The Top Ten Sports Games Ever Made This ranking will break all of your friendships. As soon as David proposed that we rank the greatest sports games of all time, Samuel was already muttering something about Amiga superiority, and Elena was preparing her usual defence of the Dreamcast. Then Joe jumped in and said that NBA Jam deserved to be ranked at the top due to the fact that “chaos beats simulation every time”, prompting…
The 10 Greatest JRPGs Ever Made: A New Player Ready Crew Ranking Ranking the greatest JRPGs of all time was bound to destroy whatever harmony existed amongst the members of the New Player Ready crew. Joe immediately started saying that Final Fantasy VII needed to be at the top of the list due to the fact that it “altered everything regarding mainstream gaming”. Samuel then presented several passionate defences of 16-bit era design philosophies and…
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…
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…
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…
It is not easy to rank the top 10 greatest platform games, especially with the heated debate that occurred during our discussion. By the time we had decided on our first five, we were already exhausted, and we knew there would be at least another few rounds of debate before we were done. We also knew that we needed to focus on the games that defined or revolutionised the platform genre. As such, we looked…
I’m Sam, and I want to get one thing settled after our team meeting. Tim said that action RPGs with cooperative gameplay are “basically button masher games with stat sheets.” Honestly, that’s a pretty big deal — and I think he’s never actually played Secret of Mana. I get that the genre can seem overwhelming to someone just getting into it, but to dismiss one of the most important cooperative experiences in video game history…
The Only Reason We Have Modern RPGs: Baldur’s Gate II Was The First To Get It Right I’m Joe, and I have to say one thing before we look at BioWare’s work of art. Carl thinks the current crop of RPGs, like The Witcher 3, are the ultimate expression of the RPG genre, while Tim believes that JRPGs do a better job of telling stories. Both of them are wrong, and this is why: Baldur’s…
King of Fighters ’98 Review: How SNK Perfected the Team Fighter Formula Hello everyone, my name is Elena, and before Sam starts telling me about the importance of frame data and precision, and before Joe starts bashing KOF saying Fatal Fury is better, I want to tell you why King of Fighters ’98 is the ultimate team-fighting game. This is not just nostalgia; this is mechanical perfection, balance of rosters, and how SNK created what…
The Model 2 hardware (Sega Retro) did more than just allow for better graphics – it allowed for fundamentally different gameplay mechanics. The original Virtua Fighter used Model 1 hardware which could render some very basic polygonal character models but couldn’t perform more complex animations and environmental details well enough to be useful. Model 2 did not only increase the number of polygons it could render – it also rendered those polygons with enough precision…