YouTube user 331Erock is best known for his epic metal covers of today’s biggest hits and famous movie music. But the one thing he might do better than those is his metal covers of classic video game music. He’s done Tetris, Metal Gear Solid, Skyrim, Legend of Zelda and many, many more. May favourite cover, by a wide margin, is this Super Mario Brothers cover which includes all of the major themes from the game.
Yearly Archives: 2013
The Cave Review: A Domain of Evil It Is. In You Must Go.
The second-to-last week of January had a game I was very excited about. Strike Suit Zero was a gorgeous looking space sim. Having grown up on space sims, I was looking forward to a great space flight combat game. Then I actually started flying the titular Strike Suit ship and found myself quickly underwhelmed by twitchy controls and combat mechanics that didn’t work as advertised in the tutorial which resulted in a massive and frustrating difficulty spike.
Fortunately, there was a second big indie game release that week. Double Fine Productions released their much-anticipated The Cave. The developer is best known for their work on Psychonauts and they got a hand from popular games director Ron Gilbert whose resume includes the cult-hit Monkey Island series. Better than the team behind it was trailers promising puzzles, stories and dark humour. In other words, it ticked off most of the items on my checklist of things I like in games.
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Who Won the Super Bowl on Twitter? (Infographic)
So you spend three to four million dollars to get all of 30 seconds of ad time during the Super Bowl. What exactly does that get you? Well, it used to be that you had to wait day or weeks to see any effect those ads might have. Now, all you have to do is check Twitter for a real-time evaluation of the effect that the ad had on your brand. For some brands, the social media results were great. For GoDaddy, it might be best to give up on Super Bowl ads.
To see how the various brands did on Super Bowl Sunday, we have a handy infographic. Read the rest of this entry
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Catch Up on Dead Space with This Lore Recap
Dead Space is one of my favourite game series of this generation and has now reached the inevitable third instalment. I would have thought that DS3 would have been on Earth and wrapped up the trilogy but that’s not how you milk money from a franchise long after people forgot what the original game was about.
Anyway, if you need a quick refresher of what happened in the first two games, GamesRadar put together a recap of the story of Dead Space 1 and 2. Some artistic liberties may have been taken.
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How to Build an Aperture Science Lemon Grenade
Alright, I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade – make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons!
Anyway, Portal 2 is one of my favourite games of all-time and Cave Johnson is probably the most quoteable man in gaming history. Johnson’s best quote in Portal 2 (though there are many to choose from) was the speech about lemons. Well, Jen over at EPBOT has constructed an Aperture Science (not actually) combustable lemon and even has some DIY instructions on how to build your own lemon.
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What to Expect from Mass Effect 3 Reckoning Multiplayer DLC
Between description leaks and datamining the 1.05 patch, we have some idea of what to expect when BioWare eventually launches their upcoming Reckoning DLC for Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer. Unfortunately, BioWare has gotten better at not tipping their hand in their patches. Read the rest of this entry
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Geek Links of the Week
Morale at CNET is plummeting over CBS’ edict that any product/company involved in litigation with parent company can’t get any good coverage from CNET. In other words, CBS is starting to take editorial control of CNET. [Jim Romenesko]
NVIDIA made a big splash at CES with their Project Shield handheld gaming device. Did you know, however, that the project was only about a year in the making from initial concept to being a showstopper at CES? NVIDIA detailed the development process on their blog. [NVIDIA]
MIDI turns 30 years old this week. Who didn’t love a good MIDI song growing up? [The Verge]
With the Sim City beta weekend done and dusted, the uber geeks at Mental Floss looked at the history of Maxis’ Sim franchises. [Mental Floss]
So what is the best Final Fantasy game of all-time? I’m not endorsing this list because FF8 is massively underrated and FF10-2 isn’t even on the list. (Shut up. I liked it.) I just want to remind myself to try to get finish an FF6 retro review before Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (-3) comes out. [Kotaku]
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Watch Hotline Miami Violently Murder Your Childhood
One of my favourite games of 2012 was Hotline Miami. There wasn’t much in the way of a deep plot or fantastic graphics. It was just an excuse to unleash some old school death and destruction on the forces of (relative) evil.
But what would happen if Hotline Miami crossed over to unleash chaos and death on other classic games? It might look a little like this.
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Is Sony Revealing The PlayStation 4 on February 20th? Get Giddy!
That video above says it all. Sony has decided to hold a massive PlayStation event in less than three weeks’ time. Investors and the media have been invited to this press conference.
All signs point to this being one of two things: Either Sony has purchased the exclusive rights to Crash Bandicoot and handed off development of a new trilogy to Naughty Dog or PS4! PS4! PS4!
Sorry, I’m trying not to get excited. While this generation of console hardware has performed admirably and has played host to many an excellent game, after seven years, it’s time to move on. When a cellphone (okay, smartphone) has more horsepower than the major home consoles, it’s time for an upgrade.
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How We Score Video Game Reviews
We’ve done a few video game reviews here on et geekera but we haven’t really explained what the scores mean. Sure, the scores at the end of the reviews are a reflection of the content of the rest of the review but we haven’t expressly said what constitutes a full endorsement and what is a game that must be avoided at all costs. Read the rest of this entry
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