The Best of Retro Gaming: Music From the 8-Bit Era
The sad truth is, I’m an old and crumbling husk of bones and withered, parchment-like skin. That’s not just because I’ve taken over a stolen corpse as my body, either. I blinked one day, and when my eyes opened again, time had passed. Twenty years, about.
In some ways, this was extremely cool. The internet happened, over about a week or so as far as I can tell, I was suddenly living in my own house, there was a car in the driveway, and I could eat pizza every day. Video games also got bigger, with that Super Nintendo, Genesis, Playstation, Xbox, a brief flash of Gamecube, and finally the Wii appeared, ghostly in its hidden and unpurchasable majesty.
Then I turned around and talked games with a buddy of mine, and discovered he’d never played the original NES Metroid because it came …
Fallout 3 Editor Coming Down the Pipe
Bethesda announced plans today to release their Fallout 3 editor, named GECK, to the general public as a free download. Scheduled for a December release, the GECK will allow players to modify data, create new dialog, raise up buildings, and infest their games with unforgivable porn. The Fallout 3 editor will be a free download.
Also, coming out around January, Bethesda will unveil Operation: Anchorage, the first downloadable expansion for Xbox and Windows. You can find the entire announcement on Bethesda’s Fallout 3 site.
As always, we here at Vox Ex Machina will keep you informed the most interesting and vile mods that spew forth from the Fallout player community. In case you didn’t notice, we also have a rundown on the current crop of Fallout 3 nude mods and patches. Check it out and spice up your wasteland experience. It should …
Guild Wars Marches on the Sev
Fallout 3 isn’t the only game you’ll find under the counter at the local 7-11. As more publishers reach out to stuff their games next to the chips and beer, new ways of getting those games on your computer have come to light. One of the latest fantasy worlds to appear among the shrouded snack forests is the Guild Wars MMORPG, using a game card system to bring new players into the fold. Priced at $20, the card offers the original Guild Wars, which is as good a way as any to find yourself in Tyria.
If you haven’t tried Guild Wars for yourself, take a look. It’s a strange beast among MMORPGs, and might be just your style. There’s no monthly fee, instead the game is funded by optional expansions which bring new stories, zones, and character classes into your personal version of …
With a Name Like Robokill, It Has to Be Good
Sure, we all loved Smash TV, but did you ever get the feeling that the classic trigger-mashing, horde-spewing, meat grinder could use more RPG elements? Like maybe a weapon shop, levels, and items?
The folks down at Rock Solid Arcade sure did, and so they took the gameplay of Smash TV, wrapped it firmly in Descent’s excuse for a plot, and simmered the meaty goodness in a sauce squeezed from Diablo’s item and equipment system. The result is Robokill, an arcade shooter where your character, clad in a mechanical armour suit, runs through endless rooms filled with angry robots and transforms them into empty rooms filled with craters.
The controls are simple; move with the standard WASD keys, point your mouse at something to sling your guns that way, and then press the mouse button to shoot. …
World of Warcraft 4th Anniversary, Fluffy Bears, and Death Metal
Apparently, it’s come time to celebrate the fourth anniversary of World of Warcraft, a fact which I learned by surprise when my post-frozen alleyway undead Little Flower Girl opened her mailbox and a bear jumped out.
That’s right, not only did Blizzard send along a message to its players concerning a successful and incredibly lucrative four years of digital murder simulation, they also attached a lovable widdle baby polar bear pet. Quite a reward for the $50 box + $40 Burning Crusade + $40 Lich King + 48 months of gameplay at $15 a pop I’ve bled out into their insatiable corporate maw.
Also, because the sixty-four billion they pull in annually from Warcraft isn’t enough, Blizzard has unleashed a new suite of celebrity WoW ads featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Steve Van Sandt. The real truth is that actual celebs and Important People really …
Final Fantasy XI Plans Three New Content Releases
Good news for all you OCD bishi-loving japanophiles, Final Fantasy XI is coming out with three new downloadable content expansions. Starting with A Crystalline Prophency: Ode of Life Bestowing, a most badass name if I’ve ever heard one, this expansion series is slated to appear in the spring, each one following a few months after the previous.
Unlike more traditional expansions such as the Wings of the Goddess release, these new content packs will focus around a novel-like approach, offering new plotlines that deepen the story in existing zones. Apparently, a dev team has been thrown together expressly for this project, so the usual march of standard expansions will continue without pause or mercy.
The new expansion series will be sold as downloadable content only, and should cost about $10 a shot.
You can find details about the whole affair up on Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XI …
NCsoft: One MMO Down, One MMO Up
So now that NCsoft has dug a grave for Tabula Rasa, what’s next on the unhallowed list of new releases?
Aion: Tower of Eternity is scheduled to release in Korea this year, and to the rest of the civilized world in 2009. The game involves a dream-setting, ancient god-monsters, and flying combat. It’s built around the same graphics engine in Far Cry, one CryEngine, and looks damn pretty if you’re into the asian Final Fantasy art style.
In the continuing tradition of unoriginality, Aion offers the standard classes, you know, beatstick, sniper, one-shotting ninja bastard, mage and priest. The only real wrinkle is that at some point, characters grow wings and take to the sky. Aerial duels seem to be a strong part of Aion’s design, but it remains to be seen …
Tabula Rasa Eats a Sci-Fi Shotgun
Just recently, NCsoft announced that their sci-fi shooter MMO, Tabula Rasa will be getting the axe at the end of February, thanks to slow sales and general suckitude. Tabula Rasa is a sort of MMO version of Quake, where players fight against an alien enemy for control over vital resources and strategic positions on a war-torn world. The game was praised for its unique combat system, which combined character-based dice-rolling with player skill in accurate targeting, an approach which worked well to counter the lag and slow response times common to MMOs. However, technical problems like memory leaks, random crashes, and a total lack of anything actually fun to do hurt the game during its release.
While several patches have come through since then, including a number of new content releases that added the necessary standards of an Auction House and crafting system, the damage had been done. …
Google’s Lively Isn’t.
Out around July, the search engine giant and our future overlord Google launched a virtual world project called Lively. Another one of Google’s experiments, Lively was meant as a sort of MMO playground that would expand along a common standard to create a massive virtual space across the countries of the world. However, the game, if you could call it that, was hamstrung by a family-friendly approach that limited its appeal against the (very much more) relaxed Second Life MMO. Also, user reports had the client as a rather bloated, slow, and inconsistent beast that failed to perform on even the beefiest computers.
Yesterday, Google announced they were shutting down Lively in December and clearing out the dev team to hurl them back into the Search Mines of Googlestania. No particular reason for axing the service was given, except that it didn’t pay off suitably to survive. …
FCC Transition Team co-chairs are also Warcraft players
President-Elect Barak Obama may have just hit pay dirt with the gaming generation, he’s appointing people who have actual MMO experience under their belts. Not only last week did we have our first YouTUBE Presidential address, but now we’re starting to see more people put into positions of authority who play the same games we do!
From the titular Gigaom article,
Werbach’s involvement in WoW is worth noting as it raises the possibility that in the coming months, he and Crawford will craft strategic policy positions relevant to online games and worlds, including broadband usage, content regulation, etc. Along with Ito and like-minded academics, Werbach sees both as important to the future of work and technology:
“What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, …
Categories
- Fiction
- Humor
- Let's Play
- Mods and Patches
- News
- Reviews
- Strategy Guides
- Videos
Recent Comments
- Nelson Williams Yes, they have catgirls....
- Nelson Williams The US military has been amazing at folding video game tech ...
- Nelson Williams If crowd-sourcing gets me the missing third act of Brutal Le...
- Nelson Williams BRB, porting all animes to Skyrim....
- Nelson Williams You know I love taking unverifiable stories from Reddit and ...
- Nelson Williams All the old arguments are in there, too. Desensitizes child...
Archives
Blogroll
- Game Politics - Where politics and video games collide.
- Mill Avenue Vexations - A gothic, occult thriller by Kyt Dotson—burning rubber where angels fear to tread.
Meta