Box Art is Horrible: The NES

It's always important to remember our roots in gaming. Remember that the 1080p multi-gigabyte AAA titles of today were the 10x10 pixelated sprites of 1985... and marketing wasn't quite as easy then. So difficult, in fact, that artists had to take a few liberties with the source material to get our greedy little eyes fixed on the packaging of an otherwise completely unrelated product.

These are the lower echelons of box art. Let Ryan and RJ guide you on this safari of insanity...

Gamestop Needs to Be Useful and Go Retro

With rumors rampant that the latest and greatest from Sony & Microsoft won't support GameStop's cash cow that is used games, it isn't hard to fathom that the $2.5 billion (with a b) company isn't utterly shaking in its boots about the future. There is hope for GameStop, however. It just needs to do two things: sell themselves as a service, and (oh please, oh please) leverage their retail locations and store-to-store distribution network to bring out-of-circulation "retro" gaming back to the masses.

On DRM, Pre-orders, and Torchlight II

The developers at Runic Games have me in a quandary, and their motherland of origin hasn't done much to help the situation, here.

As the Diablo III hype was whipped into a malevolent storm of excitement, anticipation, and unbridled gamer fury, I had elected to sit on the sidelines and observe the Internet maelstrom while taking a trip into the last decade and dusting off my old - old - copies of Diablo II. After spending several hours of classic hacking and slashing, I came to two conclusions:

1. Diablo II is still fun.
2. Diablo II is not as fun as I had hoped it would be.

Hell... for the hundredth time.

It was with a shallow pit in my stomach that I put my D2 discs aside and sat there yearning for the ever-niggling requirement for "more." The problem wasn't that beating the hero-goblin Rakanishu upside the head for the umpteenth time wasn't as smooth, fluid, and altogether rewarding as it was twelve (ugh) years ago. The problem was that after reaching the double-digit mark for brutally beating ol' Rak like a piñata doll filled with hundred dollar bills, you start to wonder if or when he'll go on strike for better working conditions... maybe even a little vacation time and bonus incentives to go with his meager salary as a ne'er-do-well. The point is, Diablo II just felt stale.

Mods notwithstanding, it was clear that I needed to move on from Throw the Devil A Beatin' 2.0, and get onto other, more recent things. But, when it came to Action RPGs, my initial gut reaction was that there was just no beating the King that is Blizzard. Diablo III had to be the way to go, and that just soured my stomach.