Gaming off the Beaten Path

Last week, we started our look at Lost Odyssey, a title that seemed to break unwritten rules of gaming left and right. We have a traditional RPG, which is the brainchild of the creator of Final Fantasy, released for XBox, a console not known for the genre, at a time when said genre was at what felt like the absolute bottom of its popularity. We started with the story, characters and world, all of which I thought were really good to great. That's a great start for an RPG, where those aspects are very important. But all of that can be undone if the gameplay isn't up to par. It's critical in any generation, but this is an essential aspect to call out in 7th gen RPGs. There was a lot of experimentation going on in the genre at the time, a lot of which didn't yield positive results. I guess I get it, the genre wasn't doing well at the time and developers were trying to do anything they could to bring it back to relevance. Sometimes, that meant terrible gimmicks. Other ti

  Before we unpack and review this week's game, we need to talk a little bit about the console it's on and that console's history. But this isn't some lesser known 90's system like the Neo Geo or 3DO. It's a console family that in the last 20 years has become a household name for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Whether you are a fan of the console or not, there's no denying the original XBox caused a seismic shift when it was released in 2001. The big black and green box immediately stood out physically and it wasted little time in establishing itself as one of the most unapologetically western consoles of all time. Born of a marriage between a multi-billionaire's spur-of-the-moment infatuation and excessive 90's edgelord marketing and baptized in Mountain Dew, XBox took Sega's "cool kid" strategy and turned it up to 11. There were no silly plumbers or hedgehogs here. Nintendo and Sony? Those were for anime nerds and little kids. Sega

  As usual, it took way longer than it should have, but I did EVENTUALLY do exactly what I said I was going to. It's a year late, but I've finally made my way through the Quintet trilogy. Playing these three games became a stated goal of mine since I started podcasting last year. One of my earliest episodes covered Soul Blazer, the first title in the pseudo series. The second game, Illusion of Gaia, was also a landmark episode as it was the first one to include the intro song ("A Glass Half Full of Tears" by Aura Blaze, who's music you should check out here ). Both of them received pretty solid scores, though I didn't quite like the latter quite as much as a lot of people seem to. After all these years, I'm still surprised I never played these games when they came out. Both were definitely right up my alley and readily available to buy or even rent at my local video store, but I just never picked them up. It's a little more understandable that I had ne

  It's time to check another obscure 90's console off the list. Okay, it's not really THAT obscure, but it's definitely not one a lot of people, or anyone I know really, grew up with. Arcade giants SNK are very well known in the gaming community, especially among fighting game fans. Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, you could go all day just listing out fighting games that they were responsible for. Of course, they also had plenty of other well known titles like Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors. SNK is actually still in business today, though it's technically not the same as the original company went bankrupt in the early 00's. Normally I try to include some basic background about how these companies end up where they do, but I am going to spare everyone thousands of words of legal jargon and just simply describe the company's history with an emphatic "it's complicated." Either way, most gamers knew about their titles from either arc