No. Which I know because a rather neat tool came up on social media this week, which very efficiently searches Hansard (the extensive official record of the UK House of Commons) for the first mention of any word or phrase. Inevitably I went straight to Dreamcast – but nothing. The first mention of Sega, however, …
Games Asylum is 15 years old this weekend, which means we can finally watch Die Hard. Yippee ki-yay indeed, melon farmers. Much has changed since 2001, so to wish ourselves a very bloody happy birthday, here are eight things that didn’t exist 15 years ago when we started this nonsense. 1. Motion control The first …
It’s easy to forget that there were four months between the American and European Xbox launches. US gamers gained their black beast on 15th November 2001, while we Europeans had to wait until 14th March 2002. The wait wasn’t an entirely bad thing – a few more games were added to the line-up, and it …
With the third Xbox being unveiled this evening, it seems like a good time to look back at how Microsoft approached launching the first – over a decade ago now. The tagline ‘Play More’ is well-remembered, mainly thanks to the Champagne TV ad. The print campaign was just as unusual, but has been largely forgotten. …
The humble video game controller has gone through a lot of changes over the years. Compare the NES pad to the Wii remote, and you could argue that it’s come full circle. But there have been plenty of evolutionary dead ends along the way. Here are five we left behind. Original Xbox controller The original …
Owning a rare game is one thing; owning a sealed version of a rare game is quite another. But to own something that was never commercially available to the public? That’s taking collecting to the extreme. Plenty of things only available to industry insiders have been sold on eBay recently. A good example is this …
The philosophy of a video game corporation nowadays is that if a game doesn’t prove to be popular, then all support and everything to do with it should be dropped like a hot potato, and attention focused elsewhere. This sort of thinking only started around ten years ago, when budgets for video games began to …
The web made a step towards being a whole lot bigger yesterday, when ICANN revealed the full list of potential new generic top-level domains – because .com is terribly 1985. Sony have gone for .playstation, .xperia and .sony. Microsoft are after a handful, including .microsoft, .xbox and .live – giving them the option of both …
The discovery of a new Sonic game on an old Xbox development kit caused a bit of commotion on the internet recently because, well, it’s a Sonic game. It’s no shame Sonic Extreme was canned though. As this video shows, hedgehogs and skateboards don’t mix. Another unreleased Xbox game has since surfaced too, and not …
The title explains it all, really, here are five things that annoy me about my 360. Firstly… …The inconsistent stupidness of it all. The 360 can play DivX when I share my media through the cumbersome Windows Media Player, but the nice Windows Media Centre interface won’t play DivX at all. This is stupid. I …