Sam's video game collection essentials

And now for what I consider one of the greatest video games ever made. Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation had recently set a new bar for cinematic-style storytelling in games, with a gripping plot, interesting characters, and fully-voiced dialogue. But it was still limited in some aspects by the PlayStation’s hardware limitations, which is incredibly evident if you so much as look at the faces of the characters. With the new and much-more-powerful PS2, there was so much more potential. And Konami wasn’t going to waste time making their big new Metal Gear Solid sequel (which everyone knew was coming due to a hint at the very end of the previous game). The game first released on PS2 only in November of 2001 under the title “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty”. A year later, an updated version called “Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance” came out for the Xbox, which added new content, most notably dozens of “VR missions” for people who enjoy gameplay which contribute many hours of pl...

In this console generation it started to become much more common for companies to release compilations of their older games. And boy, what a great opportunity this was for Capcom who had made so many Mega Man titles in the previous few console generations!  The Mega Man Anniversary Collection first came out in 2004 (though this Xbox version didn’t until the following year) and contains the six NES Mega Man titles, Mega Man 7 which was originally on SNES, and Mega Man 8 ported from the PlayStation 1 version. They could have done a simple bare-bones release, but thankfully there are all kinds of things to sweeten the package. There are two bonus arcade games included, and special features (sorta like stuff you’d get on a DVD) which vary depending on which version of the game you have. And of course, you can save the game normally instead of relying on passwords, which is always great. If that weren’t enough, the NES Mega Man games have optional features from the PlayStation 1 ports t...

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...