DS Features

Good inventions are brilliant. They're new things that are specifically designed to make things better. The top of our 'Good inventions we want' list reads like so:

1.Time machine.2.Star Trek-style transporter.3.Cigarettes that won't make us dead.

Yeah, it's pretty unimaginative, but anyone that doesn't have a time machine and Star Trek-style transporters on their list is just trying to be a smart ass. Anyway, being big fans of

They're just trying to be friendly - so come and watch them sing and play. They're the young generation - and they've got something to say. Sounds kinda like "Ooo ook ook oo aaaah! Aaah! Aaaaaaaah!"

We wouldn’t expect any of you to have noticed, but there are recurring elements in many role-playing games. They're cleverly disguised from game to game; often, similar characters may wear different outfits or you'll use a gunblade instead of a sword, but once you learn to identify similarities, you can usually predict what’s going to happen in about any RPG you want.

Game peripherals are no new thing. They've been with us for as long as we've had home videogame systems to plug them into. The first wave of game peripherals hoisted upon the virgin generation of gamers was a hit-and-miss mix of pointless plastic tat and genuinely innovative inventions. Here we've gathered a pretty even mix of the two, plus a bunch of stuff that falls somewhere in between. Be amazed.

Game Mate 2 Wireless Game ControllersThe orthopaedic shoes

Breaking news! Toad isn’t actually a toad... street fighting doesn’t involve fireballs… guns rarely come with chainsaws attached… and a theoretical physicist has never spent his scientific career smashing zombie head crabs with a blood-soaked crowbar.

As we demonstrated last week, however, the real world would be a hell of a lot more interesting if any of the above was true.

Abnormally sized limbs that are sort of funny to look at: a premise that only minutes of arduous brainstorming could have birthed. Can we actually fashion a coherent article with a subject weaker than the plot of a Family Matters episode? Carl Winslow would believe in us, and it isn’t as if it hasn’t worked for us in the past. Enjoy, and be sure to come back next week for “100 slices of bacon that look like Mario.”

Mario has a very defined look: brown shoes, blue overalls, red shirt, a matching red hat with an "M" over the bill and white gloves. It's a look seen in dozens of games and a third-world economy's worth of merchandise. But even with such an established character, at the heart of Mario's history and appeal is his parade of different outfits.

There's no way that anyone alive and gaming at the end of the 80s could have predicted how videogames would evolve over the next two decades. We know because we were there. Sure, it was pretty safe that graphics would get more better and consoles would get an ass-load more powerful, but besides that we were pretty clueless as to what gaming in the 21st Century would really be like. Now that we've arrived in the future, here's some of the things we could never have seen coming 20 years ago

[align dan-art.gif along right]If you’ve been a Street Fighter fan during the last 10 years, you already know his trademarks: the weeping, the tiny fireballs, the pink gi, the tendency to scream a lot for no reason. Dan Hibiki is the Rodney Dangerfield of Street Fighter, respected by none but beloved by most, and over the years he’s gone from an obscure gag character to one of the series’ most enduring fan favorites.

A couple of years ago our Nintendo editor, Brett Elston, rolled up his sleeves and undertook an inquisition. His heavily-armed crusade van was fueled by his shamelessly excessive nostalgia for classic kid’s games like Duck Tales, Tiny Toons, and Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, and his target was modern licensed kiddie games (also known as “expensive Frisbees”). It was a commendable cause – today’s kiddie games do