PSP Features

Goodbyes are never easy, but at least we made it funny...

Jesus Christ, you guys. This isn't even the holiday season, and look at how many games are coming out. This is unreasonable. Publishers can't realistically expect to make money in September, can they? Ah, hell, who are we kidding? We're gonna buy almost every friggin' one of these releases before claiming bankruptcy. Just in time for October's similarly unfair set of releases to overwhelm us all over again. Well, until then…

Deathmatch. Capture the Flag. Domination. Team… those things. These words have made up a familiar vocabulary for multiplayer games over the past 15 years or so, and they’ve been standard in nearly every game that’s allowed one player to shoot at another. These days, however, “standard” is seldom enough, and this year it seems like every other big fall release wants to reinvent, deepen or otherwise put its own unique spin on competitive and co-op play.

Some of those spins are more interesting than others, and they’re resulting in a fall lineup that – in spite of being composed largely of sequels – is doing enough big, unusual things with multiplayer to make even the most steadfast solo gamers take interest. And now that another annual 24-hour marathon is safely behind us, it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at the unique stuff that lies ahead...

Take one hour, multiply it by twenty, and then add four. That’s how long we devoted ourselves to playing with our community last weekend and we did it in one straight, foolhardy shot. Those of you who didn’t join us over Steam, Xbox Live, or PSN, first of all – SHAME ON YOU! Now that you’ve sufficiently wallowed in your shame, you get to see what you missed in this here video encapsulating all our kills and cut-ups. More importantly, this is our “Thank You” love letter to the hundreds of people who joined us in the multiplayer merriment, hung out on the Justin.tv stream, and helped us raise almost two thousand dollars for the charity Child‘s Play. Sincere, heartfelt thanks to all of you!

We celebrate the SNES big time, talk post-humanism, and other jabbering...

Licensed games don't have the best of reputations, for reasons too obvious to repeat here. When the rare successes do occur, however, it’s usually because the games are based on older movies and, thus, weren’t rushed to market in order to coincide with a theatrical release.

The lesson here, developers? Stop looking to current, crappy Hollywood for inspiration and go back to the classics… by which, of course, we mean the ‘80s movies that we adored as children and would happily pay money to play through again as adults...

In 1980, a perplexed and delighted public were getting their heads around Defender, the Mattel Intellivision and this new thing called videogames. Skip forward to 2011 and there's 30 years' worth of canon to revisit - but as with anything, the best-regarded games don't give the full picture...

What a year 1999 was for PlayStation. Developers had new tools to help them squeeze the last drops of horsepower from the machine, brand recognition was global and gameplay was a priority again after the Great Polygon Rush of '96. Ridge Racer Type 4 rode the crest of that wave, offering some of the best graphics the machine ever produced, along with sublime handling, atmosphere and soundtrack. And, unlike Gran Turismo, it hasn't aged badly in the slightest. In fact, it's still sensational. Let me show you why: