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
Xbox Store Today: Far Cry Primal, PvZ Garden Warfare 2, The Walking Dead Michonne, more
Today’s Xbox Games Store update is all about scary things… cannibals, zombies, dying alone in the wilderness, and that thing on Gorbachev’s head.
The hero of Far Cry: Primal (Xbox One), Takkar, will have to spend his days dodging cannibals as he fights for survival in the game’s prehistoric locales. Thankfully, Takkar will be able to rely on his own tribe to help him out, and the wild animals that he tames including elephants, tigers, and wolves. In the Stone Age, it’s easy to show those cannibals who’s really on top of the food chain.
Zombies don’t usually munch on brains, but Telltale’s smart adaptation of The Walking Dead saga gets a new chapter today with the release of The Walking Dead: Michonne (Xbox One and Xbox 360). Players will take control of the character’s famed sword in a story that explores Michonne’s absence between issues #126 and #139 of the comic book… “and what brought her back.” A different sort of undead are at the center of EA’s Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 (Xbox One), but the team-based shooter includes a ton of new maps and modes for fans of the series.
Also available today is The Flame in the Flood (Xbox One), is “a wilderness survival game in which a girl and her dog travel by foot and by raft down a procedurally-generated river.”
Finally today, Reagan Gorbachev (Xbox One) will fight back against a group of extremists in a top-down shooter using “their fists and samurai swords and poison darts and pistols and shotguns and fully automatic assault rifles and grenade launchers and miniguns and bazookas and some other guns.” Sure… why not?
More information on all of these (along with a few other new releases) can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Far Cry: Primal, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, The Walking Dead: Michonne
Kickstart This! Need to Know, Essence: The Resurrection, A Place for the Unwilling
I’ve survived Chinese New Year and a solitary Valentine’s Day (because my other half is currently in China), so I decided to spread the love further than one day by highlighting some of the fantastic games currently vying for funds on Kickstarter. And for the price of a romantic gourmet burger, you could help finance a cool game that you actually get to play. Thankfully, not all the projects I picked are lovey-dovey.
We start things off with the mass-surveillance thriller Need to Know from Monomyth Games. Next, there is the surreal first-person exploration adventure Essence: The Resurrection by ONEVISION. Finally, we have an interesting isometric sandbox sim called A Place for the Unwilling by MadeInSpain Games. (more…)
Pre-order Doom 2016 on Xbox Games Store and get original Doom and Doom II for free
Doom first delivered a shotgun blast of innovation to the game industry all the way back in 1993. Which means that many of today’s most voracious first person shooter fans weren’t even alive when John Carmack, John Romero, and the rest of id Software asked players to fight back against the denizens of Hell with a minigun and a whole lot of moxie.
Thankfully, anyone who was planning to pre-order the upcoming reboot through the Xbox Games Store will receive a Doom history lesson at no additional charge, as every Xbox One owners who pre-purchases Doom 2016 will receive a download code for the original Doom and Doom II: Hell On Earth for the Xbox Live Arcade. Best of all, both games will be backwards compatible on the Xbox One.
Players who pre-order Doom 2016 on the Xbox One (or any other platform) will also receive the “Demon Multiplayer Pack,” which includes a “unique Demon-themed armor set with three skin variations, six Hack Modules, six exclusive metallic paint colors, and three id logo patterns that can be applied to weapons and armor.”
Bethesda will digitally deliver the download codes for both games to your Xbox Live inbox roughly a week after Doom’s May 13th launch date.
Posted in News, Xbox One
Tagged Doom (1993), Doom (2016)
Crowdfunding campaign for Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch launches on Fig
Snootchie bootchies… Kevin Smith is making a video game! The Clerks director has teamed up with Interabang Entertainment to develop Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch, a 2.5D beat ’em up about a cursed mall. With an art style inspired by Clerks: The Animated Series, Chronic Blunt Punch might just be the Askewniverse game adaptation we’ve been waiting for:
Jay and Silent Bob’s customers are gone and they’re on a mission to find out why. Their search soon leads them to the sparkling new mega-mall which is almost a city unto itself complete with apartments, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. On the surface, the mall seems a Utopia. But as our heroes soon discover once a would-be patron of this paradise enters they find they can’t make their way out. Before long the power of the place mesmerizes them and they no longer remember their lives before becoming permanent citizens of The Galleria. Who’s responsible for this diabolical labyrinth?! What do they want?! Will Jay and Silent Bob ever find the Orange Julius?! Only time will tell…
Interabang has launched a crowdfunding campaign for Chronic Blunt Punch through Fig, and the developer is seeking $400,000 by March 31. Like Fig’s previous crowdfunding success story, Pyschonauts 2, prospective backers will be able to pledge money through a variety of reward tiers or invest in the final product and receive some of the profit back further down the line. As of this writing, the campaign has amassed $25,000 in pledges and investments.
In addition to “voicing” Silent Bob, Smith will serve as a consultant on the game to ensure it captures his signature vulgar streak. He’ll be joined in the recording booth by his hetero life mate, Jason Mewes, who will provide Jay’s unmistakable voice. Players will be able to team-up in a two-player co-op mode and they’ll also be able to use their words to drive the story in new directions with the Convo Combo Combat mechanic. According to Interabang, the mechanic “changes the dynamics of enemy showdowns through cutting insults combined with an intricate facial animation system that bonds dynamic fighting with timed phrase matching.”
If Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch reaches its crowdfunding goal, the plan is to release it for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One in February 2018.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch
Bethesda will add official mod support to Fallout 4 (on PC) in April; Console release to lag one-two months behind
Bethesda’s Todd Howard is a very busy man. But the company’s Studio Director found the time to sit down for a discussion with Game Informer recently, where he revealed that official mod support for the PC version of Fallout 4, AKA the Creation Kit, will be available in April. Howard also confirmed that PS4 and Xbox One owners will get a chance to play with Fallout 4’s mod tools, but they likely won’t be ready until May or June:
Game Informer: When can we expect to see mods, especially on console side?
Howard: Our goal is between the first two DLCs. It’ll go up at that time on PC. In April. All of that stuff will go up on PC. People are beta testing it. There’ll be a lag on consoles. We want to get it up on PC and have it work. It’ll probably be a good month before it hits Xbox One, and another month for PlayStation 4.
Howard was a huge presence at last week’s DICE Awards, when he trudged to the stage on Thursday to collect “Game of the Year” honors for Fallout 4. That same day, he also had a conversation with comedian Pete Holmes and told the audience that Bethesda is currently working on three unannounced projects that are, in his words, “big and crazy.”
Tom Clancy’s The Division Beta Impressions: Fear and Loathing in New York City
After watching Ubisoft’s E3 2015 playthrough last year, I started up the weekend-long beta for Tom Clancy’s The Division with some vague memories of a very traditional looking third-person shooter with an online mode designed to encourage uneasy alliances. Now that I have played The Division, I can confirm that it does indeed play like most other third-person shooters, and yes, it looks about as uninspiring as most of them, too. Fortunately, The Division’s hook, “The Dark Zone,” does occasionally deliver great, tense moments in which you’ll be wondering which member of your hastily-assembled team is going to try to kill everyone and make off with the loot. And who knows? Sometimes, it might even be you. (more…)
Check out the first trailer for The Arbiter in Killer Instinct Season 3
Killer Instinct Season 3 will kick off on the Xbox One and PC next month, but the upcoming addition of franchise mainstays Kim Wu, Tusk, and Gargos might be overshadowed by a pair of previously-confirmed guest characters.
Microsoft and Iron Galaxy unveiled Rash (of Battletoads fame) last year, and now we’ve been given our first look at The Arbiter’s Killer Instinct debut. Unfortunately, it sounds like Keith David won’t step up to the microphone for the character in Killer Instinct Season 3.
Iron Galaxy usually requires two-to-three months of development time to bring each new character to Killer Instinct, so it might be a while before we get to play as The Arbiter. Though you never know, the team might break with tradition and release the entire character set for Season 3 all in one fell swoop. Probably not, but I can dream, right?
Posted in News, PC, Xbox One
Tagged Killer Instinct
New Releases: Far Cry Primal, PvZ Garden Warfare 2, Mega Man Legacy Collection, More
A trip back to the Stone Age, anthropomorphic plants with guns, and a compilation of some of the greatest platformers ever sit atop this week’s new release roundup.
Publishers are easily swayed by trends and it’s not hard to slot many of the most popular shooters of the last 15 years into three well-defined eras. After Medal of Honor, everyone rushed to produce a shooter set during World World II. After Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the hardware and tactics of the modern military became the focus. And after Deus Ex: Human Revolution, many shooters have seen shifted to the “not-so-distant future.”
But Ubisoft wants to go back… even further back than the European Theater. And that’s why Far Cry: Primal (PS4, Xbox One) features a battle between warring tribes of Stone Age warriors. Trading machine guns and laser rifles for stone knives and spears, Far Cry: Primal also lets players train a prehistoric tiger to do their dirty work for them.
And on the subject of bizarre shooters, EA and PopCap Games are back this week with another entry in the Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare saga. Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One) is a time-hopping trip that also adds back in the single-player modes that its predecessor was lacking.
Finally this week, Capcom brought together the first six Mega Man games for the retail release of the Mega Man Legacy Collection (3DS, PS4, Xbox One). If you didn’t play it last year, you should definitely stop putting it off.
A complete list of this week’s new releases can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Far Cry: Primal, Mega Man Legacy Collection, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2