I've held off on presenting this for quite awhile, basically because I wanted to start up a challenge to the gamers to come up with what they thought would make for an original game. Then supposedly I would blow everyone away with mine.
But given recent events, I think it's time to just come out and show what I've got.
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For George Carlin.
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I call this one......"Bad Baby!!"
You play the role of a 47-year-old semi-retarded alcoholic that has an adult-baby fetish.
After an accident drinking tainted breastmilk, this freak manbaby has the oddball superpower to crush his enemies with his sonic manbaby-cry. Secondary weapons would involve a lead rattle, beer bottles painted white to look like baby ba-ba's, toy horsey Shurikens, a touch-activated talking teddy bear, and his own loaded diaper.
The controls can be simplified to the classic TMNT style of jump and attack, but to really take advantage of the extended attack options, a third attack button would let you you use whatever was in your sub-weapon slot at the time, and a fourth would let you use your charged-up sonic manbaby cry. Controlling the Manbaby can be as easy as using either the D-pad or the analog stick.
Levels would include:
* Generic street level with hordes of disgusted citizens and lowly cops on the beat.
* A drunken rage at a local biker bar.
* Brawling with security on the set of the Spring Jerringer Show.
* A drug-induced stroll through a very colorful land of candy (Which turns out to be another generic street level after completing it).
and
* A local gun-toting militia consisting of, surprisingly, rival manbabies with the sole intent of taking you down.
Bonus games would involve getting burped by a very embarassed hooker, attempting to use cuteness to get out of a public indecency arrest, picking the perfect mother to breastfeed with, and scaring real babies at a day-care center by making faces with the analog sticks, face buttons, and the shoulder buttons.
My lack of experience with the Xbox 360 can only leave me to wonder if there's ways of using the x360 headset to send voice commands into the game itself (like Lifeline and the SOCOM games for the PS2). If so, then there could be room for even more insane shit.
There could be a cheat code screen where you only see the Manbaby staring at the player, and the analog sticks control which way his hands rub his fat hairy manboobs (Clicking the analog sticks would squeeze the manboobs), and if you do the proper motions while saying certain phrases or talking a certain way in the headset, you could unlock various cheats. But the method would be so disturbing that, well, why would you WANT to?
The cheat code entry would also be recorded and sent to XBox Live for contest purposes of who can make the funniest and/or most disturbing variation of a cheat code entry.Obviously, you have to reward the winners with something, so give them Microsoft Points. They earned it.....sick fucks.
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:-D
I Know allot of you will get comfused because of all of the Accronyms I use on my reviews. So look at this list of Accronyms and definitions to help you understand the mmorpg world!
MMORPG: Many Men Online Role Playing as Girls!Games that men play as female characters and females play as female characters, male characters are very rare. Yes it's All a Vagina fest! JUST A Joke people, MMORPG means Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, it in which you basicaly play as your dream persona from the past or the recently made popular future! Either you whant to be a guy that can shoot Orcs between the eyes with a bow and arrow, or a space ship pilot blowing the shit out of stuff with your massive capital ship! its all here! its like a simulated adventure!
Long before I started blogging here, I commented on what would make for a good WWE Legends game. I'll be re-heating some of the issues somewhere down the line, but mostly, I want to comment on some serious problems concerning wrestling games in general.
Ironically-enough, Nintendo got the ball rolling with "Pro Wrestling" for the NES (Now available on VC), and Technos followed up with a home port of their "Tag Team Wrestling" arcade game, but everything after that has been either the WWF, or WCW. Wrestlemania, Wrestlemania Challenge, WWF Steel Cage Challenge, Super Wrestlemania, WWF Royal Rumble, WWF Raw, WWF Wrestlemania (Arcade), WWF In Your House, WWF Warzone, WWF Attitude. That was everything Vince McMahon had to offer under the Acclaim label, and you could count them on your fingers.
I'll excuse every WWF game released under Acclaim/LJN for the simple fact that the NES/SNES/Genesis/GameBoy had their limits, and Acclaim was goofing around in their later years. But when War Zone and Attitude were released for the 32-bit consoles, I was flabbergasted at how little had been improved. Acclaim was using the Mortal Kombat style of performing manuevers (Ex: Tap forward, back, down/up+A to do a suplex), and was using motion-capture to showcase the movements of the WWF talents, as well as the techniques themselves. And granted, the Hardy Boys were curtain-jerker talent at the time, but they went above and beyond by doing all the motion capture themselves, and yet they were never featured in either game. Most of the disc space was used up for the motion capture, video promos of the 12 characters, and FMV cutscenes of a rich woman who wants you to win the world championship so she could invite you into her limo. The rest was for match types, entrance music, movements, and something new called "Create-A-Wrestler". Yes, despite the many flaws of this wrestling game with poor hit-detection, this was the beginning of the customized wrestler feature. WCW tried to mimic that style with WCW Nitro and WCW Thunder, and failed miserably.
I'm going to skip ahead a bit to the AKI era for the Nintendo 64 and our previous console generation:
"WCW vs NWO: World Tour" offered four-player gameplay, alternate costumes, a solid grapple/defense system, and was the only time a 5-on-5 fighting-game style elimination match was implemented.
"WCW vs NWO: Revenge" offered limited customization, but continued to offer more talents to choose from, as well as improved their wrestling engine.
When THQ brought AKI with them to the WWF brand, "Wrestlemania 2000" improved more on the Create-A-Wrestler feature, a more improved engine, and was the first include a story mode.
"WWF No Mercy" would be the last AKI-produced game under any official wrestling promotion, included a ladder match, a steel cage, a survival mode, improved Create-a-Wrestler feature, and an improved story mode.
"Def Jam: Vendetta", despite being a game not licensed to any wrestling promotion, was heavily influenced by the WWF, borrowing many signature maneuvers. Unfortunately, despite the increased processing power of the Gamecube, Playstation 2, and the Xbox, it still could only handle up to four competitors, and it would not improve with "The Fight for New York".
The Smackdown series borrowed many elements from the AKI series, saw many gradual improvements over the past nine years, but suffered a great deal along the way, mostly due to the combination of licensed wrestlers, the inability to use more than thirty customized wrestlers, and the constant pushing towards mimicking that of the WWE experience.
This is where I have to draw the line on things.
It was more than possible to make over 30 custom wrestlers ten years ago with WWF Warzone, all you needed was multiple memory cards. Now that there's mass amounts of hard drive space, there's no excuse.
Obviously, there's this need to make the WWE games resemble that of the TV programs, but why even go that route? If I wanted to watch storylines unfold, I'd watch WWE TV, so scrap the storylines, and get down to the wrestling. You'll save lots of space that way, and make more room for more wrestlers, more customizable options for your wrestlers, MALE AND FEMALE. What the fuck has happened there? The girls have limited options now? The girls can't participate in storylines? How are they supposed to level up their stats? I can't max out my Samus Aran character without experience points, and those can only be achieved through the storylines.
If they're going for realism, they failed. If I wanted realism, I wouldn't be playing video games OR watching WWE.
Why are there fewer moves available every year, while being swapped out for other moves used by current wrestlers? I understand the need to keep with the times, but why does ANYTHING need to be swapped out? Again, scrap the storylines. We just want to jump into the action, we don't need the soap-operafest.
Seriously: Where is the Kawada-Driver?
Or the "Six-Seconds Magic"?
Or neck-crunch portion of Aleksander Karelin's "Russian Neck Drop"?
Seriously, drop the bra & panties matches, the story modes, and the "superstar" voiceovers, and get those moves back.
We're in the era of 3ghz processors and 500mhz graphics chips, and yet we still can't get more than eight guys in the ring? More importantly: Where are the giant online wars? I was looking forward to a 16-player hardcore match with multiple refs doing simultaneous pinfall counts and submission verification, and yet there's still only a limit of four?
With the amount of open-source programmers on the rise, it shouldn't be very difficult to construct a cross-platform wrestling game that's just as good as the AKI games and the entire Smackdown series, and distribute it on Sourceforge. Wrestling gaming should not be regulated just to whatever Vince McMahon shoves down our throats. The possibilities should be LIMITLESS.
Platforms:Playstation 3,Xbox 360,Microsoft Windows
Plot
In a future straight out of Orwell's '1984,' where all actions of daily life are regulated and monitored by the government, you take control of Faith, a woman struggling to retrieve her sister from the clutches of the omniscient government regime. Our protagonist is a runner, a member of an elite group of citizens living on the outskirts of the city, in the corner of the security camera's rotation. They are the last denizens of free thought, carriers of information and objects their owners don't want to go through stiff government legislation. In constant battle with local police forces, dubbed 'blues' in runner slang, wanting to shut down their operation, Faith and her company free-run across town, using the city's angular building design against it.
The plot is mainly told through 2-D animated cutscenes, with a few moments playing out in-game. Its a common setup with a bit of character motive through in to individualize it, but here's hoping the narrative pulls away from cliche long enough to make us happy we just parkour-ed our way through dystopian downtown.
Style
As we all have heard from the title song played over nearly every released gameplay video (named 'Still Alive', a bit awkwardly in a post-Portal world), the soundtrack takes a bit of a techno-hinged ambiance to it, reflecting the rigid design and bright color palette of most of the city's buildings while tossing a bit of a electric heartbeat to add to the main running mechanic of the IP's gameplay. The symmetrical, and almost boring, landscape design looks uninviting from afar, but acts as simple way to create easily recognizable patterns of platforms for Faith to free-run to and from. The way the level design is built around preserving our lead runner's momentum is its true draw, where a sort of poetry of motion arises out of the convenience Dice has given to the layout, placing two ascending rooftops beneath a ripe-line that leads to a series of grabbable pipes should give the player a sense of fluidity and rhythm.
Character designs not cloaked in SWAT gear look a bit behind the design timeline, but considering how little they appear in 3-D, it shouldn't be too much of a bother. In-level, we see Faith sometimes reflected in the windows of more decorated buildings, but otherwise we only glimpse her arms and hands, again giving the majority of focus on the organization of usable objects in each level. The whole game has a sense of a brightly colored take on the German film 'Run Lola Run,' which is not a bad thing.
Gameplay
Mirror's Edge takes place entirely in first-person, save for the non-interactive animated cutscenes. The player controls only Faith, guiding her sliding, jumping, climbing, and rolling along the various branching paths within each level to her destination. Gunplay is involved at times, but Dice has come out and readily acknowledged that the shooting mechanics were where the least amount of time was devoted, as the focus of the game revolves much more on the disarming of guns rather than their use (the most famous Mirror's Edge trophy/achievement is given when the player never shots a gun.) The player enters a sort of quicktime event whenever attempting a disarm, where the accuracy and speed of the controller input dictates how well and quickly Faith gets the gun out of the officer's hand.
The most toted ideal of Mirror's Edge is the preservation of momentum. The player is encouraged to swiftly move from one interactive element of the level to another (leaping off a rootop to slide under a railing, etc.) in order to achieve a sense of speed and athletic power that comes with parkour, Faith will miss jumps if lacking sufficient momentum to do so. Although speed is encouraged, the levels do also feature several hidden messenger bags the player could collect for special in-game bonuses (and trophy score) and several paths the player could choose in order to get to the end of a level. One stage has both a rooftop path, complete with ropelines and pipe-climbing, and a ground path with a couple wall-scaling moments.
It seems highly possible that, once exploring or looking for collectibles, the game could take a less entertaining turn from when the player gets a handle on the free-running aspects, but hopefully Dice has created enough levels where the player feels like a free-runner, with the reticule in the center of the screen preventing any causes of vertigo.
Structure
Mirror's Edge runs off of the Unreal Engine 3 with a newly designed lighting structure (designed by Illuminate Labs,) in order to achieve their bright and contrasting color design. Like most major releases of this year, the Heads Up Display (H.U.D.) has been taken away in order to maximize the sense of immersion. Damage is shown by the edges of the screen slowly reddening, the colors of the world fading to muddled grey as more damage is absorbed. The game is broken up into 10 chapters, with a total runtime of around 7-9 hours, depending on play style. Parts of some levels will also be available in a Time Attack mode, where the player attempts to run to a endpoint against their own times, online leaderboards, or downloaded 'ghosts' of other player's times. There are no other multiplayer functions in the game.
- There was some speculation about Mirror's Edge being a timed PS3 exclusive, based on a mis-quote by Mike Reeves, the CEO of Sony Europe.
- Eurogamer reports that Mirror's Edge will receive exclusive downloadable content only on the Playstation 3 version, available via the Playstation Network. No further details or release date have been announced.
- The Playstation 3 release has been reported to have slightly better graphics than its Xbox 360 and PC counterparts, in addition to the promise of DLC.
Outro
This is a really unique game that hopes to create a bigger sense of satisfaction and awesomeness that we felt in Assassin's Creed, guiding Altair across rooftops. If more games like this receive decent sales, we can hope to weed out the abundance of brainless shooters the market is saturated with and give a renewed focus to games with a personal sense of style and function.
Wow! It's been awhile since I've had time to post something. A combination of school, work, and having nothing to talk about! (Can't play games if I'm busy with school or work) But One thing I always have time for is Rock Band, my absolute favorite game of recent. How does Rock Band 2 match up?
More than likely, you already have a preconception of whether or not you are going to get this game, so most of what I say will make no difference. But I will go ahead and write. What to start with? Unlike everyone else, I'll start with the game, I've been able to play it with both the old hardware and the new hardware so I will get to that part later. And unlike my previous reviews, this will be split into ratings for each item, then a final rating for the overall set. So lets go!
The Game: Rock Band 2, whats different? Not much. You could think of this game as more of an expansion pack to Rock Band 1, but I would think of RB1 as an expansion of RB2. Why? Because if you have RB1 (or can borrow it from a friend) you can transfer most of the songs to the harddrive so you can play in RB2 (provided that you have the internet connection so you can pay the $5 fee.) But what is really different? With gameplay, absolutely nothing. If you played before, you know how to play now. There are tweaks here and there, the biggest difference is how you unlock songs. Since there is no longer a solo career mode, the best way to unlock songs is to create a band and do the Marathon setlists in the Challenges mode. These are 6 songs each but you can stop and save after a song if you can't finish all six songs at once. World Tour mode is back, and you can do it by yourself or with friends, even if they live across the country as you can play online in World Tour now.
Before I begin, I just want to send a little message to all the people who voted for Fatal Frame II for the Halloween Horrorfest: FUCK YOU!! This game is goddamn terrifying! I've never jumped so high in my life, and my mother is asking uncomfortable questions as to why there are claw marks in my ceiling. I can only come to the conclusion that your intent was to make me fill my pants with terrified excrement, and while I've not YET needed to change my shorts, this game HAS caused me to lose several years off of my lifespan as well as giving me an unwanted streak of gray in my hair! You'll get your Hall of Fame article, but after that you GO TO HELL!! YOU GO TO HELL AND YOU DIE!!!
Sorry, went on a bit of a tangent, there. Anyway.....
Horror and Videogames may have a healthy relationship nowadays, but in the first 20 years, attempts to make scary video games were...shaky at best. Attempts to bring horror classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Atari 2600 and Friday the 13th to the NES received largely negative receptions. And while games like Castlevania and Splatterhouse would borrow thematic elements from horror movies and novels, the games themselves were pretty standard affairs, lacking any real frights.
The first game that could legitimately claim to be frightening was Infogrames Alone in the Dark, released for PC in 1992. Its use of movie style camera angles, oppressive atmosphere, and surprise attacks made it a critical and commercial success, and it would birth a new genre: survival horror. Unfortunately, the two lackluster sequels that followed meant that this new genre would have to wait a few years to really shine. In 1996, that time would finally come.
Uhhh...Chris? Buddy? I think you need to lay off the 'roids for a while...
A note from the author. You've probably come here because you saw the "5 Gaming Blunders" Blog under the BOB entry on the front page. You're probably wondering why this article isn't up, and why the previous 10 Blunders article has vanished into the ether.There is an explanation.
When I was writing the 10 blunders blog, I had some help from a friend of mine. As he lives in Chicago, his "help" consisted of talking to me over the phone as we discussed what we wanted to put in. It was from him that I got a lot of my information from. While some of the items on both lists were blunders I'd seen myself, or were common knowledge to gamers, a fair few were given to me over the phone from Chip. When I asked him where he'd gotten his information from, he simply told me "from some magazines." I've known Chip for years, so I simply trusted it. When the 10 blunders blog was a hit, I decided to throw up the notes we'd left out from it up as the 5 blunders blog.
However, on October 31, 2008, greybob left a comment stating that the items on this list were nearly identical to a similar list published on gamespy.com. I was unaware such a list existed, and after finding and reading said list, and making an angry phone call to my cowriter, I was horrified to discover that it was this list that I had been given much of my information from, there hadn't been any "magazines." He'd simply read the information off of the website.
Halloween. A time of witches, bats, vampires, and (if you're anything like me) ceremonies meant to summon the Old Ones so that they may come forth and drive the world to madness. (That which is dead can eternal yaddayaddayadda)
And since videogames are chock full of scary beasts and and frightful terrors, I figured it was only appropriate to count down the scariest monsters in gaming. They may not have the clout of final bosses and villains, but these are the guys that terrify us and make us fill our pants with excrement.
Outside most of our windows and residential zones is a swirling mass of human beings fitted with ties and tea breaks, twisting within its own existence as to create autonomy within the nine to five world. Whether the native tongue is different at home or the food is spicy or bland, a cumulative effort is given to professionally create a manner of speaking and living politically correctly in the workplace as their blazer suits and high heels hold hands. Inside all of this is the gamer, the man or woman who sees Tetris in the cubicle design and has professional looking spreadsheets set to open on the touch of a global hotkey as to mask the newest Total War game. So as the gamer population spans a wider age group with each year, this article will try to examine the psyche of the gamer as we get older, and maybe even how elementary teachers can still feel good about themselves teaching eight year olds after an alien slaughter-fest. It's about not becoming diluted by the transition from Baldur's Gate to Peggle (I know there are a ton of Peggle fans out there, but if you ever put that on a top 5 list of games I will publicly support your slapping in the face, glove or no glove, your choice), it's about self-esteem and the inherent value in games.
We know ourselves within our groups. We're the ones in the corner laughing about how in Civ 4 Ghandi always becomes Jewish and war-waging as he tears your non-Jewish-non-Indian colony to bits. We know where "I dreamt I was a moron" comes from and the new meme's, no matter how new or how many go-karts are involved. We debate over whether the correct spelling in a fantasy setting is "dwarves" or "dwarfs" and are most definitely not the people whose facebook pictures are taking a picture of themselves in the bathroom without a shirt to show that they, in fact, have a chest and mirrors can reflect flashes while pro-actively demonstrating by always being the one taking the picture that no one in their right mind would actually take that picture for them. And we take pride in this. I won't define us much more because, if you are one of us, you know this stuff. So I won't be like the IMDB pages that consider plot keyword spoilers things such as "death", "beautiful woman" and "male female relationship" (look at the Gone With the Wind page if you don't believe me). However, I will not be able to describe how we can still feel good about ourselves after our grandmother beats us at Wii bowling.
Before we tackle our refusal to age, let's stay with granny and how games are changing right along with us. We had lots of confidence when we used to walk into Best Buy with a confident nod to every employee with a condescending "I know your job better than you do" look in the eye as we walked around with that one annoying friend that everyone has condemning brick and mortar stores, especially Best Buy, as you scourge the cages for that laptop on clearance and seriously considered having a makeshift sign that says "I'll do it for 30 times better and for less", tape it on yourself, and then stand beside the geek squad employees. Heck, places like that were our zeniths of power, ziggurats of giving your life for Aur or something. But now there's no longer just the people with horrible music taste, but soccer moms in the gaming section, our ground zero. But not to buy games for little Timmy, who in this age probably has an iPhone instead of watching anthropomorphic singing animals like I did growing up, the jerk. They're checking out wii fit or insert newest phenomena here instead, which means that although gaming is becoming more socially acceptable for "cha cha" chai tea drinkers, I still can't play Disgaea in front of my family without feeling strange, much less playing Harvest Moon. "I'm a farmer...I water these onions every day... Dad, why are you leaving?". Instead, it's become as cheap as language in the instant message era, becoming "that's real neat...move your arm like that huh? Ok guys, the burgers are ready."
Hello! Thought I'd pop in for a moment with a brief newsbit and a sign of things to come with the Hall of Fame.
First off, thanks to all of you who voted for the Halloween Horrorfest we're in the middle of right now. I figured it was about time to reveal the winning games, one of which has already had its review published, and the other is coming this weekend. They are, in no particular order, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, and Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. Why FFII:CB won out over its predecessor is unknown to me, but I guess that's something I'll learn when I actually PLAY the game. :P I was surprised that none of the Silent Hill games made the top 3, but hey, there's always next year! I was also surprised to see System Shock 2 get a dozen or so votes, but SHODAN already got her time in the sun, so SS2 was disqualified.
In the late 90's, horror gaming was ruled by two franchises, Capcom's Resident Evil, and Konami's Silent Hill, both of which were exclusives for the Sony Playstation, although the N64 would receive a port of Resident Evil 2 in the last legs of its life. Eager to try and capitalize and expand on this genre, Nintendo partnered with Silicon Knights to create their own survival horror game. Though it was originally planned for the Nintendo 64, the project was eventually pushed back to appear on the Gamecube.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem was released early in the Gamecube's life on June 24, 2002. The main plot concerned Alexandria Roivas, an art student who is called to the mansion of her grandfather Edward, a clinical psychologist, to look into the cause of his mysterious and violent death. Frustrated by the incompetence of the Rhode Island police force (no offense meant to actual Rhode Islanders), Alex begins to investigate for herself, and eventually discovers her grandfather's secret study, and the Tome of Eternal Darkness. Reading the Tome placed players into the sandals of Pious Augustus, a Roman centurion in 26 bc. While leading his troops in battle, Pious is summoned to an ancient Persian temple, where he is forced to battle the undead monsters within. This served as the games tutorial level, as well as the prologue for the greater story. In the last room of the temple, Pious came across the three Essences of the Ancients, Chattur'gha, Ulyaoth, and Xel'lotath. Choosing one of these essences transformed Pious into an undead mage, who was bound to service of the chosen god. It was this choice that would determine which Ancient the player would ultimately face.
Clive Barker is often called one of the modern masters of Horror. With novels like The Books of Blood, and the Hellraiser series of films on his list of accomplishments, its hard to dispute that claim. It seemed only natural then, that with Horror gaming becoming a larger and larger part of the video game market, that Clive Barker would join with DreamWorks Interactive in 2001 to create his first entry into video gaming.
Clive Barker's Undying told the story of Patrick Galloway, an Irishman who, after serving in the First World War, left his native land to wander the world as a paranormal investigator. But a letter from his former CO, the wealthy Jeremiah Covenant, brought Galloway back to Ireland, to investigate strange goings on in the Convenant estate. Upon his arrival, Jeremiah told Patrick of a curse upon the Covenant family, which had claimed Jeremiah's parents as well as all four of his siblings, and with Jeremiah dying of an unknown illness, it seemed he was next. The curse was linked to an occult book and a series of standing stones on the covenant estate. As children, Jeremiah and his siblings had taken one of their father's books, and had unwittingly unleashed a dark evil from the stones known as the Undying King. This evil had come to claim Jeremiah, and it was up to Patrick to put an end to the curse before the Undying King was set loose upon the world. Along the way, Patrick would have to face off against a slew of monstrous undead creatures, as well as the demonic spirits of Jeremiah's four siblings.
As the gap between video games, novels, and movies grows ever smaller, games gain more and more ability to provoke emotions and reactions from those who play them. Be it happiness, sadness, or even abject terror. And then there are some games that make us wonder "what drugs were they on when they made this?" These are the moments that send shivers down our spine, and make us question the sanity of those who produced the games. These are the top 10 creepiest moments in gaming.
10. The Fight with Psycho Mantis. (Metal Gear Solid)
As I write this, it is 2:11 in the morning of October 8th. Which means that voting for the October Reader's Choice columns are CLOSED. I got quite a few votes, and while I haven't tallied them ALL yet, let's just say that a one of the columns that got leading votes is no surprise, while 1 caught me completely off guard (especially since it was one I'd already written the column for!) and we've got one that, while it got great reviews, probably hasn't been played by a good many people! The list will be kept secret until the posting of the columns, which will begin next week, after Clive Barker's Undying.
Right, now that that's done, I just want to take a moment, and post something for myself, and address a rather....striking message I received not long after I posted the Tomb Raider column. The following piece was originally posted in the forums, so as not to overshadow the Tomb Raider piece, but I think enough time has passed that its no longer a worry.
Greetings, and welcome back, to Part 2 of our countdown of the Top 11 consoles that, for some reason or another, just weren't big names. If you missed it, go read Part 1, where we count down the 5 consoles that could have made it into the big leagues, if they had just been handled a little better.
This time around, we're counting down the 5 consoles that just plain sucked. Either because they were poorly designed, or because the company who made it screwed the pooch so hard there was nothing for it but to put a bullet in the pooch's head. We also cap our list off with one console that was such an oddity, that you could really go either way with it. Once again, as he was in Part 1, Chip joins me to add his knowledge to my own. Say hello to our readers, Chip.
We're pausing from our Halloween Fright Fest here in the Hall of Fame, to talk to you today about some consoles from days gone by that for one reason or another, weren't real best sellers. Be it because they were mishandled by marketing, or because they were too godawful to be saved. We're counting down 5 good ones, 5 bad ones, and 1 that you can decide for yourself on. And no, I'm not going to make a "Why Top 11" joke.
Welcome back to the Gaming Hall of Fame! For the entire month of October, we will celebrate Horror gaming, from pioneering classics to modern masterpieces, along with three titles as chosen by YOU, the readers, later this month! Our first entry is a game that not only was one of the first 3D games ever made, but also was the first game in the genre of Survival Horror, a full four years before Resident Evil was even a thought in Capcom's mind: Alone in the Dark.
Author's Note: Due to the age of this game and compatibility issues, I was unable to take many screenshots or compose any appreciable video. I have sought out a video, made by the much more technically skilled David Sukljan. All credit goes to him for the video, which does an excellent job of showcasing the gameplay elements of Alone in the Dark. What screenshots I DO have, are my own.)
In the early 90's, gaming was ruled by three major genres: the side scrolling platformer, the point and click adventure, and the arcade shooter. They were all formulas that worked, but despite the winning storytelling of games like Monkey Island, and Sam and Max, games were largely simple affairs, with no real immersion or atmosphere. In 1992, a company called Infogrames would seek the fill this unseen niche, and in doing so, would create an entirely new genre, a genre that would eventually be called Survival Horror.
Game
This time around, we're counting down the 5 consoles that just plain sucked. Either because they were poorly designed, or because the company who made it screwed the pooch so hard there was nothing for it but to put a bullet in the pooch's head. We also cap our list off with one console that was such an oddity, that you could really go either way with it. Once again, as he was in Part 1, Chip joins me to add his knowledge to my own. Say hello to our readers, Chip.
