61 Frames Per Second

It’s Friday, people. Friday means one thing. It is date night! Not just date night though. You don’t have work tomorrow and neither does your fancy. So you can stay the night then have breakfast sex.

You know what’s awesome on a date? Videogames. Bet you wish you knew what to play on your date. Well take it from the suavest, savviest players around!

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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.

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The term “casual gamer” gets tossed around by everyone from Best Buy employees to Bill Keller. It references the growing market of people across all demographics who are only just starting to purchase and play videogames. It’s a misleading term, though, because nigh on every single person who has ever touched a computer has played one game: solitaire. And while it’s the very definition of a casual pursuit, it’s also serious business. Josh Levin has written up a great piece on the history and nature of computer solitaire play for Slate’s Procrastination issue. Check it out, kill some time, then fire up a game yourself. You know you want to.

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There’s no time like the present to revitalize fundamental game types. Like abstractionist painters finding new creative horizons in crafting a pristine still life, designers are going back to the well, throwing off the shackles of complex narrative and detail rich presentations to create more immediate, visceral experiences. Once June rolls around, we here in the United States will get our greedy little hands on Space Invaders Extreme and Arkanoid DS, stylized modernizations of Taito classics with gameplay rooted in thirty year-old tradition. The trend, however, kicked off one year ago when Toru Iwatani released Pac-Man Championship Edition.

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Remember that delightful French auteur Michael Ancel? Penchant for lavishly detailed cartoon worlds and limbless characters? What happened to that guy after he made that King Kong game that was totally better than the movie? He worked on Rayman Raving Rabbids.

Yech.

But the man’s making up for lost time. Though there’s damn near no real information to speak of, Ancel has confirmed that he is creating a sequel to his cliff-hanger-ending, science fiction epic, Beyond Good & Evil. The original BG&E released back in 2003 and, despite a handful of flaws, is a remarkable piece of game due in no small part to its ambitious presentation, active world, and its protagonist, Jade. Jade remains a beacon of gender equality in a medium dominated by sexless anthropomorphics and muscle bound he-men. While publisher and IP holder Ubisoft have yet to kick the game into “full production”, it’s out there. Viva la Jade, baby. Hit the jump for a loot at the original game in all its glory.

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Having never been much of a PC or Mac gamer, I’ve come into Valve’s games far later than most. I experienced the original Half-Life second hand through my college roommate and only played through it myself last summer, on the PS2 of all things, in anticipation of the Orange Box’s fall release on consoles. When I finally did play through Half-Life 2 and its subsequent episodes, I was more than impressed. Valve’s reputation as peerless storytellers is more than deserved and despite being four years-old at this point, Half-Life 2 remains a high-water mark for game making free of the language and tools of film narrative. Writer Eric Wolpaw’s most impressive work in the Orange Box, however, is the widely lauded Portal, a perfect mix of Half-Life’s menace with the humor of his work on Psychonauts.

Up until last Sunday, I’d been waiting for a chance to race through Portal a second time for months. This wasn’t possible since my copy of the Orange Box had ended up in Korea. Damn roommates. Portal is a strange experience when you return to it.

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Yes, I realize I'm mixing my references a little here. Enjoy this minute of comedy from the good folks at Mega 64.

Game Reactor has screens of Order of Ecclesia, the upcoming Castlevania sequel for the DS, which follows the delightful Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. Let's take a look... yes, that definitely looks like Iga-produced Castlevania.

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The recent announcement of a Richard Kelly-less Donnie Darko sequel reminded me of a universal truth: just because something’s good, just because that something’s profitable, does not mean there should be more of it. The original Donnie Darko was a deeply personal work and it was that creator’s touch that made it such a wonderful artifact. S. Darko may be end up being a fine film but what’s the point without Kelly’s voice? Silent Hill without Team Silent has already proven to be just as questionable a proposition.

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I like to think, in my more ponderous moments (read: stoned), that gods are born constantly. It was probably the steady diet of British fantasy I consumed while being an ornery Catholic school student during my formative years that led to this continuing line of speculation. Working on the internet every day, I’ve started to spot the reigning deities of the Web 2.0 pantheon. The Angry Video Game Nerd is one of them. I’m not wholly convinced James D. Rolfe was ever a human being at all; he was born straight from the net, a spiritual conjuring made of Youtube users, fandom, and nostalgia addictions. His followers are legion too. Just look at the sheer number of blatant imitators sacrificing their dignity at his altar, the numerous acolytes playing his theme song across Myspace and Facebook.

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Capcom, as a corporate entity, has had a profound impact on my life. That’s not something a person should be happy to say out loud but it’s true. I have been giving them my money, time, and precious brain real estate for what literally amounts to four fifths of my life.

And I am proud of it!

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As with any art form, videogames have their share of notable people and subjects that fall through the cracks of time. Trends fade, voices go quiet, and games that were seemingly complete disappear entirely. 61 FPS’ Where Is? feature asks where the lost have gone.

Anime-styled Japanese games, particularly RPGs, are a dime a dozen on store shelves these days. Though they’ve been a staple of gaming in the United States since the mid-‘80s, there was a time when only a select few of them made the Pacific jump and even fewer of them made it over without being heavily censored and altered to suit more western tastes. Working Designs was one of the few companies out there devoted to faithfully localizing quirky Japanese titles and was a fan-favorite throughout the 1990s.

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I’ve got to hand it to Cracked, this is an almost perfect list of pants-wetting aggressors from videogames across the ages. Wallmasters, poison head crabs, Baron von Blubba, and Sinistar have all caused seriously tense moments for me in addition to all sounding like euphemisms for incurable STDs. That said, there are a handful of noticeable omissions from this list. 61 Frames Per Second, being the civil minded outlet it is, brings you five other baddies.

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Let's say, hypothetically, it's Monday evening and you wake up at midnight after passing out on the couch for a couple hours. You're too restless, headachy, drunk and sexually frustrated to go back to sleep. Hypothetically. And you've beaten The Legend of Zelda so many times in the past month, in an attempt to push your completion time under fifty minutes (final score: 49:58.13) that it doesn't have much to offer in the way of comforting distraction.

For a cosy mix of the familiar and new, do what I did. . .

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It’s Wednesday and that can only mean one thing: Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is going to talk very fast and be very funny while doing it. The latest Zero Punctuation up over at The Escapist tackles the hottest gaming subject around this fine spring, Grand Theft Auto 4. Yahtzee does indeed enjoy the game quite a bit but takes issue with the one aspect of the game that I’ve taken the most joy out of so far. He calls the friendship/dating sim mechanics in the game “an irritating, mindless chore” but, as I’ve said a number of times, I’ve found it to be the most immersive and engaging aspect of Rockstar’s magnum opus. Than again, I’M VERY LONELY!

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OST reviews original soundtracks, arranged albums, remixes, and game related music.

Everyone hates Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, and despite my nostalgia-warped fondness for the game, I admit it's a pretty lame addition to the series. The 1992 "beginner's RPG" — known insultingly in Japan as Final Fantasy USA — has a parodically generic storyline, preschool gameplay and bland-as-hell graphics. But there's one thing to love about it: the soundtrack. Even Mystic Quest's most fiery detractors tip their hats to Ryuji Sasai's ass-whooping hard-rock score, which pushes the SNES's sound chip to its limits of its metalosity.

Sasai must've pissed off one of his bosses, because the few games he scored — including Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy Legend III, and our subject for today, Treasure of the Rudras — were all kind of stinkers, by general public consensus. Maybe that contributed to his early exit from the game industry; he's currently playing bass in a Queen tribute band. Treasure of the Rudras never made it over to the U.S., so its soundtrack is even more obscure than Mystic Quest's. But if you've got a yen for some choice, melodic hard rock, it's a real buried, uh, treasure.

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When it comes to Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s always the first name that springs to mind. Yeah he’s the creator, the designer, the director, the writer of all that dialogue, not to mention that the entire team behind the games is named after the man. But another name springs to my mind as I quiver with anticipation of Metal Gear Solid 4’s release: Yoji Shinkawa. Shinkawa’s expressive illustrations have been the face of the MGS series from the beginning and are, if I do say so, sexy as hell. The vaguely defined faces of his figures, the broad-stroke heavy lines of his characters, the almost melancholic tone of his largely monochromatic illustrations. Shinkawa gets us hot and no mistake.

What do you say, FPSers?

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While admitting this risks damaging my “cred”, I do not game that much online. Indeed, my experience with online multi-player is limited to only a handful of games like Mario Kart DS (which I quickly abandoned due to rather egregious cheating) and a very brief stint in World of Warcraft (once I got to more populated areas of the game, my aging G4 PowerBook just couldn’t keep up. I got lucky.) That said, like so many others, I’ve played a lot of Halo 3 online. In general, the random people I’ve played with have been alright; not offensive but not people I’ll become bosom buddies with. Playing online is like hanging out with any group of strangers: it’s civil and awkward. On heavily populated nights though, when Microsoft’s servers strain under the weight of hundreds of thousands of players, that’s when you get a taste of the horrific behavior that keep many people from playing online at all. Racist, moronic, misogynistic rambling from a multitude of pubescent men with no sense of irony, humor, or decorum. No description, no recording can do it justice, you have to experience this sort of dumb hostility yourself to truly understand it. Though you don’t have to play online to witness it at work in the community. Just look at the Kotaku comments section during last year’s Resident Evil 5 debacle.

Angela from Lesbian Gamers and Michael from Brainy Gamer have written up an essay that succinctly states the problem and elegantly asks what’s to be done about it if discourse on games is going to grow.

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December 13th, 1988. Nintendo EAD Headquarters. Kyoto, Japan.

"I can't deal with this, man. I have to sleep. Now."

"Buck up. Have another slice of pizza."

"No more fucking pizza. Let's just come up with one more item for Super Mario Bros. 3 and call it a day."

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As I listened to this past Friday’s 1up Yours podcast, lazily typing away and sipping coffee, I perked up when the crew got on the topic of how they planned to introduce their children to videogames. While What They Play’s John Davison is already raising two very young gamers of his own, the other three gents still aren’t fathers but they all mentioned that they definitely want to see their kids weaned on classics from a young age. This is interesting to me because I’ve given the subject quite a lot of thought. My plan? Bed time stories.

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While the final months of 2006 were exciting times – the Wii and Playstation 3 were released mere days apart while the Xbox 360, DS, and PSP really started to heat up content wise – it was also a time of mourning. Just after the release God Hand and Okami, Clover Studios disbanded. Parent company Capcom absorbed much of the staff while the designer trinity of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil), Hideki Kamiya (Devil May Cry), and Atsushi Inaba (Viewtiful Joe) went off to form a new independent studio. Clover’s games were true rarities in the industry, each one an artistic ziggurat built on a foundation of violently colorful worlds and idiosyncratic mechanics. Viewtiful Joe’s comicbook world of an empowered movie buff that found the player manipulating the action with VCR commands, Okami’s sumi-e fantasia that allowed the player to literally exert their will on the world through painting; truly special stuff. That’s why it’s so exciting that yesterday’s rumors about their new games turned out to be absolutely true.

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For the uninitiated, the National Purchase Diary Group is the market research firm that has turned tracking videogame sales into something of a cult spectator sport. For gaming afficianados and journalists from a number of disparate outlets, the NPD’s monthly sales data for the videogame industry is the true frontline of the “console wars”. If you think I’m exaggerating the interest in such things, just check out this thread over at the infamous gaming forum, NeoGAF. That’s a forty-three page discussion about sales data for a single month.

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Written by Derrick Sanskrit

I've developed a nasty habit that I like to call "Alternate Soundtracking". I think it stems from my wanton desire to multi-task as much as possible. Most of my gaming these days is on handhelds while I ride the train and when I've got an iPod full of new and classic tunes vying for my attention, the games' soundtracks just become redundant.

This is a slightly different beast, though. Alternate soundtracking, for me, involves sitting down with a familiar game, turning down its volume, and queuing up my music library to find music that actually enhances the gaming experience.

For the first entry, I'm going to keep things simple. This one's all about the raw youthful energy. Super Street Fighter II is one of the most popular fighting games of all time, but its popularity isn't thanks to violence.

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Nothing Square-Enix could announce would make me happier than a sequel to ActRaiser, their seminal 1991 genre-bender. Back in the early days of the SNES, ActRaiser was one of the first games that felt genuinely next-generation. Mario World was great, but, well, it was Mario. ActRaiser, with its dense forests, poisoned lakes and vast deserts, was a window onto a gorgeous natural world that older game systems only had the power to imply. And the soundtrack kicked fucking ass.

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Jetpac is not good. Neither is Killer Instinct, Kameo, or Captain Skyhawk. While we’re on the subject, you should also know that Perfect Dark is bad. Battletoads sucks. There. I said it. Rare makes bad games. They have always made bad games. Playing Rare’s games reminds me of having to sit next to the kid who always crapped his pants in kindergarten. You feel bad for them, you may even think they’re pretty funny, but that doesn’t mean you want to play with them.

Banjo Kazooie 3 and Viva Piñata 2 will most likely also be bad.

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Once upon a time, in the hallowed days of the mid-90s, there was a show on USA called Up All Night. Up All Night aired, as you might expect, in the dead of night and was little more than truly crap movies – typically violenceploitation, sexploitation, pretty much any kind of movie that might end in ploitation – hosted by Gilbert Gottfried. It was always a special treat when you’d drunkenly channel surf your way into Gottfried surrounded by bikini clad women and telling you how you were about to watch C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D. Over the last twenty years of saving princesses and whatnot in the wee hours, I’ve come to realize that there are many, many games that fit the Up All Night formula. All they’re missing is a shrill comedian.

Dear reader, let me be your Gilbert Gottfried!

Tonight on Up All Night, 61FPS presents P.N. 03, an all but forgotten piece of trash from Capcom starring Vanessa Z. Schneider.