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UPDATED 9/27/16: The visual evolution of racing games is varied, with many off-shoots and constant improvements. Since this article first appeared, we've added two more entries to the list.
Today's beautifully rendered racing games, with their licensed cars and amazing attention to detail, are a continuation of one of gaming's oldest genres. Back in 1974, Taito's Speed Race featured black and white graphics of a blocky on a vertically scrolling road. Interest in the genre meant racing games were able to evolve with gaming since the very beginning, with breakthroughs coming with each console generation.
As was the case for most games, the best graphics could be found in the arcades. Sit-down multiplayer cabinets and gearshifts, steering wheels, and pedals added further to the realism. However, as the price of advanced hardware fell, so did interest in arcades. Eventually the home console experience would reach parity with the arcade experience. While capturing the "feel" of driving is something that was best done in an arcade cabinet designed to simulate a car seat, today's racing games easily match the graphical fidelity once only found in the most advanced and expensive arcade games.
Click on the right arrow in the slideshow below, or scroll down to see each game.
This black-and-white top-down racer was Atari's 1974 entry into the world of racing games. The beastly cabinet weighed over 400 pounds and the graphics were extremely limited, as can be seen. The white dots trace the borders of the track, and players must avoid hitting the dots with their steering-wheel controlled car sprite.
Night Driver was notable because it was the first driving game to feature a behind-the-car view, something that would become common in racing games and would eventually lead to first-person and dashboard views. If you squint a little you can almost see how the 2600 graphics approximate the thrills of driving after the sun goes down.
Rally X from Namco was a top down, multi-directional racing game with multiple paths and opposing racers. The object was to race through the streets collecting flags and avoiding contact with other cars. It also featured a "radar" and a finite fuel supply.
This Namco arcade racer was one of the most influential racing games of all time. It was so popular that it even spawned a Saturday morning cartoon. The bright, third-person view graphics and smoothness of motion set the standard for racing games. The 2600 version of the game looked typical of 2600 arcade ports, but still managed to do a sort-of decent approximation.
SEGA's Hang On took the third person view of arcade racers and substituted a motorcycle for a race car. Even cooler, the arcade cabinet was controlled by a motorcycle controller players would sit on and use to lean into turns. It featured SEGA's "Super Scaler" sprite technology, along with gorgeous, colorful 16-bit sprites.
Rare Ltd. developed the 3/4 view radio-controlled racer for the Nintendo Entertainment System known as RC Pro-Am was one of many racing games that would come to the NES. The tracks weren't contained to one static screen, but rather scrolled along with the cars.
Hard Drivin' was one of the first racers to feature polygonal graphics. The driving was true to its name, and the home version could have easily been called "Impossible Drivin'." The relatively simple polygons of the time still required an awful lot of the SEGA Genesis console, and most players spent their time either trying to run over the low-res cow or crashing as spectacularly as possible.
Super Mario Kart for the Super NES spawned a hugely successful series of games, as well as clones and knock-offs. Using the Super Nintendo's "Mode 7 scaling" to simulate movement along a three-dimensional plane (a technique used expertly in F-Zero for SNES, as well), Super Mario Kart brought Nintendo's Mario characters out of the side-scrolling world of the Mushroom Kingdom and into the high-paced world of kart racing.
Considering it's been off the air since 2011, October is a surprisingly busy month for Smallville. On October 1st, the entire series was released on Hulu, marking the first time Smallville was ever available to stream in the US. And on October 16th, Smallville celebrates its 15th anniversary, with the show beginning its 10-year, 217-episode run on that date in 2001.
With all that in mind, we're taking a look back at the 25 best episodes of the series and its depiction of a young Clark Kent (Tom Welling) going from a freshman in high school to finally taking on the mantle of Superman. Smallville evolved a lot over the decade it was on the air -- and went from the WB to the CW -- as Clark graduated, made new friends and began to encounter many more superheroes and villains.
So let's look back at those days when we all wanted "Somebody to Save Me."
The second meteor shower to hit Smallville brought with it a mysterious ship from Krypton that delivers two Disciples of Zod: Mam-Ek and Aethyr. While they search for Kal-El, the citizens of Smallville are still recovering from the destructive force of the shower. Clark however finds himself at the newly constructed Fortress of Solitude which Jor-El informs him is similar to the geography of Krypton, making it suitable for training. Too bad Clark loses his powers after making a rather silly agreement with Jor-El.
The spaceship that the Disciples of Zod arrived on holds another dark secret that make this episode memorable. From within emerges the Brain InterActive Construct, AKA BRAINIAC!
After seasons of Clark beating around the bush, he finally revealed who and what he is to Lana Lang in the Season 6 finale. Sure, Lana had pretty much pieced everything together by that point but it was important for Clark Kent to man up and tell her everything. If he had done it earlier, their relationship likely would have turned out much better.
"Phantom" also featured a great cliffhanger that saw all three of Clark's female confidants -- Lana, Lois and Chloe -- apparently dying at certain points towards the end of the episode, while the final moments reveal one of Clark's more fun villains, Bizarro!
Clark Kent buys an expensive class ring that just happens to have a piece of red kryptonite rock at its center. With the red kryptonite unleashing his rebellious side for the first time, Clark starts defying the rules, telling off the principal and dating the hot new girl in school. We've seen Clark be evil so many times over the course of the series but there is something special about the very first "Red" kryptonite episode. Even back in the early part of the series Welling did a great job portraying bad boy Clark.
Clark's relationship with his natural father had been tumultuous to say the least. The voice-in-the-Fortress that had acted as mentor to Clark seemed to torment the young Kryptonian rather than teach him. Often stealing Clark's powers and then lecturing him on not embracing his heritage, Jor-El was more a pain in the butt than a guiding voice. "Kandor" gives Clark an opportunity to meet his father face-to-face. We learn a lot about young Jor-El's relationship with Major Zod and his motives for creating Smallville's version of the Bottled City of Kandor.
The cloned version of Jor-El meets present day Clark briefly, just before passing away. This impacts Clark as he has to suffer the loss of a father once more and it shapes his relationship with Major Zod throughout the rest of the season.
With Lana Lang and Lex Luthor gone from the series, "Odyssey" was the start of a new chapter for Smallville. To usher in this new chapter, Clark got some help from a few friends, as Green Arrow, Aquaman, Black Canary and Martian Manhunter all make appearances in the Season 8 premiere. While, this episode is saddled with having Clark powerless for a portion of the episode, it does highlight the importance of the rest of the future Justice League. The episode concludes with Martian Manhunter flying Clark Kent towards the sun in hopes that the Last Son of Krypton will regain his powers. In the process, Manhunter sacrifices his own abilities. While lacking Lex and Lana, this exciting new chapter in Clark's journey looked to be every bit as exciting.
Continue on for episodes 20-16...
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HBO’s new show Westworld is shaping up to be another in the cable net’s long line of great dramas, though interestingly the Jonathan Nolan/Lisa Joy-produced sci-fi series is not a new concept. In fact, the tale of a theme park populated by robots is just the latest incarnation of an idea that has already been made into two movies and a short-lived TV show over the years. It also bears mentioning that a different -- if hugely popular -- franchise was surely informed by Westworld on some level… Jurassic Park.
So with the new Westworld about to make its debut on HBO, let’s take a look back at the previous versions of this classic sci-fi story. Draw!
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Westworld was originally based on a book, since the story did spring from the mind of popular genre author Michael Crichton. Crichton was a Harvard Medical School grad whose sci-fi novel The Andromeda Strain, about an extra-terrestrial virus that threatens to wipe out mankind, was made into a film in 1971. That best-selling book had really put Crichton on the map, and he soon revealed a keen interest in filmmaking in addition to writing.
With Crichton’s mind-control tale the Terminal Man also in the works as a movie, the writer conceived the idea of Westworld for his feature-directing debut. It’s the story of a futuristic vacation spot where the robot “inhabitants” are nearly identical to the human guests, and where those guests can live out their wildest fantasies as a character in the Old West (or Medieval times or Ancient Rome)… before things go horribly wrong, of course. Interestingly enough, Crichton didn’t think the idea worked as book, however.
Poster for the original Westworld
“The actual detailing of these three worlds -- and also the kinds of fantasies that people experienced in them -- were movie fantasies, and because they were movie fantasies, they got to be very strange-looking on the written page,” said the late author. “They weren’t things that had literal antecedents, literary antecedents. They were things that had antecedents in John Ford and John Wayne and Errol Flynn -- that sort of thing.”
The resulting film is a delight for fans of early ’70s sci-fi, even if it is so very, very 1970s. Set in the not-too-distant future, the film stars Richard Benjamin and James Brolin (yep, Josh’s dad) as friends who take a vacation to the Delos amusement park, where they get to play cowboy and do all the fun stuff you’d expect from an old Western… at the cost of a thousand dollars a day. That includes saloon brawls, canoodling with the local ladies, and of course gunfights. Specifically, the guys encounter Yul Brynner, who plays the most memorable robot in the film, known only as the Gunslinger. This fantasy setting takes up the first chunk of the movie, but as mom used to say, it’s all fun and games until the robots start killing everyone.
Early digital image processing was used to create the robot POV in Westworld.
Despite the relatively low-budget production, Westworld still works well as a cautionary tale about technology run amuck, a musing on the nature of AI, and a wish-fulfillment yarn -- not only do our stars get to be pretend cowboys, but we also see secondary characters becoming knights and adventurers in the other worlds, while our more base impulses regarding violence and sexual adventuring are deemed totally legit because, well, you’re just dealing with robots after all. In a twist on traditional roles, the square-jawed Brolin is gunned down abruptly before the final showdown, leaving Benjamin’s Everyman as the anti-action hero -- a nebbishy, pornstache-sporting nice guy who finds himself on the run from Brynner’s killer robot. The Gunslinger is in many ways a forerunner to James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, with its single-minded determination, steady but unwavering pace, and glowing eyes, as much as it is an ode to Brynner’s classic Western identity from The Magnificent Seven. The film was also reportedly the first use of digital image processing in a Hollywood movie -- the robot POV was modified to look pixelated.
Read on for more, including the movie sequel Futureworld, the short-lived TV show Beyond Westworld... and the Jurassic Park connection!
ContinuesSkyrim’s composer Jeremy Soule isn’t a fan of the upcoming concert for the game.
To celebrate the October launch of Skyrim Special Edition for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, Bethesda announced a live orchestral Skyrim concert to be performed in London’s Palladium theater. Tickets go on sale on October 4. But, Soule took to Facebook to reveal he wasn’t aware of the concert, and advises potential attendees to be "wary" of it.
He claims the orchestra won’t be using any of his original scores. Instead, the performers had to transcribe the notations they are performing by ear, which Soule calls a "flawed process" that’s "fraught with errors."
The composer confirmed that he doesn’t know anyone who will be part of the event, and won’t "endorse a concert that is trading on my name and music that has absolutely no oversight or involvement on my part."
IGN has reached out to Bethesda for comment.
Alex Gilyadov is a freelance writer based in New York. You can follow him on Twitter.
October is another big TV premiere month. The CW debuts its entire fall slate, including all four of their DC Comics shows (with Supergirl jumping over from CBS), while both Ash vs. Evil Dead and The Walking Dead are among the cable season premieres. Plus, HBO's long-awaited Westworld is here and much more.
Airs On: Starz
Premiere: 10/02/16
Ash vs Evil Dead returns for more wisecracks and gore as Bruce Campbell's Ash is called back into the battle against dark forces after Lucy Lawless' Ruby fails to control the demons she gained power over at the end of Season 1. TV icon Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man, The Fall Guy) joins the cast this year as Ash's crusty, cagey father.
We had some great conversations with the Ash vs. Evil Dead stars at Comic-Con:
Airs On: Starz
Premiere: 10/02/16
Patrick Stewart returns for Season 2 of Starz's outrageous Blunt Talk (hailing from Jonathan Ames and Seth MacFarlane) as Walter Blunt, a British newscaster who's trying to conquer American nightly cable news despite his very notably personal failings.
Airs On: Showtime
Premiere: 10/02/16
Willam H. Macy's Frank (barely) survives his plunge into the icy Chicago river while Emmy Rossum's Fiona tries to improve her life by dedicating herself to to managing Patsy’s as Showtime's Shamless enters its seventh season - and gets an early return in the fall, as it swaps its usual January debut slot with Homeland.
Airs On: HBO
Premiere: 10/02/16
Created by The Dark Knight/Person of Interest's Jonathan Nolan and Burn Notice's Lisa Joy, Westworld is based on the 1973 sci-fi classic about a futuristic Old West retreat populated with A.I. robots who exist to be at the beck and call of the theme park's paying guests. The stellar cast features Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Shannon Woodward, Jimmi Simpson and Thandie Newton.
Airs On: ABC
Premiere: 10/03/16
In Conviction, Agent Carter's Hayley Atwell stars as a brilliant lawyer and former First Daughter who gets blackmailed into heading the Conviction Integrity Unit, a department that re-examines cases where there is credible suspicion of wrongful conviction. X-Men's Shawn Ashmore, The Walking Dead's Emily Kinney, and CSI: NY's Eddie Cahill also star.
Airs On: NBC
Premiere: 10/03/16
From The Shield's Shawn Ryan and Supernatural's Eric Kripke comes a time travel adventure series featuring a history professor (Abigail Spencer), a soldier (Matt Lanter) and a scientist (Malcolm Barrett) who team up to stop a criminal (Goran Visnjic) from altering history.
We spoke to the cast about what to expect:
Airs On: CW
Premiere: 10/04/16
The famous DC Comics Flashpoint storyline is speeding our way as Barry's choice to alter the past at the end of Season 2 creates a completely changed present-day world. Big bads this year include Doctor Alchemy (voiced by Tobin Bell) and the speedster villains Savitar and The Rival (Todd Lasance).
Learn more about The Flash: Season 3 from our chats with the cast:
Airs On: CW
Premiere: 10/04/16
Tori Anderson and Galavant's Joshua Sasse star in this new series about a woman who becomes involved with a free-spirited guy who inspires her to make an "apocalyst," a list of things to do before the world ends - which he claims is coming in just eight months and twelve days.
We spoke to Sasse and Anderson about this unusual concept for a romantic comedy:
Airs On: CW
Premiere: 10/05/16
Forced to rebuild, Oliver, torn between his responsibilities as mayor and secret city savior, tries to turn vigilantes into a new team of heroes in Arrow: Season 5. Plus, Dolph Lundgren and The Walking Dead's Chad Coleman join the mix as villains, with Coleman playing gangster Tobias Church and Lundgren playing a Russian heavy in the flashback arc.
The cast of Arrow gives IGN all the Season 3 scoop here:
Airs On: CW
Premiere: 10/05/16
In this reboot of the Dennis Quaid/Jim Caviezel movie from 2000, Peyton List (The Tomorrow People, The Flash) stars as a New York cop, Raimy Sullivan, who discovers that she is able to speak to her deceased cop father, Frank (Riley Smith), by ham radio.
Airs On: Netflix
Premiere: 10/07/16
The back half -- 10 additional episodes -- of The Ranch's first season lands on Netflix this fall, with Ashton Kutcher as a former high school and college football star who has returned home to run the family business with his brother (Danny Masterson) and father (Sam Elliot).
Airs On: HBO
Premiere: 10/09/16
Sarah Jessica Parker returns to HBO in the new comedy series, Divorce, as Frances, a woman who suddenly begins to reassess her life and her marriage, and finds that making a clean break and a fresh start is harder than she thought. Also starring Thomas Haden Church and Molly Shannon.
Airs On: HBO
Premiere: 10/09/16
The 8-episode comedy series Insecure, starring Issa Rae, Yvonne Orji, Jay Ellis and Lisa Joyce, looks at the friendship, experiences and tribulations of two black women. Rae created the series with Larry Wilmore.
Airs On: CW
Premiere: 10/10/16
Supergirl's Season 2 switch from CBS to the CW doesn't just bring with it an automatic inclusion into the mega-crossover universe (or multiverse, to be more specific) that CW has going right now, but also Superman himself. Yes, instead of remaining off screen the way he did back in the first season, Kara's cousin Kal-El will actually enter the fray in the first two episodes, played by Teen Wolf's Tyler Hoechlin.
We spoke to the cast of Supergirl, including Hoechlin, at San Diego Comic-Con:
Airs On: ABC
Premiere: 10/10/16
Katie Otto (Mike and Molly's Katy Mixon), a confident, unapologetic wife and mother of three, raises her flawed family in the wealthy town of Westport, Connecticut, filled with “perfect” mommies and their “perfect” offspring.
Continue on for more October debuts, including the return of Legends of Tomorrow, Supernatural and The Walking Dead.
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The tragic story of Cornell Stokes.
Full spoilers for Luke Cage's seventh episode continue below.
So I was a little wrong and a lot right about the way Luke Cage would handle its villains. Cottonmouth's incarceration lasted about as long as it took to load up a new episode of the Netflix show, proving that Luke's big win lacked a lot of punch. But much like episode 4 (my second favorite of the season so far) offered an inside look into the origin of Luke Cage, episode 7 gave us a deeper understanding of why Cornell and Mariah are who they are.
One of my favorite elements of the show that I plan to get into deeper in the full season review is showrunner Cheo Coker's use of music. We frequently catch up with Cottonmouth as he's vetting performers for his club, and more often than not those sequences are intercut with big action. Instead of just being the soundtrack of the show, the music is part of its DNA, just like we find out it's a part of Cornell's. He should have gone to Juilliard; he has the soul of a musician, not a killer. It's been bugging me throughout the season how ineffective Cottonmouth has been as a big bad despite all his bluster, and finally we find out definitively that it's because he really isn't cut out for this type of work.
Cornell Stokes sees himself as a Biggie, as evidenced by the fact that he has a massive painting of the late rapper hanging in his office and the frequent framing of shots to show him as wearing Biggie's crown. But it's something that never fit comfortably on him; both he and Mariah are plagued by the legacy of Mama Mabel, a legacy that neither of them fully wanted to carry. Those flashbacks and the non-linear manner in which they were rolled out was some of the most effective storytelling of the season, and when Mariah finally dealt the killing blow, I was shocked even though her ascension to power has been pretty well choreographed.
Legacy is a big part of the Cornell storyline. For Cornell, he wanted to be the same type of gangster he idealized in the Notorious B.I.G. For Mariah, she wanted to leave behind a better Harlem. But both of them tried to do so by ignoring their own legacy, and sweep the darkness of Mama Mable under the rug. Mable's biggest lesson to them was that family is most important, always, but she said that after she made Cornell kill his uncle, and after letting Pete abuse his niece for an indefinite period of time. That lesson was tainted from the start, and it culminated in the way it fractured when Cornell and Mariah were at their lowest.
While that's compelling enough on its own, Shades' involvement in facilitating it, in knowing the anger brooding beneath Mariah's surface and the way Cottonmouth was lacking, added an interesting complication. Theo Rossi has been delivering a quiet performance all season, but it's clear there's much more to him than what we've seen. He's a conduit for bigger things to come, and the moment Cornell overstepped too much was when he stepped in. Is this still Diamondback pulling strings behind the scenes, or is this Shades working on his own? And with Cornell dead, who was the person who hired the gunman at the end of the episode?
Partway through the episode it seemed like Luke's biggest threat was Cornell's threat that he would send "Carl Lucas" back to Seagate, but with Cottonmouth dead at Mariah's hand that now seems to be neutralized. Still, Shades and Diamonback have the same option if they want to get Luke back behind bars, and Misty Knight and the Harlem PD seem like they're on the right track to figuring out who "Luke Cage" really is. But the more pressing threat is the bulletproof superhero is no longer bulletproof halfway through Season 1. Lucky for him there's a helpful and capable nurse standing right next to him (one who has a "lawyer friend," no less), but unlucky for him there's a whole mess of people who would like to use his new vulnerability to take him down.
The Verdict
In Luke Cage's best episode yet, the veil gets drawn back on Cornell Stokes and Mariah Dillard to some tragic results. It's a credit to stars Mahershala Ali and Alfre Woodard and director Andy Goddard that the reveals with these characters were so effective. Cottonmouth's death was especially well-choreographed and acted, so it came across as a surprise even as it was inevitable.
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