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
- 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”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
- In 2005, games started rewiring our brains – The AV Club (2025)
Most Recent: Xbox 360
Xbox Store Today: GTA5, Far Cry 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, many more
Aside from LittleBigPlanet 3, today’s Xbox Games Store update looks like a copy-and-paste of yesterday’s PlayStation Store update. As such, here’s what Xbox One and Xbox 360 should definitely be looking forward to this week:
- Rockstar has released Grand Theft Auto V for the Xbox One, adding a first-person mode, extra missions, a graphical upgrade, and a few other tweaks.
- Ubisoft dives back into the Far Cry franchise with Far Cry 4 (Xbox One, Xbox 360), another whacked out first person shooter that takes the action to the Himalayas. And as the trailers keep reminding us, you can wreak havoc while riding on the back of an elephant.
- BioWare brings back the Dragon Age series with Dragon Age: Inquisition (Xbox One, Xbox 360), a huge new RPG that looks like it’ll dwarf the much smaller Dragon Age II.
Other games of note this week include Deep Silver Dead Island spinoff, Escape Dead Island (Xbox 360); the next-gen launch of 2K’s WWE 2K15 (Xbox One); and yet another Rabbids game froom Ubisoft, Rabbids Invasion (Xbox One, Xbox 360).
More details on all of these games (and a few others) can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Dragon Age: Inquisition, Far Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto V
First batch of excavated E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges sell for $500-1500 apiece
The first batch of excavated Atari 2600 cartridges from the Alamogordo landfill have been auctioned off and checkbooks were opened wide to own a piece of history. The auctions were managed by the Tularosa Basin Historical Society and the priciest E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridge (complete with an original box) sold for $1,537. Other E.T. cartridges sold for similar prices, though the ones without a box sold for closer to $500. Other games (including Defender, Asteroids, Centipede, and more) all sold for under $500 with a copy of Missile Command responsible for the lowest sale of $157.50. A complete list of every auctioned off game can be found at eBay.
The city of Alamogordo will continue to sell some of the excavated cartridges in the coming days, though it’s unknown when the next wave of auctions will begin.
Atari: Game Over, a documentary chronicling the dig, as well as Atari’s rise and fall, will be available to download through Microsoft’s Xbox Live service beginning tomorrow.
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.
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…)
New Releases: Super Smash Bros Wii U, Far Cry 4, Grand Theft Auto V PS4/Xbox One, More
After years of revealing screenshots and teasing trailers (including one 35-minute “Extravganza“), Nintendo is finally ready to release Super Smash Bros. For Wii U this week. It’s a big week for Nintendo in general as the publisher will also release Pokemon: Alpha Sapphire and Pokemon: Omega Ruby for the 3DS along with their first wave of Amiibo figures.
What can the rest of the publishing world do to compete? A lot, actually. Rockstar will bring Grand Theft Auto V to the PS4 and Xbox One for the first time while Ubisoft will release the Himalayan-set Far Cry 4 (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One) too. Those are both massive open-world games… though only one lets you ride an elephant. Also available this week is BioWare’s latest RPG, Dragon Age: Inquisition (PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One); Sony’s latest LittleBigPlanet game, LittleBigPlanet 3 (PS3, PS4); and Deep Silver’s Dead Island spinoff, Escape Dead Island (PC, PS3, Xbox 360).
And if you’re looking to pick up some previously released major releases on new platforms, now’s your chance. WWE 2K15 makes the jump to the PS4 and Xbox One, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor downgrades to the PS3 and Xbox 360, and Watch Dogs finally makes its way to the Wii U.
And you can find even more new releases after the break. (more…)
ScreamRide coasts into stores on March 3
Microsoft has announced that ScreamRide, their roller coaster creation sim, will be released for the Xbox One and Xbox 360 on March 3. Developed by Frontier Developments, ScreamRide is expected to serve as a spiritual successor to the RollerCoaster Tycoon series.
More than 50 levels will be included in ScreamRide and Xbox One owners will be able to share their original creations with other owners of the game. Players on both platforms will be able to add their name to a set of global Leaderboards. Best of all, ScreamRide will be budget priced… $39.99 on the Xbox One and $29.99 on the Xbox 360.
And remember to keep your hands and feet within the car at all times.
Posted in News, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged ScreamRide
Xbox Store Today: Terraria, Toybox Turbos, Pure Pool
Welcome to the weekend as three new games have been added to the Xbox Games Store. Terraria, the side-scrolling world-builder, is now available for the Xbox One and with a special launch trailer to boot. It’s joined by Pure Pool, VooFoo’s billiards sim that was originally released for the PC and PS4 over the Summer.
Over on the Xbox 360 Games Store, Codemasters’ return to their top-down racing roots, Toybox Turbos, is now available to download.
More details on all three games can be found after the break. (more…)