Gaming off the Beaten Path

 It's back to the Neo Geo this week, I've been in a fighting game mood and it's quickly become the first console I turn to when that happens.  I've always found it weird how often I remember some of these games I come across from when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong, I had never played Kizuna Encounter: Tag Battle, or its predecessor Savage Reign, in my life before I did it for this post. But from the second I booted it up, everything about it seemed so familiar. I guess that happens a lot with fighting games, they almost always feel some level of familiar to Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. I guess in the SNK universe, it's Fatal Fury that many of these fighters feel similar to. But that wasn't really the case with KETB. It took me a while, but I finally realized where I had seen this game before. I've said this before, in fact I dedicated an entire post and podcast episode to it, but I was a huge connoisseur of video game magazines when I was a kid. Ho...

I've probably covered Mega Man more than any other series here on GOTBP. Yet there is still a lot of uncharted territory for the franchise, territory I am going to start exploring this week. For as much time as I have spent on the series, and as important as it is to my history as a gamer, I've never really explored the Game Boy Mega Man titles. As was the style at the time, pretty much any popular NES/SNES/Genesis game got some level of similar handheld release on the Game Boy/Game Gear. Sometimes these were attempts at straight points, others were instances of the same name but a different game, while others had elements of both. For the most part, the Mega Man Game Boy entries fit into the latter category. They were typically released between NES entries, Mega Man II on the Game Boy between 2 and 3 on the NES, and so on. They would contain elements of the two games they appeared between, the aforementioned Mega Man II would contain four bosses from MM 2 on the NES and four f...

  It's time to discuss yet another one of the internet's favorite games. It's not that I hate covering these things, it's that I always worry I'm going to say something that's going to get myself in trouble. I guess I don't have enough followers for that.  Of course, we all know how things can go when you have a difference of opinion with the rest of the internet. All it takes is not liking a game everyone loves to set off a firestorm. That's especially true with some of the more obscure or indie games that tend to have very passionate fanbases. At the same time, I kind of understand some of the backlash to some of these "hot takes." There are so many attention seekers out there that it's hard to tell whether someone genuinely believes these things or whether they are just trolling. Fortunately for me, my opinion on this week's game isn't completely off from what most people seem to think. Unfortunately, it's also one of the fir...

  I'm going to keep going with my tradition of opening the year with an old sports game. But this time, I'm going to go about it a little bit differently. Usually I go with either an old title in a current series or I check out a title from a once prominent sports series that died out. I mean, that was kind of supposed to be the whole point of this thing when I started. But after last year, where I started looking more into titles on obscure consoles, I found myself looking for sports games in other places. While it was somewhat difficult to find more mainline sports titles on these systems, there were certainly plenty of other examples to be found. For better or worse, most of these tend to be more arcade style sports games, they don't really try to accurately simulate the sports they represent. I personally think this tends to lead to better results for older sports titles. It was really hard to reproduce the feel of an actual sport on a 3rd, 4th or even 5th generation co...