Gaming off the Beaten Path

  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

  Yippee Ki-Yay, it's time to talk about everyone's favorite Christmas movie. Look, I don't actually have any specific thoughts on whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie, I guess I could see it either way. At the end of the day, it's just a matter of opinion. What's not a matter of opinion is just how big a deal Die Hard was when it came out in 1988. We all know the story; John McClain attempts to reconnect with his estranged wife by attending her company Christmas party at Nakatomi Inc. All is going according to plan when the building is attacked by a band of terrorists led by Hans Gruber. The villains are trying to get access to the vault on the 30th floor and will stop a nothing to get it.  Based on the 1979 Novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorpe, expectations were low for the film. Studio execs were unsure what to think of Bruce Willis, who was more known as a television actor at the time, as a leading man in an action movie. Several bi

  Hey, he said he'd be back. We are forging ahead with our licensed 80's movie games, but there's no way we were moving past Arnold Schwarzennegger without covering Terminator. This is the first time we are going to be covering the franchise, but it's most certainly not going to be the last. For one, there are tons of Terminator games out there across a variety of consoles and generations. But for all I talk about how much I dislike movies, Terminator and Terminator 2 are among the rare examples of films that I can watch over and over again. The second movie is particularly excellent, still one of my all time favorites to this day. I think most people are familiar with the plot by now. The year is 2029, and humanity is on its last legs, fighting off a horde of sentient machines led by a rogue AI, Chat G...err, uh, Skynet. Skynet decides the best way to finally end humanity is to send a highly advanced Terminator, the T-1000, back in time to kill resistance leader John C

I am having too much fun with these 80's action movie games, so let's keep going with those. We're leaving Stallone and the jungles of Vietnam behind, but we're going to keep the bullets flying with Schwarzenegger in the jungles of South America. Originally panned by most critics upon release, Predator has become a big-time sci-fi cult classic. The film tells the story of Alan "Dutch" Schaefer and his squad, sent on a CIA mission to rescue hostages from an unspecified South American nation. They defeat the guerillas, only to encounter something far worse: an invisible alien creature called the Predator, hell bent on taking them out one by one. This was Arnold Schwarzenegger at his cheesy 80's best, supported by Carl Weathers, Jesse "The Body" Ventura and a pretty solid cast. I wonder how many other movies starred two future governors?  The film became known for its gratuitous violence and gore, not to mention the iconic Arnold one liners. The Pre

  It seems like every series, even the most popular ones, has at least one title that kind of falls through the cracks. You'd be hard pressed to find a lifelong gamer who has never heard of Double Dragon, maybe someone younger as the series' heyday was way back in the 3rd generation. The first three games are considered NES classics, even though the third is considered a bit of a step down and often the butt of jokes in the online gaming community. The games star the Lee brothers, Billy and Jimmy (or is it Bimmy?) as they take on the evil Black Warrior (a translation error later corrected to Shadow Warrior) gang. It may sound simple on paper, but Double Dragon broke a lot of ground in the beat 'em up genre gameplay and style-wise. It was one of the first genres with continuous scrolling, unique movesets and the ability to take enemy weapons. It featured cutscenes and a much darker atmosphere, drawing inspiration from both Enter the Dragon and Mad Max. I have complained on h

  It's always crazy to look at deep cuts and early efforts from some of the more celebrated developers and publishers in the industry. When we think of Nintendo, franchises like Mario, Zelda and Metroid come to mind almost immediately. But does anyone remember Excitebike? Not going to lie, those of us of a certain age probably do, but it's not really top of mind as a Nintendo franchise. At this point, isn't F-Zero considered a deep cut Nintendo Franchise? I mean, more than 20 years without a new game, right? Maybe it's time for a new one? Anyway, every gaming company had to start somewhere. It's not like Nintendo just popped up one day and started cranking out Mario games, they actually made Hanfuda playing cards for almost a century before they started cranking out light guns for Magnivox and creating consoles like the Color TV Game. But we won't be talking about the Big N today. We are going much further into the alphabet to the big R, everyone's favorite

  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

  Sometimes, a game leaves you speechless. That may seem like praise, but it isn't always. Yeah, sometimes a game can be so good or interesting it's awe inspiring, I remember playing stuff like Final Fantasy VII or the Resident Evil remake for the first time and being stunned. But sometimes, it's the opposite, a game is so unbelievable awful you just don't know what to say, I remember also being stunned the first time I played Rise of the Robots or that game with the moose and being similarly flabbergasted. But it's not all about good and bad, yin and yang, positive and negative. Games can leave you speechless for other reasons, like how unabashedly weird they are. Total Carnage fits squarely into the 'weird' category. One look at Total Carnage, an arcade cabinet from Midway that was ported to the Super NES in 1993, and you think you know exactly what to expect. The box art has two jacked, shirtless dudes spread firing machine guns and the game is called

I have always had a soft spot for 3rd generation games. Unfortunately, they can sometimes be a challenge to write about. I should back up a bit and admit that when I say 3rd generation, I am essentially talking about the NES. I had some familiarity with the Sega Master System, but most of my formative years were spent playing "Nintendo" as I am sure was the case for most kids who grew up in the United States. But the 3rd generation was still very much the frontier  era of gaming. At the time, Sega and Nintendo were new to the market and there were so many gaming computers available it would make your head spin. Atari was still very much in the picture, though the 7800 wasn't exactly on par with other offerings of the era. It seems weird to think about now, but there were so many competitors to the big two (who weren't even the big two at this point) that it's hard to keep track, though not all of those consoles made it to the U.S. But this was also before the in

  It's been a long road full of damage and destruction, but we've finally reached the end. We've been through the highs and the lows, the good and the bad, but we've arrived at the end of the Twisted Metal franchise. It's crazy, it's been 10 years since we've last had a new Twisted Metal game (at least an original one, remasters and compilations don't count), which is crazy to think about in a lot of ways. Remember, this used to be one of Sony's banner franchises, one gamers looked forward to with each new console generation. Even after a few lackluster entries early on, the series rebooted with Twisted Metal: Black to much critical acclaim and continued with a well crafted entry in Head-On. Sure, it was frustrating to hear about all of those cancelled games and  lost half finished ideas, but the series was very much still top of mind for PlayStation owners throughout the life of the PS1 and PS2. But those of us that were able to decipher a secret me