Cyberpunk 2077: Putting the Punk Back Into Cyberpunk

If you ask Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith, most cyberpunk games aren’t cyberpunk at all. They’re just third-person shooters, racers or action games with a cyberpunk veneer, a grimy sci-fi aesthetic that doesn’t actually translate into anything especially interesting in-game besides the odd augment. “Most people think cyberpunk is just a summary of specific tropes; big guns, dark streets and dangerous guys in ubiquitous leather dusters,” writes Pondsmith in the first of a series of excellent blogs on the Cyberpunk 2077 website. “But the core of cyberpunk is a lot more subtle than that. Cyberpunk is about the seductive qualities of corruption and decay… It doesn’t have to be dirty or grimy on the physical level. But on the psycho-social level, even the cleanest and most orderly Corp-zone should be rife with darkness and collapse.”

What a perfect world for The Witcher’s digital curators to step into. In CD Projekt Red’s interpretation, The Witcher’s world is rife with vice, moral corruption and ambiguity, with selfish kings and opportunistic killers. If anyone is a hero, they are a reluctant one. The Witcher games evoke all the themes and ambience of the original books’ world without relying on their characters, their plots or situations; they are calmly, self-confidently adult, and entirely their own. If I ever create a fictional universe, I’d hope CD Projekt makes a game out of it.

The Witcher’s writer Andrzej Sapkowski isn’t enormously enamoured with video games as a whole (actually he seems to kind of hate them despite expressing respect for CD Projekt’s work), but Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith seems able to better appreciate the developer’s gift for realising fictional universes in interactive form. After a few failed games based on the Cyberpunk franchise in the past, he seemed justifiably nervous about letting another developer at it, says game director Mateusz Kanik – until he came to visit CDP in Poland.

“At the beginning he was really scared. You could see that on his face,” Mateusz laughs. “There have been attempts at Cyberpunk games in the past and each of them was bad, and he was scared it would be the same again. But he came to us at the beginning and met the team, and we talked about vision, ideas, how we want to approach this adaptation of his work – and when he left he was extremely happy about it. So I think it was OK from then on.”

“

Cyberpunk 2077 is self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been at the back of CDP’s mind since even before The Witcher was out. The team has spoken before about their collective love for the original pen-and-paper RPG, which many of them had played as teenagers in then-Communist Poland, where it was hardly a mainstream pastime. Whilst making the Witcher, the developer came up with plenty of ideas that just weren’t usable in a fantasy RPG, and Cyberpunk was a dream property to work with.

Character customisation, for instance, was necessarily not an option in Geralt’s world. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects on the world and how it reacts to you. “We will have several features that allow you to create your [visual] style, and your style will affect gameplay, storyline and relationships between characters,” explains creative director Sebastian Stepien. “Your appearance and your dress will change the behaviour of NPCs, and also the story also in some parts,” Mateusz adds. Style and appearance works together with the personality you create for your character and express in conversation to determine how the world reacts to you.

“It’s about telling story via what happens, not cutscenes or other features,” Mateusz says. “To do that we need to create a totally new unique dialogue system – we’re doing that right now, it should be awesome.”

Augments, of course, are a huge part of the Cyberpunk world. They are the focal point of the teaser trailer, which shows a squad of specialised police facing off against a woman who has gone too rather far with her biomechanical self-improvement regime. But Cyberpunk 2077 will not be about conflict between the augmented and the police; that Deus Ex: Human Revolution-style societal tension over the morality and ethics of augmentation is not at the centre of the story.

“The psycho squad is just one of many cool elements in this world," Sebastian explains. “We had several ideas for this short teaser and had to focus on one of them. Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, and that’s why it’s in the teaser. But it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber-psychos. That’s a sub-plot… The story will be low-level. We are not going to save the world, or even save a city. We are focused on the main character and his problems, or her problems.”

“

Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, but it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber psychos.

Cyberpunk hasn’t been as easy to adapt as a video game as you might think. Pen and paper mechanics have been the foundation of many digital RPGs over the years, but they do not translate well into the kind of game that CDP is trying to make. “The game mechanics are totally different on paper, they don’t work in video games because they would be super boring,” Mateusz says.

“The main problem is that the original system is based on dice rolls. When you think about Cyberpunk you think about shooting, action, a lot of explosions. But that doesn’t fit dice rolls in a video game. We want to make it more action-like – there will be a system that lets you use active skills actually in the gameplay in a shooting sequence or something like that, rather than just passive skills like in the books.”

The fiction, too, needed to be adapted. When Cyberpunk 2020 was originally written, the year 2020 was a long way off, but things have advanced far enough in the intervening time to make some of its futuristic technology feel a little ridiculous. “The original Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of retro game – you cannot believe in this world today because a lot of things in our world are already higher-tech,” agrees Mateusz. “So we needed to change this to make it more real for modern people.

“But also it’s important to still keep the mood and the original feel of Cyberpunk – we don’t want to just create a science-fiction game. It’s easy to do that. We still want to balance it with those main features and the mood from the Cyberpunk original. This is a huge task, I think.”

“

There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games.

It all comes back to ensuring that Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t do what other games do: fall back on just a term and an aesthetic when cyberpunk as an idea is about so much more. Sebastian hopes that Cyberpunk 2077 will be a true realisation of that idea – not just the tropes, not just the futuristic feel, but the whole philosophy, with all its ambiguity, corruption and individualism.

“First of all it will be an RPG, so that means you create the story. In Syndicate and other shooters you can do no such thing,” says Sebastian. “The other thing is that you will have the chance to create your character’s personality. This is very, very important. The style and mood and atmosphere of this world, what you do at the bar, what do you drink, how you react with other people, what dialogue you choose –all these things let us keep the Cyberpunk atmosphere all the time.”

“There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games,” adds Mateusz. “We want to put more punk into ours. We do not want to make a dark and hopeless world. We are not doing Blade Runner. It will be full of rock and roll.”

“It’s more like a Tarantino approach,” Sebastian concludes.

CD Projekt is taking its time with Cyberpunk 2077. It almost certainly won't be out before 2015 on PC - nothing's confirmed, but it seems likely given The Witcher 3's simultaneous release that it will appear on the next-gen consoles too. The team is still playing around and experimenting with ideas, throwing things like multiplayer and prototyping. But the vision is firmly in place, and you get the impression that it has been since before CDP even started work on this project. If I were Mike Pondsmith, I'd have confidence in them too.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK and can't wait to actually see this game. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Cyberpunk 2077: Putting the Punk Back Into Cyberpunk

If you ask Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith, most cyberpunk games aren’t cyberpunk at all. They’re just third-person shooters, racers or action games with a cyberpunk veneer, a grimy sci-fi aesthetic that doesn’t actually translate into anything especially interesting in-game besides the odd augment. “Most people think cyberpunk is just a summary of specific tropes; big guns, dark streets and dangerous guys in ubiquitous leather dusters,” writes Pondsmith in the first of a series of excellent blogs on the Cyberpunk 2077 website. “But the core of cyberpunk is a lot more subtle than that. Cyberpunk is about the seductive qualities of corruption and decay… It doesn’t have to be dirty or grimy on the physical level. But on the psycho-social level, even the cleanest and most orderly Corp-zone should be rife with darkness and collapse.”

What a perfect world for The Witcher’s digital curators to step into. In CD Projekt Red’s interpretation, The Witcher’s world is rife with vice, moral corruption and ambiguity, with selfish kings and opportunistic killers. If anyone is a hero, they are a reluctant one. The Witcher games evoke all the themes and ambience of the original books’ world without relying on their characters, their plots or situations; they are calmly, self-confidently adult, and entirely their own. If I ever create a fictional universe, I’d hope CD Projekt makes a game out of it.

The Witcher’s writer Andrzej Sapkowski isn’t enormously enamoured with video games as a whole (actually he seems to kind of hate them despite expressing respect for CD Projekt’s work), but Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith seems able to better appreciate the developer’s gift for realising fictional universes in interactive form. After a few failed games based on the Cyberpunk franchise in the past, he seemed justifiably nervous about letting another developer at it, says game director Mateusz Kanik – until he came to visit CDP in Poland.

“At the beginning he was really scared. You could see that on his face,” Mateusz laughs. “There have been attempts at Cyberpunk games in the past and each of them was bad, and he was scared it would be the same again. But he came to us at the beginning and met the team, and we talked about vision, ideas, how we want to approach this adaptation of his work – and when he left he was extremely happy about it. So I think it was OK from then on.”

“

Cyberpunk 2077 is self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been at the back of CDP’s mind since even before The Witcher was out. The team has spoken before about their collective love for the original pen-and-paper RPG, which many of them had played as teenagers in then-Communist Poland, where it was hardly a mainstream pastime. Whilst making the Witcher, the developer came up with plenty of ideas that just weren’t usable in a fantasy RPG, and Cyberpunk was a dream property to work with.

Character customisation, for instance, was necessarily not an option in Geralt’s world. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects on the world and how it reacts to you. “We will have several features that allow you to create your [visual] style, and your style will affect gameplay, storyline and relationships between characters,” explains creative director Sebastian Stepien. “Your appearance and your dress will change the behaviour of NPCs, and also the story also in some parts,” Mateusz adds. Style and appearance works together with the personality you create for your character and express in conversation to determine how the world reacts to you.

“It’s about telling story via what happens, not cutscenes or other features,” Mateusz says. “To do that we need to create a totally new unique dialogue system – we’re doing that right now, it should be awesome.”

Augments, of course, are a huge part of the Cyberpunk world. They are the focal point of the teaser trailer, which shows a squad of specialised police facing off against a woman who has gone too rather far with her biomechanical self-improvement regime. But Cyberpunk 2077 will not be about conflict between the augmented and the police; that Deus Ex: Human Revolution-style societal tension over the morality and ethics of augmentation is not at the centre of the story.

“The psycho squad is just one of many cool elements in this world," Sebastian explains. “We had several ideas for this short teaser and had to focus on one of them. Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, and that’s why it’s in the teaser. But it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber-psychos. That’s a sub-plot… The story will be low-level. We are not going to save the world, or even save a city. We are focused on the main character and his problems, or her problems.”

“

Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, but it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber psychos.

Cyberpunk hasn’t been as easy to adapt as a video game as you might think. Pen and paper mechanics have been the foundation of many digital RPGs over the years, but they do not translate well into the kind of game that CDP is trying to make. “The game mechanics are totally different on paper, they don’t work in video games because they would be super boring,” Mateusz says.

“The main problem is that the original system is based on dice rolls. When you think about Cyberpunk you think about shooting, action, a lot of explosions. But that doesn’t fit dice rolls in a video game. We want to make it more action-like – there will be a system that lets you use active skills actually in the gameplay in a shooting sequence or something like that, rather than just passive skills like in the books.”

The fiction, too, needed to be adapted. When Cyberpunk 2020 was originally written, the year 2020 was a long way off, but things have advanced far enough in the intervening time to make some of its futuristic technology feel a little ridiculous. “The original Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of retro game – you cannot believe in this world today because a lot of things in our world are already higher-tech,” agrees Mateusz. “So we needed to change this to make it more real for modern people.

“But also it’s important to still keep the mood and the original feel of Cyberpunk – we don’t want to just create a science-fiction game. It’s easy to do that. We still want to balance it with those main features and the mood from the Cyberpunk original. This is a huge task, I think.”

“

There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games.

It all comes back to ensuring that Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t do what other games do: fall back on just a term and an aesthetic when cyberpunk as an idea is about so much more. Sebastian hopes that Cyberpunk 2077 will be a true realisation of that idea – not just the tropes, not just the futuristic feel, but the whole philosophy, with all its ambiguity, corruption and individualism.

“First of all it will be an RPG, so that means you create the story. In Syndicate and other shooters you can do no such thing,” says Sebastian. “The other thing is that you will have the chance to create your character’s personality. This is very, very important. The style and mood and atmosphere of this world, what you do at the bar, what do you drink, how you react with other people, what dialogue you choose –all these things let us keep the Cyberpunk atmosphere all the time.”

“There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games,” adds Mateusz. “We want to put more punk into ours. We do not want to make a dark and hopeless world. We are not doing Blade Runner. It will be full of rock and roll.”

“It’s more like a Tarantino approach,” Sebastian concludes.

CD Projekt is taking its time with Cyberpunk 2077. It almost certainly won't be out before 2015 on PC - nothing's confirmed, but it seems likely given The Witcher 3's simultaneous release that it will appear on the next-gen consoles too. The team is still playing around and experimenting with ideas, throwing things like multiplayer and prototyping. But the vision is firmly in place, and you get the impression that it has been since before CDP even started work on this project. If I were Mike Pondsmith, I'd have confidence in them too.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK and can't wait to actually see this game. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Cyberpunk 2077: Putting the Punk Back Into Cyberpunk

If you ask Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith, most cyberpunk games aren’t cyberpunk at all. They’re just third-person shooters, racers or action games with a cyberpunk veneer, a grimy sci-fi aesthetic that doesn’t actually translate into anything especially interesting in-game besides the odd augment. “Most people think cyberpunk is just a summary of specific tropes; big guns, dark streets and dangerous guys in ubiquitous leather dusters,” writes Pondsmith in the first of a series of excellent blogs on the Cyberpunk 2077 website. “But the core of cyberpunk is a lot more subtle than that. Cyberpunk is about the seductive qualities of corruption and decay… It doesn’t have to be dirty or grimy on the physical level. But on the psycho-social level, even the cleanest and most orderly Corp-zone should be rife with darkness and collapse.”

What a perfect world for The Witcher’s digital curators to step into. In CD Projekt Red’s interpretation, The Witcher’s world is rife with vice, moral corruption and ambiguity, with selfish kings and opportunistic killers. If anyone is a hero, they are a reluctant one. The Witcher games evoke all the themes and ambience of the original books’ world without relying on their characters, their plots or situations; they are calmly, self-confidently adult, and entirely their own. If I ever create a fictional universe, I’d hope CD Projekt makes a game out of it.

The Witcher’s writer Andrzej Sapkowski isn’t enormously enamoured with video games as a whole (actually he seems to kind of hate them despite expressing respect for CD Projekt’s work), but Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith seems able to better appreciate the developer’s gift for realising fictional universes in interactive form. After a few failed games based on the Cyberpunk franchise in the past, he seemed justifiably nervous about letting another developer at it, says game director Mateusz Kanik – until he came to visit CDP in Poland.

“At the beginning he was really scared. You could see that on his face,” Mateusz laughs. “There have been attempts at Cyberpunk games in the past and each of them was bad, and he was scared it would be the same again. But he came to us at the beginning and met the team, and we talked about vision, ideas, how we want to approach this adaptation of his work – and when he left he was extremely happy about it. So I think it was OK from then on.”

“

Cyberpunk 2077 is self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been at the back of CDP’s mind since even before The Witcher was out. The team has spoken before about their collective love for the original pen-and-paper RPG, which many of them had played as teenagers in then-Communist Poland, where it was hardly a mainstream pastime. Whilst making the Witcher, the developer came up with plenty of ideas that just weren’t usable in a fantasy RPG, and Cyberpunk was a dream property to work with.

Character customisation, for instance, was necessarily not an option in Geralt’s world. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects on the world and how it reacts to you. “We will have several features that allow you to create your [visual] style, and your style will affect gameplay, storyline and relationships between characters,” explains creative director Sebastian Stepien. “Your appearance and your dress will change the behaviour of NPCs, and also the story also in some parts,” Mateusz adds. Style and appearance works together with the personality you create for your character and express in conversation to determine how the world reacts to you.

“It’s about telling story via what happens, not cutscenes or other features,” Mateusz says. “To do that we need to create a totally new unique dialogue system – we’re doing that right now, it should be awesome.”

Augments, of course, are a huge part of the Cyberpunk world. They are the focal point of the teaser trailer, which shows a squad of specialised police facing off against a woman who has gone too rather far with her biomechanical self-improvement regime. But Cyberpunk 2077 will not be about conflict between the augmented and the police; that Deus Ex: Human Revolution-style societal tension over the morality and ethics of augmentation is not at the centre of the story.

“The psycho squad is just one of many cool elements in this world, Sebastian explains. “We had several ideas for this short teaser and had to focus on one of them. Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, and that’s why it’s in the teaser. But it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber psychos. That’s a sub-plot… The story will be low-level. We are not going to save the world, or even save a city. We are focused on the main character and his problems, or her problems.”

“

Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, but it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber psychos.

Cyberpunk hasn’t been as easy to adapt as a video game as you might think. Pen and paper mechanics have been the foundation of many digital RPGs over the years, but they do not translate well into the kind of game that CDP is trying to make. “The game mechanics are totally different on paper, they don’t work in video games because they would be super boring,” Mateusz says.

“The main problem is that the original system is based on dice rolls. When you think about Cyberpunk you think about shooting, action, a lot of explosions. But that doesn’t fit dice rolls in a video game. We want to make it more action-like – there will be a system that lets you use active skills actually in the gameplay in a shooting sequence or something like that, rather than just passive skills like in the books.”

The fiction, too, needed to be adapted. When Cyberpunk 2020 was originally written, the year 2020 was a long way off, but things have advanced far enough in the intervening time to make some of its futuristic technology feel a little ridiculous. “The original Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of retro game – you cannot believe in this world today because a lot of things in our world are already higher-tech,” agrees Mateusz. “So we needed to change this to make it more real for modern people.

“But also it’s important to still keep the mood and the original feel of Cyberpunk – we don’t want to just create a science-fiction game. It’s easy to do that. We still want to balance it with those main features and the mood from the Cyberpunk original. This is a huge task, I think.”

“

There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games.

It all comes back to ensuring that Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t do what other games do: fall back on just a term and an aesthetic when cyberpunk as an idea is about so much more. Sebastian hopes that Cyberpunk 2077 will be a true realisation of that idea – not just the tropes, not just the futuristic feel, but the whole philosophy, with all its ambiguity, corruption and individualism.

“First of all it will be an RPG, so that means you create the story. In Syndicate and other shooters you can do no such thing,” says Sebastian. “The other thing is that you will have the chance to create your character’s personality. This is very, very important. The style and mood and atmosphere of this world, what you do at the bar, what do you drink, how you react with other people, what dialogue you choose –all these things let us keep the Cyberpunk atmosphere all the time.”

“There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games,” adds Mateusz. “We want to put more punk into ours. We do not want to make a dark and hopeless world. We are not doing Blade Runner. It will be full of rock and roll.”

“It’s more like a Tarantino approach,” Sebastian concludes.

CD Projekt is taking its time with Cyberpunk 2077. It almost certainly won't be out before 2015 on PC - nothing's confirmed, but it seems likely given The Witcher 3's simultaneous release that it will appear on the next-gen consoles too. The team is still playing around and experimenting with ideas, throwing things like multiplayer and prototyping. But the vision is firmly in place, and you get the impression that it has been since before CDP even started work on this project. If I were Mike Pondsmith, I'd have confidence in them too.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK and can't wait to actually see this game. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition Boxed Copy Release Date

You'll be able to pick up the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft as a boxed retail product from June 28th, Microsoft has announced.

Copies will also include a 48-hour subscription to Xbox Live Gold, allowing players to download all the latest content for the game and sample some of its online-only features.

The last we heard about a boxed edition of the game was on April 12th, when Microsoft’s Larry Hyrb – aka Major Nelson – revealed that the game had been delayed until June 4th. While this remains the release date for the US, we'll have to wait until June 28th to get our mitts on physical copies.

Since it was released last year Minecraft has become a huge success on Microsoft's console, selling more than six million copies.

Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition Boxed Copy Release Date

You'll be able to pick up the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft as a boxed retail product from June 28th, Microsoft has announced.

Copies will also include a 48-hour subscription to Xbox Live Gold, allowing players to download all the latest content for the game and sample some of its online-only features.

The last we heard about a boxed edition of the game was on April 12th, when Microsoft’s Larry Hyrb – aka Major Nelson – revealed that the game had been delayed until June 4th. While this remains the release date for the US, we'll have to wait until June 28th to get our mitts on physical copies.

Since it was released last year Minecraft has become a huge success on Microsoft's console, selling more than six million copies.

Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer. You can be part of the world's most embarrassing cult by following him on IGN and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

You Know You’re Playing An '80s Game When...

The release of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has given us cause to revisit the 1980s, a decade in which childhood summers seemed to last for months, SodaStream tasted better than Coca-Cola because you put the bubbles in it yourself and completing your Panini sticker album required endless rounds of swapsies with your friends. There were also a host of telltale video game conventions to be observed – some we miss, others not so much.

...You Can Save The World With Just A Couple Of Buttons

Game controllers were once exemplary pieces of minimalist design. You could save a princess, master a sport, defend the Earth and help a frog to cross the road with no more than a button or two. The skill was in how you played the game not whether you could contort your fingers and your mind around an assortment of bumpers, knobs and gyroscopic nonsense. Individually, the buttons did something cool, while pressing them both at the same time was guaranteed awesome.

Ahh, a simpler time.

...You’re Spending Your Time Playing, Not Watching Cutscenes

Once upon a time you could learn everything you needed to know about your character’s background and motivations by reading the back of the game box. Developers didn’t feel the need to prefix their game with 10+ minutes of poorly scripted, non-interactive exposition. You jumped right-in and got on with the serious business of delivering those papers, killing those aliens and Shinobi-ing-up the place.

...The Box Art Is Terrible

'80s video games had a lot going for them but the packaging was not was not one of their strong points. Haughty exclamations of “State-of-the-Art High Resolution Graphics” and hopeful tag-lines promising “All the Arcade Action” were accompanied by bandana-wearing macho men or a picture of a lone plane or helicopter. Arguably the worst offender was SEGA, with its blue and white graph-paper-style Master System boxes that looked as though a school child had become bored and doodled in their exercise book.

Anyone fancy a round? Anyone... (Credit: The Old Computer)

...Part Of The Fun Is Whether The Game Will Load

A legitimate part of the fun of the cassette tape games of the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 was A) betting Pick ‘n’ Mix sweets with your friends over how high the tape-counter would get before the game loaded and B) deciding how long to leave it before acknowledging that the game had crashed. It was a popular parental axiom of the era that if you wanted to teach your child the value of anticipation over instant gratification you buy them a cassette tape personal computer. True story.

...You Pay One Price and Get A Whole Game

The internet has brought us many wonderful innovations and means we now seldom have to venture outside for entertainment, gratification or information unless we really want to. Unfortunately, it has also opened the door to the nefarious notion of selling our games to us piecemeal in the form of shoddily packaged downloadable content. There was a time when all the horse armour, pretty outfits and playable characters you could ever want came included on the cartridge to be unlocked via dedicated play or quick-fix cheat codes.

...The Amusement Arcade Is THE FUTURE

The best thing about family holidays was wandering into an amusement arcade with pockets full of change and eyes full of wonder. Arcades offered a shady retreat from the midday sun filled with a cacophony of electronic noise and myriad brightly lit screens, all vying for your attention. Some let you pilot an X-wing and take down the Death Star while the likes of Gauntlet allowed a staggering total of four players to team-up to raid dungeons – “Wizard shot the food!” Stupid wizard.

...You Win Or You Lose, There Is No Save

Quick Save, Auto Save, Save and Quit: it’s little wonder that kids’ attention spans are getting shorter. Arranging falling blocks and gobbling-up dots was once considered serious enough business that it couldn’t be postponed just because you had to visit the grandparents or go to bed. You sat and played for hours-on-end until you either saved the world or you didn’t. Now, games bleat at us every 15 minutes to “take a break and go outside” but in the 1980s you had to pry a kid’s Power Glove out of their sweaty little hands to get them to stop.

...It Makes Sense That Your Character Doesn’t Speak

When games were the size of modern-day email attachments it made sense that none of the characters spoke actual audible words. Truth be told we didn’t need them to; we read the back of the box, we read the manual and we read the words on the screen. Now we have a strange mismatch of Hollywood stars rattling through pages of dialogue while your character remains mute throughout. Link must’ve really seen some terrible things to still be struck dumb after all these years.

...The Game Goes On Forever (Kind Of)

If you measure value for money in terms of hours of gameplay then the games of the '80s could be considered the cream of the crop. Pac-Man, Galaga, Space Invaders, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Tetris: all were games that could theoretically last forever as they had no programmed end and, mercifully, no final boss. Unfortunately, a range of issues that often involved internal counters and messy 8-bit integer overflows frequently meant that the game came crashing to an end anyway, unceremoniously ending that hard-fought high-score run.

...The Tutorial Consists Of Reading The Manual

Want to know how to play the game you just spent all your pocket money on? Read The Flippin’ Manual! Unsure how to use that cool new power-up? Read The Frakking Manual! Can’t work out why Little Mac keeps getting knocked on his ass by Mike Tyson? READ THE F****** MANUAL! This method worked just fine for all of us until someone decided that we were all too stupid to read the manual and that the start of every game should be given over to a lengthy tutorial. It was probably the same person who thought cut scenes were a good idea.

If that's got you feeling nostalgic for a bygone, neon-tinged time, check out our feature You Know You're Watching an '80s Movie When.

Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherent the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

"The Undertaking" is Near on Arrow

The long-lasting success of Smallville wasn't exactly a shock, since everyone knows and loves Superman. But even though Green Arrow is far less of a proven commodity with TV viewers, Arrow has met with similar success in its first season. Audiences have responded well to the ongoing saga of Oliver Queen and his close circle of friends, allies, and enemies within Starling City. This season has seen Ollie develop a reputation as a vigilante and slowly unravel a conspiracy involving many of the city's most rich and powerful families. Those running threads are culminating over the course of the final three episodes of Season 1, beginning with the revealing episode titled "The Undertaking."

We had the opportunity to chat with Arrow Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg to find out more about what this last batch of episodes holds in store for our hero. Kreisberg discussed the state of Ollie's relationships with his partner Diggle and best friend Tommy, the truth behind the Undertaking, and what fans can expect from the flashback scenes. Kreisberg even dropped a few hints as to the course Arrow will take in Season 2. Did someone say Diggle flashbacks? Read on to find out more.

IGN TV: Probably the biggest development from this last episode was that Diggle and Ollie had sort of a bad break-up. How would you say that rift is going to play out over these last three episodes?

Andrew Kreisberg: We're incredibly proud of the relationship we've developed between Oliver and Dig over the course of the season, going from this place of distrust to friends and partners. This is less of a permanent schism and more of a bump in the road. Their friendship and partnership is at the heart of the series.

IGN TV: Diggle has often been this voice of reason as he's tried to keep Ollie from becoming to consumed by this mission of his. Do you think their roles have become reversed a little now?

Kreisberg: Definitely. With Dig, Deadshot is clouding him slightly. And Oliver is also clouded, because he's been avoiding looking at his mother too closely. A big part of what's going to happen over these next few episodes is that Oliver is going to have to confront the most dangerous person in his life, who happens to be sleeping down the hall from him.

Even without Diggle, Ollie is ready to get back into the game.

IGN TV: You mentioned Deadshot, and last week was the third time he's appeared so far. Are we going to be seeing any more of him this season?

Kreisberg: Umm... maybe? [laughs]

IGN TV: [laughs] There have been references to A.R.G.U.S. and the fact that they want to bring in Deadshot themselves. Is there any chance you're building towards the eventual appearance of Amanda Waller and the debut of the Suicide Squad and elements like that?

Kreisberg: The Suicide Squad is definitely something we've discussed with DC Comics. There's no definitive plans right now to introduce Amanda Waller, but certainly we carefully chose A.R.G.U.S. and did not make Lyla Michaels work for the FBI or CIA. A.R.G.U.S. is the S.H.I.E.L.D. of the DC Universe, and it felt like a fun thing to introduce into our world. And we hope it'll play a bigger role in Season 2.

IGN TV: Even as Ollie lost touch with Dig in this episode, it seemed like you guys were setting the stage for Thea and Roy to join up with him. Can you talk about how much their hunt for the vigilante is going to be a focus in these episodes?

Kreisberg: Everything that we've set up in the last couple episodes is going to play out in the final three. Everyone is sort of on a collision course. Oliver with his mother and Malcolm, and Thea and Roy closing in on Oliver. There's big, emotional stakes coming up and a lot of conflicts and relationships coming these characters' way in the last couple of episodes.

IGN TV: And one character I definitely want to focus on is Tommy, because he went through a lot of emotional turmoil in this last episode, between his conflicted relationship with Ollie and breaking up with Laurel. What state of mind is he in in these final three episodes?

Kreisberg: I think Tommy has a lot of issues with Oliver. In [Wednesday's] episode he's going to reveal a secret to Laurel, but probably not the one that people are expecting. Colin Donnell has just been delivering amazing performance after amazing performance the last few weeks - 19 and 20 and in these last few episodes. He's really coming into his own as a character, and it's been so much fun writing this new iteration of Tommy. Tommy is at the heart of everything. His father is the big bad of the season. His best friend is the hero. And they're both in love with the same girl. There's a lot of emotional turmoil going through Tommy, and as everyone sort of fights for Tommy's soul, it's going to be grand and epic.

IGN TV: We've seen him turn away from his friends and more or less return to his father's fold in these last few episode. Is he going to be forced to choose where his allegiances lay by the end of this season?

Kreisberg: Absolutely. I mean, these last three episodes are definitively about Tommy choosing his allegiances. There's a certain subset of fans who think they know where this is going to go, and I think they're going to be shocked and surprised at how it plays out.

IGN TV: And that's one thing I've really liked about Tommy so far. His last name is Merlyn, so you assume he's going to turn out like Merlyn in the comics. But I think you guys have done a good job so far in terms of subverting expectations and keeping things unpredictable.

Kreisberg: Thanks. It's always interesting because there are two types of fans. You've got the people who only watch the show and don't know the comic books and are just enjoying the show on its own merits. And then you've got this whole other set of fans who know these characters in and out and know where they go and who they marry and all that. They think that it's like when people go to the movie after reading the book and you already know what's going to happen. As writers, one of the trickiest and most fun aspects of crafting the show is defying everyone's expectations so that the show is fresh and fun for everyone. So if the comics go one way, sometimes we go down that path and sometimes we don't. But we always do it consciously in order to make the show exciting and fresh and new so that no one is too far ahead.

Continue to Page 2 for more on what's to come on Arrow.

Source : ign[dot]com