Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Video game consoles, like any product, fail for a number of reasons. Remember, things weren't always like they are now, where it's all but guaranteed you are going to get a new PlayStation, XBox or whatever random name Nintendo decides on every 8 to ten years. Gaming history has seen a lot of different players attempt to enter the console market, some successfully and others not so much. This wasn't just a long time ago either, I would say this kind of continued up until the 7th generation (and it still does occasionally happen even today). It was probably most prevalent in the really early days, there are tons and tons of pong consoles out there from manufacturers you would never imagine making video games. It was definitely still true in the 90's when a lot of players were still looking for a piece of the gaming pie. Nintendo and Sega were in the middle of a full-on console war, but they weren't alone. NEC and Hudson were still plugging away with the Turbografx,...

I am having too much fun with these 80's action movie games, so let's keep going with those. We're leaving Stallone and the jungles of Vietnam behind, but we're going to keep the bullets flying with Schwarzenegger in the jungles of South America. Originally panned by most critics upon release, Predator has become a big-time sci-fi cult classic. The film tells the story of Alan "Dutch" Schaefer and his squad, sent on a CIA mission to rescue hostages from an unspecified South American nation. They defeat the guerillas, only to encounter something far worse: an invisible alien creature called the Predator, hell bent on taking them out one by one. This was Arnold Schwarzenegger at his cheesy 80's best, supported by Carl Weathers, Jesse "The Body" Ventura and a pretty solid cast. I wonder how many other movies starred two future governors?  The film became known for its gratuitous violence and gore, not to mention the iconic Arnold one liners. The Pre...

  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 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...

  This week's entry is going to have a little bit of everything: a "Was it Really" post, a game review and some general thoughts. It's like all the different stuff I do rolled into one nice, neat package. One of the topics I wanted to cover more since I started GOTBP is the competing narratives surrounding certain games. I touched on this a little bit with my Legend of Dragoon review, as that game was considered somewhat underwhelming when it came out but is now lauded as a classic. I find that such revisionist history is common in gaming, for better or for worse. Of course, it cuts both ways. It's become fashionable to bash classic games, call them dated, say they were never that great, etc., etc. Final Fantasy VII, Goldeneye and Halo are a few that spring to mind as favorite targets for this. Some of the more recent criticism is justified, some of it is ridiculous, but all of it leads to a disparate narrative about those games and their brethren. But for now,...

It’s been a while, but its time to circle back to the Sega Genesis. I have discussed before how I was a Nintendo kid, only had an SNES, yada yada yada, etc.  etc.  A lot of games I will eventually talk about here will be new to me, but old hat to anyone that grew up on Sega.  Games like Vectorman, Comix Zone and Phantasy Star are “off the beaten path” for me, but many Genesis kids wouldn’t consider them so.  I had certainly heard of them, even if I hadn’t played them. But this week, I am going to discuss a Sega Genesis game I had never heard of in my life.  Released early in the system’s life cycle in 1990, E-Swat is a 2D side scroller that is somewhere between a run and gun game and a puzzle platformer.  You play as a futuristic police officer named Duke Oda, who is a member of the City of Liberty (not Liberty City, that’s a different place) swat team facing off against a mysterious organization called E.Y.E.  This organizatio...

The Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon Hi Kids!  Today we are going to talk about a very serious topic...drugs. It’s no secret that drugs are bad for you.  They are illegal, unhealthy and expensive.  Of course, that isn’t going to stop people from using them, but just because someone else does something doesn’t mean you should too.  Even if they can make you see or feel something completely out of the realm of ordinary, the long and short term effects can be devastating.   Besides, there are plenty of ways to experience what its like to be high/tripping/rolling/etc. without risking your health.  One of those is to play “The Mystical Ninja.”  The best way I can imagine this game’s development is that a team of folks at Konami hacked the source code of Super Mario 64, ingested one or more types of some unknown illicit substance, watched a documentary about Japanese culture and made a video game. And, despite all of its technical fl...

I wasn’t entirely thrilled with having to review another Mickey Mouse game, but, well, we can’t possibly go any lower than we did last week. This is yet another game starring everyone’s favorite mouse (well, almost everyone’s favorite, I personally would rank the Mickster behind Rizzo from the Muppets and Speedy Gonzalez) by Capcom.  This time we have moved up to 16 bits, as this game was exclusive to the Super Nintendo. Those of us that were gaming back in the day can vouch for how big a jump that was. Looking at Mickey Mousecapade, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, it was pretty clear to see it was a typical licensed game, a cheap cash in designed to sell copies to unsuspecting kids or parents who didn’t know any better.  That was pretty common back in the pre-internet, pre-streaming era.  There really wasn’t any way to know if a game was good without buying it, subscribing to a magazine or finding it at your local video store.  It st...