also includes access to the “Moogle Chocobo Carnival,” an in-game event that starts on Tuesday, January 24.
Posted in News, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Final Fantasy XV
Bethesda has no plans to remake Oblivion or Morrowind; Skyrim Special Edition was a “one-off”
Bethesda will probably forever be linked with the Elder Scrolls franchise, but the publisher has spent the better part of a decade branching out beyond the RPG genre. And after launching games like Dishonored, Doom, and Wolfenstein: The New Order, they’ve begun to present themselves to the public as a place for all genres… and high production values. But according to Pete Hines, this desire to move in new directions make it unlikely that Bethesda will ever look to the past to create remakes of Oblivion or Morrowind.
Speaking to Xbox: The Official Magazine (via GamesRadar), Hines said that the Skyrim Special Edition was a “one-off” born out of a very unique set of circumstances:
OXM: You’ve got some big-name games and you’ve never really fallen into the remake culture that a lot of people are getting into. Skyrim Special Edition feels like a one-off. Would you say that’s true, are you more about moving forward?
Hines: Generally speaking, yeah. We did one for Dishonored but that was a unique case where it was a new IP at the very end of the last generation of consoles. So remastering it and bringing it to this gen wasn’t a ton of work and it made a lot of sense given the proximity of those two. Skyrim was more about the work that Bethesda Game Studios had done in the early days of getting ready for Fallout 4 on this generation of consoles – moving the Skyrim engine and doing some work to run it on this generation of consoles just to see how it worked, and so forth, before they started doing all their Fallout stuff. It’s the most recent thing they did.
Instead of remaking past titles, Hines said that Bethesda’s culture is very much focused on creating “something new”:
Hines:But these things take time, it takes effort and manpower. Generally speaking, our approach has usually been that instead of spending all this time on a thing we’ve already made, why don’t we instead spend that effort on something new, or on the next version of that thing?
One of those new things that Bethesda is working on is The Elder Scrolls 6. However, Studio Director Todd Howard said “it’s a very long way off” back in June.
Posted in PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim