Gaming off the Beaten Path

  I think it's pretty obvious I'm a huge nerd, I wouldn't be talking about old video games on the internet if I wasn't. But as nerdy as I am, tabletop games have always been a blind spot for me.  I've talked a little bit about this before, but the Satanic Panic was still very much alive in the 90's. It may have been on its last legs, but it was still there. Violent video games gave the collective outrage mob a second wind, with games like Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and, especially, Doom serving as fresh new targets to sink their claws into. Other more traditional game formats weren't safe either, as Magic: The Gathering also became a punching bag, though I have to admit that was a little more understandable when you try to walk in those folks shoes. Not even Pokemon was safe, especially when the TCG came out and the usual suspects started claiming it was intentionally designed as a gateway drug to get into Magic. We aren't talking about the folks that had...

  I've never been one to be picky with port differences. If I'm being honest, I usually don't even notice them and I typically don't care about small differences as long as the core gameplay remains intact. Sometimes, you can't help but notice the difference. I wouldn't call the 90's the frontier days of gaming, but the landscape wasn't nearly as settled as it was today. Things were starting to get that way, as the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis went toe to toe in the console wars, establishing themselves as the two titans of the industry. But as I've talked about a lot recently, they were far from the only consoles out there. I've dedicated quite a bit of time this year learning about and playing games for some more obscure consoles from the era, which has really broadened my horizons when it comes to old school games. I've discovered a lot of interesting stuff and learned a lot about the consoles that kind of fell between the cracks, at le...

  "The American Prevailing" is a cliche that only happens in your Hollywood movies. Oh Mr. Kennedy, you entertain me. To show my appreciation, I will help you awaken from your world of cliches." Of all my 10s games, I think Resident Evil 4 may be the one I feel the weirdest about. I know, I know, how could I feel any level weird about Resident Evil 4, one of the most sacred of sacred cows of gaming history. This is one of those games that people will straight up rail you for disliking, as if it's some sort of personal attack. I guess that's starting to change a little bit, it's become a victim of being so popular that people start to hate it just for being so. That always seems to happen in the gaming industry, though that is a different discussion for a different day. Besides, it's not really why I've always had a sort of weird relationship with RE 4. I'm not the first person to say this and I'm certainly not going to last, but it just didn...

Last week, we started our look at Lost Odyssey, a title that seemed to break unwritten rules of gaming left and right. We have a traditional RPG, which is the brainchild of the creator of Final Fantasy, released for XBox, a console not known for the genre, at a time when said genre was at what felt like the absolute bottom of its popularity. We started with the story, characters and world, all of which I thought were really good to great. That's a great start for an RPG, where those aspects are very important. But all of that can be undone if the gameplay isn't up to par. It's critical in any generation, but this is an essential aspect to call out in 7th gen RPGs. There was a lot of experimentation going on in the genre at the time, a lot of which didn't yield positive results. I guess I get it, the genre wasn't doing well at the time and developers were trying to do anything they could to bring it back to relevance. Sometimes, that meant terrible gimmicks. Other ti...

  Before we unpack and review this week's game, we need to talk a little bit about the console it's on and that console's history. But this isn't some lesser known 90's system like the Neo Geo or 3DO. It's a console family that in the last 20 years has become a household name for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Whether you are a fan of the console or not, there's no denying the original XBox caused a seismic shift when it was released in 2001. The big black and green box immediately stood out physically and it wasted little time in establishing itself as one of the most unapologetically western consoles of all time. Born of a marriage between a multi-billionaire's spur-of-the-moment infatuation and excessive 90's edgelord marketing and baptized in Mountain Dew, XBox took Sega's "cool kid" strategy and turned it up to 11. There were no silly plumbers or hedgehogs here. Nintendo and Sony? Those were for anime nerds and little kids. Sega...