No Lives Left

The newest installment of the Super Smash Brothers 3DS series has been in stores for about a month now. The Wii U version will be out around November 21st. I've rode the hype train ever since I saw the first trailer . The introduction of Megaman was just icing on the cake. The Smash series is probably my favorite franchise in the history of gaming. I think it has to do with having so many beloved franchise characters duking it out in four player party action that makes it so addictive.  In order to honor the new game coming out, I was thinking of doing a retrospective of the older versions of the series. I've spent quite a bit of time with each installment of the series. So let's not waste too much time and get to the action! Super Smash Brothers 64 (1999) Super Smash Brothers 64 was the beginning of the epic franchise. Most people didn't really see it coming though. In 1999, the company, Hal Laboratory, spearheaded the production of the Nintendo Fra...

The indie scene has received a lot of my attention lately. Despite the advent of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Wii U, I've been more inclined to research projects of lesser known developers. I used to scan Kickstarter for new projects and checked the Humble Indie Bundles to see if there were any gems from the last few months that I had forgotten. But lately, I've found that I lack the drive to follow them anymore. My complaint is that the indie scene has gotten quite crowded. It seems that so many developer try very hard to push nostalgia as the main selling point instead of trying to offer something innovative and new. The indie scene has created a sense of déjà vu ; every game I play seems to borrow from another game recently released in the past.  Since the developers are small teams and also very young, they try to emulate the thing about what made games great to them when they were a kid. Rather than having other 12-year olds flock to their games, they target ...

So this is going on right now:  http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon It's an interesting concept. Set up Pokemon so that people in the chat window can input commands to control the character one step at a time. Based off the FAQ, TwitchPlaysPokemon is: "TwitchPlaysPokemon is a social experiment, it is a stream of the Gameboy version of Pokemon Red (151 romhack) running on an emulator. An IRC [internet relay chat] bot translates buttons said in chat into keypresses (simulated in software, no fancy typist robots)." For example, if someone wanted the character to move down, they would type "down" and the character would go down one step. Now it seems simple, but when you get thousands upon thousands of people inputting commands at once, it can get hectic. Which you can see in the livestream right now (if it's still up by the time of this posting.) So why does this interest me so much? Well, it's an experiment that involves a video game I loved so m...