Gaming off the Beaten Path

Hey all, welcome to my third, seriously third, Year End Review. It seems like just yesterday I was playing through Shadow Madness, thinking to myself "I need to keep up my writing skills, I should do a review of this butt-ugly, totally weird RPG and post it on the internet." Now I have more than 200 followers on Facebook. I know that's a drop in the bucket, but as someone with limited time to promote or market myself I will take it. I think next year I want to try and grow things a bit bigger while branching out to more kinds of content, but who knows what will happen. I know I've said that before, but I mean it this time. Anyway, the end of the year means it's time for the 3rd Annual GOTBP awards, where I award my best game, worst game, most surprising and most disappointing. This year, I'm going to add a 5th category for game I'd most like to see receive a modern upgrade or remake. As usual, 10's games aren't eligible, nor are any other non-video...

You know, for all the racing games I've covered over the years, I think last week was the first time I ever played a simulation racing game. This week I'm going to re-visit another genre I haven't touched in a while: arcade sports titles. Arcade sports games are a love it or hate it kind of thing. In some respect, it's difficult to pin down what exactly an arcade sports title entails. At its most basic level, it's a sports game that isn't a simulation of the sport it represents. But I personally would take it a bit further. It's any sports game that doesn't even attempt to simulate the sport it represents. Obviously, RBI Baseball on the NES isn't anything close to a simulation by modern standards, but it was the best they could do at the time. Would you consider that sim style or arcade style? At any rate, I think it's safe to include any over the top, ridiculous sports titles in the arcade side of things. Games like NFL Blitz and NBA Jam are som...

So it looks like it's we're back into "this is totally and completely countercultural for me" territory. I'm just going to come out and say it, I know next to nothing about NASCAR. I know it's incredibly popular, but it's just not something I grew up with. I'm from the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line for that. But it's more than just regional. Racing just wasn't something my parents or anyone I knew paid attention to. As little as I know about NASCAR, I know even less about F-1 or rally racing or drag racing or whatever other competitive kinds of racing are out there. My extent of knowledge of the sport comes from not changing the channel when SportsCenter showed race footage between football highlights and coverage of MLB trade rumors. It's not that I don't have respect for NASCAR drivers, in fact I don't understand people that refuse to call them athletes. "They only make left turns!" Have you ever made a left turn go...

It's time for A-ni-ma-iacs! Sorry, I had to. I was really, seriously thinking about doing this review to the tune of the Animaniacs theme song, but I'm not creative enough to do that. So instead, you get another run-of-the-mill review of yet another platformer, this time for the SNES. Anyone that grew up in the 90's will have some level of familiarity with Animaniacs, an animated children's show that ran in some iteration from 1993-1998. Created and distributed by Warner Bros., the show followed the exploits of the Warner siblings, Yakko, Wakko and Dot, three... somethings? whats-its? Look, I don't know what the Warners are supposed to be, but they live in the WB water tower and get into all sorts of goofy situations and ridiculous trouble. While the trio are the primary focus of the show, it also featured other whacky characters like Ralph the Security Guard, Dr. Scratchansniff, Chicken Boo and the Goodfeathers. Perhaps none of the secondary characters are more ico...

Hey all and welcome to my latest sort-of-series, The Black Sheep. The idea came to me a few weeks ago and I figured I would give it a try, it gives me a chance to explore some more offbeat titles in more popular series. Every series seems to have a black sheep, a title that's just different from all of its brethren. Black sheep can be different in many ways, be it conceptually, thematically, aesthetically or mechanically. Sometimes they come about from developers trying to mix up a long running series, other times they come early in a series' life cycle where there isn't a clearly established formula yet (we are going to see a lot of second and third titles in a series here). And that least us to our first black sheep, one of the more famous series outliers in gaming history, Super Mario Bros. 2. Super Mario Bros. 2 confused a lot of people when it was released stateside in 1988, largely because it played almost nothing like its renowned predecessor. People still liked the ...

It seems like every gaming IP from the late 90's/early 00's ended up with a kart racer. Even some non-gaming IPs got kart racers. Anybody remember Homie Rollerz? Maybe I'll play that one later. I guess you can thank Mario Kart for all of that. I mean, hey, it worked for Nintendo, why wouldn't it work for everyone else? Because all developers take the time and care in creating their spinoffs as Nintendo while also having a similarly large cast of memorable characters to pull from, right? Yeah, a lot of these racers turn out to be not great, they're kind of like movie licensed games that are cranked out just to to make a quick buck. And it's not just second rate developers that are guilty either. Sega has since redeemed themselves, but Sonic R wasn't a very good game at all. That said, not every kart racer is a bad Mario Kart clone. Crash Team Racing is a very good game, one I'll likely review in the near future. Even though one turned out well and the oth...

  Yes, that's the full title of the game. It might be the most ridiculous game title I've ever heard in my life. I mean, I guess it does make sense: this game is the official licensed game of the King Kong film from the early 'aughts directed by Peter Jackson. But it's just such a mouthful. They couldn't just call it "King Kong: The Movie" or something like that? Maybe just "King Kong?" Could you imagine if they called Super Star Wars "George Lucas Presents: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope: The Official Game of The Original Film Trilogy: Part 1?" Now it's really got me thinking, is this the only game in history to include a film director's name in it's title? See, this is where your mind goes when you start playing these licensed games. They're all so terrible, so you have to keep yourself distracted with things like that. Well, maybe not all of them. MOST of them are terrible, not all of them. There are a few pretty go...

  For the first time, I'm going to have to put an asterisk on a review. Yeah I know, even at the beginning of the review I know its going to have to happen. It's just going to have to. I know Sega fans really love Jet Grind Radio (called Jet Set Radio outside the US) and its generally pretty well regarded for a variety of reasons. But here's the thing you have to remember when you are reviewing media; reviewers are looking at both objective and subjective aspects. When it comes to video games, that means you are looking at things like control and graphics as well as fun factor. However, I've always felt things always leaned more on the subjective. Sure, some games have outright bad controls, but sometimes they have a bit of a subjective component as well. Some people hate tank controls, others don't mind them. Sometimes, a game can be objectively strong, but a reviewer can find it subjectively bad (as I did with Star Fox Adventures ). Other times, a game can make up...

I don't want any more sad things to happen! I hate suffering! That means we need to destroy the mist, that will stop the suffering! Contrary to popular belief, there were RPGs developed by companies other than Square or Enix. Hey, remember when they were separate companies? Or when they weren't owned by EA? They really made some outstanding games back then. I'm going to cover quite a few of those games in the 10's, but this week we're going to take a look at another RPG, one of only a handful of games ever developed by Contrail and Prokion. The small, internal studio within Sony didn't last very long or produce very much. However, it was responsible for producing what I consider to be one of the most underrated, underappreciated, misunderstood games of all time: Legend of Legaia. Legend of Legaia received somewhat middling reviews in its day, and in some respects I can understand why. It has a relatively simplistic plot, at least on its surface, and some of the ...