Gaming off the Beaten Path

  Contrary to popular belief, Sonic the Hedgehog hasn't always been Sega's mascot. I always forget how much earlier than the SNES that the Genesis was released, or how long it competed directly with the NES. I am a little young to remember the true early days of the "Genesis does what Ninten-don't" campaign, though it was still around in some form when I was growing up. To people my age, Sonic the Hedgehog is Sega's mascot and always has been. However, that wasn't actually the case. Because before there was everyone's favorite super fast, super blue hedgehog with attitude, there was a derpy little boy name Alex Kidd. Released in 1989, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle is actually the only one of the series' five games to come out on the Genesis. Developed and published by Sega, it was the fourth game in a franchise that dated back to the early days of the Master System, Sega's 3rd generation console. I'm not going to lie, I don't think

  Believe it or not, I actually do have goals. They may be stupid, but they are technically goals.' One of my stated goals this year is to play through the entirety of the Quintet trilogy. You would think I would make my goals stuff like learn a skill or a language or something. Why waste time on a hobby you enjoy, right? Anyway, the Quintet trilogy is a series of highly regarded action RPGs which, for whatever reason, I never got around to playing. That's kind of odd for me, because I played tons of RPGs in the 90's and 00's. I hit most of the main SNES titles, but I missed these three, Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma (at least the two games that came out in the U.S., Terranigma was never released here). Some people consider The Granstream Saga, which I played a long time ago, to be the fourth game in the series, but that's not always the case. They always seemed up my alley, but just kind of passed me by. Anyway, the three games in question are not re

  With the amount of unique video games that exists, it's always surprising how certain subject matter just isn't represented all that frequently. There really aren't that many games about firefighters out there and it kind of feels odd. They do exist, but they are few and far between and it almost feels like there should be more. I mean, how many kids out there want to be firemen? How many towns have all volunteer fire departments? How many firefighter shows are on TV? It's not like the premise would be completely out there. And yet, firefighting games are few and far between and the few that do exist tend to be off the radar budget titles. Which brings us to Real Heroes: Firefighter. Originally released in 2009 for the Wii, it was updated and ported to the PS4, XBox One and Switch in 2020. The game has so many publishers and developers listed for it that I couldn't tell you exactly who created which version and when. What is immediately apparent is that RH:F was m

  Yeah, I know, two non-game reviews in a row. But I feel like I couldn't pass this one up. In case you haven't heard, there's a new Super Mario Bros. movie out and it seems like a lot of people are going to see it. So many, in fact, that I've heard it broke some sort of record for animated films. Apparently, it made more money in its opening week than something called "Frozen," which must be some sort of indie film because I've never heard of it. In all seriousness, the Super Mario Bros. movie has been a surprisingly big deal. I knew it would be popular, but I had no idea it would be this popular. It's made more than $700 million globally. Almost a billion dollars. Again, I don't think people realized how big this thing was going to be. As to why, I have a couple of ideas. I don't think normies realize how dedicated gamers are. I don't think they understand how popular video games, especially Nintendo games, are in Asia. I don't think

I actually had a review prepared for this week, but I've decided to take a little bit of a detour. Thanks to the magic of personally curated content suggestions, I stumbled upon something I found to be quite interesting. When you play video games for as long as I have, you are bound to encounter some bad ones. Typically, these games are dismissed immediately and often become the target of online game reviewers like myself, pointing and laughing at their horrible controls or stupid plots or lousy graphics or whatever. I touched on the whole subset of online content dedicated almost entirely to anger-fueled, profanity-ridden rants against horrible games in the intro episode of my podcast. Unlike other media formats, it's seemingly rare for bad video games to have defenders. Which is why I was surprised when I came across an entire sub-culture of gamers that embraced these titles, games affectionately known as Kusoge. Kusoge is a portmanteau of the Japanese words Kuso, meaning cra

  X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse I'm a little bit shocked that it has taken me this long to get to an X-Men game, but here we are. I don't think everyone's favorite team of non-reptilian mutants needs any introduction. The X-Men have been featured in just about every kind of media imaginable, from comic books to Saturday morning cartoons to major movies, the X-Men have been a big deal for a very long time. While most 80's and 90's kids have some familiarity with the cartoon series, and children of the 00's will probably have seen at list one of films, that only scratches the surface of how deep the group's lore goes. Believe me, this iceberg goes deep, you've got alternate universes, pasts, futures, other teams like X-Force and X-Factor, stuff that a hardcore X-Men fan could probably explain to you but is completely over my head. Honestly, I wasn't really a huge fan of the cartoon, I always found it to be an incredibly oppressive and bleak show and it shoc

  Sometimes, a game leaves you speechless. That may seem like praise, but it isn't always. Yeah, sometimes a game can be so good or interesting it's awe inspiring, I remember playing stuff like Final Fantasy VII or the Resident Evil remake for the first time and being stunned. But sometimes, it's the opposite, a game is so unbelievable awful you just don't know what to say, I remember also being stunned the first time I played Rise of the Robots or that game with the moose and being similarly flabbergasted. But it's not all about good and bad, yin and yang, positive and negative. Games can leave you speechless for other reasons, like how unabashedly weird they are. Total Carnage fits squarely into the 'weird' category. One look at Total Carnage, an arcade cabinet from Midway that was ported to the Super NES in 1993, and you think you know exactly what to expect. The box art has two jacked, shirtless dudes spread firing machine guns and the game is called