There's one game that no console plays well, and that is catch-up. All systems eventually face a time when they're simply incapable of properly handling the newest and biggest games on the market. Sometimes publishers want to milk their hit title by porting it to every system imaginable, regardless of their individual capabilities; other times, they are forced to continue using an outdated system because its next generation sibling isn't ready yet. In any case, developer and consumer alike would have been better off with games designed to emphasize the strength of each system rather than shoehorning in whatever was popular at the time.

The following are just a few examples of high-end games ported to low-end systems. Feel free to add your own in the comments. Keep in mind that I'm deliberately ignoring certain games like the infamous 2600 version of Pac-Man, as its failings resulted as much from rushed production and managerial incompetence as it did technical limitations.

Double Dragon (Atari 2600)

Arcade

NES

Atari 2600

I was surprised this game existed at all; the 2600 is mostly known for simple, single-screen arcade titles, not fighters with multiple moves and characters. But by 1988 the system was eleven years old, and there was only so much they could do. With only one action button, different attacks are assigned to a button + joystick direction combination -- holding up and pressing fire does a flying kick, for instance. Since the joystick is also needed to, y'know, move around, you can often find yourself moving slightly away from your enemy and then attacking the air. The problem is exacerbated by stiff controls and enemies who suffer none of these hindrances, meaning they can bludgeon you to death while you're wiggling around trying to do a kick.

One must admire the effort, though: There are one and two player modes (though in the latter each player is restricted to either the top or bottom half of the screen), and even a two player versus mode. They've included weapons, even if that just means a brown rectangle (bat) and white rectangle (knife). Linda and Abobo are here too, albeit with Linda looking like a strip of cabbage dipped in mayonnaise.

Even some of the music made the transition, though after about 5 seconds you wish that it hadn't.

NES Stage 1 theme
Atari 2600 Stage 1 theme

And it just goes on like that.

Zaxxon (Atari 2600)

Arcade

Colecovision

Atari 2600

Okay, I admit, this whole article could just be about the 2600 and its many ill-advised arcade ports. But while many were simply clunky or ugly, a select few make you wonder why they ever thought it was a good idea to begin with.

Zaxxon and isometric perspective are inextricably linked. If a person can't remember anything else about the game, they at least remember that. For a while, if someone wasn't familiar with the term "isometric perspective", you could just follow it up with "Y'know, like Zaxxon." It's the element that really made the game stand out in arcades, next to the comparatively flat and simple likes of Burgertime and Dig Dug. Thus it was only natural for the developers to completely remove the single defining aspect of the game for a port to a system that shouldn't be attempting this kind of game anyway.

Though, like Double Dragon, you do have to give them points for trying. They replaced the 3/4 view with an equally unusual heads-on perspective, with barriers and enemy sprites moving directly towards the screen. It's not exactly Space Harrier, but it at least allows for a vague approximation of the original's gameplay. Unfortunately, the missiles are gone (aside from the one on the robot's shoulder) and while the altimeter is still present, it's pretty much impossible to tell the height of anything on the field anyway. For reasons unknown, the altimeter is removed for the space sections and you fight on a single axis.

While the Zaxxon name should never have graced the 2600, I can't help but think something could have been made of this game with more tweaking and without the standard of the arcade title to live up to. Maybe drop the space bit and turn it into River Raid 3D.

Rise of the Robots (Game Gear)

DOS

SNES

Game Gear

(The Game Gear shot is tiny to maintain native resolution, but you can click to enlarge.)

It can be hard to tell when a port is bad when the original game was terrible anyway, but the Game Gear edition of Rise of the Robots does what it can to let you know. The one selling point Robots had (and it wasn't much of one) was its rendered characters and fluid animation, and while they did manage to keep some of the FMV for the Game Gear port, the rest of the game is a mess. Sprites are small and ugly, the animation is choppy, and the blue blob and yellow chunk are fighting in front of what I can only assume is a giant Twizzler. But hey, maybe it will get better with the next fight.

nope

I also want to point out that in the process of taking these screenshots I killed the yellow metal thing by continually kicking it in the toes until it fell down, but the timer keeps going during the death animation. So after it hit the ground the timer ran out and the game declared the round a draw. Rise of the Robots sucks.

Virtua Fighter 2 (Genesis)

Arcade

Saturn

Genesis

{arcade shot borrowed from KLOV)

One way to get around the fact that your system couldn't possibly handle the game in question is to turn it into a completely different game. Wanting to combine the popularity of the Virtua Fighter series with the popularity of a Sega system more than five people owned, Sega decided to squeeze their next generation, made-for-the-Saturn arcade fighter onto the last generation, totally-not-a-Saturn Genesis. The change is so drastic that one could argue it doesn't even count as a port, but what else can you call it? It has the same name, look, characters, and moves, the only thing that's missing is everything that drew people to VF in the first place.

What's odd about the port is that even after taking the 3D out, they still couldn't seem to make the game work on the Genesis. They also had to remove Shun and Lion from the character roster (the very two characters introduced for VF2 to begin with), cut several backgrounds and moves, and take out every game mode that wasn't arcade or versus. It makes one wonder why they bothered at all, or at the very least didn't just call it a port of the first Virtua Fighter. Yes, the obvious answer is "money," but surely they had other franchises they could more easily exploit. There's a Sonic golf game out there just waiting to be made.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (SNES)

Arcade

PSX

SNES

It should go without saying that an arcade game made in 1996 ported to the SNES is going to lose some things in the translation. The sprites are smaller, the animation has fewer frames, the color palette is limited, the secret characters are gone, and the music is more MIDI-ish. But what's actually more notable is how much remained intact. Thanks to a special data compression chip, all the characters, stages and endings have been retained. Hell, even the intro is still in.

Arcade

SNES

While it would never be chosen over the PSX or Saturn versions, this was still a decent port if you really wanted to play Alpha 2 and all you had was a Super NES. The major issue against it is not the drop in resolution but in speed. Even at the highest speed setting, the game feels muddy and clunky. Not enough to completely ruin the game, but enough to remind you you should really be playing this on a more well-equipped system.

Trivia to pull out at your next cocktail party: Due to the aforementioned data compression, Street Fighter Alpha 2 is on the shortlist of SNES games that have noticeable load times. It's not on the level of a CD game, but it is a few seconds worth, and not at the greatest of times either. The game pauses for a few seconds after "Fight!" has appeared on the screen, meaning you've got to start moving as soon as the pause is over, without knowing precisely when that will be.

SimCity 2000 (SNES)

DOS

Super NES

The original SimCity was a welcome surprise early in the life of the SNES; it was the kind of game rarely seen outside the realm of PCs. When SimCity 2000 hit DOS a couple years later, people naturally wanted to bring the sequel over too. Whether this was a good idea remains a matter for debate.

This is indeed SimCity 2000, with all the same gameplay and features, including the ability to query individual buildings and read the local newspapers. They even added a couple little touches, like seeing rain and snow, and the shadows of clouds passing by on overcast days. It's certainly an accomplishment, but the trade-off is that the game chugs. Loading a map takes 15 to 20 seconds, and from there pretty much anything that involves redrawing the map requires a two-second pause. Re-center the screen, wait two seconds. Go to the map screen, wait two seconds. Leave, wait two seconds. It may not sound like much, but given that the game has only two zoom levels -- the third, farthest out zoom is gone -- you have to move around a lot, and the game's sputtering engine could irritate you after too many hours of play.

That said, the original DOS version was never exactly a hot rod to begin with, especially on lower-end systems. So maybe you can come to terms with the speed. Then all you're left with is the fact that the game is kinda ugly, with pixelated buildings blending into one another and making it harder to pick out individual locations. Like SFA2, it's certainly nothing you would have chosen over the original, but if a Super Nintendo was all you had, you may have been able to bear with its faults (and its occasionally questionable text) and just be happy you were getting a chance to play SimCity 2000 at all.

The one unforgivable sin: No mouse support. Ick.

Posted by Bill at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Part 1
Part 2

With the major news out of the way, all that's left is to pick up on little side stories and commentary on smaller sites. You're not going to be getting any earth-shattering news out of these sites (even they had any, you would probably have seen it other places first), but they each provide something unique in their own way.

I can't use the Horror Vision™ icon here, because none of these sites are ugly and they're generally too small to have gaudy Flash ad campaigns on them. None of them, with one possible exception, are even bad, so I'm mostly just going to run through and give quick descriptions and you can take them from there. I know, I'm disappointed too.

Game Politics

The name pretty much says it all -- GP reports all the political news of the gaming world, including the progress of violent game bills and government hearings (like the one currently underway concerning the VA Tech shootings), whatever Jack Thompson decides to crap out this week, mainstream media reports on games, and basically anything else related to the public perception of gaming.

Politics have never really interested me in video games or in general, but if you consider yourself any kind of gamer, you should really keep tabs on these things.

Lost Levels

I keep checking this site to see if it has updated again, but I guess Frank Cifaldi has gotten busy with having an actual job now. Anyway, this is a site dedicated to games that, for whatever reason, never saw the light of day, with information about the games pieced together from interviews, old magazine previews, and beta ROMs. Even though it doesn't look like there's anything new coming down the pipe, you should still check it out if you haven't before and read about things like the sordid history of Sonic X-Treme or the Final Fantasy SGI demo for the N64.

In lieu of new site content, you can check in with the Lost Treasures forum to find out about new discoveries in the realm of unreleased and beta games. The ASSEMblerGames forums are also useful for this. And by "this" I mean getting distracted from your work by early footage of Chrono Trigger and the NiGHTS engine Sonic X-Treme tech demo.

PC Games You Can't Find At Wal-Mart: GameTunnel and Fun-Motion

I must admit I never got around to using GameTunnel. Not because they're bad, but because I never had time to really look into independent games. But it's a handy resource if you're interested in finding some indie games to play, with reviews and yearly awards to the best titles to sort out the good from the bad. Some of the most interesting game concepts come from the indie scene, because the developers can afford to experiment.

Fun Motion covers the growing field of physics-based games, usually in the form of small indie productions like Armadillo Run and Line Rider. Physics games are almost always fun to goof around with, so it's worth checking in every once in a while to see what new titles have come up. Some are free, some aren't, but they always have a demo of some sort. The site also includes a video of each game they review, so you don't actually have to download each demo just to find out whether or not some game that sounds interesting actually is.

Video Game Media Watch

This site keeps petering out for a couple months and then coming back, but their most recent post assures readers that they will "return to form shortly" thanks to recent staff expansions. I seem to recall them saying this once already, but whatever.

VGMW is unique among game sites as it is purely about the video game media itself. They follow trends in game journalism as well as call out cases of sloppy reporting, such as IGN announcing a game based on a fake press release on the NeoGAF forums. Not terribly necessary to the average gamer, but worth keeping an eye on out of curiosity.

Insert Credit

You can't get much more niche than this (well, you can, but you have to try really hard, like having a site dedicated solely to Windjammers fanart or something). Insert Credit manages to always talk about things nobody else does, usually by focusing on obscure Japanese games and news. You should be able to find something that interests you here, even if you don't care about dating sims and Cave shmups. If you can't, maybe you're not nerdy enough.

Retro Gaming with Racketboy

It's a guy named Racketboy and he discusses retro gaming. Boy, these are a lot easier when people don't choose nonsensical names like "Error Macro." Old games are covered, of course, like the guides to undiscovered gems on various consoles, but there's also stuff more related to the hobby itself, like guides to the cheapest good games to build up your collection. And sometimes he just posts naked ladies for no reason.

That last part might not actually be true, I don't know.

GameSetWatch

I'm not quite sure how to encapsulate what GSW is. Their own description simply says "an alt.video game weblog from the people who run Game Developer and Gamasutra," which isn't very helpful, but at least gives you a clue that these are not the sorts to post "top 10 racks in gaming" articles.

Like Insert Credit, it's a lot of off-the-beaten-path type content, with a focus on the industry and game design instead of weird Japanese crap. If you like Gamasutra, you'll probably like this. That's the best summary I can come up with.

The Escapist

If you were wondering which one was going to be the "one possible exception", here you are. On one hand, I can appreciate what the Escapist tries to do. It tries to be thoughtful, in-depth and analytical, to be an intelligent examination of games and gaming. They want you to think about why we are what we are and play what we play; why games "work" and what they say about us. This is all fine and I think it's worth investigating.

On the other hand, The Escapist is ten pounds of bullshit in a five pound sack. The danger in analysis of this sort is taking it too far; not realizing that Mario punches blocks not because he is an avatar of the proletariat representing their unending struggle to achieve a greater goal that is ultimately illusory (and replaced with a midget), but because that is how you make the mushroom come out. These are the people who write seriously and at great length about things like ludology. I'm not saying there aren't concepts here worth being explored, but it should be done with one eye always watching the ground to see how detached from reality you're getting.

The magazine format, which can thankfully be skipped in favor of a simple article layout, only adds to the ridiculous pomposity of the articles. It came close to making me drag out the Horror Vision™ icon, but it's not ugly or obtrusive so much as damned silly. Each feature is designed with your average 15 year-old DeviantArtist's sense of drama and proportion. Quotes are taken out of the article and then BOLDED and CAPITALIZED RANDOMLY to give them more punch, accompanied by images meant to emphasize the tone and subject of the article. Got an article about Pirates of the Burning Sea? Throw in a picture of a pirate ship on the ocean with fire laid over it. Perfect! One of my favorite examples is an article on the Out of Hell mod for UT2K4; the visual theme is dark and firey and industrial, as you would expect, up to the last page which includes the phrase "time to kick the baby out of the nest." Naturally, then, this page had to be illustrated with what can only be described as the hell chicken. Never has a baby bird looked so sinister.

A Penny Saved is a Penny Spent on Another Game: Cheap Ass Gamer, Amazon's Game Outlet, Movers and Shakers and Deal of the Day

Cheap Ass Gamer is a source of deals, sales, and coupons on video games. The site layout is kind of messy and most of the deals are in the forums (which require a free registration), but such are the sacrifices of being a cheapskate.

Amazon's outlet is simply a list of games that have been marked down, which you can glance over to see if there's some old game you skipped over at release that you might want to give a shot at its new price. Movers and Shakers is a list of games that have hit sales spikes recently, either due to recent release, hype or (the reason for its inclusion here) a sale. Finally, the Deal of the Day is one game each day that gets put on sale for 24 hours. I can't link directly to it since it changes every day, of course, so the link above leads to Amazon's video game category page. The Deal of the Day link is in the upper right.

This is all terribly self-explanatory, but I'm sure there would be someone who couldn't figure it out if I didn't explain. The only other thing to note is that sometimes the Deal of the Day seems to fluctuate; it'll be $14.99 at first and then $9.99 a few hours later. I don't know why.

That's it. You now know everything I know. Pick out a handful and skim over them every day, or wallow in ignorance. Me, I'm finally going to get back to writing my own stuff instead of linking to other people.

Posted by Bill at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Read part 1 here.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, link. The second tier includes lesser known and slightly more specialized sites, as well as the guys who do nothing but point to everybody else. For some reason, even when a site is dedicated to only linking other sites' stuff, no one seems to catch it all, so once again you have to pick and choose the right combination. Or find a sap to dig through all of it five hours a day. I should reiterate that I'm just naming off what I personally used in creating newsposts every day. I realize there are dozens of well-known websites that I'm skipping over, but apparently I got along without them.

"Second tier" doesn't necessarily refer to quality, of course. Some of these sites are much worse than that.

The Flesh of Fallen Angels! Continue to look out for the patented Horror Vision™ icon, letting you know that at least one element of a site's design is an infernal engine of the Netherworld powered by your tears!

For We Are Many: Digg

Remember the part in the old Carmen Sandiego game show when the host would stick his head out the door and ask Rockapella what the word on the street was? Replace the host with you, and replace the charming a cappella quintet in primary color '30s throwbacks with the writhing mass of psychotic red ants from SimAnt's lose screen, and you understand how Digg works.

Commander Keen confirmed as secret character in Final Fantasy XIII! Yes! Digg! DIGG!!

I guess most items show up there eventually, meaning you could theoretically use it for your news needs. But it's not actually much of a time saver because you have to read each article to know whether the headline is accurate or if Bobby No Thumbs just wanted to direct some traffic to his Geocities page. On the plus side, the teeming masses are sometimes good for catching obscure things, often a thread on some forum or an article on a small-time website, that would've escaped the attention of other sites.

Just don't read the comments. For God's sake, don't read the comments. These are the kinds of people who read my World of Nintendo catalog and responded with gems like

I find it very hard to believe that Nintendo, the company that removed blood from Mortal Kombat, would produce a catalog that talks about your girlfriend "leaving a wet spot" on the couch.

Fake - No Digg

JUMPING JESUS INSPECTOR YOU CRACKED THE CASE

All Purpose Nerd News: Blue's News and Slashdot

Blue's News and Slashdot have both been around since the Internet was made of twigs and mud, so they must be doing something right. Blue's News is more PC focused, with a small sub-section on console news, but they are a good source of new previews and interviews about PC games if you're really into that sort of thing. The one thing to note about them is that they just copy the headline of the story they're linking to without any editing, and sometimes said headlines are sensationalized, exagerated or just plain wrong.

Slashdot only has a new item or two per day on average, but they occassionally had something I missed elsewhere. To be honest, that's the problem I have in recommending any particular site on the secondary tier -- almost all of them had something "occassionally," but none of them are necessary or even good well-rounded sources of news on their own. The only way to really get any use out of these sites is to put them all in a big folder and read them all together, but that's going far beyond what most people are willing to do. I don't know anything about del.icio.us or any of these other bookmarking and tagging websites, maybe there's something out there they can combine all their feeds into something useful.

Otherwise, just assume a "sometimes interesting but in no way vital" comment on pretty much every site on this list.

Where the History Comes From: Eurogamer, British Gaming Blog and Computer and Video Games

After extensive tests, I have come to the conclusion that I am not European, so these sites weren't of terribly great use to me. But Eurogamer is one of the biggest video game sites in the UK, so this is probably a place you want to keep tabs on if you happen to be from that place over there. With the tea.

British Gaming Blog unfortunately doesn't update very much, but it's a clean design filled with big screenshots and their own hosted versions of various gameplay videos and trailers.

LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS THAT ARE MOVING PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THEM Computer and Video Games wasn't even on my list of sites, but I'd get linked to it regularly enough. I put it here solely so I can complain about this Godforsaken design. It recently took the title of worst "multimedia experience" you'll see in the gaming news circuit, ever since MTV's all-Flash site experiment came to a blessedly quick end.

The title banner cycles through images of several stories, a news ticker scrolls above it, there's a Flash ad above that, there's another block Flash ad in the middle of each category page, and every single page of the site has a video player to the left side running some useless thumbnail clip. Right now it keeps looping the camera pull out of the bus from the Fallout 3 teaser trailer, which would be completely meaningless to me if I didn't already know it was from Fallout 3, in which case I have no need to see it. Adblock to the rescue again.

The Nintendo Fun Club: Infendo, 4 color rebellion and Go Nintendo

Infendo is the Fox News of Nintendo reporting. They've even got the same sort of slogan intended to make them sound even-handed in the face of their rampant bias: "Intelligent passion for all things Nintendo." That bizarre compulsion some people have to ally themselves with a corporate entity is in full effect here, with "I told you so" smirks behind every new report of the Wii's success or the PS3's troubles. When the real world isn't providing the juice they need, they'll skew some statistics or evangelize Nintendo Christ's healing of the crippled game industry, possibly while masturbating, to provide that all important jolt of self-righteousness. And then, sometimes, they just make a post with a picture of poop on it.

4 color rebellion has a more light-hearted approach, going less for the "I MUST CARRY REGGIE FILS-AIME'S MANSEED" tact and more the "gee Nintendo games sure are swell aren't they?" path. Still fanboyism, but less aggressive and aggrandized (and, as such, less aggravating). If you still play your NES more than a 360, 4cr is probably your site. If you own a "Know Your Roots" t-shirt with an NES controller on it, you're probably a Hot Topic poseur and need to drop out of a window.

Go Nintendo avoids both options by being not much more than a Nintendo infodump with little to no commentary either way. In fact, if you only came here for Nintendo news, this might be your best surrogate, with tons of screenshots and links to IGN, Gamespot, Game Videos and Game Trailers. In fact, the one downside may be there's a little too much updating.. I'm writing this right now in the afternoon of June 5, and posts dated for the 5th go back four pages already. But using the RSS feed would clear up that issue.

I should mention I also had N-Sider and The Wiire on my list, but I don't think I ever actually used them.

Forum Quorum: Evil Avatar and Something Awful

Something Awful's Games forum might be seen as a more intelligent Digg, with users submitting information but also being punished (through mockery or actual probation/banning) for stupidity and blatant misuse. I know there are people who have problems with Lowtax and/or the SA community as a whole -- hell, so do I and I've been there six years -- but thankfully little of that applies to subforums like Games. (Most of the idiots who define their lives by a message board stick to the general fourms.) While news can sometimes get lost in the shuffle, a forum is still generally the best place to follow events as they happen, find mirrors for recently released trailers and feeds for live conferences, and listen to 20,000 people analyze an issue and likely find something you missed.

The NeoGAF forums might also work for this too, but I've never used them so procede at your own risk.

Evil Avatar is really more of a half-way point between news sites and forums, with users submitting items that are then reviewed by an editor and posted. It's actually not a bad solution to the problem I had of having to find all the news myself. They do a fairly good job, with the one issue being that coverage is somewhat uneven. Someone might not work up a post on something until several days after other sites, and sometimes you get stuff posted as news that was talked about elsewhere six months ago.

Simple and Clean: Opposable Thumbs

I don't have a snazzy category to fit it in, just a poor Utada Hikaru reference, but I should mention Opposable Thumbs. While it doesn't update enough to be a "real" newsblog (and I don't think that's the intention), each post is intelligent and actually sounds like it was written by an adult. If there's commentary, it's almost always interesting and insightful. OT is an extension of Ars Technica, a long standing PC and general tech news site that I've always appreciated for being mature and in-depth.

I feel like I should counter this love-in with a negative to remain even-handed, but nothing's coming to mind.

Sites I Rarely Used... But Will You?

Text ads fit anywhere! Gamers Reports - An ugly website with too much text and those awful paid content links that pop up ads for crap with no relation to what you're reading when you dare to accidentally mouse over them. If you're looking for a website that does nothing but copy and paste press releases and link to articles you've seen elsewhere already, you can probably still find a better site for it than this.

Games Are Fun - A clean layout with a basic news column, and hey, games are fun, aren't they? Too bad they post an average of two news items a day, and both are usually several days old.

FiringSquad - A PC gamer site with all the hardware reviews and performance tests that go along with it. I must admit, my interaction with this site was limited mostly to occassional features and marvelling at how Goddamned big graphics cards are getting.

GameDaily Biz - The industry news section of Game Daily, and GameIndustry.biz's American doppelganger. As such, many things get repeated from GI, and since I always checked GI first, GameDaily didn't usually have much to tell me. But obviously I can't hold that against them, so if you like GD's design better or you prefer an American focus, by all means, consider them and GI.biz interchangable.

That's it for today. Next time is the final installment, with all the little niche sites that fill gaps only nerds can appreciate.

Posted by Bill at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Since January of 2006, I've been sifting through a selection of about 40 game news websites each day, five days a week, sorting the crap from the only-kind-of-crap and posting the results in what I hoped was some kind of helpful, condensed form. It's not something I recommend doing (though if you must, Firefox's "open in tabs" option for bookmark folders is a godsend), but it does ensure that you catch most everything worth catching.

In the next few articles I'll lay out all the sites I've used for Error Macro, and hopefully you'll find some combination that works for you without having to check 15 different places every day. Today, I cover most of the majors.

Fun 'n' Games! Be sure to look out for the patented Horror Vision™ icon, letting you know that at least one element of a site's design was implemented by a mentally challenged six year old who was just struck by a bus!

Mommy and Daddy: Gamespot and IGN

The two primary news sources in our little world. They have access that many other sites don't, but they also have journalistic integrity (or at least aspirations thereto) that other sites don't, so one shouldn't turn to them for the latest breaking gossip and rumor. While this leaves them a little slow to respond to certain news events, it also awards them a stronger level of certainty -- If it shows up on Gamespot, you can assume that someone with half a brain actually looked into the issue and found it worthy.

Of the two, I prefer Gamespot. They've got more of an enthusiast bent, whereas IGN feels very corporate. If Gamespot is your local game shop, IGN is a Sam Goody's, trying to cover games and movies and music and women and anything else males age 16 to 34 might be interested in.

Tastes like money! Individual news items at IGN usually have one big Flash block planted in the article, some of which can get pretty heavily animated. Despite this, they're generally not too bad, unless left open in tabs alongside other some of the other Flash whores I'll be mentioning later. That said, IGN is responsible for the legendary McGriddle Incident, and this is something we must never, ever let them forget. Ever.

Of course, Gamespot goes overboard in their coverage sometimes too, just in a nerdier way. They've established the unfortunate trend of streaming live feed of them playing a major new title the day of its release, sometimes for hours on end. Imagining the people who put aside large portions of time to watch these events is about as sad as those little kids you used to see in the arcades who would stand there yanking the joystick around and smashing on buttons while the game's attract mode demo played.

Related links: Gamespot's weekly release schedule. Note that it's automated, which means you can browse ahead but also leads to all ungodly number of problems. Seems like every week there's at least one obscure PC or portable game that's not actually coming out when the list says it is. This especially happens when someone has set a game's date as "spring 2007" or "TBA 2006," which causes the system to just set the game's release date as the last day in that time period.

The Boys: Joystiq and Kotaku

If Gamespot and IGN are the parents, then Joystiq and Kotaku are the younger and older sons, respectively. Young Joystiq is brash and impetuous, unwilling to compose himself for polite company and prone to bouts of naivete and damned stupidity. As if responding to an unspoken theme, the site's comment sections are fittingly composed entirely of idiot children.

For as big a site as it is -- and how that has come about is anyone's guess -- Joystiq updates less frequently than one might think. They're not slouches, but in the space of time between a morning and evening newspost on Error Macro, Joystiq would have roughly a half-page to a full page of new content, whereas Kotaku would have one and a half to two new pages. As another example: Going back from right now to the last post of May 29th on Joystiq takes me to the bottom of page 2. Doing the same for Kotaku goes back to the middle of page 4. Obviously numbers aren't everything, but given Joystiq's average output (hey guys let's vote on webcomics and talk about Pokemon workarounds all while making the same tired "My Pokemans" reference twice in 24 hours), I don't think they can play the quality over quantity card here.

Kotaku, being the elder child, is a bit wiser and a bit sharper, with a greater sense of responsibility. Their posts are usually semi-intelligent, without being overblown or sensational, and cover a pretty wide spectrum (it's the only place I've noticed linking Insert Credit with any regularity aside from GameSetWatch -- I'll talk more about those two later). If you could only pick one site as your news source, Kotaku would probably be your best bet at catching the most information.

That said, there is a downside. While Joystiq roams free with its childish wonder and amusement with the phrase FTW, Kotaku stays inside to brood in its awkward teenagerness. The site sometimes drifts into repeated, obsessive tangents about Japanese pop singer game IDOLM@STER (at least that seems to have finally faded awaoh goddammit they've done it again) and even less game related otaku things. Other times, Florian Eckhardt just acts retarded. Yes, I realize he doesn't write there anymore, he moved on to bloody Wired.

Thankfully, these moments are comparitively few, and can be skipped over. I know some people don't like Kotaku, and I'd be interested to hear why, but right now I think it's one of the best bets you've got.

The Weird Uncle: 1up

I will strain this family metaphor until it shatters. Or if that doesn't work, here's another: 1up is kind of the Fox to Gamespot and IGN's NBC and ABC. (No one wants to be CBS.) By the time 1up came along, the others were already well established, so they must differentiate themselves by being hip and "now." They have some entertaining features, like histories on certain franchises and the old standby of scans of terrible game ads, and the Retronauts podcast can be interesting for old coots who like to talk about old things.

The news section itself is reasonably good. It's a bit of a halfway blend between the "official news source" feel of the Big Two and the looser, more immediate coverage of blogs. I actually kind of wish it had a bit more of the former... The site is backed by Ziff Davis, giganto publisher of EGM, Official Playstation Magazine, Games For Windows and Succulent Juggs, and yet their news always seems to come from somewhere else. When an important item is in Japanese, they wait for some slipshod translation to appear on the Internet. Shouldn't they have people on staff who can do this?

They feed on your circuits for their fuel! It's pretty bad when I have to intentionally limit how many 1up pages I open at once for fear of crashing my browser. 1up employs horizontal banners and side box and skyscraper ads, sometimes working in tandem, all in that terrible legacy of Nazi occult research, Flash. If you're lucky, you'll just get the "a Flash script is taking too long to finish" message, or even "a Flash script has caused an error, restart Firefox soon." If you're not lucky, your browser will crash, disappear from your screen, uninstall itself from your computer, buy a bus ticket, head out to New Orleans, and fall into a downward spiral of drugs and prostitution. If you plan on using 1up, you should get AdBlock. You'll feel better.

I suppose it doesn't mean anything to them that I can't actually remember any of the products ever advertised in this way, even when the images were frozen on my screen (along with everything else) while I silently cursed the heavens.

The Industry Insiders: Next Generation, GamesIndustry.biz, and Gamasutra

Built from the ashes of the old magazine of the same name, Next Generation is a mostly industry-focused website. That can make things kind of dry, with lots of reports about numbers and executive reshufflings, but there is the occassional interesting news item. For the casual game news reader, though, said items will usually show up somewhere else soon enough.

Teamed up with Next Gen as possibly the only sites with .biz doman suffixes that aren't built for spam is GamesIndustry.biz. The news content is similar to Next Gen, but GI also seems to have a weakness for gossip. I've noticed an unusual number of news items that revolve around someone important in some company making a bold statement about the competition sucking or the industry dying or some "oh no they di'nt!"-worthy comment. Because of this, it's best not to rely solely on GI's headlines, as they sometimes trump up remarks in the titles to make something sound bigger than it is.

It should also be noted that GI is based in the UK, which means they're more likely to report on what HMV is doing than Wal-Mart.

Finally, and perhaps best of the three, is Gamasutra. Keep in mind we're talking about a website whose sister magazine, Game Developer, is filled with thought-provoking articles like The Dark Art of Pivot Animation, complete with diagrams of how feet should work, and you'll get an idea of the intended audience. Still, there's a lot of intelligent, substantive material here, including regular articles looking at the issues facing game design itself instead of just naming the ten best controllers ever for the 80th time. If that sort of thing appeals to you.

One important flaw to note in all three sites is that, being industry-focused, they actually pay attention to what analysts have to say. This is never a good course of action.

Related links: Gamasutra's Release This! column, their weekly release schedule. Unlike Gamespot's, this is put together by a human, and is less likely to be stupidly wrong. Additionally, they label the top ten most anticipated titles as measured by IGN GamerMetrics, which gives you some idea of how popular (or at least how hyped up) each game is. And, for those dirty foreigners who manage to clamber out of their caves long enough to find a lemon and some copper wire to power their rock with the word LAPPTAWP scratched on it, they also have release lists for Europe and Japan.

That's it for now. Next article: How to read Digg and not hate humanity.

Posted by Bill at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

On the dawning of 1993, the Super NES had been on the market in the U.S. for over a year, and the Genesis even longer. The NES was looking longer in the tooth with each day that went by. By that point, even new games for the system looked old, and thus what came out had to be something special if it hoped to draw attention away from the next generation. It had to offer something new and exciting. It had to be fresh and original. In other words, it needed to not be Time Diver: Eon Man.

Continue reading "Time Diver: Eon Man" »

Posted by Bill at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

More important than eggnog or family members during the holidays is having the appropriate music on hand. Winter and Christmas themed music has become just as important as lights and gaudy sweaters in celebrating the holiday season. Unfortunately, the realm of "Christmas music" usually boils down to the same old songs from the '50s you've heard a thousand times and Trans-Siberian Orchestra's "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" set on loop. That just won't do. What you need is music that says "I'm celebrating the holidays and I'm a giant geek."

Enter the Holiday Video Game Mixtape. 21 tracks containing 184% of your daily allowance of sleigh bells and sure to make you nostalgic for Christmases past and the games of yesteryear at the same time. As you can imagine, it's not easy to find many songs from games that are specifically focused on Christmas. But you can find quite a few that have a more general winter theme, which are perfect for watching the snow fall outside. Or if you live in Florida, watching your neighbors staple fake snow to their roofs.

All links lead to handy places elsewhere that have more bandwidth than me where you can download each track.

1. Christmas NiGHTS - Christmas in Nightopia
2. Sonic 3D Blast - Diamond Dust Act 1
3. OneUp Mushrooms - Super Mario's Sleigh Ride
4. Animal Crossing - Christmas Eve
5. Atelier Iris - Village of Snow and Glass
6. Ice Climbers - Snow Cone Heaven (OC Remix)
7. Christmas NiGHTS - Joy To The World
8. Sonic Adventure - Snowy Mountain
9. Sonic 3 - IceCapped (OC Remix)
10. NiGHTS - Frozen Bell - Take The Snow Train
11. Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon - Chocobo's Happy Christmas
12. Sonic 3D Blast - Diamond Dust Act 2
13. Jumping Flash! - Slippery Ice Land
14. Metroid Prime - Ice Valley
15. Mother 1+2 - Winter's Theme
16. Shenmue - Christmas on Dobuita Street
17. Final Fantasy VII - Buried In The Snow (it's track 64 at the link)
18. Secret of Mana - A Bell Is Tolling
19. Phantasmagoria - Phantasmagoria
20. Secret of Mana - A Wish
21. Donkey Kong Country - Christmas Cave (OC Remix)

In case you cocked an eyebrow going down the list: The Phantasmagoria track is not from the PC horror game of that name, but rather an album of original music from Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu. It's the only song here that doesn't have a deliberate seasonal theme, but it always sounded like snow to me.

Posted by Bill at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Music is a vital element in video games. It helps tie together the presentation, by working together with the visuals to create a cohesive atmosphere and tone for the game. But sometimes, music goes bad. And sometimes, it goes really bad. The following is a list of 15 of the worst songs in video game history. No "top whatever" here; the Internet has too many of those and the rankings are always arbitrary anyway. The list is, however, divided into three categories. Think of them as the three circles of musical hell.

Continue reading "The Worst Songs In Video Games" »

Posted by Bill at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

Nintendo normally keeps a fairly tight reign on its properties. Mario is their face, their symbol; thus they strive to make sure that if he's used in a video game, he's used right. The vast majority of Mario games are developed by Nintendo, with an occassional license to a trusted third party like Square (Mario RPG, Mario Hoops) or Hudson (Mario Party) or Camelot (Mario Golf, Mario Tennis, Mario Jai Alai, Mario Shuffleboard).

Except, that is, for a stretch of about four years in the early '90s, when apparently they just handed him out like candy to random passers-by. From 1991 to 1995, nine Mario titles were released by companies other than Nintendo, one of them being Mario's first appearance on the PC, six of which being edutainment titles. They were all made with kids as the intended audience, meaning the name of this article also serves as a good catch-all title for any of the games seen below.

Continue reading "Mario's Bastard Children" »

Posted by Bill at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)