Gaming off the Beaten Path

It’s been almost a year, but we are once again getting into a genre we haven’t touched yet. Flying games are a very, very niche genre, but I do consider them to be their own unique slice of the gaming pie.  They aren’t quite driving, aren’t quite vehicular combat and aren’t quite action.  I always want to like them more than I do.  I probably have as much of an enjoyment rate of flying games as I do racing games.  But whereas I generally recognize I am not a fan of racing titles, I just can’t stop having these things catch my eye. Warhawk certainly did when I saw a demo of it on the “PlayStation Picks” disk that came with the original console in 1995.  It wasn’t quite a launch title (it came out about 2 months after the system did), but just the 2-3 minute, non-playable demo made me take notice of this new player in the market.  Remember, this is the early age of 3D gaming and stuff like this was absolutely mind blowing when compared to what the 16 bit conso

Come on, you knew this was coming.   I telegraphed this a mile away last week, but we are going to talk about the other forgotten member of the X series, Mega Man X6. I mean it can’t be all bad.  Its predecessor was a solid, if underwhelming entry into the franchise, with some fun boss fights making up for less inspired level design.  So maybe X6 was the one that put it all together?  Did it combine the great level design and soundtrack of X4 with the outstanding boss fights and more polished graphics of X5?  In a word, no. Despite not necessarily being a “bad” game, X6 is among the worst in the entire Mega Man franchise (both old school and X games).  I would certainly say its the worst X title and if you were to bring the older games into the fray, the only one I disliked more was probably Mega Man and Bass.  Again, this isn’t some jank franchise that has been around for five years, so its a different set of standards, but if you are going to try to jump

I wanted to start this review by waxing nostalgic about the Mega Man franchise, but I realize I already went that route in the “Command Mission” review, so there goes that.   For such a mainstream series, Mega Man sure goes off on its share of tangents.  We already discussed one of those tangents, but there were so, so many others.  But perhaps the most forgotten games are the middle entries in the X series. Look, I think most gamers agree the first two Mega Man X games were classic.  The third is considered a solid effort and the original cart is a SNES collector’s item, while the fourth received middling reviews in its day but has since been recognized for the quality game it is.  Mega Man X7 is pretty much universally hated (though not by me, I could probably write an entire post on it) and X8 is thought of as a return to form.  It’s weird, even though the latter two games have a reputation, its almost as if non mega fans don’t even know X5 and X6 exist