Gaming off the Beaten Path

So, this week we are going to go on a bit of a detour. I wasn’t planning on covering Mega Man 8 this week, but on Father’s Day I asked my son what he wanted to do and he was like “play video games with daddy!”  I wasn’t going to tell him no.  I even told him he could pick the game.  He went right to “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem,” but when I informed him that that game was just slightly not appropriate for a 3-year old,  he happily picked Mega Man 8 as a second choice.  How fitting, starting his gaming career off with the same franchise I began mine with 25 years ago. By now just about everyone is familiar with Mega Man.  I have touched on some of its more unique games and some parts of the X series, but this is the first time we will jump into the original series.  Released in January of 1997, 8 is the only mainline series title for the Playstation 1 (it also came out on the Sega Saturn).  It would also be the last one we would see for a while, as Mega Man & Bass (which is

Kagero: Deception 2 For the first time, I’m not entirely sure how I would classify the game I’m about to review.  It’s not uncommon to find titles that mix genres, even back to the early days of gaming.  It’s a great way to keep stale formulas fresh and try new things.  But I’m not entirely sure what genre Kagero fits into, or if it even fits into one at all.  It’s part third person adventure, part strategy, part survival horror, part RPG and, dare I say, a little bit of a puzzle game.  A lot of games like this tend to become disjointed and incoherent, but that didn’t happen here.  Kagero is an outstanding game, but it comes with a major caveat. I am just going to get it out of the way, Kagero is a very violent and at times, very disturbing game.  It really, really earned its M rating.  As a PS1 game, the blood and gore aren’t really all that shocking.  In fact, the blocky character models and lacking details make the game much easier to stomach.  But that doesn’t change the fact tha

It’s back to the Sega Genesis this week.  What can I say, I ignored it for too long, even in my younger years. It’s no secret that the Super Nintendo was regarded as a haven for great RPGs while the Genesis was widely considered a wasteland for the genre.  But was that really the case?  The first part was certainly true.  There are dozens of really good to great RPGs for the SNES, especially if you include Super Famicom games.  But was it really that much better than the Genesis’ RPG library? Honestly, yes.  But that doesn’t mean the Genesis was the RPG wasteland it was made out to be.  It had a number of solid entries in the genre, mostly from its two main RPG series’.  I already discussed the amazing Phantasy Star IV, a game I never realized was as classic as it was.  That inspired me to look into Sega’s other oft discussed RPG series: Shining Force. Released in 1993, Shining Force was actually the second game in the series, a follow-up to Shining in the Darkness a few years ea

Oh boy, I have been dreading this for a long time.  It’s time to talk about one of the scourges of the gaming world: licensed movie tie-ins.   There was a point in time where you absolutely knew any game based on a movie was going to be complete trash.  Developers would slap together something as quickly as they could, throw on a label and flood store shelves with it.  These were almost universally shameless cash grabs designed to separate gamers, and their unassuming parents and relatives, from their hard earned money.  Fortunately, that has changed to a degree as quality control has become better.  But it still happens. First, a little bit about the source material for today’s game.  In true “Street Fighter: The Movie” style, we have a video game that’s based on a movie that’s based on a book, the first in Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series.  I remember reading the book when I was younger and thinking it was alright, but I never read any of t

It’s been a while, but its time to circle back to the Sega Genesis. I have discussed before how I was a Nintendo kid, only had an SNES, yada yada yada, etc.  etc.  A lot of games I will eventually talk about here will be new to me, but old hat to anyone that grew up on Sega.  Games like Vectorman, Comix Zone and Phantasy Star are “off the beaten path” for me, but many Genesis kids wouldn’t consider them so.  I had certainly heard of them, even if I hadn’t played them. But this week, I am going to discuss a Sega Genesis game I had never heard of in my life.  Released early in the system’s life cycle in 1990, E-Swat is a 2D side scroller that is somewhere between a run and gun game and a puzzle platformer.  You play as a futuristic police officer named Duke Oda, who is a member of the City of Liberty (not Liberty City, that’s a different place) swat team facing off against a mysterious organization called E.Y.E.  This organization has unleashed a compliment of mo

It seems like just about every game gets at least one sequel, no matter how lousy it is or how poorly it sells. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a direct sequel, hell sometimes it can even be a prequel, just a second game in the series. I am wracking my brain for a single one.  Well, other than this week’s entry, of course. Nano Breaker is an action game released for the PS2 in the early aughts.  It’s a Konami game, so its not like it came out of a small studio that closed down or anything like that.  It didn’t get the best reviews or anything but again, gaming is such a sequel happy medium that it is a tad surprising the IP was just abandoned.  There were certainly a lot of interesting elements presented here, so why not give it another shot?   Before we get into that, let’s discuss the gameplay a bit.  One of the first games I reviewed on GOTBP was “Castlevania: Lament of Innocnence,” another Konami title.  It took about two seconds of playing Nan

I just realized I missed out on the opportunity to do an on-theme post for the whole “May the 4th be with you” thing.  Oh well, better late than never I guess. It probably won’t come as a surprise that there are eleventy billion Star Wars video games out there, ranging from completely mainstream to totally obscure.  I bet most of you out there have so familiarity with “Battlefront” or “Force Unleashed,” but how many of you have played “Yoda’s Stories?”  I figured I would split the difference with a game that was a huge deal back in the 90s, but has since fallen out of the gaming consciousness: “Shadows of the Empire,” a third person shooter for the Nintendo 64. Before I get into the game, I should say that I am the rare “casual” Star Wars fan.  It seems like this is a franchise that everyone either loves to death or straight up doesn’t care about.  I have seen, and thoroughly enjoy, all the classic trilogy films.  I have seen all the prequels as well and I am