Gaming off the Beaten Path

Last week, we started our look at Lost Odyssey, a title that seemed to break unwritten rules of gaming left and right. We have a traditional RPG, which is the brainchild of the creator of Final Fantasy, released for XBox, a console not known for the genre, at a time when said genre was at what felt like the absolute bottom of its popularity. We started with the story, characters and world, all of which I thought were really good to great. That's a great start for an RPG, where those aspects are very important. But all of that can be undone if the gameplay isn't up to par. It's critical in any generation, but this is an essential aspect to call out in 7th gen RPGs. There was a lot of experimentation going on in the genre at the time, a lot of which didn't yield positive results. I guess I get it, the genre wasn't doing well at the time and developers were trying to do anything they could to bring it back to relevance. Sometimes, that meant terrible gimmicks. Other ti...

  It's been a while since I've discussed Mega Man and, hey, I'm always looking for the excuse to do so. I've talked at length about my love for the series and I even spent a month covering some of its more obscure entries in the early days of the blog. Mega Man 3 is on my 10s list, and it's the game that's essentially responsible for me picking up video games as a hobby to begin with. But for as much as I love the series, at least the original and X series, I had yet to play Mega Man 10 until now. It's not that I never had the desire to, I just never got around to it. I loved Mega Man 9, I consider it to be one of the best games of the 7th generation. This was the early days of the whole "new old-style games" trend, and Mega Man 9 and 10 were huge when they came out. It didn't hurt that it had been almost 15 years since a new title in the series came out. But while Mega Man 9 was met with near universal acclaim, the 10th entry was a little bit ...

  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?"...

  I swore I would never, ever play any of these Lego games, but here I am about to review my second one. The things we do for our children. I have to say, the formula leads to a lot more fun than I ever thought it would. They aren't the most varied or challenging but considering the target audience that should kind of be expected. Big budget titles certainly have their downsides, but you know with something built by a huge team at a huge developer that you are going to get some level of polish on the technical side. But you can also kind of expect all of the umphteen titles that will inevitably come out in a series to sort of run together, even if they feature different IPs. A lot of different universes have received the Lego treatment over the years. Indiana Jones was the first one I played, but now it's time to leave the Temple of Doom Behind and travel to the mean streets of Gotham City. In terms of lore, I'm going in a little less blind than I was last time. I am certa...

  I think I did the Wii a disservice by focusing my first review of one of its titles on a shovelware game. The Wii had a bad, and in many ways deserved, reputation as a haven for shameless cash grabs and licensed junk. It's the kind of place where you would find, say, a game based on a reality TV show that was thrown together without any thought or effort...not like I'd know anything about that though. However, the Wii has some really good games as well, mostly stemming from Nintendo's big-name franchises. There were some excellent Mario and Zelda games for the console, it feels like there were excellent Mario and Zelda games for every console. In a way, the Wii was very similar to the Nintendo 64, with some essential first party games buoying a lineup dragged down by largely forgettable third-party titles. But unlike the N64, where many of those first party games are household names even among non-gamers, many of the Wii's better first party titles have been forgotten...