Gaming off the Beaten Path

  I always thought fan games were cool. I especially think it's cool when developers and publishers put their support behind those fan games. And I especially, especially when those fan games mix two of my favorite franchises in a way that makes sense. Anyone that has been following my content for any length of time knows I am a huge fan of both Mega Man and Street Fighter. You know, I didn't even realize how much I like Capcom games in general. When I first tried to start blogging back in my college days, I did a list of my top 100 video games of all time. That list would look much different if I did it today, but I don't think my top games would change too much. Of my top five, four of them were Capcom games and I didn't notice until I looked at it many years later when I started GOTBP. In fact,  both of these series  found their way into my top five. So yeah, a crossover between the two would be right up my alley. Apparently,  I wasn't the only one either, becaus...

  Video games are still a relatively young media format, so I often find things that are common in film or television come off  as novel when it comes to gaming. That's to be expected, video games as a format are (debatably) around 50-70 years old and weren't what you would call mainstream for much of that time. In addition, cinematic or story driven video games didn't really become a thing until much later, while technology made those stories difficult to tell until even more recently. Because of this, certain tropes that are old hat in the other formats haven't really been done in games or  haven't been done well. Again, it's understandable, you have a lot of the same genres, action, horror, etc. you get the idea. But we aren't really here to talk about any of those today. Because we are going to talk about a genre,  I don't think games have typically done as well as movies, TV or even radio in their relatively brief existence: comedy. That's not t...

  After a slight delay, it's finally time to crown a 5th anniversary champion. These two RPG heavyweights are some of the genre's most renowned titles of all time, so this is going to be a knockdown, drag out slugfest. As it stands, they defeated some stiff competition to get here, and both titles are absolutely deserving. Both scored 9.75s and were strongly considered for 10s. Hey, one or both might get bumped up after this battle. I'm sure many people already consider them 10s, which is going to make said battle tough to decide. This isn't like the comparison I did with Chained Echoes and Sea of Stars, with all due respect to those two titles the ones we are comparing today have had time to marinate. The book on them is written, as written as the book on a game can be, and history has already decided them to be great. Of course, they are both RPGs, so we will be using the same categories as our last battle. Those are: Round 1: Graphics Round 2: Sound Round 3: Story Ro...

  My goodness, are technical difficulties annoying. I had my 5th anniversary final almost completely done, ready and scripted. The key word there is had. Thanks to some unfortunate computer issues, it got deleted, so I am going to have to re-write my entire 10 round fight. It's a lot of work to do those and I don't want to rush to try to get it done, I want to give Suikoden II and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne their due time in the spotlight. So, I am going to pivot and do that next week. Besides, it allows me to continue yet another Gaming Off the Beaten Path tradition: starting the year with an old sports game. I have already talked about Madden '04, it was actually the first 10s game I wrote about (I guess it was really about all the PS2 era Maddens, but '04 was the one I discussed the most). But again, that was the 6th generation version. Which I honestly thought was the only version. I didn't realize they were still making Madden games for the PS1 in 2004, so I ...

Oh boy, now it's on. We are getting down to the nitty gritty. We are down to the best of the best; six games are left with four alive for the championship. We will do our semis first, since we need to drop two more games down into the consolation finals, then move on from there. So, let's get to it. Semifinal 1 (2) Suikoden II vs. (6) F-Zero GX This is going to be very, very tough for me. On one hand, you have a game that I feel the need to evangelize at every turn because the company that publishes it refuses to make a new one. The other is a favorite of the internet JRPG crowd that very much deserves the praise it gets. I think I've made it pretty clear how much I love F-Zero GX, going so far as to call it my favorite racing game of all time. But at the same time, I don't really care for the genre. Suikoden II might not even break my top 10 RPGs of all time, but it's such a hard list to break into because I love the genre so much. Both are absolutely incredible, s...

Last week saw a few fun, if uneventful, matchups in the prelims. There were no surprises, there usually aren't, so it's time to move on to the quarters, the elite 8, whatever you want to call it. Let's get right  into this. Quarterfinals Matchup 1 (4) Sonic Mania vs. (5) Sweet Home We will get started with the two games we haven't seen yet, my first and most recent GOTY winners. I reviewed Sonic Mania way back in 2019 and it ended up narrowly edging The Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon for GOTY that year. Anyone that has any familiarity with Sonic the Hedgehog will know exactly what to expect from Sonic Mania. You run fast through big levels with multiple paths while dodging enemies and occasionally doing some platforming. There's tons of variety in each level, with the various paths each presenting a different challenge. To me, speed, variety and level design are what separates the good Sonic Games from the great ones,  and you know what? I think Sonic Mania might be...