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 3D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 3D. Show all posts

13 September, 2011

Super Mario 64

1:43:00 PM  D_Homes  13 comments


  • Release Date: 1996
  • Platform: N64
  • Developer: Nintendo
  • Genre: Platform


Mario would seem to have come to the end of his natural life as games embraced the third dimension. Nintendo's mascot was getting on a bit, and he was so emphatically linked to the suddenly rather tired world of two-dimensional scrolling that many fans suspected either retirement or, worse, irrelevance awaited him on Nintendo's new console, the N64.

In fact, neither was the case. Mario's first three-dimensional adventure saw the plumber as trailblazing and trendsetting as ever, showing competitors how it's done, and throwing analog controls into the mix (a little push forward to walk, a push all the way to run) to create an adventure no one would forget in a hurry -- particularly Mario's rivals on other platforms.

Certain things had to change. Rather than a long travelogue quest heading from the left side of the map to the right, Super Mario 64 introduces Peach's castle as a hub from which other levels would be accessible once enough stars had been collected from the game's various challenges. The means of entering these themed levels -- leaping through paintings -- is still a genuinely magical piece of design. The worlds found beyond, all of which have room enough for a handful of different tasks, are masterpieces of thrifty imagination, providing the space for a coin hunt one minute and a boss fight the next.

Like the hub itself, the levels become non-linear arenas, and from the mountainous peaks of Cool, Cool Mountain to the tangle of pathways that make up Big Boo's Haunt, Super Mario 64 almost feels more like a theme park than a series of themed courses. No matter where exactly it's getting its inspiration from, however, Super Mario 64 remains one of the most influential -- and one of the best -- video games ever made.

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