Gaming off the Beaten Path

It’s no secret at this point that I’m a huge RPG fan.  That said, I have always found action RPGs to be hit or miss.   I find a lot of them to be very unbalanced, filled with difficulty spikes and generally inconsistent.  So naturally, I wasn’t all that excited when Dark Cloud was released back in 2001.  There were just too many other games out there that were more interesting and it got fairly middling reviews, so it was easy to ignore.  However, it also garnered something of a cult following and it has been one of the longest standing classic games available for download on Sony’s PlayStation store.  I figured now was as good a time as any to try it. Right off the bat, I noticed a bevy of themes that are prevalent in modern games: randomly generated dungeons, ‘town building and other mini-games and an almost singular focus on item collecting and upgrading.  This stuff existed in games back then, but it wasn’t nearly as prevale...

I wasn’t entirely thrilled with having to review another Mickey Mouse game, but, well, we can’t possibly go any lower than we did last week. This is yet another game starring everyone’s favorite mouse (well, almost everyone’s favorite, I personally would rank the Mickster behind Rizzo from the Muppets and Speedy Gonzalez) by Capcom.  This time we have moved up to 16 bits, as this game was exclusive to the Super Nintendo. Those of us that were gaming back in the day can vouch for how big a jump that was. Looking at Mickey Mousecapade, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, it was pretty clear to see it was a typical licensed game, a cheap cash in designed to sell copies to unsuspecting kids or parents who didn’t know any better.  That was pretty common back in the pre-internet, pre-streaming era.  There really wasn’t any way to know if a game was good without buying it, subscribing to a magazine or finding it at your local video store.  It st...

So this week, the plan was going to be to go back to reviewing “kid friendly games.”   I mean, Rocky and Bullwinkle certainly qualify as a kid friendly IP.  Their original run was well before my time (think 1960s), but thanks to “Nick at Night,” they were a major part of my childhood.  I couldn’t tell you what a single episode was about, I just know I loved tuning in every night for the antics of a flying squirrel, dopey moose and their Russian Nemeses (because remember, communists are bad and all Russians were communists before 1991) Boris and Natasha. I am just going to cut to the chase here, this “game” barely qualifies as a game.  This is a instrument of torture.  “Days of Thunder” is a bad game.  “Rise of the Robots” is a horrible game.  This puts them to shame.  I can honestly say playing this is one of the worst things that happened to me this year.  I would put it just below the stomach virus I got in February....

Last week, I took a high level look at Mega Man X: Command Mission, an RPG featuring side scrolling stalwart Mega Man.  Now its time to take a closer look. I guess we can get started with the first thing anyone would notice: the graphics.  They are pretty good, everything is bright and bold and all the characters look great.  The attacks look cool, the enemies are well done and the backgrounds are serviceable.  I found a lot of the areas to kind of look dull and sterile.  There isn’t much to look at, but it kind of fits the setting of the MMX universe.  My eye was usually drawn to the enemies, many of whom appear in 3D for the first time.  That might not matter to non fans, but as a Mega Man aficionado I thought it was cool. The music and sound effects are also great, but the cutscenes....whooooo boy.  It brings us to one of the biggest flaws in the game.  Anyone that has played any of the PS1/Saturn MMX games (X4, X...

Mega Man X: Command Mission - Part 1 I’ve finished yet another RPG, so its time to take a break from the kid’s stuff and review a game from yet another franchise I am intimately familiar with. I am just going to come out and say it: Mega Man is the reason I play video games.  Mega Man 3 is was the single game that made me beg my parents for an NES back in the 90s.  To this day, its still one of my favorite gaming franchises and one of the few I pay attention to in the modern generation.  For a brief period, Mega Man games were the only non-RPGs I actively played. That phase didn’t last all that long, but RPGs did become the genre I primarily focused on.  I was back to playing a bigger variety by 2004, but when I heard they were making a Mega Man RPG, I was pumped.  It wasn’t often I got excited by new games at that point, but this certainly made me take notice. I had also learned to temper my expectations for games, so while I...