Gaming off the Beaten Path

  You know, I'm glad they included "racing" in the title. It's kind of a subtitle on the case and disc, so when I saw just "Mag Force" I thought I was about to play some sort of shooting game. But instead we have a racing game, a futuristic racer originally published in 1999 by Crave. For those that may not remember, Crave was also the publisher responsible for the first game I reviewed on GOTBP, Shadow Madness. But we can't really use that for comparison, a traditional RPG and a futuristic racing game are about as far apart as two games can be. In doing some research, the most similar game I found was something called Killer Loop, it's also a futuristic racer, also published by Crave and also released in 1999. It's almost like it's the same game. Wait a minute...it's not almost the same game. It IS the same game. For whatever reason, they decided to change the name for the Dreamcast version of the game. It's Killer Loop on the PS1 a...

 It's time once again to go back to this past. This time, our destination is 1995, the Los Angeles Convention Center for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, otherwise known as E3. We are smack in the middle of the bit wars, with Nintendo and Sega's 16-bit consoles, the Super NES and Sega Genesis, are starting to see their powers wane. It was time for the new era of gaming consoles to take shape, with exciting, 32-bit machines on the horizon. This event would see Nintendo showcase the Virtual Boy, and we all know how that turned out. Sega would announce the surprise launch of the Saturn, its long awaited follow-up to the Genesis (or Mega Drive for you Europeans out there). But it was the new kid on the block that would grab the attention. It's hard envision a time when Sony was a new player in the gaming console market, but here they were ready to introduce their first console, the PlayStation. There's a whole story behind its development, I've already talked a littl...

  It's amazing how much I've learned from video games over the years. Thanks to Sony, I recently got some practice in prepping for doomsday. I always sort of scoffed at people that hoard important items during the end times, something that seems to have happened a lot in the last year or so. But when Sony announced earlier this year they would shutter the PlayStation Store on the PS3, I started panic buying. You see, the PS3 has tons of "PSOne Classics" for sale that aren't available on the PS4. You have the standard stuff, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc. But there are also a ton, and I mean a ton, of rare, expensive JRPGs that can be had for under $10. I love physical media as much as the next person, but at the end of the day experiencing the games is what's really important. Do I want a physical copy of Suikoden II? Yes. Can I afford it for $300? No. But there it is on the PlayStation Store, for the perfectly reasonable price of $9.99. Sony did renege on their...

It's recently come to my attention that this month marks Sonic the Hedgehog's 30th anniversary. Really makes you feel old. It's been a while since I covered Sonic, about two years at this point. The excellent Sonic Mania will go down in the annals of history as the inaugural winner of the "GOTBP Game of the Year" award. Who knows, maybe one day said award will actually mean something. Anyway, I do feel like sometimes I stray a little too far from my whole schtick of "playing forgotten games," especially when it comes to dealing with household names like Sonic. At the same time, it's also nice to revisit some more known commodities after coming across some of the junk that I get stuck playing. I toyed with the idea of doing a series retrospective or playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the Genesis, but then I remembered Sonic Spinball existed. Sure it's still Sonic, but its certainly not a mainline title in the series. Sonic Spinball, relea...

 It's been a busy week, so I decided to go back to fighting games. I also haven't done a Dreamcast game in a while, so I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone. I'm not sure I would consider Dead or Alive to be that obscure a fighting game franchise. When I covered Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, I thought a lot about "tier levels" of fighting game popularity and how all of the series' would rank (strictly based on popularity here, not quality). SF and MK would obviously be at the top, but what about all the dozens of other franchises? Maybe that's a discussion for a different day, but today we are talking specifically about DOA, a series I would put towards the upper middle of that tier list. It definitely can't touch the big two, it's certainly not on the level of stuff like Tekken or even Virtua Fighter, though I would put it in the category below those. While the original came out for the PS1 and the second was an early title in the ...

 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...