General gaming

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• The Essential 100, No. 46: Spacewar!
• The Essential 100, No. 47: Guitar Hero
• The Essential 100, No. 48: Colossal Cave Adventure
• The Essential 100, No. 49: Super Mario Kart
• The Essential 100, No. 50: Civilization
• Cover Story: 1UP's Essential 100, Part Three
• The Last Story Review: Deconstructing Fantasy Heroes

The Essential 100, No. 46: Spacewar! Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:04 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE The Essential 100, No. 46: Spacewar! Cover Story: How a few hackers predicted video games' future schism in the process of creating the medium. "A ccessibility" may be the single most controversial term in video games today. Forget "digital rights management" or "downloadable content." Roll your eyes when you hear "outsourcing" or "annualization." If you want to angry up the core gamer's blood, sing the praises of accessible game design. To the dedicated gamer, the word "accessibility" speaks of compromise. Surrender. Ceding vast swaths of a beloved pastime, a medium that has given them countless fond memories, to the inevitable evil of marketability. Developers hesitate to use the word. Gamers froth at the mouth when they hear it. To many, accessibility represents the vanguard of gaming's conquest by the same outsiders who once sneered at them, shoved them into lockers, stereotyped them as friendless losers, insulted them, refused to date them. The girl who laughed when you asked her to a movie back in 9th grade because you kept your school papers in a Legend of Zelda binder? She's all grown up now, and she plays video games. Her ChefVille requests clog your Facebook feed. She likes games, now. They're accessible.

The Essential 100, No. 47: Guitar Hero Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:03 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE The Essential 100, No. 47: Guitar Hero Cover Story: When American rock music met plastic, it helped gamers live the thrill of performance. B efore Guitar Hero set living rooms across the U.S. ablaze with the sound of rock 'n roll, Konami had already successfully married rhythm and plastic for their own music-focused series, GuitarFreaks, a spin-off of the already popular (in Japan) Beatmania games. Between GuitarFreaks 1999 arcade launch and Guitar Hero's 2005 debut, Konami shipped 14 different versions of the game. So why did Guitar Hero sales blow past of an already established competitor by presenting a suspiciously similar take on the same idea? Compare their soundtracks, presentation styles, and respective overall approach, and you'll see why one series took off in the American living rooms while the other sat faded in the arcade. The music of Guitar Hero strayed far from the J-Pop quirk that lived within Konami's GuitarFreaks, leaning heavily on a set of beloved rock classics. In it you could find Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark at the Moon," "Spanish Castle Magic " by Jimmy Hendrix, Queen's "Killer Queen"; even a David Bowie track made it into Guitar Hero's metal-focused soundtrack. The music didn't include a wide spectrum of talent, but the choices sent a clear message: Guitar Hero would let you play some of the most devilish and iconic music by means of a plastic guitar.

The Essential 100, No. 48: Colossal Cave Adventure Posted: 10 Sep 2012 02:24 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE The Essential 100, No. 48: Colossal Cave Adventure Cover Story: How Will Crowther's humble project proved that video games could do anything. A s 1UP soldiers on with our Essential 100 series, I've noticed a certain misconception about the ranking of our chosen games. So, allow me to put you at ease: a higher-ranked title isn't necessarily better than those that came before it, just more influential to the medium as a whole. And there's no greater example of this than 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure, which comes in ahead of more than half of our entries, yet provides the charmingly primitive experience you'd expect from a game quickly approaching its fortieth birthday. It may be difficult to grasp the importance of Colossal Cave Adventure without first knowing that no one had done anything like it before, despite how obvious its ideas may seem in retrospect. Though assembled as a simple diversion by a dad looking for a way to bond with his two daughters, the work of programmer William Crowther served as a direct inspiration to the first wave of game designers, whose influences we can trace further still. Of course, Colossal Cave Adventure wouldn't have spread to the outside world without some help; Crowther originally developed his game for the PDP-10 mainframe computer, a monstrosity which looked like set dressing straight out of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's Muppet Labs. But Crowther didn't design Colossal Cave Adventure for commercial sale (even if such a thing could happen in 1976), so friends passed it along during the early days of the Internet, where the few people with access to computers found themselves addicted without knowing just where this brilliant game came from. In the early '70s video games typically involved a car, spaceship, or ping-pong paddle set against a black void of nothingness, but Colossal Cave Adventure had players exploring an environment that they could map out for themselves -- inspired by Cowther's own knowledge of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave.

The Essential 100, No. 49: Super Mario Kart Posted: 10 Sep 2012 01:20 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE The Essential 100, No. 49: Super Mario Kart Cover Story: 20 years ago, Mario appeared in his first true spin-off and created a genre in the process. W hen Shigeru Miyamoto first created Mario, he originally thought to call the then-nameless hero "Mr. Video." His thinking was that Mario -- or rather, Mr. Video -- would serve as an all-purpose protagonist, able to stand in for any role his creators could possibly conceive. Despite going with the more affable moniker "Mario," Nintendo put Miyamoto's Mr. Video plan into effect from the very beginning, thrusting the character into a number of Game & Watch titles shortly after the debut of Donkey Kong. A couple of years later, the Famicom (NES) home console launched in Japan, and even before the revolutionary Super Mario Bros. debuted Mario had his hands full with cameos in a great many early NES titles. Still, these were mere footnotes in game history, grist for trainspotters to compile their "complete list of Mario appearances" wikis, or a meaningless factoid for video game trivia contests. NES Golf, Tennis, Pinball, or even later titles like Dr. Mario had nothing whatsoever to do with the character; they were simply standard games into which the character had been shoehorned for greater visibility (and salability). It wasn't until 1992, more than a decade after his debut, that Nintendo finally and at long last gave its most important character his own true spin-off.

The Essential 100, No. 50: Civilization Posted: 10 Sep 2012 11:26 AM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE The Essential 100, No. 50: Civilization Cover Story: How Sid Meier destroyed billions of man-hours of productivity by being a board game fan. E xpand! Explore! Exploit! Exterminate! These are the tenets upon which game designer Sid Meier built his seminal strategy game Civilization... though the "4X" concept wouldn't be canonized in gaming parlance until a few years later, once the brilliance of Civ has trickled out and inspired other creators to try their own respective hand at developing the concepts Meier converted into video game form. Expand! Turn-based strategy games have always shared a close relationship with role-playing games; at their most basic level, they're macro-level variants on the same fundamental concepts of resource management, exploration, and conflict that RPGs deal in. Rather than controlling a handful of warriors as they make moment-to-moment decisions in battle (as you would in an RPG), a 4X places players in control of the overall army or nation, allowing those RPG battles to play out behind the scenes. Individual combat actions take a back seat to large-scale planning, general strategies, and managerial decision.

Cover Story: 1UP's Essential 100, Part Three Posted: 10 Sep 2012 11:25 AM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE Cover Story: 1UP's Essential 100, Part Three We edge closer to the top in our countdown of the 1UP's community picks for most important games ever. We've passed the halfway mark in our countdown of the 100 most important video games of all time, meaning that this week we'll be recounting the back half of the top 50. Now we're in the same territory we covered in our Essential 50 series nearly 10 years ago -- though you'll definitely find this list is not at all the same as the original. Time has marched on since then, bringing new ideas, new franchises, and new directions to the medium and the industry. While you'll definitely see some overlap with that older list, you'll also find new selections that we didn't even consider a decade ago. Of course, the biggest difference -- as we've mentioned before -- is that the Essential 100 doesn't simply represent the 1UP editorial crew's opinions. We are not proclaiming these selections from on high, but rather worked in tandem with you the reader to build a democratic and comprehensive list. Needless to say, as with all such lists, these picks are completely subjective. You may not agree with every selection. You definitely won't agree with the placement of certain titles. And since we're a U.S.-based website with a predominantly North American audience, the list omits plenty of titles that would be on a European or Japanese-based list. I don't think a single Spectrum or C64 title made the list, although games like Elite definitely deserve to be on here!

The Last Story Review: Deconstructing Fantasy Heroes Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:54 AM PDT 20 hours seems like a ridiculously short amount of time, especially when it comes to caring about someone. Making a friend or falling in love takes much longer than that. 20 hours is nothing compared to the length of a life; yet games, at times, can compress so many emotions into a handful of meaningful minutes that once you have completed your adventure and the credits roll, you feel like a little part of your heart has gone -- that you've said farewell to a friend you've known forever. The Last Story is one of these rare games. It's not simply a nice experience; in many ways, it feels alive. The game's rich and colorful cast makes this magic happen. The story begins in the middle of a mission that serves both as a brilliant tutorial for the action-oriented battle system and as an introduction for the main group of mercenaries you control.

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