GeekMandem Rewind: Halo Combat Evolved

I think we're just getting started...

Man, I feel like a Forerunner.  Ten years after unsealing the hushed casket, the boys at 343 Industries – Bungie, in spirit — are honouring their long-time legendary loyalties with next week’s enhanced anniversary edition of the real 2001 space odyssey, Halo: Combat Evolved, Bungie’s breakthrough that redefined the first-person shooter’s limitations and set the genre loose on the home console market.  Rest assured, we’ll have Anniversary’s review for you and more, but to satisfy your insatiable nostalgic appetite until its release, we thought we’d take a look back at Master Chief’s original outer-space outing before coming around full circle.

First, the looming question: why is Halo so significant to gaming culture? What impact and legacy has it left on the hearts and minds, both developer and player alike, within our illustrious industry? To mince words, what’s the big deal? Twenty years have forged the first-person shooter into the most popular genre in gaming, sure, but where Doom formulated, Halo reinvented, shocking the desktop shooter skeptics convinced that a control stick was no match for a mouse.  Bungie proved the naysayers’ negativity null and moot.

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Geekmandem Rewind: Resident Evil 4/HD

It’s Halloween, a holiday I have no strong feeling about whatsoever, so when better than to write hugely uninspired seasonal review. As there aren’t too many scary games out at the moment, why don’t we rewind the clock a bit and look at one of my favourite ‘horror’ genre games from the past few years that, coincidentally has had a HD version just become available for download on Xbox live and the Playstation Network.

Resident Evil 4 was, funnily enough, the first Resident Evil game I ever played, and actually still is the only one I’ve played with any vigour. That doesn’t mean I know nothing about the series though. Resident Evil 4 was something of a turning point in the franchise, whether it was for better or worse is a matter of opinion. Many changes were made to what were previously mainstay features of the series that are still present today. The changes in the camera position being the most obvious.

GeekMandem Rewind: The Generation of the Advanced RPG

The one-time standard of the video game industry.

 The Role Playing genre has seen a lot of changes over the past few decades; earlier this year, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series, which gave every gamer a reason to look back at where they started playing video games.  For me, it was on an old Apple IIe with a text-based game called Eamon, and on my NES with Zelda and Final Fantasy as my starter series.

GeekMandem Rewind: Bulletstorm Review

              From Epic Games (Gears of War & the Unreal series) and there subsidiary People Can Fly (Painkiller) comes an over the top FPS by the name of Bulletstorm.  The game is a throwback to the cheesy action games of yore like Serious Sam & Duke Nukem (don’t worry it’s not like Duke Nukem Forever, just give it a chance) as opposed to the super serious and dark shooters we see so often now like Gears of War & Halo.

GeekMandem Rewind: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Review

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is gritty. Whoever suggested GTA: Pleasantville at Rockstar’s brainstorming conference didn’t get the thumbs up. You’re Huang Lee, orphaned, fresh off the boat, full of initiative, and a little too trusting. It’s chaos from the start, as the writers here don’t hesitate to end the lives of characters you’ve only just met. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will share that my expectations of which persona would fit into which cookie-cutter roles were quickly deceived.

Gears of War: The History of Multiplayer History

It begins here.

It’s been almost two weeks since Gears of War 3 has been released and amazed us with its gorgeous world of destruction along with touching our hearts with its story but what about the multiplayer? This trilogy has seen many changes in its multiplayer game play from weapons to modes these changes make up one of the best multiplayer games on Xbox Live.

A Look Back: Nintendo 64

Look upon it, in all of its majesty!

 It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 15 years since a major event happened for US gamers: On September 29th, 1996, the third major home console from Nintendo released, the Nintendo 64.  While some point to the N64 as the system that led to Nintendo’s disadvantage in the console war, it’s also worth pointing out that the N64 generation of games presented a number of timeless classics, and important advancements in gaming technology that shaped everything to come.  Over the console’s lifetime, it sold over 32 million copies, featuring 64-bit graphics, four-player inputs out of the box, and a new control scheme unlike anything used commonly at the time.