Gaming off the Beaten Path

  It's always fun to come across new things on the internet, even when those new things are actually old. In my never-ending  quest to get more eyes on Gaming Off the Beaten Path, I find myself interacting on social media far more often than I ever thought. I don't really do personal social media, so this is all very new to me. I've started following quite a few streamers, both old school and new, and stopping by the occasional stream when I get the chance. Usually, these are games I've heard of before, the new school stuff is Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc. while the old school  stuff is typically games like Super Mario World or things of that ilk (though right now it seems both the old and new are hooked on the Super Mario RPG remake). So I was intrigued when I saw streamer Juyceman Gaming playing an NES baseball title I've never heard of, a game called Bad News Baseball. Not that a guy with over a thousand followers needs a recommendation  from someone like me, but ...

  I really like reviewing 3rd generation games, but sometimes it's hard to find much to talk about with them. It's understandable, technology was so limited at the time and a lot of developers were still figuring out what players wanted and how to iterate on formulas that had proven successful. Think of how many games were just the same side scroller or platformer with a new license slapped on. How many seemingly simple mechanics were considered revolutionary back then. Being able to pick your stage order in Mega Man? Walking to the left in Metroid? These things seem ridiculous to call out as special now, but at the time they were a major deal. It was also the frontier days for developers and publishers, with small studios growing, changing and evolving alongside established companies in other spaces looking for a piece of the video game pie. Digger T. Rock: Legend of the Lost City, kind of encapsulates all of those things. It was published by Milton Bradley, known more for bo...

  Yippee Ki-Yay, it's time to talk about everyone's favorite Christmas movie. Look, I don't actually have any specific thoughts on whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie, I guess I could see it either way. At the end of the day, it's just a matter of opinion. What's not a matter of opinion is just how big a deal Die Hard was when it came out in 1988. We all know the story; John McClain attempts to reconnect with his estranged wife by attending her company Christmas party at Nakatomi Inc. All is going according to plan when the building is attacked by a band of terrorists led by Hans Gruber. The villains are trying to get access to the vault on the 30th floor and will stop a nothing to get it.  Based on the 1979 Novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorpe, expectations were low for the film. Studio execs were unsure what to think of Bruce Willis, who was more known as a television actor at the time, as a leading man in an action movie. Several bi...

  Hey, he said he'd be back. We are forging ahead with our licensed 80's movie games, but there's no way we were moving past Arnold Schwarzennegger without covering Terminator. This is the first time we are going to be covering the franchise, but it's most certainly not going to be the last. For one, there are tons of Terminator games out there across a variety of consoles and generations. But for all I talk about how much I dislike movies, Terminator and Terminator 2 are among the rare examples of films that I can watch over and over again. The second movie is particularly excellent, still one of my all time favorites to this day. I think most people are familiar with the plot by now. The year is 2029, and humanity is on its last legs, fighting off a horde of sentient machines led by a rogue AI, Chat G...err, uh, Skynet. Skynet decides the best way to finally end humanity is to send a highly advanced Terminator, the T-1000, back in time to kill resistance leader John C...

  Here we are again. It's the dreaded NES movie adaptation. I have talked in the past about how certain genres have been prevalent throughout gaming history, from mascot platformers to tournament fighters to first person shooters. But as a subset of games, licensed movie titles for the NES were as popular as anything. If there was a major action movie between the years of 1982-1993, it got made into an NES game, usually a terrible one. One need not go deep into the bowels of the internet to see how derided these games, or the infamous developer responsible for most of them, have become in recent years. It didn't matter how good the movie was, how appropriate the subject matter or whether its plot made sense as a video game, as long as money could be made it was getting released. I was a bit young for the true mid-80's boom here, but these things were definitely still a thing when I started playing games in the early 90's. It may have been several years old at that point...

  I knew I was going to get here eventually. For what feels like a decade now, I've heard about Sweet Home, the NES game that served as the basis for Resident Evil. It's one of those games I knew I was eventually going to review, and it looks like now is the time. I think a lot of gamers know the story by now. Resident Evil started as a remake of Sweet Home, with the latter's director Tokuro Fujiwara working with the former's originator Shinji Mikami. After realizing the technical limitations of the relatively new PlayStation hardware, as well as a variety of other snags, the project evolved into the zombie-filled survival-horror icon we know and love. It's a title that most people know is influential, even if all they know about it is its name.   You know, for all of the talk about how influential it is, I barely knew anything about Sweet Home's gameplay. I was totally expecting some level of action game, maybe akin to the original Metal Gear. I was shocked, p...

I have always had a soft spot for 3rd generation games. Unfortunately, they can sometimes be a challenge to write about. I should back up a bit and admit that when I say 3rd generation, I am essentially talking about the NES. I had some familiarity with the Sega Master System, but most of my formative years were spent playing "Nintendo" as I am sure was the case for most kids who grew up in the United States. But the 3rd generation was still very much the frontier  era of gaming. At the time, Sega and Nintendo were new to the market and there were so many gaming computers available it would make your head spin. Atari was still very much in the picture, though the 7800 wasn't exactly on par with other offerings of the era. It seems weird to think about now, but there were so many competitors to the big two (who weren't even the big two at this point) that it's hard to keep track, though not all of those consoles made it to the U.S. But this was also before the in...

  After having such a miserable time with the first Street Fighter game, I decided it was time to go back and revisit another Capcom series first and a game I referenced several times in that review. It's 25 years old and nearly all of its sequels are better games, but the original Mega Man is still loved and respected by gamers today. Many people go back to this game and go back to it relatively frequently, even if not as frequently as its direct sequels. It may have sold poorly upon release, but it's widely considered one of the more influential games of all time. But what made the original Mega Man so different than the original Street Fighter? I mean, comparing a 2D side scroller to a 1v1 fighting game isn't that simple and it's probably an apples to oranges comparison. But they were both first games in what would become hugely popular series' released in the same year and made by the same company. So why was one front and center on the biggest gaming console ...

Hey all and welcome to my latest sort-of-series, The Black Sheep. The idea came to me a few weeks ago and I figured I would give it a try, it gives me a chance to explore some more offbeat titles in more popular series. Every series seems to have a black sheep, a title that's just different from all of its brethren. Black sheep can be different in many ways, be it conceptually, thematically, aesthetically or mechanically. Sometimes they come about from developers trying to mix up a long running series, other times they come early in a series' life cycle where there isn't a clearly established formula yet (we are going to see a lot of second and third titles in a series here). And that least us to our first black sheep, one of the more famous series outliers in gaming history, Super Mario Bros. 2. Super Mario Bros. 2 confused a lot of people when it was released stateside in 1988, largely because it played almost nothing like its renowned predecessor. People still liked the ...