While unpacking some boxes of my magazines today, I ran across an issue of Dungeon magazine (number 116 to be precise, November 2004) that made me stop what I was doing and filled me with a desire to read the article advertised on the front cover. As a 30th anniversary celebration for Dungeons and Dragons, this issue listed the 30 greatest adventures of all time to appear under the D&D ruleset, any version. The list was chosen by the editors as well as a team comprised of some of the bigge
Following up on my previous blog entry, I decided I would make this concept more than a one-time deal. So this time, instead of NES titles, we'll look at my top 10 casual SNES games. Remember, this isn't about long, drawn-out games that take hours of levelling or days of practice to complete. This is about games you can pick up, play for a little while, and then put down again when you don't have very long to sit in front of your TV.
10 - Super Tennis
As noted in the previous blog, there ar
Occasionally when the muse strikes me, I will write. Sometimes I do short stories, sometimes I work on longer ones, but often I write poetry. These are two examples from my lunch break at work today. Feel free to contemplate their meaning to myself or to you, and discuss in the comments box.
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In my heart
I wrote the ending a million times.
In my mind
I wrote it one thousand.
In my journal
I wrote it four or five.
In my reality
It was written once
With heavy editing, not my
Let's Read: Nintendo Power #5
Ninjas didn't just suddenly become popular with the arrival of Robert Hamburger's "Real Ultimate Power" website, that was more just the icing on the cake. For the real birth of the ninja power lovefest in the western world, you have to go back to the 1980s, when ninjas were sort of like the Nazis of film and video games. You could have them commit all sorts of heinous crimes (like kidnapping presidents or hijacking arms shipments) without anyone in the wor
Let's Read - Nintendo Power #7
When I started doing this series, it was actually this particular issue that I was looking the most forward to digging back through because the cover features Mega Man II, which is one of my favorite NES games of all time. Aside from Issue 1, this is the earliest issue of NP that I have in my collection, and I believe I acquired it through a promotion that Chips-Ahoy cookies ran where if you sent in a few UPC symbols, you'd get a free issue of the magazine
There's no way I can keep myself from writing about the most awesomely bad film I've seen in years. And given that there are actually people who read this blog on occasion, hopefully this means that one or two of you will take the time to find a copy and watch it too, because I swear that you won't believe a word I write until you too have witnessed it for yourself.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force!
OK. Tell me, honestly: you walked into a video
The first time I read "Zod Wallop," I had just graduated from high school and was working away the summer before my transition to freshman status at Ball State at the local public library. I saw it on the shelf, mentally asked, "What the hell is this?", took it home, and read through it in two days. After I returned it, I never saw a copy come through again, and for a while I had forgotten about it.
Then, several years ago while working at the bookstore, a paperback with an odd title c
I always thought somebody should make some kind of board game based on the Aliens universe. They've made plenty of video games based on the property after all, on everything from the 2600 to the modern-day consoles with the pending release of Aliens: Colonial Marines. There was also a fun "Aliens vs. Predator" collectable card game released in the 90s. Surely somebody somewhere thought about a board game, right?
Well, they did. It was called "Alien", it was released in 1979 as a board game
I frigging love Parasite Eve for the Playstation. It's one of my favorite RPGs of all time (small wonder, since it's written and directed by the guy who directed Chrono Trigger and designed Final Fantasy IV on the Super NES, and scored by Yoko Shimomura who did the music for Breath of Fire, Kingdom Hearts, many incarnations of Street Fighter II, and Legend of Mana among others), and I've felt it never received the recognition it deserved coming as it did in the wake of Final Fantasy VII and bei
The recent death of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, who starred in such memorable films as "They Live" and such immemorable ones as "Hell Comes to Frog Town" and "Sci-Fighter", really got me thinking about movies that were ahead of their time in one way or another. So I'm not boring my readers to death, I'm restricting myself to the five best examples that I believe fit this mold and I'm only allowing one John Carpenter flick on the list. That said, here are my picks:
5) John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)
You've probably noticed over the last few days that I've been clogging up the "new images" feed with a literal metric ton of advertising material culled from gaming magazines. A lot of this work has been simply updating old images with better-quality copies. Phillyman started the Retromags ad database all the way back in 2009 by pulling ads from older scans of EGM and GamePro, but a lot of those issues have received new releases in the intervening years offering better resolution scans. We also
Over our vacation last week, I gave my girlfriend something that I wasn't sure she would like. Now, normally I'm pretty conservative when getting gifts for her. I know what she likes and doesn't care for, since we've been together for over 10 years now. But this year, I decided to go with something that was a bit of a gamble. See, my girlfriend isn't very much of a gamer at all. Sure, she'll sit and watch me vapourize Necromorphs in Dead Space or whack Daedra in Oblivion or explore ancient ruins
Here's the situation: you've been anticipating a title for months. The hype has been extraordinary, the press coverage relentless, the previews have all been favourable, and you, by golly, have just got to have it. So you went to the local shop where you satisfy your gaming itch, picked up your very own copy, got home, threw it into your system, and...
...boy did it suck.
Seriously, you think to yourself, what the hell were they thinking? Then, you turn the blame inwards. What the hell wer
The last Easter Egg-themed blog entry that I wrote was about the weirdest secret I had ever seen in a video game. This one isn't quite as bizarre, but it is a fun story that you may have heard before and in my opinion, is worth telling again.
So, when was the last time you got to kill your own boss (without fear of legal repercussion)? The short answer for all of you is (hopefully) "Never." For the members of iD Software circa 1994, however, the answer was, "As often as we want to." It was
Let's face it - if you've been gaming for as long as I have, it's quite likely that your first exposure to a game that threatened to actually make you change your underpants was Resident Evil. And if there's one area in Resident Evil that is more likely to have actually made you need to change your undies than any other, it was one of the most infamous jump-scares in video game history: when the dogs break through the outside windows and into the narrow hallway. Even if you suspected something
Spoiler Alert: This blog entry describes the plot and final battle of Super Metroid on the SNES. If you haven't played this game to completion and do not want the ending spoiled, you shouldn't read any further.
I grew up gaming. One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of my father holding me up in front of a pinball machine (the Gorgar table) and helping me hit the buttons on the flippers so that I could bounce the silver ball around. I think I lasted all of about twenty seconds, but wow, w
Another one of my favorite Easter Eggs.
Boot up Diablo (the original) and use Print Screen to grab a copy of the title screen where you can start a new game and whatnot. Now, close the game, open up your favorite image editor program, and use the Paste command to dump the screen image into the program. You should get something that looks like this:
Looks innocuous so far, right? Big red demon, some title screen junk, and nothing at all about Natalie Portman. As a wise Jedi once note
Note: this is a cross-post of an editorial that I wrote for Intelligent Gamer, another gaming site that I contribute to on a semi-regular basis. I figured it was gaming related, though not video game related, and deserved a spot here on my blog. And actually, as of about 5:30 today, the article hasn't appeared on IG's website, so you get a sneak preview of it here first!
Who loves ya, babes?
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Thirteen Little Scary Story Starters
At a loss for something to creep out your role
Often when a game is ported from one region of the world to another, significant changes are made, not least of which is usually an attempt to translate and localize the game for a new audience. Sometimes things are removed or altered for sociological reasons; a rather famous example is the graphical changes that accompanied Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI for the Super NES thanks to Nintendo of America's stricter policy on drinking and sexual themes in their games as compared to Nintendo
I'm awakened by the sound
Of rain against my window
It's getting harder to ignore
But these tired eyes need rest.
-- "Flourescent Skies", Assemblage 23
I read a lot. I know this will make some of you wonder "when?" given the amount of time I spend going on and on about games, either playing them or writing about them, but despite the fun of interactive entertainment, there's nothing quite like a good book. Also, I make my living working in a used bookstore,
"Anxious" does not even begin to describe my feelings when I discover that there is a new survival horror game coming out. As you've no doubt figured out by now if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, horror games are something I simply cannot get enough of. And while there are a number of franchises that compete for my attention, none is more apt to receive my gamer girl bucks than the perversely fascinating titles in the Silent Hill series. Having played through every entry i
I will level with you by starting this blog with the caveat that I am in an incredibly foul mood at the moment. But rather than doing something constructive with my rage, like tossing small children into deep wells or drugging really ugly men at the bar and leaving them in my neighbor's front yard without their clothing again, I decided I might be better served (and avoid inconveniences like court dates and prison sentences) to compile a list of horrible Star Wars games. I'm aware that this is
Sometimes you just can't be as hardcore a gamer as you want to be. Sure, there's nothing like sitting down and marathoning through a game like Dragon Warrior in a 20-hour stretch of levelling madness, but as you get older and summer vacations become a thing of the past, most of us don't get that kind of quality time in any longer unless you wind up both independantly wealthy and without a significant (or dependant) other.
So what do you do when you want to game, but you only have an hour or le
Some of you may not be familiar with Scratches, and if that's the case, then I pity you because you missed out on one of my favorite graphical adventure games of all time, and one of the creepiest games of 2006. It casts you as Michael Arthate, a horror novelist who hit paydirt with his first book and is now looking for a suitable atmosphere in which to complete his sophomore effort. His idea? Buy the oldest house he can find, and live there to let the atmosphere surround and penetrate him to
Let's Read - Nintendo Power #8
Here we are, eight issues in to Nintendo Power's run, and the big news of the Sept./Oct. issue is Duck Tales. In fact, it's such big news that the big N is devoting a dozen pages to it in this issue in addition to all the attention it got in issue #7. The best news is that Duck Tales is one of the rare examples of a licensed property game that didn't suck eggs, so I can't begrudge Nintendo for featuring this game on the cover. This issue also features th
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