General gaming

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• The Essential 100, No. 36: Donkey Kong
• The Essential 100, No. 37: John Madden Football
• The Essential 100, No. 38: Resident Evil 4
• The Essential 100, No. 39: Rogue
• Kirby Dream Collection Review: A Perfect Anniversary Gift
• The Essential 100, No. 40: Angry Birds
• LittleBigPlanet Vita Review: A Great Idea, Finally Realized

The Essential 100, No. 36: Donkey Kong Posted: 12 Sep 2012 05:34 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. 36: Donkey Kong Cover Story: The classic tale of boy meets girl meets giant ape. I t's easy to define the original Donkey Kong as essential for its part in birthing the character who would eventually evolve into Mario, but for me, the arcade game created something much grander. Donkey Kong is the Big Bang that acted as a catalyst to my favorite genre of gaming -- the platformer. I adore games that give me a well-developed environment to explore using an avatar's physical prowess. No video game challenge entices me more than using twitch reactions to hop over pits, duck under fireballs, and bop enemies on top of their heads. If you litter a world with shiny collectables, you can bet damn sure that I'm going to find them all. It's this mix of discovery and challenge that make platformers so desirable to me, and without 1982's Donkey Kong, none of that would be possible. Courtesy Giant Bomb

The Essential 100, No. 37: John Madden Football Posted: 12 Sep 2012 04:17 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. 37: John Madden Football Cover Story: EA's football sim helped shape the 16-bit era right out of the gate. T he lasting image of NES football will always be Bo Jackson sprinting through a bevy of hapless defenders on the way to another touchdown -- the greatest video athlete of his age. Tecmo Bowl and the NES all ruled an era in which fidelity to the game really wasn't possible. Developers did their best (and made some very fun games in the process), but at the end of the day, the strategy was matter of picking the scissors to your friends rock. And Bo always, always ran wild. John Madden Football didn't change things overnight, but it did do a great deal to shape the perception of sports games as simulators rather than arcade games.

The Essential 100, No. 38: Resident Evil 4 Posted: 12 Sep 2012 02:51 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. 38: Resident Evil 4 Cover Story: How Shinji Mikami's daring upheaval of survival horror reinvented the third-person action game. A s the world slowly crawled into the 21st century, it looked like Resident Evil would be left behind. With new technology broadening the scope of game design, the tropes of survival horror -- rooted in technological constraints of the previous generation -- quickly grew from quirky to intolerable. Though games like Silent Hill 2 would use the genre's awkwardness for an intense emotional effect, Capcom's breakout franchise began flailing desperately for new ideas. And while Resident Evil saw a stellar GameCube remake of the first game in 2002, its attempts to shake things up with first-person, online, and top-down handheld installments did nothing but dilute the shrinking importance of the series. If Resident Evil hoped to repeat the splash it made during its PlayStation debut, drastic measures would have to be taken. In a move that would be unheard of in our high-stakes age of HD development, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami did what had to be done. After scrapping what looked like a significant amount of development -- something Capcom had also done to Resident Evil 2 several years earlier -- Mikami drastically refit the main premise of Resident Evil into a faster, more action-packed format. In doing so, he violated the core rules set up by his franchise. Now zombies ("infected" if you want to split hairs) ran rather than lurched, communicated with each other, and could even use tools. Now the camera viewpoint stuck behind your character and would veer to one side of the screen while aiming rather than looking down on the action from a fixed angle. Now protagonist Leon Kennedy could jump, dive, punch, suplex, and turn on a dime. In what can only be called one of the greatest miracles of game development, this fresh coat of paint didn't amount to Mikami selling out survival horror to make it accessible to a whole new audience; simply put, Resident Evil's fourth installment did the impossible by redefining both the series and third-person action games in one masterful blow.

The Essential 100, No. 39: Rogue Posted: 12 Sep 2012 01:07 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. 39: Rogue Cover Story: Looking back at the time that ASCII text created an entire video game genre. P ity the poor At Sign: No video game hero has suffered the way it's suffered. No other protagonist has died more (or more varied) deaths. No warrior faces steeper odds or deals with more nonsense. The At Sign deserves to be on the cover of magazines. It deserves to dominate "coolest characters" and "bravest heroes" lists. The At Sign makes Master Chief, Mario, Commander Shepard, and that one dude in the hoodie from Prototype or inFamous or whichever game it was look like a collective of cowardly sad sacks. And yet, no one ever gives At Sign its due. Despite starring in one of the most influential video games of all time -- Rogue -- and dozens of RPGs derived directly from Rogue's DNA, At Sign gets no love. It doesn't even have a proper name or anything akin to a personality. It's just a placeholder for the character, a disposable cipher, HTML code @.

Kirby Dream Collection Review: A Perfect Anniversary Gift Posted: 12 Sep 2012 12:42 PM PDT Nintendo's Super Mario All-Stars collection, to be frank, was a pretty lackluster way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of gaming's most pivotal games. The packaging was pretty, and the compiled games were still great, but in the end all Nintendo gave us was a Super NES ROM shoveled onto a Wii disk in a fancy cardboard box, for which they wanted $30 (rather than the $8 the same ROM would have cost us if they'd simply served it up on Virtual Console). The difference in price didn't really justify the box and paltry extras; and given Mario's legacy, the collection should have been so much more. Well, Nintendo may have blown it for Mario's silver anniversary, but at least they're making good for Kirby's 20th. Why does a second-stringer like Kirby deserve the love that was denied to Mario? We'll probably never know the answer to that (although Nintendo president Satoru Iwata does have an extensive background with Kirby developer HAL -- you may formulate your conspiracy theories at your own leisure), but let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. There's no point: Kirby doesn't even have teeth, despite his voracious appetite.

The Essential 100, No. 40: Angry Birds Posted: 12 Sep 2012 10:56 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. 40: Angry Birds Cover Story: How a flock of fat birds changed handheld games, 99 cents at a time. A ngry Birds draws a lot of hate from hardcore gamers, an unfortunate circumstance when you consider its broad appeal and significance in video game history. That's no hyperbolic statement: In today's cutthroat world of downloadable, mobile games and entertainment, Angry Birds managed to establish itself as a juggernaut -- a record-setting success story that proved the potential of gaming on touch-based devices. Much to the ire of devoted Nintendo fans, Angry Birds is more popular today among kids than Mario, and it boasts the same potential to draw in new gamers that once allowed Nintendo to brag its own mascot was more recognizable than Mickey Mouse. Angry Birds played a major role in Apple's elevation of the mobile gaming market, and its popularity today bears similarities to Super Mario Bros.' American success in the mid '80s. Just as Nintendo's platformer helped resuscitate a dying video game market and gained huge influence among gamers and developers. Similarly -- though at a much smaller scale -- prior to the iPhone, mobile gaming didn't have much appeal in the U.S. market. The games typically associated with smartphones had all the personality and charm of Windows' built-on Solitare or Minesweeper apps. On the contrary, charm wasn't considered a major factor for smartphone games simply because the platform lent itself more to function and work-related task management than entertainment.

LittleBigPlanet Vita Review: A Great Idea, Finally Realized Posted: 12 Sep 2012 07:56 AM PDT I've always admired the LittleBigPlanet series more than I've actually enjoyed it. Media Molecule's ambitious decision to craft a platformer that put the creative power into the hands of the hands of the audience was a risky move that, for me, never quite paid off during the course of the two PS3 installments. The platforming never felt right, specifically the floaty controls and physics system that paid more attention to realism than to game logic. And then there was the creative mode, which may have given users the tools to build the next great platformer, but the less-than intuitive interface caused most of us to shy away from the digital building blocks shortly after laying our hands on them. All this could have been remedied if the AAA user levels rose to the top to be easily consumed, but navigating the online interface proved to be a challenge in its own right. It's with these prior concerns that I'm so glad to announce that LittleBigPlanet Vita, the freshman effort by Double Eleven, seems aware of the series' previous shortcomings, and uses the powerful portable's strengths to create the best volume in the creative franchise. Anyone who's even dabbled in the PS3 installments will know the general flow of the game -- create your own personal Sackboy, navigate a variety of platforming challenges, collect a whole mess of objects held within floating bubbles, and waste some time in a number of minigames. The single-player portion of LBP always seemed like a tutorial for what followed: Building your own levels, minigames, and experiments. But for me, the idea of creating a level always played out so much better in my head than it did in reality -- the interface was so overloaded with options that the entire process became wildly cumbersome. Thankfully, so many of those trails are remedied on the Vita, and LittleBigPlanet finally lives up to its potential.

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