Gaming off the Beaten Path

The Legend of Dragoon, Part 2 Last week, we talked about The Legend of Dragoon, and its awful, awful translation.  It might seem like I hated the game, but that is far from the case.  We already talked about the negative, so lets focus on the something positive. The biggest positive?  The graphics.  This game looks great.  It may be the best looking game on the system and that is saying something.  Some of the pre-rendered backgrounds are truly breathtaking and the animations are really smooth.  The character models look really good, they’re a little blocky, but that’s to be expected on the PS1.  It isn’t even just the backgrounds, its the backgrounds of the backgrounds.  Perhaps the biggest standout moment comes when your party takes a boat from one continent to another.  The water looks and moves like its real, which is a huge accomplishment.  You can’t talk about an RPG without talking about the story and LOD offers a decent one.  You play as Dart

The Legend of Dragoon, Part 1 I really, really would like to play and write about JRPGs of this era, but they are just too long to review consistently.  I am trying to always have a JRPG going on as I play other games, as they are my favorite genre by far.  That said, each of them are going to get a two part blog when I finish them, because I want to get the most out of my 40 hour investment. I firmly believe that 1995-2001 were the golden years for JRPGs and The Legend of Dragoon fits right into that window.  I wouldn’t exactly consider it a forgotten game.  In fact, I wanted to cover it for the opposite reason I have covered most games so far.  More recent online conversation around LOD paint it as a classic, an all time great, yet another jewel in the crown that is the PS1’s RPG Library.  People count it among their favorite games, touting it as a must play.  Funny, that’s not the way I remember it when it came out. While it had plenty of hype pre-rel

Lode Runner 3D This week its back to the Nintendo 64 for yet another game I have no recollection of ever purchasing in another genre that we haven’t touched yet.  We have our first puzzle game and its a surprisingly good one. First, a little bit about the Lode Runner series.  It goes all the way back to 1983, when the original game was released for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, VIC 20, Commodore 64 and PC.  It would soon find itself ported to the NES, making it one of the first third party games for the system.  The concept was simple: gather gold, avoid monsters, break blocks and reach the exit.  It was primitive and simple, but simple. It also featured a level editor, a major novelty at the time.   The game went on to spawn about 1.2 trillion sequels and spinoffs, mostly for the PC.  Most console games in the series were Japan exclusive, with this version appearing on the N64 in 1999.  The core premise is still the same, but its (obviously) in

NFL Gameday 98 Sorry for no post last week, got a little busy.  Figured I would get back into it with another genre I haven’t touched yet, sports games. Yes, there used to be football games other than Madden.  Way back in the old days, we had options.  Tecmo Super Bowl was the first king of the digital gridiron, but that didn’t last past the 90s.  In the early 'aughts, the NFL 2K series (which I find to be massively overrated) scared EA so much that they decided to buy exclusive rights to the NFL license, essentially cornering the market on football video games.   Of course, this exclusivity wouldn’t apply to first party developers.  It’s how Sony was able to keep making “MLB: The Show” titles after 2K sports bought exclusivity to the MLB license as a measure of revenge against EA.  They could have continued making Gameday titles as well, but decided against it.  Why?  The PS1 era Gameday’s were widely considered to be superior to the Madden titles