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Twenty years on: gaming now and then
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. This short but sweet comparison shows games from the 1980s put side-by-side with their modern counterparts, helping to show how far gaming has come in two decades.What's harder to judge is whether the games on the left are fundamentally any different from those on the right. A glossy graphical coating might mask identical gameplay, and you may have had as much fun playing The Bard's Tale then as you do World of Warcraft now. The success of various Xbox Live Arcade titles is testament to the timeless nature of some games; next-gen graphics are undoubtedly nice, but they serve to hide any advances being made on the gameplay fronts.[Via /.]
Blast from the British gaming industry's past
Nothing beats a good dose of nostalgia, and this BBC 2 documentary from the mid-eighties is certainly a joy to behold twenty years on. It focuses on Imagine Software and Ocean Software and their struggles to create innovative titles on a platform which has been pushed to the limits, in a market flooded with hundreds of developers and beset by piracy.For those who watch this video and wish they were back in the heyday of the bedroom coder, we hear you; casual games seem to be the way forward for indie developers, until a working time machine hits the shelves.
Survey says: Virtual Console shaping up nicely
"Virtual console? That isn't anything like the Virtual Boy, is it?"As your spine and 20/20 vision will attest to, the Virtual Console and the Virtual Boy are thankfully very different things. For one thing, the Virtual Console actually lives up to its illustrious title, being able to take the shape of past Nintendo consoles (excluding the Virtual Boy) at the press of a button and allowing you to play some of your favorite games of yesteryear. It's certainly one of the Revolution's most appealing features, but the exact specifics up until now have been...well, not very specific at all.This may have something to with the fact that Nintendo appears to still be deciding about a lot of things regarding the feature. As a leaked marketing survey (complete with menu mockups and a list of games!) uncovered by 1up seems to suggest, they're not quite sure on how games will be delivered to the player and how exactly the costs will be managed. Gauging by the questions asked in the survey, Nintendo may be considering 3 different service models: Purchase: You'll pay a set price for the game of your choice, download it and then play it whenever you want. Rental: You rent the games for a specified period of time. This could be implemented in a number of ways, possibly having you download the game and then "unlocking" it for a month. Subscription: You pay a monthly fee which opens up the entire Virtual Console library for your playing pleasure. You download games and get to play them as long as you continue being a subscriber. We reckon the subscription model could work if it was reasonably priced and the library continued to grow consistently, but otherwise the ancient tradition of paying a fee and permanently receiving a game has always made sense to us. What's your take? Also, be sure to check out the full article for the list of Virtual Console games that appeared in the survey!
From the Game & Watch to the DS
Hindsight seems to be a constant in the universe, always keen on pointing out the exact moment in our pasts that led to our recent success or our miserable failure. When gamers aren't looking forward to the next generation of consoles and the realistic ways in which they'll render a fake World War II, they're busy looking back and waxing nostalgic about the good old days of destroying mean-spirited asteroids and shooting through their own ships in order to take out invading aliens. Indeed, we spend about as much time looking back as we do looking forward... which explains this strange pole-shaped indentation on my face.The chaps at 4 Color Rebellion have posted a pretty interesting article that traces the series of design innovations Nintendo has come up with over the decades, right from the Game & Watch and NES to the DS and the Revolution. The most interesting pattern one can pick up on is that Nintendo initially added more and more buttons to their controllers, slapping on some extra plastic for the SNES and creating a freakish trident of analog power for the N64 (an innovation that the competition quickly adopted). Now, Nintendo is reversing that line of thought, choosing instead to remove those frighteningly complex buttons and instead replacing them with different and highly unique control methods. It certainly worked for the DS, but will the industry follow? Putting the Revolution in the picture, it seems we're on the verge of the first major split in controller design, with Microsoft and Sony pulling the chicken wishbone on the other end and hoping that they'll end up with the biggest piece. Or perhaps the PC got it right all along with the classic mouse and keyboard combination (with respect to the metaphor, the PC is a vegeterian and is thus more interested in the cocktail tomatoes than the chicken).Read
Hudson classics coming back
Re-releasing old classics on portable gaming systems? What a novel and hitherto unexplored idea! Those crazy guys at Hudson have plumbed their archives of goodness and yanked out a few classics they thought you might enjoy again and then promptly squeezed them into tiny little GBA carts. You know, those things that go into that bottom slot thingy in your DS.The "Hudson Best Collection" label will see the release of several great NES games, including Lode Runner, Nuts & Milk, Star Soldier, Adventure Island, Bomberman and, er, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom. Hmm, sounds like that last one should be tossed. Dreadful puns aside, I fondly remember my time with Lode Runner. I loved that game - the tension, the satisfaction of stealing a pile of gold and the realization that....you just dug yourself into a freakin' hole. Again! Man, I hated that game.
