Gaming off the Beaten Path

  It's been quite a while since I've done a post that's not about a game, but it's time to discuss the latest TV adaptation of a classic gaming franchise: Twisted Metal. Twisted Metal is a franchise I have a lot of love for, so much so that I dedicated an entire month to it on my blog. The reason for that coverage? The announcement of a new TV show, based on the long-dormant franchise. Well, that show is finally here. Not going to lie, I hated everything about this show when I first heard about it. I even talked in one of my reviews about how the initial plot synopsis sounded like it was written by someone who had never once played the games.  But then the trailers started coming out. The first one I saw showed that someone, somewhere at the very least understood the darkly irreverent attitude of the series. That was good. Then the trailer with Sweet Tooth dropped, and you could tell right away they nailed everything about him. That got me really interested. But I still...

After last week’s review, I found myself in the mood for a vehicular combat game.  I thought a lot about playing one of the Twisted Metal titles I own, but decided I would save them for later.  They aren’t that far out of the ordinary anyway. Instead, I turned a game that’s very near and dear to my heart, Vigilante 8.  The genre is almost extinct now, but in the late 90’s/early 00’s, vehicular combat games were everywhere.  The genre, at least in its 3D form, was essentially created by Twisted Metal and most of the games that followed it tried to one up the early PS1 title.  TM was filled with crazy cars, bizarre characters and cartoonish stages, so others tried to compete by trying to get crazier, weirder and more “out there,” usually to mixed results. Vigilante 8, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction.  Set in the Southwestern United States in the 1970’s, V8 ditched the demonic ice cream trucks and guys stuck ...

It’s been almost a year, but we are once again getting into a genre we haven’t touched yet. Flying games are a very, very niche genre, but I do consider them to be their own unique slice of the gaming pie.  They aren’t quite driving, aren’t quite vehicular combat and aren’t quite action.  I always want to like them more than I do.  I probably have as much of an enjoyment rate of flying games as I do racing games.  But whereas I generally recognize I am not a fan of racing titles, I just can’t stop having these things catch my eye. Warhawk certainly did when I saw a demo of it on the “PlayStation Picks” disk that came with the original console in 1995.  It wasn’t quite a launch title (it came out about 2 months after the system did), but just the 2-3 minute, non-playable demo made me take notice of this new player in the market.  Remember, this is the early age of 3D gaming and stuff like this was absolutely mind blowing when compa...