Gaming off the Beaten Path

Titles are hard. I've always hated naming things I write, whether it was headlines for news articles or titles for meeting notes at work.  I'm not going to say I'm bad at it, but I find it very frustrating.  It's one of those things that people don't realize is a major ask of creatives/copywriters/etc. With that in mind, it won't come as a surprise that I am going to give Sega a pass for giving this week's entry a confusing name.  It could just be me, but the first thing I thought of when I heard the title "Gain Ground" was a football game.  That was about as far off as I could have gotten.  Released in arcades in 1988, Gain Ground was intended as Sega's answer to Gauntlet.  While the aesthetic may be similar, I don't think they got particularly close to aping Nintendo's popular fantasy game.  They did, however, create a unique and interesting blend of top down action and single screen puzzle games.  Think Bomberman meets Smash TV. ...

Looks like it’s back to license games yet again. I think it’s worth reiterating that not all licensed games are bad.   I mean, last week’s 10’s game was technically licensed.    So are just about all sports games.   But you know that I know that you know those aren’t the kind of games I’m talking about.   I’m talking about stuff like “The Golden Compass” or “Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game.”   And yet as strange as the latter was, this week’s entry may be even more bizarre. Some of you might remember Antz, DreamWorks’ first digitally animated feature.   Released in 1998, it received solid reviews and performed okay at the box office.   It had quite the star-studded voice cast too, with Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, J-Lo, Christopher Walken, Sylvester Stalone, Danny Glover and Gene Hackman.   It also massively pissed off Pixar, who accused it of ripping off their follow-up to Toy Story, “A Bug’s Life,” which would hit theatres o...

You can call THIS, the New World Order of Wrestling, brother Let’s go back to July 7, 1996. It’s time for WCW’s Bash at the Beach, an annual pay-per-view that will be headlined by the biggest match in the company’s history.  Sting, Lex Luger and the Macho Man Randy Savage are set to defend the company’s honor against the unlikeliest of invaders.  WWF stars Razor Ramon and Diesel, now going by their real names, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, have been terrorizing WCW for months (remember, there was barely an internet, we had no idea these two were under contract to WCW when Hall jumped the barricade unannounced on Monday Nitro, especially those of us who had just turned 8).  Now called “the Outsiders,” the duo had been teasing a mystery partner for weeks.  Those of us who watched both promotions speculated on which WWF-er would show up next: Brett Hart? Mr. Perfect? The Undertaker?  Who knew? The match looked like it was going to go the way of the good guys at ...

After lamenting the almost two decade drought of F-Zero titles last week, it looks like there could be hope for the franchise yet. This week’s entry will take us to Sega’s Streets of Rage franchise, a series of beat-em-up title that defined the Genesis.  The original game even came as part of the “Sega 6-Pack” cartridge, which to me was always such a definitive collection of the most popular (not best, most popular) series on the console.  It was a landmark franchise for the company…until it wasn’t.  After the third game released in 1994, it fell off the face of the Earth.  No SOR on the Saturn.  No SOR on the Dreamcast.  No SOR on any other console once Sega switched to software only.   Fortunately, that was finally remedied this year, with Streets of Rage 4 hitting modern consoles a few months ago.  It’s great to see the dormant franchise receive new life, but that isn’t the game we are going to discuss. Many Sega fans have told me ...

Oh great, another racing game.  By now you all know exactly how this is going to go.  At this point I think I’ve made it clear that I don’t like racing games, I hate driving, they usually don’t appeal to me, etc. etc.  This is just going to be more of the same, right? Not so fast.  This futuristic racer isn’t like the “realistic” racing games I covered before, nor is it a random entry in a series that has nothing else to do with racing.  F-Zero GX, released for the GameCube in 2003, is an absolutely phenomenal game from what many consider to be Nintendo’s forgotten first party franchise. Most gamers know series protagonist Captain Falcon from Super Smash Bros., but F-Zero has had little love thrown its way by the big N other than a few references in that series.  How little love?  This week’s game was the last one released on a non handheld console in the United States.  Remember, this came out in 2003, which was 17 years and almost three consol...

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 ...

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 st...