Gaming off the Beaten Path

  One of the biggest problems I believe the gaming industry has is how quick it is to dismiss mediocre or even bad games as a complete waste of time. That may not seem like it makes sense at all, but hear me out. Just because a game is bad doesn't necessarily mean all the ideas it presents are bad. In fact, I feel like you can sometimes learn more from a failure than a success. But that doesn't always happen in the gaming industry. I think this is a big part of why it sometimes feels like the same game gets released over and over again, developers just take everything from their successes and slap a new label on them. Sometimes, it would help the industry innovate more if they took some of the more positive aspects from their less successful titles. In case it wasn't immediately apparent, Flying Dragon, a fighting game for the Nintendo 64, isn't a particularly good game. I probably could have just said "fighting game for the Nintendo 64" and you probably could

  This week I'm going to do something a little different. Hey card gaming is still gaming, right? I know I've talked before about my love of Magic: The Gathering and I've always wanted to write a little more about it, but I've never really had a reason to here. I debated doing something last year when they announced their whole "realms beyond" thing, where they decided to bring a bunch of crossover IPs into the MTG universe. Honestly, I wasn't a fan. As someone who has played since 1996, I don't even like that they have a "multiverse" with "planes" other than Dominara. So when I first saw the "Walking Dead" Secret Lair, I was a bit thrown. "I will never buy one of those crossover things" I thought to myself. I mean, there was talk of mixing in IPs that at least made some sense, like Dungeons and Dragons or Lord of the Rings, but a show about zombies? Stranger Things? Wasn't a fan. Well, then MTGs longtime pub

You know, for all the racing games I've covered over the years, I think last week was the first time I ever played a simulation racing game. This week I'm going to re-visit another genre I haven't touched in a while: arcade sports titles. Arcade sports games are a love it or hate it kind of thing. In some respect, it's difficult to pin down what exactly an arcade sports title entails. At its most basic level, it's a sports game that isn't a simulation of the sport it represents. But I personally would take it a bit further. It's any sports game that doesn't even attempt to simulate the sport it represents. Obviously, RBI Baseball on the NES isn't anything close to a simulation by modern standards, but it was the best they could do at the time. Would you consider that sim style or arcade style? At any rate, I think it's safe to include any over the top, ridiculous sports titles in the arcade side of things. Games like NFL Blitz and NBA Jam are som

  After almost two years, it's time to re-visit the World Heroes series. I had previously covered World Heroes 2 Jet, a tournament fighter from the 90's, and I wasn't particularly kind to it. While it was a well made game, it was overly simplistic and did very little to differentiate itself from it's countless contemporaries. Put simply, it was yet another average Street Fighter clone. However, it was far from the best the series had to offer. That would be World Heroes Perfect, which hit arcades in 1995 before winding up on the Neo Geo that same year. I've been doing this for three years and the only feedback I've received about which games I review was that I should have just skipped Jet and gone right to this game, as it is far superior. But was that really the case? I know SNK has a small but very dedicated fanbase, so could it just be bias? Well, World Heroes 2 Jet is a Street Fighter clone that's decidedly mediocre. World Heroes Perfect...is still a

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