Gaming off the Beaten Path

The late 80's/early 90's were a very, very interesting period in gaming history. I've briefly touched on this before, but the medium was very much evolving and found itself at a crossroads at this time. Better technology, better graphics and better storage led to more unique and ambitious games. The days of almost all games consisting of "shoot stuff, get points" were drawing to a close and developers were starting to try new and unique things with console games. A lot of this stuff, like deep storytelling and more adventure oriented gameplay, was more common on PCs, but for home consoles it was new ground. It's through this lens that we look at Fatal Labyrinth, released for the Genesis in late 1990 in Japan before making its way to the west in early 1991. It features elements of a lot of different genres, but would generally be classified as an RPG. But if it came out today, it would almost certainly be classified as a "roguelike." That term wasn...

Last week I gave my initial thoughts on the dark, brooding atmosphere of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. I feel like I struggled to adequately explain just how different this game is design wise from anything else I have ever played. While I'm not sure I did the atmosphere justice, I don't think I will have any such issues with the gameplay. Lets start with the combat. For as different as SMTN is aesthetically, the combat should feel right at home to any JRPG fan. You have a party of four, with each character outfitted with a set of magical or physical special moves. It's good, old fashioned turn based combat, with just enough twists to make it feel refreshing and unique. You get one action per turn for each character in your active party. However, you can increase the number of actions you can take in several ways. Land a critical hit or exploit an enemy weakness and you will get another action that turn. Don't have anything impactful to do with a particular character? Y...

Are video games art? It's a question that I think a lot of people that are really into gaming grapple with and have been grappling with for a long time now. Those of us that grew up in an era where video games were "just toys" or "only for kids" have certainly heard plenty of folks opine that they most certainly are not. But in recent years, as the industry becomes more popular and gaming becomes more mainstream, more and more people have been asked to, or forced to, view video games as a media format. I'm sure it happens with every new format, just as our parents were confused by the stupid video games, theirs were confused by the stupid television, and theirs by the stupid radio, and so on. But that isn't what we are here to talk about, it's a different topic for a different day. We are here to talk about my first foray into the Shin Megami Tensei, or Megaten, franchise. For years, I have avoided playing any of these things because their close atta...

It's time to talk about what may be the clone-iest of the Street Fighter Clones.  Released by Data East in 1993 and ported to the SNES the next year, Fighter's History is the first in a series of games from the early 90's. I can't say I've ever played the others, the second game was only ever released on the Neo Geo CD and the third game never left Japan. Honestly, it would probably be easier and cheaper to fly to Japan to pick up a copy of the third game than it would to find a working Neo Geo CD and a copy of the second. But the first game was relatively easy to acquire and became infamous for taking fighting games to a place they'd never been before...the courtroom. You see, I'm not the only one that who considers Fighter's History to be the most egregious Street Fighter ripoff. Capcom thought so too. They sued Data East for copyright infringement, claiming they had ripped everything from their characters to their combat straight from their more popul...