Wii Features

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.

Summer is full of free time, and we know what that means: staying inside, playing games and not letting the sun’s rays touch your skin. But there are also blockbuster films to deal with, which are worth going outside for, at least for the short amount of time needed to get to the theater.

Contributors: Chris Antista, Charlie Barratt, Brett Elston, Matthew Keast, Shane Patterson, Mikel Reparaz

Hundreds of games are released every year, then played and forgotten by the next. Only a dozen or so will be remembered a decade from now, and only a few of those will have any lasting impact on the medium as a whole.

Which upcoming titles stand the best chance of leaving that meaningful mark?

Need a break from the lurid bursts of awesomeness screaming out of San Diego? Then we suggest having a look at some of this week’s worst trailers in another thrilling edition of Trailer Trash. No packed-to-the-gills special appearances by Hayao Miyazaki or spectacular Green Hornet reveals, just the most futile bits of video game video we could find, rounded out with sardonic commentary. Enjoy!

Deep down, you realize they’re not real. You understand that what you’re seeing on screen is only pixels and polygons, that what you’re talking to is only a voice actor and that what you’re supposedly interacting with is only a fancy collection of programming codes. Sometimes, however, you can’t help but be a little fooled. Especially when you’re a young, dumb, naïve and impressionable kid…

There are two editorial gold mines in the videogame-list business. The first is box art, because laughing at other people’s hard work gone awry is fantastically easy. Right behind those myriad articles about game packaging are lists devoted to poking fun at their very names – and we’re not afraid to go back to the well for another bit of fun.

Mark Hamill unleashes a fiendish cackle that simultaneously sounds like skin ripped from flesh and fingernails dragged across corrugated iron. If the bowels of hell have a soundtrack, this is it.

With Nintendo’s handheld future on the horizon, let’s take a moment to think about its past. As the 80s began and games like Space Invaders was becoming the hottest things around, Nintendo not only started work on their own arcade games, but also found a new market by repurposing newly cheapened calculator tech and making the first must-have handheld videogames in the form of Game & Watch...

With the 3DS less than a week from launch, it can be easy to forget that the handheld – while extremely impressive – isn’t Nintendo’s first attempt to make a 3D system. After its success with Game & Watch and the Game Boy, Nintendo launched its third portable system in the mid-‘90s, when virtual reality was seen as the future of gaming. Envisioned as a successor to the Game Boy, the Virtual Boy would deliver true 3D gaming at an affordable price. It would also be widely considered the single worst piece of hardware Nintendo ever produced, if not the worst game machine ever produced, period...

It’s comforting, isn’t it? Though our hobby is famous for igniting stupid flame wars and for inspiring stubborn fanboy bias, all gamers – no matter what their console or genre preference – can agree on, and rally around, one unassailable truth. Party games suck.