General gaming

General gaming

Borderlands 2 Review: A Case of Armed and Dangerous Deja Vu

Posted: 17 Sep 2012 09:00 PM PDT

For me, the original Borderlands existed as a solution to an especially first-world problem -- giving me a game to play when I couldn't decide which game to play. I turned to Gearbox's loot-based shooter in these dark times, and it also served a vital role during post-bar gaming sessions, when indecisiveness met inebriation. For this, I am thankful. But the experience never really stuck with me; Borderlands might have occupied an embarrassing amount of my time, but, looking at the many hours I've logged on Steam, I'm still not sure why. I assumed I enjoyed it at the time, if not for the basic, human joy of watching various numbers slowly increase over the course of 50 hours. Above all else, I decided to take on Borderlands 2 in an attempt to understand what had me so hooked on the first game.

Anime vs. Video Games

Posted: 17 Sep 2012 03:00 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 17 | RETHINKING JAPAN

Anime vs. Video Games

Cover Story: The tug-of-war between two of Japan's big pop-culture exports.

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apanese video games and anime stick close together. The two court similar audiences, and the cross-pollination goes far beyond the assortments of anime-based games and game-based anime. Manga creators and anime artists design game characters all the time, animation studios routinely work on games, and countless names jump from one field to the other. Cowboy Bebop writer Keiko Nobumoto worked on the first Kingdom Hearts. Gurren Lagann director Hiroyuki Imaishi crafted the opening of Samurai Legend Musashi. So it goes with a thousand more examples. Bore deep enough into just about any Japan-made game, and you'll see some anime influence.

This complex little web formed over many years of pop-culture symbiosis, as the fortunes of the nation's game and anime industries rose and fell. They're promoted, fed off, and perhaps even damaged each other. All the while, it's gotten harder to separate them.

Cover Story: Rethinking Japan

Posted: 17 Sep 2012 10:15 AM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 17 | RETHINKING JAPAN

Cover Story: Rethinking Japan

Join us all this week as we take a positive perspective on Japanese games, both old and new.

The past seven years of our HD generation have not been kind to Japanese developers. In the face of an ever-changing marketplace, Japan has struggled at adapting entrenched business models to changing consumer demands, causing companies to fold, major players to flee the institutions that made them, and delays to significantly hamper (or destroy) successful franchises. Where Japanese blockbusters once dominated sales charts, these days, the only Eastern titles that manage to squeak into each year's top ten list exclusively feature Mario and his pals. Great if you happen to work at Nintendo, but the same can't be said for once-fruitful Japanese companies just trying to scrape by in this crazy 21st century of ours.

This isn't to say that we at 1UP have a doom-and-gloom mentality about Japan; one look at our editors' favorite games reveals that most of our selections hail from that very country! And 1UP readers love Japanese games as well, as indicated by the generally emphatic reception we receive whenever we write about this topic -- especially anything related to Final Fantasy VII. (You guys seem to really like that one.) But this love isn't just relegated to retro classics from any so-called Golden Age of Japanese Gaming; just check out our reviews for Tokyo Jungle, The Last Story, and Dragon's Dogma (and their comments) for evidence that both we and our audience don't tend to write off games based solely on their country of origin. If anything, these stunning examples of design prove that Japanese developers might not be as prolific in terms of game development, but they still know how to wow us.

Interview: Building a Better Pokémon

Posted: 17 Sep 2012 10:14 AM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 17 | RETHINKING JAPAN

Interview: Building a Better Pokémon

Cover Story: The creators of Pokémon Black and White 2 on creating sequels to Japan's most popular export.

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okémon" may be synonymous for most people with "Nintendo," but in reality the core Pokémon games (and those 650-odd creatures you like to collect) owe their existence to an independent developer by the name of Game Freak. To promote the company's next big project -- Pokémon Black and White Version 2 -- producer Junichi Masuda and director Takao Unno recently visited San Francisco and discussed the ins and outs of the first direct Pokémon sequel in the franchise's 17-year history.

1UP: So, besides Pokémon, I'm fan of Pulseman, Drill Dozer, and Game Freak's other non-Pokémon projects. If you don't mind my asking, do you ever bring the influences of those games into Pokémon? I know that creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum, so I'm curious... when you're developing a Pokémon game, do you look at the other things you've made and say, "How can I bring those other ideas over here?"
Posted by Shri Krishna

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