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Interview: Steve Jackson, role-playing game titan
Feature There aren’t many interviews – particularly when it comes to those offered because someone has a new video game to promote – that take place at the home of the interviewee. Such was the case, however, when I went to meet Steve Jackson. A man who, along with university chum Ian Livingstone, not only founded Games Workshop, but …
Thirty-five years ago today: Space Invaders conquer the Earth
Antique Code Show Tomohiro Nishikado already had a string of almost a dozen arcade games under his belt when he started on what was to become the best remembered - certainly the most played - game he was ever to create: Space Invaders, released in Japan 35 years ago this month.
Nishikado was an engineer who had joined vending machine company …
Exclusive Halo game coming to Windows 8 and WinPhone 8
Microsoft is looking to woo gamers over to its latest mobile platforms by releasing a new entry in its popular Halo franchise exclusively for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.
Halo: Spartan Assault will be a completely new game with a new story featuring familiar characters from the franchise, set in the years between Halo 3 and …
EVE Online OFFLINE: Wannabe Capt Kirks clobbered in cluster-ruck
Updated Multiplayer spaceship game EVE Online has taken its systems offline after it was warped out of shape by a debilitating denial-of-service attack.
In a statement on Facebook, its developers at CCP Games explained that it disconnected its server cluster from the internet as a precaution while it reviewed the integrity and defences …
Film crew plans dig to find lost burial ground of Atari's E.T.
Did Atari really bury millions of unsold videogame cartridges in the New Mexico desert in 1983? A documentary film crew aims to find out.
When the home videogames market went bust in 1982, the story goes, Atari was left saddled with millions of dollars in unsold Atari 2600 game consoles and cartridges.
Legend has it that …
Reports: New Xbox could DOOM second-hand games market
Updated Microsoft has been quite cagey about its plans for games licensing on the new Xbox One, but multiple reports now suggest there's going to be very little incentive for a second-hand games market anymore, and buyers could get stung with extra charges.
On Thursday Consoledeals.co.uk received a note from a senior member of a UK …
Is the next-gen console war already One?
Game Theory How else to start a Game Theory column other than with the Xbox One? With the dust starting to settle on news reports, I’ve gone for a rather more devil’s advocate approach to Microsoft’s unveiling. There’s also room for a review of Metro: Last Light, and a quick look at the splendid The Last of Us to whet the appetite for next …
Microsoft reveals Xbox One, the console that can read your heartbeat
Microsoft has shown off its next-generation gaming console, the Xbox One, with an upgraded Kinect and voice-recognition system, Skype integration, seamless switching between viewing modes, and a massive ramp-up in server support for the Live online community.
Xbox One One console to rule them all
"We've designed an all-in-one …
Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans
Nintendo has contacted fans who post walk-through videos of its games to YouTube, claiming all revenue from their efforts.
Gamer Zack Scott brought the practice to light in a Facebook post. Scott is a member of Let's Play, a community in which folks post "videos in which the author records the complete gameplay of a video game, …
Bureau of Stats releases educational SimClone game
Australia's Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released a game, Run That Town, that borrows heavily form SimCity to give players the chance to learn about the way statistics are used to shape policy.
The iOS-only game, offers the chance to pick an Australian postcode, then assume a quasi-mayoral role and juggle competing fiscal and …
Nvidia opens pre-orders for handheld Shield console three days early
Nvidia is now taking orders for its Shield handheld gaming console, three days early, though the Android-running Tegra-powered gadget won’t make its way into punters’ hands before the end of next month at the earliest.
Shield, which incorporates a clamshell design to hold a flip-up 5-inch, 1280 x 720 “retinal quality” screen, …
Google adds Atari Easter Egg for Breakout's birthday
Google has added a playable version of the early Atari game Breakout to its Image Search system to celebrate the game's 37th birthday.
To access the game go to the Google Image search page and enter "Atari breakout." The search results pages then form into five rows of bricks and the paddle and ball game commences under mouse …
Fighting Fantasy and fantastic fights in tights
Game Theory This month’s column has been unceremoniously cleft in twain. Why? Because, while May’s big news will undoubtedly revolve around Microsoft’s unveiling of its Xbox 360 successor, there are still a fine number of new releases to discuss.
Expect the second part of this month’s Games Theory right after the dust has settled on all …
First, the bad news: EA bags Star Wars games rights
Disney has made good on its promise to farm out future Star Wars games to an outside developer after scrapping LucasArts - and picked much-loved EA.
Electronic Arts will be able to build on its Jedi-inspired online multiplayer game Star Wars: The Old Republic now that the two entertainment giants have signed a multi-year …
Next Xbox won't need always-on internet after all
Widespread fears that Microsoft's next Xbox gaming console will require an always-on network connection may be unfounded, if a memo purportedly leaked from Redmond proves authentic.
Ars Technica claims to have had a peek at an all-hands memo sent to every current staffer working on "Durango," the codename for the next Xbox, …
Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson
Australian games developer Greenheart Games has released a cracked version of its own product – a games business simulation called “Game Dev Tycoon” – as an experiment in education of pirates and their reaction to a game that tells them their software-pinching ways are evil.
The startup outfit detailed its exploits here, …
Japan's naughty nurses scam free meals with mobile games
Japan’s male mobile gaming geeks are being taken for a ride in ever-greater numbers by hungry, cash-poor women who befriend them online before tricking them into paying for an expensive dinner for two.
This particularly devious scam is on the rise in the Land of the Rising Sun as single Japanese women struggle to pay the bills …
Next Xbox to be called ‘Xbox Infinity’... er... ‘Xbox’
The next Xbox will be called the Xbox Infinity, if a piccy of an allegedly leaked logo is to be believed.
Or perhaps it’ll just be plain Xbox, as a separate, equally unofficial, just as questionable logo suggests.
The Xbox Infinity - not actually a name, just the word XBOX with an infinity symbol superscript - and the tagline “ …
Microsoft to unveil new Xbox console on May 21
Microsoft has confirmed that it will unveil the next iteration of its Xbox gaming platform next month.
The new console will be revealed at a special press event that will take place at Microsoft's Redmond campus on May 21. The event will also be streamed on Xbox Live and Xbox.com and simulcast on Spike TV in the US and Canada …
Shut the CANUCK up! Sony offers $1m to hacked gamers
Canadian gamers affected by the hacking of Sony's Playstation Network have been offered compensation worth $1m by the entertainment giant.
An email titled “PSN-SOE-Canada Settlement” went out this week to gamers in Canada offering small sops to anyone affected by the outage in 2011.
Any Canadian who started an account on the …
Hardware hacker unifies 15 retro consoles in format frenzy
Most fans of old-skool videogame hardware rely on emulators for their retro gaming kicks. But not some fellow going by the handle Bacteria. Three years ago, he decided he needed 15 original games consoles in his living room and that he wanted them all in a single box.
Project Unity Game cube: the console offering a feast of …
'Sorry, I don't get the drama around having an always-on console'
Quotw This was the week when former British Prime Minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher died, setting the Twitosphere alight with opposing deluges of vitriol and veneration. The passing of the woman the media insists on referring to as "divisive" inspired a whole slew of people to post "Ding dong the witch is dead" tweets, while others …
Microsoft Xbox exec quits after ENRAGING the INTERWEBS
A high-flying Microsoft creative director has quit after enraging Xbox owners with a widely publicised tweet saying they should get used to consoles being constantly connected to to the internet.
A week ago, Adam Orth provoked the wrath of bedroom-bound gamers and industry experts alike after sharing his thoughts on the always- …
Sonic the Hedgehog
Antique Code Show Pocket-money saved, game ordered, wait for the postman and... nothing. A friend had the game already – rubbing salt into the wound – yet my journey of anticipation home from school each day still arrived at a big hole of spiky blue hedgehog nothingness. The original Sonic the Hedgehog was especially hyped throughout its long …
Gaming's favourite platters get another stir of the pot
Game Theory Another month goes by and, as ever, gaming isn’t short of its share of news and controversies. While recent reveals of Battlefield 4, Metal Gear Solid V, The Witcher 3 and Thief: Out of the Shadows show us what the future holds, there's no getting around the fact that we're currently entrenched in a present in which …
Aussie AI boffins let fly with Angry Birds automation code
Java code used in last year's Angry Birds artificial intelligence competition has been released into the wild.
The Australian National University's Artificial Intelligence Group last year decided the game would be a fine way of testing just how brainy artificial intelligences have become, because as anyone who's played the game …
'Pong' ported to 29-storey skyscraper 'screen'
Seventies gaming classic 'Pong' will reach a hitherto undreamed of scale later in April, when a version of the game is launched for play on lights adorning a skyscraper.
The building in question is Philadelphia's Cira Center, a 29-storey edifice opened in 2006. The building features a programmable array of 1500 light emitting …
Disney shutters Star Wars game unit with 200 layoffs
Just a few months after snapping up George Lucas' Star Wars empire, Disney is shutting down its game unit LucasArts and laying off around 200 employees.
All work has ceased on the two new games announced last year, Star Wars: 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault, although they could be revived if another game-maker takes over.
In …
Chinese game addict MURDERS girlfriend after she leaves him
A Chinese man with a gaming addiction has been convicted of murdering his girlfriend in a jealous rage and, after doing the deed, using her credit card to buy more time playing games.
Guangzhou Daily last week reported the case of one Xie Huachang, a Guangdong resident whose girlfriend decided to leave him after she found he …
The gaming habits of Reg readers revealed
A recent research study carried out by Freeform Dynamics we looked at the activities of Register readers with respect to smartphones, tablets, gaming and TV viewing.
In this article we willf ocus on what you told us about your gaming habits (that’s gaming in the sense of playing electronic games rather than gambling). In total …
El Reg bundles your gaming past into brace of ebooks
Games, we love 'em. We've played a fair few of them over the years too. And while we've seen graphics evolve from barely distinguishable bunches of pixels to elegantly sculpted and rendered 3D models, and virtual arenas expand from the limits of a screen's resolution to take in entire cityscapes, one thing is constant among all …
EA Origin vuln puts players at risk
A flaw in EA's Origin game store puts its 40 million or so users at risk of remote execution vulnerabilities
The vulnerability was described by security researchers Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferranta of ReVuln, in a paper released on Saturday.
Origin is the distribution platform behind just-launched SimCity, along with other …
SimCity owners get free game, EA will get A NEW CEO
Updated Maxis has published the list of the games it's offering free miffed 'Mayors' to compensate for SimCity's disastrous launch.
The offer was announced by Maxis on Sunday and lets existing customers and those who register before March 25 to get a free game along with their copy of SimCity as compensation. The downloads start on …
Trip the fight fantastic
Game Theory After a gap of five weeks or so since my last column the games industry has suddenly become a whole new animal. The next generation - well, Sony’s at least - has been revealed, and games publishers are finally able to talk about developing for a new breed of consoles without resorting to coded, barely voiced communications.
It’s …
Nelson Mandela's island prison hell to become game
Computer game violence continues to raise hackles around the world, having been fingered as a cause of gun violence in the USA and suggested as an underminer of civility just about everywhere else.
What to make, therefore, of an imminent game that will simulate nearly two decades of imprisonment and mind-numbing labour on a …
Modder hacks SimCity for unlimited offline play
A server glitch that rendered the latest version of SimCity virtually unplayable mere hours after its launch could have easily been avoided, players say – because contrary to its publisher's claims, the game doesn't actually require network access at all.
SimCity fans have been fuming over the outage, leading Amazon to pull the …
SimCity 4
Antique Code Show There’s a prevalent feeling throughout the whole of SimCity 4 that this is the game that Will Wright and Maxis would have liked to have made from day one. That is if graphics technology and PC hardware had been up to the task when the original SimCity was in development.
The 2003 release was expanded in both the macro and the …
Microsoft unveils even more tempting Kinect offering: Open source
First it was developer tools, then Kinect for the PC, now Microsoft's given hackers a shot at the Kinect code under an open-source license.
Specifically, Redmond has now released samples of the Kinect code under an Apache license to serve as a template for hackers building apps for the hands-free motion controller that's been …
Multimillionaire Brit games dev wants your cash for Shroud of the Avatar
Multimillionaire games developer, moon rover owner and space tourist Richard Garriott has taken to Kickstarter to try to get funding for his new video game.
Shroud of the Avatar game on Kickstarter
Garriott, aka Lord British, is looking for $1m to make Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, which gamers have been describing …
Boy Scouts get Game Design badge
The Boy Scouts of America have created a merit badge in Game Design.
Unveiled at tech-and-culture-fest SXSW, the badge's premise appears to be that playing a game can be just as challenging as traditional scouting activities like camping and hiking.
Playing games of all sorts, the Scouts say, “... challenges us to overcome long …
SimCity 3000
Antique Code Show I don’t know if my gaming habits had started to become dominated by RTS and FPS games by the time SimCity 3000 made its delayed debut in 1999, but for some reason I don’t recall it registering on my radar.
Strange, for not only was SimCity 2000 one of my favourite games - as it remains to this day - but its sequel was also a …
Proto Steam box may feel your arousal, hints Valve daddy
Game developer Valve will be pushing out prototypes of its living room download-and-play games box sometime in the next “three to four months”, company chief Gabe Newell has revealed.
The machine, dubbed the Steam Box, is essentially a Linux PC linked to Valve’s online games shop, Steam. Being a PC, it’s easy to build, but …
