General gaming

General gaming

The Essential 100, No. 76: Portal

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 07:45 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE

The Essential 100, No. 76: Portal

Cover Story: A triumph in experiential storytelling that rewrote expectations.

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t's easy to recognize Portal as one of the biggest success stories from the Fall of 2007 in hindsight, but if you tried to predict that developer Valve's highly anticipated puzzle platformer would match up to (and possibly exceed) the quality of games like BioShock or Halo 3, that would be quite a sale indeed. Portal's success wasn't completely unexpected -- especially given developer Valve's track record of crafting highly polished game experiences -- but it came out during one of the most crowded release periods of the year. A lot of highly anticipated games came out in the Fall of 2007, with titles like Super Mario Galaxy, Rock Band, Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect all sharing a pretty crowded holiday spotlight. And yet, like a bizarre twist in a well written TV drama, Portal stood as tall (if not taller) than its contemporaries, in terms of critical reception and praise, and delivered a narrative achievement that taught the industry a thing or two about the power of brief experiences in relation to video games.

If there's one thing I learned right away the second I played Portal, it's to never judge a product by its marketing. All of Valve's promotional materials indicated they were making a crafty puzzle game using portals, and the trailers taught me everything I needed to know before I even played the game. Using inter-dimensional doorways, called Portals, players could connect two different locations on a set plane. Thanks to the sheer simplicity involved with handling a Portal gun, the mechanics presented themselves in a basic manner at first: fire an entry portal, then fire an exit portal -- all within a set space -- and then step through one to come out of the other. Presto! Instant travel that could take you across a room or over a set of deadly obstacles.

The Essential 100, No. 77: Tecmo Bowl

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 04:23 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE

The Essential 100, No. 77: Tecmo Bowl

Cover Story: It took a Japanese developer to adapt one of America's pastimes.

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s the genre of sports games have evolved into photorealistic and impossibly complicated experiences, it's important to look back at the simpler times. Before EA strong-armed the NFL license from any possible competitors, the sports genre was free rein for any company to take a stab at. Hot off the heels of action pillars like Rygar and Ninja Gaiden, the Japanese developer Tecmo set their sights on adapting one of America's greatest pastimes. This bore 1989's Tecmo Bowl, and for that, we should all give thanks.

As strange as it sounds, Tecmo Bowl for the NES taught me about the fundamentals of chess long before I was able to differentiate a rook from a bishop. The pigskin simulator was less about the sport of football and more about getting inside the head of your opponent. Mind games, misdirection, and feints were your biggest ally on the field. Taking a pair of sacks and lulling your opponent into thinking they know your pattern was akin to sacrificing a pawn for a move you have planned down the road. It may seem strange to compare this 8-bit football title to one of this planet's oldest games, but the similarities are certainly there.

The Essential 100, No. 78: Mystery House

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 02:26 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE

The Essential 100, No. 78: Mystery House

Cover Story: How one game defined a genre (or two) without being particularly enjoyable.

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ystery House (Apple II, 1980) was the very first release from Sierra Online. Husband-and-wife cofounders Ken and Roberta Williams mailed the game in Ziplock baggies. They eventually sold over 10,000 copies.

A word of warning, though: Mystery House isn't any fun.

The Essential 100, No. 79: E.T.

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 12:26 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE

The Essential 100, No. 79: E.T.

Cover Story: Gaming's greatest cautionary tale.

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.T. is essential not for what it accomplished, but rather what it nearly accomplished. It's important in the pantheon of gaming in the same way that Plan 9 from Outer Space is crucial to the film-studies cannon. Like a symphony of car wrecks, the two are impossible to look away from. They are such wildly broken and technically inept pieces of work that demand to be studied in order to determine the circumstances under which they were created. But while Ed Wood's infamous science fiction fiasco did no real harm to the film industry, E.T. for the Atari 2600 played a crucial role in what could've possibly been the death of our medium.

At first, the formula seemed like it couldn't fail. The biggest movie in the world, Steven Spielberg's opus on childhood through the lens of an interstellar traveler, combined with the youngest medium of entertainment that was slowly finding a ubiquitous place in America's living rooms. This should have been the game that propelled video games to the popularity of film. How could this concoction possibly fail?

The Essential 100, No. 80: Double Dragon

Posted: 20 Jul 2012 10:26 AM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 16 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART ONE

The Essential 100, No. 80: Double Dragon

Cover Story: Simultaneous fists to the face of the brawler genre sparked a bloody revolution.

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ouble Dragon. Even the name, which is often underlined by entwined twin dragons, still sounds indescribably cool. Initially born in the arcades in 1987 (and subsequently ported to every device bearing a screen and a microchip, from the NES to that tangle of electrical equipment that your local hobo has stashed away in his bindle), Double Dragon wasn't the industry's first side-scrolling beat-em-up game, but it was definitely one of the most popular -- and for that reason, it's also one of the most important.

Double Dragon is a well-built game. It's fun, it's a little goofy, and it's good to have on-hand when you just need to pulverize something. But is it really a landmark in gaming history?
Posted by Shri Krishna

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