General gaming

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• The Essential 100, No. 96: Asteroids
• OP-ED: Metacritic Presents Real Problems for the Industry
• The Essential 100, No. 97: Pitfall!
• The Essential 100, No. 98: Phantasy Star Online
• The Essential 100, No. 99: Out of this World
• Cover Story: 1UP's Essential 100, Part One
• The Essential 100, No. 100: M.U.L.E.

The Essential 100, No. 96: Asteroids Posted: 16 Jul 2012 06:47 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE The Essential 100, No. 96: Asteroids Cover Story: The shooter that revolutionized movement in games... and made players think about how they were shooting. I n Space Wars, one of the first arcade games, two spaceships flew around and shot at each other. That was it. Each player had the one thing to shoot. The genius of Asteroids, in part, comes from giving players lots and lots of targets. They aren't thinking, breathing targets that talk trash back at you, but there isn't any shortage of them.

OP-ED: Metacritic Presents Real Problems for the Industry Posted: 16 Jul 2012 05:40 PM PDT Metacritic is a problem; few will attempt to deny that. Far too often -- which is to say, ever -- publishers rely on it as something more than a potentially accurate snapshot of a game's critical reception. Gamers sometimes look to it as either a definitive statement on whether a game is good or bad, or as a means for pointing out how a review is 'wrong.' To say Metacritic is outright ruining the industry would, in my opinion, be a stretch, but it clearly is not doing it any good. For the uninitiated, Metacritic is a reviews aggregator. It collects reviews of videogames, movies, TV shows, and music albums from a variety of publications, presenting a 'Metascore' for each title. This is a weighted average of all the review scores the site tracks, meaning certain publications' reviews have more impact on the Metascore than others. It's problematic enough when scores are the only thing readers look at, rather than the text that accompanies it, but Metacritic breaks the opinions conveyed in dozens of reviews down into a single number that readers and game publishers alike often look to when discussing the merits of a game.

The Essential 100, No. 97: Pitfall! Posted: 16 Jul 2012 05:06 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE The Essential 100, No. 97: Pitfall! Cover Story: A jungle adventure that helped liberate both gamers and designers. R un. Jump. Evade. Collect. Explore. Activision's Pitfall! didn't invent any of these video game concepts or mechanics. That's OK, though. Sometimes the most important games aren't the ones that introduce new ideas but rather the ones that turn those raw concepts into something that actually works. Pitfall didn't introduce gamers to platforming; Donkey Kong did that, with aplomb. It wasn't the first game to set players wandering on a mission of discovery in a deadly maze; we'd give Colossal Cave (aka ADVENT) the nod for that one. And collection has been hard-wired into adventure games since the start, whether for completion (as in the Zork and Ultima titles) or simple points (Pac-Man and dozens of games on either side of its release).

The Essential 100, No. 98: Phantasy Star Online Posted: 16 Jul 2012 02:47 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE The Essential 100, No. 98: Phantasy Star Online Cover Story: A bold sequel that broke away from series tradition and helped bring consoles online. P hantasy Star Online helped consoles embrace a world where player experiences could be connected over the Internet. To make this pipe dream possible, Sega's Dreamcast shipped with a 56k modem -- a laughable connection speed by today's standards, but one that Sega put through its paces in the early days of internet console gaming. The Japanese company took many opportunities to entice players to try it, offering enough free promotions that it was impossible not to give SegaNet a chance to prove itself.

The Essential 100, No. 99: Out of this World Posted: 16 Jul 2012 01:39 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE The Essential 100, No. 99: Out of this World Cover Story: Eric Chahi's short-but-sweet cinematic action game remains incredibly relevant today. I n Out of this World, everything wants to kill you. Okay, so maybe it doesn't differ much from most games in this respect, but Out of this World takes absolute delight in killing you. When a faulty science test launches scientist Lester Knight Chaykin unexpectedly into another dimension, he immediately finds himself deep underwater, with hideous tentacles reaching up from the floor to tear apart their next meal. Pulling himself out of the water, we (but not Lester) see a horrible beast in background, which proceeds to follow his movements before disappearing over a cliff. When Lester suddenly comes face-to-face with his new predator, it takes after him, causing the lanky scientist to run, swing, retrace his steps, and collide with the first sign of intelligent life he's seen in the past few minutes. His humanoid saviors blast the beast, take one look at Lester, and quickly set their phasers to stun.

Cover Story: 1UP's Essential 100, Part One Posted: 16 Jul 2012 12:40 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE Cover Story: 1UP's Essential 100, Part One We celebrate the most important games of all time, as chosen by you! Many years ago, back when 1UP was a very young site, we ran a year-long feature called The Essential 50: A series of 50 articles that paid tribute to our picks for the most important games of all time. It was a bold, ambitious piece, and it garnered plenty of attention, but it wasn't perfect. Some of the picks didn't sit well with readers. Plus, readers weren't even asked to help create the list; the articles kicked off before 1UP had launched properly with its social features. There was no 1UP community to speak of back then. Nearly a decade later, we feel the time is ripe to revisit that concept and bring it up to date. Plenty has changed since we published The Essential 50 -- who could have predicted in 2004 that Nintendo would rise again via motion games only to be pistol-whipped by mobile phones? -- and today's landscape of video games barely resembles that of a decade ago. And so, 1UP presents an old idea improved for the modern age: The Essential 100.

The Essential 100, No. 100: M.U.L.E. Posted: 16 Jul 2012 12:38 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE The Essential 100, No. 100: M.U.L.E. Cover Story: Our countdown of the 100 most important games of all time begins with a cult classic simulation. T here's nothing quite like a non-violent economic simulation to angry up the blood of an '80s gamer kid. That may sound like smartassery, but in at least one case it held to be completely, unironically true. M.U.L.E. is an odd duck: A game of planetary conquest, full of aliens, robots, and even space pirates, where nary a shot is fired. Nevertheless, it's one of the most ruthless, cutthroat, controller-throwing games ever made. Yes, you will be furious at a friend for manipulating the price of food through artificial scarcity. Also, you will completely ace your economics courses because an old video game taught you what artificial scarcity is without you even realizing it.

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