Gaming off the Beaten Path

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”   How many times have you heard that in your life?  What I’m sure was once sage advice has become a hackneyed platitude repeated ad naueseum by those looking to appear more open minded than they turn out to be.  That being said, throughout my life I have found that statement to be demonstrably true for the most part. Sometimes though, what you see is what you get.  Take one look at a PS2/XBox game from 2003 based on MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch and the first thing that will most likely pop into your mind is “wow, that game is going to suck.”  I wish I could say I found a hidden gem, or that this was shockingly good or something of that nature.  Hell, I would have been okay with “passable.”  But that most certainly wasn’t the case here. For those of you unfamiliar with Celebrity Deathmatch, it was an MTV show from the late 90’s/early 00’s where claymation versions of famous people ba...

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...

Oh great, another racing game.   Look, I think I’ve made it pretty clear I don’t really like these things, but they don’t take too much time to play or review.  This one isn’t even that obscure, a lot of folks that played video games in those days have heard of it and its even part of the Nintendo World Championship cartridge.  It wasn’t quite mainstream, but not really off the path either. I do talk a lot on here about “the name in the corner” with games.  Games are frequently under- or overrated because of who developed or published them, probably more so than any other type of media.  It was true then and it it still true now, even though there are far fewer developers (if you aren’t counting indie developers, of course) than there used to be.  Most of the ones that were around in those days were very specialized and known for making games in only one or two genres. And that’s what makes Rad Racer weird.  You m...

The Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon Hi Kids!  Today we are going to talk about a very serious topic...drugs. It’s no secret that drugs are bad for you.  They are illegal, unhealthy and expensive.  Of course, that isn’t going to stop people from using them, but just because someone else does something doesn’t mean you should too.  Even if they can make you see or feel something completely out of the realm of ordinary, the long and short term effects can be devastating.   Besides, there are plenty of ways to experience what its like to be high/tripping/rolling/etc. without risking your health.  One of those is to play “The Mystical Ninja.”  The best way I can imagine this game’s development is that a team of folks at Konami hacked the source code of Super Mario 64, ingested one or more types of some unknown illicit substance, watched a documentary about Japanese culture and made a video game. And, despite all of its technical fl...

This year marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most important game consoles ever released...the Nintendo GameBoy.  It may not have looked liked much, but this little gray beast with monochrome graphics stuck around for 14 years, outlasting the NES, SNES and N64.  Hell, the GameCube came out before Nintendo stopped making these things. They came out with all sorts of iterations, including the smaller and better lit GameBoy Pocket and the GameBoy Color, which, you guessed it, played games in color.  There were also about eleventy billion accessories, maybe three of which were actually useful. I wanted to review a GameBoy game in honor of the milestone, but most of mine have been lost to the ages.  The GameBoy was great to take on the road with you, but the small cartridges were easy to lose in all sorts of places.  I didn’t want to play any of the obvious ones, so, Star Wars it is. This is a straight up port of the NES Star W...

So today, we are going to talk about a fighting game. This game is the second entry in a well known 90s tournament fighter franchise.  It’s sort of a sequel to a sequel, with extra modes and the ability to make the action a little faster.  It features a colorful cast of characters representing various countries, each with their own unique fighting styles and special moves.  You all know which one I mean. Of course, I’m talking about World Heroes 2 Jet!  What? Street Fighter II Turbo?  Never heard of it.  In all seriousness, World Heroes was one of many tournament fighters SNK produced in the 90s. Fighting games were incredibly popular in those days, but most companies stuck to one or two franchises.  Capcom had Street Fighter. Akklaim/Midway had Mortal Kombat.  SNK had World Heroes.  And Fatal Fury.  And King of Fighters.  And Art of Fighting. I think  there are others that I am forgetting, maybe I’ll p...