Today on Retrochick Retroblog, we're going to remind everyone why grammar is important, even when you're dealing with video games.
To wit: please open the image on your left. This is the second page of a two-page-spread ad for the PS1 game Fighting Force, developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. It comes from the Sept. 1997 issue of GamePro. I'm sure it ran in other magazines, I just happened to be reading this one when I spotted it. The first page contains an image of a
I've gotten a few PMs since I joined up at Retromags from other members asking me what my name means, or where it came from, so I figured it would be a good idea to answer that question out in the open, once and for all.
First of all, Areala is not a misspelling (intentional or otherwise) of "areola". One is my user name, the other is a part of the body. Just figured I should get that out of the way.
Those of you who were reading small-press comics in the mid-90s may have guessed where my n
Piracy itself is a topic for another blog entirely, so tonight we're just going to focus on Titan Quest itself and showcase a small sample of what happens when you take anti-piracy schemes to the next level.
You remember Titan Quest, don't you? Of course you don't. It was developed by the now-defunct Iron Lore Entertainment, and published by THQ, Inc, and it was targeted at the market of people who were waiting for Blizzard to get around to releasing Diablo III. And like most every other PC
In the days before the Internet started shoving a cruel, pointed stake into the hearts of video game magazines, we had no choice but to trust the reviewers who got paid to do what we all wished we could get paid to do: play lots of video games and then write about it.
The guys and gals of the gaming journalism world were supposed to be our lifelines, making sure we didn't buy the crap and didn't miss the gold. Usually they were on the money. But sometimes...well, deadlines can do strange thin
I feel like I've hit the wall, both creatively and when it comes to gaming. I've so far ignored this current generation of games, as none of the "next gen" systems on offer feel like they have anything to offer me, and yet this creates a conundrum for me. I honestly cannot remember the last time a game absolutely blew me away, and yet looking back through the past, through my own memories, I can see dozens upon dozens of instances. Some of them were gaming "firsts", such as the first time I saw
We all know Easter Eggs. Not the kind the bunny goes around hiding, but the little hidden things programmers and designers leave in the game for players to find. Most commonly, these are debugging codes that allow you to skip levels, fill your inventory, max your powers, become invulnerable or other tools that let testers whisk quickly from one place to another without having to play the game from the start time after time after time. Less commonly, you'll find things like hidden playable cha
You've probably noticed over the last few days that I've been clogging up the "new images" feed with a literal metric ton of advertising material culled from gaming magazines. A lot of this work has been simply updating old images with better-quality copies. Phillyman started the Retromags ad database all the way back in 2009 by pulling ads from older scans of EGM and GamePro, but a lot of those issues have received new releases in the intervening years offering better resolution scans. We also
Occasionally when the muse strikes me, I will write. Sometimes I do short stories, sometimes I work on longer ones, but often I write poetry. These are two examples from my lunch break at work today. Feel free to contemplate their meaning to myself or to you, and discuss in the comments box.
* * * * *
In my heart
I wrote the ending a million times.
In my mind
I wrote it one thousand.
In my journal
I wrote it four or five.
In my reality
It was written once
With heavy editing, not my
Presumably at some point Phillyman will find a better blog entry to feature on the front page than mine about why I care about old magazines and it will no longer be featured so prominantly. Since this is a sort of follow-up to the original entry, I thought I'd better make sure that I pointed to the original which can be found right under this rock here. While it is a follow-up, it's not a direct sequel, and you can easily read this entry without having read the other. I just love shameless s
All Croft-aholics know that Valentine's Day is the birthday of Our Lady and Savior, the Divine Ponytail. So what better way to say "I Love You" than to pick up the brand new Tomb Raider I - III Remastered collection from Aspyr and Crystal Dynamics?
Yes, for most of us, it was love at first polygon when we caught our first glimpse of The Great One, whether it was that ever-so-alluring pyramid-shaped box or one of the many, many, many magazines whose covers she graced. And today, for a
I had to have it.
The minute I laid eyes on it in my local game store, I knew that it was coming home with me. If there's one thing I'm a gigantic sucker for, it's horror-themed games. And as soon as I took Theresia off the shelf and read the description, I knew there was no chance I was leaving the store with exactly the same amount of money as I walked in with. No chance in hell.
Theresia is a point-and-click adventure game developed with more...mature...themes in mind. We've seen
Picture this: it's the middle of the night, you're driving through the countryside by yourself, your only company is the voice of the local radio station's DJ talking at you via your stereo system. You notice you're getting low on gas, so you make a diversion to a service station for a fill-up, and that's when it happens. Everything just stops working.
You get out of the car to find out what's going on, and a mysterious energy field blocks your passage back the way you came. Now there's noth
Quick: when is a Final Fantasy game not a Final Fantasy game? Answer: when Nintendo decides to rename a different Squaresoft RPG in the hopes of capitalizing on the fame of the Final Fantasy name. This was the case with a series of games released in the US on the Game Boy. In the US, we know them as Final Fantasy Legend I, II and III, and Final Fantasy Adventure.
In Japan, however, they're two completely different series. Final Fantasy Adventure is actually Seiken Densetsu, the precursor to
Some of you may not be familiar with Scratches, and if that's the case, then I pity you because you missed out on one of my favorite graphical adventure games of all time, and one of the creepiest games of 2006. It casts you as Michael Arthate, a horror novelist who hit paydirt with his first book and is now looking for a suitable atmosphere in which to complete his sophomore effort. His idea? Buy the oldest house he can find, and live there to let the atmosphere surround and penetrate him to
Are you crazy?
Well, whether you are or not, you should consider the research. For example, did you know that ten out of every ten people polled by Hanwell Mental Institute's top-rated researchers tested positive for at least one mental illness, and eight out of those ten tested positive for two or more? And that three of those remaining eight were found to have a staggering five or more mental illnesses according to the soon-to-be-released DSM-V?
Are you sure you're not crazy? Remember: a
Yes, you read the title correctly: 'Survival Horror without the horror.'
"What the hell are you talking about, Areala?"
Glad you asked. You'll note that if you remove 'horror' from 'survival horror' you are left with just one thing: survival. And while this description could apply to a great many games since nearly every video game has "not dying" as one of its prerequisites for winning, there's something to be said for a game that tries to take a different approach to things. Disaster Repo
Whether it's for a film, a television show or a video game, I'm a sucker for a great soundtrack. I'm even more of a sucker for soundtracks that don't have lyrics, where it feels more like an organic, singular entity than something that a dozen artists threw one track apiece at and called it a day. And Cliff Martinez reeled me in completely with his absolutely enthralling score for this year's viral outbreak disaster film "Contagion."
Contagion, as a film, isn't a particularly tradition
I frigging love Parasite Eve for the Playstation. It's one of my favorite RPGs of all time (small wonder, since it's written and directed by the guy who directed Chrono Trigger and designed Final Fantasy IV on the Super NES, and scored by Yoko Shimomura who did the music for Breath of Fire, Kingdom Hearts, many incarnations of Street Fighter II, and Legend of Mana among others), and I've felt it never received the recognition it deserved coming as it did in the wake of Final Fantasy VII and bei
I always thought somebody should make some kind of board game based on the Aliens universe. They've made plenty of video games based on the property after all, on everything from the 2600 to the modern-day consoles with the pending release of Aliens: Colonial Marines. There was also a fun "Aliens vs. Predator" collectable card game released in the 90s. Surely somebody somewhere thought about a board game, right?
Well, they did. It was called "Alien", it was released in 1979 as a board game
If there's any question that is bound to throw me for a loop (aside from "What's your favorite book?"), it's this one. I love when people ask it, because it means that they are at least faking a mild interest in my life, but at the same time I hate when people ask it because it means that they expect some sort of answer besides, "How the F&@$ should I know?"
My musical tastes run from one end of the spectrum to the other, and that means that you'll find in my collection everything from 60s
Here's the situation: you've been anticipating a title for months. The hype has been extraordinary, the press coverage relentless, the previews have all been favourable, and you, by golly, have just got to have it. So you went to the local shop where you satisfy your gaming itch, picked up your very own copy, got home, threw it into your system, and...
...boy did it suck.
Seriously, you think to yourself, what the hell were they thinking? Then, you turn the blame inwards. What the hell wer
Remember Socks? He was the black and white feline counterpart to former US President Bill Clinton. Children everywhere used to write letters to Socks (and his canine bro, Buddy); the best of these got collected and published in a book entitled, "Dear Socks, Dear Buddy." Everybody loved the First Pets, so what better way to show your appreciation for all their trials and tribulations around the White House than to immortalize one in a video game?
Er...right.
So somebody at Kaneko has this br
Digging through the collection, I unearthed this gem discussing a really awesome-looking game being developed by Accolade for the Genesis and Super Nintendo. I'm pretty familiar with the bulk of the Super Nintendo library, but I didn't remember ever seeing this title on the market. Was it yet another unreleased game previewed by EGM, this time in their January, 1994 issue?
A quick trip to GameFaqs confirmed my suspicions: Fireteam Rogue was in development in the mid-90s and then axed before c
"It's Gotta Be The Shoes." With that five-word tagline, Reebok launched a sneaker fad for the 90's over which people went absolutely apeshit. And just as with every other great product innovation, there had to be cross-promotion. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ate Pizza Hut pizza, Modern Warfare soldiers drank Pepsi, Alan Wake used Energizer batteries in his flashlight, and vampires wore Pumps in that classic NES title, Drac's Night Out.
What's that? You've never played Drac's Night Out?
I'm sure you've watched the videos from Leonard Huntings by now (and if you haven't, shame on you - they can be found right here). Four simple little messages to showcase the happenings at Hanwell Mental Institute. If they didn't whet your appetite for more, then you may want to check your pulse and confirm that you are, in fact, still breathing.
For a few weeks now, Senscape's website has contained those four videos, a link to an interactive teaser preview which raises far more questions tha
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