Sam's video game collection essentials

For its first year, PlayStation really lacked a mascot. It proved that it didn’t need one as early sales were strong. But clearly there was a void there to be filled, and the one to come fill it was a company called Naughty Dog that hadn’t made very many games before. Enter Crash Bandicoot. Crash 1 is a fairly straightforward game, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Crash is on a quest to rescue his girlfriend Tawny from the evil Dr. Neo Cortex, and he has to gradually ascend an island divided up in a series of levels to do so.  This is a very early 3D platformer. It’s not the very first one, and it’s not super innovative. It launched around the same time as a bigger and more influential one featuring everyone’s favorite plumber. But this one came out on a different console, which helped it stand out more. Levels are fairly straightforward in Crash 1, with not a lot of open space to explore, with gameplay consisting of overcoming a series of enemies and obstacles to reach t...

In the leap to the next generation, although it stayed in 2D, Castlevania reinvented itself. The series started out as an action platformer, where the player typically traversed levels simply moving from point A to point B while fighting monsters and avoiding traps. This was its main identity and how the majority of games played out. There was some experimentation at times with branching pathways, and the second game incorporated some RPG elements and provided a world that could be freely explored. But Symphony of the Night provided a new blueprint that the 2D games would follow for years to come. This game is clearly inspired by Super Metroid, with the whole game basically being one enormous level to explore that you gradually gain more access to as you gain new tools and abilities. SotN also brings back RPG elements by having a level-up system and items to equip to increase stats. So much did fans of retro gaming love SotN that it helped coin the term “Metroidvania” which is commonly...

The fighting game genre was well established by 1997, for both 2D and 3D fighting games. You ought to know the typical formula: one-on-one, both players have a health bar that gradually depletes with hits, there are a variety of attack buttons, special moves can be done with specific directional and button inputs. Well, this game tried to be very different and went for a more realistic approach, which is a really neat and refreshing change of pace from the norm. “Bushido” refers to a moral code followed by Japanese samurai. This is a weapon combat game that may appear to us Americans at first to be a feudal Japan sort of thing, but it actually takes place in modern times and uses some European weapons too. Rather than having a series of playable characters each with a set weapon and set of  moves, Bushido Blade has you pick a character and then one of the game’s weapons for them to use. Both characters and weapons have their own unique parameters, and some combinations work better ...

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 “...