General gaming

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• The Essential 100, No. 81: Maniac Mansion
• The Essential 100, No. 82: Fallout
• Fez Left Broken, Highlighting How XBLA Shoots Itself in the Foot
• The Essential 100, No. 83: Contra
• The Essential 100, No. 84: Monster Hunter
• Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time Could be the PSP's Final Hurrah
• The Essential 100, No. 85: Minecraft

The Essential 100, No. 81: Maniac Mansion Posted: 19 Jul 2012 05:42 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. 81: Maniac Mansion Cover Story: Revolutionary mechanics and fantastic storytelling helped spark a genre. T he year was 1985. A young game designer by the name of Ron Gilbert, along with graphic artist Gary Winnick, was handed the reigns to develop a new adventure title for the fledgling interactive division of LucasFilm. Two years later, Maniac Mansion would not only light the spark under a graphic adventure game blaze burning vividly well into the '90s, but the effects of its campy approach to videogame storytelling are still readily present today. While the name LucasArts would eventually become synonymous with adventure games -- arguably as much or more-so as one-time competitor Sierra -- Maniac Mansion changed the course of the genre more than any other title of its ilk. If you were not yet alive to witness the evolution of adventure games, you might be unaware the earliest efforts were -- well, less than "user friendly." Text-parsing adventures required manual entry of commands, and there's a finite amount of times anyone can screw up syntax without gouging their eyes out with a pencil.

The Essential 100, No. 82: Fallout Posted: 19 Jul 2012 04:22 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. 82: Fallout Cover Story: New life emerges from the barren wastes of PC role-playing games. T he 1990s were largely a period of stagnation for computer RPGs. As first person shooters and adventure games thrived, the genre began a slow decline marked by few games and fewer new ideas. Fans were left with little to do but longingly gaze upon faded cloth maps while recalling past conquests. The arrival of Fallout in 1997 was -- oddly enough -- a breath of fresh air. Released more than a full year before Baldur's Gate, it ushered in what is widely considered the greatest era for CRPGs with exactly the sort of rich, creative role-playing experience that had been missing for so long.

Fez Left Broken, Highlighting How XBLA Shoots Itself in the Foot Posted: 19 Jul 2012 04:00 PM PDT Long-awaited Xbox Live Arcade title Fez received a patch last month fixing a long list of issues. However, despite this patch taking more than two months after the game's initial release to show up, it proved to introduce a serious issue of its own: it could corrupt players' save game files. The update was pulled from Xbox Live and we've been awaiting a fixed version, only we now know one is not coming. Developer Polytron has announced its decision to re-release the patch as-is due to the cost involved in issuing a new one. This is yet another illustration of how Microsoft has hamstrung Xbox Live Arcade and ensured that, without changes, it will never fulfill its potential. But first, Polytron's decision demands addressing. A blog post from last night explained that Microsoft would charge "tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game," and with the save corruption happening to less than one percent of players (and most often to players "who had completed, or almost completed the game"), it has been deemed "safe for an overwhelming majority of players." Microsoft agrees the patch is 'good enough' to be re-released, and you can now go about downloading the patch (if you haven't previously) to fix the framerate, various crash bugs, and so on. Polytron notes that, had it been released on Steam, "the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us." Between this and a subsequent tweet, it certainly sounds like a Steam release is in the works.

The Essential 100, No. 83: Contra Posted: 19 Jul 2012 03:05 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. 83: Contra Cover Story: The cooperative game that one-upped the action movies of the '80s. S ome games capture a certain zeitgeist; others kidnap it forcibly and hold it for ransom. Contra is one of the latter. To say the action movies of the '80s influenced video games would be a gross understatement. For better or worse, the likes of Terminator, Rambo, Aliens, and Star Wars essentially gave shape to a budding medium. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a single game that managed to cram more of those influences into a single 30-minute play session that Contra. It's all here: Cooperative combat action in the jungle (Predator), overwhelming manliness (Rambo), giant robots and metallic skulls with glowing red eyes (Terminator), and a final showdown that involved blowing the face off a giant alien and blasting its sentient heart to pieces while crustacean larvae leapt from the background (Aliens, quite nearly to the point of actionable infringement).

The Essential 100, No. 84: Monster Hunter Posted: 19 Jul 2012 12:33 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. 84: Monster Hunter Cover Story: Nothing says winning like turning your prey into an accessory. T he overgrowth in the forest looked thick, but the fog layered over everything felt even thicker. My avatar walked carefully through the middle of a swamp, as I struggled to take in the surroundings. The boars in this zone tend to charge at first sight, so it's best to run through this thick marsh, but I needed to keep my eyes open. My quest to defeat the Rathian, a large beast world renowned as the Queen of the Wyverns, had just begun, but first I had to find it.

Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time Could be the PSP's Final Hurrah Posted: 19 Jul 2012 11:26 AM PDT Judging by the first few hours, Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time is a nice, very old school looking RPG with original and addictive gameplay. That's good, because with a release date set for the end of July, it will also be one of the last -- if not the very last -- RPGs for the PSP. At least unless something changes the fates of Final Fantasy: Type-0 and Grand Knights History -- but I digress. The PSP has become a haven for enthusiasts of dated RPGs. The system has been host to a number of remakes, and it's always nice to be able to experience games that were previously exclusive to Japan in a portable format. Such is the case of Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time, which has taken its name a bit too literally and wandered off for nine years before finally making it to the West, filling a gap in the series with this expanded port of the original PS2 version. The first thing I noticed when I started Wayfarer of Time is its flamboyant art direction. The game features an unimaginative if likeable cast of characters, starring the usual gang of pretty girls and even prettier girly boys already explored by the expert pen of character designer and mangaka Satoshi Urushihara, who seems to be forever trapped in his early '90s heyday.

The Essential 100, No. 85: Minecraft Posted: 19 Jul 2012 10:01 AM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE The Essential 100, No. 85: Minecraft Cover Story: The ultimate in do-it-yourself gaming sits on the cusp of inventing a whole new genre. A t first glance, Minecraft barely seems like a game, much less one that would become one of the bestselling games of all time, or one that would go on to spawn its own vast subculture and swarms of imitators. Largely free of dialogue, characters, or even clearly established goals, Minecraft rests on the far end of the spectrum of freedom vs. structure, offering the player ultimate agency in a completely and totally modifiable environment. To put it simply, Minecraft is the idea of a sandbox game taken to its ultimate and most extreme conclusion. Starting a game of Minecraft drops the player in a near-infinite, procedurally generated world made up entirely of one-meter by one-meter blocks, comprising mountains, seas, forests, and caverns, and populated by cows, pigs, chickens, and at the player's discretion, hostile monsters like spiders, zombies, and iconic, suicide bombing creepers. What differentiates this from what would otherwise be, honestly, a crude and ugly terrain simulator, is that every single one of these blocks can be mined, dug, chopped, or gathered, then either replaced elsewhere in the world or used to create tools to expand the player's options for interacting with the world. To all intents and purpose, Minecraft is an entire world made entirely out of LEGOs, which the player can break apart and use to build anything they want. It's remarkable that over the decades the LEGO license has been used in countless racing and movie tie-in games, but it took an unknown outsider to develop what should have been the first and most obvious implementation: A game where you build stuff out of LEGO blocks.

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