Gaming off the Beaten Path

Since I've started reviewing games, I've always made it a point to be completely honest and transparent when it comes to my opinions, even if they aren't necessarily popular. Frankly, it rarely, if ever, even comes up. For all of the complaints I hear about mainstream gaming reviews, I feel like they usually get some semblance of close to the mark, or at the very least the same mark I have in my mind. Nine times out of 10, games that are rated highly or poorly deserve the scores they get. Maybe the big guys score a game a 10 when it really deserves a 9, but its some semblance of close.  That's why I don't like using the O word anymore. Because even if I don't like a game quite as much as more mainstream critics, I still typically like it. But even saying that about some games is bound to cause controversy.  That's kind of the spot I find myself in with this week's title, a game I don't think needs any introduction. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's ...

Great, we're just starting out and already we have an enormous problem with false advertising. I just finished watching baseball almost four years after 2020 and what I saw was absolutely not what was promised in Super Baseball 2020. First and foremost, there were absolutely no robots or androids. You certainly didn't have to hit balls to dead center for home runs and there was a lot more foul territory. It was pretty much the same old baseball that I always remember, though I guess if I found out Aaron Judge is actually a terminator I wouldn't be surprised. Remember how futuristic 2020 felt in the 90's? As 2000 drew ever closer, sci-fi media started realizing they had to push their futures farther. You would have thought they would have just said 2100, it's very unlikely any of us are going to be around then. But a lot of games that would have had "2000" in the title started doing "2010" or "2020" as if it was so far in the future. I m...

  I mean, you had to know this was coming, right? You know how I love to do my comparisons, and this was just too easy. You could see it coming from a mile away. Of course, that's something you definitely can't say about the SMRPG remake itself. It's a few months later and I already finished the game, but it still doesn't feel like a reality that it actually exists. Even with all of the remakes that we see nowadays, I am really surprised that this game got the treatment. A lot of things had to align and, allegedly, a lot of bad blood had to be sorted out for it to happen. But here we are, we have a shiny new Super Mario RPG remake for the Nintendo Switch with updated graphics, music, translation and just about everything under the sun. Before anyone asks, I had originally planned a 10-Round Fight for this, it seemed logical at first. After playing Final Fantasy VII Remake and seeing how different it was from the original, I kind of had in my head that all remakes would ...

Looks Like Bowser is at it again! Nintendo was the unquestioned king of the home console video game world in the 80's, but by the time the 90's rolled around they found their castle was under siege. This siege, led by a super-fast, super hip hedgehog and his edgy compatriots, was going quite well for the Big N's latest rival. Their biggest weapon in all of this was a new, sleek, 16-bit gaming machine that has the aging NES on the ropes. Between the marketing blitz and blast processing and top-of-the-line graphics, Nintendo had their hands full. The NES had some great games, like Super Mario Bros. 3, but it just couldn't compete with the Genesis from a technical standpoint. However, Nintendo wasn't about to hand over the crown just yet. They were ready with some brand-new firepower of their own, kicking off the 90's with the new Super NES. Now they had their own 16-bit machine, a new console to help them defend their figurative crown. But a console alone wasn...

  Longplay footage of Street Fighter II Turbo for the SNES. I want to do a run on max difficulty but I figured I'd do a warm up on 6/8 stars. I'm a little rusty, was sloppy with my technique and way to reliant on hadoukens, but it could have gone worse.

 After focusing on one of my son's latest obsession last week, it's time to talk about one from my own childhood. Let's be honest, I wasn't the only one.  Back in the early 90's, it seemed like everyone between the ages of 4 and 10 was in full blown love with the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.  This was much watch stuff every time it was on television for 90's kids.  Every time these five warriors, who were actually just five ordinary teenagers in glorified space suits, took on the diabolical Rita Repulsa and her intergalactic monsters, we had to watch. Everything about it was just so cool, the explosions, the giant, colorful monsters, the robots that turned into even bigger robots, it was tailor made for me and and every other 90's kid. This show put many a karate instructor's kids through college. It really is amazing when you think about it.  Who would have thought a teen drama written around repurposed footage from a random Japanese TV show (Supe...

While the series is a little too mainstream for what I originally intended, I realize that I have yet to review a Mario game.  I have tried to stick to the obscure, but at this point I have covered Sonic, Final Fantasy, Madden and any number of popular franchises, so why not. I still wanted to keep it a little out there though.  Most people have heard of the Lost Levels, but its certainly the black sheep of the old school series.  It’s origin story is probably more well known than the game itself.  This was actually Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan.  It was deemed “too difficult” for U.S. audiences by Nintendo of America, as it was assumed they weren’t as skilled or patient as Japanese players.  Instead of releasing it stateside, they re-skinned a game called Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters, called it Super Mario Bros 2 and called it a day (which explains why that game is so different from everything else in the series).  It wasn’...

Taking on the armies of hell, one demon at a time... When you think about it, its really unbelievable how many first person shooters are out there right now.  Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, the list goes on and on and on. And its not just straight up FPS’ anymore.  Open world games are FPS’ now (Far Cry).  Hell, even RPGs are more FPS’ than RPGs now (looking at you Fallout).  It’s getting a little tiresome, even if I do love a good FPS.  But that wasn’t always the case.  There was a time where these games were a novelty, something you only saw a few times in a generation.  So what happened?  Doom.  Doom is what happened. Don’t get me wrong, Doom was far from the first FPS.  There were games like maze war dating back to the 1970s and of course, there was ID software’s precursor to Doom, Wolfenstein 3D.  But none of those quite captured the hearts and minds of Americans like the journey of a single, unname...

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...