Eurogamer in blog format - Retro

War's road to redemption begins.

Croteam's high-def update of the PC blasting classic gets a formal release date.

Rock Band gets light-hearted with the minifigs.

Dotnia experiences an expansion into an entirely new dimension.

Wheee! We're suckers for a bit of dog-fighting, especially with those crazy rear-prop driven Japanese planes.

Sneaky tactics and sharp headshots in the sequel to DICE's jolly battlefield romp.

Blood Bowl gets its first new race in the lithe and dangerous form of the Dark Elves.

As an ancient and powerful Umbra witch, Bayonetta has a few handy tricks up her tight sleeves. Here, learn about her flashy, demon-powered killer moves.

Video on demand streaming is coming to the PS3 very soon, with a massive wedge of entertainment waiting at your digital fingertips.

When you're heading into a life or death battle against uncaring robotic overlords, you want to be wearing the right dress.

Ever wanted a zebra-striped AK-47? Of course you have.

The PSP title slips out, somewhat in the shadow of its big brother.

Meet the two opposing forces of the Avatar world, and choose which one you'll be fighting for.

Series creator Chris Taylor discusses his sequel, and what improvements have been made over the original.

Two short CCTV vignettes with those lovable, psychopathic rogues, Kane and Lynch.

Tecmo KOEI offers a first look at Again, a DS game made by Hotel Dusk developer Cing. Story and contenxt are explained in this clip.

A fantastic job of a sequel, building on strengths and addressing weaknesses - AC II hits the shops this Friday.

The perpetually confined simians return in their first balance board title, jonesing for bananas like the dirty little potassium junkies they are.

With social network integration a hot topic, Sony pumps up its Facebook app.

The hub of all starship activity, the bridge is where the important stuff happens. That and engineering, but engineering is far less glamorous and doesn't have the comfy chairs.

"If he finds a warp, he can jump worlds!"

In the climactic scene of the 1989 film The Wizard, a withdrawn kid called Jimmy who's a preternaturally gifted videogame player is competing at a tournament. In the final, he has to play a game he's never played before: Super Mario Bros. 3, then unreleased in the US. For over five minutes of screen time, footage of the game looms large over a screaming audience while Jimmy's brother - suddenly possessed by the spirit of the back of the box - shouts tips and game features from the sidelines.

It's a silly scene in a bad, exploitative movie. It's full of implausibilities, it's badly acted and it's an embarrassingly naked advertisement for Nintendo. But it's also humbling. 20 years ago, the money shot in a major feature film was footage of a game. The game was presented accurately and honestly, discussed in gamers' terms, and the sight of it caused waves of excitement in the audience. Read more...

Call of Duty was an underdog. It is very hard to get your head into that space with Modern Warfare 2 looming over us all in full SAS gear, blowing cigar smoke in our ears, receiving more pre-orders than any other game in history and scaring all the other shooters into spring 2010, but it's true. The series that dared to lock horns with Medal of Honor was once a plucky young thing with aging Quake 3 Arena tech and publishing difficulties involving a split with EA and last-minute rescue by Activision.

That's not to say the guys at Infinity Ward didn't know exactly what they were doing. This was a studio made up of ex-2015 employees, the team that made Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, subject of today's other retrospective, in the first place. Still, they had enough ideas and heart to win rookie studio of the year at the Games Developers Choice Awards, and it's nice how much of that still shines through the original Call of Duty today.

All of the team's talent is right there on display. As an FPS the game is still neat, punchy and tactile, with Nazis crumpling excellently with each well-aimed shot. Flanking and suppressing manoeuvres are always rewarded, the guns make excellent noises, and the level design alternately seduces, teases, jokes with you, tests you, and occasionally about-faces and comes flailing at you with some ruinous bastard of a mission that never seems to end. Read more...

Sit old people down and ask them to tell the same story and you're generally in for a confusing time. Over the years what he said, what she said, times and places have become confused or expanded for entertainment value. The only rock solid facts that remain are the tale's foundations - whether that's to do with the number of bananas imported during the war years, or which of their neighbours put it around with the American Airmen.

Ask gamers of advancing years about what happened in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, development ancestor of this month's big release Modern Warfare 2, and you'll get similar responses. Everyone remembers the dash from cover to cover on Omaha beach and a few other notable scenes, but everything else is mired in things that may or may not have been in Call of Duty or Brothers in Arms, and the order in which it all takes place in-game will be entirely unstuck.

The deluge of WW2 shooters that followed Allied Assault (predominantly through the wares of Infinity Ward, the splinter group that had been a huge chunk of MOH creators 2015, or EA's attempts to spin out its franchise) has not only meant that gameplay locations in Northern France have been utterly rinsed, but nigh-on FIFA-esque yearly WW2 updates also mean that there was rarely any particular reason to go back to the game that first introduced the glorious ping of an M1 Garand reload. Read more...

When you think Halloween you might not immediately think Police Quest III. In fact, when asked to name a classic adventure game there's a fairly good chance this would appear far down most people's lists. Further, I wonder how many people now even know that the long-running Vivendi SWAT series began as four point-and-click adventures?

Police Quest in fact reaches back as far as 1987, when the original parser-based adventure was made by Sierra in collaboration with ex-police officer Jim Walls. Aiming to create something more realistic the game followed Walls' own real-life experiences, as well as strict police procedure. Police officer Sonny Bonds begins as a traffic cop, but soon finds himself working a homicide case involving drug dealer Jessie Bains.

The second game followed the same motifs, with Bains having escaped from prison and after Bonds and his girlfriend Marie. (Scandalously, Marie was a prostitute in the first game who had aided Bonds.) This time the procedure and realism is ramped up to a ludicrous degree. By Police Quest III: The Kindred, Bains is dead, Sonny and Marie are married, and despite being promoted to Sergeant he finds himself back on traffic duty at the start. Read more...

Trade secret: for the last 10 years, reviewing PC flight games has been a piece of cake. Step one - rabbit on about the fun-quotient, physics, visuals, missions and multiplayer for a bit. Step two - slip on the knuckledusters and deliver the kidney punch: "Of course, if you're after superlative sky thrills, you're still far better off with Crimson Skies."

One of the reasons why the likes of Blazing Angels, Secret Weapons Over Normandy, HAWX and Heroes Over Europe have never managed to topple this cloud-couched charmer is that none of them have half its character. Set in an alternate 1930s where gangs of air pirates prey on the giant zeppelins that have superseded ships and trains, the game has a freshness and coherence to its fiction that makes most World War II or modern backdrops seem ditchwater-dull. Zipper Interactive can't take all the credit for the shimmering lore. Much of the inspiration came direct from Jordan Weisman and Michael Stackpole's 1998 board-game, which in turn enthusiastically plundered the treasure chamber that is American pulp radio, cinema and literature.

The brilliant intro newsreel illustrates just how skilfully the developers mix history with hogwash. It also hints at another of the game's accomplishments - its characters. In a genre where the flying machines often seem to have more personality than the people piloting them, heroes like Nathan Zachary are worth their weight in hijacked Russian bullion. Read more...

For those who realised what was going on, the 1997 release of Bushido Blade was a scary time. This was a fork in the road for fighting games. This title was taking a stand against everything we knew, and with luck it could have torn a rift in the entire genre. We watched Bushido Blade leap forward, beginning its attack. A bird took flight from a tree. The breeze stilled as we held our breath. All was silence.

Over the next year we watched Bushido Blade fail to muster the attention it should have - we saw the game drop its sword, fall to its knees, and cough out a crap sequel. That was that. All of Bushido Blade's training and secret techniques would be lost forever to the games industry.

And that hurt. Lord, it still hurts to this day. Every Tekken and Virtua Fighter brings a little soul-sting of what could have been. If one of your flatmates comes home to see you playing the new Soul Calibur and you notice the faintest hint of a tear forming in his eye, you know you're looking at a Bushido Blade fan. Read more...

Let me attempt to walk you through the order in which the Jedi Knight games appeared. It began with Star Wars: Dark Forces featuring Kyle Katarn's adventures, working in parallel with the original Star Wars films.

Kyle was but a soldier back then, but soon showed a propensity for the Force, which brings us to this, the peculiarly named Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. This is not to be confused with the expansion pack, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith. Nor indeed Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, which was of course followed by Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. Erk. We shall call this game Jedi Knight, and all shall understand.

1997's Jedi Knight picks up a year after the end of Return of the Jedi. Katarn learns that a Dark Jedi, Jerec, has killed his father. Returning to his father's home he learns details of a map to the Valley of the Jedi where he will be able to avenge his father's demise, and rather significantly, gets given a lightsabre. Read more...

Three pads. The collective price of Rare's Blast Corps among my circle of school-friends. Three pads, their triple prongs shattered, their analogue sticks hanging floppy, detached from their housings by countless forceful smashings. Three pads, added to the exorbitant price of an N64 early-era release. Three entire pads, ruined, all for this game. Was it worth the expense and the disapproving parents? Worth it for Blast Corps? Totally.

A bit of context might be necessary. It's 1997! The Nintendo 64 has made its debut! It's world-smashing, and synapse-blowing! It's not actually any of those, but bear with me for now. For expectant players, there's the genuinely, truly, unquestionably classic Super Mario 64 and there's...! Well, there's not much else. As a compulsory-education aged proto-fanboy, I was desperate for N64 software to prove my obvious superiority over my friends who'd had the temerity to purchase another company's product. Those morons! Did they not know? Sixty four bits! SIXTY FOUR!

So, obviously, any new cartridge, no matter how dodgy, was jumped on as the next saviour of gaming. Exercising my hyperbole muscles, I extolled the virtues of a host of lazy ports and rushed cash-ins. Reading previews of Blast Corps, I warmed them up again, ready to defend the indefensible, a concept that read like something scooped from Michael Bay's wastepaper bin, something like this: Read more...

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl - let's drop all the dots - seemed to divide people. For every person I know who would enthuse and OMG about the atmospheric shooter, there would be another for whom the game had been a horrible mistake. This article, I suspect, isn't going to be for that second group of people. They've tasted this peculiar Ukrainian experience, and they won't be going back. For those who know the game, accept its foibles, and still find something worth spending time with, this will be a story they understand rather well. They'll probably be nodding along at the most salient points. Hopefully, however, we'll also have a third species of reader: the one who has yet to give it a try.

With Call of Pripyat, the third Stalker game, set for release later this year, the hour is ripe for both looking back on Shadow of Chernobyl, and for playing it. Call of Pripyat is the sequel to the events of the first game, while the Clear Sky - the flawed second game - acted as a prequel. I am inclined to hope that GSC's third excursion to the fictionalised exclusion zone will, at least in some way, match the accomplishments of the original. Clear Sky's lack of original content, peculiar atmosphere-breaking decisions, and badly-implemented faction warfare, meant that it was a step back from the first title. If you are one of those people who has not played any Stalker at all, then Clear Sky is something you can miss entirely.

That's not to say the original game, Shadow of Chernobyl, was in any way perfect. It was not the most subtle or elegantly designed of games, but its accomplishments were nevertheless numerous and awesome. While there were some bugs, and plenty of rough edges, GSC managed to create a game that was a singularity in the heavily populated landscape of shooters. Read more...

EA Sports boss Peter Moore has said he reckons the Dreamcast - 10 years old in the US today - paved the way for modern console internet services.

Writing in a blog looking back on his time at SEGA ("I trust my employers here at EA will allow me the indulgence of reminiscence and nostalgia"), Moore talked about the famously-lovely dead console's strengths and its demise from his perspective as boss of SEGA of America in 1999.

"I don't think it is an overstatement to say that the Dreamcast and its online network laid the ground for what we all take for granted today - online gameplay, linking innumerable gamers from around the world to play, compete and collaborate, as well as enabling new content to be delivered in addition to that which was delivered on the disc," he wrote, as a group of PC gamers chewing terrain and hitpoints suddenly froze mid-mouthful and gazed in his direction. Read more...

Powersliding, while a glorious, evocative word for petrolheads, proved an irritatingly elusive dynamic for driving game developers of the 1970s, eighties and very early nineties. Indeed, it was only the remarkable acceleration the genre benefited from as a result of videogaming's transition to 3D (coupled with the renewed processing power of enhanced hardware) that finally enabled the recreation of drifting a box of polygons sideways through a corner in a manner that felt satisfyingly convincing. Up to then, even the most fervent member of the Sprite Generation knew deep down that adding smoke and screeching effects à la OutRun just didn't cut it. If you're going to give the illusion of powersliding, you need to do it in three dimensions. Namco's absurdly popular Ridge Racer was an early front-runner in this regard and soon found a rapidly growing number of efforts from other publishers in its slipstream.

Forgive the historical introduction, but it is crucial in understanding why it would be another couple of years before developers felt confident enough to take driving games off-road. Because unlike circuit racing, powersliding is a fundamental component of rallying - get that wrong and it doesn't really matter how good the game's other elements are.

Thankfully, one particular game got it very right. Read more...

(A warning: Spoilers tend to go with the territory in retrospectives, but I'm going to reveal Stranger's Wrath's greatest twist early on in what follows. If you're planning on playing through this game for the pleasure of watching the plot unfold - and this is one of the few games where that wouldn't be an entirely self-destructive objective - you might want to do that before reading any more.)

Pluck a favourite game from the air, and picture yourself playing it. Who are you? If it's an FPS, you may well be a grizzled super-soldier, armour-clad and shaven-headed, despatching fiery justice and grim witticisms as you avenge some manner of contrived atrocity. If it's a cartoon platformer, you're probably a wise-cracking furry of some description, or a lovable robot whose arms keep falling offat the least appropriate time .

If it's fantasy, things get even easier to predict: are you a sexy lady spellcaster with sickly skin and a complex magical necklace, a grouchy dwarf weighed down under rusty armour, or a chirpy elf with glistening eyes and shafts of spiky hair? And, whatever the game, it's likely that you're an amnesiac of some kind - a real pandemic in the realms of digital adventuring - your slowly-returning memories meshing perfectly with your escalating move-set. Read more...

Amidst the dusty annals of video gaming, there are games only mentioned in hushed tones. There are games that are traded in back-alleys, games where the few extant copies are guarded by hooded, pale-faced men who worship the old gods Mintah, Ammygah and Com O'door. Games where only one person has ever played it, and he whispers its plot endlessly from his isolated, padded rooms in Bedlam...

Planescape Torment isn't one of those games.

Planescape is the game most likely to be name-dropped by PC journalists, after Deus Ex. Planescape is the game that took the cigarette-end of the superb Baldur's Gate engine-based games and immolated their legacy in a ball of conspicuous failure, followed shortly by the apparent collapse of its publisher, Interplay. Planescape is a game that, shamefacedly, one of our writers gave 7/10 to, though his reasons were just. Planescape is the only game I've ever borrowed and not given back (I do hope they're not reading...) Read more...

There tend to be two angles taken on a retro piece. Either someone goes back to a game they love and explains why they love it, or they go back to a well-known game and point out how it was actually quite flawed. I intend to take a slightly different approach to this reflection on Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. This is a piece about how it was actually quite flawed, and why I love it.

Adventure games are enjoying a moment of renewed interest of late - the timing is perfect. Handheld gaming devices find mass popularity at the same time as a vast "casual" gaming market is exposed. The gentle nature of the adventure is the ideal next step for those who've discovered they enjoy playing games via their iPhone or lunchtime forays into the lands of PopCap. And adventures are appropriately technically undemanding for the non-hardcore platforms, the DS, the Apple gadgets, and even the Wii. As LucasArts apparently goes through some sort of exorcism and discovers the sweet, good-natured child within, its adventures are appearing on Steam. Charles Cecil has remade the original Broken Sword for DS and Wii, and has just announced an updated Beneath A Steel Sky for the iPhone. And just recently Activision-Blizzard has added a few of the Sierra adventure collections onto Steam, et al.

The Space Quest games were one of Sierra's many ongoing adventure series, alongside King's Quest, Police Quest, Quest For Glory (sort of adventures), Leisure Suit Larry, and Gabriel Knight. Directly competing with LucasArts in a thriving genre, each publisher had taken a distinct approach, leapfrogging over each other with each generation. But as history looks back, LucasArts are undoubtedly declared the winners, with the Sierra games rarely given the same accolades and respect. It's tough to find anyone in the gaming industry who wasn't influenced or delighted by Day Of The Tentacle or Grim Fandango. It's much more tough to find someone who'd tell you it was Police Quest III that made them want to be a developer. (And they bloody well should, Police Quest III was fantastic.) Read more...

The first time I ever heard of the PC Engine was when a friend whose Chinese mate's uncle had imported one told me about it. Without having seen it, I just assumed it was some kind of Japanese computer for word processing's sake - not a console the size of a good sarnie, and certainly not one that ran cutting-edge games stored on credit cards. Any which way you sliced it, the PC Engine was something special. From five-player games and the eight-way d-pad sported by its controller to what was at the time easily the best console version of R-Type, NEC's machine was a little marvel. Shame, then, that hardly anybody in the UK had one (though, for some reason, everyone in France did).

Beam forward a couple of decades and the advent of completely legit online libraries of old games has been a great leveller, at once making rare consoles of the eighties and nineties accessible to an audience that otherwise might never have experienced their curious charms, and at the same time providing relatively cheap access to official versions of games whose exaggerated prices and/or genuine scarcity had made them the preserve of collector-mentalists with big wallets; the best example of this being the presence of Neo-Geo and PC Engine titles on the Wii's Virtual Console.

Now the Japanese branch of the PS Store is starting to explore the pre-PlayStation generation, stocking its Game Archives with a selection of PC Engine relics playable on both PS3 and PSP. There are four titles to begin with, each of which is an 8MB download. Since the Largest HuCard Ever held a piffling 2.5MB - that was Street Fighter II Dash, trivia fans - these files are likely bloated by their inclusion of digital instruction manuals, neatly abridged but ultimately pointless documents spanning three or four screens. Read more...

Let's get the controversial one out of the way first, along with this disclaimer: Super Smash Bros. is a fun game. I like it. In its day, it was even an original game, and something of a breakthrough for Nintendo in the way it used its stable of characters. Today, however, it's more of a curiosity than essential purchase.

Some will rear up in dismay at such sacrilege, and that's understandable. A lot of people have waited a long time for this chunky brawler to arrive on the Virtual Console, and a lot of people would like to be transported back to the halcyon days of 1999 for the price of 1000 Wii Points.

The trouble is that for some Nintendo games, the earliest incarnations are still the best. Mario Kart, for example, never really improved on its perfectly formed SNES debut. Smash Bros., on the other hand, has been rendered redundant by its own sequels. This one is a game still in search of its ideal incarnation, an idea yet to fully bear fruit. On the most basic level, the line-up of 12 characters can't help but seem slim when compared to the boosted rosters of Melee and Brawl, and the absence of auxiliary game modes leaves the single-player experience feeling undernourished. Read more...

How soon we forget. All LucasArts has to do is waltz through door with a smile on its face, a Monkey Island revamp and a decent Star Wars MMO under its arm, and the keys to a digital distribution service jangling in its pocket, and all of a sudden the past five years are forgotten. For years, absolutely nothing - and then suddenly she's back on the doorstep with a cheeky wink and a quip about selling me some fine leather jackets. Out of nowhere, we're rolling around in hay together and daring to dream of a new Day of the Tentacle, and more. As if the life that I wasted lying horizontal on the sofa and staring at the wallpaper hadn't been frittered away.

Well actually I haven't forgotten, you bitch. You left me. You grew tired of the things we cherished: pointing at verbs and combining objects, flying TIE fighters through asteroid fields and singing 'Lucas Arrrrrts!' in daft voices whenever we saw your logo. You walked out of that door and started chasing anything with a wallet or a nascent interest in pod-racing. And now, after so long searching for the fleeting affections of people who could never love you like I do, you've come crawling back to me. Good, old, dependable me.

I knew you'd come back though. I could, for want of a better phrase, feel the good in you. I thought for a while it was through basking in the reflected BioWare glory of Knights of the Old Republic - but no. I knew that your increasingly cold heart was still beating because of Republic Commando; the game that somehow and some way took comedy battle droids and gravel-voiced Kiwi clone troopers and rendered them vibrant, gritty and cool. Sure, it wasn't perfect, with its repeated action bursts and environments, its fixation with corridors and hangars and a paucity of enemy types - but it was effused with a spirit that couldn't be denied. And its music was brill too. Read more...

Atari has given Universal Pictures the nod to create a film based on the Asteroids IP.

Matthew Lopez, writer of Race to Witch Mountain and The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Lorenzo di Bonaventura - producer of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra - are confirmed as onboard, writes The Hollywood Reporter.

There are no details on plot or cast, although the licence involves little that the film studio must actually follow - the original arcade game had no plot, just a spaceship and some rocks. Read more...

I love the sunshine, and I've rather a taste for garlic, so I've decided I'm probably not a vampire. It's taken a while to be sure, though. The world of Bloodlines is so arresting, so marvellously cohesive, that it's difficult not to be entirely taken in. Despite the ageing visuals, the places and people of this gritty, gothic Los Angeles are frighteningly real. Read more...

BBC4 is making an "affectionately comic" TV drama celebrating the central rivalry in British home computing in the 1980s: between Sir Clive Sinclair, creator of the ZX Spectrum, and his former colleague Chris Curry who went on to design the BBC Micro.

The (very clever, if you ask us) working title for the 90-minute film is Syntax Era. It will star Alexander Armstrong of comedy duo Armstrong and Miller as Uncle Clive, and The Office's Martin Freeman as Curry.

Extra nostalgic value will be extracted by the use of archive footage from the time, including clips from the likes of John Craven's Newsround, according to The Guardian's report. Read more...