Gaming off the Beaten Path

It's time to continue our now-annual tradition of starting the year with an old sports game review. A few weeks ago, I talked about Cricket. Now it's time to talk about how we put bats on balls on this side of the pond. I can't, for the life of me, determine when this edition of Triple Play Baseball came from. A quick web search will show that it came out in 2001 and is the only game in EA's baseball sim series that doesn't have a year attached to it. You would think that you would just find the year that's missing, but the same search will also turn up information on Triple Play 2000, 2001 and 2002 and they all appear to be unique games. Maybe this is Triple Play 2001.5? I guess we shouldn't get that wrapped up in such things. I mean, does it really matter? Of course not. The quality of the game is what's important. And Triple Play Baseball has to be at least decent, right? I mean, EA was on fire at this point and with their quality control and attent

  (Re)-Enter the Survival Horror The days are getting shorter, the temperature is dropping and another Halloween is in the books. I guess now is as good a time as any to finally dive into Resident Evil.   I don't think Resident Evil needs any introduction. It was an instant hit when it was released in 1996, but I can't imagine anyone at Capcom ever saw it becoming as big as it did. It has the second longest running continuous lore of any video game franchise. It has tons of sequels, spin-offs, major motion pictures, crappy Netflix shows that will soon be mercy killed , animated features, you name it. It wasn't the first horror game, not by a longshot. You had games based on horror properties as far back as the 70's. Games like the 7th Guest, Alone in the Dark and D all predate RE, as do more cinematic horror games like Phantasmagoria. But the first Resident Evil was what really put the genre on the map while also coining the term we still use for games of its ilk today:

  I always felt like the 6th generation was where gaming really started to take off as a mainstream hobby. It's not that a there weren't a lot of people playing video games during the previous two generations, because there were. But it always felt like it was predominately a medium targeted at boys age seven to 17. I didn't realize it at the time, I fit right into that group after all, but games were almost exclusively made for that demographic. It was around the 6th gen where I feel like that began to change. My guess would be that some gaming execs realized there was money being left on the table. "Hey, maybe girls like video games too?" "Our user base is getting older, maybe we should make more titles aimed at adults?" "If we made educational or child friendly games that don't suck, maybe parents will buy them for their kids?" Anyone that's ever sat in a marketing meeting knows exactly what I'm talking about. In this case, it wa

  Quick, what's the first brand you would associate with a video game? Would it be a major media franchise? There are tons of those, name a media franchise and it's had a video game made about it. Would it be a food company? That's been pretty common since the early days of gaming. A consumer goods company? Depending on the game, it could make sense. Maybe a sports league or wrestling promotion? Hell, that may be the most common situation you see, there's a new NFL, NBA, NHL and WWE game every year.  At this point, many video game franchises have become brands themselves. Mario, Sonic, Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and a host of others are essentially brands of their own at this point. Look, video games are, were and always have been great opportunities for branding, at least when the branding makes sense. But sometimes, you still find games featuring brands that shock you. If you asked me "which brands do you think would best lend themselves to video games?"

  Thus far, our Twisted Metal marathon has taken us through the series, highs, lows and reboots. Now it's time to revisit what may be the series' most underrated title. Twisted Metal: Head-On rarely gets any love from the gaming populace at large and is often just forgotten when discussing the series as a whole. I myself didn't even know it existed until several years after its release, when I started buying up cheap PS2 games that Gamestop was liquidating towards the end of the system's life cycle. Initially released for the PlayStation Portable in 2005, the game was ported to the PS2 as the "Extra Twisted" edition in 2008 with added content. Full disclosure, that is the version I played for the review. I do actually have the PSP original, but I lack a functioning PSP, so playing that would have been a slight issue. The port was handled by Eat Sleep Play studios. Wait, another new developer for TM? What happened this time? Well, the PSP port was indeed develo

  We've talked a ton about first series' first games over the past few weeks, but now it's time to shift gears a little bit. It's time to talk about reboots. I really hope it came through just how great I think Twisted Metal 2 is. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way, reviews and sales numbers back my conclusion that it's absolutely a game worth playing. The first game put the series on the map, but the second took it to the top of the world. TM had become one of Sony's flagship franchises and it looked like it was going to become a huge cash cow, turning out game after game like a well oiled machine. That was, of course, until the machine broke down. But it wasn't an explosive ice cream cone or a barrage of patriot missiles that did it in. No, it was something much less interesting. A contract dispute between developer SingleTrac and Sony caused the gaming giant to shift development duties to one of their in-house teams, 989 Studios. But tha

  I'm going to take a break from game reviews this week to discuss a topic that popped into my head after a conversation, or rather, an argument I saw online a few weeks ago. I guess the whole "old vs. new" debate isn't unique to video games, or even new when discussing them. I talked a little bit before about why I prefer older games to newer games, and I feel like I reference this fact constantly. You know, I'm not really ashamed of that and no one is going to change the way I feel. But I also sometimes feel like an old man yelling at a cloud. Just because I prefer older games doesn't necessarily make them better, though I do maintain that they are very, very different. And even though I prefer the older games, there are a lot of things about newer games I prefer. Before I get into what exactly those things are, I want to establish (I guess re-establish) what I mean when I say "old" vs. "new." I did a write up about it last year, so check

  It's time to go back to the "racing games based on motorsports I know absolutely nothing about" well once again. This time, we're stepping out of our stock cars and hopping on our dirt bikes. I talked in the NASCAR '99 review about how little I knew of stock car racing. Well, if I know very little about NASCAR, I know next to nothing at all about motocross. Should I be capitalizing motocross? Is it a proper noun? I know that it's essentially racing on dirt bikes, but I don't know any of the rules. I couldn't tell you what the big events are or where the top venues are or who the top riders are. I've heard of Ricky Carmichael, but he was the only member of this game's roster I had recognized. So basically, I am going into this blind, at least when it comes to how the subject matter is presented. That said, I've played a lot of racing games over the past three years, probably more than I had in my entire life, so I'm starting to learn