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Last week saw the return of an annual event that gamers, game developers and game enthusiasts look forward to each year, a prestigious show that celebrates the achievements of the games that have wowed us, and the people behind them. I speak, of course, about the BAFTA Video Game Awards. This year’s BAFTAs saw the true potential of Indie games, with the small games beating out some of the behemoths in the industry in true David versus Goliath fashion. The…

Although Guardians of Middle-Earth was far from perfect, its biggest strength was in bringing the MOBA genre so successfully to consoles. Perhaps it’s just as impressive to see how well Warner Bros. and Monolith are continuing to support it. They’ve announced today that they’re releasing Isengard’s very own wizard of many colours, Saruman, as a purchasable guardian. You’ll be able to make buy him from both the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live. Saruman is part of the Enchanter class, although…

An infographic released by Square Enix today proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the online portion of the excellent Hitman Absolution is doing very well. Players have collectively earned 1.77 Trillion dollars, and the most played levels have collectively seen nearly 1.5 million plays. It also showed that Spain has the world’s most efficient snipers by some 20 kills per user. If there was a country in Europe to be suspicious of, we may just have found it.…

Maxis and EA have made it pretty clear that “just making SimCity offline” is not going to happen. Not only would this negate all of the cloud features and DRM, but they also claim that it’s actually completely impossible, that from the very beginning always-on was planned to be a part of the base code. That meant the only option was for people to wait for them to deal with server issues and hope that everything eventually works out for…

Geoff Keighley is today interviewing the head of Moby Dick Studios. The most impressive thing about this is that the mysterious Joakim Mogren almost certainly doesn’t exist… Keighley tweeted earlier that he was going out to meet the lead on The Phantom Pain, the game that many concluded was actually Metal Gear Solid V. Joakim is, of course, an anagram of Kojima and anybody with even a passing interest in the Metal Gear series recognized references and flat out signs…

In the middle of 2012, LucasArts registered a domain for Star Wars: First Assault - it was around the same time they registered 1313. We found out a little more about First Assault in October, when a picture leaked from XBLA and someone close to the project gave a few details. First Assault was a multiplayer shooter that would lay the foundation for a possible Battlefront III. It has now been put on indefinite hold.

Square Enix released Final Fantasy VII for PC last year, and while it never made it to Steam, there was almost definitely reason to think it would. For whatever reason, it never happened. Someone has found something interesting in the Steam back-end though: a set of very specific achievements.

The big issue for the PlayStation 4 is its lack of offline backwards compatibility. It’s the most often repeated complaint, often followed some variation of the phrase “it’s not a deal breaker, but really Sony should have made more of an effort.”

SimCity seems to have caused a lot of issues for many players, but EA have issued a statement saying that everything should be fixed in a matter of hours. Lucy Bradshaw, a general manager at Maxis, posted an update at the EA blog. Here are some quotes which describe the current situation:“The server issues which began at launch have improved significantly as we added more capacity.  But some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we’re working fast…

It was one of those things that was just flat-out fun to watch. After days of complaints and bad PR against EA and the inability to play a single player game of SimCity without instead being blocked from the server, one person hitting a forum and trying to explain the situation a little might not sound too far-fetched. When that person’s name is GlassHouse – the name of the SimCity engine – and they’ve only ever posted good things about…