Back in 2001 – as Dr. Frank N. Furter would put it – it wasn’t easy to have a good time. There were few alternatives, for a PC gamer, to full price titles bought on store shelves: the good free indie titles were still far on the horizon and Macromedia Flash wasn’t yet ready for…
Please allow me a quick comparison: Skitchin’ was to Road Rash what Beavis & Butthead were to The Simpsons. Where Road Rash was direct, brash and kind of rude, Skitchin was instead rad, in your face and never afraid to flip the bird. Grab your skates, steal a ride on a car bumper and we’re…
It is fascinating how the history of video games tends to be skewed towards a USA-centric narrative. Still, to this day, it is relatively easy to come across articles – written by Italians of all people – that keep on mentioning the “console wars” in the 90s or the “great video game crash of 1983”,…
Among many classic home computers, the Commodore 64 is far from being the ideal platform for the point’n’click genre, beyond the usual technical limitations, there is one glaring problem: no mouse support. Textual adventures were definitely more at home on the dear ol’ breadbin, along with being easier to program in BASIC. Still, graphical adventures…
Very few people seemed to care about the history of video games in the 90s: everyone just played them really. Truthfully though, back then the medium was still in its teenage years; it would be rather unreasonable to expect people to start looking back and think about the evolution of the medium, let alone on…
In the 80s, while dice-and-paper D&D based RPGs were slowly being introduced to a bigger audience, teenagers who didn’t have friends to play with found companionship in gamebooks. Among the first examples of these RPG influenced Choose Your Own Adventure experience, was the classic Fighting Fantasy series was The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, originally written…
Arcade conversions on Commodore 64, despite often ending up being quite disappointing for most players, were a major source of revenue for many publishers at the time. Naturally, most coin-ops from the mid 80s were way beyond the limited reach of the beloved breadbin’s hardware. Plenty of times, the C64 received subpar or unplayable conversions,…
H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most beloved horror authors of the last century, which won’t come as a surprise since he has inspired countless movie directors, writers and, naturally, videogame designers. While reviewing Daughter of Serpents, I’ve mentioned my sensation that many times, titles that are “somewhat” inspired by Lovecraft seem to actually fare…
I had the pleasure to talk with artist Craig Stitt, he worked on the art department with software houses like Sega Technical Institute and Insomniac Games. In this interview we went over several of the titles he worked on, from Sonic 2 to Ratchet & Clank along with other infamous cancelled projects, plus some of…
It is kind of reassuring how gaming is slowly going back in time in regards to technology, because sure one could argue that games need fancy graphics, multiplayer components and breakneck action to be considered of interest for the general public at large. But, if the objective is just tugging at one’s heartstrings, then visual…