Gaming off the Beaten Path

Lets take a quick trip back to 1994. Bill Clinton is president.  Boys II Men and Whitney Houston are on top of the charts. George Foreman is world heavyweight champion and Major League Baseball is on strike.  O.J. Is on the run. Kurt Cobain is dead.  And I don’t care about any of it because I am six years old. It may have been an eventful year for the world, but my world revolved around video games and dinosaurs.  I knew more about dinosaurs than most people know about their own families.  The same was (and may still be) true of video games, especially fighting games.  I had grown tired of games like Mario and Duck Hunt, I was starting to get into RPGs, but at that time, I was all about Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.  When I heard they were going to make a game that was essentially Mortal Kombat with Dinosaurs, I lost my tiny little mind. It took a year, but in 1995 Primal Rage finally made its way to the SNES.  I begged and pleaded to go to KMart to

So I decided to go with back to back SNES games.  I have been in a 16-bit kind of mood and don’t currently have easy access to a Genesis, so here we are.  What can I say, it was a great generation in gaming. Of course, each generation has its quirks.  They all seem to cater to one genre more than the others.  In the current gen, its open world adventure games.  In the 32-bit era, it was RPGs.  In the early 90s, it was mascot platformers. These things were everywhere, mostly because everyone was trying to replicate the success of Mario and Sonic.  The official mascots of Nintendo and Sega appeared in tons of games, ranging from good to all time classics.  It may be hard to believe with some of the Sonic games out there now, but there was a time where the blue blur could do no wrong.  It seems Mario still can’t. Of course, that also meant imitators.  It seems like everyone was cranking out games with generic cartoon animals looking to create the next

Eye of the Beholder   Here’s the thing about bad games, they aren’t all necessarily bad.   Wait, what?  Did I just type that?  It may sound like it doesn’t make sense, but its true.  A lot of different things can make a game good or bad and not everyone agrees on what is most important.  Sometimes games are bad overall, other times they have one glaring flaw.  Add in the fact that rating games is as subjective as it is objective and you can see what I mean.   Eye of the Beholder should be a good game.  It has good graphics, solid sound and an interesting premise.  You build out a team of four characters to take on a sewer full of baddies on a mission to destroy the city. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons game, so it follows the rules of that universe.  I have never been a huge D&D fan, but it’s still nice to see.    It’s a unique game unlike anything else on the SNES.  It’s difficult to describe, but anyone who has played the Might and Magic games on

Unlike most of the games I have talked about so far, I have played quite a bit of this week’s entry. I was never the most social gamer, often eschewing multiplayer staples for individual gaming experiences.  When friends came over, my collection of two player co-op games offered slim pickings, so we played a lot of Doom Troopers.  Of course, that was a long time ago and once we moved on to other systems, this game sort of fell by the wayside.  I figure now is a good time to revisit it. I remember being excited about this game when I got it, as the “Doom” in the title led me to believe this would have something to do with, well, “Doom.”  It could have less to do with the FPS juggernaut, but it does take place in the Mutant Chronicles Universe.  Ever heard of it?  Yeah, neither had I.  It’s a post-apocalyptic pen and paper RPG from the 90’s, which actually has a pretty cool storyline.  My guess is the game was part of a larger merchandising play, as it came out a