Games Archive

Almost immediately, fans asked how this happened. Why was Andromeda so much worse than its predecessors? How could the revered RPG studio release such an underwhelming game? And, even if the problems were a little exaggerated by the internet's strange passion for hating BioWare, how could Andromeda ship with so many animation issues?

I've spent the past three months investigating the answers to those questions. From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk about the game, a consistent picture has emerged. The development of Andromeda was turbulent and troubled, marred by a director change, multiple major re-scopes, an understaffed animation team, technological challenges, communication issues, politics, a compressed timeline, and brutal crunch.

Many games share some of these problems, but to those who worked on it, Andromeda felt unusually difficult. This was a game with ambitious goals but limited resources, and in some ways, it's miraculous that BioWare shipped it at all. (EA and BioWare declined to comment for this article.)

Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months. This is the story of what happened.

In the nearly 18 months since a CD-ROM-based "Nintendo PlayStation" prototype was first found in an estate sale, emulator makers and homebrew programmers have created a facsimile of what CD-based games would look like on an SNES. Efforts by hacker Ben Heck to get that kind of software actually working on the one-of-a-kind hardware, though, had been stymied by problems getting the CD-ROM drive to talk to the system.

Those problems are now a thing of the past.

In a newly posted video, Heck lays out how the system's CD-ROM drive suddenly started sending valid data to the system literally overnight. "I was working on this yesterday and the CD-ROM wasn't even detecting the disc," Heck says in the video. "I came in this morning and jiggled the cables around and got ready to work on it some more, and all of a sudden it works... did a magic elf come in overnight?"

In the early life of the Nintendo Switch, when it was still codenamed Nintendo NX, there were a lot of rumors floating around about the device. We saw a console with an oval shape and a screen that seemed built into the buttons and rumors that the new device would run Android as its operating system.

While the product we have today resembles nothing of those early prototypes, it looks like the Android rumor may not have been far off. Cyanogen's Kirt McMaster tweeted early this morning to say that Nintendo had approached him about designing a custom Android-based operating system for their new console, but he had some choice words for the company.

In Kingsway, Andrew Morrish's upcoming PC role-playing game, monsters are pop-ups, quests are emails and your backpack is a cluttered file folder. That's right, it's an OSRPG.

Coming to PC later this year via Adult Swim games, Kingsway is a role-playing adventure that takes the form of the Kingsway Operating System, which is basically a primitive Windows/MacOS for the monster-slaying set. Travel the King's land via World Navigator window, slaying monsters as they pop up on your desktop. Drag-and-drop windows to your heart's content.

The Switch is a console sandwiched between a bar of success lowered by the disaster of the Wii U and the considerable ground Nintendo must make up.

Compared to the Wii U on its merits, the Switch is a slam dunk. It takes the basic concept of the Wii U, of a tablet-based console, and fulfills the promise of it in a way Nintendo simply wasn’t capable of realizing in 2012. It’s launching with a piece of software that, more than anything in the Wii U’s first year, demonstrates its inherent capability of delivering what Nintendo says is one of the Switch’s primary missions: a big-budget, AAA game that exists across a handheld device and a television-connected portable. The hardware lives up to its name in how easily and smoothly it moves between those two worlds, in how dead simple it all is to make something pretty magical happen.

Gabe Newell sits perfectly still, leans forward. His hands are laid on his lap. Only his eyes are moving. They shift rapidly from left to right and back again. He's physically here, he's sort of listening, but I'd say he's also somewhere else, mentally untangling the knots of the future.

The way he talks bears this out. He's unscripted, exploratory. He ranges far from corporate dogma and empty visionary horseshit. He admits when he’s been wrong in the past, or that he might be wrong right now about one of the biggest gambles of his career.

I like this about him: the act of engaging with journalists without a script, enjoying an actual conversation, prodding ideas that might be important outside the confines of a media event.

With those out of the way, TASBot moved on to a similar total control run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. After a few minutes of setup, the Zelda screen faded out, then faded back in on a bordered window with an ersatz logo for the "Super N64." Without any forthcoming explanation from the runners on stage, TASBot started apparently playing through a glitch-filled speedrun of Super Mario 64 on the Super NES, following it up with a similar glitch-filled speedrun through Valve's PC classic Portal. After that, the scene somehow transitioned to a Skype video call with a number of speedrunners speaking live from the AGDQ event through the SNES.

No one on the AGDQ stage acknowledged how weird this all was, leaving hundreds in the Herndon, VA ballroom and nearly 200,000 people watching live on Twitch temporarily guessing at what, exactly, was going on.

The Nintendo Switch will be released March 3 worldwide for $299, Nintendo announced today during a press briefing in Tokyo.

Nintendo will sell the Switch for 29,980 yen in Japan. In Europe, the price will vary by retailer. The Switch will be available in two configurations: one with gray Joy-Con controllers, and the other with neon red and blue Joy-Con devices. Otherwise, the hardware will be the same: 32 GB of internal storage with a 720p touchscreen.

"Funky Fantasy IV" is a 100% machine-translated version of Final Fantasy IV for the Japanese Super Famicom. The project is still unfinished, with little bits and pieces of untranslated menu text still strewn about, but all of the main and important text has been run through Google Translate.

Of course, it only works if you have other people to play with. A few gamers who bought Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare through the digital storefront built into Windows 10 have discovered they can only play with other gamers who also bought the game from Microsoft. Xbox One players can only play with other Xbox One players, and PlayStation 4 players can only play with other PlayStation 4 players. This has always been the case. The trouble is that this time not all PC players can play with other PC players. For unknown reasons, Windows 10 Store customers are segregated from customers who bought the game from Steam, which is by far the most popular platform on PC.

That's like buying a game from Target and learning you can't play with people who bought it from Best Buy. Call of Duty fans who made the unfortunate of mistake of giving Microsoft their cash are left sitting in lonely multiplayer lobbies waiting for games that'll never start.

However, it appears that Microsoft is giving out refunds.

In a few hours of testing, I haven't seen any noticeable problems with the graphic or sound recreation on the NES Classic Edition. Even the flickering and slowdown issues that were a forced part of that original NES game design seem to be captured accurately.

Colors are rendered brightly and accurately (unlike similar NES emulation on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS), with big, sharp pixels by default. So far, I'm really enjoying the CRT filter, which adds a pleasant fuzziness to the edges of the sprites without being distracting.

As both a console and a portable device, the Nintendo Switch will use cartridges known as Game Cards. The portability is one of the system's most important features; Nintendo's trailer showed people using the Switch in handheld mode on a plane, in a car and on a city rooftop. Nintendo said that people can bring multiple Switch units into the same place for "local multiplayer face-to-face competition."

It's the tale of an extremely difficult, user-unfriendly game reaching untold heights of success. It's the story of a company that has remained committed to listening to and interacting with its fans even as it at has grown exponentially. More than anything, it's the story of two best friends who liked playing video games and decided one day to make their own.

Riot is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, but to really know how one of the world's biggest development studios got started, you need to go back to Los Angeles in the early aughts. You need to find two University of Southern California business students who formed a bond unrelated to their studies.