Author: J.A. Laraque

Celebrity gamers

Gamer Profile: Jay Mohr

I loved Donkey Kong Jr. and spent so many rolls of quarters on it. There was also Dig Dug at my local Ihop and I wore that out too. I wasn’t particularly good at Dig Dug but I loved digging and digging and planning on how the rocks would fall and blowing dudes up with my air pump. Donkey Kong Jr. I loved because it had it all for the time. great graphics. Jumping, swinging, timing and a mission to save someone.

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Company RepresentativesGamer Profiles

Gamer Profile: Evan Hahn

Windforge is a steampunk building block RPG, with fully buildable airships. It’s kind of like a mix of Contra and Minecraft with flying airships. It’s a game that embraces freedom, creativity, and chaotic emergent action. There a million things to do in Windforge, even pretty outrageous things like mining whales for meat, or even turning them into airships.

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Notables Gamers

Profiled: Daryl Rodriguez & Jeanette Garcia

World 1-1 is the first in a documentary series on the history of video games. This chapter is about the early years including Atari and how they helped to create a new industry. It focuses on the business deals, the personalities of the pioneers, and the creations of the engineers. This documentary will be a combination of interviews, archival footage, and reflection that retells the story to a new generation that may not know the roots of their favorite hobby

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Company RepresentativesGamer Profiles

Gamer Profile: The Unallied

More than all other games, the original Pokemon was a game that hides its complex mechanics under a dead-simple interface. I like many Nintendo games for this reason, but I’m still impressed with how well they distilled the RPG formula into a one-on-one battle with just 4 actions for each side. The game gets much more complex simply by giving you many choices – you can customize your 6-Pokemon team, choosing them from 150 types, and choose the best 4 moves for each one. This kind of “layered complexity” is something I try to think about when designing games, and Pokemon was how I learned it.

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Celebrity gamers

Gamer Profile: Ryan Culver

Now one of my most memorable video game experiences was playing the original NES at my friend’s house as a kid and working every night to beat Super Mario Bros. It was by far the most popular and talked about game at that time and the big challenge then was to beat that dragon. We had gotten there a couple times before but got killed, so every time you made it to the last part, you’d get nervous, like something real was actually on the line.

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Pro Gamers

Amrack’s Gamer Profile

So my name originated from my youth (like most people). To me a name is like a connection to the past that you can never experience again; it’s a memory of what I once was. When I was little (~8 years old) I use to write crazy RPG adventure books. I used to stay up talking to my brother (because I bunked with him) and role played stories with him so I had more content to write in my chapter books. Though my characters changed from story to story their names remained the same. Names like “Drakis”, “Amrak” (yes, it’s misspelled for a reason), and “Larkins”, to name a few. These were my online names that I gravitated to choose when playing games with my brother.

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The Music Hall

Streets of Rage 2 OST

So after reading through Nick’s article on Streets of Rage 2, I really got all nostalgic and went searching for my OST from the game. I remember this and Sonic 2 were the two games I played constantly on the Sega Genesis. Everything about this game is well done, but I specially love the music and wanted to share it with the OG Nation.

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PlayStation

Weird Games: Alive

As stated the graphics are not that great. Obviously it is FMV, but the added animation is not well done. You can really see this in the car crash and explosions scenes. It is pretty bad. You can also tell in the gun shots that they use squibs, but all this goes along with the bad acting and overdone death scenes. If there is something I would say this game is known for it is the death scenes, especially the knifing scenes and the abrupt Game Over screen with what sounds like a cheap version of the Law and Order gong.

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Celebrity gamers

Gamer Profile: Cambria Edwards

I didn’t have gaming consoles growing up, but my cousins did and I was over there all the time. Donkey Kong was one of the first games I ever played and I fell in love. Whenever a new console came out, of course my cousins had it and monopolized it. So I would go in the other room and play my Donkey Kong on the Nintendo. Even in the early 2000’s I would always ask to play until they finally got rid of their system. I was a bit heartbroken and it still remains one of my favorite games to this day.

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Celebrity gamers

Gamer Profile: Ashly Burch

I really like games that are deceptively complex and that don’t hold your hand at all. One of my favorite modern games is Spelunky, as a point of reference. Harvest Moon is actually incredibly nuanced and difficult (I failed miserably the first time I played it), but — potentially unlike Spelunky — it’s an absolute joy to play no matter how well or poorly you’re doing. It does an awesome job of creating a simplistic but deep world that feels real and is filled with secrets and possibilities that aren’t apparent on the surface. Also, I think competing in festivals and courting a potential wife is empirically fun no matter who you are.

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Obsolete Network

The Obsolete Gamer Show #36

This was a great interview. William started out in a band and then made his way to screen acting and then voice acting working on L.A. Noir. He has worked on a number of screen projects and was even a body double for Nic Cage. Not only is he a gamer, but he even invented a drinking game for the Atari 2600 classic game Warlords.

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Company RepresentativesGamer Profiles

Dominique Vial: Domsware

We were on our final “lycée” studies and we needed to prepare THE french exam named “baccalauréat”. It’s very important to make a big score to this exam because it’s the passcard to university and High Schools. Anyway. We spend a lot of time playing DM instead of working our final exams. Locked on my friend’s bedroom, our parents believed we were working on our studies! Ah ah ah! It was a really immersive and addictive game. And, for the story purpose, a friend of my elder brother was working on some computer science laboratory on some kind of “network”. He was helping us by providing us printed listings containing the precious answers to hard DM’s issues: these was from this mysterious “network”. Later and later I found the name of this guy on a W3C document: I then understood he was one of the first working on the internet and that was the mysterious network. He was a pioneer while we were exploring dungeons !

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Company RepresentativesGamer Profiles

Kevin Cerdà: BeautiFun Games

This isn’t a really known game. However, I believe that it was really innovative at the moment it appeared. It was made by Mythos games, with Julian Gollop, creator of X-COM. In Magic & Mayhem you really felt like a wizard, combining spells in many clever ways (such as levitating and enemy and turning it into stone to smash it against the ground, breaking it into pieces). It was like a strategy game with the full base inside one single character that was able to move around and create minions out of nothing without any cooldown at all. Really surprising, fresh and dynamic. A source of inspiration.

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Blog

Droidscape: Basilica

The year is 4057, and a power-hungry Ecclesiarchy has plunged humanity into a new Dark Ages. One of few remaining Chronomancers dedicated to preserving the secrets of time-travel has been taken hostage on the gargantuan Basilica space station, and if he dies, an already dark world will get a lot darker. Only a small, unarmed droid named Bishop 7 can save him—and only with your help.

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Nintendo DS

Oracle of Seasons

Now the zones in the game are pretty interesting. Remember going to the dark world in Link to the Past, well, while the changes are not that drastic there are four different versions of every screen you are on when in the outside world. This is because of the four seasons. As I said, the seasons changing can help you get somewhere you could not normally. For instance, a lake in the summer is frozen so you can walk over it in the winter.

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Blog

SteelSeries & Valve Introduce The Siberia v2 Dota 2 Edition Headset

SteelSeries, the worldwide leader in professional grade gaming peripherals along with Valve, developer of Dota 2 and creator of The International Tournament, today announced the Siberia v2 Illuminated Gaming Headset Dota®2 Special Edition which features an exclusive in-game item, Scythe of Vyse for Nature’s Prophet. In addition to the new headset, SteelSeries will also roll out two new SteelSeries QcK+ mousepads featuring character artwork from the game.

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