A decade ago, cheat devices were a veritable phenomenon. These peripherals let players use cheats that game developers hadn’t programmed in, bestowing players with anything from limitless health to the ability to walk through walls or jump from level to level. Despite an increasing fear of hacking and many attempts from console manufacturers to thwart these devices, they were legal and sat on the shelves of major electronics stores. What’s more, they often outsold the games next to them.
Who doesn’t like a good videogame Easter egg? There’s nothing like playing a game and discovering some incredible secret you had no idea about, like the sinister messages scrawled on the walls ofPortal’s Aperture Laboratories, or John Romero’s bloodied head on a stick in good old Doom II.
Then there are the secrets that most of us don’t discover, the ones so insanely tricky to find that only a handful of people ever find them on their own. Some secrets were buried so deep into their games they became the stuff of legend, the magical old wives’ tales of gaming – before the Internet came along and made nothing a secret, right? Which I guess makes this article detailing the labors behind seven particularly insane videogame secrets no more than a big fat part of the problem.
Microsoft is ramping up available GamerScore points for Xbox Live Arcade titles from 200 to 400, and to celebrate its launch of the Arcade NEXT promotional jamboree. Starting today, four special titles will be released each week to commemorate a change that will have Achievement hunters cracking their knuckles in glee.
But they shouldn’t be the only ones excited. For a few years now we’ve been kicking up a fuss about the Summer of Arcade, the time of year Microsoft seems to choose to spotlight the very best XBLA games – but this time it looks like it’s coming early. The four games in the Arcade NEXT promotion are all looking full of potential, with one or two of them arguably likely contenders for end-of-year accolades. We preview the four games that Microsoft are collectively calling Arcade NEXT, but maybe it’s best to think of them as 2012’s Spring of Arcade.
Gaming is struggling to find new mascots in the modern age. Seemingly sure-fire winners like Sackboy, the Miis, and Master Chief aren’t capturing people’s imagination (and more importantly their wallets) like Pac-Man, Mario, and Sonic used to. It’s good that games need to do more these days than have a marketable face on their covers, but gaming without mascots is like Uncharted without frail floorboards; it just isn’t right. In an age of reboots, remakes and reimaginations, why try to come up with something new when gaming can offer a litany of old-school heroes who deserve another day in the spotlight?
Here are five of gaming’s most notably forgotten mascots along with suggestions for how they should make their glorious returns to the fore.
Let’s be frank: a lot if not most of the so-called social games that you find on Facebook aren’t very good. They tend to be horribly shallow or too geared towards getting you to cough up some dough. And some of them are just plain embarrassing, excessively cutesy or childish affairs that make you wonder why you signed up for social networking in the first place.
But not every social game is to be sniffed at. There are some social games you shouldn’t be at all self-conscious about playing – nay – games that maybe you should be playing. Here are four examples of great social games you needn’t be embarrassed about playing – and, before you ask, each one is free-to-play and doesn’t keep trying to make a cheeky grab for your wallet.
Syndicate, SSX, and Twisted Metal… and those are just the reboots you can look forward to in February, or be soul-crushingly anxious of. Since time immemorial, we’ve seen those who write the cheques respond to the flashing red lights of falling sales and dwindling interest by drawing deep on their knowledge of the dark arts to cast the blackest of magic: the reboot. Sometimes this is a resurrection of a franchise so old you also have to reboot its pills, while other times it’s the most exhaustive of makeovers: painful face lifts, gruesome surgery, and endless hours of liposuction to suck out all those nasty preconceptions.
Is the strategy genre dead? Is it just too inaccessible alongside clean-cut modern games? I don’t know about you, but when there’s just been a convention holding a tournament with a $1.6m prize fund for an upcoming strategy game that probably won’t even see light of day until 2013, something tells me that the strategy genre ain’t dead, no way sir and madam.
What’s coming in the future of MMOs? Ding. Grind. Ding. Grind. Every MMO is the same old repetitive time drain. Except they’re not, not even close, and it only takes a look to the future big names of the online scene to see how MMOs are changing. From shooters pitting thousands of players against each other in what can only be described as a territorial war to players working together to unpiece the mystery of the lost city of Atlantis, not one of the MMOs on this list fits neatly into the mould. Developers now have the hardware and bandwith power to set their ambitions sky-high and attempt incredible things, and that’s exactly what they’re doing in the name of bringing people all over the world together to play and have fun.
At this year’s E3, we got our first hands-on with End of Nations, a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game being published by Rift creators Trion Worlds and developed by the team behind the 2006 RTS game Star Wars: Empire at War, Petroglyph Games. We came away from that hands-on a bit worried that the game’s high level of ambition was making it pull in too many directions.
Rift has been one of the recent success stories for MMORPGs. By spicing its game with basic dynamic content on top of an amalgamation of the best things from other headliners like World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Lord of the Rings Online, Trion Worlds has reaped the rewards of an enthusiastic community and growing interest in the world of Telara. One only has to look to see how that Trion-engineered buzzword of dynamic content has translated into a new crop of MMOs with worlds that look to change and bend to the swell of player’s actions. It’s an exciting time for the genre.