Tag Archives | Gaming

Donkey Kong: Thirty Strange Years!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 11, 2011 at 12:13 am

What’s the most significant arcade game of all time? Pac-Man, probably. But you could also make the case for Donkey Kong–a game that celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this month. It was wildly popular in its day. It remains iconic. And it was the breakout hit that put both Nintendo and Mario on the map–a team-up of game company and character that’s as important today as ever.

And then there are all the weird little Donkey Kong footnotes. Such as the fact it was almost about Popeye and Bluto. And the odd spinoffs (Donkey Kong hockey?). Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a bunch of them for Donkey Kong Oddities, our tribute to video gaming’s greatest ape.

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Donkey Kong Oddities

Posted by Benj Edwards on July 10, 2011 at 10:29 pm

Thirty years ago this month, Nintendo released Donkey Kong to arcades across the United States. The game’s American version went on to sell tens of thousands of units, saving the then-struggling US branch of the company and paving the way for Nintendo’s future success on Western shores.

Without Donkey Kong, we would have no Mario, and without Mario, it’s hard to imagine what Nintendo would look like today. That makes Donkey Kong, above all others, the most pivotally important video game Nintendo has ever released.

So it’s time to celebrate–which I did by rounding up a bunch of weird, odd, and interesting stuff about this beloved game.

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Bungie Waves Goodbye to Halo

Posted by Jared Newman on July 8, 2011 at 5:16 pm

Bungie’s been finished making Halo games for nearly a year, but now the developer is cutting its final ties with the franchise and ceding control of multiplayer to another developer.

Although the changeover won’t actually happen until August 2, Bungie is saying its goodbyes now, having celebrated its 20th anniversary by playing Halo: Reach with fans. Soon, the developers will drop off the radar as they work in secrecy on a new project, as part of a 10-year publishing agreement with Activision, 1UP reports.

“Halo is yours now,” the company wrote. “In many ways, it always has been. Its new caretakers will strive, just as we did, to be worthy stewards but you have the package. Hold these characters and stories and worlds to the same unflinching standards you did while we were at the helm, but allow them all to blossom and change and grow in the ways that they must.”

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Something’s Fishy About This Playstation 4 Rumor

Posted by Jared Newman on July 5, 2011 at 4:07 pm

If the Playstation 4 really is a distant thought on Sony’s mind, then the latest rumor from DigiTimes is a longshot: Sony’s not only thinking about a new console, the publication’s sources say, it’s starting production this year and will launch the Playstation 4 in 2012.

DigiTimes doesn’t provide many details on the rumored console itself, except that it’ll have body movement-based controls like Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360. Foxconn and Pegatron Technology will reportedly assemble the PS4, with a planned shipment volume of at least 20 million units in 2012.

That shipment estimate is the biggest reason to be skeptical of this report. Sony launched the Playstation 3 mid-way through its 2006 fiscal year, and only shipped 5 million units through Q4. After that, when Sony started reporting sales instead of shipments, the PS3 took two years to reach 20 million sales. For 20 million Playstation 4 shipments to make sense in 2012, initial demand would have to be unprecedented.

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World of Warcraft Joins the Free-to-Play Craze

Posted by Jared Newman on June 29, 2011 at 8:00 am

Why, it was only last week that I wrote about how Valve and several other big video game publishers are lovingly embracing the free-to-play business model. Now you can add Activision-Blizzard to that group, because World of Warcraft is going free-to-play.

The new program is called World of Warcraft Starter Edition, and lets players explore the massive multiplayer game for as long as they want. Eventually, they’ll hit restrictions that can only lifted with a full, paid account. Those restrictions include a level cap of 20, a gold cap of 10, a trade skill cap of 100 ranks, no trading, no guilds, no public chat and no voice chat.

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Supreme Court Strikes Down Violent Game Law, Hopefully Stops the Madness

Posted by Jared Newman on June 27, 2011 at 2:35 pm

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed last year to rule on a California law that would restrict the sale of violent video games to minors, I was relieved. Finally, I assumed, the nation’s highest court would rule that violent video games should get the same First Amendment protections as movies and books, instead of being regulated like pornography.

Turns out, my assumption was correct. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California’s violent video game law for good, with seven of nine justices in agreement. If you love video games and despise the way they’ve been demonized by politicians, read the first couple pages of the decision. It’s quite cathartic.

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Team Fortress 2 Goes Free to Play, As Does the Rest of the Games Industry

Posted by Jared Newman on June 24, 2011 at 1:30 pm

The free to play gaming craze has suddenly swept through some major players in the video game industry.

Valve announced that its popular first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 will now be free forever through the company’s Steam PC gaming service, with some optional premium perks for players who spend money on anything in the game. This is part of Valve’s of larger effort to bring free-to-play games to the Steam service.

But Valve is hardly going against the grain here. Last month, Ubisoft announced its first free-to-play foray with Ghost Recon Online. Electronic Arts, which has dabbled in freemium for years now, added its popular Battlefield franchise to the mix this year with Battlefield Play4Free. In March, Sony’s Free Realms became the first free-to-play title for a home game console.

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Happy Birthday, Sonic

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2011 at 11:27 pm

He’s Avis to Mario’s Hertz. Or, if you prefer, Pepsi to Mario’s Coke. He’s Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, and he turns twenty on Thursday. And even if you know more about him than I do, you don’t know everything there is to know about him. But you’ll learn a lot by exploring Benj Edwards’ “Sonic the Hedgehog Oddities,” which covers two decades of Sonic sidelights: his strange Sonic adventures, his mysterious  work with Michael Jackson, his controversial contribution to the science of human genes, and much more.

View “Sonic the Hedgehog Oddities” slideshow

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Sonic the Hedgehog Oddities

Posted by Benj Edwards on June 22, 2011 at 11:04 pm

Twenty years ago, Sega took a bold gamble in its bid to unseat Nintendo as king of the console realm. The company released Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Genesis on June 23rd, 1991, unleashing the company’s speedy mascot onto the world for the first time.

The iconic spiny mammal saved Sega’s console in its hour of need and spawned a massive franchise that spans dozens of releases for every Sega console (and plenty of non-Sega platforms since 1998). And whether we like it or not, Sonic started a trend of animal game characters with ‘tudes that continues to this day.

To celebrate the anniversary, I dove headfirst the annals of Sonic lore to pull out oddities for your entertainment.

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Talking Tom and Friends Aim for the Big Time

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 21, 2011 at 7:46 am

Outfit 7's Talking Ben

Characters from video games have been showing up in other media since…well, at least since Hanna-Barbera’s dreadful 1982 Pac-Man TV series. Now Outfit7, whose apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android have been downloaded 135 million times, is getting in on the act. It’s signed up William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency headed by superagent Ari Emanuel, to represent Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog, and the other characters from its programs.

Outfit7, which was founded in Slovenia and started releasing apps last year, doesn’t make games, exactly–its apps let you interact with puppet-like digital creatures by poking them, petting them, and speaking to them (they repeat what you say in their own voice). The programs are fun, the quality of the animation and the quality of the animation is good given the devices it runs on. The company has aspirations to become a Pixar-like powerhouse whose creations appear everywhere from movies to books to toys.

The most iconic characters to debut in a phone app to date are, of course, the Angry Birds. They’re already licensing superstars. The Outfit7 troupe hasn’t seeped into the public consciousness to that degree. But they were meant to be personalities from the beginning (unlike the Birds, who–let’s face it–are weaponry more than characters). I’ll be interested to see whether their appeal transfers to other media, and whether it’s possible to give them a bit more depth so people keep on caring for them throughout a film or storybook.

 

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