Toy Fair 2015 is a wrap, and now it's time to dig through all the coverage to bring you the key items you'll want to prepare shelf space for when those pre-orders pop up. And I've gotta say, Mezco totally brought its 'A' game this year.
Who else would put out an Earthworm Jim action figure, mind blowing 1:12 Dark Knight Returns action figures, ultra creepy but still adorable Living Dead Dolls, and a veritable army of Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy action figures? But it's the new toys from Mortal Kombat X that we really came here to see. Here's a run down of the challengers yet to come.
Sub-Zero
Scorpion
Coming June 2015: Mezco’s design digitally sculpted the figures using files provided by the game developers themselves, meaning they're accurate down to the finest detail. Each figure features 23 points of articulation, many with ball joints, allowing them to recreate their most action-packed moves and poses.
Sub-Zero: Comes complete with his game accurate hammer and sword, and alternate fighting hands.
Scorpion: Includes his spear-tipped wrist chains, as well as two game-accurate swords and an additional pair of fighting hands.
Raiden: Comes with game-accurate alternate hands, alternate lightning hands, and a lightning ball.
Kitana: Includes her glaive, fan blades, and alternate fighting hands.
Quan-Chi: Packed with a skull projectile, sword, and alternate fighting hands.
Kotal Kahn: Comes with a macuahuitl, sun disk, X-ray knife, and alternate fighting hands.
Scoprion
Sub-Zero
Raiden
Scorpion
Sub-Zero
Raiden
Scorpion
Sub-Zero
Sub-Zero
Scorpion
Mez also has a teaser for Mortal Kombat Klassic in the back of its One:12 Collective catalog which suggests it might bring this license to its killer new action figure series. Bottom line, you scream for it and throw money, Mezco will make them. I suggest a series of emails that just read "GET OVER HERE!" with a hand-drawn picture of your favorite character and a photo of your money waiting to be spent. That should work!
For a look at the full show floor, check out this .
Complain though we might about the (seriously Assassin's Creed, we're worried about you), we do get pumped at the prospect of spin-offs where our favorite second bananas get some time in the spotlight. Yoshi, Clank, Raiden, Daxter, Wario, Vincent Valentine, unfortunately Tingle - that not at all exhaustive list shows how fertile the spin-off earth is for planting.
And hey, while we're getting our hands dirty, we have a few suggestions of our own! In the slides beyond you'll find a collection of of guys, gals, robots, and aliens who have all proven to be so capable, interesting, and memorable that they could easily support their own downloadable offshoots and/or massive trilogies. These sidekicks shouldn’t be wasting any more time in the background, and we know just what type of game they should star in. Do we have your attention, corporate overlords?
Sorry, what is this game series called again? The Legend of who? Hmm, funny that. As big a deal as Zelda is in the Legend of Zelda series, and as skilled a fighter as she's implied to be, a game with her at the helm has yet to materialize. gets close by making her playable and giving her control of her own badass army, but she gets the same amount of attention as everyone else in Team Fanservice, and basically ends up being upstaged by Link. Freakin' Link man. Ultimately, a game where she is the undisputed protagonist and doesn't get kidnapped is the only way to do this leading lady of Nintendo justice. Seriously, no kidnapping!
A Zelda-led title could fit snugly just about anywhere in the Legend of Zelda canon. Heck, she wouldn't even have to be a princess, if you wanted to go the Skyward Sword route. Just focus on her honing her magical abilities, and maybe make her transformation between Zelda and Sheik a gameplay mechanic as she travels through Hyrule on a quest to defeat Ganondorf. And it would be called The Legend of Link, naturally.
Half-Life is defined by the silence of scientist-turned-savior Gordon Freeman, but Half-Life 2 introduced gamers to a character many would come to love much more than the stoic Freeman. Alyx Vance is one of the more multifaceted characters in gaming, at times strong and determined, and at other times scared and unsure of herself. Despite occasionally ending up the damsel in distress for Gordon to save, she’s often Freeman’s equal, if not better equipped to deal with the alien-infested totalitarian state the world has become.
Were Valve to make a game starring Alyx, it could finally break out of its silent protagonist mold and have her take an active role in the story. The game could be a prequel, telling of Alyx’s many exploits as part of the resistance before Gordon decided to wake up from his convenient slumber, but that seems too safe for Valve. Instead, how about they throw the entire gaming world a curveball and make her the star of Half-Life 3, killing off Freeman in the first 10 minutes? Once players got over the shock, we think they’d ultimately appreciate a hero that can speak for herself.
Unlike most of the characters on this list, Falco has been trying his best to grab the spotlight since he first appeared. Hardly content to merely support Star Fox leader Fox McCloud, Falco is a hotshot pilot that consistently tries to outdo McCloud at every turn, and even when he slightly mellows with age, Falco's skills still rival Fox’s in the air. Plus, anyone that’s play Super Smash Bros. Melee knows Falco is at least Fox’s equal in hand-to-hand combat. It’s time Lombardi got the starring role he so richly deserves.
As the Star Fox titles continue to move away from the arcadey flight that defined the series, Falco has always remained committed to the air, so let’s just keep him there. Let Fox have his tanks and submarines, and let Falco’s spin-off focus entirely on classically-styled flight levels featuring Lombardi leading a whole new team of pilots. Star Fox traditionalists would finally have the game they’ve been clamoring for, and Falco could finally become the leadership position we assume Nintendo has been grooming him for.
It's true that Lydia is just as prone to standing in your way during a fight or getting stuck in a door as any other AI companion who follows at your heels. Still, as perfect as she may be for Fus Ro Dah target practice, it feels like there's something special about her. Maybe it's because she's a beautiful first companion, and you never forget your first. Maybe it's that she's really really good at carrying stuff. Maybe it's because she's an accomplished bodyguard (don't let her standing on your toes in battle fool you) with a mysterious past that you're burning to discover. Maybe it's all those things, and maybe all of that's so interesting that she should get a game all to herself. You know, maybe. By which I mean definitely.
Since Lydia's life before she met the Dragonborn is seldom mentioned, a game centered on her journey to become the best housecarl in all the land is ripe for exploration. How does she work her way up the social ladder to enter the house of Jarl Balgruuf before she's gifted to her thane? How many dungeons did she get hopelessly stuck in before mastering the art? Where did she learn how to cook? I MUST KNOW!
In a world of horrific military casualties, the man with a decent set of armor is king. Nobody proves that better than Clay Carmine, who managed to avoid losing his head or the majority of his torso to Locust swarms, which puts him many steps above his unfortunate brothers. Surviving thanks to his incredible physical prowess and , he's both skilled and interesting enough that he would probably survive a game of his own.
While Gears isn't what you'd call a narrative experience, it has its share of touching moments (most of them named 'Maria'), so Clay could spend a bit of time mourning his brothers in between blowing his enemies apart. In fact, Ben Carmine mentions having three brothers before his death, so why not go all Saving Private Carmine and have Clay go full-bore hunting down the last of his flesh and blood? With their luck the guy would probably die , but it's worth a shot!
, and we'll say it again: get this girl a game! Your young ward and moral compass during your trip through Dunwall, Emily may seem more like an animate door prize than potential protagonist, but there's more to her when you take a closer look. She mentions Corvo teaching her at least basic combat skills, for instance, and Dishonored's possible eldritch abomination/whale god The Outsider takes an interest in her early on. These things combined, it's easy to see Emily going on a magic-powered quest for justice/murder spree all her own.
Granted this may be a bit tricky, since Dishonored ends with her becoming either a puppy-feeding saint or a full-on psychopath at age twelve, resulting in two wildly disparate versions of her character. But since it wouldn't be too difficult to port your chaos rating from the first game, this could actually be an interesting mechanic, letting Emily start off as either a goody-toe-shoes or horribly evil and have that affect her options going forward. Regardless, you'd get to play as a badass assassin queen, and who wouldn't want that?
Though she turns into a bit of a damsel in , Jeanne is every bit her badass bestie's equal, and she takes care of herself just fine for the 500 years before the Bayonetta we know starts kicking around. What exactly was she up to all that time? Undoubtedly something completely insane involving a lot of interpretive dance and explosions, and you know you want to play the living hell out of it.
Since Jeanne would probably handle a lot like Bayonetta (if her unlockable model in both of the games is anything to go by), you can probably expect the same sort of globe-trotting, angel-stomping shenanigans from her. Plus, since the series tends to play it close to the vest with expository details, there are plenty of aspects of the world left to explore. Maybe Jeanne and Bayonetta's witch training, or the war between the Umbran Witches and the Lumen Sages, or the half of millennium of downtime afterward. And what's that? The producer for Bayonetta 2 ? Yes? Yes.
For as interesting as the redemptive tale of Darth Revan was, virtually everyone that played Knights of the Old Republic remembers a certain deadly droid more than anyone else in the groundbreaking RPG. An accomplished droid assassin, HK-47 captured the hearts of gamers everywhere with his dark sense of humor and propensity for suggesting that murdering people with lasers was always the best solution to a problem. Popping up occasionally in sequels and both Star Wars MMOs, nothing seems to be able to stop this droid, so why don’t we just cut to the chase and give him his own game?
Fortunately for HK-47, the market for action games starring assassins is booming right now, so a Hitman/Assassin’s Creed type game starring HK-47 is like a blank check LucasArts has yet to cash. The publisher has already covered the darker aspects of the Star Wars universe in games like Force Unleashed, but telling tales of HK-47’s past working for gangsters and other unsavory elements would explore a part of Star Wars mythology rarely seen outside of the occasional novel or comic book. Sure, a Boba Fett game would work about the same, but that would deprive the world of more of HK’s hilarious disgust for the meatbags that comprise humanity.
The supporting players in Chrono Trigger are so well realized and defined that almost any of them could support their own spin-off. We'd surely enjoy a game starring Magus or Robo, but we see the most star potential in the tragic tale of Frog. A noble, stoic knight that’s cursed to be trapped in an amphibian's body, he doesn't let that stop him from being a heroic swordsman.
Though the official ending of Chrono Trigger has Frog return to his human form, we hope that the new side game would keep him in his green form. The setting could stay in his home time of 600 AD with him defending the realm from some new threat now that Magus is taken care of. You could even give him some sidekicks of his own who might just be cool enough to get a sequel in 2028.
As is tradition at GR, we saved room for at least one mention of Okami in this feature, but this one is richly deserved. For most of the game Issun appears to be a talkative glowing flea that’s a little too obsessed with attractive women. When you see the tiny aspiring artist up close, you’ll notice he’s actually a respectable young man with a cool brush that doubles for his sword. After he helps Amaterasu save the day, Issun decides to continue the work of the gods on Earth, a plot worth seeing unfold.
Issun’s game would follow the tiny guy’s continuing adventures to keep the world safe from demons, and the biggest draw would be the interesting sense of scale for the character’s world. Similar to the the memorable shrunken levels in Okami, Issun will face dangerous enemies and save humanity without ever being noticed by the larger world. And since he followed along with Amaterasu to learn her Celestial Brush techniques in Okami, let’s say he inherits those innovative powers, but puts his own unique, inch-high spin on the whole thing.
Nathan Drake may be the coolest thief/archeologist/trained killer in a half-tucked shirt, but he learned all those skills from the master, one Victor “Sully” Sullivan. Sully adopted Nate to teach him all about stealing artifacts and shooting people, skills Sully picked up in his time in the Navy and as a freelance thief in his own right. An accomplished pilot with a love of fine cigars, Sully supports Nate every step of the way, usually keeping pace with Drake’s acrobatics, which is impressive considering he's, like, 300 years old.
Sully’s skills and determination give him great star potential, though his age and constant smoking stretches the believability of his ability to have adventures, so let’s turn back the clock. Let’s see the decades of adventure that Sully had before working with Nathan, having fun throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Of course, it could also take place after he teams with young Nathan, allowing for co-op missions with Drake pushed back into the sidekick role, an interesting change in fortune.
Gamers all over the world are clamoring for the return of Mega Man, and while we also miss the Blue Bomber, his sister has been relegated to warming the bench for far too long. Roll has made playable appearances before, usually as a comedic character in fighting games Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. Normally the jokes center around her cooking and cleaning abilities, which is why we want to see a game that finally bucks those domestic stereotypes and make her at least as tough as her brother.
We see the story opening with Dr. Wily finally succeeding in defeating Mega Man, nearly destroying the droid and leaving him at death’s door. There seems to be no hope until Roll nominates herself for an upgrade, admitting that she’s always been a little jealous that Mega Man gets to have all the fun. Light reluctantly weaponizes her, sending Roll into the fray to take on the Robot Masters. When she ultimately succeeds, she earns a newfound respect from her friends and family. Meanwhile, as Mega Man recovers, he finds a new passion for cooking and cleaning, which could play out in some random minigames.
It’s hard to steal focus from a character as compelling as GLaDOS, but in Portal 2 Wheatley pulled it off with endearing--and overly British--incompetence. A dangerously moronic program created by Aperture Science in the hopes of dumbing down GlaDOS, Wheatley accompanies Portal players through a good chunk of the game, usually making things worse through his bumbling idiocy. But even when he turns on you, it’s hard not to love the foolish robotic orb, because when he’s maniacally plotting your death, he’s still incredibly funny.
Were Wheatley to get his own game, we’d pick up right where we left him, floating around the moon. After learning the error of his ways, Wheatley teams up with his fellow floating spheres and tries to find a way home, propelling himself in zero gravity through a series of clever puzzles. Having the bumbling AI complete physics-based conundrums sounds like a fittingly scientific approach for a Portal spin-off.
Grand Theft Auto IV protagonist Niko Bellic was a an interesting character who made tough choices. Still, much of the time Niko just bummed us out, and we’d rather spend time with his friends, particularly the hilariously inept Brucie. At first it’s easy to hate Brucie’s over-the-top machismo and quest for respect, but soon that gives way to pity, then understanding for a friend that will always have your back. By the finale we loved to hang with the genetically different Brucie, if for no other reason than to hear the next way his barely-hidden homosexuality would pop-up in dialogue.
Since Brucie is so much more fun than GTA IV’s star, fans deserve at least some spin-off DLC starring our favorite bro. Crafted in the style of The Ballad of Gay Tony, a Brucie side story could work as a brilliant bit of self-parody on the part of Rockstar. The plot could follow the usual path of one man’s morally grey rise in the world of crime, only Brucie’s idiocy would derail it at every turn as he screws up every mission in some ridiculous fashion. GTA games have always been some of the funniest in gaming, so it’d be great to see Rockstar do a full-on comedy, and Brucie is just the man for the job.
Sure, is all well and good, but I can't be the only one who thought what about Shaundi? She may show up in some of the Saints Row side material and does go all Terminator for How the Saints Saved Christmas (in the spirit of the season), but she doesn't yet have a game to call her own. Not even a standalone expansion. And that's just wrong.
Given that pretty much anything goes in Saints Row (recall that there's a DLC pack called Enter the Dominatrix, and that Gat Outta Hell is a literal description), there are no limits on what Shaundi's adventure could entail. Think epic planet-hopping adventures with Jane Austen to liberate Saturn from the grip of reptilian space bikers who are also on fire, and she's part robot 'cause that's awesome. That's one idea, and it already sounds perfect. Come on devs, show a homie some love.
Those are the 15 sidekicks that desperately deserve their own game, and honestly, we're not just wishing to the wind here. Not only do these characters have obvious protag potential, but when we originally said that Mario's Toad should have his own game? Just saying, there's some magic in our words.
Can you think of any other background players that are deserving of a solo game? Let us know in the comments below, and get some of these good vibes. Big money, big money!
Want to learn more about sidekicks? Check out our list of the .
When asked to write up the important showpieces of Toy Fair 2015, I took it very seriously. With 20 years of collectibles reporting behind me, I develop a sort of twitch if I'm not able to dive into the topic fully and completely. That being the case, there was only one company I needed to look to for that same level of love in creating every figure it brings to retail: NECA.
Did you catch NECA's incredible BioShock Infinite Motorized Patriots? What about the army of Gears of War figures, complete with two of the bloodiest toys ever created? NECA loves its work and it shows, and we show them our love by throwing money at them. Get ready for plenty of that impulse as I explore NECA's 2015 video game related lineup.
Blizzard's team brawler brings all its favorite characters into one game, and now, one action figure line! Blizzard action figures used to be brilliant but fairly immobile, statue-like figures. That all changes now. NECA's fully articulated 7 inch action figures kick off with...
Series 1: Summer 2015
Nova
Illidan
Deluxe figure: Stitches
Note: Stitches pictured is actual figure size while the others are two-up prototypes.
Tyrael
Arthas to stores late Summer/early Fall.
This is a new licence for NECA and a new partnership with Sony, which will hopefully lead to more projects down the line. The LittleBigPlanet figures will be released in assortments of three, featuring two Sack Boys and one version with a deco from another video game.
Series 1: June 2015
Happy Sack Boy
Sad Sack Boy
Kratos from God of War
The rest shown are 'possibilities' including Killzone and Uncharted versions. NECA says it hopes to crank out at least six of the eight shown, if not all.
NECA continues its popular salute to classic video games starring our favorite movie characters through 2015. This year's crop includes...
A collaborative effort between two main painters at NECA and Director of Product Development Randy Falk made these little pieces of art a reality. Poring over cut scenes, gameplay, box covers, and title screens gave them plenty of reference to use for the final figure. For instance, Rambo here comes from a couple of different looks inspired by a mash-up of the Nintendo and Sega games. The painter decides on the colors and shading and the group gives input. What's next? Randy says "a bunch more!" No spoilers, apparently.
Dante comes in a deluxe window box with over 35 points of articulation, Ebony and Ivory pistols with removable muzzle bursts, Dante's sword Alastor, a shotgun, and interchangeable hands. The figure goes on sale in May.
Video games heroes, movie protagonists, and more - that's a pretty cool collection. Which icon is going on your shelf this year? Sound off in the comments below!
There's more to see this year, like the for a look at just about everything on the show floor.
Video games require a lot of suspension of disbelief, more so than movies or books. And that’s totally fine. We’re in no rush to trade in balletic aerial throwdowns atop fighter jets, sword battles with dragons, or the punching of gods in the face. This is not an article in support of the dull mundanities of the real world. That said, there are plenty of times when things in videogameland don’t even make sense within their own fiction. And if games have taught me anything, it’s that the best way to find out whether something works is by trying to blow it up and seeing how well it holds together.
So, here are eight devices that, when you really think about them, are about as incongruous as a window box on a submarine. That have less point than a nail with a head at both ends. That fall apart faster than ACME flatpack furniture. I wouldn’t change most of them for the world, you understand, but poking holes, and a little fun, won’t do these games much harm. Shall we?
Pokemon
No, not for the reason you’d think. If I can buy into the TARDIS, I can live with unspecified technology capable of shrinking a monster the size of an office block into a tiny sphere. What just doesn’t scan is how this tool of the monster hunting trade ever got out of RD. Every trainer knows that even the puniest Pokemon can bust out of a ball before it’s been weakened, with a tiny capture rate based on blind luck. Oh sure, maybe the very first Pokeball thrower got lucky before he was pecked to death by a rabid Pidgeotto, but remember that they were lobbing a hollowed-out Apricorn, not even one of Silph Co’s weaksauce starter models. It’s unlikely.
So what do you use to weaken Pokemon to get them inside Pokeballs? Why, Pokemon, of course. In Pokeballs. Which got there how? It’s the chicken and the egg all over again, except the egg is a white-and-red gacha capsule and the chicken can shoot lightning from its cheeks. People bang on about how Pokeballs are a dark, prison-like concept, but they’re a sunshiny picnic compared to thoughts of early trainers in the long grass toting baseball bats covered in Rattata blood from all the, ahem, weakening they’ve been doing. Brrr.
Halo
Oh no! The Flood are infesting everything in sight. However shall we stop them? Why, by building a bunch of gigantic death-rings in space, slaughtering every thinking being in the galaxy so the Flood starve to death, and then starting over. Obviously. But you know what, mass extinction of all life just seems so callous and wasteful, so let’s also use those death rings to study Flood specimens, where they won’t suffer any harm when we murderise all the other, not galaxy-threatening, sentient life. What could possibly go wrong?
Not only is this the worst plan in history - like trying to put out a forest fire while coating all your fire engines in napalm - but even the Forerunners didn’t totally buy into it, building a master ring to rule them all (OK, it has petals too) outside of the galaxy, where they could take key species to survive the whole inconvenience of extinction. Its great defenses are anonymity and distance, so what do the geniuses at the Forerunner council cook up? That’s right, a portal that takes you straight there. At which point, you might as well paint ‘Guys, we totally left the keys in the ignition in case you needed a climactic battle over the fate of the universe. Hugs!’ on the side of thing and have done, no?
Lego Indiana Jones
OK, it’s hardly TT Games’ fault, but this iconic cinematic moment makes even less sense when subject to the clumsy fingers of players. And that’s from a base level of making no sense whatsoever. If you’re designing an elaborate mechanism to protect a priceless golden idol, by all means throw in pressure plates and poison arrows and spike traps before any light-fingered rogues can lift the thing off its pedestal. I don’t envy you the cleaning bill, or the smell, but objective achieved. Far less sensible is placing a trap trigger after the thief is making off with your precious statue. I'm pretty sure having to climb down into a spike pit to retrieve an idol is the dreaded fast-food chain career of the pre-industrial world.
The boulder trap, however, doesn’t just risk damage to the idol. It ensures it. Assuming it even works. What really is the plan here? To give successful thieves a bonus cardiac workout? And is that worth rolling your nice, soft, golden cave-candy into a spectacularly ugly plate? Imagine having to explain that one to the gods. Gulp.
Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Forget the three-in-one grenades that ensure exactly 66.66 per cent of each one is wasted. Forget the sound suppression charge that stops enemies from being alerted to your presence by creating a highly noticeable absence of sound. Nope, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s least plausible technology is these magnetic gloves. Because why? Why do men wearing Exo suits that can rocket jump them into the air suddenly need to haul themselves up very specifically constructed buildings? You know, ones made of sheet metal, not the much more common stone or brick. Are they... CLONG! Are they for...CLONG! Aretheyforstealth? CLONG! Nope, they’re clearly not for fricking stealth purposes either.
Look, I get there hasn’t been a decent Spider-man game in bloody ages. And kudos, really, for trying. But if rubber-faced Kevin Spacey wants to turn this whole Atlas thing into an earner, he might want to can the mag gloves and look into supplying grappling hooks. I mean, even the Sentinel Task Force seems to have worked that one out, and it’s not like they were particularly smart when it came to shutting down a certain, obviously evil private military company leader before he went rogue...
Dead Space
Isaac Clarke is many things. Engineer. Man of action. Handy with a Plasma Cutter. Delusional. Paranoid. But Mr Fantastic he is not, and it’s therefore a bit of a stretch (if you’ll pardon the pun; please do, it was awful) to see why RIG suits only put their wearer’s health read-out on the spine, where everyone but the occupant can see it. Developer Visceral knows this. That’s why a little searching in Chapter 7 will turn up a poster emblazoned “Watch each other’s back! Safety begins with teamwork.” Cute, but it explains so very little.
There’s something incredibly disturbing about a society that's totally comfortable with indiscriminately broadcasting the exact, current welfare of its individual citizens, and something almost sadistic about putting critical information, such as the amount of stasis power you have left, so tantalisingly out of reach. Still, while as a feat of industrial design the RIG is something of an own goal, Isaac is an engineer. A couple of well-placed bathroom mirrors and a few bolts, and he can start soiling himself just as much as we do when that comforting cyan spinal column starts changing colour faster than an LED mood light.
Metroid
Samus’s Power Suit is a thing of wonder. Arm cannon, Grapple Beam, missiles… this thing has the works. It also has the curious ability to do, er, something to its user that prevents them needing a swift trip to AE and a wheelchair for life when it wraps up them up into a ball. Another cheeky nod from the developers here: in Metroid Prime, there’s a lore entry about the Space Pirates attempting to reverse-engineer the Morph Ball. Let’s just say it didn’t end well for the mangled test subjects.
Still, the real question is not how it doesn’t kill Samus, but why it’s part of her arsenal at all. What use does an incredibly weaponised suit of powered armour have for the ability to roll through tunnels, when you have enough firepower on your wrist to clear out a planet? You seriously couldn't make the hole a little wider with a little click-click, boom-boom? Or, you know, crawl, with a far lower profile than a thigh-high ball could possibly offer. Real-life spleunkers manage to wriggle through tiny gaps with air tanks on their backs, so the obviously limber Samus shouldn’t have too much trouble getting through, even with those shoulder pads. Yes, the Morph Ball can jump (how can it jump?), and drop bombs, and is very cool, but with everything else the Power Suit can do, it's just over-engineering on a grand – well, one-thirds – scale.
BioShock Infinite
Ah, the friendly skies. So peaceful. So serene. So pant-wettingly terrifying when you’re 30,000 ft above the ground, suspended only by a thinnish rail and an open, sharp-enough-to-cut-a-face-apart blender attached to a wooden brace. Even assuming that everyone in the world of Columbia has downed a vigor capable of giving them the grip strength of a silverback gorilla (I imagine the bottle would be an Art Deco clenched fist with ice on the knuckles), it’s a terribly unsafe way to travel. What if you sneeze, or there’s standstill traffic on the rail? There’s no way to switch arms when one grows tired. And while the Hook itself may be magnetised to ensure a good lock, sweaty hands seem like an awfully obvious point of failure.
Fictionally, of course, the first rail riders are daredevils, not proles. But when you start giving these things out at public fairs, you’ve got to question exactly who is going to want to go shopping, say, with a Sky-Hook taking up an entire arm? It’s not like you could carry anything home without drastically increasing your chances of becoming a human pancake in the very near future.
Resident Evil
Look, I love the Resident Evil REmake, but the Spencer Mansion’s security system is properly bonkers. And of all the mad ways to protect Umbrella’s questionable research, none is quite as insane as the fun little set-up George Trevor creates for the armour Key. You see, the thing about the armour trap is that it’s a two-parter. Part one is far-fetched enough, involving summoning an undead dog with a whistle, then removing its collar. Assuming all the Umbrella employees handle this like Jill or Chris, the company would be getting through a whole lot of hounds a year just to enter some old rooms.
Still, in a roundabout way, this eventually gives you a fragile imitation of the required key, which – if the intern doesn’t accidentally try it in a lock and break it forever, leaving ol' Spencer in quite a bind – can then be used to deactivate the second part of the trap. Part two means removing the real key from a pedestal, activating a whirligig bladed suit of armour on rails, and then plopping the fake in place to reset the deadly knight before it turns the workie kid you sent to do this into salami. The flaw in this master plan, bar the easily ruined imitation? Any patient thief could take the imitation to their local key cutters and bypass the possibility of inglorious dicing. Maybe stick to key cards next time?
Time to remove my fingers from the light socket of the universe and go and find a good comb. But I’m certain that can’t be all the video game gizmos that unravel faster than a Bubsy game. Call out the ones you’ve noticed in the comments below. Between us, I’m sure we can turn up more madcap gadgets than even Q could store in a lab.
And while you're musing upon that, why not check out some of our related, bad-science features for inspiration? May I recommend ?
Remakes and remasters are a fun facet of modern gaming that allow old games to feel fresh. They give new players a chance to enjoy retro titles in the HD era, while older fans can play the titles of their youth without digging up a CRT television. But what about the opposite? What happens when more recent games get redone as pixelated adventures? That’s how you end up with demakes.
Demakes are clever tributes to the games of today that reimagine them as if they were on the consoles of bygone eras. Whether by the developers themselves or inventive fans, these jokey prequels let you celebrate your love of retro games in a whole new way. And these have to be the most clever demakes out there...
Speaking of Capcom, after Platinum’s staff left the company, the publisher went in a number of new directions. Not all of Capcom’s experiments were successful - for every Dead Rising, there was a Dark Void. The jetpack-based action game wanted to be a serious AAA contender, but it’s a dreadfully boring game, and it doesn’t have half the spirit and sense of fun as its jokey spin-off, Dark Void Zero.
Starting as an April Fool’s goof by the developers at Other Ocean Interactive, Dark Void Zero fast became a reality. The silly 2D download purported itself to be a Playchoice-10 game, because that was one of the earliest dual screen arcade machines that the DS could replicate. A mix of old Metroid, Castlevania, and Contra, this game started as a promotional tool for Dark Void proper. Now Dark Void Zero, a fictionally forgotten game, is the only thing people remember about the series.
A lot of these demakes stick with the warmer, friendlier worlds of 16 and 8-bit gaming, while Halo 2600 heads back to the truly primitive days of Atari. The aged system’s games ruled the United States in the early ‘80s, and are the gaming equivalent of cave paintings today, which is just the feel is going for. It molds Master Chief into the hero of second gen classics like Adventure or the catastrophically bad E.T. game, only you’re the one killing extraterrestrials this time.
It’s a cute way to kill your free time, but it’s also noteworthy for being more connected to the source material than most fanmade freeware. The game is credited to Ed Fries, who older gamers may recall as one of the earliest Xbox bosses. He worked hard to get developers like Bungie on the console, so that explains his connection to the Halo franchise. Halo 2600 came out a few years after he left Microsoft, proving that even if he doesn’t collect an Xbox paycheck, he couldn’t give up on the Chief.
The most recent, faux-old entry is a cute bit of fanservice from Platinum Games. The Osaka, Japan team is known for hiding dense Easter eggs in its games, and the same can be said for Platinum’s website. If you find yourself on the , you’ll be treated to a simple game that recasts company star Bayonetta as a 16-bit angel slayer in a pixelated shooter.
The Flash game obviously lacks the depth of a proper Bayonetta battle, but it’s a cute treat nonetheless. The graphics and chiptune soundtrack feel like a labor of love from fans who dig their own work. I’d happily buy a downloadable offering of a much fuller game. It has the unmistakable vibe of a SNES-era Capcom game, which isn’t surprising considering more than a few Platinum employees were with the company back then.
This demake may have the weirdest backstory and the strangest shift in gameplay styles of all. Fallout has always been a very Western-centric series, but with Fallout: New Vegas, publisher Bethesda had a clever plan for introducing the title to a new audience. When you headed to New Vegas’ , a version of Fallout would boot up that looked suspiciously like a 8-bit RPG.
Turning Fallout into Dragon Quest is a cute trick, and perhaps I could’ve soaked in more of the cleverness if I could actually read Japanese. As it stands, the pixelated world and turn-based action is an adorable way to introduce fans of JRPGs to the long-lived postnuclear roleplaying series. Hopefully this radical strategy convinced at least a few fans of old school Dragon Quest to take a trip down to New Vegas.
Now this here is a pretty passive-aggressive demake. The indie dev team behind Super Meat Boy were resistant to porting their game to iOS. Mainly because the two Meat Boy creators felt that phone games lacked any real depth, and that mobile titles were the current day equivalent of those crummy Tiger Electronics ports from decades ago. Then, to prove their point, the developers literally created a .
As the devs put it, the crappy on-screen controller is both true to iOS gaming and the terrible LCD screens of the early ‘90s. The platforming is intentionally terrible, going along with developer Tommy Refenes' belief that iOS controls of the time But, as intentionally poor as the gameplay and graphics may be, Super Meat Boy Handheld is a humorously ironic lark, and now it feels extra special because the game has since been removed from the App Store, with an actual Meat Boy iOS game coming soon.
Retro City Rampage on the surface feels more like a nostalgia-rific tribute to the games of the ‘80s and ‘90s than a true demake. A bit like a mix of Grand Theft Auto, Mario, Metal Gear, Contra, and a stoned afternoon watching Back to the Future, Retro City Rampage is also a Cinderella story for the makers of unlicensed demakes. More than a decade before its final release, RCR began as one fan’s attempt to make an NES version of GTA3.
In 2002, developer Brian Provinciano had thought it’d be fun to build his own dev tools for the NES, eventually crafting a homebrew title called Grand Theftendo. The top-down action and inventive use of graphics became a cult hit in the indie community, and Provinciano decided to go all out in expanding the cute tribute into a full game. By 2012 Retro City Rampage came out, packed with more references to Generation X than anyone can handle in one sitting.
AM2’s Virtua Fighter games broke boundaries for 3D fighters, and the series was also on the forefront of demakes. While so many other entries in here are postmodern throwbacks, the Genesis/Mega Drive version of Virtua Fighter 2 saw release around the same time as the Saturn version. And because Sega’s 16-bit machine could scarcely handle polygons when porting Virtua Racing, the Genesis version flattened the perspective to make the premiere 3D fighter .
Unless you were still a dedicated Genesis owner in 1997, you likely missed this game, but that’s no great tragedy. It’s a slightly above average 2D brawler that halfheartedly recreates most of the characters and moves of its three dimensional sibling, though the sound is atrocious. The music and SFX are the noise equivalent of pouring an exquisite wine through a dish rag. My heart goes out to any kid who asked for Virtua Fighter 2 as a gift and got this version.
I have strong nostalgia for the Game Watch handhelds of the early ‘80s, though advocating for them sounds like I’m saying, “Ditch that car for a horse and carriage. Sure, it’s out of date, but the buggy whip is outstanding.” Nintendo’s clock combos have simple action akin to the cheapest of today’s iOS games, and you can get a pretty accurate feel for them in , a unique tribute to God of War.
Invented by fans for the granddaddy of Flash gaming, Newgrounds, Greek Wicked takes the Hydra boss battle that opened up the first GoW and makes it as lo-fi as possible. The characters may be flat silhouettes, and the noise beeps ‘n boops, but it’s still a faithful recreation, right down to the QTE conclusion. And just like in classic Game Watch releases, you can beat Greek Wicked in minutes, and are expected to repeat it endlessly until your character dies. Truly, this version of Kratos is worthy of GW’s legacy.
That’s a diverse set of tributes, including a number that are more than a little official, but am I missing any? Drop some links in the comments, because I’m always ready for another dose of faux nostalgia.
Ah, Dragon Age. You came and conquered, with your dragon slaying, templar defiling, open-world, giant nug-riding immensity. So why, after 100 hours of my lazing-on-the-sofa-doing-nothing devotion, ending my journey in the deadly peaks of Emprise du Lion with ruins to spare, do I feel a little less than loved? Don’t panic, I still worship you, but that’s not going to stop me from dissecting you. Sorry!
Because, in spite of our admiration for Varric’s chest hair and Iron Bull’s mighty breasts, in the end, BioWare could still do something to improve you. Or eight somethings, actually. So here are the improvements I dare to suggest, nestled within the heart of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s crucial RPG components. Beware, mild spoilers ahead!
Upon first seeing the colossal Skyhold, the Sims-obsessed part of me trembled with glee. My very own castle. A dungeon! Even a wine cellar! Mine … all mine! The possibilities of personalisation seemed endless.
Endlessly functionless, that is. Most of Skyhold’s customisable faucets are void of purpose, aside from being a visual feast. The biggest nuisance is the lack of an inventory chest in the unnecessarily enormous, private quarters, rendering repeated visits to sell unwanted loot a continuous annoyance. Such simple, functioning aspects would be a welcome addition to our personalised castles; taking post dragon slaying naps in my inquisitor-sized bed for example. That’d be just lovely.
Undeniably, BioWare delivers fantastic, non-human companions, with Iron Bull’s irresistible voice, Solas’ unhealthy relationship with demons, Varric’s wit and… we won’t talk about Sera. So, Dragon Age: Inquisition isn’t just about humans, right?
Wrong. In conversation and lore, BioWare tells us about the turbulent political status of the dwarfs, elves and the qunari. The key word being ‘tells’, given that, besides the companions, rarely do we interact with other races. There’s a pathetically small Dalish camp, some token ancient elves and rebel dwarfs, but that’s it. It leaves a huge qunari-less hole in the game. So, perhaps in future DLC, BioWare could integrate volvement with the other races, because humans are, well, really boring.
Especially prevalent in the second half of the game, the strong bond between Inquisitor and companion seems to become slack. If, like me, you develop a relationship with your companions early (they’re just so damn lovable), conversation options dry out quickly. It’s not quite as bad as listening to Garrus’ obsession with finishing his calibrations, but it’s getting there.
Consequently, it’d be great to see some additional loyalty quests, to bolster character development and to strengthen relationships between us and our favourite companions. While I revel in making imperative decisions for my friends, the aftermath of stale chit-chat leaves me feeling a little cheated.
Everyone loves dogs, with their floppy ears, wet noses and unshaken loyalty. Unless you don’t… then maybe you should move to the next slide. Nonetheless, considering BioWare provides your inquisitor with a castle and boyfriend/girlfriend/godfriend, it seems rather cruel that man’s best buddy doesn’t make an appearance.
A mabari war-hound would be a valuable companion on the battlefield. Instead of the search feature, we could make use of a Fable-esque mabari nose-radar, on top of an extra pair of teeth in battle. The beloved mabari companion was a hit in Dragon Age: Origins, so why isn’t it here?
BioWare delivers an engrossing story, with edge-of-your-seat twists married with badass inquisitor moments. However, for all the completionists out there, main quests are too few and far between, in consideration of the vastness of Inquisition’s thirteen areas.
Truthfully, there are only so many fade rifts, fetch quests and who-put-what-invaluable-treasure-where mysteries a player can do before the pace simply loses momentum. Dragon Age: Inquisition could certainly learn a thing or two from games like Divinty: Original Sin or Skyrim when it comes to a much needed injection of engrossing fillers, preventing our minds evaporating through repetition.
The sheer thrill of executing a final blow at the end of difficult battles in Dragon Age: Origins is unforgettable. Especially after being bludgeoned way too many times by an extraordinary foe like Flemmeth, swinging around the beast’s head and performing a finishing mid-air strike, Final Fantasy style, makes me cackle with vicious pleasure.
So, why isn’t this mechanic included in Dragon Age: Inquisition? Without this final gratification for our gruesome efforts, the aftermath of epics battles falls a little flat. We could say that removing cinematic kills endorses a sense of realism, but we’re talking about dragons and giant nugs here. Besides, who doesn’t need more slow-mo action shots in their lives?
Shards. Shards everywhere. I hate shards. But using them to open the Temple of Solasaan proffers just rewards, so as much as I hate to say it; they’re worth searching for. This mind-bogglingly boring quest is easy; find the Ocularum, spy the shards, go fetch.
But we are deceived! See that reachable shard peaking at you on the hill? It’s not reachable. Instead, you have to jump, scramble, and fall to find a passable route to the golden ticket (50% of the time anyway). Please BioWare, if you’re going persecute us like this, at least incorporate fun ways to interact with the environment. Far Cry 4 and Divinity: Original Sin put you to shame in this respect.
If you explore every area before completing Dragon Age: Inquisition’s finale, you may find yourself finishing the ultimate stages of the controller-gripping story arc more rapidly than you’d hoped, as a consequence of your over-powered party. But you’re not to blame!
The desolate Hissing Wastes and red lyrium-infested Emprise Du Lion have a plethora of extra side quests and striking landscapes to discover at higher levels. Sadly, we’re punished for that extra gameplay, since Doom Upon All the World is recommended for levels 16-19, rendering our death match with Corpyheus, after extra adventures, easy. Raised difficulty levels would be advantageous here, or dare I say, adding an extra main quest?
So that's my current list of things that could quickly improve Dragon Age's latest and greatest. But how about you? Any particular tweaks you'd like, or do you think it's already perfect as-is? Let me know in the comments.
And before you go, why not check out some of our related features? Our .
At a very young age, I longed to play the board game Trivial Pursuit, but I was too young to have the knowledge needed to succeed. From then on I worked hard to collect all the useless knowledge I could in the hopes of one day being the ultimate trivia game champion. That hasn’t really worked out so far, but a handy side effect is I have a ton unnecessary information on subjects such as games, and that information demands to be shared.
Still, in a long career of compiling lists of errata, you end up with a lot of unexpected strangeness that doesn’t really fit anywhere else. But all these little nuggets of unlikely gaming knowledge need a space for recognition as well, so I’ve collected them into one weird place. Ones that will make people go, “Really?” before Googling their veracity. But, believe it or not, these bits of off-the-wall gaming trivia are all real...
The directional pad (D-pad for short) is such a constant in the gaming world that it seems weird that any one company could lay claim to it, but Nintendo did just that for decades. Created for an early portable recreation of Donkey Kong, the cross-shaped input method felt superior to just about any other control at the time, and it’s still a standard for 2D movement. In honor of that achievement, Nintendo was awarded an Emmy to further cement the d-pad’s legacy. That may seem strange, as Emmys are mainly known as awards for television, but the d-pad’s award falls under the ‘science’ section of The National Academy of Television Arts Sciences. Officially Nintendo won it for “” back in 2007, and I think it’s a wasted opportunity that all future controllers didn’t have ‘Emmy Winning!” on the packaging.
The Xbox had a ho-hum debut in 2000, so Bill Gates needed a People’s Champion like The Rock to make Microsoft’s first game machine ‘the People’s Console.’ With no real stars of its own yet, Xbox certainly needed The Rock’s fame to spread the word - way more people had heard of the wrestler than some green dude called Master Chief. So, when people got their at the final version original Xbox and its huge controller in early 2001, the WWE champion was right next to Bill Gates talking up such advanced features as “broadband” and “DVD playback.” Trust me, that was much more impressive back then, especially when you see The Rock towering over the richest guy on the planet.
Jen Taylor is one of a number of voice talent that work on countless games, even if many gamers don’t know her by name. Jen appears in titles as diverse as Left 4 Dead and Guild Wars 2, but her contributions to two of gaming’s biggest series is her real claim to fame. Ms. Taylor spent close to a decade playing Cortana in Halo and Princess Peach in nearly every Mario game, the first ladies of their respective consoles. Jen last played Peach back in 2008, but remains the voice of Cortana, and will likely stay that way until a real-life AI replaces her in 2234.
Pizza Hut is a totally adequate fast food chain many North American gamers have likely consumed at one point or another, perhaps without knowing that there’s a behind-the-scenes connection to games. Prior to his tenure as the United States Nintendo boss, Reggie Fils-Aime worked for Pizza Hut. No mere delivery guy, Reggie was Senior Director of National Marketing for the chain, and oversaw the creation of the radical ‘90s foodbeast, . Reggie also spent time at VH1 when the cable channel had the successful Pop-Up Video series. Between those two jobs, he basically ran about 60% of what I ate and watched in the 1990s.
As illuminated in the 2014 book Console Wars, Sonic’s birth wasn’t an easy one, with a lot of give and take between the Japanese developers and the American executives. The original idea for Sonic (surely no relation to the singer of the same name). The blonde woman in a tight red dress added some sex appeal to the game, something Sega of America executives weren’t really looking for in a game for kids. After some tense discussions, Madonna was booted from the series, and Sonic’s developers would have to wait until 2006 to make their human/hedgehog pairing a reality.
I like this fact because it’s so mathematically perfect. Nintendo loved emphasizing the 64-bit power of its black plastic console, going so far as to put the numeral in the name. But it went much deeper than that. As , the square N logo the system used had 64 sides and 64 vertices. Yes, that could just be a polygonal coincidence, but knowing how precise the Nintendo developers are, and how much they love hiding secrets like this, I’m betting it’s no accident.
The late Steve Jobs is regarded as a genius businessman who changed the way people use technology. But once upon a time he was a techy nerd in Northern California helped expand Atari's burgeoning game catalog. Jobs and dev partner Steve Wozniak were given the assignment to make a single player version of Pong. The resulting game was 1976’s Breakout, which paved the wave for dozens of clones and loosely inspired hundreds more. The proto-shooter netted Jobs some much-needed cash for his next project, though the future tech baron also asked if Atari founder Nolan Bushnell would be interested in investing. Nolan turned him down, giving up a possible 50% stake in Apple Inc. that I'm sure in no way haunts his every waking thought to this day.
NBA fans know Dennis Rodman is as weird as he is talented, so this odd story is par for the course. From the beginning, Dead or Alive featured a character who looked and dressed a lot like the Chicago Bulls champion. Eccentric fighter Zack was part of the roster since Dead or Alive began, but when the character took a leading role in the libidinous Xtreme Volleyball, the fighter started sounding more like Rodman as well. Yes, Dennis became the voice of his own parody, showing either a good sense of humor, or the keen business sense to make a quick buck off a silly tribute to him. Rodman only played Zack that one time, and now that Dennis was recently seen hanging out with a certain North Korean dictator, I’d say Zack’s life of private islands and volleyball contests seems the more normal one these days.
Baseball is regarded as an all-American sport, but when Seattle, WA was in danger of losing The Mariners, the city had to look outside of North America for help. Nintendo's US branch has been headquartered just outside of Seattle for years, so in 1992 Nintendo’s top man, Hiroshi Yamauchi, chose to buy the team as a sort of favor to the town. Nintendo still owns The Mariners to this day - explaining all those Ken Griffey Jr. games - and when Yamauchi passed away in 2013, many sports journalists billed him as ‘Mariners owner’ instead of ‘guy who saved the North American video game industry’ - admittedly, the latter takes up way more space in headlines.
Ed Boon has been serious about Mortal Kombat ever since he co-created the series with Jon Tobias. One such sign of Boon’s devotion to the series is that, even as it enters its third decade, Boon still voices MK poster boy Scorpion. Boon voiced him in every installment until 2011’s Mortal Kombat reboot. Scorpion’s new voice was Patrick Seltz, but his catchphrase ‘Get over here!’ was still shouted by Boon. As strange as it may sound for Scorpion’s voice to subtly change in battle, it’d be hard to hear anyone else shout that famous line.
Those are the most randomly weird facts I could cobble together today, but if you have anything else to add to this, make your case in the comments below!
Open-world games made some of game design’s most significant leaps forward last generation. We saw established open-world franchises take their biggest, boldest steps, and saw genres we thought of as set in stone (read: a bit boring), like driving games, try their hand at the formula. There’s something about setting off to journey through an open landscape, constrained only by a developer’s imagination, that instantly captures ours - not to mention quells any of those pesky urges to leave the house, learn to cook or create beautiful music. Ugh.
Which is why it’s all the more surprising to see some of the new generation’s biggest games abandoning the formula. Dragon Age, Metal Gear Solid, No Man’s Sky and more are all becoming more compartmentalised hub games, chopping out the cross-country travel to leave behind smaller, fully-explorable areas connected only by loading screens. But why? It’s enough to have you wishing for an eight-slide gallery feature that explores that very phenomenon. Oh look, here’s one now!
Remember that tropical beach in Skyrim? And what about the fully explorable English countryside village in GTA V, complete with a quaint, family-run post office to burgle? You haven’t had a catastrophic brain event, I made them up. Joke’s on you, it was all a ruse. But, like all the best ruses, it contains a lesson in game design at the end. While a traditional open world offers a huge swath of land to look around, it’s more or less hamstrung by having to, like, make sense. Hub worlds can ignore this sticky geographical issue.
Dragon Age: Inquisition pulls this off to magnificent effect. Drawing on what Bioware learned from Dragon Age 2’s Kirkwall – ie. that playing out an epochal storyline inside gaming’s equivalent of Birmingham or Cleveland is a tad dull - the sequel’s Inquisitor travels the length and breadth of beleaguered fantasy-continent, Thedas. From a breathtaking desert oasis, through under-construction castles, to long-lost, overgrown temples, arriving in a new area is as much about the rush of tourist-y excitement as it is the opportunity to nobble some new demon variants.
Some games simply don’t allow for an open world in the way we’ve come to expect it. The recent return of the space sim has led to several games that use the hub format out of necessity rather than any kind of overt design philosophy, built to offer millions of locations to look around, fight in and be damaged by on an existential and spiritual level.
Elite: Dangerous could technically let you point yourself at an unexplored solar system and trundle towards it at a mere 300 kilometres per hour, but it would take multiple lifetimes worth of gameplay to get even halfway there, and I’ve got better things to be doing - like Hearthstone or something - so its hyperdrive-aided hub system cuts out the wait (and your mid-flight death). Hub design is as much used to make open-galaxy games as it is open worlds at this point, facilitating game spaces that make the likes of Red Dead Redemption’s wide-open frontier look like a particularly violent atom.
The likes of Elite also raise another particularly modern issue for non-linear exploration. As we crave more and more from our game worlds, developers can’t physically keep up. Unless we want a group of haggard, sleep-deprived nerds who’ve worked their fingers down to bloodied nubs through sheer force of keyboard presses, they need a way to make big content without spending their entire lives on it.
Enter procedural generation, in which a few pieces of design can be re-used to make practically endless variations. No Man’s Sky will be creating its neon-pastel landscapes, frilly dinosaurs, and flimsy, destructible asteroid fields on the fly, and it can’t very well do it if you’re watching intently the whole time. Think of it as the game’s take on urinal stage fright - your jumps between the game’s many, many, many systems are the equivalent of you turning around to use the sink, allowing the game to freely excrete a whole new set of worlds, before, ruining this metaphor, you turn around to use the game-toilet once more. All of this is basically science, so you’re not even allowed to be disgusted.
“Why can’t I go into this laundromat?” you scream. “I mean, it has a door, I can see it there. Yes, it has a less detailed texture than doors I’ve been allowed to use previously, but it is certainly a door. I recognise all the door-like features, barring one. The only thing missing is my ability to go in and snoop around people’s baskets of soiled clothes.” I’ve been there, friend. I too have wanted to see every mundane detail of a city’s thousands of buildings but, again, it can prove too much work for designers otherwise trying to accurately simulate a dangerous crime spree.
Dead Island 2’s multiple locations help alleviate that issue. Paring the world down to interesting, constituent parts means that developers can lavish more attention on their smaller details. Couple that with some small procedural generation of building layout, and you have yourself the perfect opportunity to look around fake people’s bathrooms for the rest of your horrible life.
Just as building multiple areas lets developers focus on the detail of each, it also lets them focus on the design of it, too. Game design as opposed to art design, that is. I wasn’t suggesting Just Cause 2 takes place in a featureless world of undulating white topology.
As far as I can tell, some people are still angry that Destiny isn’t a truly open world space shooter thing. Let me just stick my head out of the window and check. Yes, I can still hear bleating. What this ignores is that each of its hub environments is built to offer the experiences you need, both in and out of missions. Enemy levelling, choke points, even the placement of seemingly non-linear Patrol mission pick-ups have been placed to funnel you through the world in the most entertaining possible fashion, while keeping the challenge consistent. Try this in a truly open-world and you’ll either have impassable mountain ranges stuck in the middle of your map (hello, Far Cry 4) or a studio of people driven mad by fractal geometry, drawing mazes on the walls in their own or others’ blood.
This one’s less about design, and more about how you, the player, are a fickle, spoilt, toddler. Don’t worry, I am too. We expect the world on a plate or, at the very least, an easily accessible inventory map. The problem with a traditional open world is that it’s unwieldy - a single, gigantic bit of architecture we’re expected to look around ourselves. Which is why fast travel was invented. But then we also complain that it becomes too easy to get around without seeing what the game actually offers between its major landmarks. So a game like the oft-overlooked Dragon’s Dogma comes along, makes fast travel a tough and arbitrary experience, and we all get up in arms about it.
The solution, basically, is to give us no choice. Assassin’s Creed Rogue, for instance, splits its world into three distinct hub areas, forcing you to fast travel between them. With nothing to see between the New York coastline and the North Atlantic, there’s also nothing to miss. Problem solved. It’s a crude solution, but looking after a toddler’s tough, you know?
Of course, behind all of this pontificating, there’s a fairly major point I haven’t addressed yet - making a decent open world is really hard. Los Santos is an incredible place, but it also took five years, hundreds of people and millions upon millions of dollars to create.Throw in the fact that a new console generation means almost every third-party developer will be spending the next year or so performing the programming equivalent of trying to make a sculpture out of thick yoghurt in the dark, and there’s a reason relatively simplistic hub design is so popular right now, in the early days of the new consoles’ collective regime.
Put it this way - as fantastic as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain looks, and as squeal-inducingly fun as attaching a balloon to a ram and flying it, fatally, into a helicopter - so that the vehicle crashes into the side of a verdant cliffside - sounds, you can bet Hideo Kojima wishes he could do more. He wishes you could then drive your Jeep to the beach, catch some rays, meet a buff volleyball player who’d make a good recruit ,and abduct him before grabbing a catamaran and sailing home to Mother Base. As it is, we’ll be *yawn* taking an evac helicopter that can play custom tunes between areas. You do what you can with what you’ve got.
But perhaps that practicality is a necessary stop-gap and nothing more - a way of capitalising on our machines’ newfound power while everyone relearns how to make huge, complex games. We’re fairly certain Just Cause 3 will return to the single open-world format (which works, primarily, because getting across the map using a grappling hook and parachute is about as much fun as anything else in the series), and who knows what else is on its way?
The Witcher 3 is going big, and Michel Ancel’s Wild is said to take place across a map the size of Europe, and there are any number of developers quietly getting on with projects that could potentially come to redefine what we know as the traditional open-world game. Hub design is proving to be a useful, and often hugely exciting, form for new-gen games to take. It could be that its self-contained freedom has provided a ‘safe’ environment in which to teach potential open-world devs a few lessons about where to go next.
The recent, perhaps necessary, boom in hub-based games raises the question of whether anyone’s really perfected the open-world yet. There’s more to come, and when it arrives, I’m willing to bet you’ll have seen its early form in the hub games I’ve mentioned. Any further thoughts? Liking the way open-world games are going, or do you crave a traditional Grand Theft Auto 6, stat? Let me know in the comments.
But before you head off into the yonder, to explore wherever you will explore, equip yourself with some of our other wide-ranging, boundary-free content. Our list of .
First it overtakes the UK, then Nuremberg, until finally setting its sites on the United States. Yes, folks, it's Toy Fair time! Toy Fair 2015 has begun in the heart of New York City, with every conceivable toy company from across the globe on the show floor to present their shiniest plastics. Favorites like NECA, Diamond Select, Mezco, and Jakks have worked tirelessly to prepare prototypes and give fans a chance to snap pictures of what's to come - all the way through 2016! GamesRadar+ is stalking the show floor for the cream of the crop, so dive in and let the drooling begin...
Can you feel that wallet tensing up? Looks like the next year is jam packed with irresistibly gorgeous collectibles. Did one catch your eye? Post your bids below!
Toys have totally invaded the gaming world. Just check out this .
Video game ne'er-do-wells get into the villainy business for all kinds of reasons: greed, jealousy, megalomania, maybe even because they think the hero simply needs somebody to fight. But let's take it one step further back - what causes them to fall in with such a bad crowd in the first place? Turns out that they just want what we all want, man: love.
Rough childhoods, absentee parents, lack of recognition, unrequited romances - yet we sweep them all into the same category as those one-dimensional bad guys who just want to wreck shit for no good reason. Shameful! So I say no longer. Come with me as I recognize some of gaming's most despicable villains who really just need somebody to cuddle.
I don't know what awful reproductive events transpired to bring Bowser Jr. into the world, but at the start of Super Mario Sunshine, his dad has him convinced that Princess Peach was an important part of the process. Biology aside, you can't blame Jr. for wanting the Mushroom Kingdom's vision of grace and gentleness in his life, given what must have been a pretty rough upbringing in the Bowser household. The little fella just wants a hug from a pair of arms that aren't wearing spiky bracelets.
I'm not sure what gives it away - maybe how Peach doesn't seem to recognize him, maybe that she despises his father, maybe the fact that she has soft human skin instead of a spiny turtle shell - but Jr. eventually realizes that she isn't his mother. If my dad manipulated my deep maternal longing as part of his evil schemes to kidnap a princess and rule the world, I'd probably be a bit upset. To be fair, I had parents who tried to raise me to be a good person rather than as a living, breathing tool of vengeance.
If four of your closest friends all decided to up and leave one day without telling you why, you'd probably be a little upset, right? Welcome to the first installment of Life Sucks with Skull Kid. Later on they briefly return, only to banish him for pulling endless mean pranks on the residents of Termina. After that, he wanders around for a while, eventually making friends with a nice little Kokiri boy who teaches him a song on his ocarina… and then also disappeared for seven years.
There's no denying that the Skull Kid has a lot of mischief in his soul - that's just the way he rolls. But if all his friends didn't keep vanishing, they might be able to turn that prankster spirit toward more creative pursuits. Seriously, somebody who has the gumption and gusto to be the trick-pulling scourge of an entire kingdom could probably do some really admirable stuff if he put his mind to it. Poor Skull Kid just needs a pal to keep him on track.
I know what you're thinking. "Vaas doesn't need more love, he needs a life sentence or intense therapy, preferably both." And it's true that he does seem to derive a bit more joy from being a murderous, treacherous asshole than the other people on this list. But it all could have been different if he'd literally anybody to rely on aside from Citra.
If you've finished Far Cry 3, you know that Citra doesn't quite match the the noble resistance leader image she tries to cultivate. Vaas learned that a long time ago. Maybe, aside from ordering him to kill people to prove his Rakyat loyalty, she was a loving adoptive sister. But judging by the really unhealthy way Citra uses sex as a carrot-on-a-stick for her most loyal soldiers, I'm guessing there was some more creepy shit going down there. You can't blame Vaas for ending up a little bit off and betraying his people (whatever that means). You can still blame him for kidnapping outsiders and selling them into slavery though, because that's just an uncool thing to do in general.
If you didn't play Mass Effect 2's Overlord DLC, you never met the Mass Effect series' most sympathetic antagonist. I could recount the sad story of David Archer leading up to his encounter with Shepard, how his brother Gavin was using him to command the Geth to claim their armies for Cerberus… To be honest, it's pretty much Rain Man, if Tom Cruise had abused Dustin Hoffman's talents for memorization and calculation by strapping him into a computer to dominate a synthetic life form instead of making a couple bucks at a blackjack table.
That's pretty much the definition of being a shitty brother, right there. Inevitably the plan goes sideways, David's consciousness is shattered, and he takes over the entire facility and kills almost all of its occupants. His story can have a happy ending if you free him from the machine and take him to the Grissom Academy, at least.
You might know the phrase 'publish or perish' if you're familiar with the cutthroat world of academia. It means you have to regularly conduct valuable research and publish your findings if you want to remain relevant and thus eligible for jobs or tenure - but for Dr. Wily, it was more like 'publish and perish'. Whatever brilliant contributions he made to the field of robotics, Dr. Light was always a step ahead of him, scooping up all the praise and international goodwill.
Wily just wanted some recognition for his almost-as-impressive body of work, but they don't give out runner-up Nobel Prizes. The jealousy drove him mad, and he decided to forsake love and admiration for total domination, reprogramming Dr. Light's robot masters to seek global conquest. Dr. Light rebuilt his beloved lab assistant, Rock, into a war machine to fight the Wily menace, and the bad feelings have gone on ever since. Maybe next time Light could just share the spotlight?
Ok, what's rule number one for maintainers of balance and observers of history? Aside from "don't have sex with your ancestors" and "don't tell anybody the lottery numbers"? That's right, it's "don't fall in love". But poor Cia spent a little too much time watching the era-spanning exploits of Link instead of reading the Triforce overseer rulebook, and she ends up developing a huge crush on him.
While she knows that her duties will never permit her to be with the hero in green, she becomes massively jealous of Princess Zelda, who can't seem to throw a musical instrument without hitting some incarnation of him. Those feelings (plus some demonic possession) drives her to take over Hyrule so… so she can be with him? The guy who always fights and kills whoever's trying to take over Hyrule in any given week? Hm. She didn't really think this one through. But such is the weakness of a lovesick mind, I guess.
Gary Smith is really bad news in Bully. Aside from endlessly scheming to take over Bullworth Academy, he also makes it his personal mission to completely undo every little bit of social standing that new kid Jimmy Hopkins manages to cobble together (once he goes off his meds, anyway). Seriously, he probably tortures small animals when he's not busy drawing up complex schemes to turn all the school's cliques against each other.
Here's a protip for any parents reading this: if your child is very likely an undiagnosed sociopath, you probably shouldn't drop him off at a crappy boarding school, set him up with an awful therapist in town, and disappear from his life. I don't know if Gary could ever expect to live a normal life free of megalomaniacal/homicidal urges, but a little more parental involvement could have kept him from "primary antagonist" status, at the very least.
Is Revolver Ocelot a villain or a hero? That's tough to say with 100-percent certainty about almost any of Metal Gear's recurring characters, but Ocelot is a particularly dense knot of duty and deception. Since you end up shooting at him more often than not, I'm going to say he's a villain for the purposes of this article. Baddie cred established, what's love got to do (got to do) with it? Just about everything.
Ocelot is the son of The Boss and The Sorrow, but he's babynapped soon after birth by the Philosophers, the increasingly nefarious international organization both of his parents work for. Would the pair have retired from international super-soldierdom to raise their kid if given the option? I kinda doubt it, but at the very least they wouldn't have let him be raised in secret military academies to become an instrument of the Philosophers' will. Unlike most of the sad kids in this article, Ocelot's parents really did care about him - the Sorrow even agreed to let the Boss kill him rather than risk Ocelot's life - they just weren't allowed to show him that love.
Being the child of a demon father and an elf mother sounds kinda metal, but it actually sucks. Hard. Isair and Madae, the sibling antagonists of Icewind Dale 2, found that out when their mother ran out of the room and jumped off of a cliff as soon as she saw their wrinkly little devil wings and cloven hooves. Not a great start, they actually had a pretty decent childhood under the care of a benevolent priestess who sheltered them from the outside world.
But when that priestess passed away (I don't think she threw herself off a cliff) the townsfolk got their pitchforks and torches and proceeded to undo their kindly upbringing. Cast off and accepted neither by humans nor fiends, they strike off on their own and try to create a new world order where their kind can live without fear for their lives… until a bunch of adventurers come around and boot them into another plane. To think, this all could've been avoided if people weren't so awful about the whole "half-fiend" thing.
But those are just some of the poor, villainous souls who could've done with a few more hugs in their formative years. Can you think of any more villains who just needed a little more love? Let me know in the comments below!
Want some more villainous insight? Check out these
It's a classic trope in the entertainment industry. Take your hero and his or her obvious love interest, add in some long, meaningful stares and a few moments when they almost kiss, and then tease, tease, tease. It's all-too-obvious to their friends, enemies, and everyone else in the surrounding solar system that these two are meant to be together - but for whatever reason they just won't seal the deal (with a kiss, I mean).
Video games have their fair share of long-standing relationships, ever teetering on the edge of romance. Granted, these couples have a lot on their minds and not a lot of time for love, what with having to save the world and all that. With any luck some of the entrants on this list will stop opening chests long enough to open up about how they feel - after they've defeated the last boss, of course.
Fair warning, we're going to get into spoiler territory with all games mentioned.
They first met back in: The Legend of Zelda (1986)
There have been many women in Link's many lives, but none have featured as prominently as Princess Zelda. Throughout the ages, these two have been brought together time and again, as if the fates themselves were conspiring on their behalf. Even so, their relationship has never evolved beyond a kiss on the cheek or a brush of the hands. Despite the fact that they've saved each other's skin over and over - and clearly care for one another - neither has been willing to string those three little words together.
Remember Spirit Tracks? Remember all the long, meaningful glances, blushing, and hand holding going on in that game? Or what about Skyward Sword, where it's implied that Link and Zelda end up together after Zelda decides to remain on the surface, but who's to say for sure? There are some exceptions, of course, such as in Twilight Princess where childhood friend Ilia is Link's main squeeze. But these are the exceptions. Maybe one day Zelda will
They first met back in: Kingdom Hearts (2002)
Poor Sora just can't spit it out, can he? Since the beginning of the franchise, Kingdom Hearts has been playing up Sora's feelings for Kairi. But there's always another quest - or another kidnapping - that keeps the two apart. In Kingdom Hearts 2, Saix even tells Kairi she is "the fire that feeds Sora's anger," which sounds like a really weird thing to write on a Valentine's Day card.
The ways and means in which the Kingdom Hearts games telegraph Sora's feelings for Kairi (and vice versa) are so frequent and numerous that I can't squeeze them all into this paragraph - let alone this feature. Needless to say, these young lovers have been pining for each other for well over a decade now, and apparently we've had to wait for the power of next-gen consoles to finally bring them together.
They first met back in: Resident Evil 2 (1998)
Ah, now here's a fun couple. Despite the fact that they're always pointing loaded firearms at each other, openly attacking each other, and periodically double-crossing each other, Ada Wong and Leon Kennedy have been doing the Resident Evil-equivalent of flirting for the past 17 years. One of them had better make a move before they finally kill each other for good.
In all seriousness, Ada does seem to harbor some genuine affection for the often bewildered Leon. One of the most prominent examples , where an injured Ada confesses "I don't want to lose you." More recent examples can be found in Resident Evil 4 and 6, where Ada seems to jump between toying with Leon and expressing genuine empathy. Of course, since Ada can only express herself in cliched, action movie dialog at that point, getting her true feelings across is a challenge.
They first met back in: StarCraft (1998)
Love conquers all, right? Right? Perhaps, but Kerrigan - better known by her punk rock moniker The Queen of Blades - is betting it'll take more than some mushy feelings to bring down an ancient evil threatening the galaxy. And she reached that conclusion just moments after finishing her first date with on-again, off-again squeeze Jim Raynor. Granted, this "date" involved teaming up to murder an old man in his office, but let's not get into semantics.
Kerrigan and Jim are destined to fail, and that's exactly why you want to root for them. Their jobs come first for the time being, what with that ancient galactic evil and all, but when Jim finally puts down the bottle and Kerrigan hangs up those blades, wouldn't it be nice to see the two of them ride off into the galactic sunset together? Maybe I'm just a romantic...
They first met back in: Prince of Persia (2008)
Healthy relationships are not without conflict and turmoil. It's overcoming these rough patches, and moving forward, that makes a relationship strong. Elika and the Prince have certainly experienced their fair share of turmoil. After going on an adventure together filled with teamwork and flirtatious remarks, the stage seemed set for a classic "happily ever after" ending. Instead, it went sour, in a big way.
You see, at the end of the game the Prince is faced with a sadistic choice: either let the woman he's fallen for remain dead, or let an ancient evil rise again (thereby undoing everything accomplished in the game) to bring her back to life. He chooses the latter, and she resents him for it. Sadly, with no sequel plans on the horizon, it is unlikely these two will ever get to work out their whole resurrection disagreement and make amends, in spite of the chemistry they share.
They first met back in: Half-Life 2 (2004)
This is an odd one, seeing as how Gordon's perpetual silence makes their relationship a little one-sided. Or maybe you're one of those people who thinks Gordon is talking and we, the players, just can't hear him. At any rate, the games have heavily implied Gordon and Alyx are destined to be together, with the bubbly Alyx taking a liking to the stoic doctor from the moment they first meet.
After that fateful encounter, the pair save each other's skin a few times, with the most memorable - and relationship-affirming - instance occurring in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Here, Alyx is mortally wounded, and through an ancient, alien ritual she is healed with the aid of the Vortigaunts who "weave the Freeman's life with her's." Alyx seems cool with all this, and even gets a little flustered when her father mentions the possibility of grandchildren. All that's left is an affirmation of love fans have been waiting eight years (and counting) to hear.
They first met back in: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010)
Monkey and Trip go through a real relationship arc throughout the events of Enslaved. They start out as, essentially, adversaries, with Monkey acting as Trip's unwilling slave and guide through the robot-infested wasteland. Gradually, their budding relationship grows into a sort of begrudging acceptance, then friendship, and then something more than friendship.
This all culminates in Trip offering to release Monkey from his servitude, and Monkey choosing to remain by her side. At this point it's clear just from the looks they give each other that these two are in love, but that all sort of gets swept under the rug once the ending starts. Somewhere between all the giant robots and the memory pyramid Monkey and Trip's relationship falls by the wayside, presumably to be picked up in a sequel we'll likely never see.
Life is too short for missed opportunities. Better to have loved and lost, as they say, than to have never loved at all. And when you have an attraction as strong as the entrants on this list, the whole 'love' part should come pretty naturally. Rejection sucks, sure, but you can't let it slow you down when the love of your life could be on the line.
And for more lovey-dovey fun on GR+ be sure to check out .
I'm not even going to try to justify this one. You know why you're here. I'll warn you though, it's going to get pretty traumatic.
I spent most of yesterday discovering the Hell that is unleashed when you set 's search filters to "Romantic" and "M-rated". I now enjoy a hitherto unimagined level of empathy with Vietnam veterans. Whatever mind-bending spectacles and seething horrors await you over the following pages, just know that I've read the full stories that these selected quotations come from, and far more to boot. You won't believe how far the rabbit hole goes. Literally and figuratively. And just FYI, all fic extracts here are presented largely as originally written, intermittent avant garde grammar and all. The only change I've made is to censor some of the more explicit terminology. But regardless, explicit content abounds from this point forth.
Written by: The Crimson Wing
The synopsis: Kratos (from God of War) and Sam Fisher (from, er, Splinter Cell) are enjoying an ongoing, passionate affair, as a result of magic portals.
Selected 'highlights': "Hot lips collided again, glazed eyes locking. Kratos caught Sam's right hand with his left as the right hand of the lower trailed down the bare chest, caressing the jumping muscles and swirling the navel. Rough fingertips trailed over the top of the kilt, sliding in ever so slightly to brush over more bare skin, earning a grunt of acceptance from the pale male. The hand of the god that wasn't occupied began to work on the shirt of the Splinter Cell, popping open troublesome buttons with ease (actually ripping them off was more like it…) before his hand paused, lips releasing Sam's to emit a sigh, eyes fluttering closed.
"Sam grinned, brushed his fingertips over the head of his lover again to earn another sigh. Kratos's muscles spasmed all at once and he was half sitting upwards to rip off Sam's shirt when…" Ok, moving swiftly onwards...
Written by: weinercaughtinabutt
The synopsis: Doomguy (from Doom) finds his wife amorous after a long, hard day of demon-slaughter.
Selected 'highlights': "Doomguy walked towards the bedroom after a long day of work. "Ugh" he grunted after trying to open the door, it would not open. "Hold on honey!" he heard from behind the closed bedroom door. The door opened softly as his wonderful wife curled her finger toward the bedroom. As he entered the doorway, she began to close the door. Her eyes beamed "you seemed to have such a hard day, why don't I soften you up" she said seductively. Her nightgown silkingly wove her body, as it fell off it revealed her tender body. Doomguy was instantly reminded that the carpet matched the drapes, blonde." Hey, this is quite tasteful.
"As they both climaxed, her..." Er, ok then, that's enough of that.
Written by: Alpha Sam
The synopsis: An Eevee named Sparky has a problem. A Pikachu named Rex helps him with it.
Selected 'highlights': "'Well I have a … little problem…" Sparky looked away shamefully. 'Yea Spark? What is it?' the Picachu put his little paw on the Eevee's softed furred head. The Little Eevee sighed. 'Well….' Sparky spread his hind legs apart showing his..." Goddam it, Alpha Sam!
Written by: BlueRaine
The synopsis: Gears of War's Marcus takes Carmine aside to teach him some advanced RR techniques.
Selected 'highlights': "Carmine freezes, standing there on his knees like a bastard child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he looks up to Marcus for instructions, his big blue eyes concerned and as wide as dinner plates. "You've got nothing to worry about, Kiddo." Baird says in his most arrogant of voices, "I happen to be damn good at this particular sort of mission, well, not that I'm ever bad at ANY sort of mission since I'm..." Baird trails off as Marcus interrupts him in a gravelly tone, 'I'm sure you can come up with something better to do with your mouth than run it all day.'" Righty-o.
Written by: StopJustStop
The synopsis: Beat from Jet Set Radio is seduced by real-life Indie Car driver Danica Patrick. In a branch of a well-known fast-food outlet.
Selected 'highlights': "Go and pick out a piece of chicken. But don't eat it. That's for later." Danica ordered Beat. He picked out a piece of chicken. "If I can't eat it, what do I do with it?" Beat asked. 'Stick it in..." Oh god!
Written by: DeamonPrince
The synopsis: Back at Wayne Manor, Bruce (from Batman: Arkham Asylum, obviously) recounts a hitherto forgotten escapade resulting from drugging.
Selected 'highlights': "Ivy's hands were now removing Batman's cape and armor. As they kissed deeply, she rubbed her hands on his iron chest making him grunt. Batman's hands were now massaging Ivy's..." Alrighty then. Surely it isn't all like this! "Ivy broke the kiss again to drop to her hands and knees to remove Batman's belt and pants. ~No! Stop! ~ He thought as she massaged his..." Oh, yeah, it is.
Written by: NoWindForThisHole
The synopsis: Hakan goes on an exciting, globe-trotting, street-fighting adventure.
Selected 'highlights': "Hakan travelled to the jungle where he found a Chinese woman with malformed legs. 'My name is Chun-Li' she boomed. 'And you look like a fun.' You've got Spinning Bird Kick well I've got Spinning Bird D..." Well, that's an image I'm not going to shake any time soon.
Written by: bloiffy
The synopsis: Wander (yeah, from Shadow of the Colossus) must defeat the 16th Colossus in order to revive Mono. The Colossus is a hot, human-sized woman. Later, he gets a horrible surprise.
Selected 'highlights': "A tear in his trousers had unlocked his most secret treasure trove. Wanderer's cheeks flushed with blood as he was filled with embarrassment, just as his **** was flushed rigid with blood due to his undeniable arousal. It stood, his True holy sword, jutting forth, pointing skyward. His gaze fell upon it, and he saw that indeed a glowing light shone forth from his vas deferens, indicating this new challenge's glowing weak spot. Her w..." No, no, no--that isn't cool. And the next bit, featuring Agro the horse? Words fail me.
Written by: irishileana
The synopsis: Months after her escape from Aperture, Portal's Chell is troubled by unusual dreams.
Selected 'highlights': "Her left hand had moved from Chell's shoulder, making the short distance to her..." Chell's partner in this fic is GLaDOS. Be aware of that. We need go no further.
Written by: babethecooltomboy
The synopsis: Tails is in love with Cream the Rabbit, but can't bring himself to tell her. Then one night, he runs into her after getting smashed on tequila.
Selected 'highlights': "Tails was a smart and had study a lot about sex..." No! No, I'm not even touching this one. Just no.
So, thank God that's over, right? I don't even know what to say here, to be honest. But, er, yeah. This was certainly a feature that I wrote and that you've just read, and those fics are real and were written by real humans. Draw your own conclusions. I can't even feel feelings any more. And if you think the previous was bad, know that what you've just seen were the very edited highlights of the nicest bits of the nicest stuff I read.
And while you recover, why not check out some of our less mind-crushing Week of Love content? Try a go.
Video games have grown from clusters of pixels on a black screen to cinematic adventures with lifelike characters voiced by all-star actors. And sometimes, these characters are so well-developed that we find ourselves emotionally drawn to them. In movies, the experience is over so quickly this doesn't have a chance to go any further, but in games, we have upwards of 100 hours with someone, and after all that time... well... emotions are silly things.
What can we say? The heart wants what the heart wants, and here are fourteen characters that still reside within our chest cavities. Er, hearts. Yeah, definitely sounds more romantic when you say 'heart'.
No one is more deserving of the phrase "I love you, man" than Roy "Big Bo" Boateng. The Rust Crew's machine-gun-toting, catchphrase-spewing heavy weapons expert is almost too much to handle and, in any other game, Big Bo probably would just be obnoxious. But he's such a great foil to Binary Domain's transhumanist melodrama, hooting and hollering about sweet headshots as the rest of your group grimly considers global politics.
French robo-commando Cain may be more charming and well-spoken, but Big Bo is your buddy through thick and thin. And Binary Domain's voice command system makes it such a bizarre joy to interact with his big, effusive personality. Rather than picking options out of a menu, you spend the campaign shouting stuff like "Big Bo! Cover me!" and "Big Bo! Nice work!", and listening to him bellow back solid gold like "THAT WAS SAH-WEET!" If you haven't fallen in love with Big Bo by the end of the game, you must not have a shred of joy in your heart.
By the time you meet Rose of Sharon Cassidy (just call her Cass), she's already lived a long, hard life. Not that anybody's life is particularly easy in the Mojave Wasteland, but hers has been particularly rough - rougher still when she hears her caravan's been burnt to the ground and decides she has nothing better to do than go traveling with you.
But even with all that taken away from her, she's still held onto two things: a dark sense of humor and a killer moonshine recipe. And those are two very good things to have in a post-apocalyptic companion. If you traveled with her father, Cassidy, in Fallout 2, you'll definitely see the resemblance - and your love for her may be more of 'daughter-I-never-had' kind than romantic. Either way, it's tough to travel with this rough-and-tumble desert flower for too long without getting sweet on her.
Not the you were expecting? Yes, Nathan Drake is a lovable rogue, but his mentor Sully has him beat in two very important areas: style and confidence. Alright, alright, three very important areas: style, confidence, and facial hair. Sully just oozes 20th century pulp-hero panache (seriously, he probably slicks back his hair with the stuff), chomping on a cigar and hopping behind the stick of his bombshell-bedecked propeller plane. It also doesn't hurt that he's the spitting image of a latter-day Errol Flynn.
But awesome adventurer traits aside, the fact that he managed to shape Nathan Drake from a roguish little pickpocket to a good-hearted treasure hunter - and that he's always willing to come back out of retirement to help him out - says it all. One of these days those endless calls to adventure might be the end of him (Uncharted 4 is subtitled A Thief's End, after all) but until then, we'll cherish every minute.
Throughout Mega Man Legends 1 and 2, Roll is the rock of the Caskett clan. She keeps Mega Man outfitted with gear and up-to-the-minute intel when he's on a mission, looks after her retired adventurer grandpa Barrel, and deals admirably with robo-monkey Data's endless hijinks. Any one of those tasks would be a full-time job by itself, but still she somehow keeps it all together. It'd be tough enough not to fall for the girl who builds you awesome new weapons with a smile, but add to that how conflicted she seems about putting you in harm's way, and resistance is futile.
Roll's so lovable that it almost sucks to see her falling for Mega Man. After all, this is the guy who 'accidentally' walks in on her changing clothes, then while she's in the bath, and pumps his arm victoriously after both occasions. That's not OK, Mega Man - you'd better treat the girl who's willing to work with her arch nemesis to build dozens of rockets so she can retrieve you from the moon right.
In any Final Fantasy game less-packed with memorable characters (let's be real, here, any other Final Fantasy) Celes Chere would clearly be the main character. Why? She kicks ass with all the strength and smarts of an imperial super-soldier. But regrets from her years of unflinching service to an increasingly evil Empire keep her aloof, even as the rest of the game's many heroes begin to relax and develop new relationships. She's like Squall and Cloud put together, minus most of the whinging.
Suffice it to say, Locke isn't the only one who's quickly infatuated with her. There's just something about Celes' confidence that makes her immediately appealing, and something about her vulnerability that keeps her in your heart. You even get to know her softer side with intimate moments like practicing for the opera and caring for her old friend Cid. No joke, Celes had us fawning like starry-eyed recruits.
Vamp is kind of an asshole, but he's also pretty sexy in that hangs-out-at-goth-clubs kind of way. There's something about a guy with long, dark hair, fangs, and a Romanian accent - the fact that he can predict your movements just by watching your muscles tense and relax is the maraschino cherry on top. Speaking of thick red liquids, he also drinks blood, which is admittedly kind of a turn off… or turn-on, depending on where you're coming from in life. Not judging.
Unique talents aside, you have to appreciate Vamp for making Raiden a teresting character purely by osmosis. And his story is actually pretty tragic - he's the literal embodiment of Metal Gear's "cycle of death on behalf of nations and ideals" theme. Metal Gear's given tragic deaths to many adversaries, but Vamp's plucked at our heartstrings more than most. When he finally croaks for good in Metal Gear Solid 4, it's more "goodnight, sweet prince," than "and stay dead, you son of a bitch".
You can't spit without hitting a brash, adventurous prince in the canon of fantasy RPGs, but it's less often that you get to watch them grow into strong and noble kings. In a game that's all about staying loyal to your friends and your ideals, Chrom is dealt the harshest blows of any, eventually casting aside his youthful commitment to peace and preparing his nation to fight for the greater good.
Of course, it helps that female player Avatars can marry him and have kick-ass future babies. But even if you decide to have your kick-ass future babies with someone else, the bond that Chrom shares with his rag-tag crew of adventurers is truly something special - in particular his total trust and support of your Avatar. It's enough to send your heart all a-flutter when he compliments your choice of tactics.
John Marston's a unique guy. Though at first he appears to be a typical gunslinger, he eventually grows into a fully fleshed-out protagonist with morals and scruples we sympathize with. He's not riding around the wilderness skinning rabbits and murdering people because he wants to - he's riding around the wilderness skinning rabbits and murdering people because he has to. For his family.
Yes, Marston is a family man, and that's the reason we ended up falling for him. He's a kind soul who will do anything and everything to look out for his family. He's the kind of guy you take home to your family; the kind of guy who your father would love to go hunting with. He's just a hell of a guy. Plus, you know, he's ruggedly sexy. Gotta love a guy with some wicked scars.
Our love for Yorda was less like a relationship and more like a sibling thing. These emotions didn't form right away, however. For the first hour or so she was an inconvenience and nothing more. She managed to be annoying despite being mute, which is a feat in and of itself, and her helplessness was nothing if not infuriating.
It wasn't until Yorda was put into danger that we realized how attached to her we were. She was like a little brother or sister we had to protect, and even though our on-screen character was technically younger, we still felt like the bigger sibling. We worried for her not just because her capture was the failure state, but because of an honest-to-goodness attachment.
Like you're surprised to see another Uncharted character on this list. Elena Fisher has been Nathan Drake's on-again-off-again partner throughout all three Uncharted games, though we think our actual feelings for Elena started showing up in the second one. In the first, she was a cute side-character, but she didn't have a ton of time to develop. When she showed up in the second game, however, we realized how much we had missed her, and it certainly wasn't because of her marksmanship.
A lot of credit is owed to Emily Rose, the voice actress for Elena. Her talented vocals have helped Elena rise from annoying reporter to full-blown crush, the kind we'd slip lovey-dovey notes to in junior high. Heck, we doubt we'd even have the guts to approach her ourselves; we'd likely need to give a note to a friend of ours to give to a friend of hers to give to her.
It started off plainly enough: our neighbor came over for a housewarming party once we moved in, and we told them a few jokes. But then they came over again and the jokes became flirts. And then the flirts became more flirts. And then they slapped us, but then the jokes became more flirts. Cut to a few months later and we were married, pumping out kids like no one's business.
Such is life in The Sims, but as strange and insane as it might sound, we've found it hard not to grow emotionally attached to the characters we end up WooHooing with. Sure, they're digital, soulless, and speak in gibberish, but we're playing as avatars of ourselves, living vicariously through digital characters. We're living the lives we want to live, going through the daily motions as we would in real life but in fast-forward, seeing our past, present, and future, all as we wish it was. And then there's the one, the one we fell in love with, living alongside us. Playing The Sims is like having a lucid dream, and good luck not falling in love with your dream.
There wasn't really any semblance of romance in the original Half-Life. Gordon was essentially alone in the Black Mesa Research Facility. Well, technically it was him, a few workers, and a bunch of aliens, but there was no one to have an emotional attachment to. And then Alyx came strutting into our lives in Half-Life 2 like it was no big deal, and absolutely ruined our hearts.
Since Gordon Freeman is a silent, invisible protagonist, he's really nothing more than an extension of the player, making Alyx's coy smiles, shy laughter and touching words all the more powerful. You can fawn over SoulCalibur's curvacious ladies all you want - the feeling we got when Alyx put her hand on the window as the elevator went down makes Ivy's cleavage (and even her neathage) fade into the background.
Zelda's cute and all, but she's sort of an arranged marriage for Link - the wife the Hero of Time is destined to have and all that. And then there's Malon, the adorable, unassuming, red-headed farm girl who spends her nights singing outside of Hyrule Castle. When you first meet her she's a cute little girl, but when the game flies forward by 10 years, she's instantly turned into a teenager that (as teenagers ourselves at the time) we were head-over-heels for.
Malon is sort of the forbidden fruit of the Zelda series. There's no way Nintendo would ever include an overtly romantic sub-plot of any kind in one of its games, so most encounters even with Zelda are kept to an uncomfortable hug. That means that Malon, who's even further away from being a romantic interest, is even further away from our grasp. Beyond being helpful, kind, and awesome, she's also just out of reach, which makes her all the more alluring.
What is there to say about Garrus that hasn't been scrawled onto the back cover of a teenage girl's Trapper Keeper? The guy's a heartthrob, plain and simple. There's just something about him that makes women weak in the knees, and the mere utterance of his name brings panties flying in from every direction. His calm, soothing voice, his charming personality, his... sort of creepy, bug/kitty appearance... It's hard to figure out exactly what makes Garrus so damn appealing, but whatever "it" is, he has it.
As a squadmate in all three Mass Effect games, Garrus proves to be 100 percent loyal. He never questions Shepard's motives. He never flips out and throws a tantrum if he doesn't get his way. Even if you intentionally screw up his revenge plan, he walks away, totally cool about the situation. We're like, "Sorry we ruined your revenge," and he's all like "Whatever, you were right. Thanks for not letting me kill that guy. Let's go clubbing!" And then he's the designated driver, because he's THAT AWESOME.
Ah, we feel all flushed just thinking about all those lovable so-and-sos. But sure enough, we haven't highlighted all the deserving candidates out there. Make sure you let us know who we missed in the comments below!
In the last few weeks, I've committed to a relationship with a horned sassmaster in Dragon Age: Inquisition, witnessed a noir romance in . There's a lot of love in all that code, but like the grouchy curmudgeon I am, I sit here decrying youthful joy and pointing out that that's not how real relationships work, bah humbug!
My hyperbolic bitterness aside, video games really do give some terrible romantic advice, and I don't just mean the dating sims. Look long and hard enough, and you'll start to notice the same implicit, wink-and-a-nod suggestions about why common interests don't really matter and how buying love works great. Sure, everyone's different, so some of this advice might work on some people some of the time. But if you go out there thinking it's as sure-fire as Cupid's arrows? You're gonna be in for some serious heartbreak. Consider this Top 7 a warning. Trust me. I know all about bad love advice.
In video games… between all the village-avenging, death-defying, and mook-killing game characters deal with on a daily basis, there usually isn't much time to kindle a proper romance. Asking someone out is rough enough when all you have to worry about is whether you have something in your teeth and whether the mustard stain really came out of your favorite shirt. When you can barely hold a conversation because the clock on this nuke is counting down way faster than it should, that's gonna throw off your game. But get that heartfelt love confession out between waves of howling enemies and, barring a heroic sacrifice during the last cutscene, you two are together for life.
But really… While asking your crush out to coffee without forgetting what language is can be a challenge, there's a whole new set of puzzles waiting in relationship-land. You never see video game characters argue about where the money's going to come from for a new rebel hideout, or start a shouting match because one of them left the legendary weapons out in the rain again. Relationships take work, and it's certainly worth the effort to be with someone awesome. Just keep in mind that comparatively, getting the date is the equivalent of the level one boss.
In video games… our lovebirds meet just as they kick off their adventures, and during their journey to the big bad's hideout/the promised land/MacGuffins "R" Us they fall for each other. You'll usually get a few cutscenes where they discuss their immediate futures, and Person A will definitely save Person B at least once. A little longer and then they start gazing into each other's eyes and shouting each other's names in moments of peril, and all that's left is to pick the wedding venue.
But really… did a discussion of hobbies ever come up? How about beliefs and values not immediately important to the plot? Whether they like their eggs scrambled or sunny side up?? Yes, obviously games have to be economical with their time, and lovebirds exchanging recipes probably ends up on the cutting room floor. However, that often leaves us looking at a couple who have seemingly nothing in common, because they never actually talk. Can you name one thing that Squall and Rinoa share aside from a mission to save the world and intense social stupidity? No you cannot, because they don't have one. That might be fine for them, but real relationships tend to last longer than twenty hours, so follow this bit of gaming's best romance wisdom and you're going to run out of stuff to talk about real fast.
In video games… you solve puzzles by putting item A into slot B, and relationships are basically puzzles, so it's really the same thing. I of course mean that item A is a gift and/or good deed of sorts, and slot B is the person that you love, and those gifts are the key to the puzzle of their heart (I know what you were thinking, pervert). The same way you feed coins into a vending machine and get health packs out, you feed kindness into your crush and will inevitably get love out. That's just economics.
But really… while there are plenty of folks out there who dream of being showered with gifts and affection by a generous suitor, it isn't as ubiquitous as games make it look. In fact, some people don't like receiving gifts or being the focus of over-the-top good deeds, especially when the giver has never disclosed their true intentions and/or has said maybe five words to them in their entire life. The discomfort meter fills up even faster when the giver's looking for something unspoken in return, especially if they do it with a creepy smile while breathing really hard. Don't be that giver.
In video games… when you have multiple romance options, you're probably going to have a favorite. You could focus all of your attention on them, trying to kindle a deep romance that will one day see you rocking on a digital porch together with wrinkly old face textures. But there is a chance they might not like you, meaning you'll end up romance-less, die alone, and most likely get eaten by your many cats. Best to play the field from the get-go and create as many romantic opportunities as possible, then pick and choose from the lovelorn fish you managed to hook.
But really… the lady/gent you're carrying a torch for has peripheral vision, and can definitely see you flirting with someone else less than five feet away. Some games do a good job of showing the jealousy this creates - romantic rivals in Mass Effect throw legendary shade - but it usually doesn't get past sexy catfighting for exclusive right to play tonsil-hockey with you. You never see the love interest who knows they're too good for this shit and peaces out - in games anyway. You'll see a lot more of that in the real world.
In video games… it can be nerve-wracking trying to court an RPG companion or dating sim cutie, because sometimes you just don't know what's going to get the best response. But don't worry - if you get stuck, there are plenty of walkthroughs and guides that tell you exactly what you need to do to raise your beloved's love meter. Whether it's what tasks you need to perform or how you should converse with them down to individual dialogue options, winning them over is a simple process as long as you follow the manual.
But really… While romancing a certain so-and-so in Dragon Age, I had to choose between jailing or killing a criminal. I decided that jailing him would be the best call... and my darling love greatly disapproved. Goddamn! It may be easy to reload a save and change my mind in a game, but if I confronted a similarly tough ultimatum in real life, giving in wouldn't be good for either of us. Sure, it means less conflict now, but it makes me miserable, makes my beau feel like I'm never being genuine with them, and creates a relationship that can't handle even the slightest bit of blowback. And it will come. Oh boy will it ever come.
In video games… something terrible's happened that's left your digital love interest utterly distraught. Their village burned down, their family's dead, their favorite character kicked it in Game of Thrones - whatever the specifics, some heart-shattering tragedy has occurred that's left them beside themselves. This is naturally the perfect time for you to console them. Yep. Console them. You know what I'm getting at, insert inappropriately obvious wink. By supporting them in their time of need, they see you truly care, and the two of you cement your relationship, which may or may not involve making out in a pond.
But really… I'm not going to say this never works, because for some folks physical comfort really is the best medicine. Different strokes and all. But there's also a chance your love interest will find you coming onto them when they're at their lowest seriously annoying, if not unbelievably creepy. You really need to know someone before you make this move, and given it usually happens at the same time as the couple's first kiss? 'Courting disaster' sums it up nicely.
In video games… remember a couple slides ago, where I mentioned guides being the way to your beloved's heart? Well bring that one 'round again, because they're essential to getting everything right. It might be a rough road winning the heart of a picky potential partner, and you might have to do some things you aren't proud of (be prepared to hide more than one body). But with determination and meticulous attention to detail, you can guarantee you'll get the happy ending you so desperately want.
But really… remember a couple slides ago, where I mentioned that guides don't work in real life? And a few slides before that, when I pointed out everything on this list is really bad advice - you get where I'm going with this. As rough as it might be, you can 'do everything right' in a bid to win another person's affections, and they might still turn you down because they don't feel the same. As heartbreaking as that can be, it doesn't make either of you bad people, or your connection any less valuable. And hey, it's a big 'ol world out there. Game characters may be stuck to the romantic paths coded for them, but you? Your love life is yours to generate
Those are the Top 7 worst bits of gaming love advice and how disastrous it can be when they’re applied to the real world. All that finger-wagging might make me sound like a loveless sourpuss, but trust me when I say that isn’t so! I mean, I definitely refer to Valentine’s as Single’s Awareness Day, but when it comes to you having a happy love life, I want nothing more than for you to succeed - and avoid every one of these romantic snares with Pitfall!-like grace. Ever tried out one of these suggestions yourself? Got any stories of associated disaster, or did this all totally work for you and I have no idea what I’m talking about? Go ahead and break hearts in the comments below.
Before Blockbuster came to represent the death of the brick and mortar video game rental business, it was a blue-and-gold juggernaut whose reached extended from coast to coast. In its prime, Blockbuster's influence was so great that it actually began requisitioning video games to be released exclusively in its stores. And while I'm sure this seemed like a very good idea on paper, in practice it spawned a whole slew of bad to mediocre titles, many of which were mere updates to existing releases.
Building a comprehensive list of all the Blockbuster exclusives is surprisingly challenging, mostly because it comes by way of word of mouth. Rumors and speculation abound about which games were "true" exclusives and which had proper retail release after the fact. For those in the latter category, I've included the [Limited Exclusive] tag. Please let me know if there are any I missed! But now, without further ado...
True to its name, ClayFighter: Tournament Edition was a slightly updated version of the original, in the same vein as Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition and others. The game fixed bugs, added new modes, and did a bunch of other stuff no one ever noticed or appreciated. It helped pave the way for the bizarrely named ClayFighter 2: Judgement Clay and, later on, another Blockbuster exclusive on the Nintendo 64.
This special version of Donkey Kong Country was designed specifically for the second Blockbuster World Video game Championships, which were held in 1994 (though it was really more of a North American championship). Donkey Kong Country was one of the featured games, and this version has only a handful of stages, no animal tokens, and a score counter, as the BWVGC was largely a high-score based competition.
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This is what most people expect when they hear the term "Blockbuster exclusive." Eek! The Cat on the SNES was a painfully overblown escort mission involving an old woman who relentless walks in whatever direction she's facing, a purple cat who was in no way Garfield, and teeth-gnashing, hair-splitting gameplay where you must protect this old lady from harm. The game itself is actually an updated version of , developed by the same team.
When beloved arcade beat-'em-up Final Fight made its debut on home consoles back in 1990, fans were disappointed to see that several features got cut along the way. No industrial stage. No cooperative play. No Guy. Everyone loves Guy! That's why Guy later got his own version of the game, where he replaced Cody. Still no industrial stage or co-op though...
While Eek! The Cat didn't garner much love, developer Ocean once again stepped up to the plate with another Blockbuster Exclusive, Mr. Nutz. The games stars a red, anthropomorphic squirrel - because we were so clever in the '90s - in a short, 2D platformer. While largely forgotten today, those who do remember the game remember it because it was rather, well, . And if you lived outside of North America, you could totally pick up this gem at other gaming retailers.
Fire Dogs continues the time-honored tradition of developers making terrible platformers based off of popular cartoons. Miraculously, the game somehow manages to squeeze hours worth of content out of a single episode of the Ren Stimpy cartoon, specifically the one about them painting themselves up as dalmatians to get a job at the firehouse. And if its sluggish, unresponsive controls didn't send you sprinting back to Blockbuster, the irritating music loop certainly would.
Not to be confused with the Donkey Kong Championship Cartridge mentioned earlier, the Blockbuster World Championship II video game was an all-in-one package for the Sega version of Blockbuster's World Championship event. The cartridge contained an oddball combo of Acclaim's NBA Jam and Judge Dredd, two wildly different styles of gaming for players to test their skills and compete for the high score. When the BWC was finished, these cartridges were supposed to be destroyed, however a few have survived to this day (fetching a pretty penny online).
The Game Factory cartridges were a forward-thinking bit of technology on the part of Blockbuster. They were basically flashcarts that could have any Genesis game available at the time loaded onto them via a dial-up connection. The cartridges came in different colors - blue, green, and red - which indicated the size and capabilities of the cartridge. It's interesting to think that a major retailer was using piracy techniques as a business strategy.
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It's starting to seem like every video game franchise had an obligatory Championship Edition at some point in the '90s. In Madden '93's case, this new edition added in everything from the base game plus the eight greatest NFL teams at that point in time (as of 1992, anyway). As anyone who has been to a second-hand game store knows, there is a veritable sea of used Madden games on the market, but this one - because of its rarity as a Blockbuster exclusive - is the mother of them all.
Blockbuster just couldn't get enough of that awkward ClayFighter action the first time around, so they brought the series back with another rental exclusive, this time titled Sculptor's Cut (because of clay, get it?). The biggest addition in this version was the inclusion of four new characters, one of which is the Statue of Liberty. Thankfully, Sculptor's Cut finally ended the tyranny of ClayFighter, and it has since become one of the most rare and expensive N64 cartridges in existence.
Amid so many horrors, Stunt Racer 64 enjoys the distinction of being an absolutely decent racing game. It combines arcade-style racing, with extreme futuristic technology like rocket boosters, which let your car perform all sorts of sweet, mid-air tricks. As you barrel roll - excuse me, aileron roll - your way to the finish line, you earn currency to buy new parts and cars. However, despite being a solid game, it never saw a wider release.
Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals - which is a real word jumble of a title - is yet another awkward, painful fighting game dropped into the laps of unsuspecting children thanks to Blockbuster Video. Sticking to genre traditions, Transmetals stars a whole bunch of characters who are all fighting for reasons no one cares about, and there are super moves. You don't even really fight so much as run around spamming projectiles while grunting "Urgh! Urgh! Urgh!"
NFL Blitz Special Edition is basically NFL Blitz 2001, only this time it's called "Special Edition" instead of "2001" which makes it different. This gets a pass, however, as NFL Blitz's hilarious combination of wrestling moves and simplified gridiron rules is still awesome. While Special Edition started out as a rental only, Blockbuster eventually started selling the game in its stores as well.
While Razor Freestyle Scooter was released on several different platforms, only the Nintendo 64 version was exclusive to Blockbuster. But not even the sweet, sweet allure of exclusivity could entice the masses to try this poor imitation of the Tony Hawk skateboarding series. How bad is it? It manages to have a plotline involving robots abducting children - in a scooter game - and still not be awesome.
This game is a collection of mini games themed around - you guessed it - track and field sports. And by "track" and "field" I mean "button" and "mashing" because that's just about all you do in it. For many kids, this was the ideal rental game, because you'd play it for a day or two and then never touch it again.
Capitalizing on the success of the Indiana Jones movies, Infernal Machine pitted Indy against the Soviets in a race to collect the four pieces of the titular device, a biblical MacGuffin that does something. While the game was praised for its detailed plotline and interesting stages, it was ultimately torpedoed by the killer of so many Nintendo 64 games: poor controls. In addition to being available to rent or buy at Blockbuster stores, customers could also order the game straight from LucasArts' website.
The troubled history of , which remains one of the most stupendous flops in gaming history, does not need to be retold here. Suffice to say, the underwhelming PC release spawned an equally underwhelming N64 flophouse exclusive to Blockbuster. It ultimately did little to help the struggling game, and was later given a standalone retail release.
It should come as no surprise at this point, but Eggs of Steel was yet another awkward, laborious game that further cemented the Blockbuster exclusivity program as a den of depravity with the motto "Who gives a shit?" The game stars a low-res animated gif of an egg wearing overalls who walks around a pre-rendered steel mill while reading letters from his girlfriend. His name is Charlie and sometimes he dies but not often enough.
Given the amount of raw edginess radiating from this game, one would assume Freestyle Street Soccer follows in the wake of Razor Freestyle Scooter as another watered-down, simplistic clone of a superior game. Somehow, miraculously, astonishingly even, this is not the case. Freestyle Street Soccer is a decent, arcade-style soccer game with four-on-four matches and an emphasis on tricks. Of course, the machismo-driven, turf-war attitude is still completely laughable.
The unfortunate Outlaw series of sports games - which mixed mediocre sports mechanics with a lethal dose of hypersexualized badittude - spawned a handful of Blockbuster exclusives. They were basically DLC packs you could rent. The two Golf games have Christmas-themed links and outfits for the golfers, while the Volleyball game is set in Hell (which is actually kind of awesome).
Chances are, there are still some more games out there that were part of the Blockbuster exclusivity program that aren't included on this list. If there are any I've missed, let me know in the comments below and I'll see about getting them added.
Sure, it's always nice to punch a hole through your enemy's chest, grab hold of their exposed spine, and wrench it out with your bare hands. But it's even better when such a gruesome Fatality counts towards a greater good. Mortal Kombat X is sprucing up its online multiplayer play with two newly announced features: Factions and Living Towers, both which should go a long way towards adding replayability and making people feel that much vested in their online conquest.
Right from the outset, you're asked to pick from one of five Factions; from that moment on, everything you do, no matter the mode, will contribute to your Factions persistent global ranking across all platforms. Meanwhile, the new Living Towers offer three tiers of challenges which are constantly being updated, offering a bevy of new ways to test your might. To find out more details about the online features - or get caught up before the April 14th release - read on for a full breakdown of everything we know about Mortal Kombat X.
As you might expect from the latest in a series of legendary fighting games, the MKX roster offers classic characters duking it out with some intriguing newcomers. Obviously you've got icons of digital violence like Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Raiden all back in fine form - but because the MKX story takes place 25 years after the events of MK9, there's also more opportunity to shine the spotlight on a few fresh faces.
The additions to the MKX cast range from wacky (the mismatched duo of Terra and Korr) to wicked (like Kotal Kahn, who looks like a murderous Aztec demigod). There's also room for spiritual successors like Cassie Cage, the sassy daughter of Sonya and Johnny. And before each fight, you'll be treated to a brief verbal exchange that does wonders for making each fighter feel like a fully fleshed-out character. Not only is there different dialogue for every match-up - there's even multiple possibilities for each possible pairing. If you want a character-by-character breakdown, be sure to check out our .
Every MK player has their personal favorite character - but sometimes you might feel pressured to pick the fighters you're less familiar with just for the sake of variety and versatility. But MKX offers a new way to find the perfect compliment to your playstyle: variations, which effectively create three distinct versions of every character in the roster.
These aren't stances that you switch between in the heat of combat, like past MK games - they're more like three distinct themes molded around the same base character. Before each fight, you'll pick which variation best suits you (or foils your opponent), which slight aesthetic alterations to your character to make it clear which variation you've selected. All three variations will share some core moves, but other specials or even new combos can be variation-specific. It's essentially a way to make your favorite character play three very different ways, meaning you won't have to worry about counterpicks or constantly learning new characters from scratch if you want to switch up your style.
The stage-specific interactables in NetherRealm Studios' Injustice could easily turn the tide of a battle, since some characters could rip apart the stage to deal massive amounts of damage. Interactables have been ported over to MKX - but don't worry, there's not as overpowered here as they were in Injustice. Instead of making them all about big damage, interactables in MKX put more emphasis on evasive maneuvers and space control.
Activating them is the same - when you're close enough to an interactable, it'll glow, meaning you can take advantage of it with a single button press. Maybe you'll escape the corner by bouncing off a nearby wall, chuck a crate to pester your opponent from long range, or escape pressure by flinging hot ash in your enemy's face, causing them to stagger backwards in pain. Unlike Injustice, all the characters respond to interactables the same way, which makes them feel much more balanced and accessible, rather than cheap. Interactables may help you get into position in MKX, but you'll still have to do damage the old-fashioned way.
Meter management is a staple of many fighters, creating a metagame where you must constantly weigh your options and adapt to your opponent's capabilities. Mortal Kombat 9 smartly introduced a three-part super meter into the mix, as well as the hilariously violent X-Ray moves, which act as a highly damaging Hail Mary attack complete with a see-through view of all the bone-shattering and internal organ rupturing. That same meter system is back in MKX, adding an appreciated extra layer of depth to each bout.
The super meter in MKX offers a nice mix of offensive and defensive options. You can either amplify one of your special moves, break a combo to avoid further damage, or go for the all-or-nothing X-Ray attack that'll obliterate your opponent's health bar if it connects or leave you totally vulnerable if it misses. Knowing how to best spend your meter in any given situation, while still managing to keep an eye on your opponent's, is crucial to your success in MKX.
It just wouldn't be Mortal Kombat without Fatalities - the distinct brand of match-ending animations that have wowed audiences and shocked parents for years. And if you thought MK9 upped the ante with its ludicrously gory Fatalities, just want till you see the brutal executions in MKX. Every time you think they've over, they take the shock value to a whole new level.
Whatever your preference - slicing off faces, snapping spines, or bisecting entire bodies - MKX is ready and willing to show it off with the kind of grisly detail that only its new graphics engine can deliver. The current frontrunner for 'most brutal Fatality' has to go to Quan Chi, who uses his mind-control powers to make his dazed opponent walk mouth-first to the hilt of a sword. Once they've skewered their own noggin, he telekinetically lifts then up and slams them down, cleanly splitting their remains in the process. It's the ultimate addition of insult to injury, and your friends will be both mortified and delighted every time.
NetherRealm Studios set out to make MKX's online multiplayer feel more compelling than in MK9, and the new Living Towers help to make that happen. Hopping into this mode lets you choose from three towers akin to the ladders from classic MK games, with varying heights. There's currently three tiers: quick, which should take about 30 minutes to complete and refresh every two hours, daily, which offers a new challenge every 24 hours, and premier, a kind of long-term, special-event trial reserved for the masochistic among us.
The twist is that each fight as you ascend a chosen tower can have a gigantic variety of variables, which can be combined in whatever way NetherRealm sees fit. Effects can be game-breaking, in a good way: things like a constant rain of bombs or missiles, lights that fade in and out, a swaying camera perspective, or low gravity can completely alter your fighting strategy. There are hundreds of modifiers, and there some truly special combinations - particularly Juggle Kombat, which mixes slow-mo falls with extra-fast uppercut animations for some truly nasty combo potential.
Online interactivity is all the rage these days, and NetherRealm has found a clever way to integrate a sense of persistence to MKX's online play. From the moment you start playing the game, you're asked to pick from one of five Factions, all themed after iconic MK fighters: Lin Kuei, White Lotus, Brotherhood of Shadow, Special Forces, or the Black Dragon. Once you've made your choice, the game menus and UI will be reskinned to match, and you'll be grouped with players from every region and platform who picked the same Faction.
Any mode you play, be it single-player or online, will build up points for your Faction; if you want, you can essentially ignore the Faction Wars while still taking part in them. By completing mini-challenges and contributing points to your overall team, you can earn special rewards - probably things like new costumes, profile designs, or extras, though NetherRealm isn't saying just yet. Once the winning Faction for the week has been crowned, the standings reset and the war breaks out all over again. Your rewards do persist even when the race for points restarts - but if you decide to align with a different Faction, you'll have to start from square one.
Are you stoked for more Mortal Kombat? Already have an idea of who you'll be picking (or even which variation you plan on using)? Do you think the Fatalities have just gone too far this time around? Let your voice be heard in the comments section below!
It's a commonly held belief that sex sells, but that's not really true. Sure, sexually charged imagery has a good chance of grabbing people's attention, but just because someone does a double-take on your product, doesn't mean they're going to snatch it up and sprint over to the nearest cash register. Advertisements full of TA might be marginally appropriate when the game in question is all about naked bodies - Leisure Suit Larry, Muscle March, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, what have you. But typically, in-your-face objectification in game ads is reserved for titles that are desperate to distract you from their blatant flaws and failures.
You've no doubt seen those Game of War commercials starring Kate Upton, which devote roughly 0.05% of the ad's runtime to the game itself. But this is just the latest in a not-so-proud tradition of games trying to ensnare those who make purchasing decisions with what's in their pants. Strap in for a ride on this libido roller coaster, as we journey back through time to see the most ridiculously sexual game ads that in no way represent what's actually being sold.
I'm fairly certain that, at no point in the entire course of human history, has an actual person earnestly commented that "You deserve an orgy today!" But maybe Wartune is on to something. Instead of complimenting your co-worker in the hall with "Hey Alex, great job on the quarterly earnings presentation today!", why not try shouting "Hey Alex, you deserve an orgy for the way you presented that PowerPoint!" across the office? You'll destroy your reputation and career in one fell swoop, but you'll have that much common with this stolen art asset of a smiling maiden lifted from a Chinese MMO.
If Wartune really did invite people over for a rollicking evening of group sex, it would only allow its participants to remove one item of clothing (socks included, and counted individually) every seventeen hours. Its actual gameplay is about as arousing as looking at a map while someone begs you for money.
Ah, Evony - a modern classic of laughably bad and ineffective advertising. What started as a concerted effort to grab the attention of horny web surfers devolved into something bordering on self-parody, with banner ads that assume breasts, in any form, have the same effect as a hypnotist's swaying watch. If you're the kind of person who excitedly clicks on each and every Evony ad you encounter online, then prepare for a lifetime of disappointment. Things are only going to get worse from here.
Think Farmville is for Facebook casuals, but find yourself itching to click a bunch of static images while you wait for something to happen? Hankering for a SimVillage where it takes a real-world week to erect a new building? Evony is the game for you, person who doesn't exist!
If you find this imagery to be sexy, then you're well on your way to becoming a festishistic serial killer who can only make love to modified mannequins. If you find this imagery funny, you're just an idiot.
Congratulations: you're now the owner of a system with next to zero first-party support! I hope you like playing imported visual novels, JRPGs, cool indies, or remote play, because that's all you'll ever use this handheld for!
This anatomically incorrect comic book woman took a break from her role in a Rob Liefeld comic to stand next to these controllers, so I guess they must be tangentially related! Note the pasted-on Nyko logo on her shirt, carefully manipulated to accentuate the curvature of her breasts and half-raised nipples. Just to clarify, what does all this have to do with third-party controllers, again?
I guess the intent was that, when you see this drawing of a woman, your palms will become so sweaty that you'll be begging for some kind of fan-powered plastic controller to dry them off. Or maybe her dead-eyed stare will somehow remind you that your hands become rainforests whenever you're playing a game (kinda like mine)? Either way, Air Flo controllers are what you game with if you don't want anyone to ever take you seriously.
It's not often that an advertisement will use beastiality as an incentive to purchase a product. Actually, I'm not sure if it's still called beastiality when the animal you're sexually assaulting can breath underwater. And I'll be damned before I look that up on the Internet.
The visual imagery of inseminating a sea bass is only slightly more revolting than the gameplay in this Dreamcast oddity. You'll question if the sex crime you committed against all of creation was worth it when your offspring looks like Ariel's inbred half-cousin, thrice removed.
Hello, ladies! I don't speak Japanese, but your kind eyes and winning smiles are a universal form of communication. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that you're neither featured nor interested in Gallop Racer 2, and judging by your attire, jockeying is not your formal profession. So I'm a little confused as to why you're taking up more space on the page than the gameplay screenshots. Oh well!
If you often purchase horse racing games from Japan at retail, then I'm sorry to have offended you with such mockery. But then again, you're not actually reading this right now, are you? You're probably off somewhere betting fake money on fake horses because that's what your life has become. Unless the game in question is , in which case I take it all back.
"There's only one thing more torturous than playing Deathtrap Dungeon. Not playing it." So... were people writhing in agony before Eidos pressed this game to disc? Waterboarding, bamboo shoots under the fingernails, drills drawing ever closer to your eardrum - all of it pales in comparison to this third-person Dark Ages brawler. Which I guess is a good reason to buy it? Maybe?
Ian Livingstone is the author of the Fighting Fantasy series of choose-your-own-adventure books. You know how those tend to devolve into a series of dead-ends, confusing riddles, and fatal pitfalls that you can't see coming? Now picture that with some chunky polygons, and you've got Ian Livingstone's Deathtrap Dungeon in a nutshell. Yep - Livingstone was slapping his name on games before American McGee made it cool for a whole five minutes. But to be fair, at least there's actually a playable dominatrix in this game.
Pop quiz: what's the best way to promote the latest game from a third-rate mascot? If you answered "Show a parody of Janet Jackson's infamous Rolling Stone cover instead of gameplay," then you're a late '90s publicist who got flung into our time to discover that everyone thinks you're dumb as hell. Welcome! This is what's become of that little fad called "the internet". We currently have no way of sending you back to your former reality. Sorry about that.
Now admittedly, Playboy model Marliece Andrada is in Gex 3, relegated to FMV cutscenes that serve as the springboard for Gex's horndog comments. But all of those... ugh... "Miss Adventures" boil down to running and jumping through very loosely themed 3D stages, all while you daydream about playing Super Mario 64 instead. Ah, and before I forget: obligatory Geico joke.
You'd be amazed (or maybe not) at how rarely men take the sexualization spotlight in video game advertising, so Blood is a refreshing outlier. "You're soaking in it," reads the text carefully placed near this fellow's abs/crotch. I was under the impression that I was looking at a fold-out ad in a magazine, rather than soaking in blood, but I guess I stand corrected. I'm also of the belief that this man's nipples could cut through glass.
The Blood ad also has the decency to show actual gameplay to the audience - imagine that! But since this shooter uses a first-person perspective, there's no way to tell that the protagonist, Caleb, is a gritty Wild West gunslinger raised from the dead, not the hunky genderswap of Elizabeth Bathory. False advertising strikes yet again! In any case, you should go play Blood. It's pretty great.
I have no idea what this advertisement is actually for, because all I see when I look at it is a woman's butt. That description text? Those in-game screenshots? They may as well not exist, because they are vying for your attention against impossible odds (much like the paragraph you're currently reading). But besides reducing a real woman with thoughts and feelings to an anonymous rear end, there are some definite problems with this ad. I get that "Take advantage" is a tennis joke, but given the context, it sounds like the inner monologue of a sexual predator. And why is this tennis player holding a boxed game at this exact moment in time? What, is she about to spike it across the net for a highly illegal serve?
It's a tennis game. Tengen made it. I'm not sure what else you want me to say. I guess they do have individually pixelated butts.
Here's a 'pro tip': Don't stick your penis into a Game Gear. This man mistook his Sega-brand handheld for a sex toy, and his flattened, cartridge-shaped wang now serves as a permanent reminder that he was dead wrong. Maybe if this oaf was actually looking down, he would've realized that he was vigorously humping a piece of plastic.
You know, the Game Gear did full-color handheld visuals when the Game Boy didn't. You know what else the Game Boy didn't have? A voracious appetite for six AA batteries every two hours, housed in a system so bulky it could barely be called portable.
I pray to God that this woman safely escaped from the disheveled murder-house belonging to this homicidal, Tetris-obsessed maniac. Looking at this image makes me instinctually want to call the police, not rush to a store and snag a slimmer Game Boy. Advertisements like this one are why we can't have nice things, humanity.
Here's a fun experiment! Tell a joke about that time a riveting game of Tetris took priority over SM roleplaying with your significant other. Now, look around you. Is anyone laughing? No - because you're alone, and with that sense of humor, you always will be.
I think The Lonely Island wrote a song about this exact scenario. Are those mustached twins our heroes? The villains? I honestly have no idea. The woman in the green bikini looks like she's longingly gazing at the place she'd rather be - somewhere, anywhere but here.
Complete with levels that liberally rip off Space Harrier and Contra! Konami made Turtles in Time and Sunset Riders, so it's eternally forgiven for any arcade stinkers. But you won't score any points with the bikini babes by completing this coin-muncher, I'm afraid to say. Looks like you bought that neon-pink-and-yellow wetsuit and white fedora for nothing.
The photographer probably told this model to look like she was having fun. Yet the picture makes it look like she's running away screaming from this lecherous-looking man. And "Gotcha!" is typically what psychos say before a devilish grin flashes across their face, a loud violin chord rings out, and the screen cuts to black. Also, this arcade cabinet is purposely designed to make the controls look like giant pink nipples. Way to go, Atari. Also also, why is the woman transparent? Are they ghosts? This adds a whole new dimension to the terror!
No, this isn't a '70s training simulation for aspiring cryptographers - it's all the hot, steamy in-game action awaiting you in GOTCHA. You play as a ball chasing a plus sign through a shifting maze of random shapes. Because that presentation could be interpreted as literally anything, Atari's advertisers thought it would be best to offer sexual harassment as the prompt for your mind's eye. For this, they shall burn in Hell.
Why do you have to put me on the spot like that, Interlude ad? Yes, I often like to strip down to my unmentionables and lug an 80-pound home computer into my bed. Is that so wrong? I'm no different from any other sane human being: I just want to be loved. Can your product finally offer an escape from my lonely nights and tear-stained pillowcases?
As hilarious demonstrates, Interlude is just a questionnaire of your sexual fantasies, with the end goal being specified instructions for having sex. There's just one problem: by the time you've finished asking your computer about how to best please your lover, they will have already started a meaningful relationship with someone who talks to them instead of filling out 'sexy' surveys.
So there you have it - sex has been used in the attempt to sell games since the '70s, and it doesn't look like things are going to change anytime soon. Big ups to the tumblr, which has loads of retro gaming ads both classic and horrifying. Tell me in the comments which ad you think is the most egregious - and please, refrain from sharing which one got you the most aroused.
And if you're hungry for more light-hearted mockery, check out .
Handsome high schoolers in well-tailored uniforms fighting personal demons and feeling cynical about society as a whole? It must be the long-awaited full reveal trailer for Persona 5! The Japanese video flashes between animated cutscenes and in-game moments, showing how the series' distinct visual style has grown since Persona 4 - and since Persona 4 was designed for PS2, the difference is pretty impressive.
Persona 5 trades the sleepy town of Inaba for a bustling metropolis. Hazardous areas aren't just flat labyrinths any more, as the trailer shows the main character leaping from chandelier to chandelier and blinking from cover to cover as he avoids the gaze of a lurking demon. It seems to star an all-new cast of kids (except for a cameo from the long-nosed, bug-eyed fortuneteller Igor) who are terested in pulling off heists than rescuing kidnapped citizens - but we'll have to hold off on judging them until we can actually understand what they're saying. Click on for a primer on recent developments in the Persona series.
Many were waiting for Atlus USA to announce Persona 5, and while that did happen, we still know so very little about the game. The initial trailer slowly flashes five chairs on the screen with five retro-style ball and chains attached. English text appears saying, "You are slave, want emancipation?” The Japanese trailer ended by saying it’ll be out in Japan winter 2014 on the PS3, and now we know it’ll hit the US some time in 2015. That’s basically it at this point.
First off, though next-gen fans may be bothered that it will still be on PS3, it isn’t shocking given that Persona 4 was on PS2 years after the PS3 had replaced that console. If that information bothers them, fans should relax knowing the Persona brain trust - series director Katsura Hashino, series designer Shigenori Soejima, and series composer Shoji Meguro - is also running things for P5. Now that Persona 5 is official, it seems pretty clear that it’ll feature an entirely new cast and story. However, if you’re worried the Persona 4 crew is being left out, there are plenty of other ways to keep up with them.
The most intriguing of the new Persona 4 spin-offs announced is likely Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, the first ever Persona game on a Nintendo system. In the , a strange tower appears at Yasogami High (Persona 4’s setting), and the teams from Persona 3 and 4 team up to explore this strange building, along with a couple new faces. Players can mix and match teams of up to five characters to get different interactions and story elements, all featuring the super cute redesigns of the popular Persona squads.
Released in fall of 2014 in the US, the most interesting thing about Persona Q might just be the talent involved. The aforementioned Hashino, Soejima, and Meguro are all involved in similar roles from the main series, but the game is being directed by Daisuke Kaneda of the Etrian Odyssey series. Will this be a similar dungeon-crawler? And will any of the Etrian cast make an appearance? We’ll know when it comes to the 3DS portable this year.
Shoji Meguro’s music is one of the Persona series’ greatest strengths, so expanding his catcy tunes into a game of their own makes a lot of sense in this . And given that P4 cast member Rise is a pop star/idol in Japan, she’s the obvious focus of a game developed by the team behind multiple Hatsune Miku music games. But Risette isn’t the only member of P4’s Investigation Team dancing the night away on a Sony portable.
This Vita exclusive spin-offs makes a certain amount of sense given that genre’s popularity with Japanese owners, and we’re intrigued by new characters from Kanamin Kitchen, the team of idols Rise is out to save. The 30-plus songs of dancing action are headed to the US sometime in 2015, and we’re crossing our fingers that Teddie will be an actual dancer in the game, or we’ll be beary mad!
Persona 4 Arena impressed RPG fans and fighting game enthusiasts alike by combining the sharp combat and animation that developer Arc System Works is known for with the continuing story of the characters from Persona 3 and 4. Now, as is the case with most fighting games, it’s getting updated with new characters and storylines (watch this for a little fo on that).
Given the original’s popularity in the US, it isn’t surprising that North America is getting a 360 version while it stays PS3-exclusive in Japan. As for the Ultimax’s fresh challengers, there’s Persona 3’s Junpei and Yukari, and new character Sho Minazuki, a powerful (if goofy) teen who seems to be positioned as Yu’s new rival.
That's all we know about Persona 5 so far, but maybe if you leave some comments about what you want to see in the new game you'll discover some new social links...
And if you're looking for more Shin Megami Tensei, check out .
Modern gaming is pretty decent; we have some of the most beautiful looking games of all time and plenty of experimental experiences thanks to the explosion of indie games. However, while the grass is a vibrant shade of green, it’s hard not to notice one or two weeds starting to push their way through this heavy-handed metaphor. You see, games are great and all, but are we really making the most out of them? No.
This is where we get to Trophies. With Sony's virtual silverware now displaying how many people have earned each specific accolade, we can tell not just which individuals have played what, but exactly how the gaming populace as a whole conducts itself. And when we really start sifting through those challenge completion percentages, frankly, it all starts to get a bit bleak. Here are all the grimmest truths bits I’ve gathered while scrabbling through the Trophy gold mines.*
*Due to the ever shifting nature of said mines, some of these stats may have changed since the time of writing. Hopefully for the better.
When is a game “finished”? Is it when you’ve got a 100% sign flashing away on the save file? Or just once you hit the dreaded hour long credits sequence that accompanies most games? Well, it’s none of the above. It’s apparently finished when you put the game down and forget it ever existed, or hurl it into the dreaded pre-owned black hole of your nearest game shop for maybe a few quid, if Alien: Isolation is be anything to go by.
Isolation might have been our 3rd best game of the year, but only 15.7% of PS4 Isolation owners can proudly display the virtual icon telling them they’ve finished the game. Sure, that means 82.3% won’t be having Xenomorph related nightmares anytime in the near future, but they’ve also missed out on the pant-ruining terror that is a Working Joe who wants to explore the inside of your noggin. Also, the last few hours are insanely good. Fire it back up again, you fools!
But why let finishing a game be a problem when you don’t even have to properly start it? Telltale’s The Walking Dead is a fantastic game… although it’s also one that doesn’t require a great deal of actual playing. You hit buttons, but far less often than in other games, and the demands on your arcade skills are almost non-existent. In fact, to get the first Trophy you only need to spend 15 minutes playing. Should be a solid 100% collection rate for that one, right?
Nope; 93.2% of narrative zombie fans completed the arduous task of actually starting a game they spent real money on, according to the Trophy stats. That leaves an astounding 6.8% of players who maybe just saw a dog outside the window and forgot what they were doing. Who has an attention span like that? Wait, before I answer that, is that a French Bulldog..?
We all know the score by now, Tomb Raider is a pretty cool survival-action game where Lara Croft is both the victim and the monster. It’s not all about the queasy thrill of realigning the facial muscles of some poor goons on a deserted island though. There are also some tombs to have a poke around in as well. Hey, considering that the game has ‘Tomb’ in its name, you would think that would be a pretty big deal, to be fair. Let’s get raiding then?
Nope, turns out us gamers really just crave the violence. For instance, only 20.4% bothered to get all the optional tombs explored, whereas 68% of gamers mistook this for archery practice and ensured 50 enemies croaked it at the end of Lara’s bow. Add on the 62.8% of sneaky assassins who ended the lives of 25 unaware guards, and it seems we’ll forsake shelter in any old weather as long as there’s something to kill out there.
Who plays Call of Duty for the single player, ’eh? Isn’t the series now just an online playground for people without filters to vent their frustrations while blasting seven shades of pixels out of each other? Well, sort of. On PS4 CoD: Ghosts, 57% of people own the Trophy for completing the first mission. That’s 56.9% more than I was expecting, admittedly. But still, the first mission.
CoD 4: Modern Warfare still stands as one of the best FPS campaigns of the last generation, but since then, the series multiplayer offerings - both competitive and co-operative - have become increasingly dominant. This Trophy stat really hammers home the possibility that a good proportion of people have now stopped buying the series for it’s story. To look at what CoD campaigns have become - Kevin Spacey parachuted in to paper over the linearly scripted cracks and all - is a sad reminder that its single player has basically become a six hour tutorial for all the new toys in the online death grounds.
Life is full of contrasts. Some trophies, for instance, demand a commitment usually reserved for monks in a brothel. Others only require that you understand how to move your thumbs. In Burnout Paradise, your first task after turning on the game is to bundle your wheeled wreck through an Auto Repair shop, or else find yourself stuck in a death defying junkmobile for the rest of all eternity. You would expect in a game based purely around the concept of driving really fast, getting your car into an acceptable state would be a priority.
It takes some cars longer to get to 0-60 than it does to earn this Trophy and yet only 87.7% of gamers managed it. The only plausible theory is some Dark Souls level of self-imposed challenge. I refuse to believe 12.3% of players loaded up one of the best racers ever assembled and thought it “sod it” before they had even begun.
Back in the days of the PS2, Pro Evolution Soccer was the critical darling to FIFA’s mainstream, sales machine, and its genius was built on the Master League. You created your own team, inherited a squad of players and dragged them all the way to victory. It’s basically football’s version of XCOM, just without the crushing moments of defeat when all your best squad members are brutalized into a coma.
This year’s Master League brings back exactly what you want; bizarrely named players to get far too emotionally attached to. Unfortunately, the PES buying public have seemed to move on, with only 32.1% registering one singular win in Master League. The last-last-gen version of the mode has become nostalgia fuel for plenty of gamers from that golden era, but its latest incarnation will be lucky if people even remember it by the time the next edition rolls around.
Poor Ivory Tower. Years had been spent fine tuning its next-gen debut, an ambitious MMO for petrol heads where the entirety of the US is the play area. It’s online-only, to convince people to team up and form some sort of gang when they race. A crew, if you will. See, it’s such a big part of the game, it’s actually the name of it.
So it must be soul crushing to find that only 52.8% of it’s racers have bothered to have raced in a Crew. I even got my Trophy when I accidentally accepted to join someone’s game. Not everyone wants to have other people spoil their fun, anyone who has ever played online will attest to that. Still, it’s a bit rough for only half your audience buying into the game’s concept.
I can’t really think of any reasons why anybody would not want to play every inch of Rayman: Legends. Personally, I love the game so much that I find it disconcerting that not every Trophy is 100% done. But I get it. It’s pretty much impossible to Platinum the game unless you play its challenges every day for about fifty days. It’s almost understandable that the big P Trophy is hovering around the 2% mark, even if a day with Rayman is ALWAYS better than a day without him.
But it’s the other trophies that make me want to weep for the gaming community. Only 50% have got the Trophy for completing the sublime Castle Rock musical level, where your actions sync up to a cover of Black Betty. If you don’t automatically think that sounds like a good use of your time, then it might be worth reconsidering your outlook on life. Like, really, really hard.
Early on in Wolfenstein’s Nazi-robo-dog slaughtering adventure, the game makes you to decide which one of your allies is going to be dissected by a mad Nazi General. And thanks to Trophy statistics, you can see that everybody made the correct choice in who to save in this scenario. Wait, hang on a minute. Something’s wrong here. You mean isn’t it 100% for Wyatt? You beasts!
Wyatt might have been a naive urchin who was lucky not be sucking down lead every minute of Wolfenstein’s prologue, but who could resist his plucky optimism? 62% of Wolfenstein’s cold hearted, dead-eyed players, that’s who. Fergus had a few things going in his favour - he was first on screen, you shared a life-or-death incident on a plane right at the start of the game, he probably likes the same things you like and smells really good - but it’s still not enough to condemn poor Wyatt to a brain removal. Those are a boy’s hopes and dreams you’re scooping out there.
Singstar might not be a game you particularly want to save for a marathon session, but round up a few people, add in some drinks, and it’s karaoke without the usual full quotient of humiliation. Or at least with a vague semblance of gamification to distract you from the humiliation. But, according to the darkest recesses of the Trophy list, you can also rap on Singstar. Why would Singstar do that?
I’ll gladly partake when nobody’s looking, but unless you are certified, actually-good-at-it rapper, that should be the only time any of us should attempt to spit some bars. We all make mistakes, and in the drunken haze of 2:45am, I could see how showing off your flow to something as innocuous as Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) could seem like a good idea. But to unlock “That’s A Rap”, just like 4.6% of real people did, you need to complete an actual rap song five times. A horror that great should not be allowed to exist.
Kittens! Mario! A nice brew on a Sunday morning! Feel better? Good. That particular tour of the depressing state of modern gaming could have turned most of us into Morrissey. Are there any gaming behaviours that send you into a spiral of despair? Or better yet, which ones have brought a wry smile to your face?
Looking for more features to consume, you rabid over-achiever? Check out , for there are prizes to be had!*
There's a weird irony with video game characters. They suffer life-or-death, world-saving trials every day, but they never have to deal with the regular traumas of real every day life. You know, the little problems and flaws that bother and inconvenience real human beings constantly.
Yes, they have to fight off orcs, goblins, demons, and occult theocratic robot space-lemurs all the damn time, but missing a bus? Breaking a nail? Slipping a disc? Losing their place in the magical tome required to vanquish the local Elder God and having to go back to the contents page? No. Never happens. Click on for 14 more things that really should make being in a video game far, far harder than it is. In a way, those jerks have it easy.
Aiden Pearce is going 70 miles per hour down a city street with a dozen squad cars in hot pursuit, but he's not particularly worried. All he needs to do is raise a few bollards and change a few traffic lights and he'll be free and clear. Smirking at his own cleverness, he pulls his phone out from his pocket and loads up ctOS.
But then an unfamiliar screen greets him… the login screen. With mounting horror, Aiden realizes that he cleared his browser cookies last night after reading racy Brony fanfiction. His eyes dart from the street ahead to the empty password field below. He begins to panic. Dear Lord, what was his ctOS password? AidenNo1? blum3suck5? abc123?! Nothing's working! Where's the 'Password Reset' option?! Why hasn't the email arrived yet?! Why is he not watching the roa
Being the foremost robotics expert in the world and the recipient of a Nobel Prize, you might think that Dr. Light has done very well for himself financially. You would be half right. The profits from his world-changing technology allowed him to construct a state of the art lab and surrogate robo-children, yes, but it hasn't made paying off his Ph.D's student loans any easier. Particularly since interest rates have gotten even worse by 200X.
Dr. Light spends so much of his income just keeping up with interest that he can't actually afford a place of his own. He lives in the lab's broom closet, and Roll's beginning to suspect something after having found him passed out between the mop bucket and floor waxer for the dozenth time. At least Dr. Wily gets a castle. Then again, he does have to fill it with killer robots to keep the creditors from repossessing it.
It's easy to get attached to your armor in Destiny, given how you much time and Glimmer you invest in finding it, leveling it up, and customizing it to your liking. Thankfully, whatever sentimental pangs you may feel from swapping a trusty old piece of gear are usually crowded out by the joy and anticipation of slotting in a new item with more powerful stats and bonuses.
Unless it's not really a stat upgrade, and you just had to farm for new leg armor because your old ones are riding a little tight these days. Hey, it happens to a lot of Guardians - you get older, you start putting on some Light levels, and suddenly your butt doesn't fit in your old default dropship seat. Maybe go a few sizes up when you're farming Engrams to be future-proof, since you can always wear a belt.
You know, with all that armor plating, weaponry, and a freezer full of ice cream novelties, Sweet Tooth is nearly unstoppable. Doesn't really matter in the arena if your ride weighs five tons, handles worse than a bathtub on wheels, and belches plumes of acrid exhaust, as long as it keeps moving and shooting longer than all the other cars. Passing your biennial smog test, though? That can be a problem.
But if Needles Kane doesn't want to get pulled over for driving a vehicle with expired registration while he's trying to get his vehicular manslaughter on, he doesn't have much choice. Ugh, can you imagine how hard that would wreck his killer clown image? Now he can only pray that the technician doesn't notice he replaced the catalytic converter with a flamethrower…
Image via
The Dragonborn was somewhere outside of Morthal, on the edge of the Hjaalmarch, when a familiar Argonian face appeared in the mists before her. "Mother?" she asked. "What magic is this? Why do you interrupt me as I work to liberate this frozen land?" The face was taken aback, inasmuch as a swirling grey visage could convey taken-abackedness.
"Well hello to you too, sweetie. Oh, I just went down the street to old Xolth's - you remember Xolth, he said the blessing at your scale-fasting - and asked him if he could conjure something that would let me talk to you. Because you never visit! And I worry about you up there in Skylimb because it's so cold and you never dress warm enough! Your horns will freeze off! And for that matter, how are you ever going to give me grandchildren if you spend all your time liberating? You need to come back to Black Marsh and meet Xolth's son, he's back from college and he's going into business with…"
The only thing harder to get out of a khaki-colored henley shirt than Nathan Drake is a bloody grass stain. That's why treasure hunting is such a vicious cycle for him - he goes looking for rare artifacts, but in the process gets his entire wardrobe shot up by mercenaries or torn to shreds from falling out of airplanes, so he has to sell all the treasure just to afford new designer shirts and pants to half-tuck into each other.
Money gets lean between adventures, though, and eventually he has to sit down with a needle, thread, and a spray bottle of stain remover to try and salvage what he can. His hands are so messed up from years of rock climbing and firing high-caliber weaponry that it usually ends up looking like the work of a five-year-old, but he knows Elena will just laugh him off if he asks for help. It's tough to be Drake.
Yeah, getting that new Mercedes Roadster seemed great at the time, but the problem with driving an actual car on the course is that you need actual car insurance. And it's a Benz, so the insurance is incredibly expensive. You wonder why Luigi has that ever-present death stare? He's willing you to stay the hell away from his car so that you don't get in an accident and drive his premiums into the stratosphere.
I mean, it's a great car, but taking care of it has kind of driven the joy out of racing, y'know? Not much to do about it now, though - Luigi traded in his kart to help with the downpayment and the secondhand market for tiny, cartoon-sized sports cars is notoriously fickle.
So you’re Gordon Freeman. You’re a badass guerrilla physicist. Egon Spengler, Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, James Bond and Rambo rolled into one. Your time in City 17 since you arrived has been spent on one long journey of discovery, survival, and insurrection amid the long-standing Combine occupation. Now, finally, it looks like victory is in sight.
One thing though. You’ve noticed lately that your aim has gone to shit. And the loud bangs and ratta-tatt-tatts of the battlefield are making you really twitchy. And you keep forgetting important tactical conversations you’ve just had with various members of the resistance. And you keep getting really sad and teary about the stupidest little things. And you’re really, really, really paranoid. Then you realise. You haven’t taken a minute’s break since Half-Life 2’s continuous, unbroken campaign started four days ago. And those aren’t Combine that you’re shooting up, but the innocent Sunday shoppers of Tesco, and you’re actually just tripping balls.
Dom: Hey, Marcus, how far you thinking this Grub tunnel goes? Feels like we haven’t seen daylight in a week.
Marcus: …
Dom: Marcus?
Marcus: …
Dom: Hey man, where’d you go?
Marcus steps out from behind a rock with a look of relief on his face.
Dom: Where's your bandana?
Interesting thing about months-long, cross-continental RPG quests. The human immune system wouldn’t like them one little bit. Between the perpetual, mostly on-foot travel, constant exertion, ever-present risk of attack, resulting plethora of minor flesh-wounds, repeat mana burn-out, and potential for zero sleep, even if your game has a day/night cycle (and if you do get any, it’s likely to be al fresco), an RPG campaign conducted under real-world conditions would make you ill.
Levelling up as the journey goes on? No way. By the end of an RPG quest conducted under real-world conditions, you wouldn’t be stronger. You’d be a quivering, snotty, coughing ball of infection. Maybe that’s why levelling slows down the further you get into a game.
Slippy-slidey ice worlds! Amazing! Slipping! Sliding! Pretty, tinkley tunes, evocative of all the best things about Christmas! Murderous snowmen! I love them, you love them, and Mario certainly loves them. He loves the atmospheric change of pace. He loves the new challenges thrown up by the extra momentum and inertia under his platform-savvy feet. He loves stomping on insidious, sentient snow-piles and making friends with friendly penguins.
He loves all of that because he only has to involve himself with the fun parts of winter. Never once has he, around level five or six, realised his error in only bringing along his standard dungarees and thin work jumper. Never once has he found himself slowing in the run up to an important jump, joints seizing and hands aching. Never once has he slumped under a tree, mere feet from the final flag pole, so tired, so cold… so hungry… so… blue…
You know what’s ridiculous about the epic, House of Blue Leaves fight scene in Kill Bill: Part One? It’s not that Beatrix kills roughly a thousand sword-wielding Yakuza while taking barely a scratch. It’s the fact that after demolishing the structural integrity of seven or eight gangsters, she’d have found herself unable to inflict more than a nasty bruise on the rest. Swords, you see, go blunt really fast.
Katanas in particular, being the samurai’s weapon of choice, are not really design for long, protracted duels. Instead, they’re all about short, incredible sharp, one-hit kills, ideally after walking up to someone like a badass and slowly explaining how you’re definitely about to kill them and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Sorry, Mitsurugi, Yoshimitsu, and any protagonist from Onimusha. In real-life, after a few choice cuts you’d be reduced to slapping your opponents to death with a long, steel ruler.
Ken had it in the bag. It had been a tough fight. Bison had been typically relentless from the off, keeping up the Knee Press pressure and dodging every corner-trap with that bloody EX Psycho Crusher of his (seriously, how does he get that crap out so fast with half a scrap-yard attached to his shins?), but all the pain had been worth it. Ken’s Ultra gauge was now ready to go, and while he had just been knocked down, his opponent was getting cocky. The dictator had thrown caution to the wind and was actually jumping in. The crazy fool! What was he thinking? One Ultra Dragon Punch on wake up, and that shit-eating grin would be wiped off Captain Cap’s face forever.
Bison’s boots grew closer. Time slowed down. Ken rose to his feet, prepped the Shinryuken, and leapt. His fist connected with Bison’s chin, and his wrist crumpled with a nasty ‘snap’ noise, as a direct result of the sprain he’d incurred during that cheap, one-two punch combo after the cross-up in round two. Ken’s fist went as limp as a dead squid, and immediately afterwards, all was darkness.
John Marston was not happy. “Yeah, we’ll help”, had said the cheery locals of the oppressed Mexican town in the south. “Just one thing. Can you go and single-handedly clean out the fort in the north for us first? We’d appreciate it ever so much. You’ll find it really easily. It’s only 50 miles away, just past the big rock and left at the third cactus”.
What they’d spectacularly failed to tell him was that the entire desert was made of rocks and cacti, and the northern border was 150 miles across. And everywhere was full of hungry coyotes. No, John Marston was not happy at all.
Anything else you'd add? Any average, underplayed woes plaguing your life that you really think game characters should get their fair share of? Let us know in the comments, and then go and have a nice cup of tea to calm down.
And while you're here, why not check out what would happen if a game hero applied their high-fallutin' powers to a more normal life, in .
