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    An Open Letter to Ellie and Joel

    By Softballchic10

    There are certain games that come along from time to time that really get your attention. It could be for the action, the graphics or game play. However, it is a rare occasion that a game grabs you for all of these, plus the amazing experience of becoming emotionally attached and involved in the actions of characters. It is to this that I write this open letter to Ellie and Joel. I met them in the “The Last of Us.” *(Please note that I've tried to write this to contain no spoilers.
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Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

United Front Games, best known for their atmospheric Hong Kong city brawler Sleeping Dogs (2012), is rumoured to be closing down. The weight of this rumour is not slight, and deserves all the extra attention we can bring to it – true or not, at this point in time we don’t yet know for sure – because, once again, the string of events that led us here reads like yet another example of Konami-like profound executive failure. But, to start from a beginning. According to United Front producer Dan

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Bioshock Remastered, Promise, and Emotional Torture

We’re all huge fans of the BioShock franchise here on The Slowdown, but we’ve also had our fair share of the game series. We awaited each game, lathering ourselves with collector’s editions (remember the original Big Daddy statue that would crack in half?), with nightly chats about lore and story, and even with articles written on the game here in the archives. They are some really good games. Some guy named John Lanchester once said somewhere that Bioshock “was the first game he played that had

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A Warrior Nun's Most Difficult Adversary

The above song, "Santa Monica," comes from Savage Garden's self-titled debut album. It's the final track. Chances are, unless you're a huge fan of the band, you've never heard it. It got no radio play, there was no official music video, it's just one of those songs the world glosses over. It's also the one most completely out of place on the record. It's no pulse-pounding dance club track like their breakout hit, "I Want You". It's not a poetic profession of love like "To The Moon and Back" or "

Areala

Areala

Game Difficulty - What Makes You Play Again?

Retromags member Softballchic and I spend a lot of time talking most nights, and it's often about video games: what we like, what we dislike, and what we're really good at. Last night the topic of achievements/trophies came up. On the PS3/Vita/PS4 model, acquiring every other trophy in a game rewards you with a final achievement, a Platinum trophy, which showcases that you've not just finished the game, but COMPLETED the game. By the time you acquire a Platinum in most games, there should be lit

Areala

Areala

Oh, Rorona...

What other games have you face down on the pavement after being stampeded by people desperate to watch a puppet show?

Zing

Zing

Five Horror Films That Were Ahead of Their Times

The recent death of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, who starred in such memorable films as "They Live" and such immemorable ones as "Hell Comes to Frog Town" and "Sci-Fighter", really got me thinking about movies that were ahead of their time in one way or another. So I'm not boring my readers to death, I'm restricting myself to the five best examples that I believe fit this mold and I'm only allowing one John Carpenter flick on the list. That said, here are my picks: 5) John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)

Areala

Areala

Quote of the Day: Satoru Iwata

</img> </img> </img> </img> </img><a href="http://www.slowdown.vg/2015/07/13/quote-of-the-day-satoru-iwata/" class='bbc_url' rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

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Going (PS) Home One Last Time

There are a couple of Retromags members on my PS3 friends list, but I'm not sure if you all knew that outside of blasting Necromorphs in Dead Space, or ruling the city streets in Saint's Row, I spent an awful lot of time in Sony's online avatar-based virtual world called PlayStation Home. If any of my readers ever ran across me on there, feel free to chime in and say hello in the comments--I was "Areala" on there, just as I am here. I know, how original, right? Anyway, I got involved with Home

Areala

Areala

The magazine from WarGames

I just saw WarGames again for the first time in 20 or 25 years and I love how a magazine ad for computer games is basically what starts everything. The power of a magazine, huh? I tried to identify the magazine used in the film and it turns out that not only was it a real magazine but it's been scanned and put online. It was an issue of Creative Computing from September 1982. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1982-09

marktrade

marktrade

Quote of the Day: Thimbleweed Park

</img> </img> </img> </img> </img><a href="http://www.slowdown.vg/2014/11/18/quote-of-the-day-thimbleweed-park/"class='bbc_url' rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

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Quote of the Day: Ebb Software

</img> </img> </img> </img> </img><a href="http://www.slowdown.vg/2014/11/14/quote-of-the-day-ebb-software/"class='bbc_url' rel='nofollow external'>Source</a>

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Another Year Passes

Holy crap, it's been well over a year since my last blog post. How on earth does that happen? I guess 2014 just got away from me, that's all. There's really nothing else I can say beyond that. I haven't abandoned the blog or anything, I just don't have all that much to say about gaming at the moment. Most of my work here on Retromags as of late involves the magazine database. Just as few minutes ago, I put the finishing touches on the index for issue #50 of Computer Gaming World, and befo

Areala

Areala

Dear #gamergate

<p>Dear #gamergate,</p> <p>I don’t know if you’ll read this letter. I have not written to you before. We have not really spoken.</p> <p>While your message to us has, more often than not, taken either the form (and I do not mean to belittle you for it; the matter at hand is far more complex than any single person can handle alone) of the shouting of a rhetorical exercise, copy-pasted from a database of talking points, full of debate gymnastics, smoke and mirrors, r

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Harassment Is Not Okay

<p>Over the past two months, many video game developers and journalists have had to wake up and go to sleep bothered, pestered, insulted, and threatened – or worse: Phil Fish, and especially women like Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian have had great reason to be fearful of their privacy, safety, and well-being, after being targeted with threats of death.</p> <p>This is <strong>wrong</strong> and needs to stop. Period.</p> <p>No matter what y

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On the Rise of Youtube

<p>Giggle!</p> <ol> <li>You watch Long Plays to experience a game without playing it</li> <li>You watch Let’s Plays to be entertained</li> <li>You watch video reviews to be spoiled</li> </ol> <p>Thesis: None of these three things are particularly conducive to actually selling a product.</p> <div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/slowdays/slowdown?a=P25Tgk43VPQ:MYdVoITMTXQ:D7DqB2pKEx

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On the Rise of Youtube

Giggle! You watch Long Plays to experience a game without playing it You watch Let’s Plays to be entertained You watch video reviews to be spoiled Thesis: None of these three things are particularly conducive to actually selling a product.

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Nintendo Power Retrospectives – Part 32

<p>This episode we get one step closer to the end of Nintendo Power’s 3rd year, featuring the Metal Storm, and the Nominees for the 3rd Annual Nester Awards!<span id="more-2740"></span></p> <p><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text/html' width='585' height='360' src='href='http://countzeroor.wordpress.com/category/videos/'>videos</a> Tagged: <a href='http://countzeroor.wo

Count_Zero

Count_Zero

An Open Letter to Ellie and Joel

There are certain games that come along from time to time that really get your attention. It could be for the action, the graphics or game play. However, it is a rare occasion that a game grabs you for all of these, plus the amazing experience of becoming emotionally attached and involved in the actions of characters. It is to this that I write this open letter to Ellie and Joel. I met them in the “The Last of Us.” *(Please note that I've tried to write this to contain no spoilers.

Softballchic10

Softballchic10

Nintendo Power Retrospectives – Part 31

<p>This episode I’m moving on to Nintendo Power Issue #21, for February of 1991.</p> <p><span id="more-2737"></span></p> <p><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text/html' width='585' height='360' src='href='http://countzeroor.wordpress.com/category/video-games/'>Video games</a>, <a href='http://countzeroor.wordpress.com/category/videos/'>videos</a> Tag

Count_Zero

Count_Zero

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