General gaming

General gaming

The Essential 100, No. 41: Wizardry

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:59 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE

The Essential 100, No. 41: Wizardry

Cover Story: A game that defined the rigid underpinnings of the RPG and made no apologies for it.

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omputer role-playing games descend directly from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, G.U.R.P.S., and Dragon Quest (no, the other Dragon Quest). The difference between a CRPG and a pen-and-paper game, of course, is that there's no such thing as a dungeon master in a computer game. The best you can hope for is convincing fakery by the computer.

Wizardry, then, aimed to simulate the experience of an RPG session headed up by that most infamous of game masters: The one who takes pride in making his players as miserable as possible. Oh, gee, did I put a random encounter here that your party couldn't possibly hope to conquer at their current level? Whoops! Oh, say, was that treasure rigged with a trap beyond your thief's ability to crack, and all you earned for your terminally poisoned party was a low-level leather jerkin that no one in your group needs? My bad. Oops, it looks like your party is terminally screwed now that you're all dying and don't have the money to hell. Sorry, better roll new characters!

The Essential 100, No. 42: Gran Turismo

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:37 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE

The Essential 100, No. 42: Gran Turismo

Cover Story: Sony's real driving simulator taught players how to drive like a professional.

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s more and more games in the late '90s made the move from bitmap to polygon graphics, racing games benefitted greatly from the advent of 3D visuals. But period of this significant evolution didn't signal peacetime for arcade game publishers; on the contrary, studios practically went to war, with brutal battles for racing dominance fought through razor-sharp visuals and ever more realistic car handling models. Hard Drivin', Virtua Racing, Ridge Racer, Daytona USA, GTi Club: Each showed off impressive detail and sought to outdo the competition in order to draw the bigger crowd.

As arcade racing games continued to push the visual envelope with bigger and better attractions -- along with stylish and beautifully designed cabinets -- home console racing games struggled to mirror their big brother counterparts. The focus on style and pizzaz transferred well enough to consoles, but everything changed after Gran Turismo debuted in 1997. Sony's high-profile racing sim came without a flashy arcade cabinet or showy steering wheel controller, and it only arrived after a then-unheard-of five-year development cycle, but it managed to stun players with its incredible attention to realism. Director Kazunori Yamauchi and his team at Polyphony digital utilized the power of Sony's console and the system's new Dual Shock controller to immerse players in a way no other racer had.

The Essential 100, No. 43: Ultima Online

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:58 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE

The Essential 100, No. 43: Ultima Online

Cover Story: The wild, unpredictable formative days of the massively multiplayer game.

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t's almost funny that Ultima Online probably doesn't count as the world's first MMO, given that creator Richard Garriott coined the genre name specifically for this game. A better case could be made for, say, Meridian 59, Sierra Online's The Realm, or -- if we're playing fast and loose with the definition -- Lucasfilm Games' Habitat way back in 1986. Except at the time we just called those "graphical MUDs," and that was when we thought to call them anything at all. They were odd ducks that got a few of us excited more for the promise of the idea than its actual implementation, and none of them reached anywhere near the household-name level popularity achieved by UO.

If Ultima Online has any legitimate claim to firsties here, it's on account of that "massive" part of the name. Thousands of simultaneous players sharing a single world just hadn't been done before. Subscribers peaked at around a quarter of a million, which sounds almost paltry when compared to the millions upon millions still playing World of Warcraft, but for the time it was nothing short of a phenomenon. Especially when one bears in mind not only that the world's online population was orders of magnitude smaller back in 1996 when the game was unveiled, but that a 33.6k modem was a blazingly fast toy for rich people. It was a much smaller pond, and when 100,000 people started playing within the first six months, it felt like everyone you knew was getting into this thing.

Steam Big Picture Mode Accomplishes Its Goal, But Just How Impactful Is It?

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:43 PM PDT

Steam Big Picture

More than a year and a half after it was first announced (Valve Time, remember?), Steam's Big Picture mode has been released in beta. The primary purpose of it is to enable Steam users to easily navigate the program with a controller when it's plugged into a television, and in that regard it is extremely successful. The question, however, is whether this is really all that impactful.

Big Picture mode is certainly useful, provided you have a workable setup. After opting into the beta (head to Steam's Settings page to do so) and restarting Steam, a button in the upper-right corner appears. By clicking this or tapping the Guide button on an Xbox 360 controller, Big Picture mode launches and provides a controller-friendly way of navigating Steam's core features: the store, game library, and community sections. Also included is a surprisingly decent browser, giving you quick and easy access to a browser on your TV screen that can be accessed even while playing a game.

The Essential 100, No. 44: SimCity

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:32 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE

The Essential 100, No. 44: SimCity

Cover Story: Will Wright's urban planning sim taught us all the joys of playing god.

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he golden age of the PC simulation genre may be over, but the heart of SimCity beats within some of the most profitable and popular games in existence. And this inspiration isn't just a coincidence; Will Wright's 1989 masterpiece taught us the fun leadership can bring when it's completely divorced from actual responsibility. SimCity may refer to you as the "mayor," but in the context of the game, this role is akin to a god-king whose unchecked power determines even the tiniest aspects of his or her citizens' lives for decades, or even centuries. A remarkably complex idea at the time, but one carried forth so intuitively that even children could grasp the game's basic concepts of urban planning. Regardless of your destructive tendencies, SimCity stood in direct opposition to assumptions about gaming, in that the player's purpose was to create, rather than destroy.

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The Essential 100, No. 45: Zork

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:18 AM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 10 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART THREE

The Essential 100, No. 45: Zork

Cover Story: A simple blinking cursor opened the door for gaming's possibilities.

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y obsession with videogames began in 1986, when my dad bought a Sega Master System. Needless to say, my earliest memories are filled with more Space Harriers and Altered Beasts than little blinking text cursors. But a few years later, I discovered the Commodore 64: A strange, giant keyboard of a contraption, sitting in the room of a neighbor kid's older brother.

We booted the machine up, and before long, my 9-year old brain was entrenched in a world not limited to the soulless eyes of sprites, but with all the vivid detail of a kid's imagination.
Posted by Shri Krishna

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