General gaming

General gaming

How Konami's ACME All-Stars Laid the Groundwork for Soccer Dominance

Posted: 26 Jul 2012 05:42 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 23 | THE WIDE WORLD OF VIDEO GAME SPORTS

How Konami's ACME All-Stars Laid the Groundwork for Soccer Dominance

Cover Story: Before Pro Evo and Winning Eleven, the world's most popular sport took on a much loonier form.

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any great soccer games have popped up over the years. The FIFA games, as of late, have been stellar. People seem to have fond memories of the Pro Evolution Soccer/Winning Eleven series. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Sega Soccer Slam, a diamond-in-the-rough arcade soccer game released in the early 2000s. But for me, only one soccer game comes to mind with the phrase "best soccer game ever." That game is Konami's Tiny Toon Adventures ACME All-Stars.

ACME All-Stars wasn't just soccer, though. The game also contained four other events: basketball, obstacle course, bowling, and whack-a-mole. The other games varied from okay (basketball) to terrible (everything else), but the soccer portion of the game had a certain simple rhythm and cadence to it that clicked. The controls weren't revolutionary. The three buttons on the Genesis controller were used for passing, shooting, slide-tackling, and more depending on context. The basic mechanics were in place. It's easy to pick up, but there's such a frenetic pace to the game that requires great strategy and knowledge of its intricacies.

OP-ED: Why Videogames Can Never Fully Capture the Wonderful World of Pro Wrestling

Posted: 26 Jul 2012 04:09 PM PDT

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Professional wrestling is fake. This we all (I hope) know, although the existence of Internet ads teasing an answer to the question of 'Are WWE fights staged?' makes me hesitant to assume anything. I bring this fact up not to spark a debate about how some aspects of wrestling truly are real (there's a reason WWE doesn't let guys hit each other in the head with chairs anymore), but as the reason for why wrestling simulation videogames can never hope to fully recreate wrestling. How can a scripted sporting event be acted out without all of its participants being in on the ruse?

I tend to be fairly good at wrestling games, at least when it comes to squaring off against the AI. Over time I learn what works and what doesn't, and pretty quickly I find myself with ability to take down a computer opponent without him getting much offense in, if any at all. In professional wrestling such a match would be called a squash. Squashes do have their purpose, as they can be used to establish an individual as being dominant and help him or her to stand out in some way. But this is thankfully not the formula followed by your average match, or else wrestling would get boring in a big hurry.

Why We Love StarCraft So Much

Posted: 26 Jul 2012 12:49 PM PDT

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Why We Love StarCraft So Much

Cover Story: What draws people to StarCraft? There are many reasons that motivate a love for the game and today, we examine a few of those motivations.

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t the risk of being stoned, I'll admit this: I wasn't impressed when people told me that members of the Korean eSports Association (KeSPA) would be at Major League Gaming's (MLG) Spring Championships which was held at Anaheim this year. Oh, don't get me wrong. I've seen the videos. I've watched, enraptured, as the Koreans made short work of one another. I've pondered their aptitude for micro-management and marveled over their ability to click on things so damn rapidly but, at the end of the day, they were still just players to me. Ridiculously competent, unnaturally skillful players but players, nonetheless. People like you and I.

The roar of the crowd told me something different, though. To the people amassed at MLG Anaheim, they were something more. They were gods.

New Super Mario Bros. 2 Turns the Classic Platformer Into Sport

Posted: 26 Jul 2012 10:15 AM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 23 | THE WIDE WORLD OF VIDEO GAME SPORTS

New Super Mario Bros. 2 Turns the Classic Platformer Into Sport

Cover Story: Sure, it's "just another Mario game," but this one stimulates the competitive hindbrain.

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hen I played New Super Mario Bros. 2 at E3, I was relieved to find that the game dispensed with the standard life counter, challenging players to complete stages on a single life. The idea of cashing in coins for lives makes sense in a game where you're lucky to scrape up enough change for a single 1UP per stage, but in a game defined entirely by the quest to acquire money, where cash practically rains from the sky, it seems pretty pointless. At an exchange rate of 100 coins to one life, NSMB2's ultimate mission of gathering one million coins works out to 10,000 lives. Which is just silly.

But no: It turns out I was duped. Tricked. Fooled. The E3 demo consisted of a sampler of the Coin Rush mode, where players select one of three stage challenges -- Mushroom, Fire Flower, or Star, just like in Mario Kart -- that string together three random levels from Worlds 1 through 3, 4 through 6, and 7 and 8 respectively. Coin Rush doesn't represent the main game by any means; the bulk of NSMB2's content comes in the form of a classic Mario title. The adventure is broken into worlds, which in turn break into separate stages (more than 80 in total, according to the latest Iwata Asks feature). As usual, collecting coins nets Mario a new life... but the levels are absolutely crammed with coins, which means you accumulate 1UPs at a downright prodigious rate.

Hot Blooded: The Timeless Qualities of the Nekketsu Sports Games

Posted: 26 Jul 2012 07:09 AM PDT

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Hot Blooded: The Timeless Qualities of the Nekketsu Sports Games

Cover Story: The four pillars of excellence that made Technos' cartoony sports games some of the most fun ones ever made.

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hat would you say are the greatest sports games ever made? For many it's easy, especially for longtime sports lovers who've played every game of their favorite sport every year, but for the more discerning hardcore gamer, especially the nerd who might not care about real sports to begin with (I admit nothing), few games come close to Technos' Nekketsu ("Hot-Blooded") sports series of the early '90s, under the franchise where games like Renegade and River City Ransom came from.

It's also the origin point for Super Dodge Ball, the first Nekketsu sports spin-off that quickly evolved into a series of other sports games, including Nintendo World Cup (soccer), Crash 'N' The Boys Street Challenge (Olympics-style athletic trials), and several Japan-only installments that focused on marathon running and martial arts. A lot of us can bring up River City Ransom and talk about why it was so special and fun, and though a lot of elements are shared in the sports games, there are other unique little details in those games that helped them define "arcade sports" before we could even think about it. These are the most important ones.

Welcome to the Weirdness of Tokyo Jungle

Posted: 25 Jul 2012 06:38 PM PDT

We'll be the first to admit that the 1UP staff likes their games weird. Things like Mr. Mosquito, The Typing of the Dead, and Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball quickly pique our collective interest through their strange and surreal elements. So it goes without saying that we quickly imported Tokyo Jungle after its Japanese release.

Scheduled to come stateside on PSN at an undetermined point in the future, the game allows you to play as any number of critters as you try to survive the wilds of Japan. But the true magic of this game can't be captured via mere words. Watch as 1UP's Bob Mackey and Marty Sliva guide a Pomeranian through the hellscape of post-apocalyptic Tokyo.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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