Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Growing up, a lot of the games we played regularly ended up with nicknames for one reason or the other. It was pretty common to call Goldeneye: 007 just "Goldeneye," but we eventually just started calling it "Bond." Sure, there were other James Bond games out there, but at the time, this was the only one that mattered. PS1 skating titles 2Xtreme and 3Xtreme were "2X" and "3X" respectively.   Vigilante 8 came to be known as "Tomato Juice," get it, because V8? Final Fantasy VII was so essential to us that it was simply "VII," though not too many console series had seventh entries at that point anyway. This week's game, simply called the Pokemon Trading Card game, also had a nickname, one of my good friends came up with it and it stuck like glue: "The addiction game." Yeah, that pretty well covers it. Even after playing it some 20+ years later, I can't put my finger on just what was so enticing about a digi...

This year marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most important game consoles ever released...the Nintendo GameBoy.  It may not have looked liked much, but this little gray beast with monochrome graphics stuck around for 14 years, outlasting the NES, SNES and N64.  Hell, the GameCube came out before Nintendo stopped making these things. They came out with all sorts of iterations, including the smaller and better lit GameBoy Pocket and the GameBoy Color, which, you guessed it, played games in color.  There were also about eleventy billion accessories, maybe three of which were actually useful. I wanted to review a GameBoy game in honor of the milestone, but most of mine have been lost to the ages.  The GameBoy was great to take on the road with you, but the small cartridges were easy to lose in all sorts of places.  I didn’t want to play any of the obvious ones, so, Star Wars it is. This is a straight up port of the NES Star W...