With scrappy warblers like Kellie Pickler and Bucky Covington trying to out-twang each other on American Idol, country music is hotter than a corn dog at a county fair. One reason is that almost anybody can sing it. Even mopes who argue that NASCAR isn’t a real sport have been…
On paper, Black sounds like a sure hit: Criterion Studios (the developer behind the spectacular Burnout games) designs a first-person shooter that does away with all that boring sneaking and instead focuses on the pure pyrotechnic appeal of a Hollywood-style gun battle. The game promised sub-woofer-rattling explosions, frantic gunfire in…
Somewhere between the time DJ Kool Herc got the party started in the 1970s and LL Cool J’s star turn on MTV Unplugged in 1991, hip-hop went mainstream. First it conquered the ‘burbs. Then it went global. Before long, kids in Tokyo were rapping. Along the way, hip-hop also muscled…
Gamers have a derogatory name for people who prize a game’s visuals above all: “graphic whores.” But sometimes great graphics can enhance game play — or even provide an experience that couldn’t have occurred otherwise. Fight Night Round 3 for the Xbox 360 is a perfect example. The boxers in…
Ask gamers of a certain age about Resident Evil, and a vivid memory springs to mind: They’re inching down a long, quiet hallway. Suddenly, a zombie dog crashes through a window. A ghostly howl. Insatiable jaws. Mommy, can you tuck me in tonight? The original Resident Evil pretty much single-handedly…
Last fall, Microsoft hyped its pricey Xbox 360 by promising to reinvent gaming as we know it. The blockbuster “next generation” titles were supposed to harness the machine’s awesome power to deliver high-definition graphics and impossibly realistic action. But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. The…
Sony’s approach with its handheld, the PlayStation Portable, is to carbon-copy its most popular titles for on-the-go gaming. “Enjoy Grand Theft Auto on PlayStation 2?” Sony seems to ask. “Well, here’s a version for the PSP. Oh, you’re a SOCOM fan? Super, we’ve got that on PSP too.” With the…
Ah, the Winter Olympics. The nip of drama in the Alpine air. The purity of amateur competition. Swedish women in full-body spandex. These are all things we enjoy about the winter games. Now for some things we don’t: losing to Canada in hockey, male figure skaters in blouses, and of…
Maybe it’s because we’re hung up on our past more than ever — riding a wave of giddy, nonstop nostalgia and absorbing anything that will help recapture the bliss of the good ol’ days — but Capcom’s Mega Man X Collection feels more fun than ever. The follow-up to last…
Every fighting game needs a hook to stand out: Mortal Kombat has gore, Soul Calibur has weapons, Def Jam has hip-hop stars. And Dead or Alive? It has boobies. The DOA series — developed by Tecmo — made its name with a cast of fighters who look like pinups and…
Pop-culture pundits generally fall into two camps: those who think entertainment encourages a nation of knuckle-draggers, and those who say it’s actually making us smarter. In the case of Atari’s The Matrix: Path of Neo, both sides have a point. Like the movie trilogy that inspired it, Path of Neo…
Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time — Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson¹s King Kong: The Official Game…
There’s an oft-repeated urban legend about Dragon Quest’s popularity in Japan: So many gamers ditched school and work to play that the government decreed that future releases had to take place on weekends. In reality, there’s no such law, but as with most myths, the message rings true, even if…
With a Blade TV show in the works from Spike TV and powder-faced My Chemical Romance fans carrying the goth torch at Hot Topic, this would seem the perfect time to resurrect the Castlevania franchise. Castlevania debuted 20 years ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System and was an instant classic,…
Microsoft isn’t described as an underdog very often. But in the world of videogames, Sony’s PlayStation is king, and all others fight for scraps. While Microsoft’s Xbox managed to bump the once-great Nintendo into third place, it nevertheless remains a distant second to the PS2, which commands an installed base…
2005 may be the last hurrah for this generation’s aging consoles, but sugar, they’re going down swingin’. The PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Cube age gracefully, pushing their hardware to the limit one last time and developing some brilliant games in the process — from tear-jerking, giant-slaying adventure to piss-in-your-pants…
The myth of the Wild West has mutated over the past half-century. Where once we thrilled to the wholesome exploits of the Lone Ranger, now we wallow in the mesmerizing depravity of HBO’s Deadwood. Film geeks can argue about when it started to change, but by 1992’s Unforgiven, pop culture…
No wonder Iraq is a mess. If the battlefield in America¹s Army: Rise of a Soldier is an accurate picture of what it’s like in the Middle East, we should cut and run ASAP. The United States Army’s officially licensed shooter puts you smack in the middle of the action…
In less than a decade, first-person shooters like Doom and Halo have grown from a niche genre to a cottage industry. Whether it’s our love for their immersiveness, competition, or just old-fashioned bloodlust, the popularity of FPS games shows no sign of waning. They’ve become so much of a draw,…
If Hollywood wants to learn from the videogame industry — which outgrossed the box office last year — it should pay careful attention to Shadow of the Colossus, a game with the epic scale of a summer blockbuster but the emotional heart of an indie flick. Shadow is brought to…
Putting together a sequel to a hit videogame is tricky business. Play it safe and give people more of the same, and it ends up feeling stale. But try to innovate too much, and you dilute what made the game great to begin with. Soul Calibur III somehow manages to…
Rockstar Games has a winning recipe: Blend a nuanced story with a rich environment, add a dash of sensational marketing, then drench the confection in blood. What else would you expect from the publisher that gave us Grand Theft Auto? Rockstar’s latest release, The Warriors, proves that the bad boys…
