General gaming

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• Encumbrance Value: Finding the Horror in Limited Inventory
• PlayStation Mobile For Vita Shows Promise Thanks to Super Crate Box
• Survival History: A Resident Evil Retrospective
• The Horror of Silence
• Madden NFL 13 Review: Football Deserves Better

Encumbrance Value: Finding the Horror in Limited Inventory Posted: 03 Oct 2012 04:30 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF OCTOBER 1 | A DARK DESCENT INTO RESIDENT EVIL Encumbrance Value: Finding the Horror in Limited Inventory Cover Story: How Resident Evil's limited inventory systems terrify for all the right (and wrong) reasons. D evelopers still ponder how to best handle inventory systems. With the numerous tools that games throw at players to help them come quandaries about what limits to place on these tools. Allowing players to hold as much as they want is convenient, but it also means you don't have to make any meaningful decisions about what to take with you. Placing strict limits on what you can hold, on the other hand, forces players to think about resource management, but it can also annoy and frustrate. At the end of the day, a game's inventory philosophy depends on the game in question, and more specifically, what it hopes to achieve. Resident Evil utilizes limited inventory systems to tax the player and create moments of horror and tension, but it also created problems as the series evolved. The moniker "survival horror" meant creating horrific moments, but it also meant underscoring them by limiting what players can do, creating a very real sense that they may not survive. Both ammunition and health restorers were in short supply, and you had to actively look for them as you explored the game environments. Though most games in the genre gave you enough guns to take down a small army, the fact that your ammunition was limited meant you had to actively think about whether you would shoot at monsters or simply run away to save it for something worse in the future. After all, if the game threw piles of ammo at you, then you wouldn't feel threatened by anything in the game, and thus wouldn't be scared of much.

PlayStation Mobile For Vita Shows Promise Thanks to Super Crate Box Posted: 03 Oct 2012 04:00 PM PDT Handheld game systems like 3DS and PlayStation Vita are facing competition unlike anything their predecessors ever had to deal with. Like it or not, phones and tablets are eating into the market for handheld games. That's not to say dedicated gaming handhelds are dead or that no one wants the type of experiences they can provide anymore, but there is a lot more pressure on Nintendo and Sony than there has been in the past. Sony, especially, is faced with a less-than-desirable position; whereas Nintendo has a massive war chest and a system in 3DS that has done relatively well since its price cut, the Vita, like Sony itself, has been struggling worldwide. Part of what makes iOS and Android devices so attractive to some people are their respective app stores. Although the cost of iOS devices in particular might be rather high, once you get one, you have access to what can feel like a never-ending stream of App Store games that typically cost very little. That's a major point of distinction between iOS devices and the Vita; while the latter has access to cheap games from the Minis line, those have never really gained much traction. The bulk of the games you're likely to spend your time playing are full-priced, $40 games and smaller, downloadable titles that cost more than most iOS fare like Plants vs. Zombies ($15), Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack ($8), and Super Stardust Delta ($10).

Survival History: A Resident Evil Retrospective Posted: 03 Oct 2012 03:21 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF OCTOBER 1 | A DARK DESCENT INTO RESIDENT EVIL Survival History: A Resident Evil Retrospective Cover Story: A look back at the 16-year history of Capcom's famed survival horror series. F or many years, the Resident Evil series defined Capcom as a company and kept it going. While its creators probably had not foreseen its success, RE would go on to inherit the star franchise crown from Street Fighter and become Capcom's highest selling franchise. Series sales stand at 50 million units as of June 30, 2012, 16 years and three months after the initial release. That's approximately 8,400 Resident Evil games sold per day since the first game's release on March 22, 1996. Even though other popular Capcom franchises like Dino Crisis, Onimusha, Devil May Cry, and Monster Hunter followed -- along with a revival of the Street Fighter brand -- none of them would quite have the global impact that RE would. Mega Man, Street Fighter, Dino Crisis, Onimusha, and DMC do not possess the same level of longevity, while Monster Hunter has nowhere near the same level of international appeal.

The Horror of Silence Posted: 03 Oct 2012 01:48 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF OCTOBER 1 | A DARK DESCENT INTO RESIDENT EVIL The Horror of Silence Cover Story: How important is audio to the horror experience? Ask a deaf gamer. A udio is the unsung hero of horror. Few gaming rely on sound more heavily than the terrifying archetype that Resident Evil helped pioneer. This may not always be obvious; unlike rhythm games, for example, horror titles tend not to feature audio front and center. This is a genre that uniquely aims to elicit a specific and involuntary response from its audience -- fear. Music and sound effects play a subtle yet indispensable role in providing atmospheric cues for the player. In the right context, distant thumping or labored breathing is all it takes to inspire terror of threats unseen. Perhaps the most direct way to highlight the importance of audio in horror games is to compare experiences with someone who cannot hear. To illustrate the point, I turned to a longtime friend of mine named Francis, a deaf gamer earning a degree in game design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Although he had never dabbled in the series before, Francis agreed to sit down with me and play several hours of Resident Evil for this article.

Madden NFL 13 Review: Football Deserves Better Posted: 03 Oct 2012 12:07 PM PDT Whether you're a sports fan or not, football's importance in the pantheon of American pop culture is an undeniable truth. Men are elevated as icons, cities create undying feuds with one-another, and Sunday's are cleared free to make way for the sport. Such a powerful and important force deserves to be represented in our medium via a competitive market of titles that continually innovate and grow in order to keep up with their comrades. Competition brings out the best in people, and thus brings out the best in games. Likewise, a lack of competition begets stagnation. Sadly, Madden NFL 13 is a shining example of what happens when a series places first in a race due to the fact that it's the only one participating. I entered Madden 13 wanting to find a couple of different things, but first and foremost, I desired a football game that I could pop in and get a quick fix, either by myself or with a buddy. When I look back at my favorite 8 and 16-bit sports games like Tecmo Super Bowl and Ken Griffey Jr., I realize that one of things that keeps me coming back to them is the immediacy of play. Within seconds, you can be right in the thick of a game. Sadly, such is not the case in 2012, as it takes an shockingly long amount of time from inserting in Madden NFL 13 disc into your console of choice, to the actual moment kick off. You're forced to wade through countless menus, slog across loading screens, listen to banal banter before you can actually engage in the act of playing. Aside from an experience that allowed me to engage in immediate play, the other element of fun that I was searching for in Madden was the means of creating a real community with my buddies back home. The online play works well enough, but after playing a few games with friends who live across the country, I realized that something was missing. As a lifelong Chicago Bears fan, I've become fully immersed in this football season. Because 1UP is located in San Francisco, I'm usually forced to go to a bar each week to watch the game (oh woe is me). It was in a situation like this just a few weeks back that it occurred to me just how much my enjoyment of football revolves around the communal aspect of watching, cheering, and participating with my fellow fans. From packed bars with endlessly flowing taps, to living rooms adorned with your teams' colors, the sport is meant to be experienced in the company of others. As such, the convenience of wireless internet and a headset can only do so much in replicating the communal joy of a sport. I know that this is more a levy against game design as a whole, but until someone comes up with a way to harness the societal aspects of sports, the real thing will always trump its digital counterpart.

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