Sam's video game collection essentials

Mortal Kombat had previously tried a couple times to deliver action spinoff games capitalizing on the series’ colorful characters and lore. The results were, unfortunately, not so great. While Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero did make my essentials list , it’s not an especially good game, just one that I have some fondness for as a fan of the series. After that came Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, which was even worse, and you’d be hard-pressed to find even a series die-hard who really likes it. The premise of an action Mortal Kombat spinoff was just too good to put to rest though, and they decided to give it a third attempt in the following console generation. Enter Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. This game places you in the shoes of either Liu Kang, Kung Lao, or both if you’re bringing a friend along for cooperative play. The story of the game follows the events of Mortal Kombat II. This is a neat idea, because stories in fighting games are not told like a typical story with a linear...

I’ve already talked about how companies during this console generation were getting in the habit of releasing compilation discs of their old arcade games. So it made sense for the prolific Chicago-based company Midway to do the same. Midway released a great many arcade games back in the day, many of which became very popular. I’d probably say that they’re my favorite non-Japanese arcade game developer. Even before arcade compilations were cool, they had already dabbled in the “arcade port compilation” business in the mid-90s on previous consoles, with a handful of titles per release. The compilations in this console generation would be bigger and better. The first Midway Arcade Treasures game focuses mostly on games from the ‘80s, with a couple 1990 releases thrown in. It’s quite a good collection, including many recognizable names such as Defender, Rampage, Smash TV, Paperboy, Marble Madness, Gauntlet, Joust, and more. I didn’t put it on this list, in part because there are other comp...

Mega Man was one of the most prolific series from one of gaming’s biggest companies. The NES console alone was home to the first SIX Mega Man games. So rereleasing and compiling the games in the main series made a lot of sense. The six NES Mega Man games first got rereleased on the original PlayStation only in Japan. These ports retained the original graphics and weren’t full remakes, but contained more enhancements than you’d normally see from an NES port. Thankfully, Capcom figured that American gamers ought to have something similar, so a few years later they gave us this compilation which contains the first eight mainline Mega Man titles along with enhancements and bonuses. They also contain a couple obscure arcade games called Mega Man: The Power Battle and Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters. If you want more information on these games and what they’re like, please seek out my past blog posts about them.  Some of the enhancements were taken from the PS1 ports, though I understand ...

Here are, unequivocally, the most successful iconic games on the original Xbox. Probably no other games at any time were ever more closely associated with the Xbox brand than the Halo games in their early days. The original Halo was a launch title, and was most definitely the game that truly put Xbox on the map. The Halo games are first-person shooters. They were far from the first games in the genre, or even the first successful FPS games on consoles (as opposed to PC). But they advanced the genre very significantly and set a new standard for what fans expected from a console FPS. The first game’s story places you in control of Master Chief, the dude on the cover who wears a green suit. He fights in a war against a dangerous legion of aliens known as the Covenant. The good guys discover a very large, mysterious, inhabitable ring-shaped entity known as Halo, which is where the series gets its name.  I’m not going to talk any more about the story, because the single-player campaign ...

PlayStation dominated the video game market for years starting when the original system reached all the major worldwide markets in 1995. However, one thing that was never really a strong suit for them was multiplayer party games. The original console had the standard two controller ports, and gamers could buy a “multitap” adapter to play with more than two players, but this requirement meant that party games were always going to be a niche part of the PS1’s library. The Nintendo 64 was far less successful overall than the PS1, but it had four native controller ports and absolutely had a bigger reputation as the “party console” with a variety of hits for four players to participate in. Perhaps surprisingly, the PlayStation 2 still only featured two controller ports requiring a multitap adapter for more than two players, and they didn’t make any real push to be a “party game” console. However, Microsoft, the newbies to the console business in 2001, did have aspirations to compete in this...

I previously showcased NFL 2K and NFL 2K1 for the Sega Dreamcast. Those were the first games in a new series from Visual Concepts and Sega, and set a new bar for what fans expected out of American football games. Their graphics were, at the time, unparalleled. Gameplay and presentation were similarly excellent.  It didn’t take real long for competitors to start taking big shots at the new high bar. In particular, once the extremely popular Madden series hit the PlayStation 2 for the 2000-2001 season, 2K had a very worthy opponent. For a few years in a row, both franchises would pump out a quality new football game and be greeted with highly positive review scores and great sales numbers. The early 2000s were arguably the best era for sports video games in history up to this point, as there was both a high quantity and quality of titles available for whatever spot you were interested in. You’ll notice I skipped a few years. So what is special about ESPN NFL 2K5 in particular? Well, ...