A lot of you are probably playing through one of Maxis’s most recent hits, Spore. In that game, you create a species and take it from a single-celled organism all the way to an intergalactic space empire, designing their buildings, armor, and vehicles along the way. It seems huge in scope, and it is. However, Maxis has done a similar game in the past, called SimLife. In SimLife, players are tasked with creating an ecosystem, complete with plants and animals. They can also tinker with the genetics of the world’s plants and animals just to see what they can create, and even alter the climate and topography just to observe its effects on the flora and fauna. As the game’s tagline says. this game is truly the genetic playground. It may seem overwhelming at first, but thankfully, there is a tutorial to help players get started. Players can either take on one of the game’s scenarios, or just experiment in sandbox mode and see what they can create. Like many of Maxis’s older games, SimLife has been unofficially classified as abandonware, but you can still find a copy on amazon by clicking the thumbnail above. Hopefully given Spore’s popularity, Maxis can work on a sequel to this game. Come to think of it, it would make a great add-on for Spore.

During the early days of the Xbox 360, there weren’t a lot of launch-window titles that made people want to run out and buy the system. Dead or Alive 4 and Condemned were nice, but other than those two and a few others, the Xbox 360’s post-launch library was pretty weak. Thankfully, Microsoft’s Xbox Live downloadable games service, introduced during the previous Xbox life cycle (albeit to little fanfare) was kicking into high gear this generation, starting with its integration into the console itself (rather than having to buy a separate disc). Over time, players would be treated to a slew of classic re-releases, newer titles, and independently developed games. One of the first games available on the service, Geometry Wars, took old school style gameplay and touched it up with some nice graphical effects. It was in the tradition of Space Invaders, where one played simply to earn a high score. It was incredibly addictive as well. So addictive, that many Xbox 360 owners played this game more than any game that was released via retail during the first 4 months after the Xbox 360’s release. Now, Bizzare Creations has created a sequel which adds new game modes while keeping the previous game’s gameplay intact.
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This past weekend I featured a big article on the Nintendo Entertainment System’s most influential games. This didn’t make the list, but it was still an excellent sports title from Nintendo’s early days. Back then, beating Mike Tyson was a rite of passage for any hardcore gamer. Of course, en route to face him, you also went face to face with several fictional boxers, each of them becoming memorable in their own right. Who could for get King Hippo, Glass Joe, or Don Flamenco? Sequels to this game later appeared on the Super Nintendo and most recently the Wii, but this NES classic is the most well known iteration of Punch Out.
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Gotta love the 8-bit era of gaming. Playing the old NES brings back so many classic memories. Remember using the drift technique in Rally King to make it through to the end of the race? Or how about seeing if you could make it to level 64 in Cosmic Gate? Or how about when you finally defeated that mega-tough guardian in Guadia Quest after some serious level grinding? What’s that? You don’t remember any of those games? Good. There is a reason for that (besides me calling you a liar if you said yes). Those games, along with 5 others, are retro-style games created for this cart. While they have 8-bit NES looks, rest assured, they are as current as Gears of War or Halo.
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During the early 80s, the video game market was in danger of dying off before it could take off. Too many manufacturers were releasing too many consoles no one cared for, and developers were making too many games that were mediocre at best. This would lead to a diminished demand for them in the consumer market as well. If that wasn’t enough, the home computer market was slowly beginning to emerge, as PCs were becoming cheaper and more easily accessible to consumers. It would be a fool’s errand for a company to attempt to reenter the market, yet Japanese developer Nintendo would jump in the market head first.
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Now Halo is hardly a game that one would consider a lost classic, but given the franchise’s popularity, and since Halo ODST hit stores this past week, now is a good time to take a look at this classic, if for no other reason than to see how far the series has come in the 8 years since Halo sold many an Xbox so long ago. You play as the Master Chief, humanity’s last and best hope against a collective of alien races known as the Covenant. Aided by your fellow crew members and a holographic artificial intelligence known as Cortanta, you blast your way through many covenant soldiers in an attempt to discover the secrets of the artificial planet/space station known as Halo.
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I have always loved college and high school level athletics. In the place of money hungry celebrities whose egos and off-court/field antics seemingly overshadow their athletic abilities (Vick, Rodman, Owens, and about dozens of others, I’m looking firmly at you), you get young and hungry talent willing to do anything to get noticed and make it towards that next level, be it a college scholarship, or an NFL contract. This be-the-best-that-you-can mentality creates an atmosphere where anything can happen. Also, there is a certain charm in seeing local high school and college stars compete that you can’t get watching multi-million dollar celebrities, and who doesn’t enjoy watching the marching band, especially in black college football games? So it’s no surprise that I’ve always enjoyed 2K Games’ College Hoops better than its NBA counterpart. For years, developer Visual Concepts has managed to create a game that captures the atmosphere of college basketball while delivering solid gameplay on the court. That is why I was sad to learn that 2K Sports would not be renewing it’s NCAA basketball license for subsequent years, thereby putting an end to this series. To that end, 2K8 is an excellent swan song for the series. The improvements that it makes are little compared to 2K7, but they serve to refine the gameplay further.
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Before Sega’s House of the Dead, there was Konami’s Crypt Killer. While the most recent House of the Dead game takes its inspiration from Grindhouse Cinema, Crypt Killer seems to take inspiration from the B-movies of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. You know, the flicks that made guys like Lon Cheney, Boris Karloff, and Vincent Price into horror icons. They were quite scary at the time, but by today’s standards, they are actually a bit comical. After all, the dialogue was pretty cheesy and it was plainly obvious that the horrible ‘monster’ was actually a guy in a rubber suit. Crypt Killer does a perfect job of capturing that B-movie goofiness. Even if it isn’t the greatest game ever, it’s still fun while it lasts.
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