Gaming off the Beaten Path

So I just bought a car.  I may not be the first one of my friends to own a minivan, but I'm damn sure the first one to own a minivan of my own free will!  I figured now was a good time to check another genre off the list.  One I have been dreading for a long time.   I really, really don’t like racing games.  At least, realistic ones.  I like my share of kart racers and more sci-if oriented racers, like F-Zero, but that’s about it.  I have just never been a car enthusiast (I just bought a minivan for crying out loud) and I can count on one hand the ones I think are actually fun.  Everyone always talks about Gran Turismo or Forza or whatever, how they accurately simulate driving.  Great!  Who doesn’t love driving!  While we're at it, lets make games that accurately simulate squirting lemon juice in your eye or getting kicked in the nuts!    So as it is, there’s some genre bias here, but I am always...

Cosmic Star Heroine Once again, I am taking a detour from old school gaming to more modern fare.  Well, sort of.   Cosmic Star Heroine may have come out relatively recently, but it has old school RPG written all over it.  From the pixel art to the narrative to the style and atmosphere, this looks exactly like something that would have came out on the SNES in 1995.  It plays like it too, which is a very, very good thing.   Make no mistake about it, CSH is a very, very flawed game.  Much of it is simply a function of it being a kickstarter funded indie game designed by a small team.  Making a video game is hard work and you can’t expect the same level of perfection you can from a developer that has a 1,000+ man team.  Some of the flaws were design based and there is room for improvement, but it doesn’t change the fact that I want to see more games like this. The story puts you in the shoes of Alyssa La’Salle, o...

Spring is finally here!  Of course, that means baseball is back, so I figured its time to take a look back at the All-Star Baseball Series. As I discussed in my Gameday review, football games always sort of had “top franchise” that was regarded as being better than its competitors.  First it was the Tecmo Bowl series, then Gameday and now Madden is the only game in town.  The history of baseball games is a little more convoluted.  There were tons of these things, but they always seemed to be an afterthought.  Even sports giant EA’s baseball series, Triple Play, was considered a laughing stock by many.   I should also note that I do have a little bit of genre bias here.  While there are fun football games across generations of gaming (seriously, check out Super Challenge Football for the Atari 2600) I find any baseball game that came out before the 32/64-bit era to be unplayable.  Yes, that includes the much-loved Ken...

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...

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. Wh...