activision

Missed Opportunities: Bloodlines

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The business of video games is a precarious one, especially as technology has improved and standards have risen. Multi-million dollar budgets often result in a lot of meddling by the game publishers, eager to release their products in time for major purchasing seasons and generally acting like focus-group-influenced movie studios. Not surprisingly, a lot of great games get stepped on in such an environment. The business has become so stifling that a lot of programmers and designers have turned to independent outlets for the sake of creative control, resulting in new classics like Braid and an endless supply of Internet browser games. In the past decade, perhaps no major studio game was more unjustly hurried, and thereby crippled, than Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Read more

Hall of Classics: Jedi Academy

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It's always nice to see a strong, ambitious game series develop to its full potential. Sequels are always tricky business, so when each successive game in a franchise improves upon the last while adding new content it's encouraging. Few series have evolved so interesting or so well as the Jedi Knight games.

Produced by Lucasarts and Activision, Jedi Academy is the most recent game in the series, coming out in 2003. On its own, JA is a fun, engrossing action game that does a good job of mixing up missions and level designs so it's not just one long slog of hack-and-slash. But in the context of where it came from, the game is even more satisfying. Read more

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