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• Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz

  October brought its true fury and grandeur to New York today. It took three days, but the nattering leftovers of summer finally drifted out to sea like so many dead leaves and left behind the lowlight and intent wind so particular to the month. Walking down the street, I could smell it, looming like bonfire smoke and Halloween parades: game season. I hold no love for the business structure that sees some ninety-percent of the year’s most ballyhooed games releasing all within a tight ten week window. It leads to sensory overload and, for the devoted gamer, it adds to already-big backlogs. But I’d be lying if I said it isn’t always exciting. All of the hype, all of the previews, leaked screens, developer showcases, and high, high hopes all lead here and it always begins in October. Holiday 2008, as it were, is going to be a particularly interesting season considering that it is gaming’s first to witness true third-party agnosticism. Nigh on every publisher from East and West is releasing their biggest games on any and all platforms available. (There are rare exceptions. See Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles, Valve’s Left4Dead, and a number of Wii titles.) This brings even closer scrutiny to the console holders' offerings; more than ever, first-party games need to be system sellers. They have to act as ambassadors, convincing casual and hardcore gamers alike that if they put money into such and such a system, there will be more where that came from. Read More... Posted Oct 03 2008, 05:30 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, little big planet, playstation 3, motorstorm, resistance, nintendo, microsoft, xbox 360, wii, sony, gran turismo, gears of war, animal crossing, halo, fable, wii music, lips, banjo kazooie, ridge racer

• Screen Test: Fable 2

  For all of the hate the original Fable got for not living up to Peter Molyneux’s wild claims about how the game’s role-playing would provide a nigh on life changing level of depth and complexity, I adored it. It was a perfectly paced little nugget of fun, about fifteen hours of content, satisfying combat, and some neat (for its time) character customization. Even if it didn’t quite let you live the full hero’s life it originally promised to, it still offered some impressive opportunity for moral choice in a game world, choices whose consequences are far more interesting than the ones found in similar games five years later. I’m still not too sure what to expect from Fable 2. I feel as though its been flying under the press radar since it was announced. Even though its all but done right now, no preview or interview has given a sense of what the full game experience is going to be like. Right now, it just sounds like Fable but bigger. These screens certainly bear that out. As always, Lionhead bangs out some pleasantly exaggerated human caricatures, homey looking fantasy villages and forests, and some nice and spooky enemies. Maybe that’s why Fable 2 is still flying under the radar. Instead of being billed as a paradigm-altering juggernaut, it’s being sold as what it looks like: videogame comfort food. Catch the rest after the jump. Read More... Posted Sep 15 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, microsoft, xbox 360, screen test, peter molyneux, fable

• The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

  Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! We cite Punch-Out!! here not for starring Mike Tyson (a controversial figure, even before his rape conviction), but for the degree to which it epitomizes a trend that would dominate gaming in the late-'80s and early-'90s: the "beat up stereotypes from around the world" gameplay model. Granted, most of Punch-Out!!'s characters are too ludicrous to really offend; it's hard to imagine Pacific Islanders getting all up in arms about King Hippo being kind of a jackass. That said, the sight of cross-eyed Piston Honda babbling "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi!" as a mid-match battle cry is a little unsettling. — PS Read More... Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:13 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, metroid, nintendo, derrick sanskrit, xbox 360, final fantasy, top ten, call of duty, pokemon, Playstation, tomb raider, punch out, mcdonalds, heavenly sword, fable, mike Tyson, narc, dead or alive, persona

• The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 2

  Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Call of Duty 4 is a game obsessed with realism, its depiction of combat situations and the tools of war meticulous to an almost terrifying degree. Early in the game, you are placed in the gunner’s seat of an AC-130 Spectre over a Ukrainian field, the night vision view of an aerial assault looking no different than an Iraq war newscast, the radio confirmation of kills unsettlingly casual; a game so realistic that it mimics a soldier’s detachment from killing. It’s strange then that the game, for all its incessant specificity, sends the player to kill Arab soldiers in “the Middle East”, and not an actual nation. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over seven million copies in a war-weary United States in under a year. Am I the only one who finds this sort of depersonalization unsettling? — JC Read More... Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:12 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, metroid, nintendo, derrick sanskrit, xbox 360, final fantasy, top ten, call of duty, pokemon, Playstation, tomb raider, punch out, mcdonalds, heavenly sword, fable, mike Tyson, narc, dead or alive, persona

• The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 1

  Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine NARC I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith Read More... Posted Jun 20 2008, 01:11 PM by John Constantine with | with 7 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, peter smith, metroid, nintendo, derrick sanskrit, xbox 360, final fantasy, top ten, call of duty, pokemon, Playstation, tomb raider, punch out, mcdonalds, heavenly sword, fable, mike Tyson, narc, dead or alive, persona