Editor
Oli is the editor of Eurogamer.net and likes to take things one word at a time. His friends call him The European, but that's just a coincidence. He's still playing Diablo 3.
Featured articles
Feature50 game releases to look forward to in 2019
Plus: listen to our podcast predictions for the year ahead.
FeatureThe 10 best game reissues of 2018
Remasters, remakes, re-releases and more.
FeatureWith Fortune Island, Forza Horizon 4 remains generous to a fault
XOXOX marks the spot.
Win a Smash Bros. edition Switch in Nintendo Life's Smash Battles Live tournament
UPDATE: Streaming live tonight!
Update: Today's the day! Nintendo Life's Alex and Arekkz will do battle, live on YouTube and Twitch at 7PM. Don't forget to tune in to see who picks Kirby, therefore automatically making them Sakurai's favourite to win.
Below finally has a release date - and it's next week
Up from the depths.
Below, the long-in-development dungeon crawler from Canadian indie studio Capybara, finally has a release date, and it's very soon. The game will be released on Xbox One and PC (on Steam) in just over a week's time, on Friday 14th December.
FeatureThe Water Temple isn't as difficult as we remember
Reentering Zelda: Ocarina of Time's infamous dungeon, 20 years on.
It's a bit like going back to visit your school as an adult: everything seems smaller than you remember.
When I booted up the World of Warcraft Classic demo for the first time a couple of weeks ago - while BlizzCon was still in full swing, and the servers were busy - the general chat channel was flooded with nostalgic longing. People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game's early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.
Digital FoundryThe evolution of Tetris - and why Tetris Effect is "the perfect game"
UPDATE: New video with real arcade hardware and more games!
UPDATE 14/11/18 9:20am: We've updated the original video with two additional games and made changes in accordance to Arika's posted guidelines on The Grand Master series. The video is now more accurate than ever with footage capture from original arcade hardware bringing it inline with the rest of the content featured.
Forza Horizon 4's first expansion goes off-shore
Fortune Island is out in December.
Playground Games has announced that the first of Forza Horizon 4's two expansions is called Fortune Island and will be released on 13th December.
It's hard to know where to start with this misbegotten game, a short interactive drama with a deaf protagonist and live-action sequences that succeeds only in replicating the experience of flicking between the Starz channel and a substandard PS2 brawler with the TV on mute. It is a terrible idea, poorly executed, which is insulting to the hard of hearing as well as the time of everyone who plays it.
Blizzard has announced an all-new Diablo game for mobile phones called Diablo Immortal, developed in partnership with the Chinese company NetEase.
Blizzard is remastering Warcraft 3 at last
And it's out next year.
Blizzard has announced the long-rumoured and much wished-for remaster of its classic real-time strategy game, Warcraft 3.
WOW Classic will be released in summer 2019
Subscribe to WOW to access it.
Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft Classic - a version of the game that restores it to how it was 14 years ago, before any of the expansions were released - will be released in summer 2019.
Destiny 2 is free on PC until 18th November
Download it and you can keep it forever.
Bungie has made the PC version of Destiny 2 free to download on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher, starting now, to celebrate the first anniversary of its launch.
Grip: Combat Racing review - unrefined tribute to cult racer Rollcage
Tyred and emotional.
It's a marvel of modern video game economics that 'spiritual successors' have gone from game-forum daydreams to a viable cottage industry. Fuelled by crowdfunding and early access schemes and by an ageing gaming population with strong nostalgic yearnings, this industry is ready to honour any dormant title that still stirs fond memories, no matter how obscure. Rather sweetly, it also sometimes brings the games' original creators back into game development after decades away.
FeatureDiablo 3's classes - ranked
On the Switching hour.
Diablo 3 launches on Nintendo Switch this week, and good Lord it is a lovely thing. Blizzard's opulent action RPG has been on a long journey since a difficult launch on PC in 2012, but it has been a genuine classic since 2014's Reaper of Souls expansion blew the doors off the original game's stodgy structure and balancing and introduced the endless Adventure Mode. Some of the groundwork for Reaper of Souls was laid by an impeccable console conversion in 2013, which had a generous feature set, a crisp interface and cleverly adapted controls. This console game has gathered up all Diablo 3's expansions and content updates since as it has rolled from one console generation to the next, and arrives on Switch with one hell of an added bonus: you can now play Diablo on the train, which is one of the better inventions of my lifetime.
How to unlock Zelda bonuses, including Ganondorf armour and a Cucco, on Diablo 3 for Switch.
Diablo 3 Zelda outfits are Nintendo bonuses exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version of the Eternal Collection.
Every week, Forza Horizon 4 features a new Forzathon weekly challenge. These charge you with owning a particular car and using it to complete a series of challenges. This past week's challenge has been called Horizon Anniversary and marks the release, six years ago this week, of the first Forza Horizon. To complete it, you need to own a 1995 Volkswagen Corrado VR6, rack up two million skill score with it, win a race in it, and carry on racing to earn a few clean racing skills.
Forza Horizon 4 brings the long-awaited route creator to the series this week
Plus a new story, bug fixes and more.
A route creator has been one of the most requested features for Forza Horizon since the open-world racing game series launched in 2012. Those requests are finally answered this week: Forza Horizon 4's route creator is added in a patch this Thursday, 25th October (as previously announced by Playground Games and confirmed in fresh patch notes today).
FeatureGoogle and Xbox just started the next platform war
And this one will be different.
Game streaming is coming. It's been coming since before we all laughed at OnLive and ignored PlayStation Now, and those too-little-too-soon gambits did nothing to impede its inevitable arrival. It is the future, in the sense that a credible and widely-used iteration of game streaming technology is around the corner and is something everyone reading this will probably end up using. Whether this future will prove mutually exclusive with other futures - those of games consoles and of digital platforms like Steam - is much more debatable. But it's coming regardless.
Emma Kent joins Eurogamer as our new reporter
Plus, Matt Wales goes permanent too.
Hi everyone. This is one of those welcome-new-staffers posts - with the twist that if you've been reading the site in recent months, you'll already know these writers' work.
RecommendedForza Horizon 4 review: racing great rolls gingerly into new era
British play land.
When you hit rank 40 in Forza Horizon 4, a series of events unlocks which is hosted by a vapid streamer character and framed as a countdown of the 10 greatest cars in video games. What it actually is is a tribute, by the developers at Playground Games, to their inspirations: the freewheeling worlds of Test Drive and Smuggler's Run and the sun-drenched zest of the Sega arcade classics OutRun, Daytona and Crazy Taxi. It's a gesture that could only have been more gracious if it had tipped its hat to the original car-culture collect-'em-up, Gran Turismo. The most sincere of the tributes, though, honours Project Gotham Racing by taking us back to the streets of Edinburgh for the first time since PGR2, and illustrating how that series' Kudos score, which rewarded stylish driving, inspired Forza Horizon's own skill point system.
FeatureForza Horizon 4 gets off to a slow start - but stick with it
Turning the corner.
As Forza Horizon 4 is the most online-focused game in this series to date, we'll be publishing our full review next week to give us an opportunity to play the game on more populated servers (early access begins this Friday, 28th September) and to experience a live season change. These early impressions are based on several days' play with a review copy of the game.
Here's a full list of the 265+ games playable at EGX this week
Fill your boots.
EGX 2018, the gaming event formerly known as the Eurogamer Expo and operated by our parent company Gamer Network, starts today at the NEC in Birmingham and runs for the next four days. And good Lord is there a lot to play there.
FeatureA major video games exhibition opens next week - and it's very different
London's V&A museum takes a radical approach.
"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.
EGX 2018: Soulcalibur, Total War, Sonic Racing and more get UK debuts
Plus developer sessions news.
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.
FeatureShenmue and the blissful boredom of being young
Notes from a first-time player.
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.
