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Collection essentials #589: Steel Battalion (Xbox)

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A lot of video games don’t truly try to be realistic. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of arcade racing games, for example, place you in what seems to be a real-life car, but the controls are simplified and the physics of the vehicle aren’t the same as in real life. Sometimes, you don’t want things in video games to be as complex or restricted as they are in real life, and reducing realism can lead to more fun. But some video games are designed with the point of being as realistic as possible, using that as a selling point. That’s not typically something I’m super into, but sometimes there can be exceptions. In the early 2000s, some developers for some wild reason thought that they’d better take this approach in a video game with an activity that doesn’t even exist in real life: piloting a giant war robot. And they went so far with it that they decided to design an entirely unique, complex, huge, insane controller that resembles what an actual control panel inside a giant ...
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Collection essentials #588: Namco Museum (Xbox)

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We’ve already seen some arcade compilation discs on this blog lately. Finally I’m showcasing a Namco Museum release. I’m pretty sure Namco is the #1 most prolific maker of compilations like this. It started in 1995 as they released several compilations with five to seven games each on the original PlayStation. Intact, the term “Namco Museum” has been the recurring title for these since those early days, and they’ve spanned a wide variety of consoles in the decades since.  Namco is of course best-known for their mega arcade hit Pac-Man, as well as the highly-regarded sequel that they surprisingly didn’t make themselves, Ms. Pac-Man. And of course, Namco has a very large repertoire of arcade games with various levels of popularity. So compilations like this make all the sense in the world for them to make. The first two Pac-Man games are so popular that there always will be an audience for them on practically any console. Now, despite having a ton of arcade games to draw from, Namco ...
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Collection essentials #587: MVP Baseball 2005 (Xbox)

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Say hello to my favorite baseball video game of all-time, and possibly my favorite sports video game period, a sentiment shared by many.  EA Sports was one of the most recognizable sports game brands back in the day, so of course they had plenty of experience making baseball games by this point. For years they developed the “Triple Play” series which started in the later days of the Sega Genesis and was best known for its entries on the original PlayStation. While this series was reasonably successful, it declined in its later days and did not make the transition to the following console generation well. EA decided to “retire” Triple Play and start a new series of games as a fresh start, called “MVP Baseball”. When the first game proved to be a success, EA continued it the following two years, culminating in MVP Baseball 2005 as their magnum opus. What makes MVP Baseball 2005 so good? Well, one thing is the wide variety of modes and options. There are two different “franchise” mode...
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Collection essentials #586: Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks

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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...
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Collection essentials #585: Midway Arcade Treasures 2

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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...
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Collection essentials #584: Mega Man Anniversary Collection

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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 ...
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Collection essentials #582 & #583: Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox) and Halo 2 (Xbox)

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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 ...
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