Gaming off the Beaten Path

  With the amount of unique video games that exists, it's always surprising how certain subject matter just isn't represented all that frequently. There really aren't that many games about firefighters out there and it kind of feels odd. They do exist, but they are few and far between and it almost feels like there should be more. I mean, how many kids out there want to be firemen? How many towns have all volunteer fire departments? How many firefighter shows are on TV? It's not like the premise would be completely out there. And yet, firefighting games are few and far between and the few that do exist tend to be off the radar budget titles. Which brings us to Real Heroes: Firefighter. Originally released in 2009 for the Wii, it was updated and ported to the PS4, XBox One and Switch in 2020. The game has so many publishers and developers listed for it that I couldn't tell you exactly who created which version and when. What is immediately apparent is that RH:F was m...

  Yeah, I know, two non-game reviews in a row. But I feel like I couldn't pass this one up. In case you haven't heard, there's a new Super Mario Bros. movie out and it seems like a lot of people are going to see it. So many, in fact, that I've heard it broke some sort of record for animated films. Apparently, it made more money in its opening week than something called "Frozen," which must be some sort of indie film because I've never heard of it. In all seriousness, the Super Mario Bros. movie has been a surprisingly big deal. I knew it would be popular, but I had no idea it would be this popular. It's made more than $700 million globally. Almost a billion dollars. Again, I don't think people realized how big this thing was going to be. As to why, I have a couple of ideas. I don't think normies realize how dedicated gamers are. I don't think they understand how popular video games, especially Nintendo games, are in Asia. I don't think ...

I actually had a review prepared for this week, but I've decided to take a little bit of a detour. Thanks to the magic of personally curated content suggestions, I stumbled upon something I found to be quite interesting. When you play video games for as long as I have, you are bound to encounter some bad ones. Typically, these games are dismissed immediately and often become the target of online game reviewers like myself, pointing and laughing at their horrible controls or stupid plots or lousy graphics or whatever. I touched on the whole subset of online content dedicated almost entirely to anger-fueled, profanity-ridden rants against horrible games in the intro episode of my podcast. Unlike other media formats, it's seemingly rare for bad video games to have defenders. Which is why I was surprised when I came across an entire sub-culture of gamers that embraced these titles, games affectionately known as Kusoge. Kusoge is a portmanteau of the Japanese words Kuso, meaning cra...

  X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse I'm a little bit shocked that it has taken me this long to get to an X-Men game, but here we are. I don't think everyone's favorite team of non-reptilian mutants needs any introduction. The X-Men have been featured in just about every kind of media imaginable, from comic books to Saturday morning cartoons to major movies, the X-Men have been a big deal for a very long time. While most 80's and 90's kids have some familiarity with the cartoon series, and children of the 00's will probably have seen at list one of films, that only scratches the surface of how deep the group's lore goes. Believe me, this iceberg goes deep, you've got alternate universes, pasts, futures, other teams like X-Force and X-Factor, stuff that a hardcore X-Men fan could probably explain to you but is completely over my head. Honestly, I wasn't really a huge fan of the cartoon, I always found it to be an incredibly oppressive and bleak show and it shoc...

  Sometimes, a game leaves you speechless. That may seem like praise, but it isn't always. Yeah, sometimes a game can be so good or interesting it's awe inspiring, I remember playing stuff like Final Fantasy VII or the Resident Evil remake for the first time and being stunned. But sometimes, it's the opposite, a game is so unbelievable awful you just don't know what to say, I remember also being stunned the first time I played Rise of the Robots or that game with the moose and being similarly flabbergasted. But it's not all about good and bad, yin and yang, positive and negative. Games can leave you speechless for other reasons, like how unabashedly weird they are. Total Carnage fits squarely into the 'weird' category. One look at Total Carnage, an arcade cabinet from Midway that was ported to the Super NES in 1993, and you think you know exactly what to expect. The box art has two jacked, shirtless dudes spread firing machine guns and the game is called ...

Last week, we started our look at Chained Echoes, an Indie RPG for the current gen consoles. While its story had some ups and downs, the game provided an overall strong experience, with excellent atmosphere, likable characters and fantastic music. But how was the actual gameplay? Well, pretty good. It's not without its flaws, but Chained Echoes does a very good job of blending classic JRPG gameplay notes with more modern amenities in a way that largely works. Let's start with the combat, which offers a turn-based system that will feel very familiar to most old-school RPG fans. Up to four characters can actively participate in battle with four more backing them up, for a total of eight. You can switch at any time, so basically you have eight characters fighting. Like Final Fantasy X, you can see the order in which characters and enemies will attack. Characters can attack, defend, use items or use skills, which require the use of TP. This leads to one of the biggest gameplay di...

Earlier this year, I did a preview of indie RPG Chained Echoes , a title that has garnered tons of attention in the gaming community. Now it's finally time for a proper review. I don't usually do "initial thoughts" or anything like that, but there was so much buzz surrounding Chained Echoes I had to strike when the iron was hot. It takes me a while to complete games nowadays, especially long RPGs, but I'm finally done and ready for a proper review. I like to make sure I beat games, at least the main stories, before I write anything up because you never know what could happen.  I feel like a lot of reviews are just based on an hour or two of gameplay and while that is okay for some genres, I don't think that's the case for RPGs. By now I think the story around Chained Echoes is pretty common knowledge. It was created by a single developer, Matthias Linda, over the course of seven years. Linda, a German national, grew up creating fan games in RPG Maker. He w...