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  • Softballchic10

    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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Having Fun With Hindsight - Flux Magazine #4

You're familiar with the cliche "Hindsight is 20/20" right? Of course you are, that's why it's a cliche. But that doesn't mean that we can't have some fun with it anyway. So to get this party started, I'm going to pick on Flux Magazine for a little while. Flux was a magazine from the mid-90s devoted to comic books, music and video games. It didn't last for very long (a mere 7 issues) but it attempted to brand itself as the more "mature" alternative to EGM and the like. What this mea
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Where I Read ? Nintendo Power #52

It’s been almost a month since my last Where I Read, so to make up for it here’s my Where I Read for Nintendo Power issue #52 for September of 1993. This issue’s cover game is Super Mario All Stars, with Mario jumping and hitting a block. However, the inside includes guides for Final Fight 2, Rock & Roll Racing, and Enix’s RPG The 7th Saga. Let’s read on, shall we? Normally I don’t discuss the ads in the issues, because they’re generally for the magazine they’re in. However, I’m making an e
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More Music Picks From Areala

Flipping through my ample CD collection for something new, I found something I bought several months ago but hadn't listened to yet. It's a sampler record from Silber Records entitled "drones, loves, honesties, sounds". I'd never heard of Silber Records before. It came in a simple cardboard sleeve, and I got it for a buck as I recall. One of those things I bought on a lark because I was curious, then forgot that I even had it until tonight. Well, I was gonna change that, so I popped it into
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New Political Resolution - The Lemon Party

So, I'm sick and tired of politics. I have had it up to here with stupid people making stupid statements that they have no intention of honouring once they get into office. We're now involved in three different military actions directly, God only knows how many indirectly, and it's just getting ridiculous. How zarking hard it is for any of you bozos in politics to just tell the freaking truth? Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, Green, Tea Partier, Blue Dog, Conservative, Liberal
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Quality Control ? Goof Troop

Capcom’s 16-bit Disney licensed games are widely regarded as being among the best platformers in the 16-bit console generation. However, of the successful titles, like Mickey Mousecapade, that they released, lurking in their shadow was a little game called Goof Troop, which has remained fairly obscure to this day. The reasons for the title’s obscurity are two-fold. It was based on a show that was only broadcast on cable (Goof Troop aired only on the Disney Channel). While all the other Disn
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So...What's Your Favorite Song?

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
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Japan, Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Meltdowns: WTF Can I Do?

I've spent most of my free time today watching the news. Story after story, report after report, picture after picture, of the aftermath of one of the worst tragedies to hit Japan since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And while the tragedy may seem remote and half a world away to somebody who lives in Indiana, there's still a part of me that is shaken, awed, and ultimately humbled by what is happening right now. This blog is usually reserved for my thoughts on video games and gaming-r
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[Let's Read] - Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer

The first time I read "Zod Wallop," I had just graduated from high school and was working away the summer before my transition to freshman status at Ball State at the local public library. I saw it on the shelf, mentally asked, "What the hell is this?", took it home, and read through it in two days. After I returned it, I never saw a copy come through again, and for a while I had forgotten about it. Then, several years ago while working at the bookstore, a paperback with an odd title c
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Movie Review ? Buena Vista Social Club

Concert films tend to follow a very specific formula: Band does stuff before performing, audience eagerly awaits performance, band performs, band and audience leave. Buena Vista Social Club follows that formula somewhat, but with some tweaks that makes it stand out. The film follows American music producer Ry Cooder gathering a bunch of classic Cuban musicians together to record an album of popular Cuban songs from the 40s and 50s, of the son genre, which was generally unknown in the US outside
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Book Review: The Chronicles of the Chinese Emperors

Movies set in historical periods or otherwise based around historical events will never go away. We will always have Victorian tales of class-based angst. Same with tales of valorious (or conniving) knights in medieval Europe. For Eastern cinema, we’ll probably always have samurai films of various stripes, and the same with various Wuxia films, discussing various martial artists and their exploits in Imperial China. To get try and some background on wuxia films and their I recently read The Chr
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Fractiv, Offsetting

Anybody still fondly recall Project Offset, the FPS/RPG Intel bought for internal development? Unfortunately, this grand and ambitious project got canned by Intel quite some time back. The good news, though? Surprisingly, old members of the Offset Studio have already set up new shop in Santa Clara, California under the moniker Fractiv and have even released their first game, Lane Splitter, for the iPhone and iPad (with Android to follow shortly). As cheesy as its premise is, the game !The bad
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Manga Review ? Red Hot Chili Samurai Vol. 1

Red Hot Chili Samurai is a manga that feels like it’s not sure what it wants to be. The manga follows samurai Kokaku Sento as he fights various criminals in rural Japan during the Shogunate. Kokaku’s strength and weakness is his dependance on hot peppers, which he eats regularly, and which strengthen him, like Popeye. Like Kenshin, Kokaku and his comrades, bespectacled Ento, ninja manservant Shou, and girly-girl of action (if that makes any sense) Ran refrain from killing at all times, even if
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Where I Read: Nintendo Power #51

We have another recap of an issue in Nintendo Power, just in time for a significant, coinciding event in the modern video game industry. The issue is Nintendo Power #51, for August of 1993. Our cover game for this issue is Street Fighter II Turbo, which introduces the ability to have same character matches in the game, as well as the ability to play as the bosses, coinciding nicely with the release of Capcom?s latest fighting game to include Street Fighter characters ? Marvel vs. Capcom 3. In
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No Deal for Dead Island

? supposedly created by the Glasgow-based animation studio Axis Animation ? has already been viewed far over 3 million times on Youtube, with an equal amount of tweets to go. Its popularity has, in turn, turned up quite a fair bit of misinformation that now surrounds the project. As things stand, a clarification to our earlier report is in order: Unlike previously reported, no movie deal for the game has yet to be made.In speaking to LA Times? 24 Frames, Koch Media representative Malte Wagener s
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Gemini Rue (P)review

Gemini Rue, an IGF 2010 Student Showcase winner under its previous title, Boryokudan Rue, is Joshua Nuernberger?s first full-length commercial title that successfully follows up on the promising path already travelled by the developer’s first adventure game title, La Croix Pan. Dave Gilbert?s Wadjet Eye Games is to publish the game today, 24th of February, and a demo was made exclusively available at GameFront yesterday. The game, a film noir/sci-fi adventure, is of two separate halves: Players
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Book Review ? The Rough Guide to Anime

Finding a ?canon? of important works in any field is generally difficult to settle on. Do you go by popularity, artistic merit, influence on other works, early works of prominent creators, or a combination thereof? The Rough Guide to Anime, by Simon Richmond ? in Penguin Books Rough Guides series, probably has the best ?canon? list of anime titles available, and certainly makes for the best English language primer to anime currently in print in the US, and makes for interesting reading for long
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No Man Is a Dead Island

…but maybe a zombie is! A singular and unique, expertly designed trailer was all it took to light a fire under the video gaming community, bringing a slow and deliberate simmer to an absolute, absolute boil. This trailer, with its decidedly nihilistic take on the zombie mode, exhibited in reverse and to a haunting piano-based soundtrack, has been called the best trailer of the year (in February!) on several sites already, for instance, by LA Times? 24 Frames, The Escapist, Unreality, and Ain?t I
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Anime Review ? Area 88

Get Area 88 from Amazon.com In the anime portions of Gainax‘s OVA series Otaku No Video, there’s a sequence where the main character is being shown the various types of Otaku that the members of his friend’s club are part of. There’s the vehicle and mecha otaku, who is a geek about engines and how things work, and so on. One of the members of the club is an animation otaku, and he demonstrates his affinity for animation by pointing out the detail in an animated sequence (taken from the vide
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[Let's Read] - Nintendo Power #8

Let's Read - Nintendo Power #8 Here we are, eight issues in to Nintendo Power's run, and the big news of the Sept./Oct. issue is Duck Tales. In fact, it's such big news that the big N is devoting a dozen pages to it in this issue in addition to all the attention it got in issue #7. The best news is that Duck Tales is one of the rare examples of a licensed property game that didn't suck eggs, so I can't begrudge Nintendo for featuring this game on the cover. This issue also features th
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XCOM Gameplay Trailer is Intense

There’s not much new to report on XCOM, the “re-imagining” of the PC classic which we’ve covered here before. But last year at E3, 2K Games finally released a brief trailer showing in-game footage for us to pick apart, and I thought I’d bring us up to speed. Click through to see the video embedded below. <p style="text-align: center;"> Since the last time we saw the game, the screenshots are sporting much deeper colours and sharper edges. The game is still looking quite rough in the
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ReVVVVVView

Terry Cavanagh‘s seminal platformer VVVVVV dropped last January, and I gave a brief heads-up noting its brutal difficulty and audacious $15 pricetag. Since then the game has hopped onto the Steam bandwagon and has had its price slashed to a much more reasonable two-thirds less, which makes it an irresistible indie option for platformer fans. And as I mentioned in my recent summary of 2010, VVVVVV turned out to be one of my favourites of the year. You play as space Captain Viridian whose crew is
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Interview with Epic Games? Jay Wilbur

Since its inception in 2008, the Dubai World Game Expo has been the annual showcase for game developers in the Middle East. In the last few years many western studios have taken an interest and have come to sponsor or give panels, including CryTech, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Epic Games. Epic had a large presence at DWGE 2010, showcasing their latest development tool, the Unreal Development Kit. Their booth featured a workshop with tutorials on the basics of the UDK, and repre
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2010: The Year in Review

I?ve not been as active on the Slowdown as I?ve liked lately, something I hope to rectify this year. As it happens, I was actually playing games! Which left me with less time to write about them. 2010 was a very busy gaming year for me; the sheer number of quality titles was staggering, and I?ll try and give a brief mention to some of my personal favourites. While I did enjoy a handful of the huge AAA releases in 2010, I would have to say that I?ve gotten stuck in deep into the indie scene, pla
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