March 2006
The Escapist - Attack of the Parasites
You get the same vibe off the most popular gaming sites in the English- speaking world, the casual game portals: EA's Pogo, Miniclip, Yahoo! Games, Microsoft's MSN Games, RealNetworks' GameHouse, Big Fish Games and many more. These lookalike sites are "portals" because they aggregate dozens or hundreds of casual games from many indie designers. Some big portals are mere front ends for faceless distributors like Oberon Media or Boonty.
February 2006
IGN: Top 10 Tuesday: Worst Game Controllers
(via)Some brilliant ideas came out of gaming engineers...
History of: The Shining Series
(via)Very few RPG series stand the test of time. Sure, a few sequels might spring up here and there over the course of a few years, but how many of them last for over a decade? I can think of a couple, like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Zelda, and perhaps a few others. These all have their charm and place in gaming history, to be sure. There is one franchise, however, that while not exactly a series per se, it has endured in one incarnation or another for almost fifteen years.
January 2006
Next Generation - Analysis: History of Cell-Phone Gaming
Mobile gaming is changing from its early days of rip-offs of classic, low-tech 2D games and ugly 3D games that are too ambitious for the platform. As a gaming platform it's gaining momentum in a big way.
The Essential 50 Part 44: Parappa the Rapper from 1UP.com
Graphics and images have been an integral part of every game ever made -- it's a visual medium, after all. What you see is what you get. Even the most primitive games that couldn't draw proper images onscreen at least gave you ASCII art or text. And so it went, throughout gaming history, until Parappa the Rapper finally brought a new sense into play: in NanaOn-Sha's PSone masterpiece, you had to rely on your ears as much as your eyes.
Atari Gaming Headquarters - Atari Touchme
Atari's token entry into the handheld market during the classic era was actually a portable version of its unsuccessful coin-op game. Touch Me was a simple yet addictive game but never caught on, but its fun factor was confirmed by the popularity of Milton Bradley's Simon (an imitation of Touch Me by Ralph Baer), which proved to be a runaway best seller for the toy giant.
November 2005
October 2005
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