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Why Super Mario Bros. 3 is still a masterpiece Before Mario had a World, he had the biggest stage on Earth – and played the part to perfection.
Talking about Super Mario Bros. 3 risks devolving into a numbers game. It sold over eighteen million copies worldwide, another million on its Virtual Console re-release, who knows how many if you include pack-ins/re-releases, and still stands as one of the biggest sellers ever twenty-seven years later. Released in Japan on October 23, 1988, it wouldn’t see America till 1990 or Europe till 1991, but Super Mario Bros. 3 was always white-hot. In Nintendo’s western television advert, thousands of children chant ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ as the camera pans back, the figures morphing into Mario’s face and then the North American continent. Such was the anticipation and profile for this 8-bit…
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The rise and fall of video gaming’s most vocal enemy Over the course of 10 years, lawyer Jack Thompson aggressively pursued video games in the courtroom. This is a history of his career.
Inside the troubled development of Star Citizen After five years, more than $124 million in fan funding and nothing close to a finished game, Star Citizen has become a lightning-rod for controversy. What’s really been going on?
A conspiracy of silence: How NDAs are harming the games industry Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have long been a fact of doing business in video games - but their enforcement can have wide-ranging, negative effects.
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These photographs make video game worlds look real The Continuous City is a book that looks at virtual environments through a different lens.
The above image is not an old photo of a street. It’s Grand Theft Auto V. You may well remember Gareth Damian-Martin’s stunning shots of Metroid Prime, originally taken for his digital zine Heterotopias. Beautiful video game screenshots are ten-a-penny, but Damian-Martin’s work is something quite different – not least in the fact they’re taken using an analogue camera – in looking to capture not just a specific image of a game, but the nature of that place. To catch some of that ambiguity around the edges that, in the memory, hazes over beloved places and almost makes them seem like they exist. Following the production of three issues of…
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The World of Warcraft legacy server that is no more In closing Nostalrius, Blizzard finds itself the bad guy despite having the law on its side.
17 years ago today, a wild Pikachu virus appeared! W32.Pokey.Worm was not very effective...
The craziest Pokémon Go stories so far Spontaneous friendships, Diglett dick pics, illuminati conspiracies, dead bodies, and all the other crazy Pokémon Go stories so far.
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Metroid Prime like you’ve never seen it before An extract from the new issue of Heterotopias.
There are spaces that haunt us. Our childhood homes, the halls of educational institutions, the apartments of lost lovers. They sit in the memory, ready to be evoked by the correct arrangement of forms, the right quality of light, a significant configuration of walls. Some of these spaces aren’t even real. Metroid Prime’s Tallon IV is one of those spaces. Even as I call it by its name, the name of a planet, a name that evokes something vast, unfamiliar, open, I feel like I’m failing to describe it. That’s because in reality, Metroid Prime’s “planet” is made up of a rabbit warren of interiors, joined by improbable and illogical…
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Why is hating games a prerequisite for video game criticism? Smug elitists take issue with the idea of video games as art.
“You will suffer beyond imagination!” WoW Classic player fights girlfriend while streaming Annoy this WoW nerd and you will suffer beyond imagination, you will see the punishment.
A Call of Duty youtuber is livestreaming his legs literally rotting away 2020 UPDATE: THEY'RE MELTING!—Diabetic drunkard ONLYUSEmeBLADE refuses to seek treatment for the rapidly expanding sores, which are being cheered on by "leg hole" fans as they gradually consume his discolored limbs in daily livestreamed updates.
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10 Xbox things to remember on Xbox’s 15th anniversary Did you know the console was almost called 'Odyssey of the Mind'? Really.
On this day, 15th November 2016, it has been 15 years since the launch of the original Xbox. Many things have changed in that time, and Microsoft has much of which to be proud. We decided to look at the less-remembered parts of Xbox history, the parts that sometimes fade away over the years, and the ones that just make you laugh. Bill Gates, Hamburgers, and Handfeel The original Xbox controller, fondly known as the Duke, was in fact a terribly huge and unwieldy hunk of plastic – hence the swift redesign resulting in the ‘S’ pad. Keen that the rumors about its large pads didn’t alienate the Japanese market,…
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TrainwrecksTV: Twitch forced me to turn down $1.2 million streaming deal "I was thinking of doing no camera streams and not telling Twitch."
Atari VCS delays may have been worth it Customizable Atari console will have new Radeon Vega-based graphics architecture and two Zen CPU cores from AMD.
The Pokemon conspiracy A /b/tard explains his plan to become real life Pokemon master.
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The making of WipEout Forget Lara. There was only one true herald of the Playstation generation. Real 3D, real music, real gaming. The future, after years of waiting, was finally now.
Wipeout is a central part of The PlayStation Success Story. Its licenced music and in-club promotion are held up as the keys to attracting the post-pub generation. Play it now, however, and you’ll see a contradiction. Often regarded as the originator of gaming’s move towards the cool and the casual, it actually pointed the other way: towards bare-bones gameplay and aggressively clean styling. It was the perfect ambassador for Sony’s understated PlayStation powerhouse – all style, all substance. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the origins of video-gaming’s most famous trendsetter were in the resolutely unfashionable grid-based strategy game Matrix Marauders, which featured vehicle designs uncannily similar to those in Wipeout. The…
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WATCH: mom rages on livestreaming son having a smelly gamer moment Gamers sometimes need to poop where they sit instead of wasting time going to the bathroom, but this mom won't tolerate gamer moments.
The best (worst) Watch Dogs multiplayer trolls Watch Dogs online has been designed to drive you nuts and here's a compilation of some amazing moments.
The people obsessed with uncovering gaming’s deepest, darkest secrets For some, playing a video game to completion isn’t enough. They want to reveal the secrets behind its creation.
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15 underrated N64 games the world forgot about Celebrating the weirder side of the N64.
The N64 recently celebrated its 20th birthday in North America. We had to wait until March 1997 before it came out in Europe (remember the days when we’d have to wait actual years for games?), but that’s 20 years since the last of the cartridge home consoles first appeared on western shores; 20 years since platformers exploded into the 3D realm with Super Mario 64; 20 years since we played the latest games with virtually no loading times; 20 years since we first prodded at that curious ‘analog stick’ thing in the middle of that dinosaur-claw controller, like apes at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But enough of…
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The best JRPG you’ve never heard of The SNES was the home to a lot of classic Japanese RPGs, but this one is in danger of being lost to time.
The SNES was the home to a lot of classic Japanese RPGs, back when prolific developer Square was at its prime. Square was responsible for Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Actraiser and many other RPGs that have since become classics. Sooner or later we saw a lot of them make it overseas, but some were just released too late in the SNES’ lifecycle to make the localisation investment viable. Enter Treasure of the Rudras, Square’s final game for the SNES. Released in 1996, Treasure of the Rudras is a traditional Japanese RPG with an interest in Indian mythology, focusing around the last 15 days before the world is destroyed and…
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5 most garbage Ghostbusters tie-in products (of garbage) And yes, you’re a misogynist if you don’t like the tie ins.
Who are the Star Citizen superbackers? Ever spent hundreds on a game? How about thousands? Tens of thousands? These people have. How do they feel about it?
Video game journalists are a joke Gamers don’t have a problem with challenge. Game journalists do, because they're lazy hacks — and because challenge itself engenders fundamental problems for their ideology.
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5 pixel art games you need to play right now Who doesn't love breezing through a colorful, simplified world that resembles something from their childhood?
The 8-bit era is long gone, but its playful, blocky aesthetic is here to stay. It’s an attractive art style that culls the best its of nostalgia and familiarity to create slick, intriguing interfaces. And who doesn’t love breezing through a colorful, simplified world that resembles something from their childhood? Designing from the ground-up to create a game that resembles some of the best pieces of the heyday of gaming is an undertaking in itself, so it’s no surprise so many titles, indie or otherwise, are adopting this approach. The result? Spirited endeavors that aren’t just fun, but kickass. We’ve compiled five of our favorite modern pixelated fantasies for maximum…
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10 times gamers IRL died on cam F in the chat.
Inside the troubled development of Star Citizen After five years, more than $124 million in fan funding and nothing close to a finished game, Star Citizen has become a lightning-rod for controversy. What’s really been going on?
How Fable Legends took down Lionhead An in-depth look at the development of a legendary British studio's final, unreleased game.
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Back on the flight deck: an interview with Wing Commander’s Chris Roberts Why he got into game development, why he left, why he's ready to come back, and much more.
When I interviewed Chris Roberts for our History of Wing Commander feature, I wound up with much more than a few “making of” stories. Roberts and I had a running conversation about why he got into game development, why he left, and more importantly, why he’s ready to come back. My guess had always been that Roberts had abandoned such a successful career in video game development for the film industry because making movies had been what he’d wanted to do all along. When he told me why video games had attracted him in the first place, it sounded like a confirmation. It was about convenience. “I think I gravitated…
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10 times gamers IRL died on cam F in the chat.
5 pixel art games you need to play right now Who doesn't love breezing through a colorful, simplified world that resembles something from their childhood?
The story of Second Life’s long-abandoned Duran Duran universe No ordinary world.
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The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
Wing Commander’s revolutionary approach to narrative presentation helped pave the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day. In order to help us celebrate the legacy of this famed franchise, creator Chris Roberts granted us his first games-related interview in over a decade (I wound up with much more material than is presented here; also read our separate interview piece). The original Wing Commander was published in 1990. It was the Crysis of its day, a killer app that often required PC gamers to upgrade their rigs just to play it, and to soup them up to push the…
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Don’t share Watch Dogs 2’s (very real) vaginas or Sony will ban you (NSFW!) Turns out there are vaginas in Watch Dogs 2, but if you share a picture of them then Sony will ban you.
The secret to the success of the greatest MMO of them all Vanilla World of Warcraft fed on the blood, toil, tears and sweat of its players, testing their patience and resolve - but that was part of its magic.
Why video game movies fail as adaptations What are movie makers doing wrong?
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