Gaming off the Beaten Path

Video games have been around for a relatively short time when you consider the grand scheme of things. They are certainly one of the newer media formats and their time as a respected medium has been incredibly short. However, they have also made major strides in their 50–60-year lifespan. There have been a lot of revolutionary titles that have pushed the limits of what games can achieve. Typically, those games receive the recognition they deserve as landmarks in the industry's growth. Sometimes though, even games that made huge technological strides can slip through the cracks. Just because a game is technologically impressive for its time doesn't make it good, and sometimes these revolutionary titles are forgotten because they are simply not fun to play. However, that wasn't the case for our subject this week. I will never forget the first time I experienced Jumping Flash!, one of the playable demos on the notable PlayStation Picks CD. I've talked a little bit about th...

In recent weeks, I've been doing a lot of research into RPGs that never left Japan. I haven't covered a game that never came to the U.S. in quite a while, so I figured now is as good a time as any. There are always going to be games that get stuck in Japan or only get ported to PAL regions, whether its for financial, cultural or other reasons. But during the 5th generation, it was extremely common for games to stay on the mothership, especially when it came to RPGs. Simply put, the genre just wasn't as popular in the west and it was often not worth the time and effort to localize them. I talked a little bit about this with Sweet Home (though that stood zero chance of ever being released here) and Terranigma (which was not released in North America for more business related weirdness), but it still amazes me how many games never made their way to the West and how many of them I had never heard of until much later. When I started GOTBP, I kind of made it a point to not focus ...

 Now that I have kids, a lot of new media has entered my orbit. And frankly, a lot of old media has re-entered it too. It really is amazing how many kids shows are still on the air in some way, shape or form. For every new franchise my kids become obsessed with, it seems like they also become obsessed with one from my childhood. It actually leads to a surprising amount of parenting problems. My kids assume that because I know so much about Pokémon, I know equal amounts about Ninjago or Dog Man. Any other parents have kids in the Dog Man phase? I guess it beats the sheer terror and foul horror of Cocomelon. Anyway, one of the more recent obsessions in my house has been Power Rangers, a show I was absolutely shocked to find they are still making seasons of. Since 1993, Saban has been crossing footage from Japanese show Super Sentai (which has been on even longer, since 1975) with really poorly acted teenage drama to create a massive merchandising juggernaut. My kids are into all the ...

 It's back to the Neo Geo this week, I've been in a fighting game mood and it's quickly become the first console I turn to when that happens.  I've always found it weird how often I remember some of these games I come across from when I was a kid. Don't get me wrong, I had never played Kizuna Encounter: Tag Battle, or its predecessor Savage Reign, in my life before I did it for this post. But from the second I booted it up, everything about it seemed so familiar. I guess that happens a lot with fighting games, they almost always feel some level of familiar to Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. I guess in the SNK universe, it's Fatal Fury that many of these fighters feel similar to. But that wasn't really the case with KETB. It took me a while, but I finally realized where I had seen this game before. I've said this before, in fact I dedicated an entire post and podcast episode to it, but I was a huge connoisseur of video game magazines when I was a kid. Ho...

I've probably covered Mega Man more than any other series here on GOTBP. Yet there is still a lot of uncharted territory for the franchise, territory I am going to start exploring this week. For as much time as I have spent on the series, and as important as it is to my history as a gamer, I've never really explored the Game Boy Mega Man titles. As was the style at the time, pretty much any popular NES/SNES/Genesis game got some level of similar handheld release on the Game Boy/Game Gear. Sometimes these were attempts at straight points, others were instances of the same name but a different game, while others had elements of both. For the most part, the Mega Man Game Boy entries fit into the latter category. They were typically released between NES entries, Mega Man II on the Game Boy between 2 and 3 on the NES, and so on. They would contain elements of the two games they appeared between, the aforementioned Mega Man II would contain four bosses from MM 2 on the NES and four f...

  It's time to discuss yet another one of the internet's favorite games. It's not that I hate covering these things, it's that I always worry I'm going to say something that's going to get myself in trouble. I guess I don't have enough followers for that.  Of course, we all know how things can go when you have a difference of opinion with the rest of the internet. All it takes is not liking a game everyone loves to set off a firestorm. That's especially true with some of the more obscure or indie games that tend to have very passionate fanbases. At the same time, I kind of understand some of the backlash to some of these "hot takes." There are so many attention seekers out there that it's hard to tell whether someone genuinely believes these things or whether they are just trolling. Fortunately for me, my opinion on this week's game isn't completely off from what most people seem to think. Unfortunately, it's also one of the fir...

  I'm going to keep going with my tradition of opening the year with an old sports game. But this time, I'm going to go about it a little bit differently. Usually I go with either an old title in a current series or I check out a title from a once prominent sports series that died out. I mean, that was kind of supposed to be the whole point of this thing when I started. But after last year, where I started looking more into titles on obscure consoles, I found myself looking for sports games in other places. While it was somewhat difficult to find more mainline sports titles on these systems, there were certainly plenty of other examples to be found. For better or worse, most of these tend to be more arcade style sports games, they don't really try to accurately simulate the sports they represent. I personally think this tends to lead to better results for older sports titles. It was really hard to reproduce the feel of an actual sport on a 3rd, 4th or even 5th generation co...