Grim Fandango Review: The Noir Adventure Game That Demonstrated Games Can Be Art Okay, I need to post this review before Carl starts telling me again how “games as cultural artifacts” and Tim starts telling me all about how modern adventure games have “progressed” beyond Grim Fandango. Let’s be honest – they’ve really gone nowhere. Tim’s as wrong as he usually is, and I’m going to demonstrate why this 1998 masterpiece is the pinnacle of…
I remember opening my Christmas presents in 1998. I was 21 years old, driving home from Arizona State University for winter break and wondering what games I’d be getting. Little did I know that my parents had bought me a PlayStation and Spyro the Dragon. “You’ve been talking about that purple dragon game,” my mom informed me. I don’t think I had outright said I wanted it to anyone, but I suppose my sighing in…
The smell hit me first—that particular mix of pizza grease and teenage determination that only a proper four-player split-screen session could produce. We're talking summer of '97, my mate Dave's living room, and the N64 controller cables snaking across the carpet like some sort of electronic pasta disaster. His mum had given us strict instructions about not spilling anything on the new beige carpet, which naturally made every sip of Tango feel like defusing a…
Tim here and I’ve got to say that I’ve had some concerns since I started my retro gaming journey. Everyone seems to rave about this game called Doom, how it changed everything, how it essentially birthed the first-person shooter as we know it today. Since I’ve come to this game completely cold, without experiencing the supposed revolution it brought, I was sceptical of how good a 30-year-old game could be. Well, I was wrong. Doom…
Timothy here — and I need to get something off my chest immediately. When I was first looking into retro gaming a few years ago, everybody would tell me I needed to play the original Mega Man games. “They’re classics,” they’d say. “You gotta play the Mega Man series.” Well, I did, and honestly, they were like doing homework. Stiff controls, crazy difficult spikes, and graphics that seemed ancient even to me. I was about…
Last night I found myself elbow-deep in a cardboard box that's been following me through three house moves, excavating Mega Drive carts like archaeological treasures. My wife rolled her eyes as I held up Shinobi III and made that satisfied "ahhhh" sound you make when you find a twenty in last winter's coat pocket. "You know you've got that on about four different compilations now," she said. True. But there's something about the weight of…
Sam has been arguing for months that the original Rayman should be taken seriously in platformer discussions. And I think he may be right after playing Ubisoft’s debut PlayStation exclusive, which took around two dozen hours to complete. It was released in the United States on 7 September 1995 via Wikipedia. Although originally intended as a quirky character design, Rayman turned out to be the first genuinely good platformer for PlayStation, showing the potential of…
The cartridge slot clicked with that familiar satisfying snap, and there I was again—standing in that cursed carnival town of Termina, watching the same three-day cycle begin anew. My mate Dave had warned me about Majora's Mask when he lent it to me back in 2001. "It's proper weird, this one," he'd said, tapping the gold cart like it might bite. "Not like normal Zelda."He wasn't wrong. Where Ocarina of Time felt like an epic…
Half-Life: How Valve Revolutionised Storytelling in First-Person Shooters Carl is currently working on writing a review of System Shock 2 because Joe is too busy convincing Tim that the original System Shock did narrative brilliance first, and therefore should receive more credit. Everyone knows System Shock set the bar for FPS games and their ability to tell proper stories without stopping to give you a history lesson every five minutes. Here is why Half-Life proves…
Tim is mistaken when he says that Jak and Daxter was just “another mascot platformer.” Joe is closer to correct that it was the last great traditional 3D platformer before all of them turned into open world. However, Joe is missing the technical innovations that made it possible. Technical innovation enabled both the artistic vision and the engineering excellence necessary to make Jak and Daxter a great platformer. The GOAL programming language, the seamless world…