You’re walking along the crowded city streets of ancient Jerusalem or Liberty City, the specifics aren’t important. You’ve been exploring these same streets for years, in a different context every time, but the faces never change. All of a sudden, boredom overcomes you and you wonder what would happen if you trick that generic looking citizen into walking into your cleverly placed rat trap. You’ve set up a Rube Goldberg machine of landmines, falling debris, and perhaps, if you’re feeling very devious, chainsaws. The naďve fool is left in a bloody, poorly rendered mess, and in all likelihood, you return to the “normal game” that the developers intended.

These little diversions are fun, but there is always a tinge of guilt, or excitement, the first time that you perform a nasty little experiment. It is the taboo, unnatural element that makes breaking the rules so entertaining. Sure, Rockstar knows that gamers are going to go on a rampage to see how much destruction they can cause, but it is because the game seems to punish this activity that it seems so exciting. If “Press the X button to cap a pedestrian in the face” was in the tutorial, the pastime would offer little more than a few shallow chuckles.

Many ancient games did not allow for exploration in the same freeform fashion that the open-world era offers, but even developers then acknowledged and rewarded illicit behavior. Do you remember the first time you chose to pummel the chickens in A Link to the Past? Nintendo knew that gamers were naturally curious, and decided to grace us with perhaps the most entertaining punishment ever.



But it is that unexplored, virgin territory that makes interactive experimentation so thrilling. A rational person would never devote time to thinking of how many people they could run over before their car inexplicably set on fire, or how many town guards they could fend off before being overrun, but in the context of a game, these are reasonable questions with interesting answers.

Yet, in gaming, the concept of evil is totally lost on the curious. Surely a person can’t be judged for running over a guy in a game. A real body would not have flown 30 feet in the air and glitched into a stray polygon! It is this separation of the real and the unreal that is integral to the healthy development of any gamer.



The illusion of evil in games has little to do with the actual content of the games, and more on the media circus surrounding the games themselves. During the infamous Columbine shootings, the police discovered that one of the shooters had used the Doom Map Editor to plot out his school, complete with unarmed enemy models and ran through the course daily to memorize the layout of the school. The obsessive, twisted nature of that one individual has haunted the medium of gaming ever since.

Developers have begun to combat this by removing the possibility for many of the more politically incorrect scenarios. Most modern games do not feature children or elderly that can be harmed. Nudity and true gore are not available to prevent rape and torture scenarios. The use of zombies and terrorists as generic enemies offer a disassociation from the reality that you, as a player, are simulating murder. You are the hero, justified in all that you do, because most games cannot be bothered to be bogged down by actual moral quandaries. Moral choices in most games include the evil option simply out of curiosity.

No, true evil in games comes in the curiosity of every day people exploring questions and scenarios that they don’t typically think about on a day-to-day basis. A good book or movie or even linear game narrative can prod you to think about subjects that are typically deemed to be evil, but only the medium of interactivity can allow you to create a barrier whereby you commit the evil yourself, of your own free will.

Modern Warfare 2 or Edmund can force you to do evil things, but the justification on the part of the player is that you are following a scripted story by the developer. When you kill a child in Fallout 1 and 2, it was just because you could. When you put your Sim into a pool and take out the ladders, it was to watch them die like an ant below a magnifying glass. When you are left to guard the hostages in Counter-Strike and you kill them all, losing the whole team money, you are doing so out of morbid curiosity

Jonesing for some Left 4 Dead 2, but can't afford it in the holiday rush? Fret not! A dedicated L4D fan named Eric Ruth is recreating the entirety of the first Left 4 Dead game in 8-bit top down shooter form. He has supposedly completed the entire No Mercy campaign (video posted below) and is planning to release the game on January 4th totally completed.

"Valve doesn't know about it yet, but I'm sure (with their love of community creations) that they will find this mildly amusing at worst, and hilarious at best," says Ruth.

Considering the fact that this is a solo project, any of it being released ever will be pretty impressive. If he makes good on the whole product in January, Valve should hire him to head up a brand new retro division.



Here is a full FAQ:

Q: Is this just an animation or an actual game?
A: An actual game. It will be available for free download on PC around January 4th, 2010.

Q: I only see one "special infected." Will there be more?
A: Yes. All 5 special infected appear in this game regularly.

Q: How far along are you currently?
A: As of November 15th, I am completed with the first "mission: No Mercy" as well as most of the core game play mechanics.

Q: Does Valve know about this? And would they approve?
A: No, Valve doesn't know about it yet, but I'm sure (with their love of community creations) that they will find this mildly amusing at worst, and hilarious at best.

Q: Will this version have all of the campaigns from the original game?
A: Yes. All 5 maps of all 4 campaigns will be present in the final product.

Q: Like your other games, did you make this one all by yourself?
A: With the exception of a few friends backing me up in the QA area, yes, the coding, debugging, sound effects, music and pixel art are all original work of Eric Ruth.

Q: Will there be more videos that show off more of the game?
A: Maybe 1 or 2, but that's about it. If you want to see every campaign and fight every zombie, then you will have to download and play it.

Source: G4

I am a gamer.

I've traversed the lengths and breadth of countless worlds and saved those worlds dozens of times from nameless, faceless, formless evils.

I have become death to anonymous cronies and have brought life to barren plains.

I have become a god among men and slaughtered those that have stood before my might!

But I will be damned to the darkest pits of hell if I can beat my wife at Wii Bowling.

My wife is what you might call a casual gamer. She plays bass on medium difficulty on Rock Band, takes Uno on Xbox Live out for the occasional spin, and sometimes boots up Tetris on my phone when she thinks I'm not looking. However, the competitive landscape of my entire home changed when I bought a Wii.

The first thing we booted up upon getting the Wii hooked up was Wii Sports. I played around a bit before she got home, and we took some of the multiplayer out for a spin. For awhile there, we had no idea what we were doing. Why couldn't we consistently hit home runs? Why did our putts go off to the right? And why the hell was that target in the tennis practice mode so hard to $@%^^$# hit?

When we booted up bowling, she didn't even want to play. She hates bowling in real life (knee injury) and has always been embarrassed of her skills at the lanes. I have not been bowling with her since high school and though I enjoy the sport, I thought this piece of software would go largely unplayed in our house.

As it turns out, she's an amazing Wii bowler. I thought her first victory was a fluke, but when she reached pro months before me, I finally started catching on that maybe something was different about this game.

She would consistently beat me 9 times out of 10. She was better at the training games, she could beat all of our friends, hell, she even knocked down all of that 91 pin thing at the end without cheating! I've never been so humiliated and so proud at the same time. She may not be able to top me at Brawl or beat Twilight Princess, but dammit the girl can bowl.

Picture this: you've just installed a game of legendary fame. Everyone you talk to used to be an expert at this game and the internet is aflutter with its memes. Gamestop stopped carrying the game years ago and you've taken to eBay to track down this timeless wonder. It cost more than other games its age, but hey, it'll be worth it right? Everyone on the internet couldn't be wrong.

Or could they?

'Retro Goggles' is a well-documented, widespread malaise, but some games have attained an all but immortal status. Very few people question the quality of Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Chrono Trigger, etc. Sure these games have flaws and errors, but they are great in spite of those problems. So what happens when you finally sit down to experience the greatness foretold by all your friends and you find that something....is wrong. You know you should be enjoying the ride, but the road seems bumpy. Then one of your tires explodes and you lose control and careen off the road and...I think I lost grasp of my metaphor.

My point is, I've discovered that some great games have not aged well, and it is difficult to feel that I am missing out on good shared memories simply because I wasn't able to play a game when it came out. As a kid, I got one console at a time and I didn't get to go back and play others for a very long time Not everything can age gracefully, and these are a few samples of games that weren't as good as they were hyped up to be:

1.Final Fantasy VII - As a child of the N64 (which was awesome), I did not really get in on the 3D JRPG craze until long after the PS2 came out. By the time I was able to afford an original Playstation, Final Fantasy VII had already achieved a cult status with a pricetag to match.

The number one complaint about the game is that comparative to today's graphical symphonies, it rapes your eyes. Some of the polygons are downright jagged, and though this is a valid complaint, it did not bother me at all at the time. While I found some merit in the game's innovations (Materia system w00t!) I found the game to be a generic JRPG that had far too much level-grinding, frustrating minigames, and in reality, a ridiculous story. I don't hate the game, far from it, but my expectations were lifted so high, they were inevitably bound to fall.



2.Starcraft - Ok, this one is a bit strange. It is not that I find the core Starcraft game to be bad. My issue came in the real sweet spot for many people: multiplayer. By the time I finally tracked down a copy of this game, the only people playing the game with any regularity were just absolutely brutal to me.

In fact, even playing on LAN with friends was unfair because most of them had run the gauntlet enough that I didn't have a prayer of winning. It's a very frustrating feeling to come to a game and realize that you have disadvantages that would take years to level out.



3.Metal Gear Solid - I know I will probably be decried as a heretic and burned at the stake, but so far, I have not really enjoyed any of the Metal Gear Solid series. I have completed Metal Gear Solid three times, and besides the enjoyable pulp story, I find the gameplay to be quite frustrating at parts.

The controls have always been an issue for me, and I honestly haven't been able to conquer them. I can sort of see (though not completely agree) with the argument that imperfect controls can be immersive if your character is not intended to be a supersoldier proficient at combat, but Snake is intended to be a supersoldier. Why then does it feel like he stumbles through his inventory and shooting enemies when he is the savior of the world?



4.Resident Evil - I am forcing myself through Resident Evil 4 right now upon the insistence of a friend ("Like Resident Evil or I'll kill you") and so far, I have experienced the same emotion I had with the other Resident Evil games and many horror movies: meh.

Maybe it's because I am not scared easily by things jumping out of things, but overall I find the Resident Evil series to feature frustrating gameplay, stupid puzzles, and really cheap 'horror' situations. It takes a really cerebral, subtle creepiness to really get to me and Resident Evil without its scary factor has just proven to be substandard.



But don't take my word for it, try these games out for yourself. Maybe you will find that they are as great to you now as they were to everyone else then. Maybe I'm a sad, depraved individual. Maybe I just suck at games.

Ok, so about a month ago, I approached my grandmother and asked her to teach me how to sew. She asked what project I wanted to work on first, and I thought, "I should make a costume for the upcoming con." I had decided to do a themed group entry with myself as Ganon, my son as Wind Waker link and a friend as Tetra. Well, I couldn't pull of Ganon in time, but I'm proud with how (most of) my son's costume came out.



I based it off Wind Waker Link, thought what you're seeing is not final. I have white leggings and boots, but we live in Florida, and it was simply too hot to wear. Furthermore, I am planning to paint the sword a more appropriate color, but up until that morning, we weren't sure if we were going to make it to the con at all, so I didn't have time.



I have spent about 18 hours on the vest and hat and another 5 searching thrift stores for the materials. I know it's not super-accurate, but the little guy was a hit with the ladies and even made it into our local paper.





I hope to have it totally done at Halloween. Also, Protip: babies hate hats.

Just kidding, not all of them are terrible. Actually, overall, fighting games are probably one of my favorite genres to jump in out of every once in awhile. I love the thrill of learning a new system and playing with new characters and just immersing myself in battle with another person (or really good CPU in a pinch). I'm thrilled with the glut of recent entries into the genre that have attracted many old and new fans into the hardcore fighting arena.

The one problem I have with all of these new releases is that almost all of these games are sequels or spiritual successors to previous fighting games. Very few of them display a high level of experimental creativity in their character design or movesets, and though I'm grateful for a well-crafted martial arts experience, I miss the zany and wacky side that fighters used to display.

It all started when someone said to himself, "You know what would be awesome? We should get all of the Marvel Super Heroes together and let them fight each other." That stray thought spawned a whole slew of great games that went on to include "serious" fighters from the Street Fighter series and made fighting over-the-top, excessive, brash, and...well, awesome.



Then someone at Nintendo had the same idea with classic Nintendo mascots. The first Super Smash Bros. is still one of my favorite N64 games, and the sequels have attained an almost zen-like balance of depth and casual entry. The game offers you the option to have an intense one-on-one battle between an overweight plumber and a dinosaur with a saddle on his back.

I understand that serious fighting games have a place, and I would be hypocritical if I was seriously denouncing them all. Just as Killzone, Call of Duty, and Halo have a place in the gaming hierarchy, so do KOF, Street Fighter, and newcomers like Blazblue. I am simply calling for more companies to take risks and ignore the inhibition to just be wacky and crazy. My favorite fighting memories have come from "casual" fighting games, and I hope that someone will take a break from Generic FPS 3 or Shovelware Minigames 7 to make something really special.

It has been 9 years since MvC2 came out, and nothing has stepped in to fill that silly, superheroey void. For shame gaming industry. For shame.