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.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

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.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

A few month’s ago, I featured this game’s predecessor, which could only be described as darkly humorous, delightfully tasteless, and disturbingly addictive. It attracted its share of controversy, and the fact hasn’t been lost on developer Running with Scissors. In 2003, they created this sequel, and there are a number of substantial changed to the formula. Although its content these days is pretty tame compared to the Grand Theft Autos and Manhunts, it can still get a bit extreme at times. In fact, its content is so extreme that it has been banned in both Australia and New Zealand. It gained further negative publicity a few years back after the Dawson College shooting rampage in Montreal when the gunman listed Postal 2 among his favorite video games. This is the type of game that, while it clearly doesn’t appeal to everyone, still maintains a healthy cult following.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

In possibly my final look at the gaming industry and culture in Wisconsin, I take on Raven Software’s new shooter and what it may mean for the studio.

Raven falls short with Wolfenstein , follows layoffs with high hopes for Singularity
Wolfenstein seems content to mimic rather than bust the genre it created, though there’s nothing wrong with that for a summer game. As an end-of-summer game with Halo and Call of Duty sequels on the horizon, though, it falls short. Then barely a week after releasing the game in late August, Raven laid off dozens of employees from its 180-person staff. This came at a time when the studio has been enjoying a higher profile thanks to its string of new releases.
Read More>

At one time, Square’s Romancing Saga franchise was as big as Final Fantasy. Romancing Saga’s key difference from most other RPGs was its non-linearity. The plot changed dependent on which character you selected as well as what choices were made in certain dialogue situations. However, for the longest time, the series was only released in Japan, necessitating various fan translations. The most the U.S would ever see of the series were the Game Boy Romancing Saga titles, which were released under the name Final Fantasy Legend. Saga Frontier for the Playstation 1 marks the first time that the series has hit North American shores on a console. While the game is a bit on the simplistic side compared to its predecessors, it’s free scenario system made the game enjoyable.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Lets turn the clock back to 2006. It was one year into the Xbox 360’s life cycle, and consumers were either stabbing and shooting each other in order to get their hands on the newly released PS3, or lining up for hours to get their hands on a Wii. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 gamers were still waiting the proverbial ‘killer app’ for the system. While games like Oblivion, Fight Night Round 3, and Saints Row did a good job or keeping players tied over, many of them were just higher resolution versions of games on the original Xbox. What gamers really wanted was Halo 3. Meanwhile, Epic had something brand new up its sleeve. Making use of the brand new Unreal 3 graphics engine, a lifelike alternate world, and unique gameplay features, Gears of War was unleashed on the scene, and it redefined the rules of the shooter genre.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

Back in the gaming days of yore, the multiple genres of video games defined what type of gamer the person playing would be. You had your RPG gamers, your FPS gamers, your sidescrolling-adventure gamers, and your sports gamers, to name a few. (Though the sports gamers are considered a completely separate category from the rest and its fans are often rejected as being gamers at all. You know what I’m talking about) There was also the highly competitive fighting gamer. Despite one-on-one fighting games existing prior to its release, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter helped shape the genre into a more standardized style and gained it a following. It also found a niche in the arcade scene, and soon arcades across the nation were featuring fighting games left and right. However, MK and SF couldn’t carry the genre alone. Games like Primal Rage and NightWarriors soon popped up to satisfy the masses. Midway saw the goldmine that Mortal Kombat had brought in, and decided to try another fighting game in order to bank on the growing success. This game was Killer Instinct.
[Read the rest of this entry…]