Gaming off the Beaten Path

 One of the common themes I have found since I started doing reviews is the close link between film and video games. I've covered video games about movies , movies about video games and even video games about movies about video games . But this week's entry is a different animal entirely. Since the early days of video games, it feels like people from both the gaming and movie industries have been trying make the two mediums work together. As we've seen, it usually doesn't work out. As to why, well, that's its own discussion. I, for one, am not really a movie person, I've always had trouble sitting still and just watching something for two hours. Anyway, one of the ways that game developers blur the lines is by bringing in well known actors (or using their likenesses) as "stars" in their games. And I'm not talking about sponsoring stuff, like you see a lot with sports games, I'm talking about they star as the character in a movie-esque, narrati...

  This week it's back to sports games, though we're going to go in a different direction this time. It's been a while since I've covered an arcade style sports game, but I came across this one and I remember this one getting quite a bit of hype back in the day. In the early aughts, EA sports released a series of "street" sports titles under their EA Sports: BIG brand. The gaming juggernaut used this subdivision to release titles it felt were to EXTREME for its standard brand, like the SSX series and Def Jam Vendetta. In all, 21 games were released under the BIG label, the majority of which ended up being the street sports games. They released various versions of NBA, NFL and FIFA Street games, keeping the professional players while replacing the stadiums and arenas with beaches and alleyways. For this week, we will focus on the first NFL entry. NFL Street is an arcade sports title to its very core. Games are 7 on 7, with players able to organize their teams as...

It's been almost a year since I covered Shining Force, a strategy RPG for the Genesis, and it's time to dive back into the series. I had been looking to play a strategy RPG and my options are surprisingly limited. It's been a while since I've played Final Fantasy Tactics, but I've also played it about a billion times and besides, I have other plans for that game later. I decided to circle back to Shining Force instead. I wanted to play the two games in order for continuity and story purposes, though I don't think that was particularly necessary. But I also kind of wanted to play this game first, as I was told it was vastly superior to its predecessor. It's not that I was told the first game was bad (and I certainly didn't think it was), just that the second was far superior in just about every conceivable way. I will say, I definitely think the second game was better, pretty much across the board. It maintains all of the things that made the first game...

  Got a question for you. What do you get when you cross Mortal Kombat, WWE and Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood? A local access TV show where The Rock and Sub-Zero teach kids about the joys of sharing? A crossover MK game where the WWE roster is playable, but the only finishing moves are friendships? What you get is WMAC Masters, a short lived, live action children's show that ran as part of various Saturday morning TV blocks from 1995-1997. Between the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the emergence of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and the smashing success of shows like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, martial arts were all the rage for kids in the 90's. It seems like every single one of us begged and begged our parents to put us in Karate classes. It was all 'Karate' to us, none of us realized that the 'Karate' we were doing was (most likely) actually Tae Kwon Do, or that there was even a difference. The folks at 4Kids entertainment decided th...

  Fighting games were everywhere in the early 90. I know I complain a lot about open world games and FPS' now, but it was just as bad, if not worse, with tournament fighters in the 90's. You couldn't go to an arcade or a game store and not see what felt like millions of these things. There were a huge amount of these everywhere, and that glut of similar games was due to the impact of two titles we've discussed at length here: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. These two series' were the cream of the crop when it came to tournament fighters, they were critically and commercially successful and logically, they led to imitators. I already discussed some of the various Street Fighter clones out there and I think the games I covered are a good microcosm of all of them. Some are bad, some are good, some are even great. I kind of wanted to look at some MK clones, but I just don't have access to any and honestly, I'm glad. It seems like developers did a pretty good ...

 Mortal Kombat is back baby! I hope everyone is excited as I am about the new movie. It came out last week but at the time of this writing, I still haven't had time to watch it. As to why, well, we'll get to that later. But I've heard good things. The original MK film was great, it had some really great fight scenes and memorable moments, but as a PG-13 rated movie it had to scale back some of the blood and guts that the franchise was known for. Not this time though, the new version is R-rated and apparently features more of the copious amounts of viscera we've come to know and love from the franchise, including some fatalities that are true to the ones you see in the games. In a way, it's something of a reboot of the franchise. Honestly, I can't think of any franchise that reboots itself more frequently than MK. It's like a cycle at Netherealm Studios, they make an MK game, add whatever insane or ridiculous ideas they can come up with to its sequels, realiz...

Lets talk about failure. At some point, everyone is going to fail at something. Aint none of us perfect, right?  However, not all failure is created equal. Sometimes people fail because they don't work hard enough, or they don't think things through or they are working with an idea that's doomed from the start. But that isn't always the case. Sometimes failure comes from pushing too hard, being too visionary or trying to make something from nothing. I'm not sure if any entity in video game history failed more in the latter manners than Sega. Yes, there's a reason Sega doesn't make consoles anymore. But its because they pushed the boundaries too far, not because they didn't do enough. The Saturn and Dreamcast were absolute beasts of consoles, but they were expensive and allegedly difficult to develop for. Remember Sega Channel? That was the PlayStation Store before the PlayStation Store was a thought in Sony's mind. Sega was pumping digital only gamin...