Gaming off the Beaten Path

  After having such a miserable time with the first Street Fighter game, I decided it was time to go back and revisit another Capcom series first and a game I referenced several times in that review. It's 25 years old and nearly all of its sequels are better games, but the original Mega Man is still loved and respected by gamers today. Many people go back to this game and go back to it relatively frequently, even if not as frequently as its direct sequels. It may have sold poorly upon release, but it's widely considered one of the more influential games of all time. But what made the original Mega Man so different than the original Street Fighter? I mean, comparing a 2D side scroller to a 1v1 fighting game isn't that simple and it's probably an apples to oranges comparison. But they were both first games in what would become hugely popular series' released in the same year and made by the same company. So why was one front and center on the biggest gaming console ...

  Let's dive back into the always fun world of 16-bit platformers. There were tons of these things back in the 90's, almost as many as there are first person shooters now. I've never actually looked up numbers, but I would guess they were either the most common genre of games released in the 3rd-5th generations or a close second to tournament fighters. Don't get me wrong, a lot of these are great games. But, much like FPS' and open world games now, a lot of these titles started to feel the same after a while. As such, developers started to do everything they could to make their games stand out. Some used gameplay gimmicks, others tried to turn up the level of violence and many (many) tried to drum up interest by slapping a popular license on their games. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but it did go a long way in ensuring not every single platformer felt like a straight up clone of Mario or Sonic. Which brings us to Decap Attack, a 1991 platformer for ...

  I'm going to take a break from game reviews this week to discuss a topic that popped into my head after a conversation, or rather, an argument I saw online a few weeks ago. I guess the whole "old vs. new" debate isn't unique to video games, or even new when discussing them. I talked a little bit before about why I prefer older games to newer games, and I feel like I reference this fact constantly. You know, I'm not really ashamed of that and no one is going to change the way I feel. But I also sometimes feel like an old man yelling at a cloud. Just because I prefer older games doesn't necessarily make them better, though I do maintain that they are very, very different. And even though I prefer the older games, there are a lot of things about newer games I prefer. Before I get into what exactly those things are, I want to establish (I guess re-establish) what I mean when I say "old" vs. "new." I did a write up about it last year, so check...

  After damn near 30 years of gaming, I finally got the chance to play the original Street Fighter. As a kid, I always thought it was weird that no one ever talked about Street Fighter 1, like, ever. We always just called Street Fighter II "Street Fighter" since it was the first one most people experienced. It was the game on all the store shelves, it was the in all the arcades, it was basically everywhere. Most of us never even knew there was a Street Fighter I, much less what console it was on (the Turbografx 16, for the record) or where to find an arcade cabinet. I learned about it for the first time via the Street Fighter II Turbo/Champion Edition players guide, where it's referenced in the history section. But it wasn't until this past week that I was able to actually get my hands on it, thanks to finally caving and getting the SF 30th Anniversary Edition. It's always interesting to go back and look at first games in well-known series' to see how their r...

  When I started looking for games to review as part of TBS, I wasn't shocked to find that many of the candidates were either second or third games in their respective series'. I was, however, surprised to see how many of said candidates were first entries. Much as it was with Super Mario Bros. 2, developers would try and change it up for those entries before finally reverting to the style that put them on the map in the first place. That was common in the 3rd and even 4th generations. But it didn't always work out that way. There are several cases of developers starting a series with one type of game, only to completely pivot to something different and stay with it. Case in point, Shining in the Darkness. This is the very first game in the Shining series, known predominately for its turn-based strategy RPGs. I've already reviewed Shining Force 1 & 2 , both of which I liked quite a bit. I wanted to see where the series started, so I fired up SITD, expecting an ea...

  It's time to go back to the "racing games based on motorsports I know absolutely nothing about" well once again. This time, we're stepping out of our stock cars and hopping on our dirt bikes. I talked in the NASCAR '99 review about how little I knew of stock car racing. Well, if I know very little about NASCAR, I know next to nothing at all about motocross. Should I be capitalizing motocross? Is it a proper noun? I know that it's essentially racing on dirt bikes, but I don't know any of the rules. I couldn't tell you what the big events are or where the top venues are or who the top riders are. I've heard of Ricky Carmichael, but he was the only member of this game's roster I had recognized. So basically, I am going into this blind, at least when it comes to how the subject matter is presented. That said, I've played a lot of racing games over the past three years, probably more than I had in my entire life, so I'm starting to learn ...

  One of the biggest problems I believe the gaming industry has is how quick it is to dismiss mediocre or even bad games as a complete waste of time. That may not seem like it makes sense at all, but hear me out. Just because a game is bad doesn't necessarily mean all the ideas it presents are bad. In fact, I feel like you can sometimes learn more from a failure than a success. But that doesn't always happen in the gaming industry. I think this is a big part of why it sometimes feels like the same game gets released over and over again, developers just take everything from their successes and slap a new label on them. Sometimes, it would help the industry innovate more if they took some of the more positive aspects from their less successful titles. In case it wasn't immediately apparent, Flying Dragon, a fighting game for the Nintendo 64, isn't a particularly good game. I probably could have just said "fighting game for the Nintendo 64" and you probably could...