DS Features

Licensed games come and go, so most of us don’t bat an eye when titles based on movies and TV shows fall into obscurity. Today, they’re ephemeral by nature, seemingly designed with an expiration date only as far off as the coinciding property’s DVD release date.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Ghostbusters on C64, Aladdin, Goldeneye, Riddick: the list of great movie tie-ins is barely longer than Russell Crowe’s temper. What chances, then, of even seeing a few good ones during 2009? Can the year that sees Barack Obama’s inauguration, a Michael Jackson comeback, and a Star Trek movie that doesn’t suck, prove that anything is possible?

Ghostbusters: The Video

Videogames, like movies and music, live and die by their release dates. A smartly planned launch can make a niche product soar to unpredicted heights or cause a long-respected franchise to slip beneath consumers’ radar.

Pac-Man and Mario owned the 1980s. Sonic, Lara and Snake took over for the 1990s. Their games are considered classics. Their names are timeless and iconic. Their images are burned into the memory of every gamer, even those who were born after the characters themselves.

Now we have another ten years worth of heroes, villains, sidekicks and love interests to occupy our imagination. Which, however, will remain there?

July is a bit dry in terms of new-stuff quantity, but we’re really looking forward to the majority of its releases. We have a healthy amount of oddball gems, sequels and re-releases to look forward to. It’s as much a month to experiment on weird stuff as it is to catch up on stuff you may have missed a year (or five) ago. What’s particularly exciting is that we’re seeing a solid number of awesome-looking downloadable games. If you’d rather not spend $60 on bananas-bullshit like Catherine (which we’re way into, by the way), put that money toward a few XBLA games instead. You’ve got slimmer pickin’s than usual, but them pickin’s look good...

If you make a bad game, it can only haunt you for so long. All that ties you to failure is a name in the credits – that’s not so bad. But star in a game’s horrific live-action cut scenes and your image is tarnished forever. Your horrible accent, ridiculous costume, and unmitigated willingness to make an ass of yourself for money are all digitized and archived forever - ripe to be picked out of the interdepths years later

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.

As we did with Microsoft, we jotted all this down as it happened.

Nintendo's big day, where they'll allegedly announce their biggest games for the rest of the year, began with a Shaun White Snowboarding reveal. As expected, it's all about the Balance Board, leaning and tucking to race down a rocky mountainside or pull off tricks in a halfpipe. Based on what we saw, Mr. White himself didn't do much other than simply lean to execute

Looking at Nintendo’s many years of success, it’s hard to imagine the company ever releasing an inarguably awful piece of hardware. From the NES to the Game Boy to the DS, Nintendo has a strong track record – even its least successful console, GameCube, is home to some of the greatest games ever made. But in 1995, Nintendo unleashed one of the most baffling pieces of technology the world’s ever seen...

Before Mario became the most iconic character in videogame history – not to mention the most famous plumber in, well, plumbing history – he was just a carpenter named Jumpman, starring in a game named Donkey Kong. Our point? Even the best need a little time to blossom.

Such is the case with these 8 characters. Like Mario, they weren’t necessarily bad or below average in their debuts, but they were truly spectacular in their sequels, to the point that we almost forget our first impressions of them. How much they changed, and how much they improved. Here, then, is a reminder…