Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Hey, he said he'd be back. We are forging ahead with our licensed 80's movie games, but there's no way we were moving past Arnold Schwarzennegger without covering Terminator. This is the first time we are going to be covering the franchise, but it's most certainly not going to be the last. For one, there are tons of Terminator games out there across a variety of consoles and generations. But for all I talk about how much I dislike movies, Terminator and Terminator 2 are among the rare examples of films that I can watch over and over again. The second movie is particularly excellent, still one of my all time favorites to this day. I think most people are familiar with the plot by now. The year is 2029, and humanity is on its last legs, fighting off a horde of sentient machines led by a rogue AI, Chat G...err, uh, Skynet. Skynet decides the best way to finally end humanity is to send a highly advanced Terminator, the T-1000, back in time to kill resistance leader John C...

I am having too much fun with these 80's action movie games, so let's keep going with those. We're leaving Stallone and the jungles of Vietnam behind, but we're going to keep the bullets flying with Schwarzenegger in the jungles of South America. Originally panned by most critics upon release, Predator has become a big-time sci-fi cult classic. The film tells the story of Alan "Dutch" Schaefer and his squad, sent on a CIA mission to rescue hostages from an unspecified South American nation. They defeat the guerillas, only to encounter something far worse: an invisible alien creature called the Predator, hell bent on taking them out one by one. This was Arnold Schwarzenegger at his cheesy 80's best, supported by Carl Weathers, Jesse "The Body" Ventura and a pretty solid cast. I wonder how many other movies starred two future governors?  The film became known for its gratuitous violence and gore, not to mention the iconic Arnold one liners. The Pre...

  Here we are again. It's the dreaded NES movie adaptation. I have talked in the past about how certain genres have been prevalent throughout gaming history, from mascot platformers to tournament fighters to first person shooters. But as a subset of games, licensed movie titles for the NES were as popular as anything. If there was a major action movie between the years of 1982-1993, it got made into an NES game, usually a terrible one. One need not go deep into the bowels of the internet to see how derided these games, or the infamous developer responsible for most of them, have become in recent years. It didn't matter how good the movie was, how appropriate the subject matter or whether its plot made sense as a video game, as long as money could be made it was getting released. I was a bit young for the true mid-80's boom here, but these things were definitely still a thing when I started playing games in the early 90's. It may have been several years old at that point...

 Whenever something is successful, there are going to be imitators. That's especially true of video games. I think just about everyone that has ever picked up a video game controller has played or at least heard of Super Smash Bros. Honestly, I'm surprised it took someone until 1998 to think of the concept. A company takes the characters from its most famous IPs and shoehorns them into a fighting game, what's not to like? Smash Bros. was an instant success when it landed on the N64 and every time a new version of the game comes out, it's a major deal. One of the major factors that sets Smash appart from other fighting games is its accessibility. It's so incredibly easy to learn, each character's special moves are all performed the same way and they all get similar effects from their buttons. But it's tough to master, players have spent countless hours studying frame data and perfecting strategies for the strongest characters. Super Smash Bros. Melee for the ...