Gaming off the Beaten Path

Well, I’m sure surprised it took us this long to get here. During my Mega Man reviews, I talked at length about how that was the series that got me into gaming.  I have so many memories of seeing and playing it for the first time as a child and being blown away.  But over time, I started to gravitate away from the blue bomber as I got older and my tastes changed.  Enter Final Fantasy .  If Mega Man was the reason I started playing video games, FF is the reason I kept playing them and continue to play them. Like Mega Man, Final Fantasy certainly has its offshoot games.  Of all of them in my collection, Crystal Chronicles is probably the biggest deviation from the rest of the series.  Released on the GameCube in the early 00’s, FFCC was the first game in the series on a Nintendo console in more than 10 years.   The story goes that SquareSoft, the publisher behind Final Fantasy , felt their games had essentially outgrown Nintendo’s cartridge based format. 

Oh great, another racing game.   Look, I think I’ve made it pretty clear I don’t really like these things, but they don’t take too much time to play or review.  This one isn’t even that obscure, a lot of folks that played video games in those days have heard of it and its even part of the Nintendo World Championship cartridge.  It wasn’t quite mainstream, but not really off the path either. I do talk a lot on here about “the name in the corner” with games.  Games are frequently under- or overrated because of who developed or published them, probably more so than any other type of media.  It was true then and it it still true now, even though there are far fewer developers (if you aren’t counting indie developers, of course) than there used to be.  Most of the ones that were around in those days were very specialized and known for making games in only one or two genres. And that’s what makes Rad Racer weird.  You might expect to find a generic NES