Author: John Legendoffzelda In 1991, a definitive year of video game history in many different respects, the young programmer Sid Meier created his masterwork: an epic world-history tableau that’s become one of the all-time important achievements of PC gaming. It was called Civilization, and Meier put his name in the…
Author: John Legendoffzelda There’s a distinctive, almost iconic, visual style to the Steven Spielberg-produced 1994 film of The Flintstones. It’s one that Ocean badly fumbled when they translated the movie to the Super Nintendo. While the movie may have been a dumb comedy, it also had a grand production design…
Author: John Legendoffzelda The one interesting part of Ocean’s leaden adaptation of RoboCop 3 is that their game precedes the film by an entire year. Not many licensed games have ever accidentally spoiled the entirety of their sources before people got to see the source. But then, there wasn’t any…
Author: John Legendoffzelda The first review of a Super Nintendo game I ever wrote was my hard pan of Super Star Wars. And looking back I see my review was a little vague about what I found so disappointing. You see, the issue is not about how “the only good…
Author: John Legendoffzelda Hook fails to prove that the world needs a continuation of the Peter Pan story. Or at least one that presents a scenario where Peter has grown into an adult and forgotten his roots. In Steven Spielberg’s film, Peter is now a workaholic father who has his…
Author: John Legendoffzelda When Toy Story debuted in 1995, it set an important precedent. It exclusively used computer-generated imagery to tell a remarkable and inventive story. The movie expanded the possibilities of how animation could be presented – and even how movies could be made. But with Donkey Kong Country…
Author: John Legendoffzelda By the time of Whizz, Titus and Flair Software’s isometric puzzle-platformer about a rabbit in a magician’s dapper tux, the gaming community had already entered the dregs of the Super Nintendo days. The Nintendo 64 and its intense three-dimensional capabilities had been on the market for a…
Author: John Legendoffzelda Shiny Entertainment’s Earthworm Jim is the sort of game where environmental hazards will mix so well with the backgrounds that they can take players almost entirely by surprise. And a level’s twisty, bizarre design can confuse them further. Other times a smirking crow or a rabid, frantic…
Author: John Legendoffzelda Early in the Game Grumps’ playthrough of Kirby Super Star, an elated JonTron observes, “This Kirby is, like, the Kirby that everybody knows”. He justifiably loves the game, certainly one of Kirby’s high points in his series, but there’s some hidden significance in this. It’s a telling…
Author: John Legendoffzelda The big grudge held against advergames has been about compromising the integrity of a video game by introducing a specific consumer product to its concept, although having a game serve as a commercial isn’t bad in of itself. What’s key about this negative reaction is that the…