It was several years ago when I came across the website of a bitter, former player of Asheron’s Call 2. He was condemning a patch which he swore ruined its solid PvP system and any further reason to play. Betrayed by the game that he’d invested so much effort in, but still devoted to the genre and potential of MMORPGS, he had no choice but to migrate to any number of other games, one of which was a promising title on the horizon called World of Warcraft.

Searching Google now, I can’t find that old site, but there are still vestigial diaries about Asheron’s Call 2, written by scorned ex-players who clearly felt cheated out of something. And shouldn’t they?

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Making small games for promotional material is pretty common these days: Simple Flash games seem to accompany almost every major movie whose budget allows it. Being that Flash games are an easy and cheap means for engaging viral marketing, they’re a practical part of the promotion engines of many upcoming releases. Obviously, elementary Flash games won’t have much appeal for hardcore gamers, especially since they’re games promoting another game. But would something with more substance do the trick?

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In 1982, Activision programmer David Crane made a masterpiece known as Pitfall, a simple sidescrolling adventure game with the object of collecting all the treasure within a time limit(twenty minutes). The enemies were mostly static, except for a menacing white scorpion which lurked in the underground caves and followed ‘Harry’s every move whether he was above or below ground(Psychic scorpions, anybody?). The game was very popular and raised the bar for video games of the future. Two most notable games which readily used and expanded upon elements from Pitfall are Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog. A sequel to Pitfall would introduce several other features, some of them good, some bad, and at least one that would leave you bald from sheer aggravation.

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With the market for video games growing, Atari decided to capitalize on a growing demographic of gamers: young children. Unfortunately, these games did not always give the buyers their money’s worth. In this article, two childrens’ games, Strawberry Shortcake and Big Bird’s Egg Catch, will be compared for design and replayability.

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The newest — yet, the oldest — psychological need in video games, as stated by the PENS model, is relatedness. All three needs (competence, autonomy, and relatedness) arguably had a place in all games, long before we were playing Pac-man or Asteroids.

Multiplayer wasn’t always a top priority in game design. We should thank arcades (which are now a dying tradition) for pioneering the idea of playing a game not by yourself, but with some company.

In a way, it’s strange to think that despite years of arcade get-togethers, multiplayer didn’t truly thrive until it could be done in the convenience of our own homes…alone. We interact together virtually, never knowing the faces of our teammates and opponents.

So, through services like Xbox Live, The Playstation Network, Wii’s online services, and Kaillera, we have the easiest ways to meet and play, and less socialization than when we hovered around the machines at the arcades. Arcade or not, anybody who’s played a game with friends in the same room can attest to one thing: internet multiplayer lacks a little something that no online service will ever be able to simulate.

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First a brief history of the Atari 2600 and early games:

In the late 1970’s, home video game systems were beginning to flood the market, and one company, Atari, capitalized on it by taking games to the next level: removable cartridges. This enabled the buyer to purchase a console and games separately, instead of buying several bulky consoles which often had at the most five or six preloaded games. The old machines, notably Video Pinball and the great, great granddaddy Pong, made way for a sleeker, more compact system, and cartridges which held around three to maybe six or seven kilobytes of information. The resolution improved as well, as the simple squares of the paddles, walls, and balls were replaced by sprites made by multiple pixels, forming space ships, bugs, ghosts, frogs, robots, men, and other types of characters. This incarnation was dubbed the Atari 2600, an innovation when video games were still in their infancy.

Now for the review.

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We, the Players is about learning from the people who do more with games than play them. In our first interview of hopefully many more, we talk with esteemed modder and map-maker WadaHolic about Doom, his history of mods, and his take on console gaming.

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