General gaming

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• The Essential 100, No. 26: Diablo
• Why Bayonetta 2 Is More Important To Nintendo Than Call of Duty
• The Essential 100, No. 27: Super Metroid
• The Essential 100, No. 28: Resident Evil
• The Essential 100, No. 29: Final Fantasy IV
• The Essential 100, No. 30: The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past
• Interview: Nintendo Talks eShop Disparity, Miiverse, and Wii U's Online Focus At Launch

The Essential 100, No. 26: Diablo Posted: 14 Sep 2012 06:09 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. 26: Diablo Cover Story: How Blizzard created an addiction by taking you to hell and back. There were no short play sessions of Diablo. You couldn't just put in an hour and call it a day -- the game wouldn't let you. I 'm willing to bet that most of you know what it feels like to become addicted to a video game. We've all had those moments where we've pushed aside the relatively important tasks of eating, sleeping, and going outside because the call of a specific title was just too powerful to resist. Usually these are very personal experiences that, for some reason or another, strike a chord with us. Some intangible concoction of elements cause us to forgo the real world while we dive deeper into a digital one. But no game was ever built with the goal of creating this sense of addiction...right? Well, the pushers at Blizzard might have something to say about that. With Diablo's release at the end of '96, Blizzard was able to craft an experience that slowly instilled a physical dependency in the player. There were no short play sessions of Diablo. You couldn't just put in an hour and call it a day -- the game wouldn't let you. The world existed as if it were created with the sole intention of sinking its teeth into the player and never letting go. Like so many classic games, the actual moment-to-moment play is relatively simple; go forth, kill, collect, repeat. But it's that simplicity that makes the experience so inviting and addictive. Blizzard managed to create a series of systems that acted as the video game version of a carrot on a stick. Like any of the most dangerous drugs, the barrier to entry for Diablo was so shockingly low. Despite all of the number crunching that went on behind the scenes, the game presented a sleek, simplistic UI that allowed even a novice gamer to jump in and find some modicum of success. Like a svengali, it tricked non-RPG players into gladly playing an RPG.

Why Bayonetta 2 Is More Important To Nintendo Than Call of Duty Posted: 14 Sep 2012 04:31 PM PDT Word that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 would be coming to Wii U had been circulating for months; it was reported to be the case back in June and was seemingly confirmed when it showed up on a QA tester's resume in August. It wasn't until yesterday's Wii U press conference that we got official word that it was coming, and since then Nintendo has positioned the game as being one of the main ways it will attract hardcore gamers to the system. In reality, I think it's another third-party game announced yesterday that is far more important in this regard. Informed that EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich thinks the Wii U's price is too high to interest core gamers, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told GamesIndustry.biz, "He needs to see Call of Duty that we have here, or Assassin's Creed." Asked if he thinks Nintendo has done a good job in convincing Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners to pick up the Wii U versions of third-party games, product marketing manager Bill Trinen (read our interview with him here) also highlighted Black Ops 2. He told GameSpot, "We've got third-party games like Call of Duty. They've done a really good job of integrating the GamePad, particularly having that two player experience on two different screens. You're no longer playing split-screen; you can play together full-screen. And to me that in and of itself is a reason to go out and say I'm gonna get Call of Duty on Wii U because that's the way I want to play.

The Essential 100, No. 27: Super Metroid Posted: 14 Sep 2012 04:19 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. 27: Super Metroid Cover Story: A journey of discovery for both Samus Aran and her fans alike. G amers, as a whole, tend to let themselves get carried away in the pursuit of spectacle. Technical innovation and thrilling cinematic presentation get the headlines, while quieter forms of excellence often go unnoticed. But perfection needn't clamor for attention. True greatness can rise to our attention without boasting or flamboyance. Take, for example, Nintendo's Super Metroid. Hailed by many as the greatest game ever made, Super Metroid arrived quietly, presented players with a sedate and subtle world, and brilliantly blew millions of minds. It was a masterpiece made all the more masterful by the confidence evident in its presentation.

The Essential 100, No. 28: Resident Evil Posted: 14 Sep 2012 03:06 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. 28: Resident Evil Cover Story: Capcom's spiritual successor to Sweet Home unleashed a new kind of terror. V ideo games and horrors make strange bedfellows if you really stop think about it. Horror focuses on the creation of shock and fear and usually accomplish this by setting up extreme circumstances. Meanwhile, video games focus more on entertainment delivered through challenges that provide amusement and enjoyment. Obviously, people go watch horror movies to be entertained, but the idea of a someone picking up a controller to actively participate in the scary moments onscreen doesn't immediately jive. Early console releases like Haunted House for the Magnavox Odyssey initially toyed with the idea of creating suspense in video games, but it was Capcom's Sweet Home for the Famicom that successfully combined the two concepts -- and, notably, the formula it established felt heavily influenced by film. A tie-in game for a movie by the same name, Sweet Home took the idea of survival and applied it to an RPG template. As its cast of five characters desperately fought to survive inside a haunted mansion, each one employed their own unique specialization to get along, and battles unfolded through random encounters. A player tried to keep as many characters alive as possible in order to achieve one of the game's five possible endings.

The Essential 100, No. 29: Final Fantasy IV Posted: 14 Sep 2012 01:13 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. 29: Final Fantasy IV Cover Story: Square's 16-bit debut started the SNES RPG legacy with a bang. B elieve it or not, I grew up without seeing a single minute of Star Wars. This wasn't an impossibility during George Lucas' post-Howard the Duck/pre-Episode One hibernation, mind you; once upon a time, you could go for days, or even weeks without being reminded of Wookiees, Jawas, and heartfelt cantina ballads belted out by Bea Arthur. In 1994, critics considered the Death Star conversation in Clerks to be the absolute height of novelty; these days, the Star Wars nod is the low-hanging fruit of the humor world, where even the laziest comedian can toss out a half-assed comment about gay robots and receive a golf clap (at the very least) for acknowledging a cinematic cultural touchstone. Now, I'm not saying I don't understand the Star Wars phenomenon, and can admit that Lucas weaved a masterful tale of black-and-white morality that transformed the lives of those who saw it during a specific window of their lives. By the time I got around to seeing Star Wars, though, this window was closed.

The Essential 100, No. 30: The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past Posted: 14 Sep 2012 12:03 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. 30: The Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past Cover Story: The game that codified a series, a genre, and a way of game design. T he Legend of Zelda series will appear several times in our community-shaped, editor-curated Essential 100 series; no less three different chapters of the franchise made their way onto the list. We considered compacting the Zelda games into fewer entries as we ended up doing with a handful of other franchises that otherwise would have been unreasonably dominant (appearing five or six times apiece), but we ultimately decided against taking that approach: Each of the three Zelda titles voted up into this list stands apart as a distinct work with its own clearly demonstrable impact on game design. Both the original NES Legend of Zelda and Ocarina of Time appear higher up the list and will be explored in due time. Yet even though it received the fewest collective votes, Super NES classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past arguably represents the series' single most important moment. If Zelda established the DNA of action-adventure games and Ocarina defined their look and appearance, A Link to the Past serves as its skeleton and sinew. For all that Ocarina established the rules of modern 3D action games -- and we'll get to that in a future entry of the Essential 100 -- it achieved greatness by standing on the shoulders of a proverbial giant. Ocarina would have been nothing without its predecessor A Link to the Past, and that means every game that bit off Ocarina's style (not an trivial number) in turn owes is existence and success to this 16-bit classic.

Interview: Nintendo Talks eShop Disparity, Miiverse, and Wii U's Online Focus At Launch Posted: 14 Sep 2012 11:46 AM PDT While Nintendo's press conference in New York City on Thursday revealed many of the key details on Wii U we had all been waiting for -- namely its price and release date -- there were many lingering issues left to be addressed. Nintendo of America's Bill Trinen may be best known as the frequent translator for Shigeru Miyamoto, but he's also the company's Product Marketing Manager. Jose Otero and Anthony Parisi turned to him to find out more about transferring digital content from a Wii to Wii U, the reason for the disparity between the Japanese and North American eShops, plans for selling standalone GamePads, lessons learned from WiiConnect24, and why online play wasn't an emphasis for Nintendo's first-party games at launch. 1UP: From what you've seen, how is Nintendo adapting to the U.S. market right now, considering the state of the Japanese yen versus the dollar? How does that influence the approach?

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