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...

  It's time to check another obscure 90's console off the list. Okay, it's not really THAT obscure, but it's definitely not one a lot of people, or anyone I know really, grew up with. Arcade giants SNK are very well known in the gaming community, especially among fighting game fans. Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, you could go all day just listing out fighting games that they were responsible for. Of course, they also had plenty of other well known titles like Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors. SNK is actually still in business today, though it's technically not the same as the original company went bankrupt in the early 00's. Normally I try to include some basic background about how these companies end up where they do, but I am going to spare everyone thousands of words of legal jargon and just simply describe the company's history with an emphatic "it's complicated." Either way, most gamers knew about their titles from either arc...

Great, we're just starting out and already we have an enormous problem with false advertising. I just finished watching baseball almost four years after 2020 and what I saw was absolutely not what was promised in Super Baseball 2020. First and foremost, there were absolutely no robots or androids. You certainly didn't have to hit balls to dead center for home runs and there was a lot more foul territory. It was pretty much the same old baseball that I always remember, though I guess if I found out Aaron Judge is actually a terminator I wouldn't be surprised. Remember how futuristic 2020 felt in the 90's? As 2000 drew ever closer, sci-fi media started realizing they had to push their futures farther. You would have thought they would have just said 2100, it's very unlikely any of us are going to be around then. But a lot of games that would have had "2000" in the title started doing "2010" or "2020" as if it was so far in the future. I m...

  As much as I like sports games, I'm really not a fan of most of them before the 5th generation. However, I do have my share of exceptions. Of course, Tecmo Super Bowl is awesome. I don't really consider them true sports games, but I guess Punchout and Super Punchout are boxing titles. Exceptions like that are why I don't really like to make generalizations. But then again, those generalizations have to come from somewhere. It's a weird dichotomy. And fortunately, we don't have to explore it any further, because this week I want to talk about another, almost universal exception to this generalization, arcade style sports games. Maybe it's because they make absolutely no attempt to mimic actual sports at all, but I've always loved old school arcade sports games. NBA Jam is the first one that jumps to mind for a lot of people. I'm not a huge basketball fan...but I absolutely love NBA Jam. What other game allows you to have Hillary Clinton do a 360 flip du...

  The end of a console's life cycle was always a weird and interesting time. People talk all the time about how much innovation there is at the start of a new generation, but they rarely talk about how much innovation occurs at the end of one. Sometimes you are better off sticking with the best of what old technology can provide rather than the worst of what new technology offers. I think that's something that goes beyond just gaming and extends to most different kinds of media, or even hardware, but that's a different discussion for a different day. A lot of underrated, forgotten (and expensive) games come late in life cycles, most gamers just move on to the next generation without a second thought. By the end of 1995, everyone wanted to play with the shiny new toys, the PlayStation and the Saturn. Those games had some interesting and outstanding early titles, but the 4th generation consoles weren't ready to go quietly. There were a lot of notable titles that came out ...

Making a good sequel is easier said than done. For all the good that can come from change, a lot of bad can come from it too. And sometimes being more ambitious leads to bigger pitfalls that simpler games just don't have to contend with. Illusion of Gaia isn't a true sequel to Soul Blazer, which I looked at earlier in the year, but it is the second title in what's come to be known as the Quintet Trilogy. I talked at length about my experience (or lack thereof) with these games and the story behind them already. To summarize, they were a series of action RPGs developed by Quintet and published by Enix in the 90s. Illusion of Gaia was released in the West in 1994, two years after Soul Blazer. It was by far the most readily available of the trio, Soul Blazer was hard to find near me and Terranigma wasn't even released in the U.S. But Illusion of Gaia was available for rent just about every week at all of my local video stores, so it still shocks me that I had never played ...

  It seems like every series, even the most popular ones, has at least one title that kind of falls through the cracks. You'd be hard pressed to find a lifelong gamer who has never heard of Double Dragon, maybe someone younger as the series' heyday was way back in the 3rd generation. The first three games are considered NES classics, even though the third is considered a bit of a step down and often the butt of jokes in the online gaming community. The games star the Lee brothers, Billy and Jimmy (or is it Bimmy?) as they take on the evil Black Warrior (a translation error later corrected to Shadow Warrior) gang. It may sound simple on paper, but Double Dragon broke a lot of ground in the beat 'em up genre gameplay and style-wise. It was one of the first genres with continuous scrolling, unique movesets and the ability to take enemy weapons. It featured cutscenes and a much darker atmosphere, drawing inspiration from both Enter the Dragon and Mad Max. I have complained on h...