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• All Ages: Viva Piñata and Building Games For Children

  I got no end of grief from Peter Smith when I started playing Pokémon Diamond a couple of months back. Pete’s no stranger to mindless grinds; the man’s confessed his many replays of the NES Final Fantasy games. No, he was opposed to Pokémon because, “It’s for f$?!ing babies, man.” The argument confused me. After all, Pete, like me and the rest of 61 FPS’ team of outlaw journalists, was raised on the 8-bit era’s simple designs as conceived by Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo. Though Pokémon’s billion-dollar audience is mostly made up of the Trapper-Keeper and Lunchables set, the game itself is in the age-and-gender-neutral mode that’s made Nintendo the corporate success they are today. “Family Friendly” is the accepted term but it’s just a media savvy way of saying that games like Pokémon, Mario, Brain Age, and Animal Crossing can be played and loved by very young players, but they aren’t games explicitly for children. He did get me thinking, though: Have I ever actually played a game designed specifically with very young players in mind? Not the Reader Rabbit-style edutainment so many kids have been subjected to since the early-80s. Just regular, old, played-for-fun videogames. My first exposure to Viva Piñata was marked by cynicism. Microsoft’s monumentally expensive acquisition of Rare was just under four years old when it was announced and the partnership had yielded dubious results; bad sequels, middling remakes, one atrocious new IP, and another that had been years in development on three separate consoles before it was finally released. Between the animated series and the variety of brightly colored critters to gather in the game, Piñata seemed like a soulless and pointed marketing machine built for no other reason than to make Microsoft some of that proverbial Pokémon money. So it came as a surprise when the game turned out to be both a commercial flop (relatively speaking) and a critical success, praised for its peaceful, eccentric presentation while being ignored by gamers and parents alike. I never got around to playing the first, but its reputation brought me to Viva Piñata’s sequel, Trouble In Paradise, free of cynicism and curious about what I’d find. Turns out it’s a reputation well-earned. Even though Piñata is a brazen fusion of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing and Pokémon – surrounded by strange, brightly colored characters, you are given free reign to alter a seemingly mundane plot of land to your gardener-heart’s content but are tasked with gathering hordes of diverse fantasy creatures in order to level up and expand your domain – it is impeccably made, its charms difficult to resist. What’s most impressive about Viva Piñata, though, is that it is explicitly designed for children. Read More... Posted Sep 02 2008, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, microsoft, final fantasy, pokemon, mario, animal crossing, viva piñata

• FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star

  Time once again for a brief look at the Sega CD games that made us women and men (if you're currently a twenty-something, I mean). The full-motion video in games like Lunar, The Silver Star is unique stuff for a few reasons. First, it was an unfiltered assault of glittery, shojo-eyed anime during an age when most game localisers struggled to hide any cultural evidence that video games indeed come from Japan. Of course, Working Designs is still known for taking some, er, extreme liberties with their own translations and localisations, but by God that's another tome for another night. All you need to know is that Lunar saw its US release in 1993, ages before Pokemon made anime mainstream (bonus fact: anime became mainstream in Canada in 1996, thanks to Sailor Moon recieving an after-school time slot). The intro for Lunar is also made special by its...lack of animation. Maybe we were too busy drooling on the television screen at the time, but when you watch Sega CD intros in today's age of a thousand frames per second, you begin to notice that the "cut scenes" that wowed us over a dozen years ago are little more than kindergarten-grade cut-outs with pinned, movable limbs. Read More... Posted Aug 14 2008, 07:07 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: working designs, pokemon, japan, lunar, sega cd, fmv hell, sonic cd, translation, anime, sailor moon, lunar the silver star, localization

• Revenge of the Port: Dead Rising Shuffles, Moans on Wii

  The true death of the arcade came at the beginning of this decade. It wasn’t when gamers started opting for the comfort and value of playing at home; it was when home consoles finally started equaling (and surpassing) the technological heft of the arcade cabinets themselves. Sega, one of the only surviving arcade giants, signed the death warrant themselves when developing the Dreamcast and its arcade-motherboard-twin, Naomi. Games at home and games in the arcade, identical for the first time. The move may have had the negative effect of killing off the already declining amusement center population across the Western world, but it also had a significant silver lining: the death of the shoddy arcade port. Approximations of more technologically demanding games have been a staple of gaming in the home since the 1970s, but, with the exception of stray PC-based ports, downgraded game experiences have largely disappeared since 2000. Today, in 2008, the fracturing of the console space seems to be bringing them back in force. Read More... Posted Jul 16 2008, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, xbox 360, resident evil, wii, capcom, nes, PC, pokemon, sega, grand theft auto, dreamcast, port, koei, Naomi, dead rising, dynasty warriors

• The B.Beard All-Stars: Hour Eight of Pokemon part 2

  In part 2, I get in some nasty situations in the woods. 4:01 – My next destination is Eterna City. They may or may not have my bike. He-Man may or may not live there. 4:04 – Some kid just threw a Geodude at me. My own, Lebowski, rocked him. I mentioned the glacial pace of activity in my last Poké-log. I discovered that turning off the already limited battle animation speeds things up significantly. Fights are now just text and flashing monsters. It doesn’t sound exciting, but it remains engrossing. Never doubt the power of pressing a single number and watching a number climb. 4:10 – Another trainer jacked me. Even though all these random people just threaten you on your journey, they never carry more than one or two pokemon of their own. Very odd. 4:14 – Species diversity is another peculiar aspect of Sinnoh. Walk ten feet, everything looks exactly the same. But you’ll encounter entirely different species than you would less than a mile away. How do pokemon compete for resources anyway? Read More... Posted Jul 10 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, nintendo ds, pokemon

• The B.Beard All-Stars: Hour Eight of Pokemon part 1

  I wish I could tell you that I’ve gained some grand insight into the world of Pokémon. I have after all been wandering Sinnoh for just over a week now, clocking a little over seven hours. Things have not progressed much since I caught that Bidoof last Monday; I’ve been in some caves, gone to some other towns, kicked the crap out of some cult trying to give birth to a new universe. One guy made me talk to some clowns. Then he gave me a watch. It was freaking weird. Pokémon is, pound for pound, the most violent game I’ve played pretty much ever. All you ever do is fight. The entire point of the game is fighting. There is literally nothing else you can do with the hundreds of little beasties you catch. You can give them fun names, dress them up with accessories, but all of it is in the name of making them beat the piss out of each other. Pokémon don’t kill though. The merely pound each other into exhaustion (which is really strange. It seems that none of them are predatory.) You see pokémon co-habiting and working — they are semi-sentient apparently — with other humans as you wander the land but you don’t get to engage in any of that. You can only fight. Every stranger you run into on the road? They will attack you. Sinnoh is a scary damn place. As I enter my eighth hour, I am trying to find a bike. I’ve got to Lance Armstrong my way through some cave. Don’t ask. Join me and my team, The B.Beard All-Stars, as we look for the BMX of our dreams! Read More... Posted Jul 10 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, nintendo ds, pokemon

• Where is Wii's Disaster: Day of Crisis?

  The hardcore, the core gamer, the fanboy. Whatever you want to call them, it’s hard to ignore their bitterness toward Nintendo these days. I’m the first to admit that I’m one of them, but my frustration with the current king of the console hill doesn’t stem from their burgeoning commitment to the soccer mom set. It’s not even the lackluster treatment some of their core franchises (read: Zelda) have seen in the past two years. I’m angry at Nintendo because, when they first revealed the Wii and its initial line-up of games at E3 2006, they showed off two brand spanking new games, games devoid of Mario, Wario, Link, or any of the three thousand Pokemon, and neither of them have seen the light of day since. Project H.A.M.M.E.R., a fairly silly looking brawler, was actually playable at the time, but Nintendo announced that it was “on hold” as of summer 2007. Their other new IP, developed by fan-favorite studio Monolith Soft, was Disaster: Day of Crisis. Read More... Posted Jul 09 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, wii, where is, pokemon, mario, e3, link, disaster day of crisis, project hammer, wario

• Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

  A strange thing happened ‘round about last October. For the first time since its release in April 2005, I was regularly playing games on PSP. I had been carrying a grudge against Sony for promising the world with their first handheld and not delivering even a fraction of the compelling software that they had on the first two home Playstations. But then, all of a sudden, there were all these fantastic games to sink my teeth into. Strategy RPGs like Jeanne D’Arc, old-school action like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and true genre benders like Crush had finally brought me into the PSP fold. The drawback? My DS went on the shelf and wasn’t touched for months. Oh, I brought it down when Contra 4 came out and on that rare Saturday morning that I felt like going back to my Animal Crossing village to do some weeding, stomp some roaches, and writing some letters. But I wasn’t playing anything new and I started wondering if the brief reign of the DS — not as a force of business but as a fount of compelling design — was over. Man, was that stupid. Read More... Posted Jul 07 2008, 04:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, whatcha playing, nintendo ds, psp, castlevania, pokemon, phoenix wright, contra, ninja gaiden, jeanne d'arc, shiren the wanderer, crush

• To be a Pokemon Master

  I am a Pokemon fan. Not a rabid fan but just somebody who has seen most of the movies when they hit Cartoon Network, owns a plush Pikachu (or three) and was quite disappointed that MewTwo didn't make the Super Smash Bros Brawl cut. But those are all asides, occasional distractions. When I say I'm a Pokemon fan, I mean I like the core games. I was aware of the series months before it arrived in America and dove into the Red/Blue/Yellow generation full bore. My interest waned after I played through my copy of Silver and like many a lapsed fan, I didn't start paying a lot of attention again until Diamond and Pearl hit. Having skipped a generation and a number of remakes, I found a lot of fresh and new material in Pearl, including how much more there was to training the Pokemon themselves. There are multiple layers of accessibility in Pokemon that makes it attractive to all manner of gamer, from the basic catch and battle to the whole competitive metagame. I have to ask, however, are we having fun anymore? Read More... Posted Jul 07 2008, 11:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, nintendo ds, pokemon, amber ahlborn

• Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth

  When teachers and talk show radio hosts moan about the decline of America's youth, they point out how so few kids can name all 50 American States yet can identify all twelve billion of Nintendo's Pokemon with seemingly no effort. (The secret here is that Pokemon are fun and exciting where as geography is not. Oh wait, that's not a secret.) For all the lamentations of our teacher-women (and teacher-men), it seems as if the generation that grew up with Ash Ketchum is ahead of the old fuddy-duddies. This GamesRadar feature indicates that the geeks control Wikipedia and they who control Wikipedia, control the Earth. So what matters are given the most attention in the digital tome of knowledge that will soon be passed on to our children? Is it religion? Is it the rich history of the forefathers who founded the free world? No, fool. Knuckles the Echidna takes precedence over all. Get your priorities straight. Read More... Posted Jul 01 2008, 03:07 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: pokemon, gamesradar, sonic the hedgehog, mega man x, wikipedia, ash ketchum, feature, knuckles, mavericks

• Going Back in There: My Very First Hour With Pokemon, part 2

  In the second part of my journey, I discover the joy of making small animals kick the crap out of birds for me and I meet my very best friend in the world. 2:05 – Interestingly enough, Pokémon let’s me name not only myself, but also my best friend. My best friend is TheHoff. Complete strangers in the game know me and TheHoff “are tight”. He just invited me to the lake. His theme song is rad. 2:09 – No balls. No monsters. No monsters in balls. I would like to do something. 2:10 – We’re going to Lake Verity: The Lake of Emotions. This is getting awful racy. 2:12 – This is definitely more of an RPG than I remember Blue being. Is there more of an emphasis on story here? 2:13 – BIRDS! 2:14 – I found an old man’s briefcase and it happened to be filled with balls containing beasts so now I’m fending off birds with a flaming monkey. One of my available commands is “Leer” which is really kind of creepy. The battle system doesn’t give any indication as to what an attack might do, though. Is that part of strategy, not knowing what the hell you’re doing? Read More... Posted Jun 30 2008, 12:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, nintendo ds, pokemon

• Going Back in There: My Very First Hour With Pokemon, part 1

  My relationship with Pokémon has always been focused on the phenomenon, not the game. Watching the cartoon, cards, games, and films descend on Western culture between September of 1998 and December of 1999 was not unlike witnessing a natural disaster from a reinforced safe-house; I was scared but secure in other games, fascinated but not brave enough to go outside to try and document the event. I was sixteen when Pokémon Blue and Red came out, slightly too old to be caught in the flood. I got around to trying out Blue in July ’99, just to see what all the fuss was about. It was horrible. Too slow, too simple, too oblique. I put it down and never went back. Over the past decade, Pokémon has refused to die, maintaining a stranglehold on gamers of all ages, and I’ve started to wonder, yet again, if I’m missing out on something. There has to be a reason people return to these games. The brand is strong enough to survive without proper handheld entries from Nintendo, why do people keep going back for more. At twenty-six, now a bold videogame journalist, and it’s time for me to weather the storm. Join me, dear reader, as I plunge into the world of Pokémon Diamond searching for unholy knowledge of gaming’s darkest secrets. Read More... Posted Jun 30 2008, 11:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, nintendo ds, pokemon

• 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

• NPD Wrap: The Times Are a Changin’

  April’s come to a close and now, under the cold, hard light of math, three things are becoming clear. First, people freaking love Nintendo games. Sure, we already knew that, but over a million people bought Mario Kart for Wii in less than a week. Second, people freaking love Grand Theft Auto. Nearly two million people bought that in even less time. Third, our access to new videogames is going to change dramatically in the very near future. While these numbers may just look like numbers to us, to the people who publish videogames, the people who control when we get to engage these creations, the math is saying that 2008 is different. Tradition dictates that high profile, big hype games are held in reserve for the holiday push from late September through December and the rest of the year is just a slow trickle of quality goods. The math of March and April 2008 says that people will buy many, many games throughout the year, not just around Christmas. What happens now? Going forward, we’re going to see more games, more often. At least, until digital distribution destroys physical media and the whole issue becomes moot. Come get some hard analysis and delicious numbers after the jump. Read More... Posted May 16 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, nintendo, nintendo ds, ea, microsoft, npd, xbox 360, wii, psp, mario kart, ubisoft, sony, call of duty, pokemon, gran turismo, army of two, super smash bros, guitar hero, rainbow six, Grand theft auto 4