Gaming off the Beaten Path

As much as I love RPGs, especially ones as good as the game I spent two weeks discussing, sometimes I'm just in the mood for an old fashioned 2D platformer. So I figured I'd tackle one that's been on my to do list for like, 20 years. Ristar is one of those titles I've always had the urge to play, and I've always had the ability to play, but I'd never actually gotten to it until this random week. I've heard some pretty good things, but Ristar has always been something of an overlooked game. Unlike some of the stuff that I review on here though, the reason why is pretty simple: it came out in early 1995, just a few months before the PlayStation and Saturn would kick off the 5th generation. It really is a shame, as the SNES and Genesis had a lot of really great games come out towards the end of their life cycles. It's not like everyone stopped developing for them as soon as the new wave of consoles was announced and both systems continued to see new release...

  This week I'm going to do something a little different. Hey card gaming is still gaming, right? I know I've talked before about my love of Magic: The Gathering and I've always wanted to write a little more about it, but I've never really had a reason to here. I debated doing something last year when they announced their whole "realms beyond" thing, where they decided to bring a bunch of crossover IPs into the MTG universe. Honestly, I wasn't a fan. As someone who has played since 1996, I don't even like that they have a "multiverse" with "planes" other than Dominara. So when I first saw the "Walking Dead" Secret Lair, I was a bit thrown. "I will never buy one of those crossover things" I thought to myself. I mean, there was talk of mixing in IPs that at least made some sense, like Dungeons and Dragons or Lord of the Rings, but a show about zombies? Stranger Things? Wasn't a fan. Well, then MTGs longtime pub...

  Last week, I discussed Suikoden II's gameplay, which was positive pretty much across the board. This week it's on to the story which...is also pretty awesome. Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few aspects of the plot I think could have been better. In a lot of ways, I feel like they missed a lot of opportunities to really drive home their point about the ravages of war and how it causes otherwise good people to do bad things. But Suikoden II still told an epic story that's among the best I've experienced in an RPG. I gave a bit of background on the plot last week, which sees our unnamed hero and his best friend Jowy on the run from their former colleagues in the Highland Army. The duo have just witnessed the death of their entire unit, killed as part of a false flag operation to prolong the kingdom's war with the neighboring City-State of Jowston. After fleeing their pursuers, the duo is separated, with the hero washing up alongside a rushing river. There,...

  "War. War is hell. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it..." Yup, we're starting this one out with a historical quote. Fancy. I'm sure most of us have heard at least part of that quote, attributed to Union General Willam T. Sherman. It's fairly common and pretty precise. Media often glorifies war and video games are no exception. Call of Duty didn't become one of the most popular franchises in the world for no reason. But games have done their fair share of looking at the horrors of war as well, how it tears apart families, leads to untold destruction and pits brother against brother. In case it wasn't immediately apparent, Suikoden II is, at its core, a story about the personal and societal impact of war. The game puts us smack in the middle of the ongoing conflict between the City-State of Jowston and the Kingdom of Highland, a war that it appears may soon come to an end. You control a nameless pr...

After last week's lousy game, I figured I would take some time to discuss something I've had on my mind for a while. The phrases "overrated" and "underrated" get thrown around a lot, like, A LOT, when it comes to video games. I hear those two words way more often when referring to video games far more often than with film, television, books or any other type of media (maybe music is a close second). Often, they are fighting words, leading to long winded online conversations and overly defensive social media posts about whatever game is being referenced. I actually decided to cover this topic after I got way too invested in a back-and-forth discussion on one of the many gaming groups I follow online. The original poster wanted to express his love for Chrono Trigger, something that isn't uncommon in retro gaming groups. But one user had to use the O word, expressing his opinion that while the game is excellent, it was a tad overrated. What followed was an ...

  Time to check another console off the list. This time, we are going to go with something a little more modern. As I've alluded to in previous posts, I consider the 7th console generation to be very much modern, even if it is going on 15 years old. It was a very interesting time in gaming, a time where online play was becoming the norm and video games were reaching new audiences outside the standard "gamer" stereotypes. The "bit wars" were over, this was the first generation of consoles I never once heard referred to by the number of bits they had (it largely stopped in the previous generation, but early media surrounding the Dreamcast and PS2 did refer to those consoles as "128-bit"). A war that started between Sega and Nintendo ended with two new powers, Sony and Microsoft, at the top of the gaming industry. The former decided to take itself out of the console market, electing instead to become a 3rd party software developer. The latter was on the d...