Gaming off the Beaten Path

I know my content is all digital, but I've always considered myself a print media first kind of person. It's getting harder and harder to be that way as more and more news outlets and magazines shift to online-only models or simply shut down outright. It certainly made the big gaming media news this month hit really close to home. After 33 years of publication, Game Informer is officially ceasing production. Originally started as a newsletter by everyone's favorite games retailer Funcoland, Game Informer eventually blossomed into a full-on magazine featuring game previews, reviews and walkthroughs. It would even survive the company's purchase by Barnes and Noble, which would merge Funcoland with its existing game retail store Babbages and rechristen their new Frankenstein monster with the name we know it by today, Gamestop. If anything, this was a boon for the magazine as it quickly became a package deal with the company's Pro membership. At its peak, Game Informer

When I first started writing about games, I was very hesitant to include PC titles at all. As I've said numerous times before, it's just not something I've ever really felt qualified to talk about. There are so many iconic PC games that were just blind spots for me as I never really actively sought them out. If it didn't come on a PC Gamer demo disc or I didn't hear about it through word of mouth, I didn't know about it. Does anyone else remember those PC Gamer demo discs? I had as much fun playing with the UI on them as I did any of the actual demos. Maybe if I spent less time clicking around the secret underground club and more on actually playing the games, I would have had more PC experience. Eh, I'm okay with the fact that while Fallout and Diablo weren't nearly as critical a part of my early gaming life as Coconut Monkey. Even when I did play and enjoy PC games, it was typically because I played the console versions first. Games like Doom, Command

  Video game consoles, like any product, fail for a number of reasons. Remember, things weren't always like they are now, where it's all but guaranteed you are going to get a new PlayStation, XBox or whatever random name Nintendo decides on every 8 to ten years. Gaming history has seen a lot of different players attempt to enter the console market, some successfully and others not so much. This wasn't just a long time ago either, I would say this kind of continued up until the 7th generation (and it still does occasionally happen even today). It was probably most prevalent in the really early days, there are tons and tons of pong consoles out there from manufacturers you would never imagine making video games. It was definitely still true in the 90's when a lot of players were still looking for a piece of the gaming pie. Nintendo and Sega were in the middle of a full-on console war, but they weren't alone. NEC and Hudson were still plugging away with the Turbografx,

  I want to take a little break from game reviews, I haven't had as much time to play the past few weeks and even less time to write. Besides, I kind of want to start changing things up a little bit. I hope it's been some level of noticable that I have been trying to incorporate some new gaming platforms into my coverage as of late, or at the very least have a little bit more variety. I have talked about this in the past, but it's almost impossible to completely eliminate bias from coverage. I was a Nintendo person that became a Sony person, who also had fairly consistent access to Sega and Microsoft consoles here and there. Looking back at the blog, you can really see that. It's further compounded by my genre preferences, I tend to gravitate to RPGs and fighting games. As such, my blog has a fairly understandable bias towards the SNES and PS1. I review a lot of 6th generation games, though that's less about bias and more about the fact that I just have more games f

Great, we're just starting out and already we have an enormous problem with false advertising. I just finished watching baseball almost four years after 2020 and what I saw was absolutely not what was promised in Super Baseball 2020. First and foremost, there were absolutely no robots or androids. You certainly didn't have to hit balls to dead center for home runs and there was a lot more foul territory. It was pretty much the same old baseball that I always remember, though I guess if I found out Aaron Judge is actually a terminator I wouldn't be surprised. Remember how futuristic 2020 felt in the 90's? As 2000 drew ever closer, sci-fi media started realizing they had to push their futures farther. You would have thought they would have just said 2100, it's very unlikely any of us are going to be around then. But a lot of games that would have had "2000" in the title started doing "2010" or "2020" as if it was so far in the future. I m

  I've talked about "random shareware" quite a bit in the past. Those demos that everyone in the 90's seemed to have installed on their computers without any knowledge of how they got there. It's finally time to talk about the game that, for me personally, epitomized that phenomenon. I had absolutely no idea how the first episode of Heretic ended up on my computer back in the day, but I can tell you for a fact I played those levels over and over again. As is apparent to anyone who follows my content, I am a huge fan of Doom. But I've always been more of a fantasy nerd than a sci-fi nerd. So now you are telling me there's a game that's basically Doom but in a fantasy setting? Sign me up! It's funny how things come full circle, the mystery of how Heretic got on my computer has been in the back of my mind for longer than it probably should have been. Yet thanks to the research I've done for this post, I think it is close to being solved. Whenever

  As anyone who was around in the 90's could tell you, one on one fighting games were absolutely everywhere. I know I've talked about the mid to end of the decade being a golden era for RPGs, but it seems like the entire decade was a golden era for tournament fighters. These things were absolutely everywhere, largely due to the popularity of the two pillars of the genre, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Argue that other series' were better all you want, talk all you want about how Karate Champ or Pit Fighter came first, but the absolutely insane levels of success of those two games are what catapulted the fighting genre into the stratosphere. It became the most popular genre in arcades by far and was probably neck and neck with mascot platformers for the top spot on consoles, though it didn't quite take off as much on PC. Some developers tried to innovate, but far, far more tried to simply rip off the two titans. I could probably spend an entire half hour just listi