The Last Starfighter is my favourite video game movie of all time. But it had to fight, almost to the death, to claim the top spot. Because at number two is Avalon, a 2001 flick that’s part-Japanese, part-Polish, all awesome. It’s a strange movie. But I love it for the same reason I love Last…
British actor Clive Owen is a badass. A man’s man. He’s got a deep voice, a heavy face, and is usually in movies where he kills things, or is at least around things being killed. Did you know, however, that between leaving the UK and making it big in Hollywood he appeared in one of…
From Monkey Island to Full Throttle, Fate of Atlantis to Sam & Max
When you think about it, commercial video games are usually pretty harmless. Sure, they can be violent, but there’s rarely any larger controversy surrounding a game involving things like drugs, politics, or sex. Which only makes 1982’s Custer’s Revenge all the more interesting. And appalling. WARNING: Some slightly NSFW content follows. For those unfamiliar with…
Today is a day a lot of folks will be remembering the good, the bad and the downright inspirational from the company Steve Jobs helped found all the way back in 1976. So today’s Total Recall will be all about Apple’s one and only crack at the video games market: the Pippin. Sure, the iPhone…
We’ve seen title art from modern games. And from NES games. Today, we’re hitting the ground somewhere in between with a collection of animated title screen art from the Genesis/Mega Drive and Super Nintendo. These images come courtesy of Title Scream, a site run by Kiwi interactive designer Cameron Askin which is looking to preserve…
It’s not every day you get to play a new id game. If you’re not counting iPhone games (and we’re not counting iPhone games) or re-releases, the last new title the studio released was Doom 3. And that was in 2004 So this week’s release of post-apocalyptic buggy death simulator RAGE is something to be…
Canadian developers BioWare are known today for blockbuster series like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic We don’t care about those today. Today, for our younger/newer readers that may only know them for those franchises, we’re going back to 1995, where it all began. Unlike most (I’d be tempted…
Today’s Total Recall won’t be about video game history. It’s about dealing with what happens when video game history is dredged back to the present and coated in bright pink lipstick. EA’s Syndicate is but the latest in an ever-growing list of games that are reboots of old franchises. And they’re reboots in the strictest…
Even though Zelda has killing and even Mario has head-stomping, when you think about it, nearly all of Nintendo’s first-party properties are harmless affairs. Bright colours, innocent storylines, big-eyed cartoon mascots and candy-coloured fantasy worlds where everything turns out just fine With one exception: the “Wars” series, Nintendo’s only foray into, well, war. In the…
Zork is one of the oldest adventure game franchises there is. The series is so old, in fact, that aside from a few rare instances you can only play the games using, and seeing, text. No graphics, no icons, no heads-up display, nothing. So how did you get around? How did you use a map?…
Our younger readers won’t have lived through it, but the 1980s were in in many ways a bleak time, the spectre of nuclear holocaust hanging over the world for much of the decade. For such a dominant political topic, however, few games chose to address the subject head-on. Ground Zero was one of the few.…
Darth Vader turns into a shark, if you were wondering how strange
Over the past thirty years there have been plenty of memorable Star Wars games, from the Super Star Wars series to X-Wing to Jedi Knight to Battlefront. They’re all classics, not just awesome adaptations of a movie franchise but awesome games in their own right. Star Wars: Yoda Stories is not one of those games.…
With the Tokyo Game Show having just wound up, I thought today would be a good time to look back to 1996, when for the first and only time it wasn’t the only major gaming event held in Tokyo. For one year, and one year only, it had competition in the form of E3. An…
Fans of classic rock and fantasy art will no doubt be familiar with the name Roger Dean. The British artist is as synonymous with 1970’s prog rock (especially the band Yes) as epic guitar tracks, and his bold, unique art style means you’ve probably seen and remembered his work, even if you’ve never remembered his…
In 1988, Nintendo released a modem for its Famicom system in Japan. A crude device, it didn’t allow for online play; just some downloadable stuff and access to basic news and information services. The device was never released in the United States, but it wasn’t for want of trying. Indeed, Nintendo figured at the time…
Despite annual reminders, Hollywood has never made good on its threat to release a sequel to classic 1985 adventure flick The Goonies That didn’t stop video games from coming up with their own Goonies II, though. In 1987, Konami released The Goonies II on the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System. And proceeded to confuse the shit out…
It’s one of the defining works of modern popular culture, and features plenty of stylised, graphic action. So why is it nobody has ever made a good game out of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira? It’s not for want of trying, that’s for sure. There have been three (well, maybe five, but we’ll get to that later)…
Most people know, and love, Japanese developer Hideo Kojima for the Metal Gear series, a franchise he created all the way back in 1987. For me, though, that’s a convoluted mess of a property that’s become more unwieldy and pointlessly self-referential with each passing entry. If you feel the same and would like to see…
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