Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Jordan Minor’s “Boss Fight Books: Super Mario Galaxy” is Now Available for Pre-Order
- 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
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
Naughty Dog working on third project in addition to Last of Us PS4 and Uncharted 4
Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann recently sat down with Edge to talk about the work required to bring The Last of Us Remastered to the PS4. The ease-of-use of Sony’s next-generation console system has been praised by many developers, but porting one of the most complex PS3 titles to the PS4 wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows:
“I wish we had a button that was like ‘Turn On PS4 Mode’, but no,” creative director Neil Druckmann says. “We expected it to be Hell, and it was Hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and with it crashing every 30 seconds… that took a long time. These engineers are some of the best in the industry and they optimised the game so much for the PS3’s SPUs specifically. It was optimised on a binary level, but after shifting those things over [to PS4] you have to go back to the high level, make sure the [game] systems are intact, and optimise it again.”
Druckmann’s discussion of the difficulties Naughty Dog faced with The Last of Us Remastered is quite interesting, but he also dropped a bombshell in regards to the studio’s next project: “We’re working on this re-release, but at the same time we’re working on two other brand-new experiences.”
One of those “brand-new experiences” has to be Uncharted 4, but the second project is currently a big mystery. When we last checked in with Naughty Dog, the developer was debating whether or not to move forward with The Last of Us 2 or an entirely new property. It looks like that decision has been made, but it’ll probably be a while before we hear anything else about it.
Transistor launch trailer unmasks four villains ahead of May 20 release
Transistor will be available to download for the PC (through Steam) and PS4 next week. Supergiant Games has kept quiet about much of the game since it was announced last Spring, but a newly released launch trailer has shed a little more light on the hybrid action/strategy RPG.
Narrated by the Transistor itself (Logan Cunnignham, also the voice that guides the player in Supergiant’s Bastion), four faces are introduced as the villains of the piece for the first time. These characters don’t have names yet, but their inclusion gives a deeper look into Transistor’s dystopian world.
According to Supergiant’s Greg Kasavin, the shroud of secrecy around Transistor was deliberate. Speaking to the PlayStation Blog, he said: “Our feeling is that the less you know going into a game like Transistor, the more likely it is to surprise you. And we think experiencing genuine surprise is one of the rarest and most pleasurable sensations that games can provide.”
Kasavin also used the PS Blog post to tease Transistor’s Recursion Mode, a “New Game Plus” mode that opens after the player completes the story. In Recursion Mode, players will retain their User Level and Transistor Customization while experiencing a completely different resistance from enemies and “some new surprises” in the game itself.
Recursion Mode… a Second Quest if you will.
Posted in News, PC, PS4
Tagged Transistor
TitanFall stomps the competition yet again as the best-selling game of April 2014
After selling 925,000 copies in March, TitanFall continued to roll over the competition at retail as the NPD Group crowned it the best-selling game of April 2014 as well.
The remainder of the top ten was made up almost entirely of games released last Fall including Call of Duty: Ghosts (#2), NBA 2K14 (#3), and Lego The Hobbit (#5). Amazingly, Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition continues to hang out in the top five, landing at #4 for the month of April. That ranking may improve next month now that the retail version of Minecraft: PlayStation 3 Edition is available. And speaking of things that are amazing, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was the only other April release to crack the top ten (it was #8).
Finally, according to Joystiq, Sony’s PlayStation 4 can lay claim to the next-generation consoles sales title for another month. That makes four in a row for the PS4.
The complete top ten list for April 2014 can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, News, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Grand Theft Auto V, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, Lego The Hobbit, Minecraft, NBA 2K14, NPD, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Lego Movie, TitanFall
Newton, Sherman show why they’re #1 seeds in first round of Madden NFL 15 Cover Vote
Voting is complete for the first round of the Madden NFL 15 Cover Vote. Some were close and some most certainly were not, but the higher seed came away with a victory in almost every matchup. The lone upset was Luke Kuechly’s victory over Denver’s Demaryius Thomas. His win earns him the right to go up against Colin Kaepernick, the #2 seed of the left bracket.
Cam Newton and Richard Sherman, the tournaments #1 seeds, showed why EA Sports thinks so highly of them. Sherman won his matchup against Alshon Jeffery with 73% of the vote while Newton clobbered Pittsburgh’s Antonio Brown 80%-20%. Here’s what the remaining matchups look like heading into Round 2:
Left Bracket
(1) Richard Sherman (CB, Seattle Seahawks)
(4) Jimmy Graham (TE, New Orleans Saints)
(2) Colin Kaepernick (QB, San Francisco 49ers)
(6) Luke Kuechly (LB, Carolina Panthers)
Right Side
(1) Cam Newton (QB, Carolina Panthers)
(4) Jamaal Charles (RB, Kansas City Chiefs)
(2) Andrew Luck (QB, Indianapolis Colts)
(3) LeSean McCoy (RB, Philadelphia Eagles)
Second round voting will remain open until next Thursday, May 22.
Wolfenstein: The New Order launch trailer enters House of the Rising Sun… and the moon
Caroline Becker: “Blazkowicz! What’s your status?”
B.J. Blazkowicz: “Well… I’m on the mother****ing moon!”
Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames have given us one last look at Wolfenstein: The New Order before it launches this Tuesday, May 20, and they decided to go big… like, really big. Bang, zoom, straight to the Moon big.
B.J. Blazkowicz’s final foray against the Nazi forces of General Deathshead is set to the strains of “The House of the Rising Sun,” which was a big hit for The Animals in 1964. Of course, in the universe of The New Order, there was no group known as The Animals, so the song is in German. Just one of the many things Blazkowicz and the rest of the Resistance are unhappy about.
Wolfenstein: The New Order will be available for the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. And if you pre-order it in the next few days, you’ll receive access to the Doom 4 beta (PC, PS4, and Xbox One only.
Ubisoft officially announces Far Cry 4 will be released on November 18
I swear, the Far Cry series gets nuttier with every new release. When I look at the box art for the recently announced Far Cry 4, all I can think of is John “J. Peterman” O’Hurley in his “white poet warlord” phase shouting gibberish at an errand boy. Throw in a dash of Michael York and you’ve got yourself a villain.
He doesn’t have a name yet, but that villain is the “despotic self-appointed king” of Kryat, a mysterious (and fictional) region in the Himalayas. According to Ubisoft, players will have access to “a vast array of weapons, vehicles, and animals” as they venture across Far Cry 4’s open-world landscape.
Ubisoft Montreal is the primary developer on Far Cry 4, but the Watch Dogs studio will receive assistance from Red Storm Entertainment, Ubisoft Toronto, Ubisoft Shanghai, and Ubisoft Kiev. Once they’re finished, this development studio Voltron will release Far Cry 4 on the PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One on November 18.
“Following the success of Far Cry 3, we wanted to take the franchise to the next level and create a game that will surprise players and exceed fans’ expectations,” said Dan Hay, Executive Producer. “Given the unique setting, we feel Far Cry 4 will stand out as a top first-person shooter and we’re eager to reveal more about the game in the coming months.”
Players who are eager to pre-order Far Cry 4 will be upgraded to the Limited Edition, which includes the Hurk’s Redemption DLC pack and access to a harpoon gun known as “The Impaler.” Hurk’s Redemption will include three single-player missions starring Hurk, a character originally found in Far Cry 3‘s Monkey Business DLC.
Ubisoft plans to give us our first look at Far Cry 4 during their E3 2014 Media Briefing, which will be held on Monday, June 9 at 6:00 PM (Eastern Time).
Duke Nukem gets a sex change for Interceptor’s Bombshell
February’s non-announcement of Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction, a top-down action RPG for the PC and PS4, was one of the strangest things I ever saw (or rather, didn’t see). After very publicly selling the rights to the character to Gearbox in 2010, 3D Realms launched a teaser site and countdown for a brand new Duke Nukem game. Understandably, Gearbox sued 3D Realms over this rather blatant breach of contract. The countdown was put on hold and the lawsuit pushed Interceptor Entertainment’s parent company to purchase 3D Realms (Interceptor was previously teased as the developer behind Mass Destruction).
So here we are today staring down at an official announcement for Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction. Except it’s not a Duke Nukem game anymore. Say hello to Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison, the star of Bombshell and a take-no-guff intergalactic bounty hunter. She’s on a mission to save the President from an apocalyptic alien threat in a top-down action RPG for the PC and PS4.
The game’s debut trailer is above and you can practically see the seams where Duke was removed and “Bombshell” was pasted in. A news ticker even includes a dig at Duke’s penchant for chewing bubblegum and kicking ass (“Kick-Ass BubbleGum sales plummet as only customer has ‘too much ass to kick.'”). But she’s got a Skrillex-style haircut and a bionic arm, so she’s clearly an entirely new character.
Bombshell will be on display at this year’s E3 Expo and 3D Realms and Interceptor plan to release it in early 2015.
Rockstar will release next-gen game by March 2015 after shipping 33 million copies of GTA5
Rockstar Games had a pretty good year. The developer’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, presented their quarterly financial report yesterday and announced that more than 33 million copies of Grand Theft Auto V have been shipped to stores since its September 2013 release. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick didn’t specify how many copies of the game have been purchased by gamers, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it’s somewhere between “a lot” and “a metric crap-ton.”
However, one piece of information Zelnick was interested in sharing was the news that Rockstar plans to release their first game for next-generation consoles sometime between today and March 31, 2015. While Rockstar still has 70s spy story Agent officially in development and hinted at Bully 2 in the past, this new game is most likely a PS4/Xbox One port of Grand Theft Auto V. Zelnick would only say that “we are excited about what they have in store for the new generation of systems for this fiscal year.”
Rockstar Toronto began hiring developers to work on a project for “next-gen consoles” last year, so whatever it is, it’s been in the works for quite a while now.
Zelnick confirmed that Take-Two would reveal more about Rockstar’s next-generation game at a later date. Presumably, he’s referring to the upcoming E3 Expo.