Month: August 2016

Happy 30th, Samus Aran! Enjoy a fan-made present. (credit: AM2R)

Thanks to Nintendo's rise to mid-'80s fame, the gaming company has enjoyed many recent "30th anniversary" celebrations for its famed series. But while Super Mario and Zelda enjoyed official fanfare over their respective "pearl" milestones, the company's most famed bounty hunter, Metroid's Samus Aran, hasn't gotten as much official attention for her debut launching on Japan's Famicom Disc System in August 1986.

Luckily for Metroid diehards, a group of enterprising game makers have stepped up with the launch of a free anniversary present years in the making: AM2R, or, Another Metroid 2 Remake. The free game, which had a demo tease launch a few years ago, is finally in a 1.0 "full" release state on Windows (to be followed "soon" by a Linux build). This is a full reimagining of the Game Boy classic Metroid 2: Return of Samus—meaning, this is more than a colorized upgrade from its original, "green-scale" release.

Aesthetically and mechanically, AM2R will delight anybody who enjoyed the Game Boy Advance's Metroid: Zero Mission, which itself was a looks-and-mechanics remake of the very first game. The sequel now gets the same mix of updated mechanics, redrawn artwork, newly arranged songs, and slightly remixed content, along with a deep, newly written "codex" of lore, story, and analysis of everything Samus discovers in her mission to take out a new slew of augmented Metroid creatures.

What can we learn from gaming’s failures? I don’t mean the usual, well-documented critical duds like Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana. I’m talking about the industry’s crater-deep disasters.

To answer this question, I dug up the five lowest-scoring PC games ever registered on Metacritic, which proved to be an interesting list. Interesting, as in the most terrifying growth you’ve ever seen on an elderly person's back. That kind of interesting.

Worse games may exist, surely, but these five received universal disdain and did something to attract people’s attention. Maybe it was because they preyed on post-9/11 tensions or because they were so bad that the developer had to release an official apology.

The 2003 Toyota Prius in question. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

While I spend most of my time on my bike, my wife and I share a 2003 Toyota Prius. Technologically speaking, this is almost like saying I still own a Treo 650. Sure, it's a modern smartphone, but barely.

When we bought the used Prius in 2012, the previous owner made hay about how he had an aftermarket multi-disc CD changer installed in the trunk. I told him I would never use it, and more than four years later, I've proven myself right. Usually our radio is tuned to KQED (yes, we’re Bay Area public radio nerds), or for longer drives, podcasts.

For those unfamiliar with the Prius, its screen for displaying real-time energy efficiency pales in comparison to more modern cars. In fact, to hook up my iPhone, I have to use a cassette adapter to connect to the stereo and the cigarette lighter for power. (Cars Technica Editor Jonathan Gitlin reminds me that the last car to have a factory cassette deck was in model year 2010!)

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Making a keyboard and mouse for PC gaming in the living room is hard. Just ask the infamous company Phantom Entertainment which—after blowing tens of millions of dollars trying and failing to release a PC-based console—settled on releasing the ergonomic monstrosity that was the Phantom Lapboard instead. Since then, few companies have taken the challenge on. Sure, Valve had a stab at it with its Steam Controller, and while that functions as a good substitute for a keyboard and mouse in certain games, it's not quite the same as tapping away on some WASD keys.

Fortunately, thanks to the buoyant PC gaming scene, there's been a renewed interest in developing a keyboard and mouse that work well on a couch—and as someone who built a gaming PC specifically to use in the living room, only to resort to using an Xbox controller, I was particularly keen to try them out. Enter the Corsair Lapdog "gaming control centre" and Razer Turret, two very different takes on a keyboard and mouse for the lounge.