Gaming off the Beaten Path

I've decided to do something a little bit different this week. Rather than focus on one single game, I'm going to rope a few relatively similar licensed Street Fighter clones into one post. This was a very popular route to take back then and it makes sense. Fighting games were popular and so were these franchises, so, easy money right? These games are all certainly SFII clones, but do they have any similarities beyond that? Let's take a look. Double Dragon 5: The Shadow Falls So, let's start out with another member of the "Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game" club.  DD5 is based on the Double Dragon animated series, which was based on the series of beat'em up games for the NES. If you're still following, that makes it a video game based on a TV show based on a video game. Weird. They could have very easily just slapped characters from the show into another beat'em up and called it a day, but at least they tried something different...right? Yeah, Tr

Here's another one from the Joey file. He has been obssesed, like OBSSESED with Toy Story for the past few months.  And not just the first movie either.  I have probably seen all four of the Toy Story films ten times a week for the past several months.  I guess it could be worse.  There are a lot of lousy kids shows and movies out there that have no redeeming qualities for parents so at least I'm not watching those over and over again. It says a lot for these movies, at least the first two, that the mere mention of them doesn't make me cringe at this point.  I think almost everyone would agree, the original Toy Story is a classic.  Computer-animated films are almost guaranteed money now, but Pixar took a huge risk when they released it in 1995.  The risk paid off 1000-fold.  Pixar is now a household name and movies like this are everywhere.  That all started with Toy Story, which was the first fully computer animated feature film.  The second wasn't revolutionary by any

It’s back to the Sega Genesis this week.  What can I say, I ignored it for too long, even in my younger years. It’s no secret that the Super Nintendo was regarded as a haven for great RPGs while the Genesis was widely considered a wasteland for the genre.  But was that really the case?  The first part was certainly true.  There are dozens of really good to great RPGs for the SNES, especially if you include Super Famicom games.  But was it really that much better than the Genesis’ RPG library? Honestly, yes.  But that doesn’t mean the Genesis was the RPG wasteland it was made out to be.  It had a number of solid entries in the genre, mostly from its two main RPG series’.  I already discussed the amazing Phantasy Star IV, a game I never realized was as classic as it was.  That inspired me to look into Sega’s other oft discussed RPG series: Shining Force. Released in 1993, Shining Force was actually the second game in the series, a follow-up to Shining in the Darkness a few years ea

Yet again, we have a first.  Looking back, I realized I have yet to review a Sega Genesis game.  And no, Sonic Mania doesn’t count. That’s probably because I was a Nintendo/Sony person growing up.  Nowadays, the PlayStation and XBox are almost interchangeable.  Sure, there are a few exclusives, but for the most part developers are going to release the same game on both systems.  Hell, some games even have cross play between consoles.  That wasn’t the case in the 90s, when your choice of gaming console drastically altered which games you could play. This also meant the big first party developers spent a lot of time trying to ape each others’ big name series’.  Nintendo was always looking for their own Sonic, while Sega was on a never ending quest for their own Mario and Zelda.  The generally did a pretty good job making games comparable to the former, but often struggled with the latter.  There were quite a few second rate adventure games on the Genesis that j