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Most Recent: Top Story
PAX West 2017 Notebook: Nintendo’s Nindies Summer Showcase
Nintendo brought a fresh batch of Nindies games into the spotlight today during their Nindies Summer Showcase. Over the span of 22 minutes, a ton of new indie games were announced for the Switch during a rapid-fire, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stream. Luckily, I had my handy notebook ready, so here’s a complete breakdown of the games that were shown. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, Features, Previews, Switch, Top Story
Tagged No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Again, PAX West 2017, Shovel Knight: King of Cards, SteamWorld Dig 2
Kickstart This! Lona: Realm of Colors
I like to think I put my money where my mouth is, and this is very true of my relationship with Kickstarter. You could say I have something of a small obsession with helping other creatives get their projects off the ground. I jumped on the Yooka-Laylee bandwagon, funded inverted-planet flyer InnerSpace (which is now getting a console release), and still hold out hope that Knite & The Ghost Lights will see the light of day.
My most recent campaign contribution was to the shiny PELDA Pro battery case for the Nintendo Switch, because, like Gollum, I wants it! That means I cannot really afford to fund any more games. Which is a shame, because if I could, I would be funding Lona: Realm of Colors (even if they do spell “colour” wrong).
Paint brushes at the ready… (more…)
Content Crash #11: Gamescom 2017 In Review
Welcome to the Content Crash podcast, I’m your host, Dan Hartnack. With me, as always, is Keno Eastmond.
It’s kind of a crazy week because it’s Gamescom week… the European E3, as I’ve said before. We got to see a couple of new things announced, as well as a couple of feature announcements for certain games. It’s been a fairly quiet affair, but there’s plenty of cool stuff out there.
So let’s talk about it!
You can subscribe to the Content Crash podcast on YouTube or SoundCloud.
The Video Game Canon: Pong
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at the birth of Pong and asks why early game developers were so obsessed with recreating table tennis on our TVs. Here’s a teaser…
Why were early game developers so fixated on bouncing a ball back and forth?
It’s hard to pinpoint the very first video game, but it most likely belongs to A.S. Douglas and OXO. This electronic version of Tic-Tac-Toe was created by Douglas in 1952 to support his doctoral thesis, Interactions Between Human and Computer. But after that, the only question early gamemakers wanted to ask was, “Tennis, anyone?”
William Higinbotham was probably unfamiliar with OXO when he unleashed Tennis For Two on the world on October 18, 1958. Presented to the public during an open house at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the game harnessed the pulses of an oscilloscope to give players the illusion of a playing field with a net in the center and a ball bouncing back and forth. Unlike Douglas, Higinbotham was trying to wow a crowd with the possibilities of science and add a little pizazz to the BNL’s normally staid event:
“The instruction book that came with the computer described how to plot trajectories and bouncing shapes, for research. I thought, ‘Hell, this would make a good game.’ It took me four hours to design one and a technician a couple of weeks to put it together. Everybody stood in line to play. The other exhibits were pretty static, obviously. The game seemed to me sort of an obvious thing.”
After the open house, Higinbotham’s invention was dismantled, and his status as a game development pioneer was forgotten… until the early 70s when he was dragged into the legal battle between Table Tennis and Pong.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in Features, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon
Tagged Pong
Content Crash #10: Gamescom 2017 Preview
What’s going on everyone? Welcome to the Content Crash podcast, I am your host, Dan Hartnack. With me this time is my co-host, Keno Eastmond.
This week we’re going to give you a preview of Gamescom 2017. If you’re familiar, Gamescom is the European version of E3. It’s held annually in Cologne, Germany, and it’s been around since 2009. A lot of the European developers use Gamescom to show off their stuff and it’s held in mid-August as something of a followup to E3.
The show’s going to kick off on August 22, so let’s get to it.
You can subscribe to the Content Crash podcast on YouTube or SoundCloud.
Content Crash #9: Kickstarter Successes and Failures
Welcome everyone to the Content Crash podcast. I’m your host, Dan Hartnack. With me, as always, is Keno Eastmond.
For today’s topic, we’re going to talk about Kickstarter and all the successes and failures of games that have passed through there.
This was kind of inspired by Unsung Story, a game that was Kickstarted back in 2014. It’s been a big slog since then, and the developer recently made a big announcement that has seemingly turned it into one of the biggest failures I’ve ever seen in the Kickstarter world.
So we’ll talk about Unsung Story and a few other Kickstarter veterans in this week’s episode of Content Crash.
You can subscribe to the Content Crash podcast on YouTube or SoundCloud.
The Video Game Canon: Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at how the real person at the center of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! changed sports games and how Little Mac’s cartoonish opponents did as well. Here’s a teaser…
“They say I can’t lose. I say you can’t win!”
– Mike Tyson, to Little Mac, in 1987’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
“There’s no one that can match me. My style is impetuous, my defense is impregnable, and I’m just ferocious. I want your heart! I want to eat his children!”
– Mike Tyson, about Lennox Lewis, in 2000
In the 13 years between those two quotes, Mike Tyson went from being the face of boxing (and Nintendo’s best-selling Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!) to becoming a punchline for late night comedians. In between, he was convicted of sexual assault in 1992 and bit off a part of Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997.
From that moment on, Tyson would fit right in with the cartoon characters that made up the undercard to his eponymous game. After his retirement from the ring, Tyson would remake himself as something of a gentle giant, constantly tending to the pigeons he kept on the roof of his apartment building. His later decision to act in absurdist comedies like The Hangover and Mike Tyson Mysteries (an animated Scooby-Doo parody where Tyson is assisted by the ghost of the Marquess of Queensberry) just cemented it.
But the Mike Tyson of 1987 was cartoonish in a different way. The boxing prodigy known to the world as “Iron Mike” and “Kid Dynamite” demolished his opponents in ways that the sport hasn’t seen since. His first professional fight was over in less than two minutes. His next fight lasted a mere 52 seconds, while his fourth required only 39. And in 1986, Tyson knocked out Marvis Frazier in a little over 20 seconds, though an appeal changed the official time of the bout to 30 seconds.
“The Dream Fight” in Punch-Out!! was just as brutal. Tyson deals instant-knockdown uppercuts towards the game’s diminutive hero, Little Mac, for the first minute and a half of this epic boss battle. “Iron Mike” follows that up with a series of hooks that are so fast, it’s hard to keep up. In the second round, a series of ferocious jabs eventually give way to a wild combination of punches that are telegraphed by rapid-fire blinking. With bleary eyes and weary thumbs, hopefully you’ve figured out that the best strategy for fighting the champ is to just survive to the end of the third round and hope for a favorable decision.
Visit VideoGameCanon.com to continue reading this article and to explore the complete Top 1000.
Posted in 3DS, Features, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Wii, Wii U
Tagged Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
The Games of August 2017
We’re into the dog days of Summer now, but the video game industry is planning a rather robust round of new releases for the next four weeks. Sure, Madden NFL 18 will officially kick off the end of the Summer as it does every year, but we’re also getting wild new games from Telltale, Sega, Ubisoft, Naughty Dog, and Ninja Theory.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a Sonic game made by fans, an Uncharted game without Nathan Drake, or a Mario game with a gun, then now’s your chance… (more…)