Have you ever heard someone say, “sometimes words aren’t enough?” That person was probably talking about books. Yes, books may seem like nothing more than a primitive ancestor to videogames, and in some ways, they are. Books are linear, non-interactive, and require little to no skill to write. They might even be obsolete today if it weren’t for people with no reflexes. But books aren’t entirely without merit, because occasionally they're adapted into some really great videogames
To celebrate Independence Day (the holiday, not the movie), we’ve scoured our encyclopedic minds for the most patriotic games to be developed. But that wasn’t funny enough. So, we dug deeper to find the most rabidly patriotic games every developed. Ya know - the ones with so much love for Old Glory that it starts to get a little ridiculous. Behold - our results!
America's ArmyUS Army | 2002Any game can add the word
Some games are upfront about their morally dubious nature, but others pretend to be innocent while hiding their corrupting content inside sinister subtext. Join us as we blow the lid on that whole den of depravity.
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.
E3 2009 was a monster. A huge, massive, face-eating beerdemon that erased the agonizing memory of 2008’s meager, emaciated E3 from our minds with a flood of great-looking games, earth-shattering announcements, and a few quizzical oddities we never want to speak of again. After this, we mean, because some things are so good, bad, or just bewildering that you just have to tell people about them.
We love Game of Thrones, and think that some elements of the show (and, by proxy, the book) would help making games better...
Once
a videogame hero has more than one or two adventures under his or her belt, it
simply isn’t enough to just have an archenemy anymore. To keep things
interesting, they need a foil, a rival, or some other angry opposite number
obsessed with matching wits with them. Sometimes, those characters stick around
long enough to make themselves an indelible part of the series, even going so
far as to make friends with the
protagonist – although more often than not, their friendships tend to be shaky
at best, and even those involved might never fully admit to them. Relationships
like that tend to make for gaming’s most enduring and interesting rivalries,
and what follows are some of the most notable...
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,
Because we enjoy making graphs, looking at graphs, and talking about graphs so darn much, we decided to do a little research experiment. Our goal was to discover which numbered entry in a game series (not the number of games into the series, the actual number in the game’s title) is most often the best. Is it scientific? Not in the least, but it still might surprise you.
In all honesty, some games would be better off left on the whiteboard at the design meeting. Whether they're too ambitious, too expensive or simply too good to be true, we're frequently led to imagine great things only to have our expectations dashed when the game finally arrives. How could these games be so good on paper yet underwhelm so spectacularly? Let's take a look...