GameSpite.net – Verbal Spew

GameSpite isn’t just a website wasting electricity so hundreds of people can read about video games daily. Oh no! It’s also a series of self-published books wasting trees for hundreds of people as well.

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As Issue 6 explored the other side of Issue 2′s topic, so does Issue 7 bring with it an alternate perspective on Issue 3. Where once we celebrated the greatest heroes of the 8-bit era, so now do we lament the vile excesses of its worst villains. Nearly 90 different write-ups explore the cruel tyranny inflicted by tiny sprites of bygone days, from well-known enemies of freedom like Bowser, Ganon, and the Space Invaders to Ernie Alligator, Dr. Venom, and those damnable ninja-hating birds that showed up in every single 8-bit game ever made. Also in this book: half a dozen good old-fashioned game critiques, because man cannot live on tongue-in-cheek biographies of video game bad guys alone.

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GameSpite’s sixth quarterly edition sees our intrepid writers focusing on the flip side of the topic covered in GameSpite Quarterly 2: the games that didn’t make the cut as “greatest ever,” but which nevertheless deserve more love. These selections, chosen by the plucky denizens of Talking Time, range from the well-known (Final Fantasy X-2) to the esoteric (E.V.O., anyone?) to the utterly despised (why hello there, Unlimited Saga). They span back as far as the early NES era (Super Mario Bros. 2) and reach all the way into 2010 (Deadly Premonition). The one thing uniting these selections is that we think they deserve more love than the world at large has lavished upon them. And, also, that we wrote a series of insightful articles about them.

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Nintendo’s industry-changing NES debuted in American way back in October of 1985, and nearly everyone who contributes to GameSpite Quarterly was influenced by the system in some way. To mark the occasion, we’ve published the biggest volume of GameSpite Quarterly ever — it’s literally as many pages as we’re allowed to publish! GameSpite Quarterly 5 is 440 pages of NES memories, tributes, retrospectives, historical notations, and other assorted things that you wouldn’t think a bunch of adults would spend time writing about a video game system. But, well, you’d be wrong.

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Unlike other issues of the publication, GameSpite Quarterly 4 doesn’t have an overarching historical or critical theme (aside from an unintentional focus on role-playing games). The open-ended nature of this book resulted in a sort of free-form collection of essays on a vast range of topics, all generally focused around the unique design elements that define the titles under the microscope here. From classic adventure games to the vanishing space shooter, from NES obscurities to modern blockbusters like Mass Effect 2, GSQ4 looks at the traits and mechanics that make or break a wide variety of games.

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A ridiculously comprehensive, though not entirely scholarly, compendium of the heroes of 8-bit videogames. Yeah, we have your Marios and your Belmonts, but also your WInkys and your Chuckie Eggs. We’re pretty much all over the place.

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The 40 greatest* games of all time! The asterisk denotes the fact that these selections were voted on by the members of Talking Time and may or may not reflect your own opinion. At the very least, though, each article makes a damn good case for that game’s inclusion on the list.

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Celebrate 20 years of Nintendo’s groundbreaking Game Boy handheld with the debut issue of GameSpite Quarterly! It’s retrospecterrific.