Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Well, we haven't had one of these in a while. One of the phenomena I have always found interesting is how some series become major players during one gaming generation, only to be largely forgotten once new consoles are released. I found this to be especially prevalent in the 6th generation, especially with the PlayStation 2 and GameCube . I've already looked at titles like Onimusha: Warlords and Jak and Daxter, which were huge, heavily hyped 6th gen series that just disappeared after the 7th gen started. It's not like they haven't received HD remasters or ports or collection re-releases, but in terms of new games, there has been nothing. And no, mobile games don't count. Zone of the Enders fit perfectly into this category. It was a huge, huge deal when it came out and was extremely well received  critically. It came out in a time where game creators didn't get the director treatment they do now, but it was created by Hideo Kojima, one of the earliest people

  I always thought fan games were cool. I especially think it's cool when developers and publishers put their support behind those fan games. And I especially, especially when those fan games mix two of my favorite franchises in a way that makes sense. Anyone that has been following my content for any length of time knows I am a huge fan of both Mega Man and Street Fighter. You know, I didn't even realize how much I like Capcom games in general. When I first tried to start blogging back in my college days, I did a list of my top 100 video games of all time. That list would look much different if I did it today, but I don't think my top games would change too much. Of my top five, four of them were Capcom games and I didn't notice until I looked at it many years later when I started GOTBP. In fact,  both of these series  found their way into my top five. So yeah, a crossover between the two would be right up my alley. Apparently,  I wasn't the only one either, becaus

  Video games are still a relatively young media format, so I often find things that are common in film or television come off  as novel when it comes to gaming. That's to be expected, video games as a format are (debatably) around 50-70 years old and weren't what you would call mainstream for much of that time. In addition, cinematic or story driven video games didn't really become a thing until much later, while technology made those stories difficult to tell until even more recently. Because of this, certain tropes that are old hat in the other formats haven't really been done in games or  haven't been done well. Again, it's understandable, you have a lot of the same genres, action, horror, etc. you get the idea. But we aren't really here to talk about any of those today. Because we are going to talk about a genre,  I don't think games have typically done as well as movies, TV or even radio in their relatively brief existence: comedy. That's not t

  After a slight delay, it's finally time to crown a 5th anniversary champion. These two RPG heavyweights are some of the genre's most renowned titles of all time, so this is going to be a knockdown, drag out slugfest. As it stands, they defeated some stiff competition to get here, and both titles are absolutely deserving. Both scored 9.75s and were strongly considered for 10s. Hey, one or both might get bumped up after this battle. I'm sure many people already consider them 10s, which is going to make said battle tough to decide. This isn't like the comparison I did with Chained Echoes and Sea of Stars, with all due respect to those two titles the ones we are comparing today have had time to marinate. The book on them is written, as written as the book on a game can be, and history has already decided them to be great. Of course, they are both RPGs, so we will be using the same categories as our last battle. Those are: Round 1: Graphics Round 2: Sound Round 3: Story Ro

  My goodness, are technical difficulties annoying. I had my 5th anniversary final almost completely done, ready and scripted. The key word there is had. Thanks to some unfortunate computer issues, it got deleted, so I am going to have to re-write my entire 10 round fight. It's a lot of work to do those and I don't want to rush to try to get it done, I want to give Suikoden II and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne their due time in the spotlight. So, I am going to pivot and do that next week. Besides, it allows me to continue yet another Gaming Off the Beaten Path tradition: starting the year with an old sports game. I have already talked about Madden '04, it was actually the first 10s game I wrote about (I guess it was really about all the PS2 era Maddens, but '04 was the one I discussed the most). But again, that was the 6th generation version. Which I honestly thought was the only version. I didn't realize they were still making Madden games for the PS1 in 2004, so I