Many, many years ago Nintendo wanted to produce a CD add-on to compete with the Sega CD, despite the fact that Sega’s hardware had mediocre sales at best. They turned to none other than Sony to produce the SNES CD, and through a series of strange and unfortunate events, Sony ended up making the first PlayStation instead. Since that ill-fated partnership, fanboys from the camps of both video game creators have been wildly slinging rumors and accusations around about each other. Considering the obvious design similarities between the Wii remote and Sony’s newest peripheral, the PlayStation Move, a fanboy war will inevitably ignite somewhere. It is worth exploring some of the other conflicts between these two colossi of the gaming industry, even if it’s only so the waring factions can get their facts straight.Read the full article at RoboAwesome.com
Once in a blue moon, there is a game in a genre that raises the bar so high for its peers that few will be able to reach it, let alone a spin-jump over it. When Super Mario Galaxy released in 2007, players and critics alike thought it would be that standard setting game for platformers in this generation of consoles. Bright visuals, innovative gameplay mechanics, and stellar level design made it the definitive title everyone hoped it would be. Most assumed that a sequel would be a mere rehash of old ideas, and that another entry in the Galaxy series would be pointless. Fortunately for us, Nintendo took great efforts to prove everybody wrong by releasing Super Mario Galaxy 2. There are as many reasons as there are stars in the sky why it is the most amazing Wii game of 2010, but here I’ve tried to narrow the list down to the top five.
In August of 1995, I was on the cusp of turning 14. President Clinton was only a few months away from engaging in “intimate relations” with Monica Lewinsky and “One Sweet Day” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men was at the apex of the Billboard Top 20. I was probably on my third or fourth playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, still trying to find all of those key holes in Super Mario World , and life was good. I’m sure I felt like nothing in the world of video games could possibly get any better; that is, until I opened my latest issue of Nintendo Power and learned about the Virtual Boy.
Sequels in the video game industry too often are the kiss of death for what would have been an otherwise stellar intellectual property. Games like Tomb Raider and Sonic the Hedgehog have been consistently re-done and sequeled until they are mere shadows of the original game that brought them so much fame. The guys at Gaijin games decided to do something innovative by making a series of games with each one having such different mechanics than the one before it that each title could almost be a stand-alone game. The fourth and newest game, Bit.Trip Runner, holds true to this formula of innovation even more successfully than its predecessors.
Last night marked the final episode of what I believe to be the most epic television series since Star Trek: Voyager; Lost. Hopes were high and nerves were frayed as the world tuned in to see what would become of the Oceanic survivors that we had all come to know and love, and I feel like we as viewers were given everything we needed to bring some closure to the last six seasons of awesomeness. Unfortunately, it seems like I may be in the extreme minority for feeling this way.
Earlier this week, Aksys Games released indie developer Gaijin’s fourth installment in the Bit.Trip series available on WiiWare. The aptly titled “RUNNER” finally puts players in the shoes of the series’s protagonist, CommanderVideo, in this side-scrolling rhythm/reflex platformer. Be prepared for a lesson in tension management as you instruct the Commander when to jump, slide, kick (and more) as he sprints through the game’s numerous levels.
For RoboCast 007 Carl and I sat down with Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes; the diabolical minds behind the upcoming and independently developed Super Meat Boy. We discussed a variety of things, ranging from retro games, how to survive as an independent game maker, diabetes, and the 2010 census.
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