Nicholas Farinola

The Swine, priced appropriately at £1.69/$1.99 on Steam, deserves enough recognition to eventually get a console port.

Turtle Rock Studios, the development team behind Left 4 Dead and Evolve, has revealed new concept art for its upcoming co-op zombie FPS Back 4 Blood

NBA 2K21 has unveiled the cover art for its most expensive edition - Mamba Forever - priced at $99.99/£84.99 for both standard and next-generation consoles. Some users are unhappy with EA’s use of the late Kobe Bryant as a model for the game’s most expensive edition, while others got exactly what they wanted.

To this day, I continue to game on my launch Xbox One console from 2013, a true dinosaur that just barely chugs along. It’s ugly, clunky, massive and heavy - the antithesis of the recent Xbox One X. As we move past the halfway point of the year, developers' minds are on next gen, but I thought it would be fun to look at previous games that launched with a rather bad reputation.

Brave the nightmares of the Quiet Ones! Maid of Sker is an upcoming survival horror game from Wales Interactive, the developer/publisher behind the live action, cinematic interactive sci-fi thriller The Complex, Late Shift, and the VR survival shooter Time Carnage. And now, after a delay, it's got a new July release date confirmed.

One day after the leaked trailer for Crysis Remastered, which had a July 1st scheduled drop, publisher Crytek has released a statement on the game’s delay. Originally slated to release on July 23rd, Crysis Remastered was hit with severe backlash due to the overall quality of the remaster.

Appropriately priced, Hard West: Ultimate Edition on Xbox One offers hours of enjoyment throughout the eight unique campaign scenarios, for those craving an XCOM-like tactical action game - just without humanoid aliens and mass genocide, of course.

At its launch, Naughty Bear was seemingly overshadowed by E3 a couple of weeks prior. Major releases like Fallout: New Vegas and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty grabbed gamers’ attention months prior, whereas Naughty Bear, comparable to its terrible stealth mechanics, released on a whimper. The overwhelming influx of poor reviews didn’t help its case either. Yet, a decade later and here I am - writing about a game that continues to serve as a stress reliever or a rainy day substitute. That has to count for something, as I can’t say the same for most triple-A releases. 

The video game industry is growing exponentially, which is why I wanted to take a moment to analyze a rather trivial topic within this broader spectrum. Explosions. They’re cool, they’re grandiose, they’re spontaneous, yet often scripted, and give insight on the graphical capabilities of a particular console generation. From the genre-defining Grand Theft Auto III to the upcoming Destroy All Humans! Remake, explosions have evolved to something greater than poor SFX and pixelated images. Explosions now, well, look like explosions.

Conker: Live & Reloaded is a parent’s worst nightmare. A potty-mouthed, borderline-alcoholic squirrel tries to find his way back home after a disastrous night out at the local tavern with friends before they depart for “some war” - as Conker so innocently puts it. Back when this game was released exclusively for the original Xbox in June of 2005, I remember the big label at the bottom that read, “WARNING: This game is not made for anyone under age 17”. It’s as if the M for mature label and the war-ridden squirrel with a cigar hanging out of his mouth on top of a tank weren’t enough of an indicator already.

Will we ever experience Valorant on consoles? As someone who has dumped well over 50 hours into the beta and the 1.0 release, it’s tough to predict how successfully the game will translate.

Online toxicity is not a new concept. It’s been here since the earliest days of online gaming, and it does not intend on leaving in the near future. It’s a phenomenon that spans across all gaming platforms, whether you play with a controller or a mouse and keyboard.

As someone who loves to research game creation starting from ideation to execution, it amazes me that Counter-Strike started out as a mod for Valve’s Half Life 2 created by a couple of college kids, and has since become a well-known household name and esports staple.

These are the five most inventive horror games that offered some of the most memorable scares in recent memory.

Aside from the possible ethicality behind delaying the game due to its similar reality to our own, Resident Evil 3 is here. I have to point out, it was pretty surreal - a deadly virus, within a matter of a couple of months, has evolved into a global pandemic. Sound familiar? After breezing through its five-or-so-hour campaign, and diving head first into its asymmetrical multiplayer mode Resident Evil Resistance, I often questioned how it compares to the fantastic 2019 remake that is Resident Evil 2.