David Smith is the former games and technology editor at The AU Review. He has previously written for PC World Australia. You can find him on Twitter at @RhunWords.
The most popular game in the world, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is coming to Xbox One. This we’ve known since E3 earlier this year. What we haven’t known was when. Now we have an answer, and it’s way sooner than you were expecting.
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Pause Festival held a event at Melbourne’s Federation Square this morning for the launch of its 2018 program. The technology and innovation festival, now in its eighth year, brings together some of the best and brightest from across the tech world for a multi-day event in the heart of Melbourne. None of that was particularly…
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Following player ire regarding Star Wars Battlefront II‘s implementation of loot box and XP progression systems during the game’s last beta period, Electronic Arts and developer DICE have announced a re-balancing of both systems in time for launch.
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If you, or someone you know, could be considered a fan of rugby then there might come a point in your life where playing Rugby 18 seems like a good idea. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. That way lies disappointment and regret because in Rugby 18,…
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Oh boy, where does one start with an experience like the one Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus offers? The second game in a week to prove that the single-player experience as we know it is still very much alive and well, Wolfenstein II is the kind of shooter we haven’t had in a while — one with a…
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Paris Games Week kicks off bright any early tomorrow morning and Sony aren’t wasting any time. Tweeting that “E3 was only half the story,” the publisher is promising a barrage of announcements from their press conference.
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Sony have unveiled a brand new trailer for Naughty Dog’s upcoming The Last of Us Part II during their Paris Games Week media conference. The trailer is curiously devoid of any appearance by series heroes Ellie or Joel, but does feature another popular Naughty Dog player. It is also not for the squeamish.
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Christmas arrived a little early this year. PlayStation’s media conference kicked off Paris Games Week with a bang — some solid AAA trailers and a metric tonne of fabulous indie titles to look forward to. There’s a lot to cover so we’ve put every trailer Sony had to show off in one place just because…
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“Shit, have they capped the line?” wondered a 20-something woman in a home made Bayonetta cosplay, arriving only minutes before Saturday night’s Let’s Play Some Bad Dating Sims panel in the Galah Theatre. Her boyfriend, dressed less ambitiously in a tee and jeans, stared hopelessly at the line. “Guys!” I called excitedly from my position…
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Assassin’s Creed Origins is a greatest hits of modern action-adventure game design. In seeking to update the series’ ageing core mechanics and design, Origins looks to its genre stablemates to see what they’re doing and where it can’t subtly imitate them, it copies them brazenly instead. What surprised me the most about this smash-and-grab design philosophy…
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Super Mario Odyssey is the good and pure video game that this awful world needs right now. It is the kind of game that gives you hope for the form. It reminds you that AAA games can still be more than pretty window dressing for a microtransaction storefront. That they can actually still be fun. It’s a…
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Fire Emblem Warriors attempts to mash up the long-running series of turn-based tactical RPGs with Koei Tecmo’s equally venerable Dynasty Warriors. On paper, this seems like a novel idea — these are two properties that seem like they’d be a good fit. In practice, Fire Emblem Warriors is the video game equivalent of swigging orange juice after brushing your…
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Xbox Australia and Eventbrite are opening a pop up gaming hotel in Sydney that will allow guests a chance to go hands on with the new Xbox One X console ahead of launch. Feel like a sleep over?
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It’s risky to send me headphones for review, especially gaming headphones. I am a hard-to-please audiophile at the best of times and gaming headsets never pass muster for me. Almost without exception the mix is bad, the weight oppressive and the degree to which they clamp down on your ears borderline painful. So intense is…
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For fans of Blizzard Entertainment titles like Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo and Hearthstone, there’s no bigger date than BlizzCon. But for Australian fans, BlizzCon 2017’s home at the Anaheim Convention Centre in Los Angeles is a pretty epic trip to make. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Blizzard ANZ to give away 10 Virtual…
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Melbourne developer Big Ant are no strangers to including women’s teams in their cricket titles. Last year’s Don Bradman Cricket 17 also featured women’s cricket in prominent modes and the developer’s newest title, Ashes Cricket, is doing the same. Ashes Cricket will also go the extra step of authentically modelling popular, real world female players in the same level of…
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Thursday was a bit of a day for Microsoft. They’ve had an OS update drop, the launch of an experimental new piece of hardware and the announcement of some updated kit. Check it all out after the jump.
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The marketing for Bethesda’s Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has been among the year’s absolute best. After finding itself in the peculiar position of having to defend its core tenet of “Fuck Nazis” in a world where white nationalists rally in the open, the game has steered aggressively into any and all online resistance. It’s final trailer ahead…
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Humble Bundle has struck again. The charity fundraising site’s latest video game bundle highlights some of Australia’s best independently made video games. The asking price? Next to nothing.
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Electronic Arts have closed the doors on in-house developer Visceral Games. The publisher announced the closure in a blog post from executive vice president Patrick Söderlund, along with the news that they would be making rather sweeping changes to Visceral’s still unnamed Star Wars adventure game.
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Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a game suffering an identity crisis. It knows what it wants to be and makes genuinely big strides in that direction, but it’s hampered by what seems to be publisher interference. Even at the surface level, it feels like a case study for the growing divide in AAA between developer…
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This weekend saw the EB Expo return to its roots, overtaking the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre for the first time in five years. It was, by all accounts, a successful homecoming.
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It’s the most magical time of the year, and I’m not talking about Halloween. PAX Aus 2017 approaches and the full panel and event schedule has gone live this morning. Time to start planning your PAX weekend.
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As I write this, Assassin’s Creed Origins releases in exactly one month from today. It is, quite rightly, the subject of a bit of scrutiny from fans and detractors of the series alike. The first title to break with the series’ long running annual release pattern in quite a while, Origins has a lot of questions to answer….
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Australian indie developer House House (Push Me, Pull You) dropped a trailer on Monday for their next title, an untitled honk-em-up in which you play a goose that terrorises a village garden.
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Given that it was built from the ground up to be a showcase for the Xbox One X console launching in November, it feels a bit weird to be reviewing Forza Motorsport 7 on my Day One launch edition Xbox One. Racing games have been enlisted as gorgeous tech demo for fresh hardware, don’t go in thinking the…
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Gaming peripheral manufacturer Turtle Beach launched a new series of wireless headsets this week. The Stealth 600 and Stealth 700 are bit of a funny combo, aiming to please those who value style and cord cutting ease of use and the high-end customer looking for excellent positional sound.
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Popular Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo is bringing their range of Nintendo-themed tees to Australian shores this week. The designs are pulled from the UTGP2017 global t-shirt design competition, were handpicked by Nintendo and video game royalty Shigeru Miyamoto and now you can get them if you want them.
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Love it or hate it, the single most important Australian contribution to the Xbox family this side of Forza Horizon 3, the Xbox Onesie, is coming back. The new garment, with an updated design, is set to drop just days after the release of Forza Motorsport 7.
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Hot off the heels of a hands on with Forza Motorsport 7, the most visible racing series in recent memory, I went into my preview session with Gran Turismo Sport wondering if the elder statesman of racing games could make an impression given its effusive competition. It did, and what’s more, I realised I’d missed GT a little.
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