Boss Fight Books – serie

Terra the magical half-human. Shadow the mysterious assassin. Celes the tough, tender general. Kefka the fool who would be god. Each of the many unforgettable characters in Final Fantasy VI has made a huge impression on a generation of players, but why do we feel such affection for these 16-bit heroes and villains as so many others fade? The credit goes to the game's score, composed by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu. Armed with newly translated interviews and an expert ear for sound, writer and musician Sebastian Deken conducts a critical analysis of the musical structures of FF6, the game that pushed the Super Nintendo's sound capabilities to their absolute limits and launched Uematsu's reputation as the “Beethoven of video game music.” Deken ventures deep into the game's lush soundscape—from its expertly crafted leitmotifs to its unforgettable opera sequence—exploring the soundtrack's lasting influence and how it helped clear space for game music on classical stages around the world.

Bond—James Bond. In the 80s and 90s, the debonair superspy's games failed to live up to the giddy thrills of his films. That all changed when British studio Rare unleashed GoldenEye 007 in 1997. In basements and college dorms across the world, friends bumped shoulders while shooting, knifing, exploding, and slapping each other's digital faces in the Nintendo 64 game that would redefine the modern first-person shooter genre and become the most badass party game of its generation.But GoldenEye's success was far from a sure thing. For years of development, GoldenEye's team of rookie developers were shooting in the dark with no sense of what the N64 or its controller would be like, and the game's relentless violence horrified higher-ups at squeaky clean Nintendo. As development lagged far behind the debut of the tie-in film GoldenEye, the game nearly came out an entire Bond movie too late.Through extensive interviews with GoldenEye's creators, writer and scholar Alyse Knorr traces the story of how this unlikely licensed game reinvigorated a franchise and a genre. Learn all the stories behind how this iconic title was developed, and why GoldenEye 007 has continued to kick the living daylights out of every other Bond game since.

Six years after helping the Edison family defeat the designs of a malevolent meteor in Maniac Mansion, college student and classic nerd Bernard Bernoulli once again finds himself at the front door of the infamous mansion. With two weird friends, Hoagie and Laverne, Bernard must stop the evil Purple Tentacle from conquering the world—by freezing hamsters, pushing old ladies down the stairs, abusing Swiss bank accounts, and ever so slightly changing some of the most significant moments in American history.Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer's 1993 time-trotting point-and-click adventure game Day of the Tentacle brought LucasArts' game design to a new standard of excellence with smart puzzles, hilarious characters, and an animation style that harkened back to classic Warner Bros. cartoons. And somehow, they fit it all on a fat stack of floppy disks!In this definitive oral history as told by the game's designers, musicians, and artists, writer Bob Mackey tells the inside story of Day of the Tentacle's lightning-in-a-bottle production, and reveals how two first-time directors boiled down the lessons of past adventure games into a tight and satisfying game, and how the team grappled with evolving technology to achieve the coveted status of "multimedia" at the dawn of the CD-ROM age, and how a remastered edition brought Tentacle to a new generation of fans.

“You’re in our world now.” This bold tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest, the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer game. Though just five words long, it challenged players to live in a virtual world beyond anything they’d experienced before—and delivered. The game that proved the MMORPG’s potential, EverQuest outsold all prior entries in the genre and was the most popular subscription game in North America for five years until Blizzard’s World of Warcraft overthrew it. Yet EverQuest lives on, with tens of thousands of players logging in every day. Based on new interviews with EverQuest developers and veteran MMORPG developers, journalist Matthew S. Smith explores EverQuest's unlikely creation at a studio built to develop sports games, a rocky release which overwhelmed the game’s ill-prepared datacenter, the enticing game loops that placed EverQuest in a media firestorm around gaming addiction, and the real-money black market for EverQuest items that foretold the future of digital goods.

Its a beautiful day in the village, and you are a horrible goose, ready to wreak charming havoc on the weary locals. Youll ruin their gardens, invade their pub, and terrorize their children. What kind of scoundrels would make such a devious game? Before the critical acclaim, the tweets from celebrities, the major awards, the memes, the fan art, and the legion of players, Untitled Goose Game was just the goofy dream of House House, four friends in Melbourne, Australia. What began with a photo of a goose and the joking caption Lets make a game about this transformed into one of the wittiest and most stylish games of its generation. Through interviews with the creators and their co-conspirators, journalist and developer James OConnor tells the story of how this indie megahit came to be, revealing how the team succeeded by evolving their friendship into an art practice, contributing to the wider Australian game development scene, trusting their own good taste, and never, ever naming their game. Honk!!

Maybe its happened to you too. Youre talking to a friend about your favorite games, and their voice suddenly drops to a whisper. Have you played... Outer Wilds? When you ask what makes the game so special, their only response is a smile and a promise: Go play it. Youll see. After enough of these cryptic conversations, you finally try the gameand suddenly youre the one praising Outer Wilds to anyone who will listen. In this volume, novelist and escape room designer Tommy Wallach explains how a project that began as a USC students masters thesis ended up winning Game of the Year from Giant Bomb, Polygon, Eurogamer, and The Guardian. Along the way, hell discuss how Outer Wilds uses theme to reconcile the age-old battle between narrative and gameplay; how its unique form of knowledge-based gating spurs player curiosity; how it offers up true mystery without resorting to videogame-y puzzles; and how its spectacular DLC, Echoes of the Eye, remains true to the spirit of the base game while transforming its tone completely.

On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no characters, no story, no quests to fulfill or bosses to beat. What it had was a metal platform on which you were supposed to stand, put your feet into the right place at the right time, and dance. Join two music critics, long-ago players, and Sota Fujimori fans as they take you on the astonishing journey through the artists, influences, and innovators of Dance Dance Revolution, a game two and a half decades in the making and still going -- in homes, arcades, and expos. From its unexpected appearance to its social heyday to its reappearance in the American market, DDR has taken many forms -- not all of them sanctioned by Konami. It has spawned community, creativity, competition, lawsuits, 1,000+ songs that range from wacky to tacky to beautiful, and yes, a lot of dancing. While we were all leaning on the back bar, working up a sweat, DDR managed to change the world.

Despite its time travel mechanics, high stakes, and pulpy murder plot, Don't Nod Entertainment's 2015 adventure game Life is Strange stood out from most video games with its unapologetic emphasis on queer romance and friendships.Yet for all the game's specificity, players around the world found something of themselves in its protagonist, Max Caulfield, a perceptive yet insecure teen photographer who discovers she has the ability to rewind time itself.Narrative designer Kaitlin Tremblay offers an intimate close reading of Life is Strange through the lenses of personal history, YA fantasy, identity formation, grief, and most of all, choice. If Max is ';the sum of all the possible choices that she could make,' as Tremblay writes, then every decision we players make says something about who we areand who we want to be.