Great news about Steam: in anticipation of Portal 2 later this year, the device has been modified to dispense Portal for $0 until May 24th. If you haven’t played this yet, you absofuckinglutely must download it now.
There’s not much else to say… one of the seminal games of our time available for free, legal downloading? Why are you still here?
Welcome to the YouTube Round-Up, where contributors and editors of NFOpocalypse share their gaming videos and favorites. Have a suggestion for a video that should be featured here? Leave a comment!
[ Superior ] Epic Legendary
There are only so many variations to the Platforming model, but when the market was saturated with this genre, we gamers were treated to every possible iteration. Whether they were inserting RPG elements like in E.V.O. or pushing the model to its limit like in Kid Chameleon, developers built some amazing experiences from the “Platformer” scaffolding. One game that demonstrates this particularly well is Enix’s Hack-and-slash platformer\City-building Sim ActRaiser. And so, let’s ROMinisce.
Superior [ Epic ] Legendary
Before we resorted to classifying games in the megahybrid genre of “Action,” there was “Action-Adventure” and its sub-category - the iconic “Platformer.” These games were the mainstay of the industry through two decades of evolution, and the trademarks of this genre are ubiquitous in gaming as a whole. From Pitfall! to LittleBigPlanet, the best Platformers have always pushed us to the jump-landing, ledge-grabbing, death-defying limits. Since you and I both have a masochist deep down inside, let’s ROMinisce about a Genesis gem: Kid Chameleon.
Superior [ Epic ] Legendary
Rockstar Games might mean “hookers, killing sprees, and Hot Coffee” to Jack Thompson, but back when they were DMA Design they were better known for a quirky puzzle-solver called Lemmings. A slightly lesser-known but equally goofy and enjoyable game, Uniracers (Unirally in PAL regions), is the subject of this week’s ROMiniscing.
[ Superior ] Epic Legendary
The genre-bending epics of contemporary games certainly have their place, but the success of Viewtiful Joe and similar games shows that side-scrolling action isn’t dead. Indeed, there’s something special about a side-scrolling, mook-stomping, “story irrelevant” adventure. This week’s ROMiniscing hearkens back to the earlier days of the genre: Rare(ware)’s Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team.
Superior [ Epic ] Legendary
Being a creative medium, a fresh idea like Spore is well-received in the game industry (even if it’s tantamount to a five-part minigame). Long before YouTube was flooded with “Creature Creator” penis-monsters, evolution was the focus of a now obscure 1993 title published by Enix known as E.V.O.: Search for Eden. Combining Platforming with Role-Playing, creationism with evolution, and science with mythology, this classic game remains distinct and downright fun.
Superior Epic [ Legendary ]
As the spiritual predecessor to the future Horror sub-genre and the first reported game to receive a parental advisory warning (and you thought it was Mortal Kombat!), Splatterhouse is a significant point in video game history. By today’s standards, fighting crucifixes and zombies as a Jason Voorhees-esque maniac might seem tame, but this marked a step towards opening darker-themed mature content to players. Ultimately, we have Splatterhouse to thank for letting video games become more than a teenager’s delight.
In the last decade video games have gone from being something nerds did instead of meeting the opposite sex to that thing almost all people do instead of meeting the opposite sex. While video games have become possibly the largest entertainment industry in history, they have also gained some of the most sickly parasites of all. I speak, of course, about hack critics. While you are playing a game to enjoy it’s deep mechanics, gorgeous art, or complete lack of either, your critic counterpart is busy picking big words from a thesaurus so he can shit on your favorite new title. The OBRR is the line in the sand, and I stand on one side armed with poor grammar and crude language. Watch where you step.
Let’s start this off with the most obvious fart-sniffer on the whole goddamn Internet
Don’t you just love that nice alliteration? But the crassness and vulgarity of this article’s title captures the essence of it perfectly. Sometimes when a series moves forward, the hardcore fans bitch and moan because the game isn’t exactly like it was before. Fuck Fallout fans. Fuck them so hard.