Gaming off the Beaten Path

  As usual, it took way longer than it should have, but I did EVENTUALLY do exactly what I said I was going to. It's a year late, but I've finally made my way through the Quintet trilogy. Playing these three games became a stated goal of mine since I started podcasting last year. One of my earliest episodes covered Soul Blazer, the first title in the pseudo series. The second game, Illusion of Gaia, was also a landmark episode as it was the first one to include the intro song ("A Glass Half Full of Tears" by Aura Blaze, who's music you should check out here ). Both of them received pretty solid scores, though I didn't quite like the latter quite as much as a lot of people seem to. After all these years, I'm still surprised I never played these games when they came out. Both were definitely right up my alley and readily available to buy or even rent at my local video store, but I just never picked them up. It's a little more understandable that I had ne...

  It's time to check another obscure 90's console off the list. Okay, it's not really THAT obscure, but it's definitely not one a lot of people, or anyone I know really, grew up with. Arcade giants SNK are very well known in the gaming community, especially among fighting game fans. Samurai Showdown, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, you could go all day just listing out fighting games that they were responsible for. Of course, they also had plenty of other well known titles like Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors. SNK is actually still in business today, though it's technically not the same as the original company went bankrupt in the early 00's. Normally I try to include some basic background about how these companies end up where they do, but I am going to spare everyone thousands of words of legal jargon and just simply describe the company's history with an emphatic "it's complicated." Either way, most gamers knew about their titles from either arc...

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...