"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?
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
Let's Read: Nintendo Power #2
Powering on (bad pun, bad pun) from our last [Let's Read] brings us to Nintendo Power #2, which has probably the most infamous cover art of any Nintendo-produced magazine in the company's history. Yes, that is Simon Belmont of Castlevania fame holding Dracula's severed head by the hair. A closer inspection of the image reveals Dracula's heart, ring, fingernail, and eyeball laid out on the cloak where the evil one has fallen, and a bloody hand reaching
Combing through the archives, I thought it would be fun to review some classic games here in the blog, and since adventure games have always been enjoyable to me, I decided to write about a quirky and unique but often frustrating and entirely too short one from the DOS era. "Daughter of Serpents" (also released later on CD-ROM and re-titled "The Scroll") is a point-and-click graphics adventure along the lines of King's Quest or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. But while those titles wer
The last Easter Egg-themed blog entry that I wrote was about the weirdest secret I had ever seen in a video game. This one isn't quite as bizarre, but it is a fun story that you may have heard before and in my opinion, is worth telling again.
So, when was the last time you got to kill your own boss (without fear of legal repercussion)? The short answer for all of you is (hopefully) "Never." For the members of iD Software circa 1994, however, the answer was, "As often as we want to." It was
Every so often, the magazines from back in the day would give us a peek behind the scenes so that the rest of us would know (or at least have a vaguely better idea) what those weirdos whose names all appeared on the masthead at the front of the magazine did for the magazine besides the obvious.
So for their 50th issue, EGM treated us to a four-page spread of insider information, Photoshopped antics, personal photos, and other goodies. In case it's not obvious, this is one of the best reasons t
Dear Daddy,
I hope it's OK that I call you 'Daddy' because it's all you ever heard me call you when I was a little girl. I suck at buying cards, so this letter will have to suffice. Basically, I just wanted to let you know that I love you, I hope everything is well, and that I've been trying my best to be the sort of kid you'd be proud to claim as your own.
A huge part of who you are influenced my formative years. Whether it was a quick trip into town to pick up a bite to eat at McDonalds,
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of Gunpei Yokoi's death.
Many things we take for granted in the gaming world today can be tracked back to this man, including the cross-shaped directional pad (NES), portable gaming systems (Game Boy), and Metroid (every freakin' Nintendo system except the N64).
Not bad for a janitor.
Yokoi was a simple custodial worker and maintenance man at one of Nintendo's hanafuda (playing card) manufacturing plants, where he amused himself in his spare time by tinke
I'm awakened by the sound
Of rain against my window
It's getting harder to ignore
But these tired eyes need rest.
-- "Flourescent Skies", Assemblage 23
I read a lot. I know this will make some of you wonder "when?" given the amount of time I spend going on and on about games, either playing them or writing about them, but despite the fun of interactive entertainment, there's nothing quite like a good book. Also, I make my living working in a used bookstore,
Note: this is a cross-post of an editorial that I wrote for Intelligent Gamer, another gaming site that I contribute to on a semi-regular basis. I figured it was gaming related, though not video game related, and deserved a spot here on my blog. And actually, as of about 5:30 today, the article hasn't appeared on IG's website, so you get a sneak preview of it here first!
Who loves ya, babes?
* * * * *
Thirteen Little Scary Story Starters
At a loss for something to creep out your role
You want to know something? Jack Kilborn isn't right in the head. They say you've got to be a little off upstairs to write horror stories in the first place, but...sweet mother of pearl, somebody dropped Kilborn on his skull five or six times then fed his psyche into a Veg-O-Matic for shits and giggles just to see what would come out on the other end ("It slices...it dices...it warps fragile little minds..."). The most likely culprit? Joe Konrath, the real live writer behind Kilborn's pseudo
Realizing I haven't posted a blog entry in well over a year is kind of becoming an annual event here in my Retromags world. I'm not as active as I should be, as I'd like to be, and much as I wish I could promise to change all of that, I don't make promises I can't be certain of keeping. One of the most recent things I blogged about was the question of what happens when one's desire to keep up with gaming flounders, and as it turns out, there's still no cut-and-dried answer to that. Playing video
"It's time to kick ass and chew
bubblegum. And I'm all outta gum."
-- Duke Nukem
Laugh if you must, but I was one of the gamers who was utterly heartbroken to hear the long-time-coming announcement that Duke Nukem Forever was to be no more. I had long ago accepted the fact that I had been jilted, and that Duke was long gone, probably too busy off kicking alien pseudopods to bother with the likes of starring in another video game. But still inside me, there was a part, a tiny little pa
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
"Anxious" does not even begin to describe my feelings when I discover that there is a new survival horror game coming out. As you've no doubt figured out by now if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, horror games are something I simply cannot get enough of. And while there are a number of franchises that compete for my attention, none is more apt to receive my gamer girl bucks than the perversely fascinating titles in the Silent Hill series. Having played through every entry i
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
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
November of 2009 saw the release of a new roleplaying game on the Nintendo DS (at least here in the US) entitled "Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain", developed by Big Blue Bubble Inc. and published by Aspyre. In it, you take on the persona of an adventurer who is very interested in getting his (or her) hands on the loot inside the previously-abandoned Dwarven mountainhome of Firetop. Legend speaks of treasure troves of gold coins, sparkling gemstones, and magical trinkets galor
Let's face it - if you've been gaming for as long as I have, it's quite likely that your first exposure to a game that threatened to actually make you change your underpants was Resident Evil. And if there's one area in Resident Evil that is more likely to have actually made you need to change your undies than any other, it was one of the most infamous jump-scares in video game history: when the dogs break through the outside windows and into the narrow hallway. Even if you suspected something
My PS3 suffered the Yellow Light of Death problem today about an hour into my playtime of the Silent Hill HD Collection which I had just purchased today. *sigh*
Skyrim FINALLY gets its DLC released on the PS3 this coming week, and for the first week it's available, Bethesda is offering it at 50% off to apologize for taking it so long to get here. Gonna miss out on that sale, because there's no way I'll have my PS3 fixed in time. *double sigh*
Sending my PS3 in to Sony to get it repaired wil
The safety of children online is not just my responsibility or your responsibility or the parents' responsibility. It is everyone's responsibility. Online, children are exposed to things that were never meant to be seen or heard by the young or the old. As an example of this, and a reminder to all of our Retromags readers to take this kind of thing seriously, I give you the following public service message in its entirety.
Use this image. Keep this image. Post it on your break room
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
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
In the past four months, I've completely destroyed more than fifty of my own books for the purpose of digitizing and sharing them with the rest of the world.
This, I must admit, was something that past Areala had never imagined future Areala would do. After all, I spent years collecting these books, paging through them, enjoying the memories and worlds they unlocked. As a gamer, they were a part of my identity. I fell in love with them because they were books about a hobby I greatly enjoyed
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
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