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CultureTotal RecallThere Has Never Been A Good Akira Game
It’s one of the defining works of modern popular culture, and features plenty of stylised, graphic action. So why is it nobody has ever made a good game out of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira? It’s not for want of trying, that’s for sure. There have been three (well, maybe five, but we’ll get to that later)…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 6, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallSnatcher, Hideo Kojima’s Adventure Masterpiece
Most people know, and love, Japanese developer Hideo Kojima for the Metal Gear series, a franchise he created all the way back in 1987. For me, though, that’s a convoluted mess of a property that’s become more unwieldy and pointlessly self-referential with each passing entry. If you feel the same and would like to see…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 5, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
Let’s Go Shopping For Video Games! (In the 1980’s and 1990’s)
Ah, paper catalogues. They still make them, but they’re not what they used to be. What are now glossy prints highlighting only a select few items from a store used to be informational tomes, full of almost everything you could ever want. And we all wanted video games, right? These catalogues, mostly from US retailer…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 2, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallWhat Makes the Mother Series so Great?
They may not be chart-toppers – indeed, the third game has never even been officially released in the West – but the Mother/Earthbound series of role-playing games are some of the most revered and cherished of all Nintendo games (at least among certain cliques). There’s a very good reason why this is. And it has…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 1, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallRemembering The House That Civilization Built
I don’t tend to truly miss many video game studios. Businesses come and go, their developers move on, make new stuff, the world keeps spinning. But on a weekly basis I find myself missing Microprose, who gave us Civilization. And X-Com. And Master of Orion. And Railroad Tycoon. And Master of Magic. And Falcon 4.0.…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 31, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
There Were Worse Mario Cartoons Than the American One
It has a certain nostalgic charm, yeah, but lets face it, the American Super Mario Bros. cartoons were pretty terrible. Poorly animated, poorly written, poorly voiced. Next to the Japanese Mario cartoon, though, the American version looks like it was made by Disney. Premièring around the same time as America’s The Super Mario Bros. Super…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 30, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallHip Tanaka Is A Nintendo Legend
He may not sit in the limelight like some of the company’s other legendary names like Miyamoto, Yokoi or Iwata, but make no mistake: Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka is one of the most important men to have ever worked at Nintendo. Especially if you like music. Or Pokémon! Born in December 1957, Tanaka is a lifelong…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 29, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
When Pokémon Got a Little Too Nazi Germany
Pokémon. It’s a card (and video) game for kids. You capture monsters, they faint a lot, it’s all good, clean, harmless fun. Right? Well, mostly. Except for a few occasions where the series has been in trouble in the West for allegedly using Nazi imagery. Since the franchise debuted in the 1990s, there have been…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 26, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Strange, Sad Case of the North American Super Nintendo
This week is the, believe it or not, 20th anniversary of the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. It’s a cause for celebration, of course, but also makes me wonder why Nintendo decided to bless America with its own “unique” version of the console. When Nintendo released the Famicom in Japan…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 25, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallWhat do Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings Have In Common?
Rockstar North is a video game developer known and respected the world over as the creators and continued custodians of the core Grand Theft Auto series. That’s earned it a reputation as a specialist in the field of mature, cinematic video games. Games where drugs are dealt, prostitutes killed and people say fuck with a…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 12, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallThe Secret of the Secret Nintendo Song
When you talk about music in Nintendo games, the first person that pops into most people’s minds is the work of legendary composer Koji Kondo, the man behind the iconic scores for games like Zelda and Mario. We’re not talking about Koji Kondo today. Instead, we’re going to talk about Kazumi Totaka, who in addition…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 11, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallDon’t Blame Grand Theft Auto for the London Riots
So, a London cop says something about Grand Theft Auto and suddenly a British newspaper sees fit to blame the series for the riots that have plagued the English city all week long. Idiots. They’re blaming the wrong Rockstar game! If the unnamed London police officer who made the statement, or anyone at the London…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 10, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
When Sega Wanted to Take Over the World (and Failed Miserably)
The year was 1997. And Sega, the Dreamcast still a twinkle in Segata Sanshiro’s eye, was in a bullish mood. While its rivals were focusing their efforts on winning the video game war, Sega was looking beyond It didn’t have Nintendo or Sony in its sights. It had the Walt Disney Company. Sega wanted to…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 9, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallHappy 25th Birthday, Metroid!
In 1986, a number of Nintendo’s biggest franchises made their debut on the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System. Zelda was one, and now this month, we celebrate another: Metroid Both have something in common, something that makes them stand out among other company icons like Mario or Donkey Kong, and that something is a more “hardcore” slant.…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 8, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallThe Weird & Wonderful World of Australian Video Game Commercials
Before the internet put the entire planet on the same page, there were certain nations on Earth that were a little…slower than others. Places where the latest trends would turn up late, or turn up filtered through a few different sets of hands. Australia was one of those places. Owing to our extreme isolation, particularly…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 5, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallMark Wahlberg, Not Even You Could Save the Sega Mega CD
Almost every gaming platform ever released has its oddball titles. The ones that weren’t quite games, the ones that weren’t quite there. For Sega’s Mega CD add-on in the early 1990’s, that oddball was the Make My Video series. Spanning three titles, all of them released in 1992 (the year the ill-fated CD expansion for…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 4, 2011 -
CultureTotal Recall
This Is the Coolest Stuff Nintendo Has Ever Made
You can say a lot of nice things about Nintendo games. Nintendo hardware, too. Wildly successful, iconic and timeless are just three of them. But how often can you say something Nintendo made was genuinely cool? Not very often. Unless you go back to the 1960’s, to a time before Nintendo was making video games.…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 3, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallHorror Comes In Many Forms (Including Tiny Ellipsoid Cocks)
There was a PC game released in 1994 called Escstatica. It’s notable for two things: it was scary, but it was also a technological marvel. It doesn’t matter that the technology in question never really went anywhere. It was cool for the time, and this feature is all about looking back in time! Ecstatica was…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 2, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallWhen Disgustingly Sexual Art & Adventure Games Came Together
Despite having worked on everything from furniture design to rock concert props (and even directing his own films), Swiss artist H.R. Giger is best known for two things: his concept work for Ridley Scott’s Alien, and his overtly sexual paintings. But today, we don’t care about those. Today, we care about the only two video…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 1, 2011 -
CultureTotal RecallRemembering the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of MS-DOS
If you think messing around with the user-interface of a modern console, or even a modern iteration of Windows is hard, spare a thought for anyone involved in PC gaming during the 1980s and early 90s. Those hardy pioneers didn’t need icons, or dashboards. They used letters, and arcane commands, which were the bread and…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 28, 2011