General gaming

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• Cover Story: How Comics Shaped Games
• Learning to Fly
• Every Game is Batman
• Halo 4 Hands-On: That Old Familiar Feeling, Now With a Call of Duty Twist
• Endless Space Review: That Elusive Quality

Cover Story: How Comics Shaped Games Posted: 09 Jul 2012 05:19 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES Cover Story: How Comics Shaped Games All this week, join 1UP as we look at how one very popular medium made its mark on another. Though they originally began as portrayals of scruffy immigrants and their misadventures in trying to make ends meet, over the past century, comics have been shaped by various forces to fit a very familiar mold. If you ask most people what immediately comes to mind when they hear the word "comics," odds are, they'll think of capes, super-powers, and billionaires with conspicuous alter-egos. As fears of child delinquency forced comics away from gritty crime and ghost stories and into the realm of fantastic tales of good versus evil, the medium gradually took on a very standardized form, which can be seen today in ludicrously popular movies like The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man -- talk about making the best out of a bad situation. As comics gradually became the one art form America could call its own, echoes of the medium could be seen resonating throughout popular culture. From radio dramas to television shows to summer blockbusters, we've rarely been able to keep our love of comics confined to the printed page. And this fact holds especially true for video games, which can credit comics for informing the very grammar of their being. Without superheroes, who knows whether or not Mario would grow to twice his size after touching a Super Mushroom, or if Mega Man's robot masters would boast their specific and increasingly bizarre powers a la Marvel and DC's dopier heroes and villains of the Silver Age? And though he comes from a culture influenced more by manga than American comics, Nintendo visionary Shigeru Miyamoto planned on becoming a comics artist shortly before creating the iconography that's come to define video games. Clearly, there's a strong influence at work here.

Learning to Fly Posted: 09 Jul 2012 05:18 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES Learning to Fly Cover Story: How Comic Book Origin Stories Birthed Game Design J erry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn't know that they were actually creating architecture when they came up with Superman in 1938. That debut issue of Action Comics, its red-caped hero lifting a car over his head and repelling bullets with his pecs, was a sensation, no denying it. That first issue sold hundreds of thousands of copies over numerous printings and Superman pushed Action Comics' circulation above 1 million issues a month by the time World War II started. Shuster and Siegel didn't create superheroes, but they did create the catalyzing figure in comic book history, the archetypal mold that is at the heart of everything that followed in the medium. Superman was more than that though. He was a scaffolding, a house whose function outside the world of comics wasn't realized until nearly 50 years later when people started making video games. Superman's origin story and all the comic book origin stories that followed gave long-form video games their structure.

Every Game is Batman Posted: 09 Jul 2012 05:05 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES Every Game is Batman Cover Story: A look at The Dark Knight's impact on the medium. A n accurate portrayal of Batman was something of an enigma until Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009. Many companies had tried, ranging from Sunsoft and Konami in the '90s to Ubisoft and EA in the 2000s, but no one really captured the idea of being Batman in any notable manner. Most of those games were 2D side-scrolling beat-'em-ups, and while some turned out to be good, they weren't so much Batman games as they were games that happened to feature Batman. Through the years, there have been a few games to nail that Batman-esque feeling, each in their own special way. The most notable one, which debuted shortly after Arkham Asylum, is Assassin's Creed II. Ubisoft, who worked on the mildly underrated 2001 Bat-game Batman Vengeance, took the stealth assassination action from the original and added a new character with a familiar back story.

Halo 4 Hands-On: That Old Familiar Feeling, Now With a Call of Duty Twist Posted: 09 Jul 2012 03:56 PM PDT This year's annual Rooster Teeth Convention offered the public its first glimpse of Halo 4 with a hands-on multiplayer demo on the convention show floor. After years of speculation, fans -- including myself -- finally had the chance to put 343 Industry's first title through its paces. Upon first getting my hands on the demo, I felt the initial confusion of, "Where has the crouch button gone?" and "How do I sprint?" But any player of Call of Duty (and Halo, of course) will immediately put two and two together when it comes to the game's control scheme. Halo 4's control layout largely follows the one set by Halo: Reach, with the exception of the left analog stick activating sprint and the B button serving as crouch.

Endless Space Review: That Elusive Quality Posted: 09 Jul 2012 12:05 PM PDT One day in the summer of 1994, my father discovered SimCity 2000. For one very long weekend, he sat almost immobile in his office, watching his virtual city grow. Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. "I'm too busy. I can't let this game take over my life," he told me. And that, as they say, is that.

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