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Tag: Videogames

  • Pure Nostalgia: The 1996 Toys ‘R’ Us Holiday Catalog

    It’s a bit glorious and immensely nostalgic to witness remnants of the past, looking at relics that once were stationed on our living room rugs – memories of which our youth embellished all products marketed towards us; it was part of childhood. A time unlike now, where controllers were funky and wired, grey cartridges were a standard, TV’s were fat and heavy, and multiplayer meant having friends physically next to you like they were human beings or something. In the 90’s we were unraveling our three foot fruit roll ups, sucking on Capri Suns, unzipping our Jansport backpacks to reveal an extra controller, a rumble pack, or a connecting cord that would allow us to trade our Pokémon.

    In 1996, we were spoiled with an embellished catalog from Toys ‘R’ Us. It looked like this:
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    Kids (and adults) all over America went to Toys ‘R’ Us lining up behind the kiosks to play Super Mario 64. Back then, you’d make your way to the video game section and see rows of little clear plastic pouches filled with yellow slips. Above the yellows lips were flaps that laminated the front cover of the video games we were interested in. On the back, there were screenshots, details and a description of the game. Sometimes, as if experiencing a lottery, you’d pick the last slip. You’d then take that slip and give it to the cashier who would staple a receipt on it after you paid $59.99 for it. Afterwards, you walked to some magical corner of Toys ‘R’ Us where a man behind a glass case would hand you your game. Inside this magical hut were stacks upon stacks of video games, all sealed and minty fresh. In fact, it looked like the whole room was built with videogames.

    This picture does the yellow slip memory no justice, but the concept is the same:

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    To this day, you still have fans everywhere discussing which console was the best back then.

    N64 was known for its star entourage of first party platformers, alongside accessories like the RumblePak which made you “feel the game”. Goldeneye 64, much like Doom before it, (l’est we forget Maze War) set a standard for the shooter genre that we see so overly manufactured and produced today.

    PlayStation had an immense library of 2,418 games that came in CD form. Many games contained full motion videos (FMVs) which provided a cinematic experience. Roleplaying games (RPGS) were groundbreaking. The PlayStation’s startup sound was that of heavenly ascension.

    Witness the beautiful, dark and ominous high production value of commercials for video games back then. It was Y2K that entertained the doomsday idea of the world ending, which only made our hearts heavier when it actually happened the following year:

    Curious of what Sony’s E3 booth looked like in 1996? The PlayStation was the first console that shipped 100 million units worldwide:

    Marketing was rather creative, there was always some sense of competition among our favorite video game companies, and seeing them in real life was really out of this world:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Eu6cJXpmME

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cIvo8flaBc

    Before the mark of the new millennium, the sky fell, and Mario attacked one of his own:

    Now hang your head in shame knowing that marketing has been geared towards horny frat boys under the motif that “there’s a soldier in all of us”:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNxh7umVOZ0

    (Pictures via BusinessInsider, CNet, ozon3d, WikiCommons)

  • Video Games Seniors Study: Can Help Brain Function

    A recent CBS news story could change your life… through video games! Researchers working out of UC San Francisco are claiming that they have developed a video game that can reverse the negative effects of aging on the brain and improve cognitive control for years to come.

    The game is called NeuroRacer, and it was tested on subjects aged mid-20’s to mid-70’s. One of the study’s findings included that multitasking skills declined significantly with age.

    The game races players along a windy, hilly track while asking them to knock down certain roadsigns with their right hand. The game’s difficulty increases if the game senses your performance increasing. To the research team’s surprise, the seniors improved so much in four weeks that they were earning higher scores than untrained 20-year-old gamers. Even more surprising was the revelation that the skills persisted without practice for at least six months!

    Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who worked with the developers to create NeuroRacer and led the UC San Francisco research team, has said that “is the most grabbing thing here: we transferred the benefit from inside the game to different cognitive abilities [but] there’s a big leap between what we did here and the real world.” Real world multitasking seems unaffected or harmed by divided attention, and in order to make this into an awesome new science, Gazzaley would remind readers that the mental tools we use to multitask must have the same scientific backing as the exercise regimens used by professional athletes.

    Earl K. Miller, a neuroscientist with MIT who was unaffiliated with the research, said that these findings “show you can take older people who aren’t functioning well and make them cognitively younger through this training… it’s a very big deal.” So much so that the journal put the phrase “Game Changer” on its cover.

    The team’s research paper was published yesterday in the publication Nature.

    [Image is the cover of the recent journal edition of Nature]

  • L.A. Noire Gag Reel Shows the Lighter Side of Detective Work

    L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s detective work simulation game, might not have set the world on fire, but it did impress critics and fans with its ambition. Instead of animating characters to match the dialogue, Rockstar used a special motion capture technique and real actors to produce more life-like reactions and facial expressions for its characters.

    Since this “Motionscan” technology records an actor’s face and dialogue in real-time, that means even the actors’ mistakes have been preserved for posterity. The Australian company behind the technique is named Depth Analysis, and it has posted a gag reel for the game to its home page.

    Though the reel contains the types of mistakes commonly seen in movie or TV gag reels, the fact that the animated characters aren’t quite life-like enough to be considered outside of the uncanny valley makes their very human reactions all the more interesting. Also, seeing a videogame character sneeze convincingly is bizarre.