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  Every Cover Ever Made for the Best Games Magazine Around

  Call them snooty if you must, but I think Edge magazine has consistently been the most mature, well-written and well-respected video game magazine on the planet for nearly twenty years. While competitors have come and gone either pandering to the lowest common denominator or selling their pages as glorified advertising space, Edge has always been…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
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  You Can Buy the Original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Rulebooks (Again)

  You all owe Gary Gygax more than you can possibly imagine. The creator of Dungeons & Dragons, who passed away in 2008, had a big impact on tabletop gaming, of course, but those concepts he created for paper and dice are still widely used in video games today, especially RPGs. So this commemorative offering from…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
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  CultureTotal Recall

  EA’s Best Game of the 1990s Also Had the Worst Acting

  People bug EA all the time to bring back vintage old series like Wing Commander, Road Rash and Jungle Strike. All great games, and all worthy of t least a token attempt at mmodernisation. But there’s one game that, for whatever reason, is always left out. Forgotten. And that’s EA’s Crusader series. The first game…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
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  CultureTotal Recall

  The Awkward Charms of a 1984 TV Show About PC Gaming

  This is an episode from Computer Chronicles, a dusty old TV show about…computers. This one is all about games, and features appearances from guys like Atari legend Chris Crawford, EA founder Trip Hawkins and even a guy from Activision. What’s great is that, being a show that’s normally about computers anyway, it doesn’t have the…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
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  M. Bison Wants to Take Over the (Art) World

  There’s an art show opening next Friday in LA called Combo Attack. It’s a celebration of all things Street Fighter, and will include the work of over fifty artists. One of them is Aled Lewis, whose series of Street Fighter pixel art images are just wonderful. You can see them below, on the internet, or…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
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  A Wonderful Stop-Motion Video About a Trip to This Year’s Comic-Con

  Reader Rob Gilpin went to the San Diego Comic-Con this year, and decided to document his trip a little differently. Instead of writing a blog, or spamming his Instagram account with pictures of convention food, he took 825 photos and cut them into one amazing stop-motion video.

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
• Culture

  Fantasy Art so Beautiful it Should be Painted on a Crumbling Old Church

  Michael C. Hayes is a fantasy illustrator whose work may be familiar to fans of Magic: The Gathering. He’s also worked with Sony Online Entertainment on the Legends of Norrath franchise. Hayes’ work is, well, beautiful. Unlike most other artists we feature here on Fine Art, who specialise in dark environment pieces, basic character art…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 27, 2012
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  GameStop Wants to Sell Second-Hand Digital Games

  Seems the world’s largest specialist games retailer is keen on the market for “used” digital downloads. Not in a big way, at least not at first, but they’re definitely picking at the edges of the concept. I don’t know about you, but I prefer my downloads new. When the corners of my digital manual are…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 26, 2012
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  Holy Crap, These Guys Finished Portal in Eight Minutes

  You’re about to see what happens when a team of “speed-runners” knows enough about the progress and timing of a game that they can finish something that normally takes hours in just over eight minutes. The run, with video slightly edited for your viewing pleasure, is above, while this online document is full of notes…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 26, 2012
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  Nintendo Puts a DS Through Mechanical Hell to Make Sure it Works

  Despite what some may think, Nintendo doesn’t just make a product, put it on the market and hope everything works. The company has a reputation for making stuff that doesn’t break easily, and these images show how that reputation is maintained. They give a rare glimpse behind the curtain at Nintendo, showing the various stress…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 26, 2012
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  Uncategorized

  Is That A Tiger In Your Boat Or Are You Just Glad To See Me

  I had mixed feelings when I heard that they were making a film adaptation of Yann Martel lovely little book Life of Pi. I remembered reading that book right when I first moved to San Francisco in 2003—there was a period of time when 50% of the people on the bus were either reading it…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  Tera‘s Next Exciting Update Reminds Me I Should Probably Log Into Tera or Something

  The Argon Queen update for En Masse Entertainment’s action-packed massively multiplayer online role-playing game Tera drops next month in North America, bringing with it player-versus-player battlegrounds, a 10-man raid, new skills and a nagging reminder that I should probably log into the game sometime this month. It’s not you, Tera; it’s me. I still love…

  By Mike Fahey Published July 26, 2012
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  What Happens When You Take One Letter Out of a Game’s Name?

  The goal was simple. Take a video game’s name and remove one letter. See what happens. What resulted this evening on Twitter was a collection of games that might make you think, might make you laugh, but most likely will just make you think, hey, I would actually play that. And then get you thinking…

  By Luke Plunkett Published July 26, 2012
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  The Galvanizing Glory Of The Baldur’s Gate Theme Music

  Just listen to it. Listen to that puppy. That groove in five, that sinister melody. The way it pushes you, onward. Onward to the character creation screen! In just a couple short months, we’ll get to play the enhanced edition of Baldur’s Gate. That’s extra good news for me, because I played more Baldur’s Gate…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  Blonde Twins Playing A Metallica Cover On Harps While Standing In The Desert

  Sometimes the headline does all the talking. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem.

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  Dead Space Series Composer Will Return For Dead Space 3

  In light of the news that Hitman and Assassin’s Creed composer Jesper Kyd is leaving both series, it’s good to hear confirmation that Dead Space composer Jason Graves will be back for the third game. Graves’ creepy strings and dirge-like orchestrations lend a huge amount of atmosphere to Visceral’s first two outer-space creepshows. Good news!

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  Geeky Musicians Unite For The Humble Indie Music Bundle

  We’ve had humble indie game bundles, and humble indie game soundtrack bundles… so I guess it only makes sense that we’d get a Humble Indie Music bundle by people who people who like games might like. That was a mouthful. Anyway! Now, you can pay what you want for six albums by OK Go, They…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  A Visual Instrument That Turns Colors Into Music

  Music may be something that you hear, but it does have a visual element. That visual aspect is different for everyone—I see melodies and harmonies as shapes, with a chord laid out as a fragment of its parent-scale. It’s asily moved around and re-arranged, but it’s always a part of a larger thing. Other people…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  The Time MTV Turned Video Games Into Music Videos

  MTV has always been at least a bit more in touch with the video game scene than most major cable TV stations. I mean heck, our EIC Stephen wrote for their video gaming site for a time! One of the most enjoyable/bizarre things the network ever did was Video Mods, an EA-sponsored series devoted to…

  By Kirk Hamilton Published July 26, 2012
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  Planet Crashers Takes on Mario and Wario in This Week’s Nintendo Download

  Which would you rather have, a grungy old black-and-white Wario game, a dollar off a classic Mario game, or a colorful action role-playing game from the creators of Dementium: The Ward? I have no definite answer. I just like asking long form questions. I will say, at least, that were I completely unfamiliar with all…

  By Mike Fahey Published July 26, 2012