Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- Meet the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2025: Quake, GoldenEye 007, Defender, and Tamagotchi
- The BAFTA Games Awards Polled the Public and Shenmue is “The Most Influential Video Game of All Time”
- 2024 GOTY Scoreboard: Astro Bot, Balatro, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, More
- The Strong Museum of Play Acquires Prototypes and Development Documents from Volition’s 30-Year History
- Minecraft’s Volume Alpha Soundtrack Has Been Added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- It’s beginning to feel like gaming isn’t for everyone – Digital Trends (2025)
- 22 years later, modders are keeping SimCity 4 alive – The Verge (2025)
- The B-movies of Paul W.S. Anderson double as acts of devotion to his muse, Milla Jovovich – The AV Club (2025)
- Breakout, Ripoff, Genre: How Fiction Outgrows Originality – Uncanny Magazine (2025)
- ‘I Could Make “Fart Fart Boobie Fart: The Game” and Maybe It Would Eventually Get Taken Down’ – Devs Reveal Why the Consoles Are Drowning in ‘Eslop’ – IGN (2025)
Most Recent: Top Story
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Review: Grab Some Coins, Race to the Store, and Buy it Again
Aside from a rather shoddy Battle Mode, Mario Kart 8 set the gold standard for Nintendo’s venerable franchise when it launched for the Wii U back in 2014. The racing game was already bursting at the seams with characters, courses, and customizable kart parts before the consolemaker expanded it with two DLC Packs and added crossover characters like Link and Animal Crossing‘s Villager. However, the public’s poor reception to the Wii U lead to the sad realization that three times as many people had purchased Mario Kart Wii versus its sequel. So Nintendo has decided to re-introduce the game to a new audience on the Switch as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe… and with a real Battle Mode, too! (more…)
Posted in Reviews, Switch, Top Story
Tagged Mario Kart 8
Arms Global Testpunch Impressions – Nintendo’s New Fighter Needs a Helping Hand
After launching their newest console with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and a “Global Testfire” for Splatoon 2, Nintendo gave Switch owners a taste of their first wholly original game this weekend with a “Global Testpunch” for Arms.
Arms is what you get if you take Punch-Out‘s behind-the-back viewpoint and give every character a stretchy extendable set of arms and a pair of superpowered boxing gloves (which are, strangely enough, also known in-game as “Arms”). It’s all very silly, and the gameplay often feels a little wishy-washy, but Nintendo might be able to overcome these flaws and transform Arms into another big hit. (more…)
The Video Game Canon: Street Fighter II
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon with a look at Hollywood’s influence on Street Fighter II (and it’s influence on Hollywood). Here’s a teaser…
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior wasn’t the first fighting game ever released, but it single-handedly helped shape the genre for decades to come.
Capcom’s masterpiece rose to prominence by replacing the small and stiff characters of previous fighting games (including its predecessor, 1987’s Street Fighter) with highly detailed characters that seemed to fly around the screen. Instead of generic fighters clad in traditional karategi uniforms, Street Fighter II starred a diverse group of characters with fantastical “special moves.” And young fans lined up around the block to do battle with “World Warriors” like E. Honda, a sumo wrestler with a lightning-quick Hundred Hand Slap; Zangief, a Russian giant who fought bears; Blanka, a green-skinned prince who controlled electricity; and Dhalsim, a yoga master who breathed fire.
Rather than rest on their laurels, Capcom refined Street Fighter II’s controls and added more characters to the select screen through the release of four subsequent revisions. This parade of improvements (and Street Fighter II’s eventual release on home consoles) helped ensure the game’s status as the biggest fighting game of the early 90s arcade renaissance. By the late 90s, a loosely-connected group of enthusiasts for Street Fighter II began building a “Fighting Game Community” online, which eventually grew to include organized tournaments (like the annual Evo gathering) and a dedicated fandom that could rival any professional sport.
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Posted in Features, PS3, Retro, Switch, Top Story, Video Game Canon, Xbox 360
Tagged Street Fighter II
It’s 2017 and Adventure Games Are Mainstream Again
“What kind of video games do you play?” It’s a broad question that I often find myself faced with, to which I’d respond “adventure games.” That answer is then followed with an exhausting amount of game name dropping, that, in most cases, have nothing to do with the type of games I’m talking about. “You mean, like Zelda?” Not quite.
The easiest way to reiterate what I’m talking about is by calling them “point-and-click” adventure games, which is a genre and style of game most notable on the PC in the mid- to early 90s. It’s a genre that was also declared dead after the commercial failure of the critically acclaimed Grim Fandango; a genre that, over the past few years, has slowly but surely been coming back into the mainstream. (more…)
Posted in Opinions, PC, PS4, Top Story, Xbox One
Tagged Broken Age, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Thimbleweed Park
Mr. Shifty Review: Not Ready to Shift Into the Spotlight
Mr. Shifty is a top-down brawler from Team Shifty, a new development studio out of Brisbane, Australia. As Mr. Shifty, you are able to shift/teleport your way through walls and bullets, taking down your enemies at lightning speed while trying to break into the world’s most secure facility. There are 18 levels to shift your way across, all with varying difficulty. New enemies help keep the gameplay fresh and exciting, but the replayability of the title is lacking a bit.
So, you’re a teleporting thief who has embarked on his biggest heist yet. What could possibly go wrong? Well, if you are Mr. Shifty, the answer to that is everything. (more…)
Posted in PC, Reviews, Switch, Top Story
Tagged Mr. Shifty
The Video Game Canon: Contra
Dig deeper into the Video Game Canon by calling up the two commandos from Contra to examine the history of gaming’s most famous cheat code. Here’s a teaser…
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.
The rhythm of the words made them sound less like a controller input and more like a prayer. By “speaking” the correct phrase with their controller as the Contra title screen rolled into view, players were able to invoke the spirit of the developers and begin the game with 27 additional lives. In a way, the Konami Code was quite literally a gift from the gods behind the game’s creation, and not so dissimilar from the God Mode cheat that was included in early first-person shooters like Doom.
The Konami Code was originally programmed into 1986’s Gradius by Kazuhisa Hashimoto as a way to unlock a huge weapons cache in the notoriously difficult shooter. He has even joked that the button sequence was left in the game by accident. The Code quickly became an accepted part of the of the publisher’s identity, and its inclusion in Contra (along with Super Mario Bros.‘s Warp Zones and Metroid‘s password system) changed the way people progressed through a game’s levels. These features meant that players were no longer forced to follow the same trail through a game. Now, they could veer off in new directions, and discover what secrets a game held on their own.
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Posted in Features, Retro, Top Story, Video Game Canon
Tagged Contra
Kickstart This! Zombie Teacher
There must be something in the air in France (apart from all the political stuff), as there has been an unusually high number of game projects from the country launched on Kickstarter in the last few weeks. There’s LabyX from Yazorius in Bordeaux, a pair of games from Clermont-Ferrand (the awesome-looking NES game Twin Dragons by Antoine Gohin and building sim Sandbox by TarteUp), as well as Robi, which is in development at Xzezal in, um, “France, France.”
So, naturally, I chose a project from East London, because I used to live there. Just kidding. I chose Zombie Teacher because it looks awesome. So reach for those tasty brains and see what makes this game a delicious delight. Mmm… brains… (more…)
I Couldn’t Give Two Loots About Destiny 2
Destiny 2 will probably be upon us this year, assuming there are no delays like most AAA game these days. Bungie recently released the first teaser trailer alongside a rather naff logo. Seriously, the new logo looks like it was thrown together in Photoshop by a bored cat. I even managed to cook up some alternate designs while thinking about this opinion piece. The “2” just seems totally out of place. It could be more flush, using Roman numerals to match the Destiny font, or behind it, using a destroyed font to convey that war is coming, or is here already.
The trailer reveals very little about the game itself, beyond the fact that the Guardian Tower has fallen. It’s a clever story device, similar to Shepherd being resurrected at the start of Mass Effect 2, and it allows the game to shirk off aspects of the original, starting afresh with new adventures not constrained by the previous generation.
One issue Destiny fans never had to deal with was its graphics, as it is one of the prettiest first person shooters to grace the a console. The game’s problems lay in what was promised, or what fans hoped for, versus what was actually delivered. Even with The Taken King expansion, which is where I was introduced to the series, the game failed to truly dig into its own mythology, worlds, and threats, and became more of a slog, forcing players to revisit locations for the hundredth time all in the name of loot.
Yet, I don’t want to rant about failed promises of the original game. There is already an excellent post on Bungie’s Community Forums by “TrueMadnessNinja” that delves into the unfulfilled promises of the first entry. This is more of a wish list of things I wish had been in the first game, and I hope Bungie takes a look and can change my mind about picking up the sequel. (more…)