Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Fighting games were everywhere in the early 90. I know I complain a lot about open world games and FPS' now, but it was just as bad, if not worse, with tournament fighters in the 90's. You couldn't go to an arcade or a game store and not see what felt like millions of these things. There were a huge amount of these everywhere, and that glut of similar games was due to the impact of two titles we've discussed at length here: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. These two series' were the cream of the crop when it came to tournament fighters, they were critically and commercially successful and logically, they led to imitators. I already discussed some of the various Street Fighter clones out there and I think the games I covered are a good microcosm of all of them. Some are bad, some are good, some are even great. I kind of wanted to look at some MK clones, but I just don't have access to any and honestly, I'm glad. It seems like developers did a pretty good ...

 Mortal Kombat is back baby! I hope everyone is excited as I am about the new movie. It came out last week but at the time of this writing, I still haven't had time to watch it. As to why, well, we'll get to that later. But I've heard good things. The original MK film was great, it had some really great fight scenes and memorable moments, but as a PG-13 rated movie it had to scale back some of the blood and guts that the franchise was known for. Not this time though, the new version is R-rated and apparently features more of the copious amounts of viscera we've come to know and love from the franchise, including some fatalities that are true to the ones you see in the games. In a way, it's something of a reboot of the franchise. Honestly, I can't think of any franchise that reboots itself more frequently than MK. It's like a cycle at Netherealm Studios, they make an MK game, add whatever insane or ridiculous ideas they can come up with to its sequels, realiz...

Lets talk about failure. At some point, everyone is going to fail at something. Aint none of us perfect, right?  However, not all failure is created equal. Sometimes people fail because they don't work hard enough, or they don't think things through or they are working with an idea that's doomed from the start. But that isn't always the case. Sometimes failure comes from pushing too hard, being too visionary or trying to make something from nothing. I'm not sure if any entity in video game history failed more in the latter manners than Sega. Yes, there's a reason Sega doesn't make consoles anymore. But its because they pushed the boundaries too far, not because they didn't do enough. The Saturn and Dreamcast were absolute beasts of consoles, but they were expensive and allegedly difficult to develop for. Remember Sega Channel? That was the PlayStation Store before the PlayStation Store was a thought in Sony's mind. Sega was pumping digital only gamin...

 Just realized I forgot to post these here, will get started with part 1: And here's part 2:

Don't hold me to it, but this review is probably going to be a relatively short one. Some games just don't provide much to talk about. On one hand, you have the classics, those 10's that I keep going on about, and other really good games that offer up all sorts of reasons to sing their praises. On the other, you have the truly awful stuff, the Rocky and Bulwinkles and Rise of the Robots' that are so offensively putrid that you can't help but talk about them, just for how shockingly bad they are. Then, you have games like Fallen Legion. It's not that FL:FOR is bad. It isn't. It's that it's so, so painfully average that there just really isn't much to say. The graphics are good, but they aren't great. The story has its moments, but it isn't particularly memorable or unique and it tends to hang on insignificant events for too long. The combat is well designed and different from other games in the genre, but its repetitive and often leads t...

 Guys, I think I did it. I've accomplished what I set out to do. I found the perfect video game. More specifically, I found the perfect video game console. Is it from Nintendo? Atari? Sega? Sony? Microsoft? No, this piece of gaming genius comes to us from Leap Frog, a company more known for their educational titles. But this time, they went above and beyond in creating what I think we can definitively say is the single greatest console ever released, the Zippity. Now I have to admit, I am a little light on information when it comes to where this thing came from. A quick web search about this definitive console will turn up...not much. I can't, for the life of me, determine when this thing actually came out, though most of the reviews I see are from about 10 years ago. The closest thing I can find on it in any official capacity from Leap Frog is a parents guide, buried deep on their website and on page 3 of the search results. Great job with SEO you guys! I myself found this gem...