"Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt", which opens at London's V&A museum next Saturday, 8th September, is not the first exhibition dedicated to games by an august institution of art and design. Many reading this might remember "Game On", an exhibition staged by the Barbican in 2002 (and touring ever since, more or less) which featured such precious artifacts as the PDP-10 mainframe used to play Spacewar! in 1962 and an original Tempest arcade cabinet, almost all of it playable. It was an authoritative and tactile walk through video game history that couldn't help but electrify an existing love of the medium.
Hello! I have an update for you on playable games and developer sessions at EGX 2018 - the gaming event owned and operated by our parent company Gamer Network. EGX returns to the NEC in Birmingham on 20th to 23rd September this year.
I remember my teens, my early twenties. I'm not talking about the febrile highs or the painful embarrassments - although I remember those too - but the sheer aimlessness, the great stretches of unoccupied time, the loafing. Waiting for the one daily bus into town from the Northamptonshire village where I grew up and killing time window-shopping until the one bus back; later, as a procrastinating student, ambling down Coney Street in York, pastry in hand, knowing my afternoon would end in me clocking the Super Mario 64 demo for the umpteenth time in GAME, as if I didn't have anything better to do. Maybe I didn't.
"Not my warchief," says the goblin rogue who is moonwalking around impatiently as we listen to some dialogue. We're playing The Battle for Lordaeron, the scenario which introduces Battle for Azeroth, World of Warcraft's latest and seventh expansion. He's talking about Sylvanas Windrunner, undead elf, queen of the Forsaken, and current Warchief of the Horde, one of WOW's two quarrelsome player factions.
Blizzard has confirmed that it is bringing Diablo 3 to Nintendo Switch, as Eurogamer reported earlier this year. The news was shared with press this week under an embargo which was broken by one outlet yesterday, though we can now reveal some additional details - and we'll be able to bring you hands-on impressions from Gamescom next week.
It's been a long time since I've played a Formula One game, and in truth I've seldom enjoyed them that much - which, as a fan of both racing games and the sport, seemed a shame. There was something alienating, I found, in the monotonously fast machinery with its nervy handling and in the dry pageantry of the licence. The championship season was the main hook, but it was exhaustingly long and, without the variety and sense of progression offered by broader racing games, its payoff seemed distant.
Nintendo has revealed the third kit in its Labo series of cardboard constuctions for Switch, and the first new one since Labo launched. Toy-Con 03: Vehicle Kit lets you build bespoke controllers for a car, airplane and submarine which can be played with in the accompanying software.
Developer Turn 10 has announced that it will be removing Prize Crates - Forza Motorsport 7's version of loot boxes - from the game this coming winter.
I'm delighted to announce that Bendix Engmann has joined Eurogamer as the newest member of our video team! Bendix will join Aoife, Ian and Johnny on our YouTube channel, and I'm sure she'll pop up from time to time here on the site too.
Hello! Excuse the interruption, but the tech team here at work has asked me to draw your attention to a vacancy we have open and a great opportunity to join the Gamer Network family.
It's launch morning for The Crew 2, and I've logged in to do a final network test. The always-online racing game's predecessor had serious network issues on release, so I want to see if the new game is holding up. It's been stable playing with early access players this week, but would the influx of new people cause problems? So far, all is well (unless you're on Steam.) Players are popping up nearby, rather than halfway across the map as they have done during the sparsely populated early access period. They crawl their Lamborghinis up to my stationary 1993 Porsche and rev in wordless invitation to a drag race. They don't need to ask twice and we roar off up the Pacific coast road out of Malibu.
In all honesty, we weren't expecting much from E3 this year. Ahead of time, it bore all the hallmarks of an E3 the year before people start talking about new consoles. With the platform holders manoeuvring behind the scenes and the biggest games in development quietly readjusting their schedules as production managers try to suss out the logistics of going cross-gen or even fully next-gen, the big press conferences become exercises in misdirection. We knew Sony would have nothing new, we suspected Microsoft would have little and we knew Nintendo was focused on Smash Bros. and Pokémon.
Yesterday at E3, Aoife got to try out the Resident Evil 2 remake which had been unveiled with a spectacularly good trailer at Monday night's PlayStation showcase. The trailer didn't lie - this is shaping up to be a fantastic and terrifying reimagining of the horror classic.
I'm not going to quibble with Nintendo's policy, now long established, of addressing fans directly through a pre-recorded showcase at E3 rather than going through the rigmarole of a live event. Nor am I going to dispute that the Nintendo Direct videos that have proliferated through the gaming year to offer roundups, announcements and deep-dives work well for both Nintendo and its community; nor argue that it is a bad idea to spread these moments around rather than concentrate them in a single info-burst in June. They make Switch feel like the bustling, exciting platform it absolutely is.
There are a number of reasons why Sony's PlayStation showcase at this year's E3 was a little odd - and to be fair to the electronics giant, it did warn us. A few weeks ago, Sony issued word that it would be taking a new approach, avoiding major first-party announcements and focusing on four games that had already broken cover at least a year previously: Spider-Man, The Last of Us Part 2, Death Stranding and Ghosts of Tsushima. (Days Gone, star of the show two years ago, seems to have been thrown under a bus - and it's probably for the best.)
From Software is making a game exclusively for PlayStation VR which was revealed in a trailer that screened after the end of Sony's E3 showcase. Because Sony aren't doing anything by the book this year, it seems.
Valve has chosen the middle of E3's PC Gaming Show to announce that it is launching Steam China in collaboration with local games operator Perfect World.
The Crew 2, Ubisoft's open-world multi-vehicle racing game, will have an open beta next week, just ahead of its 29th June launch.
It was a great show, moving at a brisk clip, unburdened with cringeworthy banter, peppered with noteworthy announcements and premieres, and positively stuffed with games: 50 of the things, a lot of them looking rather good. Just as significantly, it felt addressed to Xbox gamers directly, rather than pundits, analysts and stakeholders.
At its E3 conference, Bethesda announced that Fallout Shelter, its popular vault management spin-off, is being released for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch - and it's out now.
Microsoft announced Forza Horizon 4 at its E3 press conference, and it's out on October 2nd for Xbox One and Windows PC. It will be included with Xbox Game Pass.
EA announced another game for its EA Originals label at its E3 show today, and it's working once again with a small indie developer: Berlin's Jo-Mei Games.
Yesterday, in response to a couple of recent controversies, Valve announced that it would abandon its (few, vestigial) efforts to curate the content of games on its ubiquitous PC gaming platform, Steam. "We've decided that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store," Valve's Erik Johnson said in a blog post, "except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."
The main menu screen for Detroit: Become Human - Quantic Dream's new game about androids discovering free will and rising up against their human masters - features the face, stunningly well realised, of an android who talks directly to the player. The android looks like a young, pretty, white woman. She asks if we are enjoying ourselves, suggests we take a survey, jokes about the game save being corrupted. If you leave the menu on long enough, she changes the subject. Did we know about the underground railroad, the secret network which helped black slaves escape the antebellum South of the USA? Then she starts to sing, quietly, pleadingly: "Hold on just a little while longer, everything will be alright." It turns out this is a traditional gospel song. She might as well have burst into "We Shall Overcome."
Days Gone is the quintessential 2018 video game. Actually, to be precise and only a bit mean, it's the quintessential 2015 video game. It's an open-world zombie-apocalypse survival adventure with a hard-bitten rebel hero who has a code of honour and an upgradeable motorcycle. In the game, you scavenge and craft, shoot, drive and brawl, follow waypoints and get stuck on tree trunks. The rebel hero, who is called Deacon St John, growls things like, "I don't shoot women if I have a choice." The art strives for poetic decay but, for the most part, only musters a rural-trailer-park drabness. I played it four days ago and can't remember what Deacon looks like. The Last of Us it isn't, even though The Last of Us is clearly what it wants to be. And State of Decay. And Sons of Anarchy. And DayZ.
