Gaming off the Beaten Path

When I came to this world, I did not even know the meaning of humanity's power, so how could I believe? But you changed all that, Hiro. You showed me the power of your inner strength and made me believe. After almost five years of blogging, I've determined that the late 90's and early 00's are my favorite era in gaming. Let's say from 1996 to about 2004. There's an entire post's worth of reasons as to why, but the most important of such reasons is a simple one: RPGs were mainstream. Nowadays, I would consider a grand total of one RPG franchise to be mainstream: Final Fantasy, and even that franchise is not as popular as it once was. I guess Pokemon is about as mainstream as it gets, but it's kind of it's own thing with a much different feel than the kind of RPGs I'm talking about.  Persona, Tails, Trails and even Dragon Quest are comparatively "mainstream" amongst RPGS fans, but they are still relatively obscure when considering the gam...

  It seems like every series, even the most popular ones, has at least one title that kind of falls through the cracks. You'd be hard pressed to find a lifelong gamer who has never heard of Double Dragon, maybe someone younger as the series' heyday was way back in the 3rd generation. The first three games are considered NES classics, even though the third is considered a bit of a step down and often the butt of jokes in the online gaming community. The games star the Lee brothers, Billy and Jimmy (or is it Bimmy?) as they take on the evil Black Warrior (a translation error later corrected to Shadow Warrior) gang. It may sound simple on paper, but Double Dragon broke a lot of ground in the beat 'em up genre gameplay and style-wise. It was one of the first genres with continuous scrolling, unique movesets and the ability to take enemy weapons. It featured cutscenes and a much darker atmosphere, drawing inspiration from both Enter the Dragon and Mad Max. I have complained on h...

  It's always crazy to look at deep cuts and early efforts from some of the more celebrated developers and publishers in the industry. When we think of Nintendo, franchises like Mario, Zelda and Metroid come to mind almost immediately. But does anyone remember Excitebike? Not going to lie, those of us of a certain age probably do, but it's not really top of mind as a Nintendo franchise. At this point, isn't F-Zero considered a deep cut Nintendo Franchise? I mean, more than 20 years without a new game, right? Maybe it's time for a new one? Anyway, every gaming company had to start somewhere. It's not like Nintendo just popped up one day and started cranking out Mario games, they actually made Hanfuda playing cards for almost a century before they started cranking out light guns for Magnivox and creating consoles like the Color TV Game. But we won't be talking about the Big N today. We are going much further into the alphabet to the big R, everyone's favorite ...

  It's been a while since I've discussed Mega Man and, hey, I'm always looking for the excuse to do so. I've talked at length about my love for the series and I even spent a month covering some of its more obscure entries in the early days of the blog. Mega Man 3 is on my 10s list, and it's the game that's essentially responsible for me picking up video games as a hobby to begin with. But for as much as I love the series, at least the original and X series, I had yet to play Mega Man 10 until now. It's not that I never had the desire to, I just never got around to it. I loved Mega Man 9, I consider it to be one of the best games of the 7th generation. This was the early days of the whole "new old-style games" trend, and Mega Man 9 and 10 were huge when they came out. It didn't hurt that it had been almost 15 years since a new title in the series came out. But while Mega Man 9 was met with near universal acclaim, the 10th entry was a little bit ...

  Looks like we are sticking with first person shooters this week. This time though, we're moving back a generation. Nintendo consoles have always had a reputation for being more kid and family oriented. That's probably because, well, they kind of are. I don't really see anything wrong with that, I would rather play a quality game without gratuitous violence than a lousy game with it. That being said, there is something to be said for offering more variety and having games targeted at older audience. More adult games don't necessarily mean more violence, games get T or M ratings for reasons other than blood and gore, but it often comes with the territory. And it's a territory the big N doesn't play in quite as frequently as its competitors. Remember how the SNES version of Mortal Kombat had sweat instead of blood? However, it also meant that when these games were announced, they tended to garner a lot of hype. The gaming media lost their collective minds when th...

The early 00's were a very formative time for video games. This was especially true of console first person shooters. FPS' were dime a dozen on the PC, but it was still a bit of a struggle to get them right on consoles. The first real success, at least to me, came in the form of a handful of really solid Doom ports to the 5th generation consoles, as well as some noble efforts to port the FPS giant to 4th gen hardware (I played a tons of SNES Doom, and I still find it very enjoyable despite the fact it's definitely not the best way to play the game). Turok: Dinosaur Hunter gave way to Goldeneye, which gave way to Perfect Dark on the N64. And if those titles were the seed of FPS' as a viable genre on console, Halo was the tree they eventually blossomed into. Look, I don't like Halo nearly as much as most people do. But you absolutely cannot deny it was revolutionary in terms of graphics, presentation, gameplay and especially control scheme. Halo did for FPS on console...

  You learn something new every day I guess. I was very much aware of Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Like, very much aware. I put tons of hours into that game. It barely missed out on being a 10's game. It's the only game I've ever played in any sort of semi-official competition (I won my first round matchup before getting absolutely smashed by someone who actually knew what they were doing in the second). And yet I didn't realize it was actually the third game in the Street Fighter III series. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's not like Capcom didn't have a penchant for doing this. Street Fighter II was essentially it's own series, there's World Warrior, Champion Edition, Turbo, Super Street Fighter II, Super Turbo, on and on, you get the point. So I guess it makes sense that they would do the same thing with SF III and I shouldn't have been too shocked to see that there were two other games, New Generation and 2nd Impact, that were rele...