Gaming off the Beaten Path

  I've talked a lot about video game series' that haven't stood the test of time, or even one off titles that never managed to receive sequels. That's relatively common amongst lesser known video games. But for this week's entry, it's most certainly not the case. Despite being a somewhat a forgotten series among mainstream gamers in the west, Samurai Warriors is huge in Japan. It also has a relatively small but very dedicated fanbase. They're pretty obviously dedicated, because there wouldn't be 5.8 billion spinoffs and sequels if they weren't. Five numbered sequels, Xtreme Legends, Chronicles and Empires spinoffs, sequels to sequels, ports, Japan only titles, you name it, Samurai Warriors has done it. "Bet you they didn't do a Samurai Warriors racing spinoff!" Yeah I guess you're right, how could they have...oh...wait, they did? It's called Samurai Derby, and it's a free to play browser game. Look it up. The series has an e

  Great, now I have to talk about something I've been dreading for the last three years. It's time to talk about my absolute least favorite genre of games, bar none. I know I've talked at length about my general dislike of racing games, but there are plenty of titles in the genre I like. I mean, I F-Zero GX is tied for my highest score ever and I certainly didn't hate games like Chocobo Racing or even NASCAR '99. I don't love racers, but there are plenty of them I like, and I understand what people see in the genre. But you already knew this wasn't a racing game as soon as you saw "007" in the title (there actually does exist a 007 Racing game, which I will try to track down, but this isn't it). No, instead, everyone's favorite super spy is going to force me to discuss a genre I absolutely loath: cover-based 3rd person shooters. I may have to put an asterisk on this one like I did Jet Grind Radio, because I don't think I've ever

  Yes, that's the full title of the game. It might be the most ridiculous game title I've ever heard in my life. I mean, I guess it does make sense: this game is the official licensed game of the King Kong film from the early 'aughts directed by Peter Jackson. But it's just such a mouthful. They couldn't just call it "King Kong: The Movie" or something like that? Maybe just "King Kong?" Could you imagine if they called Super Star Wars "George Lucas Presents: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope: The Official Game of The Original Film Trilogy: Part 1?" Now it's really got me thinking, is this the only game in history to include a film director's name in it's title? See, this is where your mind goes when you start playing these licensed games. They're all so terrible, so you have to keep yourself distracted with things like that. Well, maybe not all of them. MOST of them are terrible, not all of them. There are a few pretty go

  For the first time, I'm going to have to put an asterisk on a review. Yeah I know, even at the beginning of the review I know its going to have to happen. It's just going to have to. I know Sega fans really love Jet Grind Radio (called Jet Set Radio outside the US) and its generally pretty well regarded for a variety of reasons. But here's the thing you have to remember when you are reviewing media; reviewers are looking at both objective and subjective aspects. When it comes to video games, that means you are looking at things like control and graphics as well as fun factor. However, I've always felt things always leaned more on the subjective. Sure, some games have outright bad controls, but sometimes they have a bit of a subjective component as well. Some people hate tank controls, others don't mind them. Sometimes, a game can be objectively strong, but a reviewer can find it subjectively bad (as I did with Star Fox Adventures ). Other times, a game can make up

  It really is amazing how video game series' come and go. On one hand, you have the IPs that cross multiple gaming generations, your Marios , your Final Fantasys , your Sonics , etc. On the other, you have weird, obscure one-off titles like Nano Breaker or Shadow Madness. Sometimes series' seem to drop off the map without warning, like F-Zero or Star Fox. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a series take as strange a path as that of Onimusha. These games were a huge deal in the 6th generation. It gave us four mainline titles, the first of which will be our subject today, as well as a tactics-style game. Onimusha: Warlords, was the first PlayStation 2 game to sell more than a million copies and was eventually ported to the original XBox. It came from a huge studio in Capcom and was designed by Keiji Inafune, a name all too familiar to Mega Man fans. The game actually began development as a 64DD title in the 90's, as the higher ups at Capcom reportedly wanted a Resi

Last week, we looked at a game that had tons of prerelease hype, which managed to meet or even surpass its high expectation. This week, we will turn our focus to a game that...didn't. It's hard to convey what a big deal The Bouncer was when it was announced for the then-new PS2. The developers had big ideas in mind, promising a gritty, movie-like story with revolutionary game physics, interactable environments and customizable characters. A lot of small developers get themselves in trouble making promises like this. But this was no pet project of a small up and coming developer. This was coming from Squaresoft (along with DreamFactory), the company behind Final Fantasy, a series you might have heard of. It's not that Square never made bad games, but they were few and far between. So when they made the promises they did, we all expected them to pay them off. They had Final Fantasy stalwarts Shinji Hashimoto and Tetsuya Nomura working on the game, how could they not. The fi

  You know, I'm glad they included "racing" in the title. It's kind of a subtitle on the case and disc, so when I saw just "Mag Force" I thought I was about to play some sort of shooting game. But instead we have a racing game, a futuristic racer originally published in 1999 by Crave. For those that may not remember, Crave was also the publisher responsible for the first game I reviewed on GOTBP, Shadow Madness. But we can't really use that for comparison, a traditional RPG and a futuristic racing game are about as far apart as two games can be. In doing some research, the most similar game I found was something called Killer Loop, it's also a futuristic racer, also published by Crave and also released in 1999. It's almost like it's the same game. Wait a minute...it's not almost the same game. It IS the same game. For whatever reason, they decided to change the name for the Dreamcast version of the game. It's Killer Loop on the PS1 a

 It's been a busy week, so I decided to go back to fighting games. I also haven't done a Dreamcast game in a while, so I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone. I'm not sure I would consider Dead or Alive to be that obscure a fighting game franchise. When I covered Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, I thought a lot about "tier levels" of fighting game popularity and how all of the series' would rank (strictly based on popularity here, not quality). SF and MK would obviously be at the top, but what about all the dozens of other franchises? Maybe that's a discussion for a different day, but today we are talking specifically about DOA, a series I would put towards the upper middle of that tier list. It definitely can't touch the big two, it's certainly not on the level of stuff like Tekken or even Virtua Fighter, though I would put it in the category below those. While the original came out for the PS1 and the second was an early title in the

 One of the common themes I have found since I started doing reviews is the close link between film and video games. I've covered video games about movies , movies about video games and even video games about movies about video games . But this week's entry is a different animal entirely. Since the early days of video games, it feels like people from both the gaming and movie industries have been trying make the two mediums work together. As we've seen, it usually doesn't work out. As to why, well, that's its own discussion. I, for one, am not really a movie person, I've always had trouble sitting still and just watching something for two hours. Anyway, one of the ways that game developers blur the lines is by bringing in well known actors (or using their likenesses) as "stars" in their games. And I'm not talking about sponsoring stuff, like you see a lot with sports games, I'm talking about they star as the character in a movie-esque, narrati