Blog Posts by Mike Smith

Pokemon Black/White

Platforms: DS

Gotta catch 'em all! Love 'em or hate 'em, one thing about Pokemon is undeniable: it's still popular. Second only to Mario as the best-selling video game franchise
of all time, in fact. And if you assumed the craze would die out by the time its original fans hit puberty, you thought wrong. Pokemon Black and White, which hit streets over the weekend on the Nintendo DS, are already the fastest-selling Pokemon games of all time.

Not bad for a craze that's just about old enough to drive -- and judging by the widespread acclaim for Black and White, it's a situation that's not about to change. A number of critics have even dubbed the pair (major Pokemon releases come as a duo of

What could be more American than pinball? A true twentieth-century cultural icon, pinball probably conjures images of Happy Days, 50s diners, and rock opera Tommy -- but perhaps t ought to make you think of ruff-clad European aristocrats, too.

Bagatelle - Nikki Tysoe Bagatelle, one of the many games that inspired pinball, is first recorded not in a cheery amusement park, but at a party attended by France's Louis XVI, in 1777, at a
Parisian chateau. Played on an inclined seven-foot board covered in pins and holes, bagatelle isn't very different from today's pinball tables, minus the
complex electronics. Players launched their balls from the bottom end of the board using long, pool cue-like sticks, aiming to land

Red Tide - Photo: Andrea Swenson Dunlap A publicity stunt intended to advertise upcoming shooter Homefront ended up backfiring this week when 10,000 red balloons, released by publisher THQ into the San Francisco skies, wound up in the waters of the Bay itself, angering local environmentalists.

Scheduled for release on March 15, Homefront takes place in 2027, and sees a belligerent and heavily armed North Korean army invades the mainland of the United States. The balloons were released in a mock protest against the game's fictional North Korean regime, and coincided with this week's Game Developers Conference taking place in downtown San Francisco.

But what goes up, must come down -- and thanks to San Francisco's notoriously

Fight Night: Champion

Platforms: X360, PS3

Fight Night: a knockout

Already an established brand with many fighting game fans, the latest Fight Night game, Champion, launches this week, with the addition of a bold innovation for a fighting game: a storyline. It follows protagonist (and
pugilist) Andre Bishop as he struggles through the boxing ranks, going from chump to champ in a five-hour tale that's captivated many critics. Praise for the plot of a fighting game? You better believe it.

It's enough to earn it top marks, from Game Revolution, for one. Despite coming in a sceptic, Jesse Costantino says Fight Night Champion's storyline "succeeds where so many other sports games before it have failed." It blends

Playing cards - Morguefile Four suits.
Fifty-two cards. Twelve face cards. You might take the make-up of a modern deck
of playing cards for granted, but behind its familiar conventions lurk
somewhere around 1,200 years of history -- and plenty of questions. We plumbed
its depths for some answers.

Where does the Joker come from?

If you answered, "He was a small-time criminal who Batman threw into a vat of toxic waste," this is probably not the article for you. And unless you're playing canasta or gin
rummy, you're likely used to discarding these two oddballs without a moment's
thought.

So how did the two Jokers -- which don't fit into any of the deck's other conventions -- come to be?

They're by far the newest cards

Online gambling: legal soon? Fans of Internet-based casino and card games
could be in for a big win in 2011.

Ever since a 2006 law effectively outlawed
online gambling, they've been marginalized, either turning to pretend-money
alternatives, quitting altogether, or relying on dicey workarounds to avoid the
long arm of the law. But rumors of an upcoming bipartisan effort to legalize
the industry -- and bring it under the watchful eye of the federal government
-- have given online gamblers new hope.

Strictly speaking, online gambling isn't
actually illegal under federal law, although several states (such as New York,
Washington, and Nevada) have banned it for their residents. Instead, the 2006
federal law (bizarrely

Online games through the years

From longtime kingpin World of Warcraft to new-boy-wonder-on-the-block DC Universe Online, massively-multiplayer online worlds have never been more popular. But they're far from a new concept; tech-savvy escapists have been creating immersive multi-user playlands for as long as there have been computers. Not only are online games much, much older than Warcraft, they're even older than the Internet itself -- and the first one ever is quite possibly older than you.

Best-selling Brain Games

In retrospect, it seems so obvious: a set of quick brain-teasers linked together with an intuitive way to measure how your performance has changed over time. But who could have predicted Nintendo's Brain Age would go on to become one of the biggest successes of its generation? We look back at the game that defined the Nintendo DS for many consumers -- and the best-sellers it inspired.