Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Sorry, I know it's been two non-review posts relatively close to each other. But life has been chaotic and I haven't had a ton of time to game in recent weeks. So, instead of a review you get my opinion on random video game topics once again. I promise, I won't ever go full on into something like this, but for now I want to discuss a topic that has been bought up to me a lot in recent weeks. As I have discussed at length, I've become far more of a retro gamer, some might call me an old-school gamer, in recent years. There are certainly things I prefer about modern games, maybe I will dive deeper in to what at a later date, but I find myself playing older stuff almost exclusively. But what exactly constitutes "older?" What exactly is old-school gaming, or retro gaming, anyway? At the end of the day, the hobby is relatively new, gaming as we know it probably traces its roots to the early 70's, with it gaining popularity in the 80's before exploding in ...

 It's time once again to go back to this past. This time, our destination is 1995, the Los Angeles Convention Center for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, otherwise known as E3. We are smack in the middle of the bit wars, with Nintendo and Sega's 16-bit consoles, the Super NES and Sega Genesis, are starting to see their powers wane. It was time for the new era of gaming consoles to take shape, with exciting, 32-bit machines on the horizon. This event would see Nintendo showcase the Virtual Boy, and we all know how that turned out. Sega would announce the surprise launch of the Saturn, its long awaited follow-up to the Genesis (or Mega Drive for you Europeans out there). But it was the new kid on the block that would grab the attention. It's hard envision a time when Sony was a new player in the gaming console market, but here they were ready to introduce their first console, the PlayStation. There's a whole story behind its development, I've already talked a littl...

In our last "Was it Really?" we took a look at the Virtual Boy, widely considered a complete bust of a console and one of the worst stains on the gaming industry. In the end, I determined that it wasn't nearly as bad as it's reputation, though it's still pretty bad. This time, I'm going to pivot from a console to an individual game, one that many gamers know and one I'm intimately familiar with. Silver Surfer, a shoot em' up for the NES, is widely considered one of the most difficult video games in history, so much so that it's become legendary amongst the internet gaming community. It was one of popular YouTuber "The Angry Video Game Nerd"'s first targets and if you go back and watch the video he made today, you'll see that his anger and frustration with the game, normally embellished, are as real as it gets. I can't say I blame him. This was one of the earliest NES games I ever played, my cousin had it and we spent HOURS try...

Welcome to the first installment of "Was it Really?" one of the new series' I want to start doing regularly this year. I've ranted about this before, but I find like the gaming community, both gaming related media and gamers themselves, believe in absolute truths about beloved or hated games. There's no room to deviate from the commonly held opinions that permeate the industry, whether it be about an individual game, console or event. My distaste for this mindset was half the reason I started doing this whole thing and why I want to start doing deeper dives on stuff like this. Which brings us to the Virtual Boy. Released in the summer of 1995, the Virtual Boy was a massive commercial flop and a rare mistake by Nintendo. It's a 32-bit system, part of the 5th generation along with the PlayStation, Saturn and Nintendo 64. It promised an immersive experience for players, using a parallax effect to create the illusion of depth. What it delivered was red monochrome ...