Sam's video game collection essentials

My favorite video game that was released in the 1970s is the arcade game Asteroids by Atari. I haven’t mentioned Asteroids yet in this series, because there hadn’t been a good home port of it. In my opinion, the Atari 2600 rendition of the game was just not very good. Asteroids is a game that used “vector graphics” in the arcade (those types of games look like everything was drawn with a white pen on a black background). You control a small triangle which represents your ship, and upon starting the game there are a few asteroids floating around you. An immediate thing you’ll notice is that movement doesn’t work in the same way that it normally does in other video games. The developers tried to make movement work like it actually would in outer space. You have a “thrust” button that you have to hold down in order to move forward, and you won’t immediately stop upon letting go of it. Mastering the art of space movement is an important part of succeeding at and enjoying the game. Another ...

Last year, one of the early games I covered was Super Breakout on the Atari 2600 . You’ve almost certainly seen Breakout or one of its clones in some form. The simple yet addictive gameplay involves moving a small rectangle left and right at the bottom of the screen in an attempt to hit a ball around so that it ricochets off all the blocks in each level, destroying them. Since it was so successful, it’s no surprise that Breakout imitators started to pop up before long.  Among the most notable of these imitators was Arkanoid from Taito, the same people who developed the incredibly successful and important arcade hit Space Invaders. Arkanoid has the same basic gameplay as Breakout, but has new gameplay elements to make gameplay more dynamic and exciting. Certain blocks, when broken, will drop a power-up that falls slowly toward the bottom of the screen for the player to try and collect. These power-ups include slowing the ball down, making two clones of the ball, giving the player th...

As I said in my previous post, Sony had a ton of third-party developers making games for their console and largely rode that to huge success. They weren’t as prolific at being developers themselves as Nintendo and Sega had been in the previous generation. But that doesn’t mean Sony didn’t occasionally pump out a hit of their own, such as today’s game. The original PlayStation controller only had a d-pad and no joystick or analog stick. The problem with this is that d-pads typically can only register button presses in eight different directions, and in three-dimensional games, you often want a wider spectrum of movement than just eight directions. After their competitors released controllers with analog sticks in 1996, Sony introduced one of their own in 1997, the “DualShock”. Most games at first had optional analog stick support and were still made under the assumption that some gamers would only have the d-pad to use. But in 1999, Sony came out with this game, Ape Escape, which was de...

And now, I’ve finally gotten to one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in gaming. Sony is of course a hugely successful electronics company, and had been long before trying their hand in the video game market. They started out by publishing video games, starting with Super Dodgeball for NES in 1989 and then several more in the early ‘90s. I’ve talked about before how as technology was improving, it was clear that CDs were eventually going to be the future of video games rather than cartridges, and companies tried to get on that bandwagon early by releasing CD add-on peripherals for their consoles which would have their own compatible CD games. Nintendo had previously released a similar peripheral for the Famicom in Japan called the Famicom Disk System which used floppy disks, and they were interested in doing something similar with the SNES to get in on the CD craze. They had serious talks with Sony about teaming up to make such a thing, a peripheral that would be called the “...

Capcom wasn’t going to just stop at X-Men vs. Street Fighter. For a follow-up, how about getting a variety of Marvel icons in on the action rather than just limit the cast to X-Men?? And so, now fan favorites like Spider-Man, Hulk and Captain America get in on the action!! MSHvSF has mostly the same tag-team mechanics as the first game, so I’m not gonna recap all that again. It does add a very significant feature, though, that being the “assist”. As long as both your characters are still alive, when you press the “Medium punch” and “Medium kick” buttons together, your character who’s currently tagged out will jump onto the battlefield and perform a specific special move before retreating. It adds some good spice to the gameplay and helps when you’re playing as a character who may have a specific shortcoming that can be helped by this attack. There’s a bit of risk to it, as the assisting character can take damage from enemy attacks, although while tagged out they will slowly recover. O...

Capcom obviously struck gold with Street Fighter II in the early ‘90s and set the standard for a new genre that was suddenly booming in popularity. And Capcom didn’t stop at making just Street Fighter, either. In 1994 they started a new series of Darkstalkers, and later in the same year they teamed up with Marvel to make a Street Fighter-style fighting game called X-Men: Children of the Atom. They even included their own villain Akuma from Street Fighter in that game as a secret character. And not long after that they would add a second Marvel fighting game, called “Marvel Super Heroes” which featured a variety of iconic superheroes from the Marvel universe and not just X-Men. Those two Marvel games were on Sega Saturn, but I don’t currently own them and they didn’t make my list. Crossovers weren’t really a big thing yet, but the next step may have been obvious. What if Capcom included their own characters along with Marvel’s in one single fighting game?? This was an excellent idea, an...

Another “Virtua two-for-one” post about two different games.  Launching in arcades in 1993, the first Virtua Fighter game was one of the first fighting games ever to have fully 3D graphics, which was a big deal. It didn’t factor much into the gameplay as players were still restricted to a 2D plane, but it still played great and the game was a big hit. Virtua Fighter 2 would come out the following year, around the same time that the Sega Saturn console was to be released in Japan. And so, Sega made Virtua Fighter a big part of their plans for the Sega Saturn. A port of the first game was the big title to own at launch, and console buyers knew that a port of the second game was coming down the road. These games were the main reason why the Sega Saturn was the company’s best-selling console in its home country, because Japanese gamers went absolutely nuts for Virtua Fighter. For the North American launch, Sega decided to include Virtua Fighter 1 as a pack-in game included with every c...

I don’t do this very much, but I’m gonna highlight two games in one today, mostly because they’re similar, in the same series, and I don’t have a ton to say about them. As you may know, I dig light gun games. I already talked about The House of the Dead on Saturn, which came out later in the console’s lifetime, and is my current favorite light gun rail shooter. The Virtua Cop games can sort of be seen as a predecessor to them. Not as great, but still plenty of fun and respectable as trailblazers. Up until Virtua Cop’s arcade release in 1994, most light gun shooters used 2D sprites or digitized actors of some kind. Virtua Cop was one of the first to use full-on three-dimensional polygon graphics.  As you might guess from the title, Virtua Cop has you (and perhaps a friend) playing as law enforcement taking on areas swarming with armed criminals in an attempt to save the day. The core gameplay mechanics aren’t super revolutionary, as it’s mostly stuff that was already established in ...

This game is also known as Darkstalkers 3 outside Japan. Darkstalkers is a really cool series of 2D fighting games from Capcom, the same company that brought us the incredibly famous Street Fighter, and this series unfortunately isn’t anywhere near as popular. Darkstalkers is very similar to Street Fighter in a lot of ways, but immediately stands out very much due to a very different setting with very different characters. You could kinda say it’s like “Halloween Street Fighter”, with much of its cast being inspired by mythological creatures such as werewolves or Bigfoot in a sort of horror-esque anime-style setting. There are gameplay differences between Darkstalkers and Street Fighter. And, well, we are talking about the third Darkstalkers game here in particular, and I actually haven’t played much of the first two games at all so I don’t know all the little differences between them. Darkstalkers actually wound up introducing gameplay elements that went on to be adopted in Street Fig...

I’ve talked about Mortal Kombat 3 before, the SNES version. But this is the version I want to talk about more, since it was hands-down the best version of UMK3 released in the ‘90s. You can refer to that post to read more about some of the changes MK3 brought to the series. The first Mortal Kombat 3 was very different from the previous two games in various ways, and one of those ways was the cast of characters. Many characters did not return for the third game, even really popular ones. The game decided not to include any ninja characters at all with the exception of the three “cyborg ninja” characters they introduced. Sub-Zero did return, but his mask and ninja outfit were gone, de-ninjifying him. The original Mortal Kombat 3 is the only main game in the entire series where the iconic character Scorpion does not appear. So the biggest addition to UMK3 is the seven ninja characters, six of which are from past games and one of which is brand new. And as you’d expect with an updated ver...