General gaming

General gaming

Cover Story: Community in Games

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 03:01 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 27 | COMMUNITY IN GAMES

Cover Story: Community in Games

This week, 1UP celebrates you, and all forms of digital societies.

The general sense of comradery that video games are capable of creating is uncanny. Whether it's four friends gathered around the warm glow of a Nintendo 64, anonymous online avatars inhabiting a digital space to discuss a long-forgotten series, or a massive festival like PAX designed to celebrate and cherish all-things gaming, our medium has its own special way of welcoming fans with open arms.

The editors here at 1UP have been quite happy with our recent shift to weekly cover stories, and a big part of that can be attributed to the phenomenal discussions that have stemmed from our various topics. Between the spirited debates regarding The Essential 100, the amazing memories shared around the Super Mario series, and the healthy dialogue created over the topic of gender and sexuality and gaming, we truly feel like 1UP is synonymous with the word community, and that's something that we're definitely embracing.

Mega Man: A Community With Blues

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 02:58 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 27 | COMMUNITY IN GAMES

Mega Man: A Community With Blues

Cover Story: Mega Man's fallen on hard times, but that's only brought the remnants of the community closer together.

W

hen online communication stumbled out of Usenet, rubbed its eyes, and beheld the World Wide Web for the first time, video game-related communities likewise began migrating to web browsers. The '90s were still relatively new, and the earliest hosting services--Angelfire, Dragonfire, Geocities, Tripod, and others--made it possible for us to build primitive homages to our 8 and- 16-bit heroes. Gamers were still a young and fragmented group, and we had a lot to say about Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy, and Mega Man.

The Mega Man franchise had seen a steady trickle of games since 1987, so the Blue Bomber's fans already had a pile of content to play with by the time they took to the Internet. A busy game release schedule has kept the online Mega Man fan community alive, though tiny two-meg pages labeled The Mega Man X Homepage and Maverick Hunter Headquarters have given way to Wikis and Facebook communities (one major exception being The Mega Man Homepage, which has stood as solid as a Gutsdozer since 1994).

Leon's Saga and Resident Evil 6 Show Surprising Signs of Life in the Latest Demo

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 01:12 PM PDT

Within the first hour of playing Resident Evil 6, it's hard to fight off an intrepid sense of boredom. A lot of the blame could be pinned on the early tutorial stages -- a section of simple set pieces which hold the player's hand in all the wrong ways. In one early section of RE6, Leon carried his injured partner, Helena Harper, away from danger and into the safety of an abandoned building somewhere in the zombie-infested town of Tall Oaks. On paper, that last sentence should sound like a setup for a harrowing situation, one where the payer should feel a rush of anxiety, as they pick up their partner and pull them to safety. But we live in a world where tutorials suck the life out of sequences like this, and much like a zombie, the player simply follows the directions as indicated and plays along.

Thankfully, after about an hour or so, the Leon campaign of RE6 picks up the pieces and sets you loose inside an infected city beset with monsters. It's at this point that the game really starts to shine, as the duo of Leon and Helena tread a path toward the downtown area of Tall Oaks in search of answers behind the recent viral outbreak.

Rock Band Blitz Review: A Stay of Execution

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 08:59 AM PDT

Remember Rock Band? You know, the late '00s phenomenon that filled our hearts with song, and our living rooms with cheap plastic? (Guitar Hero fans, some of this applies to you as well.) Though you might have disposed of your instruments via Craig's List (or an open flame) months ago, odds are, your console's hard drive still contains a king's ransom of now-unplayable DLC; this is the danger that comes with an easy-to-access storefront in a game typically played by groups of drunks quickly losing their good judgment.

The answer to this distinctly first-world problem can be found in Harmonix's Rock Band Blitz, which ostensibly exists as a means to zap some new life into your dormant DLC. If you've played former Harmonix rhythm games Frequency and Amplitude, Blitz should look very familiar -- though it doesn't play exactly the same. Instead of forcing you to stick to a single track based on whatever instrument you happen to be holding, Blitz pays homage to Harmonix's earliest projects by allowing you to switch between tracks on the fly with the single push of a button. And since each of these tracks has been reduced to two "note tunnels" apiece, the focus on pure perfection has been replaced with planning strategic combos in what amounts to the thinking man's version of Rock Band.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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