Gaming off the Beaten Path

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally reached the end of our GBA Metroidvania mini series. Well, I guess it hasn't really been that long, it's been less than a year since I started this whole thing. I usually  take a lot longer to finish stuff like this, if I finish it at all. It certainly helps that almost all of these games have been vey good, but the Quintet Trilogy games were all really good and it took me damn near two years to finish all of those. Sometimes, I don't finish these mini-series at all. But I've successfully worked my way through the Metroid and non-linear Castlevania games on the GBA and it's time to wrap it up with the third and final 'Vania title on my list. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow was released for the GBA in May or 2003, a rare example of a title that actually hit the shelves in North America before it did in Japan. It wasn't by much, but it was still a rarity. Even though it's the last game I'm covering ...

  It's been a while since I've done a 10 Round Fight, but this time I'm going to do something a little different. And it's not that these two games aren't RPGs, or that they are part of the same franchise. You see, the first two times I've done this, I've used them to compare either: a) two great games - or - b) two very good, influential new games. But that's not the case here. For the first time, we are going to throw two games in the ring not as a result of their quality, but lack thereof. In plain English, that means we are going to compare two games that suck. Okay, I guess in the scheme of things, neither of these games are actually that bad. I've said this before when I reviewed titles from the series, but a bad Mega Man game is still better than some franchises at their best. But still, these two are among the most maligned titles in the franchise. Mega Man and Bass is widely considered the worst game in the classic series, while Mega Man X6 ...

  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...

  The end of a console's life cycle was always a weird and interesting time. People talk all the time about how much innovation there is at the start of a new generation, but they rarely talk about how much innovation occurs at the end of one. Sometimes you are better off sticking with the best of what old technology can provide rather than the worst of what new technology offers. I think that's something that goes beyond just gaming and extends to most different kinds of media, or even hardware, but that's a different discussion for a different day. A lot of underrated, forgotten (and expensive) games come late in life cycles, most gamers just move on to the next generation without a second thought. By the end of 1995, everyone wanted to play with the shiny new toys, the PlayStation and the Saturn. Those games had some interesting and outstanding early titles, but the 4th generation consoles weren't ready to go quietly. There were a lot of notable titles that came out ...

  It's been a while since I've discussed Mega Man and, hey, I'm always looking for the excuse to do so. I've talked at length about my love for the series and I even spent a month covering some of its more obscure entries in the early days of the blog. Mega Man 3 is on my 10s list, and it's the game that's essentially responsible for me picking up video games as a hobby to begin with. But for as much as I love the series, at least the original and X series, I had yet to play Mega Man 10 until now. It's not that I never had the desire to, I just never got around to it. I loved Mega Man 9, I consider it to be one of the best games of the 7th generation. This was the early days of the whole "new old-style games" trend, and Mega Man 9 and 10 were huge when they came out. It didn't hurt that it had been almost 15 years since a new title in the series came out. But while Mega Man 9 was met with near universal acclaim, the 10th entry was a little bit ...

  Contrary to popular belief, Sonic the Hedgehog hasn't always been Sega's mascot. I always forget how much earlier than the SNES that the Genesis was released, or how long it competed directly with the NES. I am a little young to remember the true early days of the "Genesis does what Ninten-don't" campaign, though it was still around in some form when I was growing up. To people my age, Sonic the Hedgehog is Sega's mascot and always has been. However, that wasn't actually the case. Because before there was everyone's favorite super fast, super blue hedgehog with attitude, there was a derpy little boy name Alex Kidd. Released in 1989, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle is actually the only one of the series' five games to come out on the Genesis. Developed and published by Sega, it was the fourth game in a franchise that dated back to the early days of the Master System, Sega's 3rd generation console. I'm not going to lie, I don't think ...

  X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse I'm a little bit shocked that it has taken me this long to get to an X-Men game, but here we are. I don't think everyone's favorite team of non-reptilian mutants needs any introduction. The X-Men have been featured in just about every kind of media imaginable, from comic books to Saturday morning cartoons to major movies, the X-Men have been a big deal for a very long time. While most 80's and 90's kids have some familiarity with the cartoon series, and children of the 00's will probably have seen at list one of films, that only scratches the surface of how deep the group's lore goes. Believe me, this iceberg goes deep, you've got alternate universes, pasts, futures, other teams like X-Force and X-Factor, stuff that a hardcore X-Men fan could probably explain to you but is completely over my head. Honestly, I wasn't really a huge fan of the cartoon, I always found it to be an incredibly oppressive and bleak show and it shoc...