Warp Zoned Presents
Most Recent: Features
The Video Game Canon: Final Fantasy VII
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look back at Final Fantasy VII and Square’s desire to bring cinematic storytelling to the early days of Sony’s PlayStation. Here’s a teaser…
Since the beginning, every new console cycle has existed as its own separate era that video game players speak of with as much reverence as comic fans who use “Golden Age” and “Silver Age” as a shorthand to represent the different decades of comic production. Ralph Baer’s Odyssey (1st Generation) directly lead to Nolan Bushnell’s Atari 2600 (2nd Generation). Atari’s machine gave way to the rise of Nintendo’s NES (3rd Generation), which in turn lead to the “16-Bit Wars” of the Super NES and the Genesis (4th Generation).
Up to this point, Square had only released three Final Fantasy games in America: 1990’s Final Fantasy, 1991’s Final Fantasy II (released in Japan as Final Fantasy IV), and 1994’s Final Fantasy III (released in Japan as Final Fantasy VI). Even though the remaining three games had yet to make their way across the Pacific, the publisher was determined to unify the franchise’s numbering across all regions with the next sequel. But they still had to find the right home for their game.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, PC, PS4, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon
Tagged Final Fantasy VII
The Video Game Canon: The Sims
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon as we contemplate the futility of determining the best-selling video game of all time and The Sims. Here’s a teaser…
What is the best-selling video game of all time? It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer as game publishers, unlike Hollywood film studios, refuse to release sales figures for their games on a title-by-title basis. But for years now, the conventional narrative has been that The Sims became the best-selling PC game of all time in 2002 after dethroning Myst, the graphical adventure game that sold more CD-ROM drives than every other piece of “multimedia” software combined.
Developed by Maxis, The Sims delivered a smaller, more personal, simulation that differed greatly from the macro scale of designer Will Wright’s previous games, SimCity and SimCity 2000. Instead of pulling the camera back, giving the “mayor” control of an entire city, The Sims moved the camera in close, allowing the player to interact with the day-to-day minutiae of a single family. Part Real World, part Demon Seed, and part Barbie Dream House, this approach allowed players to bypass the mayoral office and step right into the shoes of a god. However, it was a literal “Act of God” that encouraged developer Will Wright to create The Sims in the first place.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Kickstart This! Cowgirls Vs Cthonimon
Nostalgia is brilliant for selling video games. It’s pretty much half of Nintendo’s marketing strategy. But before the age of consoles, early players were loading games via cassette on legendary machines like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. Dundee-based developers Darrell Flood and Jack Oatley are looking back on those early days of gamingwith their new Kickstarter project, Cowgirls Vs Cthonimon.
Handbags at dawn… (more…)
The Games of April 2017
Here at Warp Zoned, we’re all pretty excited for the April game calendar! There’s a little bit of excitement for Yooka-Laylee, a little for Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, and even a little for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Read on to see what we’re hype for and why this month! (more…)
Warpback: What We Played in March 2017
There’s no doubt that the most talked about game here at Warp Zoned was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild! Even our Switch-less writer got to try it out. But we played a lot more than that during March, so hit the jump to see it all! (more…)
The Video Game Canon: Pac-Man
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look back at the true stories behind some of gaming’s greatest urban legends, most of which seem to revolve around Pac-Man. Here’s a teaser…
With more than 40 years of history behind it, it’s not surprising the video game community has developed its own catalog of urban legends that have been passed from player to player over the years. Everyone who played it desperately tried to resurrect Aerith after her tragic demise in Final Fantasy VII, and we all heard stories about the “nude codes” that supposedly existed in games like Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat II, and The Sims.
Unfortunately, every one of those rumors has more in common with the hook man at lover’s lane than they do with the unvarnished truth. But some of the legends are true. And nearly all of them revolve around Pac-Man in some way.
Pac-Man is a simple creature. Just a yellow circle with a triangular wedge removed to represent his mouth. Some will say his design was simplistic because the designers at Namco were working within the hardware limitations of the day. Those people would be wrong. The inspiration for Pac-Man overcame Namco’s Toru Iwatani after he snatched the first slice at a company pizza party and noticed that it looked like a circle with a mouth.
But it gets weirder from there.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
The Video Game Canon: The Secret of Monkey Island
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at The Secret of Monkey Island and the many inspirations developers plundered from to make it. Here’s a teaser…
Game publishers have been concerned with digital pirates illegally copying their games since the very beginning of the medium. Some have even gone so far as to include booby traps in their code for these would-be thieves. But when it comes to depicting actual pirates, gamemakers (along with major Hollywood players and one of the most celebrated fantasy authors of the last few decades) are content to pillage, plunder, and steal all the best ideas from each other.
It all began in 1967 when Walt Disney himself oversaw the construction of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland. Over the years, the ride would go on to be recreated at Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Park in Paris. Borrowing a bit from Treasure Island, the ride’s exciting ship-to-ship battle, raid on a coastal outpost, group of prisoners trying to bribe a dog for a key, and the frothy ditty “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life For Me)” created the quintessential image of a pirate that was shared by kids the world over.
Tim Powers was not one of these kids. Already a teenager by the late 60s, Powers rose to prominence as one of the earliest authors of steampunk (and he, along with K.W. Jeter and James Blaylock, helped coin the phrase). In 1987, he published one of his most famous novels, On Stranger Tides. The novel tells the tale of John Chandagnac, an inexperienced youth who becomes the debonair pirate “Jack Shandy” and rescues the girl after he has a run-in with several undead buccaneers.
A few years later, Lucasfilms Games’s Ron Gilbert took his experiences with the ride and mixed them with the magical seascapes of On Stranger Tides to create The Secret of Monkey Island, a point-and-click adventure game first published in 1990. The Secret of Monkey Island starred Guybrush Threepwood, an inexperienced youth with floppy hair who battled his own pirate nemesis, the undead LeChuck, in an attempt to rescue the girl. Most people would chalk these coincidences up to happenstance or cliche, but not Ron Gilbert. He’s the first to tell to you that what he did was out-and-out piracy. Or, in his words, “We in the business call it ‘stealing’.”
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, PC, PS3, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Xbox 360
Tagged The Secret of Monkey Island
Kickstart This! Pine
Those of you who were hoping for a game based around the life of Star Trek captain and Wonder Woman love interest Chris Pine are going to be sorely disappointed, and then pleasantly surprised, with Pine. This Kickstarter campaign launched just as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizons: Zero Dawn landed on shelves, reinvigorating the open world adventure genre, and leaving gamers ready to embark on another big quest. Pine limits its open world by setting it on an island, a smart design choice for an indie open world game, but more intriguingly, it asks the question, “What if man never made it to the top of the food chain?”
Let’s find out! (more…)