1UP's Game Music Thunderdome: Vote for the Greatest Music of All Time

64 tracks enter, one track leaves. Vote for your favorites every day!

By: 1UP Staff December 14, 2011

Be sure to read about and listen to the current contenders before voting!

Mid-Game Super Boss, Round 1

1UP's Game Music Thunderdome: Vote for the Greatest Music of All Time

64 tracks enter, one track leaves. Vote for your favorites every day!

By: 1UP Staff December 14, 2011

Be sure to read about and listen to the current contenders before voting!

Soaring Strings

10 Years Later: How GameCube and Xbox Defined The Current Gen

PlayStation 2 may have dominated last generation, but its competitors set the stage for this one.

By: Jeremy Parish November 16, 2011

No one would challenge the claim that Sony's PlayStation 2 was the decisive victor of the sixth generation of consoles, that nebulous post-32/64-bit era that never lent itself to an easily applied label. Not only was the PS2 the best-selling contender last generation, it remains the best-selling console ever, having moved more than 150 million systems worldwide and an unbelievable 1.5 billion pieces of software. Combined, its competitors -- Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube, both of which debuted within days of one another back in November 2001 -- didn't even manage half of that.

The PS2 achieved a near-NES-level rout, dominating the market and forcing the competition to scramble to find other strategies. Yet where the NES had a clear successor in the Super NES, in many ways the PlayStation 3 feels like a follow-up in name only. Few of the series that defined last generation's most popular console have much traction these days, or else they've gone multiplatform. PS2 overwhelmed its rivals through a combination of perfect timing, a diverse but focused feature set, and a competitive price; PS3 blew what should have been a strong launch with a soft lineup and an excessively high price made necessary by Sony's desire to make it an all-in-one media center -- and in its quest to "only do everything," the PS3 has never really defined what it does best. Five years later, the system is hardly a failure; rather, it's essentially splitting the market with Microsoft's Xbox 360, which is a far cry from the total domination both of its predecessors enjoyed. Meanwhile, neither can hope to match the lifetime sales of Nintendo's Wii, the little white box that became a dark horse juggernaut.

Lara Croft and the Reinvention of Game Heroes

How Tomb Raider changed games, and why its leading lady still matters 15 years later.

By: Jeremy Parish October 22, 2011

A woman sits on a boxy sofa in a hotel. It's meant to be a classy Calcutta hotel from colonial days, but the decor is very Silicon Valley circa the mid-'90s: Simple polygonal shapes make up the columns and furniture, and harsh lighting breaks the room into clearly demarcated spaces of shadow and light. The camera rotates around the the center of the room as it zooms in and descends, bringing the checkered floor -- the hallmark cliché of early 3D modeling -- into clearer view.

A robotic man glides toward the divan and its occupant as the point of view comes around. He lobs something onto the coffee table before her: A magazine, which glides to its resting point with no sense of inertia. On the cover is a photo of the woman to whom the magazine has been presented, captured in the act of riddling a massive yeti with bullets.

Castlevania Chronicles: We've Been Killing Dracula for 25 Years

Looking back at a quarter-century of (mostly) greatness.

By: Jeremy Parish September 25, 2011

Twenty-five years ago, on September 26, 1986, Konami launched a brand new game in Japan that would go on to become one of the longest continuously running franchises in the medium's history. Akumajou Dracula -- roughly translating to "Demon Castle Dracula," which became "Castlevania" in the West in accordance with Konami's weird obsession with pun-laden localization in the '80s -- was actually two different games on two different platforms. The better-known of the two was a straight-up action platformer for Famicom Disk System, the rewritable NES add-on released only in Japan. On the MSX computer, on the other hand, Akumajou Dracula featured the same general play mechanics and aesthetics as its FDS counterpart but wrapped them in a more labyrinthine format, compensating for the MSX's lack of smooth video scrolling by turning its castle stages into self-contained mazes.

Castlevania was a different kind of game than players were accustomed to, especially on Famicom. Unlike so many of the other platformers that had followed in the wake of Super Mario Bros.' success (Mario having launched on Famicom almost a year to the day before Akumajou Dracula), Konami's game was slow-paced, methodical, and possessed a fairly realistic ambiance. The hero, Simon Belmondo (Belmont in the West), was proportioned like an actual human adult. Japanese games of the era tended to warp the proportions of characters to give their faces more real estate and allow for cute, visually expressive designs. Simon had a tiny four-pixel face with no details, his characterization instead coming through his determined gait and unique method of attack. The Vampire Killer whip was an uncommon choice for any video game protagonist outside of Indiana Jones, striking a middle-range balance between fists and guns. The game's unconventional look, pacing, and weaponry set it apart from its peers.

How to Survive the Fallout Apocalypse

Reality Check: How real are your walks through the wastes?

By: Steve Watts June 30, 2011

The Fallout series is a gritty and darkly humorous set of tales about a world gone wrong. We've taken several treks through the massive wastelands, meeting interesting characters and forging our own legends. But would the world even be livable after such a widespread attack, and would humanity really be able to work together and trust each other after such devastation? To find out, we talked to two experts in their fields: Dr. Curtis Miyamoto, chairperson of the radiation oncology department at Temple University School of Medicine; and Dr. Karen Cerulo, chair of the sociology department at Rutgers University.

In very general terms, Dr. Miyamoto says the world would be livable. "Most of the isotopes would be gone and the half-life would have expired, so they would be safe," Miyamoto told 1UP. Most major fallout products have relatively a short half-life as compared to the dozens of years before vault-dwellers explore the wastes.