While we in the gaming community often bemoan the proliferation of sequels and franchises from companies seeking to make a quick, uncreative buck, there is something to be said for the finely tuned game experience that can emerge from a sequel to a beloved game. If you would dispute this point, you could look toward the first-person shooter market and observe the refinement of Quake II over its well-loved predecessor or observe the many critics who prefer The Godfather, Part II or The Empire Strikes Back over their respective first volumes. Such is the case with Myth II: Soulblighter. As wonderful as the original was, Myth II was the pure distillation of real-time tactical beauty with refinement and class. Or, as much class as you could pack onto a battlefield stained with blood and ichor.

Continue Reading

What is it about the early 90’s that sets my gamer’s heart aflutter? Is it the 16-bit palette? Is it the MIDI sound? I’m not entirely sure, but if you put a carpal tunnel-inspiring SNES game pad in front of me, I’ll probably go weak in the knees. And one of the first games to ever get me excited about the system was the classic, irreplaceable The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Continue Reading

Without waxing too philosophic, the majority of popular video games, even those without any typically violent content, explore the darker impulse of the id: destruction. This is not limited to the fine purveyors of first-person shooters. Destruction is not limited to the eradication of another human (or alien) life form. Consider for a moment two puzzle games that were recently en vogue: Snood and Bejeweled. In the former, the player wins by clearing the stage of all of the snoods and in the latter, every set formed leads to the annihilation of that jewel set. It may seem odd, but few games focus on the other side of that coin. Today I look back at one of the greatest games of creation in the annals of gaming: SimCity 2000.

Continue Reading

Long before Pirates of the Caribbean tapped into our collective pirate souls, there was a little game called Sid Meier’s Pirates!. Originally released in 1987 for the Commodore 64, the game was ported to eight different platforms over the ensuing four years. Before Pirates, the bulk of Meier’s games were flight simulators, so this was the first title that really tapped into the Meier-simulation sweet spot. The game put players in charge of a privateer on the high seas of the Caribbean as he captured raided and pillages–as pirates are wont to do. It opened a whole new world to gamers.

Continue Reading

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, LucasArts was a bastion of creative gaming thought amid an ocean of mediocrity. Perhaps I’m overstating the point given that plenty of wonderful games were produced other studios during those years, but a certain amount of idealization of LucasArts of that era is well-deserved. At its inception, LucasArts did not even tap into Star Wars, the greatest franchise at its disposal. Instead, the company created entirely new characters and games primarily in the adventure game genre. Although Sierra certainly did its part with the Kings Quest series, LucasArts lent its own particular flair to the genre from the outset with Maniac Mansion.

Continue Reading

Back when I was a wee tyke, no more than seven, there weren’t a lot of cooperative game options available to gamers. To give some sort of perspective, my childhood was back in the days of NES, so while I did play the occasional game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? on my father’s black and white work PC, most of my gaming was confined to the titles with the Nintendo seal of approval. Naturally, in addition to the limits set on video game play time by my parents, there was a premium on television time. With my sister only occasionally content with watching my pixelated meanderings and tiny, darting fingers that pinched vulnerable skin, it was often a lot easier to get my video game fix if I chose a game we could play together.

And the only game we had in our library that had truly cooperative gameplay was Bubble Bobble.

Continue Reading

I realize that I spent a rather large amount of virtual space bemoaning the decline of the Japanese RPG and highlighting all the ways the genre is not a game at all, but, as I implied in that article, I worry over the state of the genre because it has meant so much to me over the course of my gaming life. In that vein, I’m going to present the first in a series of retrospectives of what I perceive to be classic games that have influenced the gaming industry in some way.
Continue Reading