• James Cameron wouldn’t shut up about his new movie.
• The Host was staring at the teleprompter the whole time.
• Harry Potter’s Soccer Adventure.  Sigh.  I loved how it took them 10 minutes to get the trailer to play.  Poor Pele.
• Red Steel 2 looks alright.
• More Rabbids is never a bad thing.
• Assassin’s Creed 2 what a surprise.
• Ninja Turtles Smash Bros WHAT.
• 12,000 new Petz, My Coach, and Imagine games is not really that surprising.

This week I’d like to take a minute to talk about some more HDE’s from my past, however moving a generation over to the 16bit era, instead of the 8bit – and this is just a quickie list only three listings today.

#3 – Robotrek :

Now I’m sure many of you have not played this game, it was one of my favorite RPGs on the SNES (Final Fantasy 2, 7th saga and Super Mario RPG not included because well everything pales in comparison to those) by ENIX. It was this whacky game where you played a boy genius (much akin to Dexter’s Lab) who ends up building these little combat-robots to help fight off a band of evil crooks who are attempting to use science to do criminal things.

The real problem here is it gets a Disney style ending. Everything works out PERFECTLY for everyone. Bad guys are defeated, they manage to escape the exploding core just in time and the reporter gets her ’scoop’, your friends are like “man you are awesome.” the ghosts of your damn ancestors are even like “WTG DOOD.” Seriously.

SCIENCE!

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Sorry about the site bouncing up and down over the past couple of days. It appears that my hosting account’s primary FTP account got hacked, and the L33T h4xx0rz have been screwing with my stuff. Should be resolved now that my host restored a backup and I’ve changed all of my passwords.

In the current generation of party games across the platforms – Mario Party, Wii-Sports, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Wario Ware, etc – there’s one major thing these games have in common

Co-ordination and or timing – and mini-games.

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my day, we were lazy. Our ‘party’ games so to speak were the likes of Madden, Tecmo Bowl, NBA JAM, Blitz, You Don’t Know Jack, Pong and such. (Shh I’m leaving Track N Field out of this one.)

What I mean by this, is they were relatively sedentary games, learn a few button clicks, maybe a little bit of choice quick finger movements, but that was really it. We had buttons dedicated to juke around an opponent, or to dribble between their legs. Long gone are these games and their lazy ire for the lazy video game playing nerd. Now we have the six-axis to flick our controller in various directions to help angle his shot, a guitar with a gyro in it to detect when we are swishing our instrument into the air to ‘rock out’ harder, or a wii-mote to swish around in a graceful ark to do make a hook at a guy’s jaw. (continue reading…)

While Goldanas has already posted a thread about the onset of age and how it affects the vidya, I would like to throw in a little parallel to his personal feelings.

One thing I am beginning to get bent out of shape over is the kind of legacy I will leave. My entire childhood and most of what I would now call my adulthood has been spent with the vidya. For better or worse, my past is tied to the vidya. One of the big apprehensions I have about one day not playing video games is the fact that I will, in essence, be killing off what has been a large part of both my history and identity.

At the same time however, because our childhoods were electronic, they can be effectively captured in our various forms of modern media storage. With the advent of emulators, all of the games of your childhood, regardless of when you were born, become available. While this is very comforting, it is also very frightening. It seems scary to me that the exact experience can be immediately transferred to someone else. Perhaps this is why I have been putting more emphasis on the tactile aspect of my childhood.

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The death match is the oldest and simplest from of multi-player fps gaming. You drop X number of people into a pit, and first one to Y points wins. It’s fun, it’s a classic, and it works. However as teamwork based games become more popular the classic free for all is beginning to disappear.

If we look at some of the biggest first person shooters of last year, games like Call of Duty 5 and Farcry 2. While they both feature death match, they have a much larger popularity in in team death match and other team based game modes. Other games from last year, like Gears of War 2, Army of Two, and Left 4 Dead don’t even have it as an option. If we look back into the year before, we had Team Fortress 2, Call of duty 4, and Halo 3. Two of witch are still big in on-line gaming, and of them, Team Fortress 2 is strictly team based. Now the fact that there might be a trend is great, but what does it mean?

On the most basic level, it means gamers like working with other people more, and from there, I can come up with two ideas for what this trend could signify, one interesting and the other, more likely. The first being that gamers like working together more because it is more rewarding, and fosters more of a community. Many people I know enjoy fragging their friends, but they say it’s so much more satisfying when you and your friend save the day together. I second this opinion whole heartedly. Team fortress 2 is one of my favorite games because of the times when I’m forced to work with my team mates to progress. Team matches also reward people who play together more often as they work more and more cohesively as a team, and since your friends are not on all the time, you start to make connections with other gamers as you work together, and a solid community is formed. This community then adds to the staying power of a game, which would hopefully lead to gaming companies spending more time on games that have already been released, to keep the community at that game instead of moving to a new one.

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Since Counter-Strike, the so called “Leet” gamers are getting more and more common, but are they really worth their title? Is this elitist attitude towards games good? With the increase of online multiplayer games, it is fairly common that someone would get addicted to a game, and wouldn’t stop playing it until they’ve mastered it.

Some of these gamers are going to think they are superior to others just because they have a higher Gamerscore or PSN level, these guys can only play with another “Elite”. A lot of “Elite” gamers are that way because they place way too much importance and status on unimportant things. Getting 1000 achievement points or a platinum trophy can be quite an accomplishment, but it doesn’t grant you a special status or something noteworthy.
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Things are getting pretty stale around here, and I hate to admit it but daily traffic has kinda leveled out. In short, we’re not really growing anymore. I need some help.

Specifically, I need some help from you guys. Here’s my idea: If any of you have accounts on any big gaming forums, it would be incredibly awesome of you to make a post about this site on Wednesday of this week. I know it’s shameless for me to ask, but I really think it’ll give us the boost we need. Yes, even from these guys:

Since payments are still on hold, it obviously won’t work too well to promote the site based solely on getting people to write. Therefore, if you decide to do this, I’d like you to just pick your favorite article, post it, and ask what others think about it. That, or just post a link to the main site and say something along the lines of “lol, a community-driven blog. This will never work.” Something like that.

Anyway, if anybody decides to do this, I’ll be eternally grateful.

In my opinion Need for Speed games have always been about fun. The thrill of a cop chase or a final NOS boost across the finish line rarely fails to deliver a hardy amount of satisfaction and enjoyment. Perhaps it’s the rubber-band AI that keeps me on the edge of my seat, or the customization that can occupy me for hours. Although one thing is for sure, NFS seems to have aged a whole lot recently, and developed a nasty case of arthritis and schizophrenia.  

In 2002 I welcomed the shiny new NFS: Hot pursuit 2 into my life, although delivering a somewhat satisfactory experience I certainly wasn’t complaining. That same year saw the release of the hit street racing, car tuning popular movie The Fast and the Furious. EA having just released their sixth NFS game possibly made the greatest decision ever. They put 1 and 1 together by applying the popular elements of the movie and shoving them straight into their next game, NFS: The Fast and the Furious Underground. This wise move ascended the NFS franchise into what I like to refer to as the Golden Age of modern NFS gaming (2003 – 2005). 

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Soft and Hard counters both have different qualities to add depth to the game. They can have great effect on the way units are used, what kind of skills are needed, and what kind of strategies must be used.

Many players do not like hard counters, because they usually don’t require a lot of skill to use. This is only partly true though. When talking about micromanagement, hard counters are usually simple ot use: Click attack button and reap the rewards. Since they have such a big advantage over the unit they’re countering, you usually only need to worry about other units in the vicinity (this is not true for all genres, for example counter characters in fighting games).

However, this does not mean they are skill-less: Instead they provide a new level of depth to the macro game. Will my opponent build unit X? How many will he build? Where will he attack?

As you can see, with hard counters you really have to read your opponent (or scout) well. Otherwise you’ll use a lot of resources and time on building hard counters the enemy might not even use!
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