Posts Tagged ‘street fighter II’
Podcast: A New Challenger Appears (Street Fighter)
For this week’s episode Jam and Fred are celebrating 30 years of Capcom’s Street Fighter series. Specifically focusing on the titles in the recently released Anniversary Collection, they talk about the pop culture influences of the main three titles, all of the updates to each, and the three Alpha titles. Plenty of stories in this one.
Closing Song by Smooth McGroove (youtube.com/smoothmcgroove)
Learning from the Past: The Arcades
We live in a great time to be a gamer. The quality and quantity of games available is at an all-time high. We can even hop on our systems and play against people in our living rooms or halfway around the world.
This holds even more true for retro gamers. It is getting easier to gain access to older games, whether through the internet, local stores that focus on retro gaming or services like Nintendo’s Virtual Console. Older PC games are making a comeback as well, with Blizzard releasing StarCraft Broodwar for free and services like Good Old Games (gog.com) optimizing the settings for programs like DOSbox so gamers don’t have to fight with it.
There is one experience, however, that will probably never be the same as it was back in the hey days of the 80s and early 90s: the local arcade.
Podcast: Gameboy Top 10
As is per usual for us here at GH101, 40 games enter (20 from each host), and 10 leave. It’s nostalgic, it’s arbitrary, we may annoy due to the lack of Pokemon, but it’s our official Top 10 Gameboy games.
How Product Design has Transformed the Amusement Industry
The term “arcade game” these days conjures up images of cutting-edge graphics and sound, combined with innovative and interactive technology that can bring any concept to life. However, good graphics and interactivity have not always been a necessity for a game that is both enjoyable and addictive. I dread to mention the recent phenomenon of the Flappy Bird app but it is an example of an outrageously faulty and basic game becoming extremely popular. This has been seen in the past with games like Space Invaders, Pac Man, Tetris and Asteroids following very basic concepts and graphics, but still being addictive and rewarding when completed.
The Really Early Days
The first arcade games kicked off at amusement parks and are still present at fairs and theme parks, but there’s nothing particularly sophisticated about them. Ring toss, throwing balls at stacked cans, shooting targets, and other simple challenges have been doing the rounds for hundreds of years and can still draw in the punters to this day. Just don’t go expecting an easy win. Perhaps this is what is indicative of a good game – making it appear simple whilst making it actually fiendishly difficult to win. Make it too hard, however ,and you are left with Zelda II.
Gaming History 101 