Gaming off the Beaten Path

Bond.. James Bond Unlike most of my 10's games, I'm not entirely sure where to start with Goldeneye. On one hand, it's a favorite target, possibly THE favorite target, of the "aged poorly" people who absolutely despise this generation of gaming for some unknown reason. It's funny, to me at least, that a good majority of people with this mindset either weren't born or were very young when this game came out. But by the same token, it was such a cultural phenomena and so many people are so nostalgic for it that they are often unable to overlook its flaws or realize that, yes, certain aspects of the game are "dated." I'm going to be honest, if I split hairs and actually ranked my 10's games, Goldeneye would probably finish near the bottom. I wasn't about to go out and say that it was terrible, but I had to really sit back and evaluate whether nostalgia was clouding my opinion of the game before I fired it up again. When it was all said a...

I've come to a realization about the whole "modern vs. old school gaming" debate and I actually came to said realization via one of my other hobbies. You see, I am a big fan of professional wrestling and have been for a long time. I've also had a lot of late nights recently, thanks to my new addition to the family, and I can't always game during those nights. Fortunately, WWE has had the courtesy to put several full matches of past Royal Rumbles on their YouTube, from the federation years to the Attitude Era to the modern matches. It was when I watched the 1995 and 2018 versions back to back that I came to the aforementioned realization. Shawn Michaels and the British Bulldog started the match in 1995 and frankly, no one in the 2018 could match the star power or uniqueness of either man. However, the 1995 version of the match also featured competitors like Mantaur, and no one in the 2018 match could match his level of awfulness. In short, the older match's hig...

Super Bowl LV is almost upon us, so it's time to run a video game simulation. But why do it with Madden when we can use a hack of Tecmo Super Bowl! The hack is free from Tecmonster, chances of me ever creating something this cool is zero. The video is all mine though, it's a single game cpu vs. cpu simulation. Did Brady get his 7th ring with the 8-bit Bucs? Or did Patrick Mahomes and his pixilated KC compatriots make it 2 straight?  

Every once in a while, a video game comes along that goes above and beyond. A title that reaches deep and forces you to reflect on something far bigger than just a game. A title that wants you to think critically about something truly important, whether it be something personal, societal or conceptual. Hollow Knight is not one of those games, despite how hard it tries to be. Stuff like this is common in film, critics like to call film equivelents to games like this "Oscar bait." You know exactly which kinds of movies I'm talking about, the ones where Martin Luther King, Cleopatra and the Pope meet in a timewarp and spend three and a half hours teaching super Commie Nazis not to hate people by using the power of long winded conversations, introspective monologues and Renoir's art, all to a moving score featuring an orchestra playing alongside whatever douchey indie rock band is popular at the time. This has been happening with film for a while now, but it's a relat...

Welcome to the first installment of "Was it Really?" one of the new series' I want to start doing regularly this year. I've ranted about this before, but I find like the gaming community, both gaming related media and gamers themselves, believe in absolute truths about beloved or hated games. There's no room to deviate from the commonly held opinions that permeate the industry, whether it be about an individual game, console or event. My distaste for this mindset was half the reason I started doing this whole thing and why I want to start doing deeper dives on stuff like this. Which brings us to the Virtual Boy. Released in the summer of 1995, the Virtual Boy was a massive commercial flop and a rare mistake by Nintendo. It's a 32-bit system, part of the 5th generation along with the PlayStation, Saturn and Nintendo 64. It promised an immersive experience for players, using a parallax effect to create the illusion of depth. What it delivered was red monochrome ...

 Sometimes, combinations just don't work out, even if that combination involves two things that are independently awesome. Think about it like this: peanut butter is awesome and so are tacos. I really like both of those things individually. But if you mix those two things together, you are going to create a disgusting, mismatched monstrosity. They might even pair well with other things, but not with each other. Peanut butter is great on its own or with chocolate, tacos are great on their own, but mixing them together is a terrible idea (unless you are talking about choco-tacos, in which case, mix away!). Star Wars Demolition should be one of those winning combinations. Vehicular combat games are cool and so is Star Wars. Vehicular combat games were popular when it was released in 2000 for the Dreamcast and PS1, with titles like Vigilante 8 and Twisted Metal leading the charge, while Star Wars had vaulted back into the cultural Zeitgeist with the 1999 release of "Episode 1: The...

 I think this might be the first time I've ever gone back to a series that wasn't a "big deal" video game IP. Sure I've had multiple posts about Mega Man and Final Fantasy games, but those series' are household names. They certainly aren't as obscure as a discontinued series of baseball games that ran through the late 90s and early aughts. I already covered All-Star Baseball 99 for the Nintendo 64, a game I gave a pretty good score. At the time, it was probably the best baseball sim you could find. It's certainly not anymore, but its still a good, fun game to break out from time to time. But if that game was so great, what happened to the franchise? Well, for one, the company that made it went out of business. Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and it's intellectual properties were auctioned off, most of which were purchased by a company called Throwback Entertainment. Throwback then proceeded to do a big, fat nothing with the ASB series until 20...