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This week, Square Enix launched a new website to countdown to Final Fantasy 11’s 20th anniversary next year. The website features never-before-seen artwork, a full timeline of the game, and behind-the-scenes facts and commentary. Part of the website also features exclusive interviews with developers and others involved with FF11. The first interview is with former FF11 producer Hiromichi Tanaka who shared some details about the creation of the MMORPG, including the fact that it was almost not a numbered entry in the Final Fantasy series....

While crowdfunding campaigns can often turn out to be either a huge success that goes beyond all expectations, or a dismal failure that doesn’t even come close, there’s something special about a project that finds funding just in the nick of time. Today, that’s exactly what happened to Pixel Titans and their new game Strafe. Intended as a love letter to the fast-paced FPS action of yesteryear, Strafe announced itself to an unsuspecting audience with a vivid trailer that soon spread across the Internet....

It was nearly impossible not to fall in love with nine year-old Clementine, the girl that protagonist Lee found hiding out in her treehouse in season one of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead. No matter much affection the player might feel towards her, however, the multiple versions of The Walking Dead across various media have taught us one very painful lesson: the zombie apocalypse has no sympathy for little children....

So far, nothing has metastasized out of last week’s mysterious rumblings of a pending Uncharted announcement from Sony. Linking to a Norwegian url entitled “uutforsket” (which means “uncharted” in English), the late-1800s portrait image of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had many fans of Nathan Drake’s fortune hunting series expecting, among other things, new information on DLC for Uncharted 3. The teased date of March 22 came and went without a whisper, and Nansen disappeared from the limelight as if lost on a great Arctic adventure - revealing only an uneventful contest in Norway....

Fans of video games make memes that reference that funny parts of the game. Some memes make reference to the logic of first-person shooters. Players can use these memes to show their annoyance at certain mechanics in the game, while others use the memes to laugh about the parts of games that do not make sense. Players are sure to find something relatable when they look at any meme relating to first-person shooters....

It’s been over two decades, and for many, the ape-tastic Donkey Kong Country for SNES is still one of the kings of the jungle in terms of platforming prowess. In an era where Mario and Sonic were duking it out for supremacy, British studio Rare blasted onto the scene in a big way with one of the prettiest, most memorable titles of the 16-bit era. They managed to take Nintendo’s seemingly aged arcade romp and rebrand it as a platformer that was both flashy and fun....

10 I Lived The announcement of Metroid Dread was certainly a surprise. Although fans had known about the game for some time following an official page in the Official Nintendo Power magazine in 2005, with rumors of an E3 2005 or 2006 announcement coming soon after, such rumors were quickly halted when the game failed to appear at either convention. Although there were whispers of Nintendo potentially being able to bring it back around 2010-2012, nothing had been confirmed....

If you’re a fan of the Pokémon universe then I’m pretty sure you would have heard of Pokémon Go. Who am I kidding, you probably have your own gym, hundreds of Pokémon, and consider yourself to be the next Ash Ketchum at this point. The mobile phone game for Android and iOS allows you to become a trainer in your own neighborhood; scouting out virtual Pokémon wherever you go. It has become a worldwide phenomenon with new updates happening all the time, which add new items, events, and more and more Pokémon from all generations....

The Pokemon series has now been going for over 25 years — that’s older than a lot of its target market (I know, it hurts). While it has experienced significant popularity fluctuations over the years, Pokemon has never stopped releasing mainline games periodically. With each game promising to be bigger and better than the last, more content is added - more Pokemon, more towns, and of course, more moves. As one can imagine, after 25 years of adding more and more content, the series is getting a little bloated, with (as of the official count) 898 Pokemon and nearly that many different moves (and that’s just in the games)....

Skateboarding games were all the rage in the 2000s. Admittedly, the popularity died down extensively in the 2010s, but nonetheless, it seems the genre is making a huge comeback. EA has confirmed that it is working on a reboot of the legendary Skate series. Slated to appease fans of the original series and bring in new players, the Skate reboot has some massive shoes to fill. Fans of the original series have some major expectations....

When Watch Dogs: Legion was released in October 2020, it was amid a good time for open-world games. The desire for exploration has resulted in many big titles this year like Immortals Fenyx Rising and Cyberpunk 2077. Despite all this open-world hype, it was not a format that was seeing much in the way of reinvention (just worlds made with more to do), until Watch Dogs: Legion, where Ubisoft surprised players with the refreshing concept of an open-world with no single main protagonist....

Batman is sure going to have a lot of enemies to deal with in Batman: Arkham City, and not all of them can be dealt with through martial arts and brute force. And good comic book fan knows that millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne has gotten himself into more than a few romantic entanglements over the years, and thanks to a brief shot in the newest trailer, it looks like Arkham City will take full advantage of the fact....

This October, Bruce Wayne will don cape and cowl once again for yet another dose of Arkham-flavored fisticuffs. Announced in April, Batman: Arkham Origins will tell the tale of a much younger Dark Knight detective as he attempts to survive the night and take the fight to some of his earliest adversaries. Developed by Warner Bros. Interactive, Origins is the first Arkham title not to be developed by series stalwarts Rocksteady Studios....

The developers at Double Fine proved that the demand for a classic adventure game was still high, bringing in over $3 million through Kickstarter to launch development on the product now known as Broken Age. Following two young characters - Shay and Vella - as they seek to gain their own independence in drastically different situations, the game’s first half has now been released to Kickstarter backers. The public won’t be able to enjoy the game for themselves until January 28, when (despite some alternative funding methods being considered) Broken Age: Act 1 goes on sale through Steam for $29....

It may not have received the amount of fanfare as past releases featured in Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade, but gamers can expect to hear more about Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons in the coming weeks. Developed by Starbreeze Studios, the brainchild of Swedish film director Josef Fares puts players in control of pair of siblings on a quest to save their family (check out Game Rant’s Anthony Taormina and Andrew Dyce’s thoughts in the above gameplay video)....

Developer Arkane Studios is kicking off the final month before release with a video (part 1 in a series) that talks a little bit about the inception of Dishonored. While we’ve seen copious amounts of footage detailing the ways in which Dishonored caters to a wide variety of playstyles, oftentimes it’s a little more compelling to hear the developers explain their design decisions themselves. One of the more interesting things that Dishonored offers players is the opportunity to experiment within a linear space....

For months now, there have been rumors that Disney is developing its own hybrid toy and game franchise, very much in the vein of Activision’s enormously successful Skylanders. For once, the rumors are true. Revealed at an event in Hollywood just this morning, Disney Infinity is that game. Like Skylanders, Infinity makes use of physical action figures that are “transported” into the game world via an NFC platform - but there is much more to it than that....

The Duke Nukem franchise has been a big part of gaming ever since its PC gaming roots. While there’s no denying that it has faltered of late, such is the fate of many franchises that find themselves in development hell. With the misstep of Duke Nukem Forever in the past, there’s nowhere to go but up. Now, with the reveal of a countdown that sports a distinctly Duke flair, it looks like gaming’s badass could be staging a comeback in Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction....

Though Square Enix might have got a few things right with Final Fantasy XIII, there were many more things that they got wrong. Luckily, with Final Fantasy XIII-2, the developer is getting a chance to deliver the JRPG experience gamers were craving in 13, but never ended up finding. Part of delivering that superior RPG experience in Final Fantasy XIII-2 involves making a game world that is continuously growing. While earlier Square titles like fan-favorite Final Fantasy VII never had the opportunity to reap the benefits of DLC, Final Fantasy XIII-2 does, and will be delivering a lot of it....

Hardcore Tom Clancy game fans will be more than familiar with Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon games, a series which hasn’t seen a main franchise installment in an unusually long time (since 2007’s Advanced Warfighter 2) and whose games continue to push the story and technology further into the future. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier takes full advantage of its unique futuristic setting and gameplay mechanics, especially within the multiplayer portion of the game....