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Saturday, June 14, 2014
News::The Gaming Agenda Podcast: EA and Ubisoft E3 2014
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News::A Story About My Uncle Review : TwoDashStash
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News::Watch Dogs Guide: Unlimited Money Glitch
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News::Hands-On Titanfalls New Update With Respawn Art Lead Joel Emslie
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News::Call of Juarez: Gunslinger Retrospective Review
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News::Hands-on Impressions of The Evil Within From E3 2014 | Entertainment Buddha
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News::Beta Fan Translation of Ace Attorney: Investigations 2 is Now Available for Download
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News::Hands-On Preview: Far Cry 4 - The Most Dangerous Game I DualShockers
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News::The Top 5 Most Desired Wrestling Legends for WWE 2K15
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News::Indie Game The Movie Bundle on a Super Sale
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News::The WildStar Diaries: Part Two Crafty Little Bugger
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News::NoScope Offers 5% off your Entire Order
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News::SUPERHOT Getting New Game + Mode
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News::Hands-On First Impressions of Destiny at E3 2014 | MediaStinger
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News::Images from last weekend's World of Tanks meetup in Jakarta
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News::Who Won E3? A Breakdown of the Industry's Biggest Show
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News::Oculus Palmer Luckey calls 30 FPS a failure
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News::E3 2014: Far Cry 4 Villain Addresses Racism Controversy
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News::Kicked: Drakerz, Caffeine, and Project Stealth
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News::Luvinia World: How One Passionate Gamer Helped Bring Back the Game that He Loves
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News::E3 2014 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege Hands-On Impressions | Entertainium
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News::The Sims 4 Gameplay Preview Interview E3 2014
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News::Frugal Gaming Review | Watch Dogs Xbox One
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News::Star Citizen Video: Arena Commander at 2560x1440 on LPC
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News::David Wu talks about AI in Avalon
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News::SWTOR: Tips for gearing up your healer in 2.8
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News::Top 10 Best Trailers from E3 2014
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News::Traffic Control Algebra
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News::Nvidia Geforce Titan Z Four Way SLI Pitted Against AMD Vesuvius Crossfire 4K Benchmarks
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News::Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Producer Really Wants an Xbox One Version
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News::Retrospective: Super Metroid
It’s incredible that a 20 year old game can still be considered one of the most atmospheric ever made. Great design is ageless, of course, but the audiovisual tools today’s developers have at their disposal for immersing players, for evoking place and time and temperature and tone, are light years removed from what was possible in 1994. Yet Super Metroid remains a masterpiece of mood, a game that can stop hearts and raise hairs with no more than its title screen.
It’s not exactly working with the most promising of materials, either. So towering is the Metroid saga’s reputation, it’s often overlooked that its foundations are the stuff of bottom-dollar videogame cliché: power-suited cosmic adventurer battles space pirates and hunts energy-sucking, jelly-like aliens in mazes of caves. With the NES original hailing from 1986, that’s easy to excuse. It’s not quite so easy to explain how the Metroid games attained the rarefied power they did.
They do deviate from tradition in one crucial respect: the revelation at the end of the first game that Samus Aran, the protagonist under that suit, was female shocked the gaming world of 1986. At the time it was a show-stopping reversal of damsel-in-distress archetypes. Even today, when super-powered game heroines are far from unusual, it’s rare to see one so unsexualised, and yet iconic. Super Metroid exploits the contrast between the normal woman and the outlandish, bulbous spacesuit better than any other game in the series, revealing a flash of Aran’s true form when the screen fades to white at every death. It makes her vulnerable as well as mighty, and serves as an effective reminder of the extreme hostility of the environment.
In Super Metroid, that environment is the game’s main character, and Aran’s chief opponent. The tortuous, leading design, riddled with more secrets, puzzles and mysteries than a Zelda dungeon, is the most significant part of that. Mazes in other games present themselves as the devious man-traps they are. Super Metroid’s caverns and ancient hallways are just as meticulously drawn up, but then the man-made plans are disguised with a crust of vegetation and dilapidation that makes them feel much more organic, and twice as inscrutable.
Despite the map that fills in as you progress, this is a game where it’s possible to feel utterly, desperately lost, so thorough is the misdirection, so carefully hidden the clues. Its extreme use of backtracking – seldom has any game had the courage to double-back on itself so often – makes the exploration feel as natural and open-ended as possible, without sacrificing the tight claustrophobia of the surroundings. That sense of confinement is key to the amazing hold the game has over you, and it’s achieved with the simplest trick of orientation: in Super Metroid, there’s ultimately only one way to go, and that’s down.
No game has ever exploited the fear and pressure of descent so well, not even the other Metroids, not even Descent itself. Both the prologue and the earliest sections of the game proper are characterised by impossibly long, implausibly quiet drops down empty shafts. The airlessness and building temperature are almost palpable. Although the game clambers back to the surface for regular and much-needed gulps of air, you know you’re always going to have to go back, and the ground is going to stay over your head, until the final boss encounter – with that classically Freudian nightmare, the Mother Brain – inevitably takes place at the very bottom of the very deepest pit.
And it’s a journey you have to make alone. If there’s a key note to Super Metroid’s eerie, dreamlike mood, it’s isolation. Enemies abound, but aside from the occasional skirmish with the space pirates and the monumental boss battles, they mostly take the form of strange, barely sentient alien wildlife: dangerous but predictable and (once you get the ice beam) even useful. Nintendo’s artists seem to have taken more care imbuing the environs than the animals with personality. Plant life undulates, statues eyes’ glint, tiny insects scatter, electronic arrays scan Aran, mutely. Lonely as you are, it seems like something is there and watching you, and it feels like it’s the maze itself.
Accompanying the lush, subtle gloom of the graphics is one of the finest soundtracks of the 16bit era. The grace and power of every stride and somersault of Aran’s suit is highlighted with crisp thuds and swishes; and there’s an unnerving abstract quality to the toneless squawks of the wildlife, the chirrups and clicks of the machinery. Beneath it all are the dark choral intonations and booming atmospherics of a classic score, a series of unsettling, echoing, cyclical tunes that never resolve. They just rack up the tension and the dread.
It all sounds rather oppressive, and it certainly can be; for a fairly slow-paced, exploratory action-adventure, Super Metroid is quite the pressure-cooker. But its incredibly rich atmosphere beguiles as well as scares, draws you deeper into one of gaming’s most head-scratching and intricate mysteries. And any time you feel like the weight of all that alien rock is getting too much, the game, with exquisite timing, doles out one of its range of genuinely thrilling suit upgrades. These operate as weapons, often, and of course as keys to the myriad locks and obstacles the maze has already thrown up in Aran’s path. But they’re also some of the most gloriously empowering tools in the history of gaming.
In so many games, an unlocked ability feels like something that’s been removed, a right withheld until you earn it. In Super Metroid, you start out strong and confident in Aran’s intimidating suit, and then enjoy a prolonged, exponential power rush as each devastating upgrade is found, eventually running at rocket speed and launching her into ten-story leaps, piledriving through walls and slicing through enemies. Their ingenuity and potency area a perfect, exquisitely paced match for – and reward for – the demands and frustrations of the most bewitching and singlemindedly perverse maze in gaming history. No wonder that, 20 years on, you can lose yourself in it just as easily as you can get lost.
The post Retrospective: Super Metroid appeared first on Edge Online.
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News::E3 '14 - Hands-On With Night in the Woods | Cliqist
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News::E3 '14 - Hands-On With Hyper Light Drifter | Cliqist
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News::Get the lowdown on additional Mega Evolutions in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire
There's no shortage of new Pokémon information, is there? Check out this new video and additional screens of the new Mega Evolutions featured in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire , and try not to wish too hard that it's November already. There's a whole summer to get through still. I know it's a tough wait, but we can push through it.
Both games will begin in the Hoenn region's Littleroot Town, and players can choose to start the game as a male or female character. Each character will be gifted a Mach or Acro Bike, with either suited to speed through the landscape or hop over bridges and stones. Along with the familiar starters Treecko, Torchic, or Mudkip, the games will feature several new Mega Evolutions, including the newly-announced Mega Sceptile, Mega Swampert, and Mega Diancie.
Details are still to come as far as how X and Y players can obtain Diancie in time for the November release, but we'll let you know when we know. When you transfer Diancie from Pokemon X or Y into Pokémon Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire and use its Mega Stone, it will transform into the gorgeous Mega Diancie -- so you'll want to make sure you get on it.
I don't know if I can take any more hype right about now. Between this and all the E3 news, my wallet is looking a little sad. Which Pokémon game are you going to get, by the way? Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire?
Read more...
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News::Assassin's Creed Unity's story missions won't allow multiplayer
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News::Space Run Ready for Takeoff on Steam for 25% Off
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News::Reality check: 7 virtual reality experiences at E3 2014
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News::E3 2014: 'Evolve' releases the Kraken | USAT
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News::Tropico 5 review | Good Game
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News::[IndieGameMagazine] Crimsonland Review
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News::MONG Podcast Episode 37 - What Was The Worst Game at E3?
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News::Can Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Rekindle the Franchises Former Glory?
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News::The Banner Saga Preview Interview E3 2014
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News::History Of MicroComputers (1990s)
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News::Assassin's Creed Unity Gameplay Preview Interview E3 2014
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News::Rainbow Six Siege Gameplay Preview Interview E3 2014
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News::Battlecry Gameplay Preview Interview E3 2014
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News::(WGB) Kill The Bad Guy Review Distract With Dirty Magazines, Then Impale
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News::Battlefield Hardline Preview: Hot Fuzzy Bad Boys | Dealspwn
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News::Preview: Mortal Kombat X | Stevivor
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News::State of Decay: Lifeline Review | GodisaGeek
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News::New Mortal Kombat X Details: E3 Demo Running on PS4, 600+ Intros, More Old Characters, Block Button
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News::E3 2014: Street Fighter 5 Won't Be Pay-To-Win, Yoshinori Ono Says
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News::E3 2014: Habitat Coming to Steam, Opening Access in July
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