A depiction of Shame, one of the enemies in the role-playing game “Unemployment Quest.”

The task of seeking out a job can feel as daunting as taking on the world, with new foes appearing at every turn.

That’s how Charles DeYoe feels. The 26-year-old has yet to find a job since graduating from SUNY-Buffalo last year with his master’s in library science.

[See why one economic indicator is looking promising.]

“Sometimes it would feel as though the world is against you, and people would say, ‘Well, the reason you don’t have a job is because you’re lazy and it’s your own fault,’” says DeYoe.

Frustrated, DeYoe decided to build something in his spare time: “Unemployment Quest,” which he bills as a “non-epic role-playing game.” In the computer game, a player guides a character through the trials that come with finding a job. DeYoe, who describes himself a “jack of all trades,” is living up to that characterization, writing the game soundtrack in addition to building the game. Some of the challenges represent common hurdles in the job process, like an “online application” battle, and potential employers. DeYoe says he has also introduced a challenge in the form of “The One Percent,” whom he says “intimidate” rather than “attack” the main character.

Still, DeYoe says, many of the game’s enemies take on the shape of tougher but less tangible problems.

“Most enemies are emotional states,” says DeYoe, who has given these villains names like Shame, Doubt, and Discouragement.

“Unemployment Quest” has a decidedly old-school look to it, in the style of 1980s-era games like “The Legend of Zelda.” However DeYoe turned to the uber-modern medium of Kickstarter for funding. On the web fund-raising platform, Unemployment Quest has been an unqualified success. According to Kickstarter, about 44 percent of projects successfully meet their funding goals, but DeYoe’s game has received over $8,000 in pledges—a remarkable sum, given its initial $1,000 goal.

That level of success has exceeded anything DeYoe ever hoped for.

[See why economists are baffled by high unemployment.]

“I was planning on like having to guilt-trip 100 friends into shelling out $10 until I could make CDs, but it seems that I’ve tapped something, and it’s surprised me,” he says.

A look at the comments section of the game’s Kickstarter site shows enthusiastic support from two communities: fellow gamers, as well as people who empathize with DeYoe’s unsuccessful job search.

“I too was unemployed for a period of a year when the Dot-com fiasco occurred ages ago. Anyone unemployed that long knows its a little slice of hell,” said one commenter.

“Screw looking for a job when you can make your own work and have fun doing it. Congrats on the outstanding funding,” said another.

Still, not everyone has been supportive. When one independent role-playing game site featured DeYoe’s project, naysayers derided DeYoe’s efforts. Some criticized his game design, saying that it is too simple to justify needing $1,000. Others got more personal.

“There was this whole barrage of people saying, ‘He doesn’t have a job. He shouldn’t be releasing a game; he should be looking for other jobs,’” says DeYoe.

Still, he is using his extra Kickstarter money to print hundreds more discs of the game, which he will bring to this year’s ConnectiCon, an annual convention that celebrates “pop culture,” focusing on areas like anime and role-playing games.

DeYoe’s game might stick out amid a crowded field of role-playing games that feature dragons and warlords and goblins. Despite the creatures his hero battles, DeYoe worked hard at keeping his game grounded in reality.

[See what J.P. Morgan is losing—besides money—after its risky deals.]

Article source: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/17/new-video-game-takes-on-the-challenge-of-being-unemployed

The Legend of Zelda and Pac-Man combined into a single video. Two of the most influential video games to ever be created at the same time. Is it good? You bet it is. YouTube user NicksplosionFX has created a video depicting what would happen if the NES classic The Legend of Zelda and arcade dominator Pac-Man were somehow smushed together into a single, incredible game. Unfortunately, it is only a video, though maybe some game programers that come across this might take some inspiration from the video. (Hint, hint.) If you’d like to see the product of NicksplosionFX’s work, hit the jump to see the video!

This short video captured the best of both games in less than 2 minutes, and is sure to leave fans appreciating the effort put in to make this person’s imagination a reality. Did you enjoy the video? Tell us in the comments below!

Source: YouTube

~~~Recent Content Updates~~~

• Skyward Sword Goddess Cubes
• Skyward Sword Gratitude Crystals
• Skyward Sword Pieces of Heart
• Skyward Sword Video Walkthrough
• Skyward Sword Walkthrough
• The Minish Cap Walkthrough
• Deku Baba

• The game seems a lot easier with a sword. XD That’s an awesome video; I actually would have played that, haha.

• Wasn’t there a Link to the Past -styled Pac-Man game already?

  Anyway, this wouldn’t be too hard to make.

• It seems easy to create, it would be awesome too I would definitely play it. The weapons make it a bit too easy though don’t you think?

• I… Must… PLAY IT!!! Someone please make it!

Article source: http://www.zeldadungeon.net/2012/05/link-the-legend-of-pac-man/

Phil Fish, the designer of the video game “Fez,” in the documentary “Indie Game: The Movie”. Photo: Indie Game: The Movie via The New York Times

VIDEO games weren’t always so easy. Players who know only the current generation of consoles must think of their favourite games as gentle, kindhearted, almost mothering in their ministrations — adapting themselves to the needs of the gamer, serving up big shiny arrows or straightforward explanatory text when things get confusing, and just generally showering kisses and encouragement every time someone skins a knee.

Not all that long ago games were exacting, punishing, cruel. For more than a decade the economics of the arcade age — kill a player, get a coin — influenced the spirit of the first games that were designed to be played at home, on televisions, even though they were sold for one fixed, all-you-can-play price. Three lives and you’re out. Quickly.

In a creative version of Stockholm syndrome, now that the generation that grew up playing these games is making games of its own, difficulty is seeing a resurgence, especially among indie games: those built by small teams, or even individuals, at independent developers that work outside of the industry’s studio system and its multimillion-dollar budgets. Many of these games make a fetish of how impossible they are. And “Fez”, a brilliant, intricate new game created by a two-person team in Montreal, might be the most impenetrable of them all.

A sreenshot from the game ”Fez”. Photo: Microsoft Studios via The New York Times

In Indie Game: The Movie, a new documentary, Phil Fish, the game’s designer (he worked with Renaud Bedard, the game’s sole programmer), says his first video-game memories are of playing “Super Mario Bros.”, the “Legend of Zelda” and “Tetris”. “Fez”, his tribute to 1980s gaming, is lovingly, almost excessively, devoted to the golden age of Nintendo, from its chunky, lo-fi art style to its numerous homages to those three titans of Fish’s youth.

“Fez” took Fish and Bedard five years to build. A prototype won an award for visual excellence from the Independent Games Festival in 2008. Finally — news that broke too late for the documentarians who chronicled Fish’s failure to meet numerous development milestones — “Fez” became available on the Xbox downloadable games marketplace last month.

Fish is a Quentin Tarantino of 8-bit gaming, prodigiously quoting from the pop culture of his childhood (in this case, the Nintendo Entertainment System, rather than blaxploitation films). The oddly shaped blocks from “Tetris” can be seen everywhere in “Fez”: on the walls, on the ground, on signposts, scrawled on chalkboards, even in the constellations in the sky. Gomez, “Fez’s” protagonist, beams with joy, adorably, when he finds an important item in a treasure chest, much like Link, the hero of “Zelda.” But it is to “Super Mario Bros.” that “Fez” owes its greatest debts. For starters, there are mushroom levels, moving platforms on rails and an underground world that Gomez reaches by descending through a well that looks very much like a pipe.

Somehow all of this feels inventive rather than derivative. Initially, “Fez” appears to be about Gomez’s discovery that his two-dimensional universe is actually three-dimensional, as he uses his fez — thus the title — to reveal that squares are in fact cubes. The gameplay is always side-scrolling in two dimensions, but Gomez can rotate his cube-universe so that he traverses different planes — the flat surfaces of the same cube — to make his leaping less difficult. This Escher-like manipulation of the universe is not all that confusing on the screen, nor is it typically challenging. When Gomez falls to his death, the game generously places him on the most recent platform he stood on, rather than returning him to the start of a level or a checkpoint.

“Fez’s” difficulty — its status as a “Finnegans Wake” of video games — does not come from Gomez’s ostensible quest, which is to collect 32 golden cubes for some blah-blah-save-the-universe reason. Finding the cubes is sort of a ruse on Fish’s behalf to get you to check out every corner of his densely constructed universe so you will begin to want to unspool the complex game that is layered atop Gomez’s childlike adventure.

There are owls that utter cryptic messages and artifacts that help unlock codes for counting and lettering. Another code in the game uses symbols to convey commands that a player is supposed to enter on the game pad. Sometimes QR codes (those images read by a mobile phone) appear, and when scanned they provide instructions. One set of puzzles can be cracked by sensing the vibrations the game sends to the controller, and others involve knowing — largely on the basis of a single image in a single room out of score upon scores of such places — that a certain code must be rotated 90 degrees before it is translated. A quick brown fox literally jumps over a lazy dog. There is, of course, a monolith.

This aspect of the game can’t begin to be deciphered without taking handwritten notes to interpret the “patterns everywhere” that are promised, and quickly “Fez” makes the player feel like John Nash as portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, pasting scraps of text on a wall in a fruitless effort at unlocking a deeper mystery. (There is a “Fez notes” Tumblr, where players upload their scribbles for posterity.)

Yet every time diminishing returns to this cryptography began to set in, “Fez” would offer a new carrot pellet, revealing a fresh, alluring discovery. This sort of thing never ends well. At some point, as is always the case with such fiction — remember Lost? — it ends, and you ask yourself: Really, is that all that was?

The most retro thing about “Fez” — and one of Fish’s ambitions for the game, he suggests in Indie Game: The Movie — is how it has convened a community of players on sites like GameFAQs who share insights and crowdsource the particularly nettlesome puzzles. I could never have completed 212.5 per cent of “Fez” — not 100, it’s that kind of impishly infuriating and entrancing game — without some help from the online resources put together by these people, the 21st-century version of the classmate at recess who told you how to beat King Hippo in “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out”, or theorised that you should finish “Metroid” three times to confirm that Samus Aran is a woman. The best of these digital assistants won’t tell you exactly what to do but will point you in the right direction.

Just don’t read too much. For the mystery is the pleasure of “Fez’s” hidden codes and ciphers that promise a deeper revelation. The game cannot hope to deliver a meaning-of-life stunner that would be required for all those puzzling hours to be rewarding, except as time spent on an enjoyable task for its own sake. The question really is the answer.

One mystery lingers. Even the internet and its collective wisdom has not been able to explain the meaning of Fez’s monolith. And it’s probably not worth spending any more time on it. While wandering through the game, I stopped to transliterate some markings on a signpost. What was I about to learn? What piece of this captivating jigsaw would be revealed? “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”?

No, worse: “Trapped in a Fez factory,” read the laborious fruits of my labor. “Please send help.”

The New York Times

Article source: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/a-fez-of-the-heart-from-gamings-tarantino-20120517-1ysj4.html

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Apple’s new iPad is packed with a dual-core A5X processor that offers quad-core graphics which has made gaming on the tablet  much more powerful.

Games like Infinity Blade 2, Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto III, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 have all shown off how powerful gaming on a tablet can be.

It also seems to point to some more exciting releases down the road.

So, where to next?

Read: New iPad Review.

Well, after downloading X-Men: The Arcade Game for the iPad, a game that I wasted many quarters on as a kid, I started thinking about other games that I would love to see developed or ported to the iPad.

After some debate, I have come up with a wish list of 10 games that I really hope come to the iPad at some point down the road. I’ve tried to keep it within the realm of reason so you won’t find games like Halo 3 or Grand Theft Auto IV. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any gems in here though.

Pilotwings 64

Like many of you, I owned a Nintendo 64. And while I had many favorites, one of the all-time great games for the console was a game called Pilotwings 64. In fact, it launched alongside the N64 all the way back in 1996.

In a nutshell, the game is a flight simulator. It allows players to pick a character and then take that character through a variety of flying challenges including operating a hang glider, gyrocopter and skydiving.

Those were fun, but nothing was more fun then shooting my character out of a cannon in an effort to land within the bulls-eye of a target far away.

I would love to do that on my iPad.

Mario Kart

I don’t think I know a single person that hasn’t played some form of Mario Kart. While I never really got into the versions on the GameCube or the Wii, I have every level memorized in both the N64 and Super Nintendo versions.

I assume many of you do too. I also assume that many of you would love to race in Wario Stadium or travel down the Rainbow Road on your iPad.

I’d buy any version of this game in a heartbeat and take Toad to victory lane, just like I did in the good old days.

Road Rash

This one is a little more obscure but chances are, if you owned a Sega Genesis, you’ve heard of Road Rash. The premise of Road Rash is simple. Race a motorcycle to the finish line while using chains, crowbars and other weapons to ensure that your opponents do not.

Over time, new levels and new bikes became available ensuring many hours of gameplay, and many hairs lost at the expense of foes like Lawson and Public Enemy No. 1.

F-Zero

I can’t recall, but I think I may have smashed an SNES controller or two while playing F-Zero. The reason? Not only was it a pain trying to stay in-bounds while hitting all of the energy spots to keep my ship afloat, but you also had to achieve a better position on each lap unless you wanted to get disqualified.

It was maddeningly frustrating but also extremely fun and I’d love to see it come to the iPad.

Time Crisis

Waltz into any arcade on the planet and you’re probably going to run into a version of Time Crisis. This shooter, where you duck behind elements and then pop out to dispatch of enemies would be perfect for the iPad.

Hold the iPad down to take cover, bring it up to get out of cover and take down the enemy.

Seriously, just thinking about this game makes me want to find a local arcade. I’d rather be lazy and play it on my iPad though. Someone make it happen please.

General Chaos

Another fairly obscure Sega Genesis game, but a game that still has a place in my heart. General Chaos is a strategy game where the goal is to capture the other general’s capital city.

The premise is that you choose from different soldiers with unique abilities in an effort to defeat the enemy. It was always fun to take out my friends flamethrower guys with my bazooka guys. Or using my flamethrower guy to take out the guy with the eye patch throwing dynamite.

Any game that features a guy with an eyepatch throwing dynamite should be on the iPad, in my opinion.

No, but seriously, this game is extremely fun and time consuming and addicting and I’d love to be able to play it on my tablet.

The Simpsons Arcade Game

The Simpsons Arcade Game, a game that consumed countless of my parents quarters, is already out for the iPhone. So, hopefully, that means that we’ll see it arrive for the iPad sooner rather than later.

Super Mario 64

I think this is pretty self explanatory. Super Mario 64 is one of the best games of all time and if it were to arrive for the iPad, with Retina Display support no less, I’d scoop it up the second it came out.

I doubt that we’ll ever see as Nintendo has shown no signs of wanting to release its games on Apple’s devices but this, along with the next game, should be the first games that it releases.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

What can I say? I’ve played a lot of video games and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to this day remains one of my favorite games of all time.

If it came to the iPad, I’d be over the moon, as would millions and millions of others I’m sure.

GoldenEye 64

One of the best games ever made, I can’t even imagine how much time I would waste playing multiplayer if this were to ever come to the iPad.

The single player wasn’t bad either.

–

I realize that most, if not all of these – especially the Nintendo games, will probably never make it to the iPad. It’s a shame but thankfully,  I can deal with what’s on the App Store right now.

That being said, what games would you love to see come to the iPad?

Tags: Apple iPad, Apple iPad 3, Apps, F-Zero, Gaming, GoldenEye, ipad, iPad 3, iPad games, Mario Kart, Pilotwings, Super Mario, The Simpsons, Zelda

Category: Apps, Editorials, Mobile

About the Author (Author Profile)

Adam is an editor based in San Francisco, California who loves his iPhone 3GS, iPad third-generation and Samsung Galaxy Nexus. He’s also becoming intrigued with Windows Phone. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him by email at adam@notebooks.com.

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Article source: http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/05/16/10-classic-games-the-ipad-needs/

Not all that long ago games were exacting, punishing, cruel. For more than a decade the economics of the arcade age — kill a player, get a quarter — influenced the spirit of the first games that were designed to be played at home, on televisions, even though they were sold for one fixed, all-you-can-play price. Three lives and you’re out. Quickly.

In a creative version of Stockholm syndrome, now that the generation that grew up playing these games is making games of its own, difficulty is seeing a resurgence, especially among indie games: those built by small teams, or even individuals, at independent developers that work outside of the industry’s studio system and its multimillion-dollar budgets. Many of these games make a fetish of how impossible they are. And Fez, a brilliant, intricate new game created by a two-person team in Montreal, might be the most impenetrable of them all.

In “Indie Game: The Movie,” a documentary that opens on Friday in New York, Phil Fish, the game’s designer (he worked with Renaud Bédard, the game’s sole programmer), says his first video-game memories are of playing Super Mario Bros., the Legend of Zelda and Tetris. Fez, his tribute to 1980s gaming, is lovingly, almost excessively, devoted to the golden age of Nintendo, from its chunky, lo-fi art style to its numerous homages to those three titans of Mr. Fish’s youth.

Fez took Mr. Fish and Mr. Bédard five years to build. A prototype won an award for visual excellence from the Independent Games Festival — in 2008. Finally — news that broke too late for the documentarians who chronicled Mr. Fish’s failure to meet numerous development milestones — Fez became available on the Xbox downloadable games marketplace, for about $10, last month.

Mr. Fish is a Quentin Tarantino of 8-bit gaming, prodigiously quoting from the pop culture of his childhood (in this case, the Nintendo Entertainment System, rather than blaxploitation films). The oddly shaped blocks from Tetris can be seen everywhere in Fez: on the walls, on the ground, on signposts, scrawled on chalkboards, even in the constellations in the sky. Gomez, Fez’s protagonist, beams with joy, adorably, when he finds an important item in a treasure chest, much like Link, the hero of Zelda. But it is to Super Mario Bros. that Fez owes its greatest debts. For starters, there are mushroom levels, moving platforms on rails and an underground world that Gomez reaches by descending through a well that looks very much like a pipe.

Somehow all of this feels inventive rather than derivative. Initially, Fez appears to be about Gomez’s discovery that his two-dimensional universe is actually three-dimensional, as he uses his fez — thus the title — to reveal that squares are in fact cubes. The gameplay is always side-scrolling in two dimensions, but Gomez can rotate his cube-universe so that he traverses different planes — the flat surfaces of the same cube — to make his leaping less difficult. This Escher-like manipulation of the universe is not all that confusing on the screen, nor is it typically challenging. When Gomez falls to his death, the game generously places him on the most recent platform he stood on, rather than returning him to the start of a level or a checkpoint.

Fez’s difficulty — its status as a “Finnegans Wake” of video games — does not come from Gomez’s ostensible quest, which is to collect 32 golden cubes for some blah-blah-save-the-universe reason. Finding the cubes is sort of a ruse on Mr. Fish’s behalf to get you to check out every corner of his densely constructed universe so you will begin to want to unspool the complex game that is layered atop Gomez’s childlike adventure.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/arts/video-games/the-video-game-fez-is-complex-by-design.html

If you want a game that you’ll be able to play for a long time and that doesn’t cost you any money, then Rule the Kingdom will satisfy your urges. At its heart, Rule the Kingdom is an RPG not unlike Zenonia or old Legend of Zelda games, for example, but there’s more substance to it than that, and it handles very differently.

First, Rule the Kingdom has a point-and-click interface rather than using an on-screen joystick. You tap the screen where you want to go, and your hero goes there. You tap on a bad guy, and he will attack, and you can either wait for the auto-attacks to play out, or you can mix things up with spells.

Beyond fighting and talking to people, you also have a kingdom to manage, as the title of the game suggests. You can build a barracks to train warriors to help you battle monsters, and you can make some other people farm the land for you. And you can have somebody make cookies. And so on. A kingdom won’t run without gold and food, and you need to figure out how to produce those things.

Rule the Kingdom is engaging and effective, and it’s different enough from its counterparts that you’ll never feel like you’re playing something you’ve already played before. But this game does have one big problem: the interface.

Unfortunately, everything on screen is so small. This game seems geared toward larger tablets rather than phones in that sense. It doesn’t make the game unplayable – I was able to do most of what I wanted to do on my Galaxy Nexus, which has a large screen for a phone – but I can see some major problem arising on smaller devices.

But as long as your thumbs aren’t too big for the buttons, I think you’ll have a grand time with Rule the Kingdom. That seems like a big caveat, though.

Discover more great Android games here

Article source: http://www.androidapps.com/games/articles/12027-rule-the-kingdom-is-actually-different-from-other-rpgs

Say goodbye to your social life

Yesterday saw the release (and the subsequent launch problems) of Diablo III. Now that your body has forced you to surface for bathroom, food, and sleep, we’d like to entertain you with an oral history of how the Diablo franchise turned role-playing into a respectable activity–or a remorseless addiction. It’s a matter of perspective, really. 

Video games have had a consistent, if not odd, evolution through the years. First there were the arcade games, like Asteroids and Pac-Man, where beating levels really just meant the screen changing colors and the geometric shapes and ghosts moving a hell of a lot faster, until you eventually lost all of your lives. The point of the games was amassing an unbeatable score so that your initials would stay at the top of the leaderboard forever, or until the machine was unplugged.

Then console games began their reign. Scores were barely thought about. Most games, like The Legend of Zelda, didn’t even keep any sort of score. Like Capt. Obvious of football Herman Edwards once said, “You play to win the game,” or in this case, to save the princess (in just about every single video game, even ones involving plumbers), watch the ending cinematics, and shut the game off before the credits are done rolling. This made sense. You don’t want to have to keep saving the princess over and over again. Eventually you’d have to give up on her and cross her off in your black book.

Then came the era of Final Fantasy 7. Beating the game wasn’t enough. Instead, you had to gather 4 of every single weapon, piece of armor, and spell in the game in order to launch an attack that goes on for about one and a half minutes. Unless you have Mimic. Then you can see it multiple times in a row! Probably enough time to grab a beer and a bathroom break at the same time.

Finally, the Diablo franchise emerged, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that synchronized this love of collecting game items and possessing enough power to win the game in the press of one button into both an addiction, and later a side job. With the release of Diablo 3, we will dissect each of the Diablo games to figure out how we became so insane.

It all began here sixteen years ago

Classic Diablo

The game that jump-started popular MMORPGs was probably the purest game in the Diablo franchise. Using three different characters (warrior, rogue, and sorcerer), a player could literally use any item and cast any spell, provided they screwed up their character attributes enough to make it work. The game itself was straightforward in regards to “winning”. Levels never looked the same or even used all of the same quests each time you would play through, but there was an end. You kill Diablo, you win the game.

That wasn’t enough for most gamers, so the idea of gathering stronger items in the game, which would drop at random, was made a part of the game’s re-playability. Oh, you didn’t collect your Windforce bow and Royal Circlet? Well, play again noob.

Look at all you achieved in your younger days!

Another game perk that helped re-playability was being able to kill other online players within the game as well as monsters. This led to players spending weeks trying to get their characters maxed out at level 50 to give them just enough edge to kill a player with the same junk as you equipped.

That wasn’t enough, however, as pirate programs called trainers were invented, and used to max out characters past their respective attribute caps, create weapons that dealt hundreds of thousands of damage points, and officially ended Diablo’s reign as the supreme online game when people got bored when two hacked rogues lined up to battle based on the luck of whose Blood Star spell hit first.

The Grim Reaper — More frightening than the Devil? Discuss

Diablo 2 and Diablo: Lord of Destruction

I’m sure that Blizzard entertainment could have fixed classic Diablo if they had wanted to, but they were already working on a new project: Diablo 2. With it came more characters, more items, and a new age in gaming: buying and selling items and even characters for real money, thanks to Ebay.

Initially, hacks were created that helped dupe the more powerful items, like Silks of the Victor, the Windforce bow (again), Gull daggers to help with the new magic-find attribute to help you find even more good stuff, and the Stone of Jordan ring, a level-increasing ring that became a form of currency in the online community of Diablo. Blizzard did its best to stop the corruption of the game with these hacks but not before the duping of godly items, rare weapons, armors, and rings that were insanely powerful.

The answer is C) Some sort of hybrid Devil-Death monster

These items became so powerful that they were sold on eBay for actual money, some for as high as $20 at times, as well as character accounts that were already at level 99. The point of actually playing the game in order to achieve online godliness came to an end, as any schmo with a credit card could easily become an elite character in the game. Play the game? Who needs to waste all that time?

And what did people do when they achieved these levels? They repeatedly entered Cow Runs in order to get even more items, and once in a while killed a PVP character solo or in a guild war. Sure, you killed Diablo or Baal once in a while, but only because they dropped some bad-ass loot. The game became secondary to the collecting.

This…this is what mankind was made to do

If you’re going to charge a monster, lead with your spear

Diablo 3 

It’s hard to say where Diablo 3 will take its fans, but Blizzard is already doing what individual gamers did in Diablo 2, and what the company did in its other hit sensation, World of Warcraft. They have set up an auction house so players can buy and sell their loot for real money. AGAIN.

While the idea is not as sketchy as buying an item from a random person on the internet, then waiting for them in a Battlenet region to make the real trade and hoping that they don’t just say, “Yeah, I just gave it to you. Your online connection may be screwy,” thus screwing you over for $10.00 (not that this has EVER happened to me), it still makes a gamer wonder how great the game really has to be if the end result will be about the same as Diablo 2. How many people are actually going to play through the game instead of having friends help them get up to the level cap so they can press that button so they automatically win the game? Will Windforce return?

I’ll let you know. Of course I’m going to play it. You know…for research.

FX/Courvoisier

Patrick Emmel is a mediocre gamer who plays better with a bottle of Lagavulin and always blames his bad gaming performances on lag. You can see some of his work at www.theineptowl.com or heckle him on Twitter @Patrick_AE.

Patrick previously deciphered which alcohol your favorite Archer characters are. –

Article source: http://mancavedaily.washington.cbslocal.com/2012/05/16/how-diablo-changed-everything-about-gaming/

Video game music is bigger than some people might think. The Legend of Zelda symphony I attended here in Dallas at the start of this year was huge, selling out quickly and bringing a large and diverse crowd of gamers and music lovers.

On June 15, one of the other gaming legends brings its musical repertoire to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy is coming.

As a big, long-time fan of Japanese RPGs, the music from the Final Fantasy series resonates a lot with me. Some of my favorite games of all time come from the storied franchise, including Final Fantasy VI (originally released in the US on the Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy III). Likewise, the soundtracks feature many tracks that I’m quite fond of.

According to the website, the concert features many classic tunes from the past including:

FINAL FANTASY SERIES: Prelude
FINAL FANTASY V: Clash on the Big Bridge
FINAL FANTASY X: Suteki da ne
FINAL FANTASY VIII: Eyes on Me
FINAL FANTASY X: Zanarkand
FINAL FANTASY XIII: Blinded By Light
and many other favorites!

It should be a great performance. Tickets can be purchased from the DSO website.

Article source: http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/05/final-fantasy-orchestra-distan.html