Spy Hunter

With its smart weapons, awesome cars, Spy Hunter was viewed as a very stylish game back in the arcades on the early 1980s. It was a title that playing into any boy's fantasies- secret agents, nasty weaponry, and a driving lincese. Make no mistake though, it was the action packed gameplay that kept people coming back for more again, again, and again...

1943

The year that the war ground on may have been 1943, when rationing continued to bite down hard, construction work on the Pentagon was completed, and the Japanese forces were driven back from Guadalcanal, but it's a whole lot more enjoyable if you think of it as this wonderful little vertical-scrolling shooter from Capcom, released for the delight of the arcade-going populas in 1987...

Diablo

The game isn't just a good looking isometric dungeon crawler, it is THE best dungeon crawler. A simple - almost brainless trek through caverns and catacombs filled with vile creatures, not to mention all the loot. Blizzard spent a lot of time working on the generation of the game's spaces, making items, enemies, and geography be different every single time you load up the game...

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls games are best known for the fourth chapter in the series, Oblivion, released in 2006. In comparison,The Elder Scroll's Morrowind is altogether more of a curate's egg, neither as commercially successful nor critically applauded as it's successor. Perhaps because of that, however, it's also a much more interesting game...

Rogue

Rogue first appeared on college Unix systems in 1980. It contains an infinite variety via a series of randomly generated, ASCII-rendered dungeons that must be explored in a bid to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (Rodney spelled backwards) from somewhere behold the twenty-fifth level -- an unlikely achievement given the imposing difficulty of even the earliest dungeon layers.

Showing posts with label Blizzard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blizzard. Show all posts

03 April, 2011

StarCraft

6:46:00 PM  Kryptik  28 comments


  • Release Date: 1998
  • Platform(s): PC
  • Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
  • Genre: Real-Time-Strategy


StarCraft was the first western title to pin it's success on South Korea. There was something about this real-time sci-fi strategy game that touched a nerve, making StarCraft a staple of the country's multi-player PC cafes, which were emerging in the 1990s, leading to the sale of 4.5 million copies in the territory. It also helped to establish South Korea's professional gaming scene.

Of course, with more than 11 million sales worldwide, StarCraft is one of the best-selling PC games ever made. Yet while initial reviews were unanimously positive, it's fair to say that no one foresaw StarCraft as being quite the success that it has become. Despite the isometric graphics, the game isn't especially impressive, and less successful rival games have an edge in RTS innovation with unit control and resource management.

But StarCraft has a very special trick up its sleeve: three completely distinct and playable races. The Terrans (Humans), the Zerg (nasty, swarm aliens), and the Protoss (high tech, religious warriors) all have their own units that don't just look different but play diffferently too. For instance, as Zerg you can burrow underground and attempt to overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers, while as Protoss you have fewer units, but much more powerful weapons at your disposal. Upon release, no reace was blatently over powered, and Blizzard has maintained this balance very well with occasional patches that address multiple tatics.

The combination of diversity and balance is extremely difficult to achieve, Blizzard overcame this challenge with StarCraft and followed it up with a well deserved sequel, StarCraft II.

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26 January, 2011

Diablo

3:56:00 PM  Kryptik  13 comments

  • Release Date: 1997
  • Platform: Various
  • Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
  • Genre: Action/Role-Playing

If it's an online quiz you're working with, clicking on things is quite boring and monotonic. However, if it's Diablo, the simple game mechanic turns into something magical. Enemies explode in bursts of blood or collapse into piles of bone, heroes race across the screen to the indicated spot to await your command.Everything you click on in Diablo rewards you in some form or another.

The game isn't just a good looking isometric dungeon crawler, it is THE best dungeon crawler. A simple - almost brainless trek through caverns and catacombs filled with vile creatures, not to mention all the loot. Blizzard spent a lot of time working on the generation of the game's spaces, making items, enemies, and geography be different every single time you load up the game. The game that results from this is a game that keeps on giving.

By todays standard, Diablo's classes, characters, and piles of rewards are actually rather shallow and inferior, but the game still radiates a wonderful fascination each time you return to it's caverns. It's so simple anyone could  learn the basics, and so rich and vibrant that even the pros will find themselves coming back for more.

The game has spawned countless clones, and to this very day, the skeleton smashing formula has not changed.

Diablo's infamous "Butcher"

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