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
Insert Quarter: Should Assassin’s Creed: Unity Be Recalled?
Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.
Can you recall a video game because it’s too buggy? It’s an interesting question. For the most part, a software purchase is considered an “as is” piece of property by publishers, retailers, and most of the general public. Whether you prefer to use “Buyer Beware,” or the classier sounding “Caveat Emptor,” a software program is considered yours as soon as you break the seal. But the bugs found in Assassin’s Creed: Unity aren’t like the average glitches found in your average game. And Erik Kain of Forbes wonders if it’s time Ubisoft issued a full recall instead of resorting to patch after patch after patch:
At this point we sort of take it all for granted, however. Another buggy game release? Color me surprised. We’ve done this so many times before it hardly makes us bat an eye.
But we wouldn’t stand for it in any other industry.
The full article is available at Forbes.
Posted in Insert Quarter, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Assassin's Creed: Unity
Xbox Store Today: Thomas Was Alone, Pier Solar and the Great Architects
Two new indie titles have made their way to the Xbox One today thanks to the ID@Xbox program.
First up is Thomas Was Alone, Mike Bithell’s strangely compelling story of rectangles and squares. You might not think that a platformer starring a “sentient AI” represented by a rectangle could be compelling, but then the narration hits you. Also available today is Pier Solar and the Great Architects, Watermelon’s Genesis-era RPG that was originally released in 2010 and is now available for new-gen consoles.
More information on both games can be found after the break. (more…)
Posted in News, Xbox One
Tagged Thomas Was Alone
Nominees for the 2014 Game Awards have been announced
Geoff Keighley’s VGX Awards replacement, The Game Awards, got a little more real as the show’s advisory board announced its inaugural list of nominees. Dozens of games were nominated in 16 categories, with six titles (Dark Souls II, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Destiny, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) notching three nominations apiece. Dark Souls II, Hearthstone, and Shadow of Mordor are all competing in the Game of the Year category against Bayonetta 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition.
A complete list of nominees can be found after the break. The 2014 Game Awards will take place on December 5 at the AXIS Theater in Las Vegas. (more…)
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.
Get a lesson in “Puzzles 101” in new Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris dev diary
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was one of 2010’s biggest surprises and I was shocked a second time when Square Enix announced that a sequel was being prepped for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One this Fall. With the December 9 launch of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris just a few weeks away, developer Crystal Dynamics has released a new Developer Diary delving into the game’s intricate puzzle mechanics.
Executive Producer Scot Amos and Lead Level Designer Jeff Wajcs discuss all the environmental hazards like boulders, floor spikes, and falling platforms while also focusing on the new challenges present in creating a puzzle fit for four players.
Posted in News, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Tagged Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris
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?