Gaming off the Beaten Path

Super Bowl LV is almost upon us, so it's time to run a video game simulation. But why do it with Madden when we can use a hack of Tecmo Super Bowl! The hack is free from Tecmonster, chances of me ever creating something this cool is zero. The video is all mine though, it's a single game cpu vs. cpu simulation. Did Brady get his 7th ring with the 8-bit Bucs? Or did Patrick Mahomes and his pixilated KC compatriots make it 2 straight?  

Every once in a while, a video game comes along that goes above and beyond. A title that reaches deep and forces you to reflect on something far bigger than just a game. A title that wants you to think critically about something truly important, whether it be something personal, societal or conceptual. Hollow Knight is not one of those games, despite how hard it tries to be. Stuff like this is common in film, critics like to call film equivelents to games like this "Oscar bait." You know exactly which kinds of movies I'm talking about, the ones where Martin Luther King, Cleopatra and the Pope meet in a timewarp and spend three and a half hours teaching super Commie Nazis not to hate people by using the power of long winded conversations, introspective monologues and Renoir's art, all to a moving score featuring an orchestra playing alongside whatever douchey indie rock band is popular at the time. This has been happening with film for a while now, but it's a relat...

Welcome to the first installment of "Was it Really?" one of the new series' I want to start doing regularly this year. I've ranted about this before, but I find like the gaming community, both gaming related media and gamers themselves, believe in absolute truths about beloved or hated games. There's no room to deviate from the commonly held opinions that permeate the industry, whether it be about an individual game, console or event. My distaste for this mindset was half the reason I started doing this whole thing and why I want to start doing deeper dives on stuff like this. Which brings us to the Virtual Boy. Released in the summer of 1995, the Virtual Boy was a massive commercial flop and a rare mistake by Nintendo. It's a 32-bit system, part of the 5th generation along with the PlayStation, Saturn and Nintendo 64. It promised an immersive experience for players, using a parallax effect to create the illusion of depth. What it delivered was red monochrome ...

 Sometimes, combinations just don't work out, even if that combination involves two things that are independently awesome. Think about it like this: peanut butter is awesome and so are tacos. I really like both of those things individually. But if you mix those two things together, you are going to create a disgusting, mismatched monstrosity. They might even pair well with other things, but not with each other. Peanut butter is great on its own or with chocolate, tacos are great on their own, but mixing them together is a terrible idea (unless you are talking about choco-tacos, in which case, mix away!). Star Wars Demolition should be one of those winning combinations. Vehicular combat games are cool and so is Star Wars. Vehicular combat games were popular when it was released in 2000 for the Dreamcast and PS1, with titles like Vigilante 8 and Twisted Metal leading the charge, while Star Wars had vaulted back into the cultural Zeitgeist with the 1999 release of "Episode 1: The...

 I think this might be the first time I've ever gone back to a series that wasn't a "big deal" video game IP. Sure I've had multiple posts about Mega Man and Final Fantasy games, but those series' are household names. They certainly aren't as obscure as a discontinued series of baseball games that ran through the late 90s and early aughts. I already covered All-Star Baseball 99 for the Nintendo 64, a game I gave a pretty good score. At the time, it was probably the best baseball sim you could find. It's certainly not anymore, but its still a good, fun game to break out from time to time. But if that game was so great, what happened to the franchise? Well, for one, the company that made it went out of business. Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and it's intellectual properties were auctioned off, most of which were purchased by a company called Throwback Entertainment. Throwback then proceeded to do a big, fat nothing with the ASB series until 20...

Now that the end of year stuff is behind us, it's time to look ahead to 2021. A lot of years are good for some people and bad for others, but I don't think there are going to be too many people upset to see 2020 go. I don't think I need to go into detail as to why. Regardless of what 2021 brings, it's going to be a busy year. I have some plans as to what I want to do and where I want to go with GOTBP, but they are going to have to wait until later in the year. I have something, or more accurately someone, that's going to come into my life and monopolize all my time. I am still going to keep up with the posting, but I will probably start the year with a heavy focus on genres that are easier to review, like fighting and (sigh) racing games. However, once we get a little settled, I want to move to add in some new stuff, like: Audio I don't know what format it's going to take, but I want to do some more audio. I don't know if it's going to be a podcast o...