Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Review Update: Life of Pixel
Life of Pixel has come a long way since we last reviewed it almost a year and a half ago on the Playstation Mobile platform. At the time developer Super Icon was self-publishing on Sony’s open platform and what they created was a gem of a title at just around a dollar. You can read my previous review if you’re interested but suffice to say that despite the Playstation Mobile platform being dead, the game lives on in all its glory on the Vita (although you cannot search for it, you must browse the Playstation Mobile tab in the Vita store). After a few attempts to expand the license and platform, Life of Pixel has re-emerged, this time on PC, with a slew of changes (mostly for the best) and three more platforms for your retro gaming bliss. I must admit that the game is addicting and right at home on mobile, but that there’s definitely much to be gained by planting this tightly timed platfomer on bigger screens.
BBC Tackles the Dungeons & Dragons Fear in the 80s
As the article implies, there are plenty of things that parents have to be scared of in terms of what content comes in contact with kids today. This is nothing new. In the 50s it was rock & roll, in the 90s it was video game violence, but in the 1980s the seed of evil was none other than D&D (Dungeons & Dragons for those not familiar with the pen-and-paper role playing game). I am always fascinated by the counterculture of what parents fear and what kids get heavily involved in. Of course, like all other concerns of the past, as time moves forward all world-ending plagues on the youth come off extremely tame in hindsight and this is no exception. The wonderful people at the BBC have documented the rush of D&D fever in an article aptly named The Great 1980s Dungeons & Dragon Panic and I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in the stories behind pop culture check it out (link in the article title).
Edge Online Covers the Original Thief in a Great Retrospective
I am one of those gamers that just didn’t do PC gaming when 3D cards hit the market (Voodoo, 3DFX, etc) and as a result missed out on some of the most interesting games over the decade that spanned the late 90s/early 2000s. Much like today, it was a hardware hurdle of having the right motherboard, installing the card, and trying not to blow up the family computer in the process. Now that I’m just getting started on the new Thief game I wanted to read up on the original title Thief: The Dark Project. I found a rock solid article just written a few days ago on Edge Online and I recommend that all who either played or wanted to play the alternative view on the validity of the first person perspective check it out.
ZeldaVR bring the original NES title to Oculus
In what continues to be an impressive space for new experiences, it appears a group known as Ubiquitron has ported the original Legend of Zelda to the Oculus Rift in a title named ZeldaVR. So far only the first dungeon is available in the free demo (for those that have an Oculus, of course) but the group plans to have the full release by March. Feel free to download the demo here or check out the original Joystiq post for some videos of the game running.
Our take: I think this would be a great new experience and perhaps it could even give way to a whole new scene of ports. The down side is that all this hard work definitely cannot be charged due to copyright laws and there’s still nothing stopping Nintendo from shutting it down, but it’s still cool.
Polygon features “An Oral History of Street Fighter II”
Ah Street Fighter II, how you have become a beloved fighter franchise. While the celebrated fighter may hold a special place in the hearts of arcade enthusiasts or those who were teens in the mid 90s, I am always fascinated by the stories of the game’s genesis. Since I will never have access to the veteran team responsible for Capcom’s classic, Matt Leone (formerly of 1UP and now at Polygon) has covered just that in his recent Oral History of Street Fighter II. It’s an amazing and deep read that any fan of game development should definitely take in. I swear, features like this prove that true featured articles did not die with print.
Good Old Games Holds “Time Machine” Sale
If you head on over to Good Old Games right now you will see they are holding a “Time Machine” sale on the main page. It looks like each offer goes live for around 75-90 minutes with really decent discounts. Already today Tomb Raider 1-3 could be had for $1.99 and currently Carmageddon and the expansion, the Splat Pack, are $1.49. According to the press release the sale goes all day, covers 30 years of gaming, and some sales will offer games as low as 59 cents. As with all GOG content, these games come DRM-free, are optimized to work on modern day (typically Windows XP-7 at least) machines, and include plenty of goodies like PDF versions of the manual along with bonus content like wallpapers and soundtracks.
Editor comment: Unlike Steam and other digital distributors, GOG has always done an excellent job at creating a package that you can quite literally double click on and play in today’s PC gamescape. With retro gaming on PCs being plagued by incompatibility issues it can be risky to pick up your classic games elsewhere. To see sales like this shows that GOG is ready to compete with other online stores head on.
Review: Life of Pixel
Retro “style” has become exponentially popular these days. What started as an amusing aesthetic for Mega Man 9 or upgraded project like Retro City Rampage has spawned a rush of pixelated, sprite-based games that may look like they came from yesteryear but play like anything but. To the untrained eye (or non-technical gamer) these are nothing more than cash-in titles hoping to embrace the nostalgia of gamers like myself and strategically place a casual game in a 1985 wrapping. My only exception to this style probably lies in titles like Retro Game Challenge on the DS, which fully recreated new games that actually play like old games, or titles like Pier Solar on the Genesis, which is an actual title that plays on the console. Life of Pixel rests just in the middle because it plays completely like a game from the past, but also looks like a game of the past as well. The twist: it does this with eight different known consoles/microcomputers.
One of the first systems is the Atari 2600
Released on the Playstation Mobile platform, an odd choice at first but completely appropriate in hindsight, you follow a single pixel lost to the annals of history that rediscovers its value visiting a retro game museum. In this museum he discovers that he was quite useful on international consoles Atari 2600, Gameboy, and NES, along with five microcomputers that dominated 80s gaming in the UK. These work as “worlds” for the game, each containing eight levels of pure retro platforming bliss. In truth the levels are nothing special if not for the fact that each level and console looks and acts just like it did in the past, flaws and all. An easy example is that of the Atari 2600, which cannot scroll its screen in any way and thus the levels are contained in what you see. Additionally microcomputers could not scroll at will like the NES could so you have to move screen to screen. These are just a couple of examples of how the particular console you are on relates to the type of tactics you use in each level. This isn’t the only hook, as game design “grows up” as you progress in the consoles, so do the mechanics and gameplay styles. In the end you’re basically playing the same series and concept of game across 8 consoles and more than a decade of hardware and game design. If that doesn’t speak to the retro style I don’t know what does. Life of Pixel is a full retro experience, complete with visual styles that faithfully resemble the aesthetic of that console – you know how each console seemed to have a “look” – and properly credited music that holds as true as the graphics.
Gaming History 101 