Schmidt (Koji Igarashi jus…): My wallet needs this to n… Eusis (Koji Igarashi jus…): It's worth remembering th… Parish (GSQ4: We all go h…): They're still there. Not … NevznachaY (GSQ4: We all go h…): Jeremy, could we have the… Acosta02 (Koji Igarashi jus…): I don't know that people … Refa (Koji Igarashi jus…): Heck, I'll take an SD ver… Ryonin (Koji Igarashi jus…): This kinda makes me want … Mudron (Koji Igarashi jus…): I would suspect that peop… Refa (Koji Igarashi jus…): How is this game going to… SonicPanda (Koji Igarashi jus…): So, this is going to be m…
This is the archive, folks. The current stuff is on the main page.
GameSpite Quarterly 3 now available
30 November 09 | 07:37 | Posted by:
Hello, mortals. I am pleased to announce today that GameSpite Quarterly 3 is now live. You can read the intro and the table of contents and buy a physical copy right this very moment. Perhaps it will bring a flicker of cheer to your brief existence here on this planet!
If I were to describe this issue in a singly pithy phrase, I would call it "the one that got away." Although it's only going live a week later than its quarterly schedule would dictate, it feels like we've been working on this book for a lifetime. It has fought and resisted my efforts to wrangle it under control since the beginning. The original intent for this issue was to publish a fairly straightforward compendium of 8-bit characters, a straightforward reference work. The issue's contributors, however, had very different ideas and really didn't want to do anything so mundane. So the tone isn't quite what I had expected going into the issue -- which isn't to say it's bad! It's quite entertaining, in fact. The countless brief bits of content included here make this pretty much definitive bathroom reading, and every entry is a little different than the last.
Which brings us to the other way in which this one got away: It suffered a fair amount of scope creep, ultimately boasting twice as much material as the GameSpite Quarterly platonic ideal of 120-160 pages would advocate. Which means this thing took forever to put together, and copy edit, and proof, and so on. It also begged the question of how to keep it affordable, since Blurb charges by page count; ultimately I decided on making an extra edition of the book available, an inexpensive entry-level version that upholds our commitment to affordable game-related reading material without doing something more mercenary, like breaking the book into two volumes that everyone would have to buy separately. For those who want the full content, the larger and necessarily more expensive editions are available, of course, but the budget book is also there so's you don't feel like you're being gouged.
And even as the book grew whenever we thought, "Hey, we need to include this character," there are still plenty of 8-bit heroes we've left behind, from Bentley Bear to Wonder Momo to the nameless humanoid of Berzerk. But we had to draw the line somewhere or this thing never would have gone live.
Anyway, as usual, the contents of this issue will be posted over the coming months alongside the usual blog nonsense. And GameSpite Quarterly 4 will be... less excessive. I promise.
Looking back over my own contributions to GameSpite Quarterly 3, I was struck by a recurring theme in several of my write-ups for Nintendo-developed games. A good deal of what I loved about the company's 8- and 16-bit classics is the sense of discovery, of being given a world to explore and the means by which to go about it yet no explicit instructions how to apply those tools and abilities to complete the task at hand. I even name-dropped Metroid on (I think) last week's 1UP podcast as an example of an organic in-game tutorial.
To reiterate, Metroid was designed with the knowledge that the people who were playing it in 1986 were new to side-scrolling action games (Super Mario Bros. having popularized them only a year prior), yet its creators wanted to break beyond the bounds of forced left-right side-scrolling. Rather than simply hope players would eventually come to understand, oh, you can and should move in all directions in this game, they instead put an object lesson in the opening area by creating a low passage in a room to the right of the starting point. This obstruction could only be cleared by ducking into a ball, for which you'd need the Maru-Mari power-up, which was slightly to the left of the starting point. They knew most people would automatically move right, because that's how you started the game in Mario and Adventure Island even Pac-Land before them. The placement of this obstacle and the tool necessary to overcome it were a subtle way of saying, "Here are the rules of this game. They're a little different than you're accustomed to. You will need to understand how they work." Speaking for myself and everyone else I've seen play Metroid for the first time, the game's flow works the same for pretty much everyone: Players make their way right, learning to shoot (at falling foes) and jump (over enemies too low to be shot). Then they hit the wall, literally, and wonder why they can't go on. Eventually, they begin to wander to the left and make their way back to the starting area. At this point, they're starting to feel a little frustrated -- all that progress wasted! -- but then they notice you can move left from the starting blocks and, hey, one screen over is this new ability.
It's great game design -- even if the rest of Metroid was often maddeningly opaque -- and what's more is that it's exactly the sort of design that was a hallmark of Nintendo in the olden days. Someone recently mentioned how Super Mario Bros. 3 does something similar in World 1-1: The first screen or two are awfully similar to the original Super Mario, so you get the basics down: Hop on or over a Goomba, hit a block to snag a power-up. But things immediately change from the previous game. The Mushroom power-up goes left instead of right like you'd expect after Mario's previous outing, catching you off-guard and forcing you to rush to grab it. Soon after, you come across a power-up block on the ground, the first block ever that you've been unable to break by jumping. Kick a turtle shell into it and a Leaf pops out, which you can then use to fly by running along the subsequent straightaway -- an ability hinted at by a trail of coins leading impossibly into the sky.
It's little things like these that games seem to have lost sight of over the years. We talk about the complexity of modern games, but the NES era wasn't exactly simple-minded. Some of the classics we recall so fondly were perfectly intricate, yet they managed to convey the proper application of their more advanced techniques with simple, thoughtful level design. I actually kind of blame Mario for setting things off-track, to be honest: Super Mario World is the first game I can recall with in-game hint boxes to explain how to use your abilities. Of course, you didn't need to hit them, but the slippery slope had been breached nevertheless, and eventually those optional hint boxes mutated into stultifying hour-long tutorials. Now, plenty of developers rely entirely on in-game text or dialogue to explain how to go about things, obviating the need for level design that does the same thing. That's a shame. I miss thoughtful level design.
I'm happy to see, at least, that Nintendo is pulling back from the precipice over which Twilight Princess plunged so tragically. Great game, but did it really need to hold your hand delicately for five hours before letting you actually play? New Super Mario Bros. Wii is encouraging: Rather than explain its new abilities with text, it puts them in places where they simply make sense, uses a quick pop-up icon over your character's head to show what needs to be done to activate your new powers, and often even gives silent hints to your new potential by showing bad guys using similar powers.
Even Spirit Tracks gives players some credit for intelligence: The game's second sub-weapon, the boomerang, has the newly-added power to spread ice and freeze water. This is never stated in the game, but both water and ice activation points are placed in such a way that you're bound to activate the ability by accident shortly after picking up the weapon. It's a nice return to a more "learn it for yourself approach" to the series.
Of course, most of the game's puzzles are still explained with decontextualized hint blocks rather than, say, natural character dialogue, or intuitive design. But these days I'll settle for any victory, however tiny.
I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle, or at least that part of my lifestyle which involves uploading GameSpite Quarterly 3 to Blurb's servers for publication and sale. The hardcover edition made it online without any trouble, but the paperbacks keep giving me errors. So maybe my Monday estimate was overly optimistic. Ha! Ha! Sigh.
1. Super Metroid
And with this, we bring GameSpite Quarterly 2's online iteration to a lengthy, self-indulgent conclusion. For everyone who's ever wondered why I keep this blog active when I work full-time for a gaming site, it's because there's no possible way I could ever publish something like this under the auspices of 1UP. Honestly, I doubt people have a lot of patience for it here, either; it's the sort of thing that worked better in print. But whatever. You guys voted Super Metroid your favorite game of all time, and I wrote about why the game is great and why I love it, too. So deal with it, baby. And if this doesn't scare you away, remember that GameSpite Quarterly 3 goes on sale Monday.
2. Chrono Trigger
The central premise of this piece -- that Chrono Trigger really is the fusion of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest -- kind of just happened mid-article. Weirdly, I don't think I've ever seen this particular topic addressed, despite the fact that it's a fairly elementary deduction. That means this retrospective is either uncannily perceptive, or deeply wrong. (My money's on the latter.)
Finally back online in time for GSQ 2 #3: Final Fantasy VI
24 November 09 | 16:32 | Posted by:
Sorry about the site down time; my host barfed its entire network. Nuthin' I could do about it. Glad we pay money for this quality service!
3. Final Fantasy VI
Yeah, yeah, Final Fantasy III, whatever you want to call it. Posting this so close to Thanksgiving makes me a little nostalgic, you know; back in 1994, I picked up Donkey Kong Country to play over Thanksgiving and got bored with it about halfway through. So I spent the holiday replaying FFVI instead. All things considered, it's a pretty great game to take a leisurely cruise through.
I spent the weekend either playing 3D Dot Game Heroes or copy editing GameSpite Quarterly 3, which means I didn't actually put together anything for today. So, uh, please accept instead this compendium of podcasts on which I've recently appeared. I dunno, I think maybe I'm getting to be a little overexposed. I should probably vanish for a few months again.
at 1UP, wherein I talk about Active-Time Babble and how the heck I accidentally ended up at 1UP to begin with;
The Friday podcast, wherein we talk about Pandemic, the DSi, and I dunno what else;
Game Night, wherein I watch Thierry play Assassin's Creed II clumsily while fielding viewer questions with an equal lack of grace.
Yup. Anyway, the magazine is just about done (I just need to finish the New Game + article and make a few final copy edits), so I'll get back to the business of doing stuff. As in writing, rather than talking.
4. Super Mario Bros. 3
Mario 3 is weird, because it has a tendency to look a bit like an old PC game in still shots. Something about the artwork and the flatness of color, I think. In motion, it looks quintessentially NES-like, but check out the screenshot in this article. Weird, right? Still, don't let that distract you from the quintessential truth of this write-up. It was on my mind the entire time I played NSMB Wii.
I sat down last night and started up a new file in the import version of 3D Dot Game Heroes. I was instantly transported to 1988; the game isn't so much an homage to the original Legend of Zelda as it is a high-tech ROM hack. I was gratified to discover that it captures not only the look and general mechanics of Zelda, but also my favorite part of the game: The free, open nature of the world. It's a little more linear than the original Zelda, mind you; there are lots of progress-choking key points that require specific weapons, in the style of A Link to the Past (and every subsequent Zelda). Still, it's pretty close.
So I didn't play much of it last night. I saved it for today, so I could wake up early and spend my Saturday morning playing, armed with my pajamas and a bowl of junk cereal (there was a sale on Golden Grahams, you see). The experience was almost exactly like being 13 years old and baffled by the mysteries of Hyrule, except with HDR lighting. Eventually, I showered and dressed, but the spirit of 1988 lives on: I'm wearing a vintage electric blue Coca-Cola rugby shirt.
GameSpite Quarterly 2, #5: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
20 November 09 | 10:41 | Posted by:
5. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
As GameSpite Quarterly 3 enters the final, final pre-publishing stretch (I placed all remaining images and photos last night, so now it's just down to copy edits), the prior issue's online edition enters its final stretch as well. Just four more entries to go after this. Are you excited? You should be excited. Because it's exciting. Also, A Link to the Past is superb. The end.
The press proof for GameSpite Quarterly 3 arrived yesterday -- much sooner than I expected, in fact. The near-final product looks pretty good, and it's crazy dense. I'm talking 300+ pages. It's a lot of text.
Unfortunately, I hate the cover. The idea was pretty good, I think: Since this issue focuses on 8-bit game characters (specifically, heroes), I wanted to use original sprites for a sort of Retro Gamer-looking creation. And the layout of Nintendo's NES Tetris struck me as a perfectly fitting visual metaphor, since Tetris is a wildly popular 8-bit game, the stats box in the upper-right is perfectly placed to hold the magazine flag, and the I-Block is one of the characters detailed in the issue. So why not have the I-Block poised to clear a stack of 8-bit characters all jumbled up?
Not a bad idea at all. Unfortunately, the execution... well, it sucks. So, this won't be the cover to the issue. It's ugly and kind of embarrassing and I certainly wouldn't expect people to spend their hard-earned money on something this tacky. So I worked up something else -- something classier, simpler, cleaner, and weirdly enough designed in a flash of inspiration this afternoon when I bought a piece of cheesecake to take home to my finacée and looked at the bag it came in. You can have a look after the jump.
6. Mega Man 2
Brace yourselves, kids! It's another great comic by Philip "Loki" Armstrong. Your day is now officially awesome. And this time, I've learned my lesson: I've temporarily boosted GameSpite's maximum bandwidth so the site won't die horribly from all the inevitable links that will result from this black-and-white bundle of greatness. (Bonus: I'm pretty sure my GSQ3 press proof arrives today.)
I had a troubled relationship with Assassin's Creed. You can read my review of the game from way back when to refresh your memory, if you like, although really a lot of the bigger problems troubling our relationship exist outside the continuum of the game itself. Suffice to say there were certain disagreements to which I was merely a sideline-based observer, disagreements which actually prompted me to play the game through for myself when I hadn't really intended to pay it much attention to begin with. And what I found was a game that was roughly 80% complete, and in a confusing way: The tech and the environment and the art, by reputation the most expensive and difficult parts of a game to create, were just about rock-solid. But there was very little of interest to do in those beautifully-rendered cities of the Middle East, almost as if the creators forgot to actually include a game with their tech. I actually found myself wanting to like the game, but at every turn it seemed to make an active effort to prevent me from doing so.
I didn't have room to include this in the review, but Ezio is pretty much Renaissance Batman, and if it weren't for Arkham Asylum having redeemed the Batman game franchise a few months back, I would happily call Assassin's Creed II the greatest Batman game ever. Really, all it needs is a giant penny in Ezio's mansion to make it perfect. Giant florin. Whatever.
And I'm not kidding about the game's plot. It's seriously like Ubisoft said, "Hey guys, what if Dan Brown wrote a Japanese RPG? What would that be like?" And then they went and gave it their best effort. It's a little weird! But kind of fun, actually, just because it's so ridiculous. Especially the final battle, which lets you do something JRPGs have been nervously flirting with for more than a decade.
7. Final Fantasy Tactics
I've always been a little sad that Final Fantasy III and V didn't arrive in the U.S. until well after Tactics, because as much as I enjoyed the game (playing through it twice in a row and all that) the added context would have made it even better. I think I'm going to blame my jumbled-up Final Fantasy history as the culprit behind this article being the weakest entry I submitted for GSQ2.
8. EarthBound
Of all the EarthBound write-ups I've read over the years, I think this one is my favorite. It's short on hyperbole, surprisingly unanecdotal, yet isn't a dry mechanical analysis. Still, it really manages to convey EarthBound's appeal. I suppose it's the tone of the writing, which somehow matches the game perfectly. I dunno. Maybe you should read it instead of just reading about why you should read it.
9. Super Mario World
And now, a post about Mario that won't degenerate into unsubstantiated dogmatic arguments. Kat's take on Mario World is an interesting counterpoint to my own experience: She dreaded the game's tiered, secret-laden level design, whereas I found it to be the saving grace in a game that, at the time, I didn't think was particularly interesting. (We've both gotten smarter since then.)
2D: New Super Mario Bros. and case of the extra half-dimension
13 November 09 | 11:09 | Posted by:
So, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is pretty good. I'm sure the 1UP score will skew high compared to a lot of other reviews, but bear in mind that I reviewed it based on what it does as opposed to some fevered vision of what I think it should do. It's designed to be a universally accessible and enjoyable game, and NSMB Wii passed the Fiancée Test, which made the difference between a great score and a top score. (You can hear about said test on today's 1UP podcast, whenever that goes online; I'm too medication-addled to type it all out right now.)
I will admit there is a tiny part of me that wishes NSMB Wii had been done up in a fully retro style with 16-bit graphics. There's really nothing about the game that couldn't have been done with the Super NES... well, OK, the level zooming during multiplayer might have required a Neo-Geo. But still, NSMB Wii sticks closely to the tenets of classic 2D gaming, and it's wonderful for that... but there is a little charm lost with the use of polygons.
Not too much charm, fortunately. Look at those adorable Toads with their precious little propeller caps. Awwww.
Anyway, going with a hand-drawn style would have been a deathblow for the game. Americans hate hand-drawn art to death. It's probably no coincidence that Disney is releasing its first traditionally animated feature in something like six years (The Princess and the Frog) while hedging its bets with a horrible-looking CG vehicle for Jim Carrey to desecrate all you hold dear about Charles Dickens. Care to guess which will claim the bigger box office take?
But beyond the sheer economics of the thing, Nintendo's smart to go with the 2.5D style regardless, because it's easier for the casual gaming audience to deal with. A while back, Tomm Hulett (hi Tomm!) posted a comment on the site that suggested 3D games are more visually intuitive for casual gamers -- which is true, to a degree. The visual depth and dimension perspective offered by polygons more closely mimic how we actually see the world and require less interpretation than a two-dimensional abstraction.
However, 3D gaming -- which is to say, specifically, the navigation of 3D space -- is not intuitive. On the contrary, it requires training and practice to master. As a point of fact, Mario games offered a perfect opportunity to train in 3D with the opening areas of Super Mario 64: The open field outside the castle and Lakitu-as-point-of-view conceit were deliberately positioned as an introduction to dealing with the realities of 3D space. Of course, that was 13 years ago, and not everyone buying games now -- especially the gaming novitiates Nintendo prizes -- has played Mario 64.
So, Nintendo can cram a tutorial into the beginning of every game it makes and bore their most loyal fans to tears... or they can simply pretend to create 3D spaces by offering the appearance of depth while sticking to the far more intuitive left-to-right progression of old-fashioned 2D. Fake 3D may look more natural, but once you begin trying to judge relative positions depth on what is ultimately a flat, mathematical representation of space, things suddenly become trickier. But moving along a line, with obviously-placed obstacles and objectives? No sweat. Anyone can handle that.
So, 2.5D may look kinda ugly, and it may not make for games as elegant as those with properly hand-drawn graphics, but if you're shooting for the masses it's definitely the way to go. And NSMB Wii is shooting for the masses in the best possible way, so I suppose this all represents progress, of a kind.
Any by "TV" I mean "the Internet," because who cares about TV anyway? They always make the commercials twice as loud as the stuff you actually want to watch, which is why I wait for the DVDs.
Anyway, our half-hour video production of New Super Mario Bros. Wii Game Night is online, and it does a great job of showing off exactly why the game is so fun, i.e. because Sharkey's a jerk. I did an OK job of hosting given that I was laboring under a heavy cold (which is why I'm sitting away from everyone else), but mostly I'm just impressed that I managed to do so well on the solo level despite also narrating. I have a newfound respect for people who demo games at trade shows and press conferences, because talking about a game while playing a section cool enough to be tricky is surprisingly taxing. My 1UP review for the game should be up tomorrow, but even here and now I will say that the game succeeds at being exactly what Nintendo has pitched it as being, which is quite an accomplishment. It's so, so much better than New Super Mario Bros. it's not even funny.
The second half of the video is after the jump. Woo!
GameSpite Quarterly 2, #10: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
11 November 09 | 10:37 | Posted by:
So I managed to upload GameSpite Quarterly 3 last night. A proof copy will hopefully be in my hands by the end of next week, with orders open the following week. I'm going to hold off on showing the cover until I've seen it in-hand -- I like the concept, but don't know how well it's going to translate into an actual finished product. I suppose we shall see. Meanwhile, back in issue two....
10. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
This is probably the last time I'll ever need to write about Symphony of the Night: My definitive statement, in much the way Symphony is the definitive Castlevania experience (for me). The article is about 40% personal experience, 40% research, and 20% speculation -- though it seems my speculation was even more dead-on than I originally realized. Anyway, I love this game. The end.
Did you know that the Retronauts podcast has been around for more than three years? And what a horrible, rocky three years it's been. It's only been in the past few months that I seem to have developed a sense of confidence about podcasting -- I'm not entirely certain, but I think seeing a room full of strangers actually enjoy what we were saying, in real-time, back at PAX made the difference. Whatever the cause in all of this, I've definitely become a lot more active in 1UP's podcasting sphere of late, and I feel like the shows I've been involved with have been great. Not really because of anything I've done, though, but because we've had such informative guests.
Like, for last week's Retronauts, I pretty much just shut up and let BioWare's Greg Zeschuk talk about the company's history for an hour. He's a smart, funny guy, and he made for an interesting show. Likewise for Jeff Green, who was the guest of honor on last week's Friday podcast; it seems like it would be difficult to create a bad show where Jeff is involved. But over and above that, David Ellis has leapt in feet-first to become a really great host. I'm impressed!
There's also the new RPG podcast, Active-Time Babble, which is still finding its voice. I guess this week's episode will be the acid test for that, since it's the first show in a month or so that hasn't had a guest participant to keep things spicy. It's all on us, I fear.
We're also doing a little more video-oriented things lately; nothing on the level of The 1UP Show, I fear, but random little things like a video version of last week's Retronauts:
(Parts two and three are also available for your delectation.)
This is, of course, just my little corner of the site. The rest of 1UP has been shaping up into greatness as well. I know a lot of people gave up on the site after the 1UPocalypse at the beginning of the year, and it was pretty rocky for a while. But we're back on our feet. Give the site a look, why don't ya. I'm pretty proud of what the kids have whipped up over there.
All of GameSpite Quarterly 3 outside of New Games + and the cover and the table of contents and the copy editing is complete. Unfortunately, I appear to have worked so hard this weekend that I made myself ill. That was not terribly smart of me, I admit. But I still anticipate submitting the contents for a proof printing no later than Thursday. Is that rad? Yes, that is rad. Except the mild sickness thing.
There's been some discussion in yesterday's comments about how I should break down the standard edition of this issue, with a few people voting that they don't mind paying a little more than $12. But that would be an abrogation of a core tenant of this entire venture, which is that people should be able to pick up an interesting book every three months for a little more than ten bucks. (Yeah, plus shipping, but Blurb's new flat rate shipping structure makes that much less painful than when this project first kicked off in April.) That's why there's the deluxe edition; for people who don't mind paying more for a little extra content, the option's there -- but the price of entry for the books should be as low as possible. I determined at the outset that no standard edition would ever be more than $13, and I intend to stick by it. I'm considering a few different possibilities, but the basic edition of this issue won't cost more than $13, no matter what.
Hello, humans. Have you missed me? Sorry to leave the site neglected for a day or two -- really, I'm completely committed to this daily updates thing -- but I'm entering the final stretch of assembling GameSpite Quarterly 3. It's gonna be a long, long issue, as in 300 pages long. Which is a problem, since anything over 160 pages makes the standard edition too expensive for my ideal end-user price of $12. I am considering a couple of different options for managing this particular problem, and I'll have a clearer picture of what to do once everything is placed and assembled.
In the meantime, here is a sample of an entry from GSQ3. Go on, have a look. Back? OK then. Now, there are more than 125 other entries like this in the book, so I figure you can get a good sense of why the issue will be so lengthy from simple applied mathematics. (Images courtesy of HG101, by the way. They get a credit in the book proper, as usual.)
The inspiration of this issue was a series of "mooks" (magazine books, I think is the idea there) called Famidas, short for Famicom Dictionary All-Around Series. It's a three-volume black-and-white encyclopedia of Famicom characters and other odds and ends, and I fell in love with it several years ago and thought, "Man, I wish someone would do one of these in English." But no one did. And then I realized, oh hey, I do this self-publishing thing, and GameSpite Quarterly is pretty much exactly the same size and format as Famidas... and here we are now. Except this book encompasses more than just Famicom material and extends to all of the 8-bit family. And the write-ups probably aren't quite as didactic as Famidas's.
Anyway. Barring some unforeseen crisis, which is entirely possible given the way my life's been going lately, this issue will be submitted for proofs by the end of the week and should be up for order before Thanksgiving. Are you excited? Well, dang it, you should be.
11. Super Mario Galaxy
I'm pretty sure Super Mario Galaxy is the most recent release on this entire list (barely edging out Portal by a matter of days). Less than two years is a pretty quick turnaround time for a game to make the top of so many people's list of personal favorites. But I think it's telling that Super Mario 64 is nowhere to be seen on the list; clearly Galaxy simply soaked up all the love for 3D Mario.
41. Alpha Centauri
Today we're posting the last of issue two's hardcover-only content -- and, maybe by coincidence, the last of the games voted into this issue with which I have zero experience. From here on out, it's all familiar titles that everyone loves, like Silver Surfer for NES and that one game where you beat up Osama bin Laden as the final boss. (No, not Assassin's Creed. The other one.)
42. Sonic 3 & Knuckles
I was surprised that Sonic 3 made the cut for this issue, even at this fairly low ranking. Sonic 2 is so much better! But it's nowhere to be seen. Yet the people have spoken, and Mightyblue has written, and apparently many magical rings have been collected! This doesn't change the fact that Knuckles is pretty much a jerk. And so's the guy who invented Lock-On Technology.
12. Metal Gear Solid 3
There were a few instances in the voting for this issue where things lined up in a way that I found totally acceptable. I'm still annoyed that Bionic Commando didn't show up anywhere on the list; but on the other hand, Metal Gear Solid 3 showed up pretty close to the top of the list as the most beloved chapter of the Metal Gear series. And that is completely correct.
GameSpite Quarterly 2, #13: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
01 November 09 | 21:51 | Posted by:
13. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
Did I mention that there were a lot of Zelda games voted into this issue? You guys really like them, I guess. For my part, this particular entry was my favorite chapter of the series for a long time. At some point, I guess it stopped being my favorite, but I'm not really sure when that was. Or why. Now that I think about it, Link's Awakening really is pretty awesome. Yeah. I should go play it again.
After far too many hours of effort, I've completed all 127 profile headers for Issue 3. Honestly, the rest of the book is gonna be a piece of cake from here. Time-consuming, yeah, but far less tedious. Now to copy edit the text so I can start placing it along with the images to develop some semblance of an actual publication!
Crap, I guess I need to come up with a cover design, too.
I guess I should also finally finish Etrian Odyssey II so I can write about it for GameSpite Quarterly 4. My brain hurts a little to think that far ahead... although that could just be from the gin and tonics I had at dinner.
Hello, mortals. I am pleased to announce today that GameSpite Quarterly 3 is now live. You can read the intro and the table of contents and buy a physical copy right this very moment. Perhaps it will bring a flicker of cheer to your brief existence here on this planet!
To reiterate, Metroid was designed with the knowledge that the people who were playing it in 1986 were new to side-scrolling action games (Super Mario Bros. having popularized them only a year prior), yet its creators wanted to break beyond the bounds of forced left-right side-scrolling. Rather than simply hope players would eventually come to understand, oh, you can and should move in all directions in this game, they instead put an object lesson in the opening area by creating a low passage in a room to the right of the starting point. This obstruction could only be cleared by ducking into a ball, for which you'd need the Maru-Mari power-up, which was slightly to the left of the starting point. They knew most people would automatically move right, because that's how you started the game in Mario and Adventure Island even Pac-Land before them. The placement of this obstacle and the tool necessary to overcome it were a subtle way of saying, "Here are the rules of this game. They're a little different than you're accustomed to. You will need to understand how they work." Speaking for myself and everyone else I've seen play Metroid for the first time, the game's flow works the same for pretty much everyone: Players make their way right, learning to shoot (at falling foes) and jump (over enemies too low to be shot). Then they hit the wall, literally, and wonder why they can't go on. Eventually, they begin to wander to the left and make their way back to the starting area. At this point, they're starting to feel a little frustrated -- all that progress wasted! -- but then they notice you can move left from the starting blocks and, hey, one screen over is this new ability.
I'm happy to see, at least, that Nintendo is pulling back from the precipice over which Twilight Princess plunged so tragically. Great game, but did it really need to hold your hand delicately for five hours before letting you actually play? New Super Mario Bros. Wii is encouraging: Rather than explain its new abilities with text, it puts them in places where they simply make sense, uses a quick pop-up icon over your character's head to show what needs to be done to activate your new powers, and often even gives silent hints to your new potential by showing bad guys using similar powers. 
1. Super Metroid
2. Chrono Trigger
3. Final Fantasy VI
4. Super Mario Bros. 3
5. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
The press proof for GameSpite Quarterly 3 arrived yesterday -- much sooner than I expected, in fact. The near-final product looks pretty good, and it's crazy dense. I'm talking 300+ pages. It's a lot of text.
6. Mega Man 2
7. Final Fantasy Tactics
8. EarthBound
9. Super Mario World
However, 3D gaming -- which is to say, specifically, the navigation of 3D space -- is not intuitive. On the contrary, it requires training and practice to master. As a point of fact, Mario games offered a perfect opportunity to train in 3D with the opening areas of Super Mario 64: The open field outside the castle and Lakitu-as-point-of-view conceit were deliberately positioned as an introduction to dealing with the realities of 3D space. Of course, that was 13 years ago, and not everyone buying games now -- especially the gaming novitiates Nintendo prizes -- has played Mario 64. 
10. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
11. Super Mario Galaxy
41. Alpha Centauri
42. Sonic 3 & Knuckles
12. Metal Gear Solid 3
13. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening