SSPA – Strider

One of the best things about early home video game consoles was the novelty of ownership; Instead of losing your hard saved quarters in a single afternoon, you could play the games you love as long as you had hours in the day. However, the home ports of arcade games were rarely ever quite as impressive as the real deal. Anytime from the days of the Atari 2600 until the end of the PlayStation 1 era, arcade cabinets had capabilities well beyond the efforts of the home consoles. The Atari systems and NES could make approximations of old mainstays like Galaga, Pac-Man, and Millipede…

Arcade

NES

…but you weren’t getting a game with the same graphics and audio as the arcade for titles like Gradius and Double Dragon.

SSPA – Vampire: Master of Darkness

The full moon is in the night sky, a chill creeps through the dark night air, and the faintest sound of whispers and laughter down dark streets and boarded up houses cast a shroud of fear over the hearts of the brave. It is Halloween once again! And although Halloween is a wonderful time for cerebral, mind melting horror, it’s also a time for lighter, spoopy thrills. Gamers looking for a less intense horror game this season may look back to Konami’s early Castlevania games, Capcom’s Ghosts N’ Goblins, or even the umpteen billion Dracula games by Sony Imagesoft. This year, I want to draw attention to an obscure title tucked away in the no man’s land of gaming history on Sega’s Game Gear; Vampire: Master of Darkness.

SSPA – Alien³

 -Contains spoilers for the first three Alien movies-

Every Halloween there are a few films I love to watch, and among the cheesy old horror schlock and the classic thrillers, there is one classic that’s a must see every year: Ridley Scott’s Alien. This film combines elements of slasher films, haunted house stories, and body horror to tell a wholly engrossing and terrifying tale. The crew of the spaceship Nostromo encounter a mysterious alien crash site on a distant planet. After a hideous organism latches to the face of one of their party and he is taken back on board for medical treatment, an viscous creature bursts from his chest. This new alien swiftly matures and hunts down the remaining crew one by one. With little hope against this fearsome beast, the crew are desperate to kill it, or otherwise escape the ship.

Been There, Played That

I now present a project that I’ve been working on with two good friends, a new gaming podcast: Been There, Played That.

Brett Beasely, Ben Miller, and I discuss games we’ve loved and enjoyed, the missteps, the happy and sad memories, and our thoughts on the events and trends in the gaming industry. We’re all new to this medium and hope that you will follow us as we express our thoughts and explore ideas about medium we love so much.

In this episode we discuss the recently released Sonic Mania, what it could mean for the franchise as a whole, and we chat about how our personal relationships with the series, the high points and the low points.

SSPA – Batman Returns

Tim Burton’s Batman is one of my favorite superhero movies. True, it is Burton’s least stylized film, but it had a great atmosphere, fantastic score from Danny Elfman, and great acting from Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. It really kicked off modern superhero movies (for better or worse) in the 90s, and is a much-loved movie. The sequel on the other hand was a little more controversial.

SSPA – Congo: The Lost City of Zinj

Author Michael Crichton often dabbled in other skills besides writing. He directed the sci-fi film Westworld in 1973, and later the period piece The Great Train Robbery in ’79. In the early 80’s, Crichton started to get interested in computer games. He taught himself basic, and after teaming up with a programmer and artist, set about designing an adventure game around his recently released jungle adventure novel Congo. Unfortunately for the project, Crichton did not realize that he had already sold the rights to the novel and could not base their game on it. After some hasty tweaks and alterations, Crichton and his team released Amazon. In essence it is the same story as Congo, but with a change of setting, some characters renamed, and set pieces altered.

SSPA – Universal Soldier

Movie licensed games can be handled in many different ways. Sometimes they can be really imaginative experiences that put the player into the midst of the film’s action. SunSoft’s adaptation of Batman (1989) on the NES is a good example of this, a fantastic action platformer set right at the climax of the film to let you feel the thrill of being a superhero. Other times they can be companion pieces to the film that expand on the characters and plot. Atari’s Enter the Matrix (2003) was an ambitious project that resolved key plot points of the second Matrix film to make the game a cannon part of the larger franchise. One of the stranger possibilities is when a developer doesn’t know what to do with a game and makes multiple versions across many platforms that retell the events of the film. Ocean Software developed four different video game adaptations of Sam Raimi’s Darkman (1991) across the NES, Gameboy, and several home computers, all of which offer slightly different retellings of the movie. Today’s game is an example of a company taking a different and rather lazy approach to a movie license.