Say goodbye to your social life
Yesterday saw the release (and the subsequent launch problems) of Diablo III. Now that your body has forced you to surface for bathroom, food, and sleep, we’d like to entertain you with an oral history of how the Diablo franchise turned role-playing into a respectable activity–or a remorseless addiction. It’s a matter of perspective, really. more
See? There's SWEET REVENGE right there in the tagline.
Seriously, how did that mess get made before the increasingly relevant Monopoly? And why did space aliens let themselves get dragged into a naval battle? And why is Peter Berg wasting his time with this crap after the awesome Friday Night Lights? And–and–ugh. At least have the honesty to admit there’s no story here, just splodey, and commit to a Rihanna/Brooklyn Decker pillow fight scene.
Just click on and see what other games we’d rather see than Battleship.
By our criteria, this is The Perfect Game
Last year US videogame revenues could have bought thirty B-52 stealth bombers, and they’re not ruling that out in the battle against piracy. (It matches current bombing/anti-piracy strategies of being incredibly expensive, not working very well, and hitting a few thousand innocents for every one intended target.) Publishers make better games for the same reason farmers let their chickens run free-range: because they make more money that way. Not because they give a flying cluck about how much we like it.
They might show off incredible new game engines and massively virtual words, but there are seven simple fixes any company could make right now–changes so important that even if the first game to use them is Bratz: Escort Mission: Party Games: Wii Edition, I’d buy it to show support.more
Kairosoft
Creativity and nostalgia have a difficult relationship. There’s nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants, and the best games borrow a little bit from the past before reinventing the future. Then again, sometimes people are just stealing like wow. There’s plenty of space in between – creative remakes of a game, subtle homages to predecessors, and the occasional easter egg to make a veteran gamer smile at the joke. The following games take a little of all of these categories, consume horse steroids, and make us think Deep Thoughts about video games. Sure it’s all pretty nerdy, but think of it this way: If you get all of these jokes and references and can still go get laid, you’re retroactively giving a wedgie to every jock who picked on you in childhood. Nerd love, bros.
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Skullomania should be in ALL the video games.
Re-releasing old successes for new money is Capcom’s favorite thing, so we suggest six characters we’d gladly pay for.
Capcom have outraged gamers by selling Street Fighter X Tekken for eighty dollars: sixty for the disc, and twenty more for another twelve characters on the same disc. We shouldn’t be suprised: Capcom invented cash-grabbing downloadable content (DLC) decades before it even existed. When Street Fighter II became the best-selling fighting game in the world, they spent the next few years selling minor options settings as entire games. “Super Hyper Turbo Champion” editions cost just as much as the original despite featuring smaller adjustments than the average patch. They’ve taken more money with slight variations on the exact same thing than Ocean’s Eleven.
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