Super Adventures in Gaming: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)

Super Adventures in Gaming: Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES): Developer: Nintendo | Release Date: 1988 (JP) | Systems: NES, SNES Today on Super Adventures my Mario Marathon Month continues with S...

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Businesses Offer A Link To The Past For Lovers Of Old Video Games - npr.org

For people of a certain age, the sound of the video game character Mario growing after eating a mushroom brings back great memories.

A generation that played the original Nintendo Entertainment System title and other games as children in the 1980s and 1990s has now grown full-sized, too. And they're returning to the games of their childhood.

Inside the Save Point Video Games store in Charlotte, N.C., it's like being back in the 1990s. Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis cartridges line the store's shelves. Synthesized rock blares from an arcade game against one wall.

"It's here that 35-year-old Cameo Stevens is rediscovering an old love, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! for Nintendo. He mashes the joystick. His character on-screen dodges and counters the jab of an opponent.

Stevens has seen the store many times; walking in out of curiosity, he reconnected with his youth.

"This is like one of the games I used to play on like Nintendo ... all the time when I was a kid," Stevens says. "This is like one of my favorite games."

That joy in Stevens' voice as he plays Punch-Out! is what's helping drive a surge in interest for old Atari, Nintendo, Sega Genesis and other '80s and '90s video games. Many people use the same word: nostalgia.

For Wilder Hamm, who opened Save Point in 2012, it's not a surprise. He says many customers have the same story: Their parents either gave away all their consoles once they got new ones, or they traded them, or they sold them to a friend.

"And they all regret it — all of them," he says. "And they come here and see all this stuff, and they're like, 'Oh my god, this is incredible, this is all the stuff I want,' and then they buy it.

Games can range from a few dollars to a few hundred, depending on popularity and scarcity. It's an attractive demographic, says Scott Rigby. He consults for video game developers about why customers buy and play games.

"They're at the height of their careers, they're in their 30s and 40s, and so they can kind of make these purchases," Rigby says.

Economists have no idea what this market is worth, but it's clear the industry has taken notice.

Nintendo, for example, has combined old games, like Zelda, Dr. Mario, and Donkey Kong, into a new one called NES Remix for its latest console. Other businesses are getting in on the action, too. Some bars are pairing beer with video games. Barcade in New York, Headquarters Beercade in Chicago, and the owners of Soda Popinski's in San Francisco all opened new locations in the last year, just to name a few.

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Nick Chambers repairs a Nintendo Entertainment System at his store Video Game World in Huntersville, N.C. He says many of his customers are parents wanting to buy the games they played as kids for their own kids.

Ben Bradford/WFAE 

 

In the Charlotte area, at least nine stores sell old games; for several, it's their primary business. Most opened in the past three years.

In his store, Video Game World, Nick Chambers is repairing an old Nintendo console. He unscrews the plastic case, replaces a broken part and screws it back together — one down, about 40 to go. Chambers says his customers, in this family suburb, are slightly different. Parents shop for their kids.

"I've come to find that most parents are coming in to do this because the newer games are more violent," Chambers says. "So they're coming in to get some of the older stuff they grew up with, because they know what it is."

But there is one more demographic. At Save Point, some of the most ardent customers missed Nintendo's heyday completely.

Nineteen-year-old Shay Marceau is an avid gamer; she plays the new stuff and seeks out the old stuff that preceded it — like a music lover listening to formative bands.

"I've probably been in here three times this week, and it's only Thursday," Marceau says.
As the modern video game industry grows, more players like Marceau are getting nostalgic and exploring the past. And that means even more customers for new businesses selling old games.

Via npr.org

 http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/02/04/381973030/businesses-offer-a-link-to-the-past-for-lovers-of-old-video-games

Also roms and emulaters work fine don't forget :)

A Plea for the Gaming Industry to Respect Gamers

Although the economy might not be in the thick of a recession as it once was, that doesn't mean things are going especially great for videogame publishers. Take Electronic Arts, for instance, which hasn't exactly set the world on fire with its performance as of late. The start of the next generation is an ideal opportunity to effect change that doesn't come along often, and it seems EA doesn't intend to miss it; just yesterday it revealed plans to proliferate microtransactions throughout each of its games. As EA and publishers in general attempt to do this (and try out other means for generating additional revenue), I hope they don't forget to treat gamers with respect.

This current generation of consoles has seen the onset of numerous new money-making tactics. While expansion packs had been offered in the past, downloadable content became the norm for nearly every game, delivering everything from horse armor to new characters, maps, and more. Online passes have attempted to fight used games sales, encouraging gamers to buy new copies of their games or, failing that, forcing them to pay money directly to the publisher for access to certain (often multiplayer) content. Always-online connections, allegedly intended to enable new features but with the obvious benefit of trying to ward off piracy, spread from games where its use was implicit to those where its use is a detriment more than anything else

http://www.xploder.net/news/1631/A-Plea-for-the-Gaming-Industry-to-Respect-Gamers-.htm

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The Return of System Shock 2 - IGN

After thirteen years lost in cyberspace, Bioshock's ancestor is back.

By Rick LaneFor the past decade something has been lurking amid the vast electronic tangle of cyberspace: a name whispered with a strange mixture of fondness and fear by those who remember it; a creation that reigned supreme at the tail end of the last Millennium, and then almost completely disappeared. Just a few days ago, however, it suddenly came back, determined to regain its former glory. I’m here to tell you why you should be afraid and delighted in equal measure.


The alluring monster in question is, of course, System Shock 2, often referred to as the spiritual predecessor to Bioshock, the game that earned Ken Levine a place in the virtual hall of fame. For more thirteen years, legal problems have kept it locked in cyberspace, inaccessible to anyone who didn't buy it in 1999. But now, finally, that's all be resolved, and Good Old Games has released a version of it optimised for modern PCs.

Bioshock and System Shock 2 are linked by far more than spirit.

In both form and function, so much was carried over from the harrowing hallways of SS2’s Von Braun to the underwater dystopia of Rapture. The spacecraft is divided into a sequence of open environments, each with its own particular flavour. The story is largely told through recordings made by the ship’s inhabitants. Most of the crew have been infected by a hive-minded alien organism known as the Many, and are less extroverted, more unsettling versions of Bioshock’s Splicers. The tools at your disposal range from conventional weapons to hacking abilities to psionic powers analogous to Bioshock’s plasmids. It even has creepy vending machines.

Bioshock is a cataclysm within a circus, all action and spectacle, whereas System Shock 2 is about survival.

Yet whilst they are structurally similar, the two games play in strikingly different ways. The Bioshock games are a cataclysm within a circus, all action and spectacle, whereas System Shock 2 is about scavenging and survival. The former explores grand political and philosophical ideas, the latter simply presents to us a struggle for existence, as the squishy, organic Many clash with synthetic AI, with you trapped in the middle of this inedible sandwich.

Artificial Intelligence is a massive component of System Shock 2 on both narrative and mechanical levels. Built with Looking Glass’ famous Dark engine, it utilised the same tech that powered Thief, and the standout feature of the Dark Engine was how its sound system was interwoven with its AI system. Consequently, AI could locate and respond to sounds made by the player, and even sounds made by other AI. This in turn influenced another major theme of the game: horror.

System Shock 2 is frequently cited as one of the scariest games ever made. Despite the suggestive title, however, it never really tries to shock you. Enemies patrol freely through the Von Braun’s metal halls, and you frequently hear them before you see them. Nothing leaps out of vents making weird gargling noises a-la Dead Space. Instead of cheap thrills there is a constant sensation of dread, upheld by the knowledge that you are being perpetually hunted, that something might attack at any moment. Worse, the longer you hang around, the more desperate the own situation becomes as ammo, health and psionic energy are expended with each encounter.

Pervading this oppressive atmosphere throughout is a deep underlying sense of wrongness. The ship’s infected crewmembers apologise to you as they try to kill you. Escaped lab monkeys, their brains exposed through scientific experimentation, chatter pleasantly when unaware of your presence, but shriek with rage the moment they spot you. The Cyborg Midwives are the antithesis of birth and life, their womanhood replaced with cold, bloody steel. And the game is obsessed with worms, hiding them under every shelf and table, sometimes in huge writhing piles. Unlike most survival horror games, where you gradually numb to the unpleasant surroundings, the Von Braun becomes more unnerving the longer you spend trapped beneath its metal hull.

It’s a challenge intended specifically to provoke defiance, for the player to demonstrate their freedom.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, there is also the small matter of dealing with one of gaming’s most infamous antagonists. Right at the outset, SHODAN challenges the player directly, and in a few brief sentences demonstrates everything which makes her so abhorrent and compelling, her vanity, her god-complex and her and contempt for any being seemingly less intelligent than herself. It’s a challenge intended specifically to provoke defiance, for the player to demonstrate their freedom to act against her.

Only when SHODAN finally reveals herself does the significance of this become apparent. From that moment, the player is subject to her every whim, and knowingly so. She proposes an alliance to defeat the Many (and of course to regain the powers she lost in the first game). It’s an alliance in which you have no choice, and so you follow her orders and complete her objectives while she taunts and belittles you. It’s this complete control SHODAN appears to have over you, contradicting the game’s own apparent freedom, that makes her such a memorable adversary.

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Fourteen years on, System Shock 2 feels remarkably fresh. The Dark Engine holds up far better here than it does in the original Thief. The clean lines, angles and surfaces of the Von Braun are well matched with late nineties 3D rendering, although character models look rather like the developers beat the polygons into shape with a tenderising mallet. The eerie, pulsating musical score from Eric Brosius also helps to keep things lively. The skills system shows its age in places – distinguishing between repairing weapons and maintaining them seems completely arbitrary, and the ending is weaker than a McDonald’s coffee. The game is so strong otherwise though, that these issues can be easily forgiven.

System Shock 2 was probably the last great game of the twentieth century.

System Shock 2 was probably the last great game of the twentieth century, and it’s desperately sad that a generation of gamers have missed out on it. I can’t help but wonder how the development landscape might have been different had more gamers experienced it between Looking Glass’ demise and the arrival of Bioshock. Its understanding of level design, storytelling and choice in play style is visible in so many fantastic games from Deus Ex to Dishonored, and wouldn’t we all like a few more like those? 
 
Nevertheless, it’s wonderful to be able to play it again; and more importantly for newcomers to access it for the first time. Night Dive deserve a lot of respect for sifting through the rights wrangle between EA and Meadowbrook insurance group and rescuing it from legal limbo. System Shock 2 has been lost in the wild for too long, we should all be glad to see it finally shepherded from the darkness.-Rick Lane via IGN

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/15/the-return-of-system-shock-2

Why I Love Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland - PC Gamer

"When I first leave Vault 101, I can see the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument off in the distance. When I reach the river, I can make out the statues on the Anchorage memorial. Tenpenny Tower is usually a sign I’m going in the wrong direction. I’m never in the middle of nowhere in Fallout 3—Bethesda mapped the landscape so it’s very difficult to see nothing in all directions. This layout feeds your sense of exploration. Following the main storyline is a good way to get a tourist’s snapshot of each quadrant of the world, but wandering without a waypoint is the way to properly experience that world. When I first played through Fallout 3 years ago, it was following the skyline that randomly led me to the Oasis side quest with a nuclear tree man and his insane followers, probably the game’s best. Objects and quests are not randomly placed in this world—but their locations aren’t clearly spelled out for you, either. It’s a delicate balance of encouraging the player to explore and not making it too hard to further the narrative. No-one is better at finding the point in between than Bethesda." Excerpt from PC Gamer