Sam's video game collection essentials

Here’s the game that perhaps has the most weird-to-pronounce name of them all! I’ve talked plenty about arcade-style “shoot ‘em ups” before, those games where you fly around with your finger holding down the “shoot button”, collecting power-ups most of the time, dodging a series of bullets headed your way, with just one hit capable of taking away one of your lives.  There’s a certain style of shoot ‘em up called “bullet hell”. As the name implies, these games often have a LOT of bullets on the screen at once, sometimes dozens. Of course, there are design principles behind it, and it’s not simply about the screen getting spammed with a ton of projectiles. These games may seem extremely daunting at first glance, for superhuman players only. They’re not quite THAT crazy, though. For one thing, the clouds of bullets in a good bullet hell adhere to some kind of pattern, which makes them more manageable to navigate. Also, your character/ship will have a very small “hitbox” which means it...

 I started this series over a year and a half ago (at first just on Facebook, actually) and have been updating it as close to daily as I possibly can. At first I was making mostly short posts about Atari games, so it was a nice little quick routine thing to do. But then as I progressed through gaming history, my posts became longer and longer as I had more to say about the games. But I still maintained the daily impulse to make the next post on any day where I had a chunk of spare time at home. I'm glad I'm doing this blog and I intend to keep it going. But I'm realizing now that it's just taking up too much of my time. There are a lot of things in life that I want to invest my precious time in, and I'm realizing that this blog is just taking up too much of it right now. One of those things is...actually playing my dang video games. What a thought! It's been a lot harder to find time for games when I'm spending 1-2 hours per day making a blog post any day th...

It feels a bit weird to start the PS2 list with a game all the way down midway through the letter D. It’s not that I don’t have PS2 games that I own and like that start with those first few letters, it’s more that it’s hard for me to give them the “essential” label. For example, I have many Dance Dance Revolution games on PS2, and they are quite good, but I have already covered the original Dance Dance Revolution on the original PlayStation. The PS2 games are generally better, sure, but it’s hard for me to look at one particular installment and say *this one* is specifically essential. There are also many retro game compilation titles on the PS2 such as the two Capcom Classics Collections, which are cool, but it’s hard for me to say that *this specific compilation* is the particular release of these games that I want on my list (though there will be compilations showing up here at some point). Anyways, time to talk about…Dragon Ball Z!! It’s one of the tippity-top most popular and reco...

Ever since the video game crash of 1983, the home console market had been dominated by Japanese companies, mainly Nintendo, Sega and Sony. At the turn of the millennium, we were about to get our first major competitor from elsewhere, as tech giant Microsoft decided to throw their hat into the ring with their first console, the Xbox. What would set the original Xbox apart from its competition, the PlayStation 2 and GameCube? Quite a bit, actually. While not immediately obvious to the consumer, the console was built differently, more similar to the building blocks of a personal computer. The name “Xbox” comes from Microsoft’s programming interface “DirectX”. It was the first game console to come with a built-in hard drive, which offered a series of advantages. Mainly, this meant that players were no longer required to buy a memory card to save their progress! Xbox memory cards still existed, and were mainly useful when you wanted to transfer save data from one system to another, but they...

Wait, didn’t I just talk about the PlayStation 2 yesterday? Why move on to the GameCube without even talking about any PlayStation 2 games?? Well, looking at the upcoming games, I realize that some titles from this generation have some versions and sequels on different systems. If I tackled all my PS2 games, then everything on GameCube, etc., then I would run into some awkward situations where I’d be talking about certain games in an order that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. I am still mostly going to be talking about PlayStation 2 stuff in the coming weeks, but I want to get the competing consoles’ introductions out of the way so I can feel more free to bring up their games whenever I wish. Anyways, about the topic at hand: Nintendo was king of the video game world by the end of the ‘80s thanks to their hugely successful Famicom/NES. In the first half of the ‘90s, Sega gave them a serious challenge with their Mega Drive/Genesis, but the Super Nintendo was still clearly the best-selling...

Say hello to the (currently) best-selling video game system of all-time. Sony had caught wildfire with the original PlayStation in 1995, a system which one held that title (because I don’t count Game Boy and Game Boy Color as the same platform like Nintendo does). Unlike Nintendo and Sega, who both were less successful in the generation after their big breakthrough, Sony not only kept their momentum with the PlayStation 2, but actually increased it. The original PlayStation had sold just over 100 million units, while the PlayStation 2 wound up in the neighborhood of 160 million! How did Sony do it? Well, there are a number of factors and good decisions which culminated in this runaway success. The success of the original PlayStation gave it a leg up, obviously, and Sony made sure to capitalize on this fully by keeping certain elements of the previous console. For example, the PlayStation 2 controller is nearly identical to the PlayStation 1 “DualShock” controller, with the only differe...

What a quirky game we have here. It’s basically a “mod” of “The House of the Dead 2”, the arcade light gun shooter that I covered recently, meaning that the graphics, story, etc., are basically the same. But the core gameplay has been fundamentally altered. Now, you are not using a gun to kill zombies. You’re using a keyboard! Whenever an enemy appears on the screen, a word or phrase will appear along with them, and the player must properly type it out in order to kill that enemy. As a nice touch, the player characters now have backpacks that resemble Sega Dreamcast consoles and keyboards strapped to their chests. Of course, the things you have to type will get harder as the game goes along. And boss encounters may require the player to do something tricky. For example, the player may be asked a question and be presented with three answers, and they must type out the right one.  Since I do transcription work for a living, I’m quite fast on a keyboard, so when I finally picked this ...

I can’t tell you a whole lot about the real-life sport of skateboarding. I do know what it entails: riding around on a skateboard, doing a variety of cool and dangerous-looking tricks. I don’t really know much at all about how professional skateboarding is organized, or how a skateboarder’s performance is formally scored. But what I can tell you is that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is freakin’ awesome. And that there are an awful lot of people like me who never paid one iota of attention to skateboarding before 1999, but were nonetheless won over by a game they had no idea they wanted. This game achieved very impressive critical acclaim and popularity, garnering a whole lot of new attention to the real-world sport in the process. There were plenty of skateboarding video games before Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. None of them were particularly great, and probably mostly appealed to people who already liked the sport. But it turns out, there was great potential all along for the sport to be made int...

Namco was one of the great early arcade video game developers, most notably for creating Pac-Man in 1980. In the 1990s, they remained strong. They were, however, not one of the companies that jumped on the train of creating 2D fighting games when Capcom’s Street Fighter II burst onto the scene in 1991. It took them a few years to take a stab at a fighting game, and rather than do one similar to Street Fighter, they instead opted to make a 3D fighting game called Tekken to compete with Sega’s popular Virtua Fighter. Tekken wound up being a series that received substantial critical and commercial success. Tekken was all about hand-to-hand martial arts, and Namco saw fit to also make another fighting game that was a little different. That game was called Soul Edge, one where all the combatants wielded some kind of weapon. Soul Edge received a PlayStation port which was known in Western territories as “Soul Blade”. As a side note, you may notice a complete lack of Tekken games in this blog...