Gaming off the Beaten Path

After last week’s review, I found myself in the mood for a vehicular combat game.  I thought a lot about playing one of the Twisted Metal titles I own, but decided I would save them for later.  They aren’t that far out of the ordinary anyway. Instead, I turned a game that’s very near and dear to my heart, Vigilante 8.  The genre is almost extinct now, but in the late 90’s/early 00’s, vehicular combat games were everywhere.  The genre, at least in its 3D form, was essentially created by Twisted Metal and most of the games that followed it tried to one up the early PS1 title.  TM was filled with crazy cars, bizarre characters and cartoonish stages, so others tried to compete by trying to get crazier, weirder and more “out there,” usually to mixed results. Vigilante 8, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction.  Set in the Southwestern United States in the 1970’s, V8 ditched the demonic ice cream trucks and guys stuck between two giant wheels for

It’s been almost a year, but we are once again getting into a genre we haven’t touched yet. Flying games are a very, very niche genre, but I do consider them to be their own unique slice of the gaming pie.  They aren’t quite driving, aren’t quite vehicular combat and aren’t quite action.  I always want to like them more than I do.  I probably have as much of an enjoyment rate of flying games as I do racing games.  But whereas I generally recognize I am not a fan of racing titles, I just can’t stop having these things catch my eye. Warhawk certainly did when I saw a demo of it on the “PlayStation Picks” disk that came with the original console in 1995.  It wasn’t quite a launch title (it came out about 2 months after the system did), but just the 2-3 minute, non-playable demo made me take notice of this new player in the market.  Remember, this is the early age of 3D gaming and stuff like this was absolutely mind blowing when compared to what the 16 bit conso

Come on, you knew this was coming.   I telegraphed this a mile away last week, but we are going to talk about the other forgotten member of the X series, Mega Man X6. I mean it can’t be all bad.  Its predecessor was a solid, if underwhelming entry into the franchise, with some fun boss fights making up for less inspired level design.  So maybe X6 was the one that put it all together?  Did it combine the great level design and soundtrack of X4 with the outstanding boss fights and more polished graphics of X5?  In a word, no. Despite not necessarily being a “bad” game, X6 is among the worst in the entire Mega Man franchise (both old school and X games).  I would certainly say its the worst X title and if you were to bring the older games into the fray, the only one I disliked more was probably Mega Man and Bass.  Again, this isn’t some jank franchise that has been around for five years, so its a different set of standards, but if you are going to try to jump

Moving away from the 16-bit era, its time once again to discuss a PS1 era RPG. It’s no secret that there were tons of these on the PlayStation and while many of them are considered all time classics, many more have fallen into obscurity. The Granstream Saga definitely falls into the latter category. What we have here is an action RPG released towards the middle of the systems life-cycle that was intended as a spiritual successor to Japan-only Super Nintendo (well, Super Famicom) game Terranigma. Thanks to the wonders of emulation and fan translations, Terranigma has established itself as a cult classic in the West. It’s pseudo-sequel, despite having actually been released in the U.S., is still just a footnote. Starting with the story, you play as a young man named Eon, who is responsible for cutting pieces off of his home continent to help it float. The surface of Eon’s world is covered in water, with what’s left of humanity living on a series of four floating continen

The Legend of Dragoon, Part 2 Last week, we talked about The Legend of Dragoon, and its awful, awful translation.  It might seem like I hated the game, but that is far from the case.  We already talked about the negative, so lets focus on the something positive. The biggest positive?  The graphics.  This game looks great.  It may be the best looking game on the system and that is saying something.  Some of the pre-rendered backgrounds are truly breathtaking and the animations are really smooth.  The character models look really good, they’re a little blocky, but that’s to be expected on the PS1.  It isn’t even just the backgrounds, its the backgrounds of the backgrounds.  Perhaps the biggest standout moment comes when your party takes a boat from one continent to another.  The water looks and moves like its real, which is a huge accomplishment.  You can’t talk about an RPG without talking about the story and LOD offers a decent one.  You play as Dart

The Legend of Dragoon, Part 1 I really, really would like to play and write about JRPGs of this era, but they are just too long to review consistently.  I am trying to always have a JRPG going on as I play other games, as they are my favorite genre by far.  That said, each of them are going to get a two part blog when I finish them, because I want to get the most out of my 40 hour investment. I firmly believe that 1995-2001 were the golden years for JRPGs and The Legend of Dragoon fits right into that window.  I wouldn’t exactly consider it a forgotten game.  In fact, I wanted to cover it for the opposite reason I have covered most games so far.  More recent online conversation around LOD paint it as a classic, an all time great, yet another jewel in the crown that is the PS1’s RPG Library.  People count it among their favorite games, touting it as a must play.  Funny, that’s not the way I remember it when it came out. While it had plenty of hype pre-rel