Gaming off the Beaten Path

I know my content is all digital, but I've always considered myself a print media first kind of person. It's getting harder and harder to be that way as more and more news outlets and magazines shift to online-only models or simply shut down outright. It certainly made the big gaming media news this month hit really close to home. After 33 years of publication, Game Informer is officially ceasing production. Originally started as a newsletter by everyone's favorite games retailer Funcoland, Game Informer eventually blossomed into a full-on magazine featuring game previews, reviews and walkthroughs. It would even survive the company's purchase by Barnes and Noble, which would merge Funcoland with its existing game retail store Babbages and rechristen their new Frankenstein monster with the name we know it by today, Gamestop. If anything, this was a boon for the magazine as it quickly became a package deal with the company's Pro membership. At its peak, Game Informer ...

When I first started writing about games, I was very hesitant to include PC titles at all. As I've said numerous times before, it's just not something I've ever really felt qualified to talk about. There are so many iconic PC games that were just blind spots for me as I never really actively sought them out. If it didn't come on a PC Gamer demo disc or I didn't hear about it through word of mouth, I didn't know about it. Does anyone else remember those PC Gamer demo discs? I had as much fun playing with the UI on them as I did any of the actual demos. Maybe if I spent less time clicking around the secret underground club and more on actually playing the games, I would have had more PC experience. Eh, I'm okay with the fact that while Fallout and Diablo weren't nearly as critical a part of my early gaming life as Coconut Monkey. Even when I did play and enjoy PC games, it was typically because I played the console versions first. Games like Doom, Command ...

  Video game consoles, like any product, fail for a number of reasons. Remember, things weren't always like they are now, where it's all but guaranteed you are going to get a new PlayStation, XBox or whatever random name Nintendo decides on every 8 to ten years. Gaming history has seen a lot of different players attempt to enter the console market, some successfully and others not so much. This wasn't just a long time ago either, I would say this kind of continued up until the 7th generation (and it still does occasionally happen even today). It was probably most prevalent in the really early days, there are tons and tons of pong consoles out there from manufacturers you would never imagine making video games. It was definitely still true in the 90's when a lot of players were still looking for a piece of the gaming pie. Nintendo and Sega were in the middle of a full-on console war, but they weren't alone. NEC and Hudson were still plugging away with the Turbografx,...