GTA is well known for its jokes and spoofs, but this week it would appear someone has beaten Rockstar at its own game by falsely advertising the next installment in the GTA series. Over the past few days, GTA Online players have seen messages supposedly advertising GTA6 appear on the side of their screens. On the surface, the announcements appeared to be fairly legitimate: they used a font similar to the official Rockstar branding, and even included a link to Rockstar's website. Unsurprisingly, this was enough to hoodwink many players, who were ecstatic at the news of a new GTA game and rushed to Twitter to express their excitement.
Bungie is launching a new version of Destiny 2 for South Korea. It's named Destiny: Guardians, is exclusive to PC, and launches on 5th September. The game includes all Destiny 2 content released so far up to and including this September's Forsaken expansion, Korean esports site reported. It also includes a new microtransactions merchant. Destiny: Guardians' new shop character has been designed specifically for this Korean version. Her name is Yuna, and she will act as Korean players' merchant for the real-world money service Eververse. Here you'll be able to obtain XP boosts, weapons and armour.
Sega has given a final release date for its Shenmue HD collection, with the bundle that pairs the original two games with a gentle makeover coming to Xbox One, PS4 and PC on August 21st. The collection will release with a physical version on PS4 and Xbox One, with the PC remaining digital only - and by pre-ordering now for your platform of choice you can get a 10 per cent discount. The remasters allow players to enjoy a new interface, plus the ability to play with either the English or Japanese dubs - the first time players in the west will have had that option for the first Shenmue. Shenmue first came out for Sega's Dreamcast in 1999, its sequel following a couple of years later in 2001, and at the time it was the most expensive video game developed, and the last high profile game that legendary creator Yu Suzuki would make for the company that made his name.
Josef Fares, the lively and outspoken director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out, was not on EA's E3 stage this year, but he did get a mention. During , chief creative officer Patrick Söderland said: "A Way Out is such a huge success [having sold 1 million copies in roughly two weeks] that Josef and his team are expanding and moving into a new studio. Stories like this drive our industry, and it's why we will continue to work with independent developers to help them realise their dreams." A Way Out was published on the EA Originals label, hence the mention, but Söderlund's comments about the studio's future suggested the partnership lived on.
Epic has see-sawed once again to re-release Fortnite's Playground LTM (limited time mode) after the initial update encountered matchmaking issues. The LTM, which allows players to build and practise their skills in a relaxed environment, was originally released in last week's patch; but was mere hours after release when players encountered long queue times and error messages. According to Epic's official post on , players may still encounter some of these issues due to high player numbers. The developer has advised players to set their regions to 'auto-select' and re-queue if they encounter problems joining.
For two games that are pretty much nothing alike, it's suprisingly easy to find yourself pondering the differences, large and small, between Tetris and Lumines. Yes, one is a marathon while the other is a sprint. And yes, one is about things that collapse while the other is about things that, often maddeningly, remain fixed in place. Playing Lumines Remastered over the weekend, though, sat cross-legged on the bed as though it was 2005 all over again, I was struck by a new point of difference - or rather an old point of difference that I had simply never really noticed before. Something about the texture of your mistakes, I think. Oh yes, it's this: your mistakes feel very different in Tetris and Lumines. A mistake in Tetris is a terrible thing indeed. This is because of the sprint-like nature, I guess, the fact that Tetris is really the survival horror of the puzzle world. Mistakes stick around in Tetris for a very long time: those gaps remain in the bedrock beneath you, a bit like a group of old friends who are always ready to remind you of a terrible faux pas you made when you were 12 (just me?). The mixture of sprint and fixed in place means that Tetris doesn't forget anything. And it in turns means so much of the game is spent trying to undo earlier mistakes in a bit of a sweaty panic. And of course, because you're in a sweaty panic you make more mistakes. Tetris thrives on mistakes. So does Lumines, I think, but in Lumines your mistakes are often on your side. Lumines isn't about building a wall to unbuild a wall, it's about growing territory of a certain colour. You rotate the coloured sections of the blocks that fall so that the two colours for each stage will match up harmoniously before the timeline sweeps through. This is why some people get a bit bored with Lumines. They think you can beat the game indefinitely by dividing the screen up into sections and storing block types in specific silos, and inching your way to victory. I have never played golf, but I wonder if these Lumines min-maxers also turn up at Pebble Beach in early Spring or whenever it is people play golf and ask Ed "Porky" Oliver - I Googled him - if he'd considered just faxing the ball over to the hole.
It is, if nothing else, quite the double act. There's Id's Tim Willits, diminutive in stature yet towering in presence, and a man that, if you'd let him, would surely happily never stop talking. He's pacing to and fro around a meeting room on the upper floors of Avalanche's main studio, asking everyone assembled if they've got any good jokes about Stockholm, putting on a short one-man show before rattling his way through a presentation on Rage 2, the game his own studio Id is assisting Avalanche with. And then there's Avalanche's Magnus Nedfors - a towering man whose height is topped off by long, greying locks, yet his laconic, laid back demeanour can make it seem like he isn't there at all. They're an odd couple, this two, but in the partnership they've forged there may well be something approaching magic.
- both a beautiful game and beautiful collaboration with Native Alaskans to show a culture we otherwise wouldn't see. It touched hearts, it won awards, and now creator E-Line Media is back with something new. This something grew from from a creative discussion with the BBC during the making of nature documentary Blue Planet 2, which is brilliant go watch it. This turned into a collaboration and the something became Beyond Blue. Beyond Blue is a near-future ocean exploration game where you lead a team of scientists, equipped with tech we haven't quite reached in the real-world, in making groundbreaking discoveries about the deep waters of our world. There'll be a story as well as a strategic element as you juggle resources and pick missions based on your priorities.
The Elder Scrolls 6 location possibilities are... pretty vast. Or at least they are on first inspection of that super brief E3 2018 teaser trailer we saw - but we actually think it might be possible to narrow them down. Below, we're going to run through a series of potential locations and settings for the Elder Scrolls 6. We'll rule some out - at least in principle - and highlight some others that we think are particularly likely, and then finally, further below, we'll go through a quick rundown of everything else we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 - like its platforms and potential release date - so you've got all the information in one place. Do bear in mind though that, really, this is a bit of fun - even if we do start to get quite into it as we go...
Video games aren't that good at friends. Oh sure, they can be great for making them. Various multiplayer games have facilitated very real and valid friendships, but the games themselves scarcely contain an ounce of the same stuff in their characters. Bonds of friendship in-game are generally left to barks and grunts of command. Vermintide 2, despite taking place in the grimmest, darkest fantasy land there is, somehow manages the impossible and gives us a party of unlikely heroes whose bond feels terribly sincere. Vermintide 2 does a great job of forcing players to work together no matter which hero you choose to play as. No weapon or class reigns supreme and only a combination will see you survive the hordes of rat-men. This isn't the first co-op game to, well, encourage cooperation. What makes it special though, what makes it so memorable and pleasant on every visit is the banter between characters. In the fiction of Warhammer pretty much all these characters should be at odds with each other, forced only by circumstance to work together. The first game saw them working out the kinks in their relationship, but this sequel shows them having bonded, veterans of the perpetual apocalypse. Snarky remarks and in-jokes linger, they rib each other plenty as all good friends do. Equally though, they constantly throw compliments to each other. Hearing "Look at the elf go!" from the party's witch as you tear into a horde of baddies is the sincere encouragement that puts a little smile on your face.
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 will launch for Xbox One on 11th July, developer Fatshark has announced, with an Xbox Insider open beta available from today. Vermintide 2 will also be an Xbox Game Pass game, so if you pay the £8 monthly sub, or regional equivalent, you'll be able to play the game from 11th July for free. But what about PlayStation 4? "Yes, the PS4 version is coming," a Fatshark spokesperson told me this morning. "We don't have a date for it yet, but will communicate that soon. We don't expect it to be too far away, but we want to do one system at a time to be able to maintain the highest quality of the releases."
Pining for a new Burnout? EA doesn't seem interested in having Criterion make a new one just yet. But we may soon get a couple of spiritual successors from the founders of the famed UK studio. Three Fields Entertainment, which is led by Criterion founders Fiona Sperry and Alex Ward, has announced Danger Zone 2 (the sequel to the studio's 2017 game ) and Dangerous Driving, both for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Danger Zone 2, due out in July, takes the crash testing of Danger Zone and puts onto real public roads. It's set on the freeways of the USA, the motorways of the UK and the autovias of Spain. There are 26 single-player levels set across 17 locations.
Arc System Works' superb fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ comes out on Nintendo Switch on 28th September. All the already-released DLC characters will be available to buy day one, publisher Bandai Namco said. If you pre-order you get immediate access to Goku and Vegeta SSGSS, and you get the Japanese version of obscure SNES game Dragon Ball Z: Super Butoden, which was released in Japan, France and Spain in 1993. It looks like this: And here's an image showing how it looks on Switch:
Minecraft's Better Together version finally launches today for Nintendo Switch, and a new trailer has dropped to play up its cross-platform capabilities. Xbox One and Nintendo Switch owners can now play Minecraft as if they were on the same platform but notably - as the trailer hammers home - it is just Nintendo and Xbox on board. Not Sony. Minecraft's Better Together Update (which is in fact an entirely new game, although free to existing owners) is also compatible with Minecraft on Windows 10, iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
Life is Strange 2's free prequel chapter, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, will be available to download next Monday, 25th June at 5pm UK time. So that's 6pm in Western Europe, or 9am Pacific and midday Eastern if you're in North America. Overall, it's a day earlier than planned - and the exact same timing for all platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
The Fortnite endgame has become a tad one-note. Anyone who's into the world's most popular game will know that late game strategy - most of the time - boils down to a building face-off with shotguns and rocket launchers. Well, it sounds like developer Epic knows this, too - and wants Fortnite's endgame to be about more. In titled Counterplay and Play Styles, Epic said it plans to make changes to the battle royale game to give players multiple ways to counter each other in combat and create more strategies to win the game.
Is there anything more wonderful in gaming than those rare moments where hardware and software come together in perfect unison? Call it synergy, if you must, but really it's some fantastical alchemy at work where both parts help elevate each other, until you've got something truly special. Back in 2004, Q Entertainment and producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Lumines offered up one of those moments, arriving in tandem with the PSP and becoming an unexpected highlight of the handheld's launch line-up. Perhaps it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. The PSP was billed as nothing less than Sony's attempt to do for portable gaming what the Walkman had done for portable music players, though that message got lost in a muddy mob of ill-advised attempts to get big console gaming on the go. Mizuguchi got it, though, and set about creating something in tune with that ideal: a puzzle game for the MTV generation, complete with pulsating pop art visuals and its own impeccable sense of style. Lumines was to be to the PSP what Tetris was to the Game Boy, or at least that's how the theory went. And at least that's how it played out in my house, where an import PSP left wanting for new games in the fallow first few months for the handheld became, quite simply, the Lumines machine. Other great games eventually came along to the PSP, of course, but an indelible connection had already been made; that glorious 16:9 TFT LCD screen was always meant to be paired with a decent set of headphones for a serious Lumines session.
Hi, I'm Wesley, and I was addicted to World of Warcraft. I'm not talking about a, 'I played this game a lot because it's fun' kind of thing. I'm talking about a good old-fashioned, almost ruined my life kind of thing. Hold onto your legendary hats, things are about to get serious. In early 2005 I started playing World of Warcraft with a few friends. I was living at my family home in South London with my then girlfriend of over five years. I was trying to make it as a journalist at a mainstream Sunday newspaper, but was told that in order to progress, I'd need to get some proper journalism training. So, I dropped down to one day a week at the paper, got some freelance media analysis work for some extra money, and thought about doing a course.