Some good news today, as Spectacle Rock has been nominated for a Mobbie!  The Mobbies are the Baltimore Sun’s “Best Blogs of Maryland” awards, and we are honored to be considered as part of the Pop Culture category.

Of course, we still need people to vote for us, so if you are feeling so inclined, pop on over to the Mobbie voting page and give us a click; we would be most appreciative!

Today marks the (sort of) first birthday of Spectacle Rock, and it seemed it would be wrong to let the occasion pass unmarked.  Over the course of the last year, we’ve all aged slightly, put on and/or lost weight, and played a lot of video games.  Some of have been amazing, and some have left us scratching our head as to how they were ever made.  Either way, they all gave us plenty to talk about.

In the year ahead, I hope that we’ll be able to bring you even more thoughts about the games we love and the games we hate, and look at some new ways to make them even better.  I hope that you’ve all enjoyed the past year, and I hope that you’re looking forward to more!

-Joel

If there is perhaps any greater compliment I can pay to a game beyond a willingness to pick it up and play it again immediately upon finishing it for the first time, I do not know what it is.  For some games, such as Civilization, this is only natural; every game is different, and each session presents an array of new factors to differentiate it from the last.  In Metroidvania type games, perhaps it is an urge to top my previous time and make my way through the game more efficiently.  In sports games, perhaps it is simply the desire to hear John Madden speak to me again.

RPGs, on the other hand, are usually a different story.  After sinking thirty or forty or more hours into a game, I generally don’t have much of a stomach to start it all over again.  Generally, there is very little need for me to ever do so; the story has been told, and telling it again is going to bring me little in the way increased enjoyment.  For my favorites, I will often pick them up again someday (I play through Chrono Trigger and FFVI every few years, simply for the joy of it), but almost never have I started one over immediately upon completion.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor has broken that trend.

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You definitely owe it to yourself to hop over to Ludum Dare and try out at least Beacon, if not the other top finishers in their recent 48-hour game creation competition. (I’m also a fan of Below the House.) The theme this time around was “Caverns,” and while Beacon trod a familiar creepshow theme, the gameplay is fun and it does instill a good sense of achluophobia into the player. For those not up on their phobias, that’s fear of the dark.

There are times that, as I play Minecraft, I stop and tell myself that what I’m doing really isn’t fun, and yet I continue to do it anyway.

Minecraft, for those that have never heard of it, is a freeware browser-based game by Marcus Persson.  Calling it a game at the moment is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but calling it “something you do” just doesn’t roll of the tongue quite as easily.

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Years ago, when I was but a wee Feez, my parents bought me a Packard Bell desktop PC, sporting a whopping 128 MB of RAM and a data-crushing 90MHZ processor.  It would be almost another year before I discovered the joys of Apogee Games, and almost two years before I played Wolfenstein 3-D.  Until those joyous occurrences, I was hard pressed to find actual entertainment on this little mystery box, and was relegated to using the system for bullshit purposes such as “school” and “work”.  This was, of course, until I logged onto a local BBS, cruised to the files section, and discovered Jumpman.

Jumpman is a simple game, first published in 1983, with a stationary screen on which you move your character around to collect rings (that were, supposedly, bombs you were disarming) in glorious EGA resolution.  At the start, Jumpman’s only obstacles were the levels themselves, with ladders, ropes, and platforms the only thing standing in between him and those sweet, sweet rings.  Soon after, falling bombs and attacking dots are introduced, and later levels graduated to full-fledged puzzle-fests with switches, bombs, and robots in between you and your goal.  The game itself was incredibly simple, but there was a lot of depth to it in that even after you finished, there was a challenge of finding a faster way, a smarter way, a flat out better way to finish the level.

And so it was with great happiness that, even after 26 years, I loaded up ‘Splosion Man to find that some concepts still just work.

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Before jumping into my full reaction to the game, I have to be honest up front and say that I did not complete it.  When I wrote the Spectacle Rock review policy, the conditions clearly stated that I would not review a game until I completed it, or until I quit it out of frustration.  In this particular case, Rule #2 has come into play.  Despite my best efforts, Star Ocean has forced me to throw down my controller, throw up my hands, and shout plaintive cries to the game design gods as to how they could ever let such a game come into being.  With that made clear, we can take a deeper look into what could cause such hate to fester in my gaming soul…

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Your romantic interest is supposed to be on your side, your best friend and confidant; a source of support in bad times and an inspiration in good; compatible in mores and lifestyle and the all-important sense of humor; an intellectual and emotional companion whose need for you healthily balances your need for him.

Right?

Wrong.

Emily Short writes on the quandaries games face when incorporating romance into their plotlines. Two major issues: how does the interactive nature of games pose problems particular to the genre, i.e. what if the player (Heaven forfend) despises Princess Peach? And how does one create a convincing romance-centered conflict?

I’m blanking here trying to think of any video game romance I’ve found convincing, let alone emotionally affecting. I wouldn’t call it a romance by any stretch of the imagination, but Ico and Yorda’s relationship (err, in Ico) would be the closest I can think of. At least, I’m willing to admit on the Internet that I teared up at the game’s epilogue.

Pokemon: whether you love it or hate it or hold no opinion on it, you’ve definitely heard of it. Whether you’ve encountered it in video game form, card game form, cartoon form, or any other endless number of merchandising forms, it’s pretty tough to avoid. Pikachu snack foods, Pikachu party favors, even Pikachu airplanes; there is denying the reach of Pokemon in global culture.

But where did it all start? Many people, even if they recognize those “pokemans,” they may have absolutely no context to put them in – they just are. For those in the know, the truth is that Pokemon first came onto the scene first in 1996 as a rather unassuming Game Boy RPG in Japan and later spread to the rest of the world in 1998. In the world of Pokemon, these creatures roam the world, just waiting for a strong trainer to come along, kick the crap out of them, stuff them into a techno-magical ball, and then train them into being BFFs. That may be a rough summary, but I challenge you to tell me it’s wrong.

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