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About this blog

ExtraMana's Blog. Includes my YouTube videos and written articles.

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Entries in this blog

Video Game History : Wizardry Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord!

Video Game History : Wizardry Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord!   Wizardry box art   In 1974 Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson publish the tabletop role playing game dungeons and dragons. It isn't long before people start making there own versions of the game on computers. In the early 1970's access to computers is very limited due to there high cost. one of the only places you could get public access to them was on University campuses. It's during this time tha

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Video Game History - Space Invaders

Video Game History - Space Invaders     space invaders flyer     In 1977 the videogame market was flooded with clones of the game ‘Pong’. Pong which released in 1972 had been such a huge hit that many other game companies had tried to produce their own version of the game. This led to a glut of pong consoles hitting the market meaning videogame companies had to sell their systems at a loss and consequently go out of business.  

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Video Game History - Silent Hill 3

Video Game History - Silent Hill 3   Silent Hill 3 box art     Silent Hill 3 released in 2003 for the playstation 2 is in my opinion the best game in the Silent Hill series, even better than the classic Silent Hill 2. In Silent Hill 3 you play as Heather, a spunky, witty and bitchy teenage girl. They heather's character rather interesting, deep and detailed. For instance throughout the course of the game when you look at a carton of cigarettes or interact with

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Video Game History - Silent Hill

Video Game History - Silent Hill   Silent Hill cover art   Hey all today I'm going to look at a horror classic. Silent Hill for the playstation. This game was a response to the highly successfuly Resident evil. However unlike resident evil this game is all about tension subtley and psycological horror rather than jump scares. The game starts with you Harry Mason waking up after a car crash in Silent Hill. You quickly learn that your daughter Cheryl is missing and s

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Video Game History - Rise of the Triad (2013)

Video Game History - Rise of the Triad (2013)       Rise of the Triad promotional art   In 1994 Rise of the Triad Dark was released. The game was originally intended to be a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D that id Software had asked Apogee Software to make for them whilst they focused solely on Doom. But when id Software changed their mind about the sequel, Apogee had to re-tool the game into something new. That somethi

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Video Game History - Metroid

Video Game History - Metroid   Metroid box art   In 1986 the Nintendo Entertainment System was doing very well thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong game franchises. The NES had become a powerhouse in gaming easily rivaling the lucrative arcade industry. However Gunpei Yokoi and his R&D1 team who previously had made some successfull games for the NES such as Duckhunt, Excitebike, and Ice Climbers wanted to show they could make a game that

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Video Game History - Metal Gear

Video Game History - Metal Gear   Metal Gear box art     In 1985 the MSX2 computer was released and was fairly popular at the time. In 1986 Hideo Kojima joined Konami to work on games for the MSX2. Kojima had problems creating games due to his lack of familarity in programming. One day his bosses told him to create a combat game for the system. In 1986 combat games where very popular in the arcades due to the influence of films like Rambo First Blood p

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Video Game History - Id Software Quake 2

Video Game History - Id Software Quake 2   Quake 2 box art     After the release of Quake, John Romero was been forced out of id software. He would soon be forming his own games company: Ion Storm. Romero wanted to make new kinds of games, whereas John Carmack wanted to continue making doom like shooters and id software's next game was certainly not going to break much new ground in terms of concept. In 1996 a musician named Sascha Dikiciyan sent id software

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Video Game History - Id Software Doom 3

Video Game History - Id Software Doom 3   Doom 3 cover art     In 2000 Id Software's last game had been Quake 3 Arena, the company was trying to decide what to do next. They knew they wanted their next game to be singleplayer focused as both Id's fans and the gaming press had complaints about Quake 3 being a mutiplayer only title. John Carmack had built up a legendary reputation for his programming skills, even earning himself the title title 'God' by the gam

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Video Game History - Half Life

Video Game History - Half Life     Half Life cover art   Gabe Newell started his career at Microsoft. He worked as a programmer on the Windows 1, 2, and 2.1 operating systems. In December of 1993 id software released Doom. Doom is a mega-hit and in late 1995 it is thought that more people have played the game then own the Windows 95’ operating system. This forced Bill Gates to recognize the potential of video games and

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Video Game History - Final Fantasy Adventure

Video Game History - Final Fantasy Adventure   Final Fantasy box art   In 1987 Square put a trademark on the name 'Seiken Densetsu'. The english translation of this means 'Holy Sword Legend'. They where working on a project called 'The Emergence of Excalibur'. The game was under the guide of Kazuhiko Aoki. The game was being developed for the famicon disc system, and it was intended to be 5 discs long. Which at the time would have made it the largest game for a nint

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Video Game History - Duke Nukem 3D

Video Game History - Duke Nukem 3D   Duke Nukem 3D box art     In the mid 1990's id software was the most prominent company when it came to first person shooters. However a man named Ken Silverman had been producing a new game engine called the 'build engine' that would allow for more advanced graphics than id's games. Ken's build engine would be more powerful than id's tech, as it would allow for destructible environments, sectors that could overlap each oth

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Video Game History - Duke Nukem

Video Game History - Duke Nukem   Duke Nukem title screen   Scott Miller had been making games since 1975. Some of Millers early games had been The Computer Quiz, Astronomy Quiz, and BASIC Quiz. Later he started to make more complex games such as 'Kingdom of Kroz'. In that game the player had to collect gems, and avoid monsters. When a monster touched you the player would lose one of his gems. The player also had a whip attack they could use a limited number of

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Video Game History - Deus Ex

Video Game History - Deus Ex   Deus Ex Cover art By the mid 1990’s Warren Spector had already made a big name for himself from his involvement on the first person role playing games ‘Ultima Underworld’ and ‘System Shock’. Ultima Underworld released in early 1992. It was a technological revolution as it was one of the earliest games to display texture mapping in first person.  Spector had gotten his first taste of

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Video Game History - Computer Space (Atari)

Video Game History - Computer Space (Atari)   Computer space art   In the 1950's the cold war between the East and West raged on. The US invested massive amount of money into technology. Money was poured into the development of new missiles, aircraft and of course computers amongst many other things. In 1958 Willy Higginbotham was working at the Brook haven National Laboratories. Higginbotham had been a designer of electronic circuits for the Manhattan project and

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Video Game History - Blood

Video Game History - Blood   Blood Pc-Dos game box art     In January 1996 Duke Nukem 3D was released and at the time it sported revolutionary new graphics using Ken Silverman's Build engine. First person shooters had become incredibly successful thanks to games like Duke Nukem 3d and of course Id software's games Wolfenstein 3d, and Doom. In June 1996 Quake was realised and once again revolutionized the already very popular genre of first person shooters. No

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Video Game History - Asteroids

Video Game History - Asteroids   Asteroids arcade game   In 1962 Steve Russell creates Space War on the PDP-1 computer. It was one of the world's earliest video games and was years ahead of it's time. In 1978 Cinematronics releases Space Wars in the arcade It was based on Steve Russell's game. Space Wars used Larry Rosenthal's vector graphics technology. Vector graphics was a huge innovation in game graphics. It would allow for images drawn to have sharp edges,

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Sexiest Videogame Villainess - SiN Episodes: Emergence (Retro Review)

Elexis sinclair (hyper-sexualized villainess of the SiN franchise)     SiN Episodes: Emergence has all the elements that could have made a great game. Bombastic characters, comical gratuity both in gore and in partial nudity and a much laid back if not heavily generic storyline. If you take the final product for what it is, one 9th of a much larger game with multiple plot strands, a sprawling Universe and an internal lore, emergence comes off as rather disappointing.

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