General gaming

General gaming

Learning Through Level Design with Mario

Posted: 15 Aug 2012 05:10 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 13 | THE SUPER MARIO BROS. LEGACY

Learning Through Level Design with Mario

Cover Story: How Super Mario Bros. and its sequels pull double duty as game and how-to.

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he first thing that happens when you play Super Mario Bros. is: You die.

This fact speaks a universal truth of the game's nature. Super Mario Bros. can be tough, but it isn't an unreasonably difficult experience -- especially not at the beginning. Rather, the challenge of Mario's classic quest lies in the way it represents (and in 1985, absolutely represented) the baseline of all action games. With his first scrolling adventure, Mario had the unenviable dual task of starring in a great experience and teaching a generation of children how to run and jump and behave in video games.

Tearaway Offers A Message of Hope to Gamers

Posted: 15 Aug 2012 03:42 PM PDT

When I saw Tearaway for the first time last night, I didn't know what to think. The trailer shown at Sony's GamesCom media briefing didn't speak to me me, and I couldn't shake the feeling that Media Molecule's first new property in years shared a bit too much of LittleBigPlanet's flavor. But to really understand that this new game doesn't obey the same paradigm (Play, Create, Share) that gives life to Sackboy's countless adventures you really have to hold a Vita in your hands and play around with it, at which point you'll discover the reality of the situation: Tearaway is an action game with an unprecedented, tactile feel.

The Vita hardware indeed possesses great potential, but to date its software library has only scratched the surface of its possibilities. The intriguing touch properties of its screen and back panel mostly find use only for mundane tasks such as navigating menus, throwing grenades, and rotating objects to clean them till they sparkle.

Mario's Yearly Salary

Posted: 15 Aug 2012 02:07 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 13 | THE SUPER MARIO BROS. LEGACY

Mario's Yearly Salary

Cover Story: An audit of the Nintendo mascot's athletic earnings.

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'm going to let you in on a little secret: you don't make money by rescuing princesses. A kiss? Maybe. Respect? Most likely. An endorphin high? Absolutely. But cold, hard cash? Not so much. Let's be real -- it's hard out there for a plumber. Rent in the Mushroom Kingdom can't be cheap, and with average salary for a plumber barely north of 40K, a hero has to look to outside sources in order to live a life of luxury. But being the resourceful jumpman he is, Mario has spent the past few decades honing his skills in all variety of sports. And it turns out that being a renowned athlete pays a hell of a lot better than being a hero.

Golf - $4.4 million

The Secret World Review: Think. Different.

Posted: 15 Aug 2012 10:09 AM PDT

Confession: I always read quest text in MMOs. Always. As a direct consequence of that habit, I'm often left in the dust while my friends pick up a new task, click through the dialog window as quickly as possible, then dart off into the horizon toward their objectives. Can't say I blame them, though; the writing in these games sometimes seems like as much of an afterthought for the developers as it is to many players.

Personally, I'll take whatever nuggets of lore and context I can get if I'm expected to spend hundreds of hours in a fictional world. And, to be fair, storytelling in MMOs is improving, not only with respect to the quality of writing, but also in terms of narrative presentation. Just as quests replaced the free-form, player-defined goals of the earliest online RPGs, developers are gradually transforming my beloved flavor text into full-on cutscenes, in some cases complete with dialog trees and moral choices. Sounds like a fair trade to me.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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