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CultureTotal RecallA Brief Look At Nintendo’s Obsession With Putting Handheld Gaming On Your TV
By all accounts, the Nintendo Switch looks like the sort of portable-console hybrid that many were speculating about ever since initial rumors about the new hardware first started to circulate. It’s weird to think of Nintendo moving forward without releasing a new, strictly stationary console. For many of us, the first time we ever played…
By Ethan Gach Published October 23, 2016 -
CultureTotal RecallFirst Look At The Cancelled Metallica Video Game In Action
Reminder: over a decade ago there was a proper Metallica video game in development. It never got very far—all we ever saw was a short trailer and some excellent concept art—but recently some footage of the game in action has been uncovered. PtoPOnline managed to get hold of a very early build of the game…
By Luke Plunkett Published October 16, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Inside A Nintendo Storage Room, Where They Keep Their Old Stuff
Nintendo Japan have today given fans a brief glimpse at what must be one of the most sought-after areas of the entire company: one of their storage rooms, where old consoles and peripherals are kept. Part of a series of posts celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of The Legend of Zelda in 1986,…
By Luke Plunkett Published October 12, 2016 -
CultureTotal RecallI Love You, Resetti, Nintendo’s Most Helpful Asshole
Of all the weird and wonderful characters in Nintendo’s pantheon of talking animals/plumbers/fungi, I think I like Animal Crossing’s Resetti the best. Even if he is a big ol’ meanie. If you haven’t played the series, Resetti is a mole that you sometimes encounter. Not in your regular daily activities of walking around, fishing and…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 28, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Some Cool Stories About The Making Of Super Mario 64
Mario 64 is one of the best games of all time. You probably know that, but have you ever wondered about the specifics of why that is? Here, let the game’s creators explain to you that it’s stuff like the momentum of Mario’s movement, the placement of the camera and the feel of Mario’s jumps.…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 22, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall1989 Sega Game Was A Racing Monstrosity
Let’s all go back in time. Before Sonic Boom, before the Dreamcast, before the Saturn. To a time when Sega was awesome, and as famous for their killer arcade games as their console efforts. This piece originally appeared 9/3/15. Specifically, we’re going to 1989, and the release of Sega Super Circuit, a game that you…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 20, 2016 -
CultureTotal RecallThat Time Space Ghost Gave Peter Molyneux Shit At E3
Thanks to Frank Cifaldi for pointing this out: there’s an archive online of a series of videos made for Gametap (ask your parents), in which Adult Swim’s Space Ghost interviews a bunch of people at E3, like Peter Molyneux, Bethesda’s Todd Howard and Peter Moore. Howard’s “we make power fantasies for adolescent males” might be…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 19, 2016 -
CultureTotal RecallThe One Star Trek Game Every Star Trek Fan Should Play
On September 8, Star Trek turned 45 years old. Happy Birthday, Star Trek! Even though I hate you and your cheap-ass sets and lame vision of the future and hammy plots and silly aliens and… Originally published 9/9/2011. Ahem. Anyway. THAT SAID, even I can find room to love a Star Trek game. Not like…
By Luke Plunkett Published September 8, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Reason Behind Street Fighter‘s Iconic Button Layout
This week twenty-nine years ago, the first Street Fighter was released in arcades. There was Ken, Ryu, and some very different buttons. As pointed out on Event Hubs, the first cabinets had giant pressure-sensitive pads that you were supposed to POUND WITH YOUR FIST. Which is nuts. Problems arose from players punching the buttons, such…
By Brian Ashcraft Published August 31, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Dig Through The Archives Of A Closed Developer
Infocom, founded in 1979, were one of the great studios of the early days of PC gaming, responsible for classics like the Zork series. They may be long gone (Infocom were shut down in 1989), but their history lives on in this incredible collection of old documents This piece originally appeared 11/23/15. Uploaded to Archive.org…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 29, 2016 -
CultureTotal RecallThe Nintendo Console From The 80s Made For Recording Gameplay Footage
These days, if you want to record direct video footage of a video game, all you need to do is press a button. But back in the 1980s, this was a complex and expensive process! This piece originally appeared 10/28/15. Magazines and video producers often needed custom, elaborate equipment to get images of games, which…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 25, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
How Sega Made Pixel Art In The 80s & 90s
In a 21st century world of free software, powerful computers, tablets and mice, making pixel art is fairly easy! In the 1980s, though, your favourite games had to be made on expensive and highly specialised equipment. Video Games Densetsu have gone through some old Japanese magazines and put together a collection of interviews and images…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 24, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Nintendo Once Published A Game Featuring Nazis, Baby Jesus And The KKK
In 1991, Nintendo published an adventure game (developed by Pax Softnica) in Japan for the Famicom Disk System called Time Twist. It is not the kind of game Nintendo would publish in 2016. Hardcore Gaming played through it the other day, and say “it seems like they took a look at Nintendo of America’s censorship…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 19, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Mario vs The Legions Of Hell
In the US, Nintendo Power magazine had a monthly comic called Howard & Nester. It was, with one exception, totally kid-friendly. Cotton candy and rainbows. In Germany, however, they had their own comics in the official magazine Club Nintendo One comic in particular – called Die Nacht des Grauens (The Night of Horror), from 1996…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 4, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Nintendo Has Tried Detachable Controllers Before (In 1984)
There’s a reportfrom Eurogamer today that the Nintendo NX will be a handheld featuring “detachable” controllers. It’s a neat idea, but it’s also one that Nintendo have a bit of experience with. When I was a little kid, I would always bug my parents for a video game console like a Master System or NES,…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 26, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
The Slow Disappearance Of The Video Game Manual
Collector F. M. da Costa has an amazing Flickr page where he opens up his games, showing everything that came in the box. It’s very pretty just to look at, but it’s also a timelapse, showing the slow and steady decline in the number of pieces of paper that shipped alongside a video game. This…
By Luke Plunkett Published July 18, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Original Xbox Controller Prototypes Look Like Dreamcast Tears
Seamus Blackley, one of the key people involved in the creation of the original Xbox, has shared some concept images for Microsoft’s debut control pad, which date all the way back in November 1999 (the Xbox wouldn’t launch until 2001). Obviously the final design looked remarkably different; the “Duke” controller (below, left) was a massive,…
By Luke Plunkett Published June 29, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Pinball Was Once Illegal
Pinball. The great American (mechanical) pastime. It’s about as innocent as gaming gets, especially compared to the blood, drugs and sex you find in video games. Yet bizarrely, for decades, pinball was actually declared illegal in some of America’s biggest cities, including New York and Los Angeles. This piece originally appeared 4/4/12. It had nothing…
By Luke Plunkett Published March 25, 2016 -
CultureTotal Recall
Read Diablo’s Original Pitch Document
This is how history was made. David Brevik was one of the co-founders of Blizzard North. He was there are the very beginning of the Diablo series, and as part of a GDC talk he made last week has uploaded a copy of the classic game’s original pitch document. It’s not long (at least by…
By Luke Plunkett Published March 20, 2016
