Gaming off the Beaten Path

  It's time to discuss yet another one of the internet's favorite games. It's not that I hate covering these things, it's that I always worry I'm going to say something that's going to get myself in trouble. I guess I don't have enough followers for that.  Of course, we all know how things can go when you have a difference of opinion with the rest of the internet. All it takes is not liking a game everyone loves to set off a firestorm. That's especially true with some of the more obscure or indie games that tend to have very passionate fanbases. At the same time, I kind of understand some of the backlash to some of these "hot takes." There are so many attention seekers out there that it's hard to tell whether someone genuinely believes these things or whether they are just trolling. Fortunately for me, my opinion on this week's game isn't completely off from what most people seem to think. Unfortunately, it's also one of the fir...

  I think it's pretty obvious I'm a huge nerd, I wouldn't be talking about old video games on the internet if I wasn't. But as nerdy as I am, tabletop games have always been a blind spot for me.  I've talked a little bit about this before, but the Satanic Panic was still very much alive in the 90's. It may have been on its last legs, but it was still there. Violent video games gave the collective outrage mob a second wind, with games like Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and, especially, Doom serving as fresh new targets to sink their claws into. Other more traditional game formats weren't safe either, as Magic: The Gathering also became a punching bag, though I have to admit that was a little more understandable when you try to walk in those folks shoes. Not even Pokemon was safe, especially when the TCG came out and the usual suspects started claiming it was intentionally designed as a gateway drug to get into Magic. We aren't talking about the folks that had...

  Before we unpack and review this week's game, we need to talk a little bit about the console it's on and that console's history. But this isn't some lesser known 90's system like the Neo Geo or 3DO. It's a console family that in the last 20 years has become a household name for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Whether you are a fan of the console or not, there's no denying the original XBox caused a seismic shift when it was released in 2001. The big black and green box immediately stood out physically and it wasted little time in establishing itself as one of the most unapologetically western consoles of all time. Born of a marriage between a multi-billionaire's spur-of-the-moment infatuation and excessive 90's edgelord marketing and baptized in Mountain Dew, XBox took Sega's "cool kid" strategy and turned it up to 11. There were no silly plumbers or hedgehogs here. Nintendo and Sony? Those were for anime nerds and little kids. Sega...

  After a slight delay, it's finally time to crown a 5th anniversary champion. These two RPG heavyweights are some of the genre's most renowned titles of all time, so this is going to be a knockdown, drag out slugfest. As it stands, they defeated some stiff competition to get here, and both titles are absolutely deserving. Both scored 9.75s and were strongly considered for 10s. Hey, one or both might get bumped up after this battle. I'm sure many people already consider them 10s, which is going to make said battle tough to decide. This isn't like the comparison I did with Chained Echoes and Sea of Stars, with all due respect to those two titles the ones we are comparing today have had time to marinate. The book on them is written, as written as the book on a game can be, and history has already decided them to be great. Of course, they are both RPGs, so we will be using the same categories as our last battle. Those are: Round 1: Graphics Round 2: Sound Round 3: Story Ro...