There’s something very special about the process of old-fashioned, frame-by-frame, 2D animation. In the old days, the only way to get your animated character to wave his or her arm was to spend hours upon hours painstakingly crafting each frame and constantly readjusting your work to make sure everything flowed correctly. Now you just set a couple of keyframes and let a computer do it all for you.
IMAGE
Isaac Clarke, Raiden, Rayman, and The Prophet are just a few stars lining up for February's new release schedule. See why consoles, handhelds, and PCs will be feeling the love this month in our jam-packed peak at the games of February 2013...
Not everyone owns an iPhone, it just seems that way because they get all the coverage. Android owners know Google's platform has plenty of quality apps too, though it can be tough sifting through the dross. The following 25 have caused us a few sleepless nights and some very sore fingertips...
25. Kingdom Hearts
Squaresoft | Squaresoft | 2002
A third-person action game with light RPG elements added - and which happened to merge the Disney and Square universes in an utterly captivating way
What made it so great?
Kingdom Hearts is what happens when you give classic, universally loved characters to the best RPG storytellers in the business and ask them, "could you maybe fancy this up and make one of those video games with 'em?" It sounded ludicrous at first - Donald Duck as a wizard,
We're used to being the good guys. But did you ever stop to think about it from the enemy's point of view? Wouldn't our heroes look completely different?
Of course, just as in the real world, wartime imagery and alternative views of the enemy could undoubtedly be perpetuated with some propaganda posters… like these.
Now that the world hasn't ended after all, let's pretend we got caught in the apocalypse anyway, as we pick our the top wastelands we'd like to inhabit...
Admit it - you’ve thought about choking quite a few videogame characters to death. Whether it’s an annoying sidekick or a particularly tough boss, there’s no denying that the urge to bust somebody in the mush hasn’t seized you. There are a lot of deserving punks we could put into this article - but the most aggravating offenses come from the cutest characters. Those fluffy types just there to make a game more
We recently took issue with the claim that “gaming has not yet had its Citizen Kane”. As you can see, we managed to find 25 games that qualified for that title – and you had plenty more suggestions besides.
We’d have had no trouble whipping up a counter-list of dismal flops.
So what would happen if amoral Balkan sociopath Niko Bellic was in everyone's favourite cute and cuddly cartoon racer? Would Mario and chums accept him into the line-up with grace and humility? Would Niko keep the lid on all his murderous rage when Yoshi was firing red shells up his tailpipe? Of course, not. This is what would happen if the worlds of Liberty City and the Mushroom Kingdom clashed...
And that got us thinking. What
In the context of a game, Achievements and Trophies are harmless. They're just carrot-dangling tactics that we're happy to indulge for our greedy pursuit of intangible virtual rewards. We wouldn't think twice about nail-bombing a kitten orphanage if it meant five more gamer points.
But, let's say, purely for the purposes of this here article, that we take Achievements and Trophies out of their virtual world settings and reconsider them