Gaming off the Beaten Path

  It's time to check another obscure 90's console off the list. Okay, it's not really THAT obscure, but it's definitely not one a lot of people, or anyone I know really, grew up with. Arcade giants SNK are very well known in the gaming community, especially among fighting game fans. Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, you could go all day just listing out fighting games that they were responsible for. Of course, they also had plenty of other well known titles like Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors. SNK is actually still in business today, though it's technically not the same as the original company went bankrupt in the early 00's. Normally I try to include some basic background about how these companies end up where they do, but I am going to spare everyone thousands of words of legal jargon and just simply describe the company's history with an emphatic "it's complicated." Either way, most gamers knew about their titles from either arc...

  Sometimes, I wish I had more time to play video games. You know what? That's not a sometimes, it's an always kind of thing. I actually do play the games I review and unless something is just straight up terrible, I try to play it to completion. Trust me, I'd like to play more RPGs but I can't bang out a 40 hour game in a week. Usually, I feel like I have sufficient time to get at least an everyday gamer's level of understanding of a game. That's kind of all I need, it's sort of in line with my gimmick. But sometimes I come across something I wish I could put more time into, or at least feel like I should put more time into. I have heard since the 90's just how great Virtua Fighter 2 is, that it's incredibly easy to learn but incredibly difficult to master. I don't know how true it is, but I remember hearing stories of Japanese players lining up and waiting for hours to receive lessons from pro VF2 players back in the 90's. It's not hard...

It's a two for one offering this week. Double the Mega Man! I've wanted to discuss these two games for a while and it's been quite some time since I have discussed the Mega Man series, so I figured now was the time. I know I've covered these games a lot, but what can I say, I love that little blue guy. While I've certainly discussed MM a ton, probably more than any gaming franchise, I've found that the series provides tons of oddities that most mainstream series' just don't. I think it comes from being one of the early targets of the "its the same game over and over again" critics, it's definitely the first series I remember being slammed by reviewers for that. Honestly, they weren't completely off base in that assessment. It seems that Capcom heard the criticism and took it to heart, sometimes almost too much so. Some of their spinoffs worked, some didn't. But I'm not sure any of those spinoffs are quite as obscure as these two...