Posts By Mat Growcott

Aliens: Colonial Marines wasn’t very well received, and with good reason – the game sucked. This was especially so for PC, where the developers had seemingly took everything that was good about the console version – and it was slim pickings there as well – and made it worse. Even the graphics seemed to take a knock, in part thanks to FPS glitches that some suffered from. Gearbox have this morning announced that they’re bringing a ...

Although not quite as convincing as the achievements that were found for Final Fantasy VIII, there’s almost certainly something happening with Final Fantasy VII on Steam. The game was first mentioned in the registry in 2010, and although there was reason to believe the iconic RPG would be coming to Steam last year, Square Enix instead opted to release through their own digital distribution store. It seems like a strange move to suddenly release a Steam ...

EA said it couldn’t be done, but a SimCity modder has proven them wrong – a mere week after release. Worse, he was also able to edit outside of his city and have it save, proving that a bigger city size would be easily implemented as well. By using the debug mode, modder UKAzzer managed to disprove many of EA’s statements on the DRM false. For now you still need to reconnect to the server if you want to save,…

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It's difficult to get an unbiased view on piracy. People who download content illegally are either thieves or are paving the way for a more consumer-friendly tomorrow; publishers are either protecting their intellectual property or are pushing honest gamers to jump through hoops in order to enjoy their purchase (often when pirates get access without any issue). Sometimes the line between the two options blurs and all the statements end up being true. This has ...

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.