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
- Spore: An oral history – Design Room (2026)
- 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)
Most Recent: Xbox One
The Deep End’s Perception is officially coming to the Xbox One too
After previously revealing that Perception, a survival horror game starring a young woman named Cassie, would be released for the PC and PS4, developer The Deep End Games has now confirmed it’ll also be available for the Xbox One.
If you’re unfamiliar with Perception, The Deep End has released a new trailer, as well as posted a detailed description about the game to the Xbox Wire:
Perception is a narrative-based first-person horror game where you play as Cassie, a blind woman whose nightmares about a haunted mansion have plagued her for months. She finally decides to go to the mansion to solve the mystery, but there’s more to this estate than she ever dreamed. She must use her wits, her smartphone, and her echolocation abilities to unravel the tortured history of the place and escape with her life.
Sound is a major element to playing Perception. Every sound becomes a visual cue for the player, whether it be a hissing pipe or an alarm clock going off at an inopportune time — the more sound you make while exploring Echo Bluff, the greater your chance of grabbing the attention of the malevolent force inside the house.
As you continue to play, you’ll travel back through the decades and see the house’s many iterations, along with the generations tormented by the forces at play. As Cassie solves each mystery, the house dwindles slowly toward its original form, to the beginning of its horrors.
Perception doesn’t currently have an official release date, but there’s a possibility it could launch sometime in 2017.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Perception
Call of Duty 2017 is going “back to its roots” and CoD: Infinite Warfare is officially a retail disappointment
It’s official… Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has been a disappointment for Activision. During a quarterly financial presentation yesterday, executives from the publisher confirmed that sales of the sequel “underperformed our expectations.”
COO Thomas Tippl speculated that the sci-fi trappings of Infinite Warfare’s plot might have been responsible for the sales downturn, saying, “It’s clear that for a portion of our audience, the space setting just didn’t resonate.”
However, Activision’s senior staff are very excited for Call of Duty 2017, which is currently in development at Sledgehammer Games. Tippl confirmed the game will launch this Fall, and said it’ll feature “traditional combat” that takes the franchise “back to its roots”:
In 2017, Activision will take Call of Duty back to its roots, and traditional combat will once again take center stage. This is what our dedicated community of Call of Duty players and Sledgehammer Games, who has been developing this year’s title, are the most excited about.
During the Q&A portion of the presentation, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg added that Call of Duty 2017, which is known as “Lethal Combat” internally, will offer a better balance of traditional elements and new innovations than Infinite Warfare did:
I’ve said many times before, with any longstanding franchise like Call of Duty, there’s a balancing act we need to strike between staying true to the things that people love about the franchise and also the need to never become complacent and to keep pushing for innovations to keep the franchise fresh and vital.
Last year I don’t think we got that balance right. Infinite Warfare had a ton of great gameplay innovations that many of our fans appreciated and loved, but it also had a setting that didn’t appeal to all of our fans. The good news is, is that I’m excited to say that in 2017 we think we have this balance in perfect harmony with a game that our teams are incredibly passionate about, with a lot of great innovations, but that also has the traditional combat that we know our fans are going to love.
Barring some catastrophic change in Activision’s operational style, Call of Duty 2017 will likely be released this November.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty: WWII
Xbox Store Today: Crypt of the NecroDancer, Uncanny Valley, Spheroids
Three retro-styled games are now available to download as part of today’s Xbox Games Store update…
First up is Crypt of the NecroDancer, a roguelike rhythm game for the Xbox One from Brace Yourself Games. Players will delve deep into a monster-filled dungeon and hopefully hit their musical cues to “deliver beatdowns to the beat.”
Also available to download for the Xbox One today is Uncanny Valley, a side-scrolling survival horror game where there’s an abandoned factory to explore and puzzles to solve.
Finally today, Spheroids is a side-scrolling platformer for the Xbox One where “a jumpy Canadian boy” named Lucas has to save the world from interdimensional aliens.
More information on all three games can be found after the break. (more…)
Activision: Fans are going to love Destiny 2, which will be released in Fall 2017
Bungie still isn’t ready to officially announce Destiny 2 just yet, but Activision executives continued to talk up its imminent release during a quarterly financial report yesterday.
Activision COO Thomas Tippl confirmed the game is still on track for a 2017 launch, and also said it’ll be followed by a “content season” of downloadable expansions:
Activision, along with their partners at Bungie, plan to answer the call with the release of a full Destiny sequel later this year, designed to thrill our existing loyal fan base and bring many new players into the fold. We plan to support the release of the sequel, with a great content plan post launch, setting the stage for growth with this year’s sequel and the content season that will follow.
Later in the same report, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg promised that Destiny fans are “going to love this game,” and narrowed down the release window to Fall 2017.
No new Skylanders game in 2017, but multiple “Adventure Packs” coming
As part of their quarterly financial report yesterday, Activision executives confirmed that a new game in the Skylanders franchise won’t be released in 2017. However, fans should still expect plenty of new content to appear this year.
First and foremost, Skylanders Imaginators will make its Nintendo Switch debut on March 3. The “toys-to-life” franchise has been one of the few third party bright spots on the Wii U, so it’s good to see Activision continuing the tradition on the Switch. And with Imaginators in the spotlight for another year, COO Thomas Tippl confirmed that Activision plans to launch “multiple Adventure Packs, new characters, and new in-game content” for it throughout the year.
Tippl revealed that Netflix’s Skylanders Academy has also been well-received by fans. A second season will premiere on the streaming service sometime this year, and a third is already in the works.
Finally, Activision is working on a new mobile game set in the Skylanders universe, but that’s all we know at this point.
Episode 3 from The Walking Dead: A New Frontier will be released in March; Season Pass Disc coming February 28
Telltale Games has announced that The Walking Dead: A New Frontier‘s third episode, Above the Law, will be available to download for the PC, PS4, Xbox One, and mobile devices beginning next month. According to the developer, they’ll unveil more details about the upcoming expansion to the story “in the coming weeks.”
In other Walking Dead: A New Frontier news, Telltale also confirmed that the Season Pass Disc will be available in stores on February 28. The Season Pass Disc will contain the season’s first two episodes, Ties That Bind Part I and Ties That Bind Part II, and include access to all subsequent episodes as they’re released.
A new trailer advertising The Walking Dead: A New Frontier’s Season Pass Disc has been embedded above.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole will be released sometime between April 1, 2017 and March 31, 2018
Ubisoft has quietly delayed South Park: The Fractured But Whole for a second time.
Originally scheduled to launch on December 6, 2016, the game was later pushed back to Early 2017 before being delayed again as part of their quarterly financial report. The publisher confirmed the comedic RPG will now launch on some to be determined date during their next fiscal year (April 1, 2017 – March 31, 2018).
According to a short post on the UbiBlog, the delay is designed to give the development team more time “to deliver the best experience possible”:
The teams at South Park and Ubisoft San Francisco are committed to pushing the envelope during development to deliver the best experience possible, and this additional time will allow them to do so.
Presumably, a final release date for South Park: The Fractured But Whole will be announced soon.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged South Park: The Fractured But Whole
Metrico+ Review: This Visually Unique Puzzle Platformer Charts Its Own Course
Graphic designers who spend their days translating statistical findings into a series of colorful bars and charts are working in the interesting new field of infographics. And if you’ve opened an Internet browser at all in the last five years, you’ve more than likely seen dozens of them.
Companies love infographics because they’re able to distill complex statistical studies down into an image that is easily shareable across Facebook and Twitter. Audiences love them because they provide easily digestible primers on subjects as frivolous as the many on-screen deaths of Sean Bean to serious societal problems like income inequality.
Dutch development studio Digital Dreams used this same philosophy to create Metrico, a puzzle platformer that was released for the Vita in 2014. The team expanded on their original concept, and launched Metrico+, a remake/sequel, for the Xbox One last month. (more…)