Monday, March 16, 2009

The Adventures of Retro Gaming Man



Inspired by Christian's pathetic attempts to beat the first level in Gradius for the NES.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Social Gaming 1.0



Isn’t it great to have the possibility to chat while playing?

Behind the scenes



Will we see the cult shoot em up on Xbox Live Arcade?
See also: Microsoft Wants Radiant Silvergun For XBLA on Kotaku

Silent Map



Although Christian beat the original Silent Hill about 6 times, he still looks every ten seconds at the town map to see where he’s supposed to go.

New Year's Day



Happy New Year everyone!

Christmas Eve



We wish you a Merry Christmas! Enjoy your presents! :)

Metal Map Solid



The Metal Gear Series is all about infiltrating enemy territory without getting seen or caught by the guards. You always have a small map which shows the position of your character and the position of your enemies, including their scope of sight. I noticed that while playing you look all of the time at the map, since it contains most of the information you need to advance. So it wouldn’t really matter gameplay-wise if you’d just drop all the high-end 3D graphics and just fill the screen with the map.

Fetch Quests



Living in the European Netherworld



The non-english European versions of early PSOne games have mostly shoddy translations, which is especially annoying in great RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 and Breath of Fire 3. Thankfully, the British games keep the text and synchronisation from the US version, so buying them is a good solution for people who are to lazy to modify their consoles to play imported games.

Differing tastes



Fahrenheit is gorgeous.

Scary Game



Dead Space arrived Today. This game is just freaking awesome!

The war in our heads



It’s just about Patrick being like that statue for a whole year. He finally decided on a PS3.

New ways of communication



The role-playing game „Tales of Symphonia“ for the Gamecube has the feature of a log that summarizes all events in the game. Strangely, it contains more information than is revealed in the actual game. In the dialogues and cutscenes it often does not get clear where you’re supposed to go next, and useful hints are then only found in the log.

Gamer Portrait: The JRPG Fan



Japanese Role Playing games are mostly about figuring out where to do what. The most important clues are found in cutscenes and dialogue that can be seen only once. If you forgot about them, pickung up the game after a long time can get frustrating, as you wander around aimlessly, fight hundreds of random battles, all in the vain hope to find your next goal.

(Christian’s most vivid memory of this is of one time he picked up Lufia 2 after a long time, finding his party in the middle of nowhere on the map. The airship was nearby, so you could already go anywhere on the world. After unsuccessfully looking and asking around in a bunch of very similar looking towns, he decided it was best for him and the cartridge to just leave the things as they were und go on to something else.)

Thankfully, nowadays you can look it up on websites like gamefaqs.com (if you can live with the fact that you learn about all the things you’ve missed so far and spoil yourself half of the story until you finally find the spot you’re stuck at), and newer games usually have a feature to let you learn about what happened before by reading a journal or asking the characters in your party, like in Tales of Symphonia and Dragon Quest 8.

New Zelda game for the Wii



Wind Waker and Twilight Princess were both released for the Gamecube. The first Zelda game for the Wii was just a port of Twilight Princess with WiiMote controls. To fit better into the new control scheme, the usually left-handed hero Link had to shift to the right hand. To achieve this with a minimum of effort, the Gamecube version was just mirrored. The only exclusive Zelda title for the Wii so far is „Link’s Crossbow Training“, which is more like a spinoff than a real installment of the series.

360 Flip To FS Crooked - A Comparison



Don’t get me wrong. I really love the more realistic EA skate. But it can get pretty hard sometimes. By the way, those of you who ran through skate. know, that the title trick came from the Rob and Big Pro Challenge, right?

NFS Soap-Opera



See the Need For Speed Undercover Review on Gametrailers. They say that the cut scenes look like soap-operas … terrible.

Spore Add-On



Spore Patch