Retro Revolution

Look at this image:

This is Mega Man. Now, is this sprite of Mega Man from before or after 2008?

The answer?

Both!

As you're no doubt aware, there's been quite a retro revolution taking place in the gaming world over the past few years. Franchises long forgotten are breathed new life, like the recently announced Rocket Knight. Once a 16-bit adventure on the Sega Genesis, now re-imagined in "2.5D". Not quite 2D, not quite 3D. Like so:

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Some developers, however, push the retroness to the extreme. Like when Capcom released Mega Man 9 last year. It wasn't with new graphics, wasn't with some new mixture of dimensions; it looked EXACTLY like it did in 1987. Even the box art for the game looks like something that was popular during the time of Tron and He-Man:

It's a risky move. In the age where HD gaming has pretty much become the norm, for a developer to make something only the oldest of gamers would truly appreciate, speaks of their committment to the fanbase. And Mega Man 9 sold PHENOMENALLY, recreating a whole retro revolution in the gaming industry. Resurrecting old franchises is nothing new, but resurrecting them in the same style they were first created is as hardcore as it gets. And now there's even the advent of NEW franchises done in OLD graphics, with animations and color schemes that harken back to the games of yesteryear. A recent example is the not yet released game Half-Minute Hero for the PSP, that looks like something straight out of 1993:

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And yet, Half-Minute Hero is already being lauded by critics as a mini masterpiece. I don't know about you guys, but for a gamer like me that's been a fan of this industry since 1988, I would LOVE to see more of these. My most beloved old franchise?

RIVER CITY RANSOM.

Do it Nintendo.

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Let's Play Together

The Nintendo Wii has gotten the reputation of being a kiddy console, something Nintendo has struggled with for ages. But it also has the reputation of being one of the main companies concerned mostly with multiplayer gaming, with getting everyone involved and playing together. It's not only a good business move (more players equates to more money), but as people are looking for ways to stretch their gaming dollar a bit, they're also looking for the most bang out of their games. I recently talked about how single player gaming might be on the decline, but that doesn't mean gaming is dead. Gamers these days are interested in ways of playing together, and enjoying gaming with friends and loved ones. Here are some hot multiplayer games coming out this year from Nintendo and all the other big names.
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New Super Mario Bros. Wii

Mario and all his pals come back for another big adventure, and it even comes with four player co-op. This makes it the very first "true" multiplayer Mario game, something the old-school Mario fans will no doubt love. You can take control of Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Yoshi and many more, utilizing each of your individual skills to triumph over the evil Bowser. Hey, everyone knows Mario games are fun, no matter what kind of gamer you are, because...it's Mario. Enough said.

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Borderlands

From Gearbox, the team behind the stellar Brothers in Arms series, comes a new IP called Borderlands. Set on a distant world called Pandora, the harsh atmosphere and lack of resources plunges the planet into chaos and lawlessness. You take control of one of four characters, all with their own stories and own reasons for being on Pandora, and all searching for an alien treasure that could make them rich. This is actually my most anticipated title this year, because of a lot of reasons. Open world, procedurally generated weapons in excess of 7 Million (that's right, 7 million plus weapons), vehicular combat, unique characters, and FOUR PLAYER CO-OP! It really doesn't get any better than that. It's available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

Left 4 Dead 2

Although it looks like a movie poster, it's actually the highly anticipated sequel to last year's groundbreaking effort Left 4 Dead. Again, we have four player co-op, this time against the hordes of "infected" zombie-like creatures who come at you from every angle. Four friends can take part in this zombie apocalypse, running and gunning your way through the Southern Bayou as try to make your way to safety and sanity. Boasting all new campaigns, new guns, new modes, new zombies and a newly improved "director" engine to keep you guessing, Left 4 Dead 2 looks like a sure hit this Fall. Available for PC and Xbox 360.

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Toy Drop

Remember a couple of years ago when Furbie dolls were the biggest thing to hit America? What was the allure of those things? They were short, campy, creepy, furry mutations with a beak and terrible piercing eyes. Have you forgotten? Behold!

Still creeps me out to this day. But as creepy as I found them, they sold like hotcakes, to the point where McDonalds actually started offering them in Happy Meals. But kids, and some adults, are all into the newest toy crazes. Life's not all about games you know, all of us know kids who would probably rather play with a toy train than Super Mario Bros. (or maybe not). Either way, with the holiday season looming over us once again, and our economy still in the dumps, parents are looking for the new toys that will drive their kids crazy that won't break the bank either. Here's some I recently found that I'm thinking of getting my nephews and nieces:

Rubiks Touch Cube: The old regular Rubiks cube we knew as kids is just too easy for the young ones of today! They need a flashy electronic one! So instead of twisting it around, you slide your finger across the colors to switch them around. Looks like fun...in a hollow, digital way. Either way it's a whopping $149.99! Better go look for the duddy old plastic ones.

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Ni-Hao Kai-Lan: Kids are just so much smarter than we ever were. Their cartoons are actually teaching them another language! When Dora The Explorer becomes old hat, we have the just as adorable Kai-Lan who teaches Korean while entertaining. And these toys are a healthy $14.99.

 Zhu Zhu Pets: You thought the furryness was over?! It never went away, it just got a little less frightening. Zhu Zhu Pets, from what I can tell, are just furry toy pets, something along the lines of a gerbil or guinea pig, without all the messes, smells, sounds, and...life. Don't be fooled though, these pets are consistently on Amazon.com's top ten most sold products, and Wal-Marts across the globe are selling them for around $8, but they can't seem the keep them in stock. Will it just be Furby 2?!?

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Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Review

Not too long ago I talked about two wargames that will be released soon that really had me excited: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. They're the bigwigs in the war genre right now, but I often forget that there are lesser known but just as dedicated war games out there with their own unique take on the genre. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is the unofficial sequel to Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis that was released back in 2001. It is known for its intense difficulty and committment to war realism. I played Operation Flashpoint: CWC a long time ago and was giddy to find that headshots were automatic kills, something the other, more popular war games don't actually do. I respect Kotaku's review system, instead of giving it an arbitrary number, they break it down into things they liked and things they hated. Check it out a portion of that review:
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Loved



Damage System: Getting shot in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising can have a lasting impact on how you play the missions. Besides headshots killing you instantly, you can get tagged in the legs, the chest, the arms, the head. Injuries show up on a little version of your character on the screen, if you don't fix yourself up fast (or have a medic do it) you'll eventually bleed out. And even when you do patch yourself up you still won't be able to run sometimes. The end result? More cautious gameplay, more thinking before you move. Perfect for this type of game.

Difficulty: Played on the average setting, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a brutal, unforgiving experience. If you don't pace yourself, using tactics and squad commands, you're going to be shot down in seconds. And those one-shot kills you land can happen to you too, so don't stand in one place for too long.

Realism: From the whine of bullets and full body damage modeling to the relatively open map, which allows for just about any sort of approach you want in a map, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising plays more like a training exercise than it does a run-in-gun shooter.

Hated


Save System: Managing and creating save points in a game can be an art. Too many and players will just trudge through the game, regardless of loss of life, knowing that they can respawn feet from where they dropped. Too few and you have Dragon Rising, which has you play for 30 to 40 minutes, cross vast tracks of terrain, take out multiple units and then die only to do it all over again. The save points improve as you near the end of the game, but the beginning is brutal and unnecessary.

Line of Sight: When a single shot can kill you instantly and save points are stretched between unforgiving distances of objectives and terrain, having a game that can't render an enemy on the horizon doesn't just look bad, it guts the action. In almost every map I played there were enemies who phased in and out of existence as they wavered on the edge of what the game could handle showing me, making sniping a near impossibility.

Brain-Damaged Friendlies: Your squad mates can be life-savers, helping you flank enemies or patching you up after you've taken a shot to the chest. But man can they be stupid. It's shocking how many times my men came to patch me up and then just stood over me with a med kit in hand, watching me die, or refused to mount a vehicle, or walked directly in front of me while I was shooting. Or the one time I had to restart a section of a mission because my squad had commandeered a jeep, drove to the other side of the map with it and then refused to join me at the extraction point. In a game so reliant on squad, this level of artificial intelligence problems is unacceptable.
(Source)

Sounds good, but doesn't seem to pull off a lot of the things that made the original so noteworthy. Oh well, Modern Warfare 2 is next month! Whooo!

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Fighting Games...The Genre Arcades Left Behind

It's the summer, you're twelve years old, and you have a pocket full of change you bummed off of your parents. You step into your local arcade and are instantly dazzled; lights are flashing, 8-bit sounds are beeping and blooping in your ears, people are laughing, crying, and cheering in every direction. You're here for fun and laughs, for friends and camaraderie, but mostly, you're here for what everyone else is here for: recognition. And the best way to get recognition in the inclusive fast-paced world of arcades? Fighting games.
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Before fighting games were relegated completely to consoles, the true allure of the genre came from besting a physical opponent you've only just met in front of dozens of your peers, perhaps most of them strangers as well. It was the closest thing a geeky suburban kid could get to street cred, and the respect one gained from these competitive bouts were just as real as any sports hero would get. It was a great pasttime, one that required a great deal of time and effort, and skill, to be a champ. I had many great summers in such places.

But the fighting genre has taken a serious back seat, and competitive gaming is now mostly done online to virtual opponents half the world away. It's still fun, but a lot of the passion is gone. And as the world becomes more casual, the gaming pool wider, and production costs increased, fighting games simply don't hold sway in the gaming community as much as it once did. Arcades left them behind and the young ones don't seem to care for it.

Thankfully, in recent years, a few titles are still garnishing praise. Street Fighter IV, released in the States this year, has enjoyed tremendous success. Soul Calibur IV, released last year, was also a commercial success. And Tekken 6 is poised to storm the fighting scene in just a few weeks. Although their popularity has diminished, the competitive fighting game is still going strong, and this video from the EVO tournament shows just how intense these battles can be:

Indie Games...Pushing the Envelope

Game development is an expensive endeavor. One of last year's biggest games, Gears of War 2, had a $12 million development budget, well over the cost of the development of, say, Star Wars. And personally, I thought Gears of War 2 was a great game, well worth the development costs and just as many thrills as a similarly priced Hollywood film. But what about the little game developers? The guys whose vision might just be a bit too extreme, too unconventional, to get the financial backing of a major game publisher?  Well then they make it indie, baby!

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If you're anything like me, the term "indie" conjures up thoughts of strange fashion statements, apathetic youth, and confusing ideals. But in the gaming world, it's awesome! Generally you can find some very amazing ideas, things totally outside of the realm of jumping or shooting, that have the potential to push the idea of gaming to the edge. Take, for example, the 2005 indie title Façade. It's an interactive story where you type in anything and the game characters respond. Observe:

Amazing stuff, eh? This is a free game that you can download here. But indie developers, like any developers, need to make money. And offering a game for free isn't going to make you money. Luckily, we have the likes of the Playstation Network, Xbox LIVE Arcade, WiiWare, and Steam, to bring indie titles to the limelight. Just like last year's HUGE indie title, Braid, whose interesting time mechanics totally changed how a simple platforming game could be played.

What new delights await the gaming community? Find out at IndieGames.com.

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Is Single-Player Gaming Dead?

Believe it or not there was a time when gaming wasn't as social of an event as it was today. Lots of games were single-player experiences and that's the way we liked it. We jumped into a world, spent hours there, and didn't feel socially irresponsible after doing so. If you were itching for social gaming, you went to an arcade, and it would satisfy every multiplayer itch you could possibly have. But those days are long gone, arcades are all but vanquished from the West, and solo gamers are looked down upon. Kotaku's Michael McWhertor has an interesting article about it.

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There is some cause for concern for the solo-only player. Massively successful games like Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Valve's Left 4 Dead offered shorter campaign modes in favor of a more robust multiplayer feature set. And StarCraft fans may be more than perturbed about the late release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, already sliced into three campaigns, largely due to delays with Battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer service.

If more publishers and developers follow suit in shifting more focus to multiplayer, will the lone wolf suffer?

The addition of multiplayer to games that have relied on their single player strengths is done for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that the game buying public has simply come to expect it as a series sequelizes and evolves. It's an oft-demanded feature from the community, even in series that tend to be strictly single-player.

Personally I don't expect games to be multiplayer, and sometimes I really don't want it! But the gaming atmosphere has changed drastically over the last twenty years, could multiplayer games now be considered the norm?
[Source]

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