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. ...
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Wii is the punching bag of the games industry, regularly (though not undeservedly) saddled with the “kiddie crap” moniker and more associated with forgettable shovelware than legitimately good games. Those of us who own and actively play Wii obviously don’t share this view, but it’s almost impossible to read any piece of Wii news, be it feature, review or just straight reporting, without weeding out the “Wii sux who cares" crowd. ...
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Considering all the attention being directed toward huge, marquee juggernauts like Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, and Beatles: Rock Band, you’d think they were the only games at E3. Not true. Sure, those look fantastic, but we also saw piles and piles of great games that nobody is talking about. Nobody but us, that is. ...
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New Super Mario Bros Wii
Getting one of the best platformers of all time with four player support should be a godsend, right? Sorta. And even though the game retains the DS’s impeccable tight and intuitive, the characters goofily occupy a physical space in a relatively small field. “Up To Four Friends!” can now halt your movement, ruin timed jumps, and even swallow you while riding on Yoshi. Furthermore, one player ...
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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. ...
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With a majestic blast of mighty horns we herald the arrival of WiiWare, a veritable gaming revolution. Not revolutionary in its downloadable content ways, mind - people have been fattening their game libraries with downloaded extras ever since Shakespeare released a half-arsed Defender clone based on Twelfth Night (available through Wi-Pigeon). No, it’s the freedom from the creative shackles of cold corporate games development that has ...
When the Puritans began settling down in North America during the early 17th century, they didn’t practice cosplay. Those were dark days - dark, costume-less days, filled with famine, toil, and a depressingly short supply of free candy. It would take nearly 200 years for Americans and Canadians to finally embrace Halloween as a mainstream event - and it was mostly thanks to a flood of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the late 19th century. ...
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Videogames, television and movies frequently overlap. With so much cross pollination, you'd think the biggest and best film franchises would have respectable game adaptations by now, but that's just not the case, is it? Sure there are a handful of successful tie-ins, but many series flop around for years, seeing game after terrible game created with little or no regard for the source material. Well, we're sick of it. ...
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