Articles

Pokemon X & Y was announced less than a week ago – and the only information available to the public is in the announcement trailer. Yet within hours of its release, the internet went to work creating an absurd amount of fan art based on the FIVE new Pokemon we were made aware of. They made stylized art, GIFs, theoretical evolutions, and more. Here is just a small sample of the impossible amount of fan art that the internet has created for a game that won't be out for another 9 months.

The Starters

(via)

(via)

Ever had a moment so nerdy that you needed to tell the Internet about it? Send your submissions to dorklypwnup at gmail.

I teach senior math at a high school and I wrote an exam question about a Bullymong's population growth and decline. Was very disappointed that no one mentioned "Vault Hunters" as a reason for the decline – everyone just did the work as they were supposed to.
-James

I once got into a fist fight and dislocated my wrist because my friend kept saying that Fire Emblem 11 was the only good Fire Emblem, and the rest were terrible games with terrible characters and story. Turned out it was actually just a prank – he only did it to annoy it. We haven't spoken since.
-Dan

When one of my Genesis controllers stopped working, I gave it a proper sendoff: I lowered it into a trash can while saluting and playing Exodus on my laptop.
-Joseph

Making a videogame is a huge undertaking – imagine trying to make a sandwich, except there's a team of 100 people working on the sandwich. There are writers, directors, programmers, designers, and executives, all with their own opinions and agendas on the sandwich (Should it have ham? What kind of bread should it use? Wait, what shape should the sandwich be?!), trying to merge their ideas into a singular, delicious… – okay, the sandwich metaphor isn't working (sorry, I haven't had anything to eat today). What it boils down to is that sometimes potentially great games get canceled because of the complexities involved bringing them from conception to a finished product. Here are 10 of the greatest canceled projects in videogame history.

10. Mario 128

After the release of Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64, fans were ready for whatever was next for the plucky plumber. After all – all previous Nintendo consoles had had multiple Mario games (not including Virtual Boy, because it would have been very difficult to develop a Mario game for the three weeks that was on the market). All was quiet for a long time – until Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's resident Gabe Newell, showed off something called Super Mario 128.

Super Mario 128 (which is 2× 64, to show you the level of title creativity Nintendo was comfortable with) was alternately described as a full-on sequel to Mario 64, a tech demo, and "a real cool lookin' thing" (by me). The demos Nintendo showed off showed Mario splitting into 128 versions of himself across a rotating sphere. Would the game deal with the moral gray area of cloning? Was it an allegory for overpopulation? Or was Nintendo getting super literal with the whole idea of Mario having multiple lives?

Sadly, we never found out. Regardless of its original intention, Super Mario 128 ended up being relegated as a tech demo – the tech was eventually featured in to Pikmin and Super Mario Galaxy, and the next actual Mario game we got was Super Mario Sunshine. Which was wholly satisfactory for about five minutes, at which point everyone wanted to know more about that 128 clone thing again.

Pokemon X & Y – the first fully 3D Pokémon games – were announced today for the Nintendo 3DS. Very little is known about the games beyond the new graphical engine – but one thing Nintendo did reveal was the identities of the three starter Pokemon in the game. Here they are below, with some additional information deduced by Dorkly's staff of Pokéresearchers.

Ever had a moment so nerdy that you needed to tell the Internet about it? Send your submissions to dorklypwnup at gmail.

My aunt sent me a text asking if I wanted "HALO cry Vegas" for Christmas.
-Nick

---

When I graduated, I took my diploma, held in the air in front of everyone and sung out-loud the "Zelda: found item" song clip.
-Brett

---

No matter what I do in my life, I feel that my greatest achievement will always be in Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door when I beat the Pit of 100 Trials before I had beaten Chapter 1.
-Riley M.

The launch of a console is terrifying. A beloved company could find itself dashed against the cold shoals of consumer culture, or exalted into everlasting greatness and high stock prices. You could end up sinking your hard-earned ~$300-400 into a big dusty brick to be boxed up with your broken VCR, or investing in a permanent fixture in dorms and apartments to come. But there, guiding you to safety like harbor buoys through a thick mist, there are the games launching alongside the console, and every now and then there comes a launch game so powerful, so potent, so perfect, it single-handedly justifies that day one impulse buy or that midnight launch line. Here're the 12 best console launch titles ever put out.

12. SSX (PS2)

Bright, bumping, and bold, SSX was a gauzy dream of a racing game, trading in the white-knuckled adrenaline of your Gran Turismo or your Mario Kart for a Zen-like downhill flow state, aided by dynamically shifting electronic music. The brilliance of SSX was that, at a certain point, the whole "racing" thing just falls away in your mind, and you become engulfed in floating through impossible topographies, borne on an infinite crystalline carpet, feeling the pulse of the world wash over you like a sonic ocean. I guess what I'm getting at is that SSX is basically just MDMA.

We live in an age where there's a lot of grousing and cynicism about the state of videogames – always-online DRM, DLC tactics, and a distinct lack of Half-Life 3 have left a lot of gamers with a sour taste in their mouth about this era of gaming. Yet this may be the greatest era for gaming we've ever known, for a number of reasons. 7 reasons, at least…

Reason #1: Everything Looks Incredible

There was probably some moment for everyone, around the time the Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo came out, where you saw some game with something your young, naive mind simply could not comprehend. Maybe it was the 3-D effect in F-Zero or the vectors in Vector Man (which must have been pretty good to name the game after them). Whatever it was, you thought to yourself "This is it. This is the pinnacle of graphics. They will never be able to achieve anything greater than this."

Of course, now we live in an age where this is possible (with the aid of a few mods):

We're at a precipitous point in graphical technology – it's so, so, so good that it's nearing something very close to realism. However, if it can't quite make the jump (and who knows whether it ever fully will), we're going to have one hell of an uncanny valley to deal with. But for the moment, games are capable of staggering beauty and incredible design that would probably shake our younger selves to the core. And even games that aren't going for the total immersive realism of Skyrim are doing great things: indie games like Fez and Limbo do incredible things and utilize technology to produce beautiful, simple graphics.

Then again, in 20 years someone else is probably gonna have a list on the singularity-net (or whatever the internet's called then), showing that Skyrim picture and saying "CAN YOU BELIEVE THOSE IDIOTS USED TO THINK THIS WAS GREAT GRAPHICS?! LOL! ANYWAYS, THE RADIATION FROM THE LAST NUCLEAR WAR IS RAVAGING MY INTERNAL ORGANS, SO I'M LOGGING BACK INTO THE HEALTHSPHERE."

10. Voltorb Doesn't Want To Die

9. Fan Fiction Dragon Ball Z

20. Superman's Bad Day

19. Jurassic Yoshi