Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
Project Gotham Racing 2 Is The Greatest Console-Exclusive Game Ever Made, Period
This week, the FleshEatingZipper Staff is writing about their favorite console-exclusive games, ever! Agree or disagree in the comments below!
If you’ve listened to our podcasts before, you know I have a certain affinity for Project Gotham Racing 2 (or PGR2, as we call it). I’ve written at length about it, sure, but how did it come up to be the best console-exclusive game ever? I mean, people who write articles like this are going to say Zelda-something or Call of Duty-whatever. This was easy, though: my hands were pretty much tied.
What Is All This “Cloud Music Service” Stuff, Anyway?
Earlier this month, I went over the merits of Apple’s new iTunes Match service and found it was a fine solution for backing up your non-iTunes purchases if you already had Apple products, but now that I’ve had a bit more time with the competition, I have to ask again: is all this hullabaloo about cloud services for music worth all the rabble? Let’s dive in…
My 90’s Crush: Spice Girls
This week, the FleshEatingZipper staff writes about their crushes from the Bill Clinton, Arsenio Hall, and Gangster’s Paradise-esque 1990’s!
When “Wannabe” landed on the radio in late 1996, it instantly clung to the top spot on Sweet 98.9FM’s Top 5 for weeks and didn’t let go. I was in Bellevue, Nebraska at the time, somewhat geographically distant from the Spice Girls’ homeland of Jolley Olde Englande, and here I was up late nights bopping along with my Walkman. I didn’t even know their names until much later, I was technically just using them. But c’mon: I was twelve. I didn’t have “feelings” for them at the time, I just thought they were pretty. And British.
WiiU Presents Great Opportunity To Bring Back Starfox
It’s really hard to watch the original Starfox running in its original form on the Super Nintendo. Sure, there are times when the low-resolution 3D graphics, made possible by bundling the then-vaunted SuperFX chip into the game cartridge to assist with the heavy lifting, went relatively smooth. Then there’s the other majority of the time where you can literally count the frames as they’re being drawn on the screen. Starfox was a technical tour-de-force in 1993, so it only makes sense that the Wii-U is the ideal platform to resurrect the franchise nearly 20 years later, hopefully without all he baggage the series accumulated over the years.
Read the rest of this article…
Yoshi’s Island Is The Best Mario Game Ever Made, Period.
Image by Ravecat
Everyone played Mario growing up. Even for kids of the nineties, born when he was surfing pipes and hopping on goombas for the first time, it was an unspoken rite of passage. “You’re in,” it meant, “You’re part of this video game thing now.” In 1994, I fell in love with Donkey Kong Country primarily because it wasn’t Mario. When Super Mario World came around to launch the Super Nintendo in 1991, it seemed like it was just aping itself, running through the routines. By then, most games on the Super Nintendo were just just variations of that side-scrolling formula that Mario created. Donkey Kong Country was different, rendering a world of unbelievable depth with ground-breaking 32-bit graphics and incredible animations.
Then Yoshi’s Island came out.
Why Do They Even Bother With Star Trek Games?
Regardless as to where you sat on Star Trek versus Star Wars (most of us were on both sides, anyway), there’s no denying that the latter had the best games. LucasArts was a legendary game developer with best-in-class titles, long before Blizzard held the crown. (Then, y’know, things changed.) Meanwhile, Star Trek never had a homebase developer that would ensure its games got the proper love and respect they deserved. So with the recent announcement of a new Trek game, in the form of a shooter to be released in time for the new film next year, how is anything different? I just don’t see how.
id Finally Sells Me On RAGE, Tells Me To Wait Another Month To Get It
id, the legendary developer behind dour, violent shooters like Doom, Quake, and… well, more Doom and Quake, has been working on Rage for what feels like forever. It hasn’t been until new videos of its nearly complete form surfaced that I was convinced that this game was something I didn’t just want, but needed. Of course, as soon as I change my mind about the game is when they announce that it’ll miss its September launch date, instead debuting to the world on October 4th. Are you up for some Rage? Well, why not?
It’s Okay Randy Pitchford, Duke Nukem Forever Just Isn’t A Good Game
Dear Gearbox Head Honcho and Duke Nukem Advocate, Randy Pitchford,
Recently, you told us that we would be held accountable to our readers if we scored Duke Nukem Forever toward the negative. Well, you better start the Inquisition now, because you’ve got a long road ahead of you.
Read the rest of this article…
Movie Review: Super 8
There’s a point in Super 8 where our hero Joe (Joel Courtney) is standing on a porch with Alice (Elle Fanning), the cute girl he has a crush on, asking her to finish his friend’s film. Of course, during their last adventure, they ended up in the midst a traumatic train wreck. (The kids seem relatively unshaken after the fact, but whatever.) Her deadbeat drunkard of a dad pulls up, recognizes Joe as ‘the deputy’s boy’ and tells him to fozz off, never to come up here again. Rather than obey, he stands there like a stupid puppy. She agrees to continue filming her role, but only after he continues to idle with a dumb look on his face. It’s this false tension and anti-climax that sums up Super 8.
The Metro Invasion!: A Supremely Brief Article About Microsoft’s Dream Interface
The wide world of Metro UI (Clockwise from Top Left): Windows Phone, Windows 8, Zune 4.0 software, Xbox 360 Fall 2011 dashboard
You can blame Steve Ballmer all you want for Microsoft’s stagnancy. In the past decade, their revenues have cooled (allowing the once dwarf-ish Apple to surpass them in size), their employee count has exploded, their stock has stalled, and there’s been more than a few calls for Ballmer’s resignation. But, one thing we are going to see is the graphical unification of all of Microsoft’s products, the first time it’s ever happened across such a broad range, including phones, PCs, and video game systems. By the end of next year, the text-and-tile Metro UI interface system may be the most visible in the world, surpassing even iOS. While Metro is hardly perfect from a usability or preferential standpoint, it’s still a great interactive solution. So we have to wonder: where did this thing come from and why is Microsoft embracing it whole hog now? Let’s take a look, shall we?
