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Review – Metal Gear (NES)
Metal Gear on the NES seems to have suffered the strange fate of a tarnished reputation. It was once unquestionably considered a classic, and while to some it still is, it’s simply not held up in the same light. This may be due to the growing awareness that the NES version of Metal Gear is a port of a game…
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Review – Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
The follow-up to Maniac Mansion drops the horror/sci-fi pretense to attempt full comedy. It features a tabloid writer looking for an escape from his job. Or something. Honestly, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders could do with a head shake. But it is a SCUMM adventure game, so it's not all bad.
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Review – Maniac Mansion
Whenever I explore a new facet of video games, I have a tendency to go in hard. If there’s some revered series or sub-genre that I’ve yet to touch, I’ll dive right in from the beginning and blow through as many titles as possible before my endurance is expended. So of course I had a point-and-click adventure phase, what (formerly)…
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Review – Rad Racer
If you asked me to name ten games that helped define the NES, there’s a chance that I’d drop Rad Racer into that list, but probably not for the reason you’d expect. Sure, it sold somewhere around 2 million units and established itself as the preeminent racing game on the console at the time of its 1987 release. It came…
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Review – Outrun 2019
It’s the unimaginably distant future. The year: 2019. The streets have been overrun by insufferable people who adhere to the speed limit. The death of recreational driving has pushed the Ferrari to the brink of extinction. It’s up to you to bring speed back to the people and remind them of the joy that reckless driving can bring. It’s up…
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Review – Zero Tolerance
Here’s a very specific fact about me that you didn’t want to know and probably don’t care about: I love 2.5D first-person shooters. We’re talking the raycasted oldies like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. I don’t know why, I just love the aesthetic. The simple or abstract environments with their billboarded sprites. The invitingly humpable walls. That’s my scene. It…
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Review – Spelunker (NES)
Despite my, erm, established familiarity with terrible games, I’ve yet to touch on the subject of “kusoge,”(koo-soh-geh) a Japanese term that literally translates to “crap game.” Kusoge has been an institution in Japan for far longer than it has over here. While the masochistic interest in bad games seems to have sprung up with The Angry Video Game Nerd’s appearance…
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Review – Shadowrun (Genesis)
Beginning as a pen-and-paper RPG in 1989, Shadowrun was followed by a strange scattershot of games based on the license in the early ’90s. Its bizarre and tantalizing mix of fantasy magic and cyberpunk technology graced three (or, like, two and a half) consoles in the ’90s: the SNES in 1993, the Genesis in 1994, and the Sega CD in…
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Review – Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball
I remember when Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball landed on the Xbox, back in ’03. I was still in high school, but even amongst my more testosterone bloated friends, there wasn’t much interest. Ogling digital females was just considered kind of sad in the circles I ran with, it was equated to a guy admitting that he’s unable to…
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Review – Shadowrun (SNES)
As someone who identifies as a geek, the Shadowrun universe is undeniably tantalizing. The result of marrying Tolkien-esque fantasy with Bladerunner-esque cyberpunk is simultaneously tacky and irresistible. Massive trolls and monolithic corporations, mages and hackers, dragons and cybernetic enhancements; it’s the nerd singularity. It’s only lacking space travel, which I think it actually has a bit of. As far as…
