Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Thus far, our Twisted Metal marathon has taken us through the series, highs, lows and reboots. Now it's time to revisit what may be the series' most underrated title. Twisted Metal: Head-On rarely gets any love from the gaming populace at large and is often just forgotten when discussing the series as a whole. I myself didn't even know it existed until several years after its release, when I started buying up cheap PS2 games that Gamestop was liquidating towards the end of the system's life cycle. Initially released for the PlayStation Portable in 2005, the game was ported to the PS2 as the "Extra Twisted" edition in 2008 with added content. Full disclosure, that is the version I played for the review. I do actually have the PSP original, but I lack a functioning PSP, so playing that would have been a slight issue. The port was handled by Eat Sleep Play studios. Wait, another new developer for TM? What happened this time? Well, the PSP port was indeed develo

  We've talked a ton about first series' first games over the past few weeks, but now it's time to shift gears a little bit. It's time to talk about reboots. I really hope it came through just how great I think Twisted Metal 2 is. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way, reviews and sales numbers back my conclusion that it's absolutely a game worth playing. The first game put the series on the map, but the second took it to the top of the world. TM had become one of Sony's flagship franchises and it looked like it was going to become a huge cash cow, turning out game after game like a well oiled machine. That was, of course, until the machine broke down. But it wasn't an explosive ice cream cone or a barrage of patriot missiles that did it in. No, it was something much less interesting. A contract dispute between developer SingleTrac and Sony caused the gaming giant to shift development duties to one of their in-house teams, 989 Studios. But tha

  Consider your wish...granted. In the past few weeks, we've talked a lot about series' first games and how their predecessors improved upon the foundations they laid. I decided it was fitting to continue that trend with our next 10's game, one of the truly great sequels of all time and a game that's truly special to me. I reviewed the original Twisted Metal a few months ago and I talked a lot about how transformational it was. I also talked about how flawed it was, which, as we've seen the past few weeks, was common. You have to experiment and try different things, how are you going to know what gamers like and don't like if you don't try different things? This was especially true of early generation games, which the original Twisted Metal was, where developers were still trying to figure out what the new hardware could do and what users wanted from it. But not everyone takes to heart the feedback they receive from critics and gamers. Some developers aren&#

  Yes, that's the full title of the game. It might be the most ridiculous game title I've ever heard in my life. I mean, I guess it does make sense: this game is the official licensed game of the King Kong film from the early 'aughts directed by Peter Jackson. But it's just such a mouthful. They couldn't just call it "King Kong: The Movie" or something like that? Maybe just "King Kong?" Could you imagine if they called Super Star Wars "George Lucas Presents: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope: The Official Game of The Original Film Trilogy: Part 1?" Now it's really got me thinking, is this the only game in history to include a film director's name in it's title? See, this is where your mind goes when you start playing these licensed games. They're all so terrible, so you have to keep yourself distracted with things like that. Well, maybe not all of them. MOST of them are terrible, not all of them. There are a few pretty go

  This week's entry is going to have a little bit of everything: a "Was it Really" post, a game review and some general thoughts. It's like all the different stuff I do rolled into one nice, neat package. One of the topics I wanted to cover more since I started GOTBP is the competing narratives surrounding certain games. I touched on this a little bit with my Legend of Dragoon review, as that game was considered somewhat underwhelming when it came out but is now lauded as a classic. I find that such revisionist history is common in gaming, for better or for worse. Of course, it cuts both ways. It's become fashionable to bash classic games, call them dated, say they were never that great, etc., etc. Final Fantasy VII, Goldeneye and Halo are a few that spring to mind as favorite targets for this. Some of the more recent criticism is justified, some of it is ridiculous, but all of it leads to a disparate narrative about those games and their brethren. But for now,

  It really is amazing how video game series' come and go. On one hand, you have the IPs that cross multiple gaming generations, your Marios , your Final Fantasys , your Sonics , etc. On the other, you have weird, obscure one-off titles like Nano Breaker or Shadow Madness. Sometimes series' seem to drop off the map without warning, like F-Zero or Star Fox. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a series take as strange a path as that of Onimusha. These games were a huge deal in the 6th generation. It gave us four mainline titles, the first of which will be our subject today, as well as a tactics-style game. Onimusha: Warlords, was the first PlayStation 2 game to sell more than a million copies and was eventually ported to the original XBox. It came from a huge studio in Capcom and was designed by Keiji Inafune, a name all too familiar to Mega Man fans. The game actually began development as a 64DD title in the 90's, as the higher ups at Capcom reportedly wanted a Resi

 You can drop this one straight into the "that exists?" file. I'm not going to lie, when this game was first bought to my attention I thought it would be a fan-made game or a hack or something along those lines. But nope, there really was a dodgeball video game for the NES, released in 1989 by a company called Technos. This was apparently an arcade port, I am unsure if the original cabinet ever left Japan, but I highly doubt it. Personally I think the name is a bit confusing, so many SNES games had "Super" in the title, it was weird to see it on an NES game other than Super Mario Bros. But I digress. Super Dodgeball is exactly what it sounds like, a video game where you play dodgeball. There's a one player world cup mode, along with a versus mode and something called bean ball, which can be played with either one or two players. This mode is more like a schoolyard game, with every player out for themselves and able to move freely at any point. The other two

Last week, we looked at a game that had tons of prerelease hype, which managed to meet or even surpass its high expectation. This week, we will turn our focus to a game that...didn't. It's hard to convey what a big deal The Bouncer was when it was announced for the then-new PS2. The developers had big ideas in mind, promising a gritty, movie-like story with revolutionary game physics, interactable environments and customizable characters. A lot of small developers get themselves in trouble making promises like this. But this was no pet project of a small up and coming developer. This was coming from Squaresoft (along with DreamFactory), the company behind Final Fantasy, a series you might have heard of. It's not that Square never made bad games, but they were few and far between. So when they made the promises they did, we all expected them to pay them off. They had Final Fantasy stalwarts Shinji Hashimoto and Tetsuya Nomura working on the game, how could they not. The fi