Phoenix Games

Evander Holyfield's Real Deal Boxing - Genesis

2010-06-09T10:24:00.002-04:00

The house should have been condemned.
In my junior year of college I lived with two other guys in a house that looked like Freddy Krueger's winter cottage. All the pipes leaked. None of the doors locked properly. The basement was infested with rats that would only rarely venture into the living quarters. And it was only one of two houses on a strange little block behind an abandoned shopping center.
Our neighbor, Don, was a kindly fellow who grew tomatoes the size of basketballs. He wore white overalls every day and never complained when we packed 100 drunk college students into our rickety little house. He was also the man who made a positive ID on the thief who stole $700 in cash and two "adult" magazines from our home.
I was walking home from class when I saw Don and one of my roommates, Jason, on the front lawn. The front door was open – it never locked - and they were looking around in disbelief. Apparently someone broke into the house, found our rent money in Jason's sock drawer, and fled on foot. Don caught a glimpse of the guy, but just a glimpse. As we waited for the cops to arrive we checked out the rest of the house.
My Sega Genesis was there, "Evander Holyfield's Real Deal Boxing" sitting safely in its place.
The cops dusted for prints and asked us some questions. They encouraged us to scour the home to make sure nothing else was taken. Then they left.
We scoured the home.
In my bedroom I noticed my mattress was ajar. I looked under it to find my two girlie magazines were gone. (OK, so I used to own some girlie mags. Check under your dude's bed and see what you find.)
The cops called and asked if we noticed anything else missing. I told them about the magazines. They did not snicker or comment. I assume they wrote it down on an incident report.
We spent the next few hours playing boxing on the Genesis. The game was brilliant for its time and was definitely the best boxing game on the Genesis. It looked great – cuts and sweat were done well – and it allowed you to create and train a boxer and take him to the top.
But we soon realized that boxing on TV wasn't going to sooth our anger over being robbed. We walked to the ATM machine and foolishly took out money that we should have put aside for the rent. We were going to party that night. As Jason and I walked back to the house we saw a police car waiting for us. The cop in the driver's side rolled down the window and looked at me.
"Did you say you were missing two magazines?"
Yes.
"Can you identify the magazines, sir?"
Sure. It was Girls, Girls, Girls and Blonde Bombshells.
And then he opened a blue gym bag filled with cash and the two magazines. The man in the back of the cruiser – I didn't even notice him at first – looked down in shame. Based on Don's description they caught the dude before he boarded a bus. He had our cash on him as well as the girlie mags.
And we got every penny back.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Pictochat - Nintendo DS

2010-06-07T14:14:00.002-04:00

I've never "chatted" with Pictochat. I am typically a lonely gamer. I play games online from time to time and my friends like to play Rock Band and Warlords when we have parties, but it's usually just me when I'm playing. For this reason, Pictochat has been a useless utility on the multiple iterations of DS handhelds I've owned. I'm not much for chatting in the first place - even with pictures - and I rarely have another DS friend around for a chat.
My daughter, Charlotte, is 2 1/2 and vaguely interested in games. I don't let her see anything violent, but she's already pretty good at Asteroids and Gorf. (She loves Gorf.) The other day I was tooling around with my new DSiXL and she tried to take it away. Finally, I discovered a use for Pictochat. It's not as good as a free-form doodling application (I'm sure one exists somewhere) but it worked just fine. She sat down in front of me and I turned off the lights. Her face was visible by the glow of the screen. I gave her the stylus and showed her where she could draw, which she did - violently at first. I explained to her to be gentle with the DS – just like kitty and her baby brother – and she got it immediately. She drew big circles and then little circles inside them. When she was done with the first pic she lifted the stylus away and admired her work. Then I hit the "button" that sends the message and it slid to the top screen.
She was amazed.
She quickly drew another series of circles and I sent them to the top screen again.
She smiled.
She did it again and I did it again but this time I said "BOOM" when I sent the picture to the top screen.
She burst into laughter.
You never know what a kid is going to find funny, but when you find it you tend to exploit it for all it's worth. We spend 20 minutes (past her bed time) drawing pictures and BOOMing them to the top screen. It never got old. I watched her little eyes light up each time by the soft light of the DS. I wrote her name and we spelled it out together. I drew a little dude with a hat and tie and we BOOMed him away.
It was the best time I've ever had with a DS. It might be the best time I've ever had with any game, ever.
BOOM.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Final Fantasy XIII - Multiplatform

2010-06-07T14:08:00.002-04:00

This game came out on my birthday, March 9. I had been reading up on the game months before. When I learned it came out on my birthday I was excited that Square Enix was giving me an awesome birthday present. By the time March came around though, I was buried in the school routine. I had 23 novels I had to read for the semester. Two of the classes I was taking were intensive writing classes, so I felt I was constantly writing something. Tuesdays were always completely dedicated to the Buffalo State school newspaper. I also had no other time to work but on the weekends, so I always had plenty of hours dedicated to Kohl’s. In the end, the last thing on my mind was video games.
My school life was not always like this. There are several games that probably made my GPA lower than it should have been. I would buy them, play them, and instantly get hooked. I call this the “New Game Itch.” I would be sitting in class thinking about the previous parts of the game I had been playing and anticipating the next adventure within the game. Once I was done with classes I’d quickly go back to my room and ease my constant curiosity of what will happen next within the game.
Lately though, no game I was playing was really giving me this strong itch. I would play a game, but go awhile without playing it again. Nothing caught my attention. So, I thought about Final Fantasy XIII before, but slowly forgot about it.
This turned into a good thing on my birthday. At 11:30 p.m. on March 8, my boyfriend told me it was time to go. I was confused, seeing as I usually left his room around midnight to go to bed and he was walking me out to the parking lot. We drove and I had no idea where we were going. GameStop was the last place on my mind. When it came into view though, I remembered everything and I got excited. Square Enix was finally giving me that present. We waited in a huge line (which luckily we were near the front) and after he bought me my game we left to go back to school. I opened the package and looked over the manual and a familiar feeling came across me. I was excited to play my new game.
I was trying to be a good student though, so I didn’t play it once we got back on campus. I went to bed because I didn’t want to be tired and miserable the entire day. Of course, my birthday was on layout day for the school newspaper. I tried to get everything done as quickly as I could, but I didn’t have much luck. Any time my mind had time to wander I thought about playing the next installment of the popular series. I wasn’t thrilled with XII so I was hoping that this game would make up for my disappointment. Life was stopping me from finding out though. Finally Wednesday came and I finally got the chance to try out my new game.
I was instantly hooked. It was different than XII so I was happy. The characters had great personalities and I wanted to know more about them. The story caught my attention. The itch was back and it was strong. I played as much as I could until I remembered that I was still in school and had lots to read and write. I had to force the itch to subside until I had the time to dedicate to Lightning and the gang. It was hard, but I was able to get back into only playing either games I’ve already played or simple DS games whenever I needed a break from work. The itch was strong, it felt good to have it back, but I had to keep my priorities straight.
Lucky for me, the semester is now over. Once I’m finished moving into my new apartment, I’ll be able to put Final Fantasy XIII into my 360 and soothe the itch once again.
By Heather Aug

Persona 3 & 4 - Playstation 2

2010-05-29T11:16:00.002-04:00

It was a dark time when I realized Playstation 2 games were slowly starting to die out. Xbox 360 was the superior console and Playstation 3 was trying to climb its way up the ladder of respect in the gaming world. Less was being released on the PS2, and it was the only console I had. I didn’t have the money to buy anything else, so I kept my eyes open for new releases on the PS2 while I still could. The game Persona 3 caught my eye, but I never got around to buying it for myself. I heard positive things about the second game, but never played it myself. Eventually my birthday came around and my boyfriend bought it for me.
My GPA my sophomore year would probably be a lot higher if I never played this game. Gamers are always worried that they’ll buy a game and it won’t be worth the money. Well everyone, Persona 3 is worth the money. I have about 80+ hours invested into this game and I have yet to beat it (I’m at the end of the game though). Everything about this game caught my attention. It kept me playing for many, many hours.
It’s always easier to be interested in something that you can relate to. We play games and realize that we never do the things that our heroes seem to do. We don’t have awesome magical super powers and we can’t wield a blade and smite thousands of enemies. Also, I tend to notice that these heroes never do human things. They never stop to eat, drink, or use the bathroom. They never just live life, everything focuses on the journey and the goal to defeat whatever villain is trying to mess up/conquer/destroy something.
Persona 3 was different. I started the day, named my character, and realized I was controlling a young man who actually was going to high school. The game goes from day to day. There was no way to be confused of the day or time, like in many other games. The date and time of day is listed in the corner of the screen. The characters are introduced and I found myself going to school every day. The teachers were even asking me questions, and I had to pick an answer. I was living the life of an average teenager with a slight twist. They did get the super powers. They did fight to protect their world. They did this but they also continued to live their lives. This alone separates Persona 3 from most other video games.
You were a teenager, and you had to have a social life. This was definitely one of the best parts of the game. Instead of constantly fighting the shadows and ridding the world of the evil that filled the city during the midnight hour, you were able to choose to hang out with friends. The hero would meet a new person and befriend them, causing a new social link to be formed. The social links didn’t just make your character cool though. These links helped your character grow stronger and create more powerful persona’s to help out when it was time to battle. You met lots of people, experienced their stories, and you choose how you were going to act with these friends. No one friend was alike. The hero even had to discover love; and also had to keep it all on the down-low since every female social link eventually became your love interest. He’s quite the stud throughout the game.
Good voice acting, to me, is crucial. I can get through a game with bad voice acting, but I definitely enjoy it a lot less. I feel if the characters are going to speak in a game, they should do it right. Actors for movies and shows are hired because they can be other people while making it look and sound like it really is their life. The actors who portray different characters in games should do the same. Persona 3 goes above and beyond in this category. I would have to say that this game has some of the best voice acting I have ever heard. It all sounds natural. The characters are having conversation and it sounds real. If a person in another room didn’t know that I was playing my PS2, they assumed I was watching TV. This made me fall in love with the game even more. The game had strong characters and strong actors who were able to play their character well. I was able to listen and feel like I was truly a part of the team’s conversation.
I was definitely impressed with what Persona 3 had to offer, but there were still some flaws. You only had control over the hero’s actions even though you could have up to four people in your team. The computer players didn’t always make the smartest choices. This left me frustrated and fixing the mistakes that another character made that could have easily been avoided. Also the characters were in high school, but you never would guess that with the way a lot of them acted. Most of the characters seemed far too mature for their age. Only Junpei acts like a kid his age. Also, the hero lacked any personality. This is hard to accomplish with a mostly silent character, but it is not impossible. Also, most of the fighting happened in one very, very, very large tower. There was very little variety when it came to the fighting environments and it got pretty boring exploring the same kind of place constantly.
As I came to the end of the game and got stuck on the worst boss I’ve ever fought in a video game, Persona 4 was released. Every problem I had with the third game vanished within this next installment of the Persona series. The game starts with a murder mystery and slowly twists into something a little odd, but absolutely amazing. The game is set up in the same way Persona 3 is, you live your life day to day and go through the typical life of a teenage boy. This time though, it was absolutely believable. These were teenagers going through the same things that real teenagers experience every day, minus jumping through a TV into a world that shows a person’s deepest secrets and desires.
Persona 3 was amazing, but Persona 4 was somehow able to be even better. I honestly had not one little problem with this entire game. The plot kept you interested and was never once boring. I always appreciate a game that can get my emotions going. I laughed out loud in reaction to many different parts of the game. I actually broke down into tears during several different parts of the game as well. The characters were amazing and there was a great variety within them. No two characters were even slightly the same. These characters were round and grew into amazing people throughout the course of the 80+ hours devoted to this game.
You are given the option to control the characters on your team, but I rarely did this because the computer seemed to be a lot smarter in this game. Everything I would be upset about in Persona 3 was fixed when I battled in this game. I thought I would have to take advantage of controlling my party, but I was pleasantly surprised when I rarely had to. Every character had their own unique setting and story within the TV world. The hero was silent again, but he had character. I was much more pleased with this hero than the last one I played. The social links were all very unique and kept things interesting between the hero the company he kept. I even befriended an older, sexy nurse who seduces the hero. You also have the option to fool around with her. You can’t get bored when there are those kinds of options within a game. Don’t worry; you can keep the hero innocent as well.
Persona 4 is now one of my favorite games. Persona 3 was great, but I can’t help but give my loyalty to the youngest player in the series. I highly suggest adding these games to your collections. You won't be disappointed.
I think everyone should waste as much of their lives as I did in exchange for two great gaming experiences.
By Heather Aug

Pokemon Red & Blue – Game Boy

2010-05-27T09:55:00.002-04:00

A few days ago I was waiting in line at one of the mediocre food places at my college when I overheard two girls talking. One sounded quite upset while the other one was listening to her woes. I don’t remember what they were saying, but at one point the heated girl said, “He couldn’t come see me because he was busy playing Pokémon or something.” The listener responded, “What, is he, like, 12?” An uncontrollable, stupid grin spread across my face once I heard this part of the conversation. I’m pretty sure they both saw me, since they stopped talking and gave me a nasty look. I kept staring straight ahead as I ordered my food. Once the food was given to me I sat at a table with my boyfriend and told him what I had just heard. We both laughed.
I’m 22 years old and I still play Pokémon quite religiously. I know I’m far from the only older person who plays this game. I know my boyfriend plays; he borrows my DS in order to play Pokémon Pearl. My friend Mike wanted me to buy Pokémon Soul Silver or Heart Gold so we can trade and battle our Pokémon. One day I will buy it, but a cashier’s pay doesn’t let me buy newer games while paying for an apartment.
I was at the appropriate age when Pokémon became a popular hit in the USA. Everyone was buying the Game Boy games, trading the cards and hoping for a shiny rare one, and watching the cartoon. I was sucked into the ever-growing fad. Getting Pokémon Red was probably one of the greatest moments of my childhood. My mom probably went through more batteries that year than any other year so I could keep playing my game.
My Pokémon were awesome. I trained them and made them unbeatable. The final four had nothing on my team of Pokémon. Unfortunately though, Pokémon Red did not have all 150 Pokémon nesting within it. I had to get Blue in order to catch ‘em all. So, of course, it was added to my collection. I was able to catch a Sandshrew finally which made me very happy (it was my favorite Pokémon at the time). I tried to catch as many Pokémon as I could between Red and Blue. I was disappointed to learn that you needed to trade certain Pokémon in order for them to evolve. I had no one in my neighborhood to trade with. It was quite depressing.
I may not have caught them all, but I was very happy with the Pokémon I did have. Once they expanded the original 150 though, I boycotted the new additions. I felt very strongly that the originals should be the only ones to exist. While other kids were playing Gold and Silver, I kept making my Pokémon on Red and Blue stronger than ever. To this day I still have my original Red team from when I was in fifth grade, and I’m still very proud of them. It would be more impressive if I could remember the team I have, but newer consoles have left me forgetting the small details about the older generation games that once ruled my life.
Only recently has my new Pokémon boycott ended. I believe it was the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year that I started playing Pokémon Diamond. I just couldn’t resist anymore. Let’s face it, Pokémon are adorable. I just couldn’t keep myself away. Curiosity got the best of me, and now I’m more educated on the recent Pokémon world. I will never let go of the pride I have over my original game though. My Pokémon from the original Red and Blue games can beat up your current Pokémon.
By Heather Aug

Cool Spot – Sega Genesis

2010-05-24T12:49:00.003-04:00

When I play this game today, I pretty much just laugh the whole time. It’s an entire video game revolving around the 7UP logo. For the entire game you’re a red spot with some pretty rad sunglasses and arms and legs. You run around (snap your fingers to your own beat, play with a yo-yo, and clean your sunglasses when standing still) collecting non-living red spots in order to save other living spots like yourself. I feel kind of bad for the Cool Spot; I think he’s supposed to be on vacation when he has to go save all his spotty little friends. He’s also a tiny little circle, so things like toys and hermit crabs are a big risk to his fragile, flat body.
Let’s face it, this game is pretty lame. You defend yourself with what I believe are soda bubbles. Someone has captured all of the Cool Spot people for some reason, which I don’t believe you ever learn. 7UP is good and all, but they really didn’t need to make a game about the red dot on the bottle. The 8 and 16 bit generation was good at coming up with pretty ridiculous games. Even though these games are jokes compared to the video games that are made today, gamers still can’t help but to play these pointless games.
At one point in my life, I loved this game. Me and my cousin, Jessica, would spend afternoons running around as the little spot bragging about who could collect the most spots before rescuing our spot friends. She was not as big of a fan of video games as I was, but we definitely spent a lot of our younger days together playing this game. It was one of the few games she had for the Sega Genesis, so we spent plenty of time playing it.
I was a huge tomboy when I was a kid, and still pretty much am today. Barbie’s were never a huge thing for me. I had them, but mainly because society seemed to deem it necessary. Jess loved them though, so we would play with them a majority of the time when I spent time at her house. I’m still a girl, so I did enjoy them to a certain extent. I was just one of the girls willing to chop off all the hair on the Barbies so she can have an awesome haircut. I’m sure I’ve made some of my girlfriends cringe in the past when I did this.
When we played Cool Spot though, the tomboy within was able to shine. I didn’t have to be a girly-girl, and Jess was able to enjoy it as well. It definitely was not a great game, but it was one of the few games as a child that I could play with the cousin who was always like a sister to me. We could giggle at the silly noises he made and defeat the mini enemies of the world. We could shoot things all afternoon. We couldn’t do that with Barbie’s.
While writing this, I texted Jess and asked her if she remembered playing this game and her response was “lmao of course.” She remembers it now and hopefully one day in the future we can hook up the Sega Genesis and play Cool Spot at a family get–together and still laugh about the silliness of the game. Some games, like Cool Spot, may pretty much suck as a normal game, but they certainly have a way to create great memories.
By Heather Aug

Manhunt - PS2

2010-05-15T09:29:00.002-04:00

As a kid who grew up with video games the ability to inflict unspeakable levels of virtual violence on weak or feeble enemies has become a regular part of my life. I’ve taken to describing it as the Fallout syndrome. Why try and actually beat a game when you can spend time becoming so much more powerful than your enemies that trolling the wasteland doesn’t come with fear, it comes with bloodlust.
Not only have I come to enjoy mercilessly slaughtering the bad guys of video game lore, I like to take out the innocents whenever possible. Unarmed? Too bad. Get a gun. Oh wait, too late. You’re dead. I always hated having to play as the good guy growing up. I have to play the good guy every day, driving the speed limit, not owning an illegal crossbow, buying girl scout cookies. That stuff is for the birds. When I turn on a video game system, I want to escape from reality. So yeah, I like the bad guys. I like blowing up cities and stabbing people in the back and all the other stuff you can only do in video games without facing some serious jail time or interviews in an orange jumpsuit with CNN.
Call it making up for lost time.
But even with this attitude I was taken aback the first time I played Manhunt for Playstation 2 in 2004. The game revolves around a serial killer who has been thrown into a type of game controlled by the military. In each level, the player is faced with a new type of gang to slay one-by-one with a premium placed on stealth.
Now normally, I couldn’t care less about stealth. I don’t have the patience for it. Give me a gun, give me plenty of ammunition and a sea of weaker enemies to mow down while I enjoy a can of Dr. Pepper. Manhunt, however, is a different story. The reason? The better you are at lurking in the shadows the more brutal your kills become.
Ever wrap a plastic bag around someone’s head before crushing their skull into a brick wall? Ever shoot someone to death with a nail gun? I have, at least in my virtual Manhunt world that is.
In a day and age when violence is everywhere I think a game like Manhunt needs to be commended for rising about the crowd. Yes, there are plenty out there that I’m sure would write-off the title as blood and gore and not much else. Me? I think it’s a work of art, something so brutal and grotesque that in a world where I’ve killed hundreds of thousands of both the evil and good my kills from Manhunt stand out in my mind.
Maybe one day I’ll outgrow my alter-ego. The virtual lunatic who prowls the video game landscape looking to let my demons run free. Probably not though. It’s really fun to send blood running down the streets with an Xbox. Especially with a can of Dr. Pepper, which isn’t owner by Pepsi or Coke. An independent company. I like that.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Super Pong - Atari/Sears Telegames

2010-05-15T09:02:00.002-04:00

Tom is a veteran of the Iraq war who talks too loud, says dumb things when he's drunk and has a variety of tattoos that can only be described as "spontaneous at best." He's also a musician with a love for the blues, an honorable guy who would help you out of a jam and he's expecting his first child in two months. I like Tom, and I always enjoy when we get together to have a bourbon and play some games. Typically, Tom and I play Call of Duty, Gears of War or Halo. You know, the macho shooters that define his generation (he's in his early 20s) and were born in my generation (I'm 37, a child of Wolfenstein and Doom).
So when I hooked up the Super Pong system I got from the mom and pop gaming store the other night he was visibly surprised.
I'd made a batch of seafood stew: Squid, scallops and shrimp simmered in a broth of tomato, white wine and good olive oil. I figured his girlfriend might enjoy something other than pizza or Chinese food - that's all you can get in my neighborhood - so I told him to drop by if he wanted to pick some up for her. He did, and we agreed there was always time for a cocktail and a quick game. Since he had to get back to his long-suffering girlfriend soon, I figured Super Pong would be good for a few laughs and a quick but simple battle. We were both surprised to find it the most challenging and aggressive game of anything we've ever played. The first mode we played was a little like volleyball. Each of us controlled two small blocks on one side of the board. They shadowed each other as they moved up or down. The ball was small and fast. Surrounded by enough video game hardware to launch a satellite, we sat enthralled at the world's simplest game.
And I won.
Then we tried a game variant where you control a long bar that covers the screen save for a tiny opening. The goal is to get the ball through that tiny opening, sort of like Pong in reverse. I think I got as much joy out of scoring a point here as I have when scoring headshots in Halo. The colors on the screen were vibrant and a little trippy (given that this console is over 30 years old, it might just be broken) and the sound coming out of the small console was perfect. Tom and I had a final game that came down to the wire, as intense a gaming session as I've ever had.
And, again, I won. (Nice.)
I've had a nearly complete gaming museum in my basement for years. When people come over, I typically try to impress them with the latest graphical powerhouse from the 360 or PS3. Not anymore. From now on, if someone wants to see what video games are all about, they're playing Super Pong.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Alan Wake - Xbox 360

2010-05-11T18:36:00.002-04:00

Regular readers of this blog know my wife is not a gamer. She grew up on books and vegan cooking. I had an Atari and pork chops. Together, we are now somewhere in the middle.
If you have a partner who isn't a gamer you know what it feels like to fail at recruiting them into your obsession. Some of you have certainly had success on some level. I'm sure most of you have talked your non-gaming better half into playing Guitar hero or Rock Band, maybe Wii bowling or tennis.
For me, I'm about 0 and 12. I've tried a dozen different games to work my way into her heart. All have failed.
She still loves me, I think, but she couldn't care less about anything relating to video games other than being mildly amused that they make me happy and making sure I don't poison our children with them too early.
And then there's Alan Wake.
You’re going to see and hear a lot of hype about Alan Wake in the coming weeks. It’s one of those games that will get the attention of the mainstream media due to its remarkable qualities and revolutionary approach to old conventions while setting a new standard for successfully mixing storytelling and action.
But the one thing you’re likely not going to hear — from Game Informer to the New York Times — is that playing the game was a watershed moment in my marriage.
My long-suffering wife has put up with my gaming obsession for nearly nine years. She has looked the other way while our basement has become consumed with classic consoles, plastic music instruments and multiple surround-sound devices. She’s even succumbed to my teaching our 2-year-old how to play “Asteroids.” Typically, she tunes out while I’m gaming and she’s in the room. But a few minutes into playing “Alan Wake” she started paying attention.
“Oh, he’s going to be a bad guy,” she said about a radio host I met on the ferry.
This is the sort of foreshadowing typically associated with films and novels. She was watching the game unfold as if it were a piece of fiction from a different medium. She forgot, briefly, that it was a game.
I've spent the last decade preaching about video games and their ability to tell good stories in new ways. Alan Wake is not the first game to get non-gamers to pay attention, but it is the first one to engage my wife.
For that alone, “Alan Wake” is a huge success.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Shadow Squadron - Sega 32X

2010-05-08T20:05:00.002-04:00

I'm sure to bet on a loser every time. It never fails. Sporting events. Dog track racing. Feats of strength or endurance. You name it, I'll be sure to bet on the one coming in dead last. The same goes for game consoles. No matter how the odds may be stacked against a system, I'm always pulling for it to win.
I clung to my N64 while everyone else was enjoying the Playstation 1.
I then picked the original Xbox over the Playstation 2.
Part of my gaming collection includes such famous disasters as the Atari 5200, Atari 7800 and the Atari Jaguar (I love you, Atari. Why did you stop loving me back?).
Back in the day I rolled the dice on the Sega 32X expansion for the Genesis. Widely considered to be a waste of time and the beginning of the end for a company that would struggle with the Saturn and Dreamcast, the 32X was clunky, difficult to install and boasted only a handful of decent games.
One of them was Shadow Squadron, one of the most undervalued games of all time. Even though I came across it two years after its 1994 release, I was still impressed with its spartan but sharp visuals, huge space battlefields and Star Wars-esque explosions.
Consider some of the features:
1. Some of the enemy ships are large enough that you can fly into them.
2. When you land a particularly good shot some of the ships will change course and explode instantly.
3. You can choose between two ships, one of which offers a rail-shooting experience; the other allows you to fly and shoot at once.
4. An instant replay feature allows you to watch your entire mission from different angles once the mission is completed.
5. The vector-like graphics still look sharp today.
I really can't say enough good things about this game. It's one of the games I played for hours a day while I was recovering from a botched appendectomy. It's worth the price of a 32X and a Sega Genesis just to see how a good that system could have been if more developers unlocked its power.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Tales of Vesperia – Xbox 360

2010-05-06T10:18:00.002-04:00

My favorite genre of games is role playing games. I have also always been a huge fan of action/adventure games. I never used to like shooters, fighting games (with a few exceptions) and sports games. I wasn’t used to playing from a first person point of view. I had terrible aim in shooters. I’m just bad with the concept of fighting games. I was also never big into sports. I danced for 12 years of my life; sports were the last thing on my mind.
One sunny, not windy day at a bus stop in Buffalo New York, I met Ben. Two weeks later after much flirting, anger over him having a girlfriend, him breaking up with his girlfriend of two years, and a tiny bit of guilt on my part we became a couple. He’s a gamer and so am I. I never really had anyone to game with and he had never had a girlfriend as into games as I am. It was great at first until he wanted to play a game with me and suggested Halo; my response was to scrunch my nose.
He likes shooters and didn’t really like RPGs. I was the opposite. Unfortunately, the world of RPGs doesn’t offer much multiplayer experiences. We found ways around this little obstacle. I would bring my games to his dorm room and I’d play my RPGs on his roommate's PS2 and he’d play his shooters on his Xbox. Secretly, I longed for a game we could both enjoy, and one day at Game Crazy we discovered Tales of Vesperia.
We had found ourselves an RPG that was multiplayer. Despite the fact that it was an RPG, Ben was willing to try it. Something about it seemed to draw him in. I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t question it. He played as the rebellious hero, Yuri, and I played as the sweet, gentle Estelle. He controlled most of the action. He ran around the world map and the towns, while I sat and watched enjoying the story. When battles came into play, it was my time to shine. I was the healer and the supporter as he beat up all the baddies.
Sometimes it bugged me to not be the main person in control, but I was more thrilled that I was playing an RPG with one gamer who had been so against them. We strategized together as we battled and we laughed at the conversations that took place while exploring the world. At one point I never thought that this would happen, but we found something we could both enjoy and took full advantage of Tales of Vesperia.
We’ve both opened up to the different genres that we were once so against. I played Halo even though I was terrible at it. I’m still not a big fan, but I’ve grown to love other shooters. I could spend hours getting some headshots on zombies in Left 4 Dead. Ben still can’t play traditional RPGs, but he has shown interest in games like Eternal Sonata or any game with action/adventure qualities to the fighting system. Borderlands came out and combined the best of both shooters and RPG’s worlds.
We were two gamers who fell in love. Luckily, our gaming interests are no longer as segregated as they used to be. He can even stand to watch me play traditional RPGs. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to stick a classic Final Fantasy game in front of him and he’ll play it with glee. Until that day comes though, we can just replay Tales of Vesperia.
By Heather Aug

Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling - Playstation

2010-05-05T10:48:00.004-04:00

Looking back on my childhood – as so I often tend to do with these essays – it never ceases to amaze me how mean children can be to each other. Yes, there are plenty of cruelties that exist in the social universe known as high school but the real mean-spirited, awful things young people say to each other can usually be found at the elementary or middle school level.
In high school, kids begin to gain a little bit of maturity and in some cases, start to understand the impact of their words on others. In the pre-adolescent years, however, how truly mean or harsh kids treat each other is often a realization yet to come.
It was for me, anyway.
When I was a young George (known universally as GJ) I grew up with a group of kids either a year or two younger or a year or two older than myself. Like any gang, there were the jokers, the athletes, the soon-to-be burnouts and the smart kids. There was also a fat kid. We called him Meatball.
Meatball wasn’t a native to Riverside. He moved in at a young age and though he’s now spent more than two decades in town, he wasn’t born here and because of the absurd yet airtight regulations of being a true “Townie,” he will always be an outsider. It’s not fair, I know, but it’s the way it is.
When we played football, Meatball would always be the one taking the big hits. He was slow and he was huge and putting your shoulder into him was like tackling a bag of leaves – soft and forgiving. In basketball, he was short and couldn’t get the ball close to the hoop. In baseball, he would lose his pants rounding the bases. In both basketball and baseball Meatball would still get tackled on a regular basis because, well, kids are mean and he was the neighborhood fat kid.
This one day, after school, this teenage friend of ours came out of his house with a Twinkie. We had always told Meatball that he lived on a diet of Twinkies even though we all knew full well he had faithfully tried a number of diets but failed because of some glandular problem. Anyway, the teenager with the Twinkie, he smashed it over Meatball’s head. Streaks of tears soon covered his face though all we cared about was the streak of cream filling straight down the middle of his head ... like an obese, ironic, skunk.
But the Twinkie was child’s play. What would soon follow was one of the meanest events I have ever personally witnessed. It was an ice cold winter morning in Riverside. Our bus stop, it was this old credit union with a drive-through and an old, long shutdown ATM. To keep warm, we would break into the old ATM every morning. There wasn’t any heat but it kept you out of the wind.
The only trick was that the ATM couldn’t be opened from the inside. In shifts, one person would have to stand outside and jimmy the door open with a credit card. So on this morning, we were all in the ATM like usual when the bus pulled up.
When we all left to catch our ride, one of the gang (not me) pushed Meatball back into the ATM, closing the door and locking him in. As though the chamber was about to fill with chemical gas, Meatball pounded furiously on the door. We all watched, we all laughed. As the bus pulled away, Meatball accepted his defeat and sank to his knees in the small ATM.
I didn’t think anything of it for the rest of the day. At least not until we came back home. It was seven hours later and though the sun had come out, it was still January and it was still 19 degrees out. There, in the ATM, tears streaked across his frozen face, sat Meatball, his lunch long-since eaten.
Showing some kind of minimal compassion, one of the kids let him out. He yelled at us for a few minutes until we all apologized then he kind of laughed it off. I’m sure he wasn’t over it yet, but he was the neighborhood fat kid and didn’t have the cache to hold a grudge.
Then someone smashed another Twinkie over his head and he ran home. Only there was no good news waiting at home. You see Riverside Junior High School, having no idea poor Meatball was locked in an ATM, had called his mother to say her child had bunked school. Despite his sincerest attempts, she would not believe the all-too-true story that he had been viciously trapped in an ATM and mocked with Twinkie smashings.
He got grounded for two weeks. Throughout this time, on an almost daily basis, one or two kids would stand outside his bedroom window eating a Twinkie.
So yeah, it was brutal and perhaps that’s why I don’t talk to Meatball today, a guilty conscience. I don’t have kids, not yet, but it terrifies me to think they will be going into a world where kids are treated like this. Where kids are treated like this by people like me. I don’t know why I stood idly by why Meatball was bullied so horrifically. I also don’t know why Meatball didn’t snap one day and beat someone to death with a shovel. Maybe he was too afraid. Maybe his kankles were too swollen. I’ll never know.
In any case, the day after he came off punishment I stopped by his house. At the time, there was no one else around so I didn’t have a reason to be mean to him, to hold my place in the social hierarchy of our neighborhood gang (for awhile I was like, number two. I could play baseball better than most teenagers when I was 12. I even knew the ice cream guy on a first name basis. It was a big deal).
On that day, alone with Meatball, we played Brunswick Circuit Pro Bowling for the original Playstation. We made a character, a red headed guy named Tyrone, and we bowled not one but two perfect games. It was a fun afternoon that left with me a guilty conscience for weeks to come.
Still, the next time I got an open shot on Meatball out on the football field, I laid his slow-ass out. I like to think I’m a nice guy now but I fear the karma I’ve accumulated for bullying poor Meatball may be lurking to pay me revenge. Hopefully, it’s not at the sake of my poor, unborn children who I pray avoid any and all glandular disorders.
Today, I see Meatball every now and again in passing. We say hi, ask each other how it’s going and we go on our way. Every time, no matter how much time has passed, I feel guilty and terrible about the hell I put this kid through. Someday, I may garner up the courage to say this in person, but until then this is the best I can do.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

RoadBlasters - Arcade

2010-05-04T14:53:00.002-04:00

In the summer of 1987 I was 15 years old. A child of Maryland, I spent as much of my summers as possible at Ocean City. It's a resort town on the beach with a long boardwalk, fried food aplenty and - in the 80s - dozens of arcades.
Geoff was my high school friend and his mom let me come along when they went on their Ocean City vacation. We played D&D in the apartment, tried to score a bottle of booze, and dumped quarters at the arcade. That summer the game for me was RoadBlasters.
Why?
1. I'm a sucker for anything Atari makes.
2. I'll take driving and shooting over nearly any other gameplay combination.
3. We never found a bottle of booze, or any girls to hang out with, so the arcade was where we spent most of our time.
RoadBlasters is the kind of game that made Atari arcade cabinets so much fun. You could sit in it like a real car; the gameplay was basic but filled with cool features; it was fun to play but nearly impossible to beat. In the game you try to beat 50 levels of increasing difficulty. Your cool red car can catch new weapons and upgrades as they drop from the sky. An odd, digitized female voice occasionally cheers you on.
And, like SpyHunter, a variety of enemy cars with their own defenses and attacks stand in your way. The game doesn't reward speed as much as it rewards good driving and shooting.
Needless to say, I never beat it. I probably dumped $50 into that thing over the course of a week at the beach without women or booze.
I have absolutely no regrets.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Boxing - Atari 2600

2010-05-03T14:07:00.002-04:00

While my daughter and I watch Sesame Street something about Elmo has been giving me the creeps. Who does he remind me of? Why is that face so familiar? I don't think Elmo was around when I was a kid. And I was more of an Electric Company kid anyway (they had Spider-Man, after all, and Morgan Freeman - who allegedly once donned the Spidey suit).
I recently found myself looking through my Atari 2600 cartridges on a particularly nostalgic day. I popped in Boxing, and there he was. If you look at the screen quickly, it appears there are a black and white Elmo beating the crap out of each other.
I'm glad I popped this old gem in for a spin, because it reminded me of all that was great about early gaming. Much like other Activision sports titles such as Ice Hockey, Boxing is a spartan but attractive title that uses the wee power of the 2600 to get at the essence of the sport. The 2-minute bouts (against a friend or the computer) are always white-knuckle affairs in which movement and punch timing are critical. Your thumb will get sore with this game, the true hallmark of early gaming. And rivalries will rise and fall.
A guy I knew a long time ago once told me that all other sports are just watered down boxing. I was impressionable at the time and I thought it was a brilliant quote (even thought I'm sure it wasn't his). You could say that Boxing on the Atari 2600 is what's left of the onion when you strip away all the layers on the newer, fancier games. This game is pure in a way that is nearly impossible for new games to be.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Aladdin - Sega Genesis

2010-04-30T11:55:00.003-04:00

I am worried for the next generation of America’s youth.
Think about it: In the coming decades, today’s children will be faced with a national debt in the trillions, supporting a fundamentally flawed social security system and a lack of any halfway decent local music scene. They will also grow up without knowing what it’s like to enjoy an authentic piece of animation. In a world dominated by computer-generated cartoons, the generations to come won’t ever understand the magic of hand drawn images. Specifically, they won’t get to experience Disney in all of its glory.
Thankfully, I was born at a time when computers were still the size of kitchens. By my early teens, Toy Story and other computerized animation movies were making their way into movie theaters and homes. But these types of titles were still in their infancy. The major player, the dominant force of the day in children’s animation was still the corporate giant synonymous with mouse ears.
It may not be as old as Cinderella or Snow White but I don’t think too many people would debate that Aladdin is one of Disney’s finest products. The movie’s storyline and songs are known by just about everyone I know and when I was kid I probably saw the thing more than 100 times.
I also beat the movie’s video game counterpart repeatedly.
A classic side-scrolling title, the Aladdin video game was delivered perfectly on the Sega Genesis. All of the movie’s locations are included in the game from the streets of Agrabah to a tomb protecting the Genie’s lamp. The title also adds a little bit to the Aladdin story, taken gamers inside the Genie’s lamp and on an extensive tour of the sultan’s palace.
When the game first hit, me and a couple friends all got a copy. I was the first one, however, who made it all the way to the end. Surrounded by a room of my pre-adolescent peers, I defeated Jafar with a barrage of apples after he turned into a snake. It was a glorious day on Harold Street as my friends cheered my victory.
Afterwards, my mom made us all NesQuik.
It was a great day and something I always remember. There have been plenty of other times I’ve beaten a game with friends around or watched a friend defeat some impossible boss. Had it not been for the movie magic of Disney though, I’m not sure this day would be such a vibrant memory.
God save the children.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Kingdom Hearts – Playstation 2

2010-04-29T09:13:00.002-04:00

I love Disney. They were my favorite movies when I was a kid and I still love to watch them today. I have the songs in iTunes, and they are often heard in the office of the school newspaper where I work during layout night. I’ll never get sick of Disney. So yes, I was super excited when the game Kingdom Hearts was announced. It’s a combination of Disney and Final Fantasy. I got to fight alongside my favorite Disney characters. Could life get any better?
I can’t play this game and not be happy. Sora, the main character, is absolutely adorable and you get to play the entire game with Donald and Goofy by your side. They are the most ridiculous yet best choices for a mage and a knight. You fight with a keyblade that can open anything that is locked, including all the different Disney worlds you travel to. If the galaxy was really a bunch of different planets that revolved around the stories of different Disney movies, I’d become an astronaut.
I was a little upset though when I reached the first Disney related world in the game. It was focused on Alice in Wonderland which is one Disney movie I never really got attached to. Despite my lack-of-care attitude towards the Disney movie, fighting through the world was still lots of fun. The Queen of Hearts wanted to chop off Alice’s head once again and we had to rescue her from a terrible fate. She doesn’t get her head axed, but she does disappear. For some reason, she was considered one of the seven princesses in the game. Alice is far from a princess, so that bothered me a bit.
Before I knew it I was being trained by Phil from the movie Hercules to be a hero. Hades doesn’t approve and sends Cerberus to the arena to get rid of the keyblade holder. That is not a fun battle. All the different Disney villains are under the command of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. The keyblade will ruin her plans of controlling the heartless so she, as well as Jafar, Ursula, Captain Hook, and the Oogie Boogie Man plan to do whatever they have to in order to stop Sora from rescuing all the hearts that are in danger.
I swung through the vines with Tarzan. I grew fins and swam with Ariel through an underwater kingdom. I ran through creepy graveyards with Jack the Pumpkin King. I fought through the alleys of Agra bah with Aladdin and Abu. I flew to the top of Big Ben with the help of Tinker Bell and Peter Pan. I rescued Pinocchio from the belly of Monstro. Whenever I was low on items I had Huey, Dewey and Louie ready and willing to sell me supplies. I traveled the worlds and rescued 101 Dalmatians. When it was time to save the seven princesses, the Beast teamed up with me so he could save his one true love, Belle. Who wouldn’t want to do all of this?
On top of there being many different Disney characters, there were all the greatest Final Fantasy characters involved as well. Aeris is no longer dead; instead she aids you in your journey to stop the heartless. Squall calls himself Leon and tells you about your keyblade. Wakka, Tidus and Selphie are your friends from back at home. Cloud is working for Hades. Sephiroth is still out to get the hero. I’m jealous of Sora, Riku, and Kairi for being able to live in a universe where all of these great characters have been combined into one awesome galaxy.
All of this combined is pretty much the definition of enjoyment. There were funny parts, sad parts, and touching parts. There’s anger, betrayal, and great friendships that form. The voice acting was done beautifully and the characters kept their identities outside of their proper movies. Action RPGs always seem to have great game play, and Kingdom Hearts didn’t fall short in the least bit. The music is catchy and always seems to get stuck in my head after I play it. I did wish there was more Disney involved in the game, but that all gets fixed in Kingdom Hearts 2. We can get into that another day.
Every child that watches a Disney movie at some point in their lives wishes they could live through the great experiences shown to them through the movies. Kingdom Hearts lets every gamer’s inner child come out and play. You get to live part of your life through Sora and hang out with the Disney gang. This is definitely one of my favorite games, and I proudly hang a little keyblade from my car’s rear-view mirror to prove it.
By Heather Aug

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – N64

2010-04-28T09:47:00.003-04:00

There are more than two dozen games I’ve written about on this blog and in almost every case, I’ve talked about how they relate to some cute story from my youth. Whether it’s been chasing house robbers with my dad or playing baseball with friends, the submissions to this project bearing my name have always had some kind of positive, happy or hopefully funny relationship to my life.
Until today.
Today, I’m writing about Zelda, which I hate.
From the first time I played a Zelda title on NES the whole thing never seemed right for me. Yes, the Zelda theme is fantastic and yes, the franchise is one of the most important in gaming history, but I always found the thing to be so damn annoying. Run over here and find this heart or find this bottle or find this other thing. No. You find the bottle. I want to stab some goblins.
Despite these feelings, I made sure that Zelda: The Ocarina of Time was on my Christmas list in 1998. At the time Nintendo 64 was still an emerging system and for months the new Zelda game had been pegged as some kind of revolutionary title. I had my doubts, but I like to think I’m open minded.
So I asked for it and my parents brought it home.
And guess what? I hated it. For some reason I had suspected the game would change my perception on Zelda. I thought with an increased graphics capability the game would blow me off my feet and make me wonder how on Earth I had ever disliked the franchise in the first place.
Yeah, well, it didn’t. About an hour into the game I found myself trying to round up some guy’s chickens. Chickens! You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve got a sword and some arrows and some green guy has my princess and I’m rounding up chickens!
Making matters worse, I’ve got to keep playing this goofy little flute? Give me a break! I want to light something on fire. If you can find a heart so easily, why can’t I find some kind of semi-automatic weapon? Like a glock.
“Zelda you rotten, mangy, mutt of a beast” I thought to myself. “How dare you once again trick me into wasting so much time on you!”
But if I hated the game so much, why am I writing about? Because, as I said before, it is one of the most important titles ever. For some reason, which escapes me to this day, almost everyone I know is incapable of admitting when they’re wrong or that there is something fundamentally wrong with them.
Not me. I admit I’m wrong all the time. Just ask my girlfriend or my mom. I’m also not afraid to admit there is something wrong with me – I’m horrendously clumsy, I voted for Ron Paul two years ago and I like to eat kiwi with the skin on it. See? There’s three right there.
Which brings me to Zelda. Yes, I think it’s incredibly annoying the game has so many hidden items and yes I think it’s annoying how cartoonish the whole thing is. But millions upon millions of people don’t and I’m not about to sit here and say I’m right while they are wrong.
So I’ll say this instead. I’m wrong. I’m wrong about not liking Zelda. Instead of focusing on what it is, a deep title that creates a vast world and contains many hidden items for the hardcore game, I focus on what it isn’t – a goblin killing murder spree.
Will I ever play a Zelda title again? No, that ship has sailed. But could I sit here and watch more than 100 entries go by without Zelda being mentioned? No, I couldn’t. Even if I think a mass Zelda game burning party would be a super fun way to spend a Saturday night.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Radical Dreamers – Super Nintendo

2010-04-27T09:04:00.002-04:00

I knew Chrono Cross was the sequel to Chrono Trigger, but there was another game that was related to one of my favorite series. It was a side story to the game Chrono Trigger. My curiosity was peaked and was then devastated when I found out that the game, Radical Dreamers, was never released in the United States. Luckily emulators and roms exist, and I know I’m not the only person who would have wanted to play this game in English. I searched the web and found a translated version of the game.
I didn’t know what to expect from the game, and I was very surprised to learn it was a text based game. You didn’t control a little pixel man and you couldn’t swing a sword. There were words; lots of words on a background picture that changed depending on where you told Serge, Kid and Magil to go. I was playing a picture book. I really wasn’t thrilled with what I was playing at first. I didn’t get to run around and talk to people and fight enemies that popped out of nowhere. All I had were choices. I needed to give it a chance though, so I pushed through.
Turns out, choices aren’t so bad after all. I like to read and I’m a sucker for stories. I’m sure parents wouldn’t be upset if their children played more games like this one. It’s a little book on a TV screen. Not as nice on the eyes, but it’s still a good read. As I played, I saw where many different ideas and concepts of Chrono Cross came from. Kid and Serge were together even before they were reborn into El Nido.
Thankfully I’m a patient person, because you need that to play this game. Traveling in this game took a while because it was text based, and you had to read whatever passage appeared in each room. The entire game takes place in one area, Viper Manor. I got lost easily since many areas look the same. I’d get to an intersection of hallways and forget which areas I’ve searched. If you go the wrong way, you have to read your way back to a new area. I was often tempted to keep a notebook with me just to make sure I remembered where I went.
Despite the small frustrations, I enjoyed everything that was happening. The choices made playing this game a different experience every time. Fighting monsters was fun in this game. Since all the action was in words, they didn’t have graphics to hold back the details. The beauty of a book came out in a video game. I got to imagine my own experience instead of having it shown to me. Your choices led to many different outcomes. When I ran into a trap, I had to make sure I figured out how to either escape or disarm the trap or else it was game over. I was often thankful for the emulators save states.
Radical Dreamers is not a typical video game, but it’s games like this that make me appreciate the Chrono series. The main games are great, and this game is just a taste of what made Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross such memorable gaming experiences. It’s a quick but complex game. It’s definitely worth the Internet hunt.
By Heather Aug

Max Payne - Xbox

2010-04-26T16:08:00.002-04:00

This game had me at "Rain Dogs."
"Rain Dogs" is one of the better albums by Tom Waits. People who don't know Tom Waits should look him up; but most people who are going to appreciate him already know his stuff.
In a scene near the middle of the game one of the thugs I was about to murder sings a lyric from the title track of that album. The scene in the game takes place in an alley and it's raining at the time.
I had to pause the game to make sure I heard it correctly. Tom Waits isn't obscure, but he is on the fringe. To hear a lyric from one of his songs in a video game was a shock, even for someone such as myself who had been preaching about the artistic leanings of video games for years. This was likely a throwaway piece of dialogue stitched into the script by a Waits fan on the development team, but it spoke to the kind of people who make video games. People who appreciate art. (Or, to be fair, people who appreciate the art that I appreciate.)
Max Payne continued to wade into unfamiliar territory. My oldest niece, a Manhattan dweller, found it interesting to see how the game interpreted the big city. Friends of mine who aren't into gaming but love film noir were taken in by the over-the-top storyline.
I liked the voice acting and the graphic novel presentation, but what I liked best was unapologetic violence and how it was milked for every drop of cinematic impact possible. The game looks goofy now - Max looks like a paper character pasted onto the background - but it's still a tight shooter with excellent "wow" moments. I remember playing through it when it came out and feeling like I was being let in on something nasty. Rockstar games catch a lot of heat for their violence and anti-social sensibilities, but the one thing nearly every Rockstar game does that almost none other can is allow the player to feel like they're being let in in a secret. Remember how you felt when you first saw Pulp Fiction? Remember that feeling of watching something different, something cool and something a little bit dangerous? No one does that like the people at Rockstar. GTA gets all the press, but Max Payne wrote the book.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Medal of Honor: Underground - Playstation

2010-04-24T22:58:00.002-04:00

I brought my shiny new PS3 home on a warm day while my wife was still at work. I knew I had at least three hours of interruption-free gaming ahead of me before dinner needed to be cooked and adult life had to resume.
I found the launch titles I had purchased lacking. There I was with my shorts on, a T-shirt hanging comfortably off of my 34-year-old frame. The windows were open and the breeze was calming. Buyer's remorse set in almost immediately. This black box of technological promise cost me near $600. Where was the wow factor? Where were the life-changing graphics and revolutionary technology I had been promised?
Nowhere.
After a monumental let down I remembered that the PS3 was capable of playing Playstation 1 games. Wow. A brand new heavy in the electronics world was capable of playing games that could have easily run on the primitive technology that lived in my modest cell phone.
But it was something.
I popped in Medal of Honor: Underground and fell in love all over again. At a time when console FPS games and WWII backdrops were rare, this game excelled in breaking boundaries. It was barely an expansion to the wildly popular Medal of Honor, but the improvements to story and character made this a whole new game. As a female warrior packing weapons and a camera, you were truly embodying a fantastical character in a genre best-known for brutes and bullets.
I played that game for hours and obsessed on it later. I played nothing else for a week until I finished it. My new PS3 could play blu-ray discs and superior shooters such as Resistance: Fall of Man, but all I could think about was Manon and her (my) crusade to avenge her fallen brother.
That's a game, my friends. That's a fine memory.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

2010-04-23T20:06:00.002-04:00

November and December are always dark, snowy and cold months in New England. When I was a freshman in college, the seasonal atmosphere also came with a sense of irony. You see when I was young, I was stupid. I did good in school but I had little common sense and before I had my high school diploma in hand I thought I knew the ins-and-outs of this crazy thing called life and had the entire game pegged before it really even started.
Today, as so many people do looking back on their high school years, I laugh about how wrong I was. The music I liked was mediocre, the clothes I wore were silly and the girl I thought I loved, well, I’ve since come to tell people that her breaking up with me was one of the best single moments of my life.
At least in retrospect.
Before the end came in Dec. 2002, I thought for sure I wanted to marry this girl. Make it through four years of college, get jobs, a mini-van, a white picket fence and 2.3 children. The American Dream. But then I went to school in Kingston and the girl went to school in Worcester and things didn’t work out for any number of reasons, but mostly because she’s a harlot, in the biblical sense.
Anyway, when the news came down that she wanted to see other people, I was as devastated as an immature teenager could be about something that really doesn’t mean anything. I was on winter break, which meant I had three weeks before I would have school to keep me busy. I was also in-between bands, so I didn’t have any rock n’ roll to keep me busy.
No, all I had was a red flannel bath robe I got for Christmas that year and a Playstation 2 with Hitman 2. If you’ve never played the Hitman franchise, the games revolve around a genetically engineered killing machine who travels the world taking out high profile targets. The gamer can decide to complete missions in a variety of different ways, including a stealthy approach with as little bloodshed as possible. Maybe it’s because I was dealing with some type of John Hughes-style teen angst but I decided to carry out all of my missions like a blood thirsty maniac. I didn’t try to be stealthy about anything. I walked up to the front door with automatic weapons in each hand mowing down anything that cast a shadow.
Yeah, my girlfriend had dumped me and some imaginary cocaine dealer’s imaginary maid was going to pay the price for it.
For three weeks, I beat and then re-beat Hitman 2 sitting in my red robe drinking extra-extra ice coffees with the blinds closed. Friends came by, family stopped in, but all I wanted to do was commit executions in every corner of the globe.
Eventually, or I guess you could say inevitably, I got over the girl who wasted so many of my golden teen months. I went back to school and though the girl I started dating next would prove herself to be both a lunatic and a person of low morale character, the beginning was great as it always is and enough to get me out of my red-robe funk.
Oh, and by the way, I’m not a psychopath. I only enjoy mass murders on the digital level.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Clock Tower 3 – Playstation 2

2010-04-22T10:45:00.002-04:00

I’m not good with anything that is meant to be scary. So, of course, I go and buy games like Silent Hill and Rule of Rose. I’ll be OK the first time I play a horror game, but then the night comes and I hear noises I don’t normally hear and get paranoid that a murderer/ghost/zombie/alien is in my house trying to eat me. I lay in bed wide awake until I get so tired that I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. It’s the silent night that gets to me after putting my emotions in a frenzy by being chased and having grotesque creatures pop out at me. After that experience, I never like to play the games alone. My boyfriend likes to laugh at me for this reason. He also doesn’t find them frightening like I do.
I was not expecting this reaction when I bought the game Clock Tower 3. I liked the pictures on the case and the summary on the back seemed interesting. It was also cheap, so I added it to my collection. It wasn’t bad at first, but when the first chase scene happened I started to have a mini panic attack. All you (Alyssa) can do is run and hide. The only weapon you can use against the enemy is a little bottle full of holy water that you splash in the enemy's face. He stands there writhing in pain for a few seconds, and then he’s chasing you once again. My anxiety is always on edge until I finally escape whatever weapon the current murderer that’s chasing you has. Once he’s gone I pause the game, take a deep breath, and then continue searching for clues about the murder that had occurred.
In high school, I didn’t really have anyone to play video games with. My three best friends at the time, Sara, Tiffany, and Patti, all were interested in other things. I was the odd one out in our little group, but we were still great friends. I don’t know why, but one night I introduced them all to Clock Tower 3. We all sat in Tiffany’s brother’s room in the dark and they all watched while I played. I didn’t have to freak out alone anymore. Sara really didn’t care, but both Patti and Tiffany were on edge while a big brute with a hammer chased after the tiny little blonde girl.
Since they were both screaming and panicking, I was able to be the brave one. I found all the clues that were needed while they were huddled behind me freaking out. The best part was when the mystery of the murder was solved and Alyssa got to kick some creepy murderer butt. I was pumped up from being chased constantly, and I had my friends cheering me on. I got my weird mystical bow and arrows and trapped his evil soul. The spirits of the people he murdered were no longer trapped, and they moved on from their own tragedies. Tiffany, Patti and I rejoiced while Sara was probably sleeping out of boredom.
It felt good to see my friends enjoying a gaming experience, even if they were just watching. Sara is still one of my best friends, Tiffany has moved away to North Carolina and we only get to speak on Facebook, and sadly Patti and I are no longer friends (all over stupid, pointless girl drama). Despite the separation, I will treasure this memory until I’m old and grey.
I still develop anxiety from these games, but whenever I am feeling brave I gather my nerves and bring Clock Tower 3 out of my game case. It helps to remember the excitement my friends had when I played the game for them. As long as I think of the good times we had with this game, me and Alyssa can defeat, or avoid, any dangerous creeper that comes out way.
By Heather Aug

WCW vs. the World - PlayStation

2010-04-21T11:10:00.003-04:00

The last time I asked someone to buy me a video game console was in 1997. It was for my thirteenth birthday and I was the last kid I knew who didn’t own a Playstation. I played the system at all of my friends’ houses and after awhile coming home to my Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo just wasn’t cutting it.
So I asked my parents to get me a new toy and they complied. On my birthday, we went to Electronics Boutique (damn that makes me feel old) and bought a Playstation with a copy of WCW vs. the World. Nowadays, THQ wrestling games are really taken for granted. The grappling system that makes each title so remarkably easy to pick-up has become an expectation, like graphics. Two decades ago, however, the system was still new and despite the fact the game featured only a few well known stars, WCW vs. the World was a hit.
Not only did I spend countless hours running through the game over and over again, all of my friends did the same. We all knew the move sets for every character and the tricks to win every match.
But my time with both the game and my Playstation was short lived. Long before I was a stand-up college student who turned in papers on time and racked up a GPA well above 3, I was an exemplary elementary school student – straight As, well-behaved and quiet. In-between, well, let’s just middle school was a different story.
Right around the time I arrived at Riverside Junior High School (now Riverside Middle School) I started to pay more and more attention to things like girls and clothes and less and less attention to things like grammar and algebra. I had coasted pretty easily through elementary school and I figured I could do the same in grades 7, 8 and 9.
I was wrong. Sure enough, first quarter of seventh grade I earned my very first D from Madam Dewey’s Intro to French class. Today, kids get “progress reports” at the mid-point of every quarter in every class. Back when I was in school, only the failing kids got notices to bring home for their parents’ signature. That afternoon, on the school bus, I sat with the white slip in my hands staring at it in disbelief. My hands were shaking, like they were covered in blood after some unspeakable trauma. This kid next to me, a ninth-grader who had a mustache and a driver’s permit, he told me just to forge my parents signature.
“Do what?” I asked him, completely take aback by the idea.
“Just make it up. Do it yourself. They ain’t gonna know the difference,” he told me. “Or just light the thing on fire. I’ve got a lighter” he continued, holding up a Bic disposable and sparking it.
“I can’t do that ... It’s, it’s, unthinkable,” I stuttered.
“Whatever man,” the teenager said. “Just get in trouble then. I don’t care.”
For some reason, the kid then proceeded to continually light and re-light his Bic for the rest of our ride home, staring at the flame in some kind of magical trance. I may not have learned much French those first couple months of junior high but I certainly learned what a pyromaniac is.
Anyway, I didn’t sit next to that kid ever again and I also didn’t end up getting in that much trouble for the deficiency. My parents told me to get my act together and because I had previously sported such a near perfect academic record, I skated. By the end of the quarter, I had an ‘A’ in French and everything seemed to be fine. But the deficiency had set a dangerous precedent, one that any clear-thinking, level-headed kid not in the grips of puberty would have known to learn from.
‘Cept I was a kid in the grips of puberty and I didn’t learn. Two quarters later, I took the advice of the kid from the bus. I didn’t burn anything to the ground but I did forge my mom’s signature on a deficiency for science class. I couldn’t forge the 67 average that came home on my report card though.
Up until I was in college, no one called me George. I mean no one. When I was in CCD, even the priests at St. Brendan’s knew well enough to call me GJ and when I was in trouble, my mother had a particularly unique way of elongating the two-letter name. I swear to God, when I was in trouble, the whole neighborhood knew it. It’s tough to describe with the written word, but imagine that each letter takes about three-seconds to pronounce.
Kind of like “GeeeeeJaaaayyyy” screamed at the top of a woman’s lungs. Ever heard the old yarn about cleaning a kid’s mouth out with soap? My mom’s kind of old school. To her, it’s not a yarn. When I was five-years-old I got my first taste of Dove. I then spent 20 minutes vomiting.
My dad is about six-feet two-inches tall and has a well established fighting reputation on the streets of Riverside. He even wears a facial scar from a run-in with E.P.’s finest some 30 years ago. Still, next to the screech of my angry mother, he might as well be a kitten.
That incredibly terrifying holler, that was the sound I heard when my mother opened up my report card and saw my first failing grade. Ever. Like a fine general, her response was quick and tactical. That new Playstation I had just got, yeah, it was about to become collateral damage.
Moving quicker than a lynx on wounded prey, my mother seized the video game console. The TV it was hooked up to, it was this old cabinet style thing popular in the 1970s. The two were connected by an RF Switch. They say that people have lifted up cars in spouts of adrenaline to save a child.
Well, that’s what I thought of when I saw my mother rip the Playstation from atop my television taking the entire back half of the set with it. Pieces of particle board littered the air as cables fell limp to the floor, All the meanwhile, I took arguably the worst verbal beating of my life, the transcript of which need not be reiterated on this blog.
Ultimately, the Playstation’s life was over. A true victim in the victimless crime of my sub-par academic performance. Inside the system, my copy of WCW vs. the World sat irreparably harmed. My mother held the system in the air like primitive hand displaying the day’s trophy kill.
Maybe that’s the reason why I’ve never asked anyone to buy me a video game console since, fear I would do something to anger them and have my new gadget obliterated before my eyes. The following Christmas, my parents got me an N64. It could have been because my mother felt guilty about her reaction to my science grade but I doubt it and even if I’m right she would never admit it.
But it wouldn’t be fair for me to finish this blog without noting that between seventh and twelfth grade, I never failed another class again. The story changed in 2003 when I flunked out of URI while simultaneously running up a cell phone bill of $900 and bringing my mother’s driver’s license dangerously close to suspension by tallying $300 of unpaid parking tickets but those stories are for another time. The lesson here, I guess, is if you’re a parent looking to ensure your kid works hard through their secondary education, try destroying a 360 or something. It worked for me, at least.
by george morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Gran Turismo - Playstation

2010-04-20T10:53:00.002-04:00

The freedom, power and sense of independence is what drew me into wanting my first car. Until I could drive legally, I drove anything I could get my hands on: BMX bikes, ride-on lawnmowers, tractors in the Maine woods. If it had wheels, I wanted in – wicked in. I got my hands on a borrowed moped and didn’t want to give it back. I couldn’t afford my own at the time. A radio-controlled Hornet dune buggy had to tide me over until the very second I was 16.5 years old, the legal driving age at the time. And, of course, there was Pole Position II.
Despite the $500 price tag, my first car was almost prohibitively expensive, with the insurance and gas (no luck getting gas money from my equally destitute friends) tipping those proverbial scales. The car broke down every other month and for a time, I had to use a shoelace from my track shoes to operate the windshield wipers. I loved that car, right up until the day a friend borrowed it totaled it in the same afternoon.
I was carless for months following and used TV to get my fix. Car shows and racing events are what kept me going. I developed a deep lust for racing, for that was the ultimate freedom. Not only were you driving your own car, but you were seemingly breaking every known law in the process. Racing too, was expensive and out of reach for a dude with a high school education, and back then, no desire to go to college. Against my better judgment though, I went to college and graduated with thousands worth of student loans. I couldn’t even dream of getting into racing.
But that’s where the Gran Turismo series saved me. Pick any car, pick the most exotic track you could find and all of a sudden you could blast through time and space in a suped-up rig that you paid for with game dollars. GT-40s, Mitsu Lancers, Lancia Integrales. Could life be any better?
As time went on, my salary rose slightly, situations changed and I found myself on course to buy a car and build it into a race car. A rally car in fact. But I go back to my racing video game setup and I actually use it for cheap practice sessions. I try not to bump into anybody (an accident in a game costs thousands in real life, no matter how light the hit). I practice threshold braking, left-foot braking, clipping apexes and executing Scandinavian Flicks. I turn the music off and the sound effects up. I want to hear my engine bouncing off the rev limiter so I know when to shift.
When I cross the line in a video game race, the adrenaline levels almost match that of being in a real car. Almost.
By Kristian Gove

Final Fantasy VI – Super Nintendo

2010-04-19T10:18:00.002-04:00

I was six years old in 1994 when the game Final Fantasy VI (back then, it was Final Fantasy III in North America) was released for the Super Nintendo. We owned an SNES at home, and my brother had a copy of this game. This, of course, meant that I was not allowed to play it. Despite this, I would still sit next to him and gawk at the screen every time the game was turned on. I didn’t know why, but something about this game just grabbed my brain and would not let go.
My brother is six years older than I am, so we didn’t really have much in common. We never went to the same school together. We never experienced anything new at the same time. We lived in separate universes. He spent his time teasing me because I was his little sister, and I found plenty of ways to annoy him. When he played Final Fantasy VI though, we held a silent truce. When I look back on this time though, I think he still tried to trick me. I don’t know if he really believed this was the pronunciation, but he told me that chocobos were “chickaboos.” So for the longest time, this is what I called them. I still remember the day I realized how very wrong that was. I must admit, I felt very silly for saying something so terribly wrong.
We both liked the game for different reasons. He got to enjoy the actual gameplay, and I enjoyed seeing the chocobos and the moogles. The music was pleasing to my ears. The main protagonist, Terra, had green hair, and that was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. As time went on, I paid more attention to what was actually happening in the game. The story intrigued me, so I kept watching. When the time came for me to finally play the game on my own, I knew the storyline like the back of my hand.
The game stayed with me even when I wasn’t inside the house watching the action happen. I would go outside and play “superheroes” with my friend Eddy and I would pretend to be the girl with the green hair. I would inform him of Kefka, a major threat to the planet, and we would go fight some evil. When I was alone in my room, the thought of a moogle would keep me company. I wished Shadow’s dog, Interceptor, was my own pet. He would trust no one but me, unless Relm came along. Then we could have all been best friends.
Even though I practically memorized the game before actually playing it, it was still exciting when I first played it when it came out for the Playstation. This game filled me in on the whole reason why Final Fantasy games are so popular. The plot was well thought out, the game play was fun, and the characters had personalities. To this day, I still believe that this is the best Final Fantasy game that has been made, though I must admit that I’m thoroughly enjoying Final Fantasy XIII. I don’t need all the fancy graphics and the complex game play. Give me my turn-based fighting system and my Esper summons and I’m set for some fun times.
Both my brother and I have taken our separate paths in life. Once I went into high school, we grew apart. To this day we still aren’t very close. I’m close to graduating from college and in May I’m moving into my first apartment 400 miles away from home. The day will come though when my brother and I will reconnect. Final Fantasy VI brought us together once, and I’m sure it will have the power to bring us together again in the future.
By Heather Aug

Chrono Cross – Playstation

2010-04-18T22:15:00.002-04:00

I clearly remember the thrill of it. I had my own money, and I was buying my first video game for myself. I worked hard for this moment. I set the table for dinner, cleaned my room, and did other chores that are expected of a twelve year old. As I browsed the shelves for the perfect choice, Chrono Cross caught my eye.
Since “Chrono” was in the title, I figured it was related to the game Chrono Trigger, which was another game I loved. That fact gave me high hopes for this game, so without second-guessing my choice I brought it to the counter and paid. Little did I know that I was buying the game that would have the strongest impression on me and would still be my favorite game today.
The game starts with action and a scene that leaves the player wanting more. You learn right away how to battle and a future goal of the hero and his friends. After the sinister scene of a future murder, the player discovers that it was all a dream. The hero then awakens to his mother calling to him, exactly like how the game Chrono Trigger begins. That was also a good sign that I was in for a great gaming experience.
I fell in love with the hero, Serge, right away even though he was a silent character. The game barely began, and you were getting some of his story. A little old lady reminds you why you have a fear of cats, and you learn of a fond friendship between Serge and his childhood playmate, Leena. I absolutely hate when a gamer does not get to know the characters he/she controls for so many hours. I knew that I would befriend many intriguing characters just by talking to the villagers in the first town.
Everything about the beginning of this game made me glad I bought it. Serge’s hometown, Arni, blew my mind. The music was calming and inviting and the town itself was beautiful. I wished that I grew up in such a quaint, little place. When you go to the docks of the town, you see a vast deep blue sea that spreads over many other breathtaking sights. It made me look forward to visiting the other areas of the El Nido archipelago. I still prefer the sight of this game to the recent ones that have much better graphics. The colors were so vibrant, everything in that game was pleasing to the eyes. Even things that were meant to be ugly had a beauty to it that is hard to find in many other games. You can tell that the creators of this game cared about what the product of their time and talent would be.
I was also introduced to my favorite video game character of all time, Kid, as well. She was feisty and full of life, and added a glee to all the different situations of the game. The first time she told an enemy that she would “kick your arse so hard, you’ll kiss the moons,” I was glad she was on my team. Without Kid, this game would not be what it is. Her involvement is a big part of what makes me replay this game over and over again. I was heartbroken when the beginning scene of this game came true, and Kid was taken away from Serge and I.
The story of this game kept me interested and always wanting to know more. It was complex, and it made the player actually have to think about the events that were occurring. If a story is bad, I will not enjoy the game. I’ll suffer through it and regret wasting my time on it. With Chrono Cross, I had no regrets. The themes were deep and meaningful. The game brings up the importance of choice, and the “what ifs” that everyone wonders if they chose differently in a part of their life. The game even brings up the issues of race and prejudice. Granted it was demi humans that were suffering instead of people of different colors, but it still reminds the player of the behavior of people today. You will never get bored of this story. To this day, ten years later, I still learn something new about the plot every time I replay the game.
The game itself wasn’t enough for me. I ended up taking the soundtrack from my brother. None of the music bothered me in this game. Usually, I’ll like a few songs from the game and not really care for the others, but it was different in Chrono Cross. I listen to this soundtrack when I do homework. It helps me think straight. Even my dad found a song in this game that he loved, and he will play his bass guitar to it. He was pleased to see me playing this game during my last Spring Break when I was home. He didn’t even play the game and he still found something to enjoy about it.
I’ve played plenty of great games, but I still prefer Chrono Cross over all the others. A few weeks ago I thought that my game wasn’t working anymore, and I was genuinely upset. Turns out my PS2 is just starting to reject original Playstation games, but I can handle that. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a proper funeral for those discs when they stop working. It will be a sad day. Until then though, I will cherish every moment of the game and reluctantly buy a new copy when it does stop working.
By Heather Aug

Pro Wrestling - NES

2010-04-17T10:41:00.002-04:00

Not only do I write for this blog, but I read it too. Yes, it's true. I'm always interested in reading what others have to say about their memorable moments in video games and how they compare to my thoughts. Recently I had the pleasure of reading an essay from a buddy of mine, Victor Alvarez. I'm sure you have heard of him and quite possibly even read his work. He's quite good and has a way with words. So I woke up before work the other morning and pulled up the blog he had just written. In little time did I realize that I was the primary focus. I was shocked. In no way did I think I would be waking up to the kind words from Victor expressing his feelings towards myself and my new fiancé. I was flattered. I quickly called my girl and told her to read the blog that morning because it was about us. It really made both of our days. It also reminded me what a lucky guy I am. I have a beautiful fiancé, a daughter who is the light of my life, a loving family and great friends. What more could a guy ask for? Right after that a funny thing happened. I began to think about my life growing up. There was a time where I could never have imagined having a girlfriend, a family of my own or even talk to a girl.
You see, growing up I was the trademark overweight kid that use to get teased all the time in school. I hated school. Kids were mean, and they still are if you're not what they consider cool or popular. I was a geek. We're talking from way back to third grade until early high school. I was a chubby, quiet, glasses-wearing geek who played video games. Not only did I play video games but I loved comics, Dungeon & Dragons and anything else that you could think of that would put me on the other side of the spectrum as far as girls were concerned. I would come home from school and do my homework - I was a good student - and then I would play my video games. I had many different systems as generations changed ranging from Atari, Commodore 64, the NES and onward. Probably one of the most highly played games for myself was Pro Wrestling on the NES. Oh, I didn't tell you, I loved professional wrestling. I could never get enough of it. The problem with that was that there was never really any good games (if at all) that captured the body slamming love I had for wrestling. I don't know why I love wrestling so much but I did. A fat kid watching all these big muscular guys beating on each other and wishing I looked like any of them. Of course, one of my idols was the immortal Hulk Hogan. He was everything. I said my prayers, took my vitamins and each day I still woke up as the fat kid that people picked on. But I had my video games and that made me happy.
When I bought my NES, besides Super Mario Brothers, I ran out and bought Pro Wrestling. It was amazing. It was so life-like. There were only about five wrestlers you could choose from but each of them were unique and that was so huge for me. Each wrestler had a finishing move just like the gladiators I watched in the ring and I would make my way up the rankings for a shot for the championship belt. Man, did I play that game a lot. It even had a referee. That was unheard of for any wrestling game. The graphics were superb and it even came equipped with all of the pro wrestling rules and regulations. I do remember one of my favorite wrestlers was Starman.
Starman was the equivalent to one of today's high flying superstars. He could soar off the top rope, fly across the ring and was lightning fast. He was the man who was going to make me a champion. I remember playing for hours on end until I finally defeated King Slender for the VWA Championship of the World. What an accomplishment. I did it! But it wasn't even close to over. The game was so great that it allowed me to defend my title. I took on all takers. I was a people's champion; no one would be refused. So as I battled opponent after opponent I retained my title. I was a true champion until it happened; I had to wrestle The Great Puma. The Great Puma was the champion of the Video Wrestling Federation. This was the real deal and I wasn't about to disappoint my fans. If you have never picked up Pro Wrestling on the NES - and I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't -the Great Puma is one of the toughest bosses in quite possibly the history of NES games. I'm not kidding you. He was awful, mean and nasty. I'll be honest, I couldn't beat him straight up. I had to go for the count out. I know it's not the way of a true champion but it's the only way I could beat him; and I did it. I took him outside the ring and I pounded on him. I pounded on him just enough that he was down and then I quickly rolled back into the ring before the 10 count and got the cheap victory. Ok, for anyone who knows professional wrestling you can't win the title on a count out, but hey, it's the NES.
The bottom line is that I loved that game and that's all that mattered to me. Looking back, at that time and long after I never dreamed I would find a girl who would ever be interested in me. Why would they? I was the walking definition of any geek in any 80s movie trying to build their own girl because they couldn't get one. It looked like it was me and my video games forever, but you know what? Things change. Boy, do they change. Everything I thought was going to be reality couldn't have been farther from the truth. I found one of the most beautiful girls ever and she loves me. I questioned her thought process on this but she said she was serious so who was I to argue. I'm 6'4" tall, about 250lbs and ironically no one picks on me anymore. Maybe saying my prayers and taking my vitamins paid off? Either way, I'm one of the happiest guys in the world. I'm still a geek and that will never change but it's funny to look back on how things were and how they are today. So did I really need Victor to write a blog about me to remind me how lucky of a guy I was? No, not even close. But it did give me a great excuse to write about a game that I loved growing up and a girl who I love even more.
By Stephen O'Blenis

Shaq Fu - SNES, Genesis

2010-04-16T11:30:00.002-04:00

There are video games and then there are VIDEO GAMES. Some of them just transcend an entire generation of gamers. Street Fighter is one of those titles. For some reason people flock to it as if it were the Holy Grail of fighting games. On the other side of the coin though sits a little gem known as Shaq Fu. While all the cool kids were over hanging out at the arcade showing off their Street Fighter skills, I was kicking anyone’s ass who would throw down with me in Shaq Fu.
Yes, Shaq Fu is a classic. It maintains a special place in my heart because I never saw the lore of Street Fighter, but Shaq was a different story. I loved the way the man played his chosen profession of basketball (since his days at LSU) and the way he capitalized on this to pursue his other passions. I think he gets a bad rap for milking things, but really, he has such genuine enthusiasm for everything he does. I’ll watch his movies, listen to his music, he even introduced me to one of the greatest culinary advancements during my lifetime – The Double Decker Taco (seriously, has there been a better food invention in the past 20 years?!). So the least I could do was check out his video game. And it wasn’t bad.
I may take some heat for this, but my main takeaway from Street Fighter is the d-pad/joystick + button combos, and, you know what, Shaq Fu has them too! That was enough for me. I’m all for the underdog. I was in college when Shaq Fu came out so there was always non-stop gaming going on in our dorm. The Shaq Fu challenge
consumed months of ‘study’ time for us.
It was absolute fun and Shaq was a character everyone either loved or hated. Some of his in-game adversaries were a bit strange but at the end of the day they all packed a little something special so you could easily have a favorite. And the thing was the game was easy to pick up and play and with a little time you could find some
glitches to exploit and strategies to use.
So when I was thinking about what games really made an impression on me, about what I’ve personally played and its impact, Shaq Fu was one of the first to come to mind. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it was an iconic game for me. Prior to that only a few fighting games really stood out (like Killer Instinct) but due to time and circumstances Shaq Fu happened when there were always lots of people around and when there was nothing we’d rather be doing (for the most part). And I know my fellow floor mates all felt the same way.
What does this really say about the game? Not too much I suppose. But it definitely proves that regardless of how technically good a game may be, it can still be an absolute blast – in those days it came down to how much fun can you make it. Shaq Fu was the ultimate in cashing in by wrapping a persona around an established gameplay mechanics but for me, it was something more. It occupied months in my SNES and great memories and, at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing in the world. Long live Shaq Fu!
By Rob Fleischer
rob@sandboxstrat.com

Super Star Wars – SNES

2010-04-15T09:01:00.002-04:00

My favorite holiday has to be Christmas. I just love the feeling of the season, the lights, the music and just being together as family. When I was younger I would always find a new video game and a big box of Swedish fish for myself under the tree. It was so exciting. It was a time where we would open all our presents and I would search for that special shaped box and would just tear into it. I usually asked for a specific game for Christmas and the anticipation of that morning would kill me. It seemed like forever and as far as I was concerned Christmas Eve was the longest day ever. One of the things that made it a special day was that I knew after our big dinner all my friends would come over to my house and we would play for hours on end. It was a tradition. My house always seemed to be the place everyone wanted to hang out. It was just a fun and relaxing place. My friends loved my parents and my parents didn't mind everyone piling over during the holiday. It just made the day even better with a household full of people.
There is one specific Christmas that I remember very well. It was 1992 and I asked for Super Star Wars for my Super Nintendo. At the time, this was a highly anticipated title for the system and for myself. I really wanted this game. The thing you have to realize is that I was a geek and I loved games; ok, I still am so when I asked for Super Star Wars for Christmas I had really hopes that I would wake up Christmas morning and have the opportunity to begin my Jedi training. My parents would always tease me and tell me that they didn't know if I would get the game or maybe they couldn't find it just to push me over the edge. That was just wrong and I didn't find it funny but it just made Christmas morning even more exciting when I finally found the package under the tree. I tore open the wrapping paper as my eyes opened wide and I just stared at that black box with Luke, Han and Leia on the cover. It felt like I waited forever for this moment. I couldn't wait to run to my room and pop it in the system and fire it up but before I did that I had to find my box of Swedish fish. Traditionally I would find it in my stocking but sometimes I would score the really big box and it would be wrapped somewhere underneath the tree.
Then the time came when I finally got to go to my room and play. Wow. The game was amazing; it was everything I expected. This was the first time that you were able to play as Luke, Han and even Chewy. You couldn't do this in any other Star Wars game so this was something special. Oh, and if you haven't figured it out I'm a huge Star Wars fan so it didn't get much better than this. I had to foil the plans of an evil empire and that was exactly what I was going to do. Normally I would last about an hour if I was lucky before I picked up the phone and called my friends and tell them that I got the game. The graphics, the sound, the characters - it was everything straight from my favorite movie and I couldn't wait to share it with everyone. When I called my friends, the first thing I would ask is what time were they coming by because I knew we would be playing late into the night.
Even now I still remember jumping around as Luke Skywalker on a huge sandcrawler and working my way to the top in hopes to find C3P0 and R2D2. These were the droids I was looking for! I started out with my blaster taking Jawas out along the way leaping from conveyor belt to conveyor. It was a while before I could finally use my lightsaber and that's when things really picked up. Nothing was cooler than doing somersaults in the air with my lightsaber and landing on a helpless Jawa. Impressive, most impressive. I played this game for hours and I enjoyed every minute of it. It took some time to make my way to certain points in the game that allowed me to play as the other characters. I have to be honest, I couldn't wait to play as Chewbacca. This was the first game that ever allowed you to play as the famous Wookie and I wanted to shoot his crossbow more than anything. When I finally made it to the cantina in Mos Eisley my dream finally came true. I was Chewbecca. He may have been slower than Luke and Han but he was big and he meant business. His crossbow was awesome. I made my way threw the cantina letting out the occasional howl as I made my way to the Falcon before the Empire found me. She was the fastest ship in the galaxy, ever heard of her?
By this time my friends had finally showed up and we piled on my bed and began to play. We past the controller around so everyone had a chance to experience the goodness but it was really hard to give up your turn. This game was awesome but as unfortunate as it was not to be able to play it gave us the opportunity to head out to the kitchen to the candy dish and grab a handful of Swedish fish. Then we rushed back to the bedroom to make sure we didn't miss anything during the game and that we didn't drop and fish along the way. This is what gaming was all about. Old school gaming that raised the bar of video games to something that had never been experienced before. I loved it and when it was time for my friends to leave I stayed up and continued playing by myself. It was a perfect day.
Time really goes by so fast. I remember this day so well it really seems like it was yesterday but unfortunately that isn't true. I'm 36 years old now and I have a beautiful 8 year old daughter who makes Christmas a whole new experience for me. Those were the times that I look back on and remember how easy life seemed to be. Christmas was a special time in my house - and still is today. It wasn't because of the gifts or the food but because of the fond memories of my friends and family and how we all treated each other. It was a great way to grow up. Christmas is different now that I have my daughter and it's special in a whole new way but the funny thing is that even now when I look under the tree I find a video game and a box of Swedish fish. Thanks, mom and dad.
By Stephen O'Blenis

Chrono Trigger - SNES

2010-04-14T11:30:00.003-04:00

There’s been at least a couple of times in this blog I’ve written about a guy named Joe Q. The “Q” is short for Quattrucci and “Joe” is short for Joseph. Among those who know Joe, almost any would agree that he can be loud and like most of us, occasionally obnoxious.
He’s also a complete and total, one-in-a-million kind of character. I’ll put it this way: A lot of people out there know Jamie Silva, a Riverside native who took the Townie football team to a state championship before having a fantastic athletic career at Boston College. Today, he plays for the Indianapolis Colts. I never knew Jamie that well, we played on a couple youth sports teams together when we were young, but I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him and from all reports he is one of the most revered Townies in recent memory.
Before he played in The Super Bowl, however, Jamie was Prom King runner-up his senior year of high school. The winner? Joe Q.
More important than any of this, however, Joe Q is one of the most loyal people you will ever meet and one of the best friends a guy like me could ever ask for. We first met when I was 12 or 13, I don’t remember, but I was young. His grandmother (the late, famous and absolutely fantastic ‘Mamar’) and aunt had moved in next door to us a few months earlier.
For a couple days a week, Joe Q would spend the afternoons at his grandma’s until his mom picked him up from work. We both liked basketball and video games. We also both liked Little Caesar’s pizza.
We hit it off instantly.
For the remainder of my adolescent years there were few people, if any, I was closer to than Joe Q. Though he would only come by the neighborhood a couple times a week during the school year, he was around every day in the summer, long before either of us had jobs or other responsibilities. We played plenty of basketball down at “The Gully,” and we went to two national duckpin bowling championships together, coming in second one year as a doubles team.
For the record, Joe Q was a much, much better bowler than I.
Between all of this, we played a lot of Chrono Trigger. For those who don’t know, Chrono Trigger was an RPG released for Super Nintendo in the late 90s. The game has since developed an extremely devout cult following due in no small part to the fact it was incredibly well made. Just think about this: Chrono Trigger was a SNES game that had more than 10 different endings.
Fallout 3 can’t even say that.
I can’t tell you how many times Joe Q and I beat the game together. I don’t think we saw every ending, but we saw a whole lot of ‘em. We would spend hours going through the game time and time again, drinking Fresca and laughing about a whole series of inside jokes that wouldn’t make sense to anyone except us no matter how I tried explaining it. (If Joe Q happens to be reading this though, I have one word – Frog.)
Anyway, around our freshmen years of college, Joe Q and I had a brief falling out over the stupidest thing in the world (a girl) but that’s long behind both of us. Nowadays, I see Joe Q once in a blue moon, usually stopping by next door (his mom and his aunt live there now, two wonderful people who are good friends to my entire family) or at the occasional function, like a graduation party.
Maybe it’s odd, maybe it’s not, but it’s never awkward to see Joe Q. I think when you spend the kind of time together at the ages we were, it doesn’t matter how long you go without seeing each other, you pick up where you left off. Like riding a bike or something.
Whenever we do see each other, we go over work schedules and try a find a day we could get together for a drink. We usually leave things with an “I’ll call you Wednesday” or “Next week looks good,” then Wednesday or next week comes and the phone doesn’t ring on either end because there are jobs and girlfriends and all the other things that make adult-life different from childhood.
I may not see Joe Q as much as most other people in my life, but he’s a great guy and I know that no matter what type of path this life leads me down, there will always be those days every so often where me and my old friend get to kick back for a few minutes and remember kicking the crap out of Lavos with Luminaire.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

House of the Dead 2 - WII

2010-04-13T19:35:00.005-04:00

Stone Cold Steve O'Blenis is everything you could want in a friend.
Honest.
Loyal.
Funny.
Big enough to handle himself if we get into a bar fight.
He's a good guy trying to make his way in the world while raising a great daughter and trying his best to enjoy the things he enjoyed as a child: Star Wars, professional wrestling, sports and video games. It's no surprise he and I became fast friends when we worked together at the same newspaper more than 10 years ago. Back then he had a fiance and I had a rotating door situation with women, which is to say I had nothing and no one. The fiance became a wife who became an ex-wife. Out of this relationship he got a fine daughter and a clear head. He spent the next few years of his life working hard, getting to know his little girl and, I believe, getting to know himself again. And at the right time, when he least expected it, a girl named Diane walked into his life.
I met Diane one night and liked her immediately. She's a good girl with a good heart who isn't afraid to be generous and caring to anyone. She's like Steve: Honest, solid, and extremely good looking. (She really is. Steve aint so bad himself.)
So I was relieved when he said he was going to marry her. Part of me thought the big guy got burned too bad to go back. It happens. But he's a strong dude and she's the right woman and I couldn't be happier for him.
And this is what we talk about these days when we finally carve out some time for cocktails at the local pizza joint down the street. Last night we celebrated his upcoming marriage and did a few shots of tequila. We ended the night by watching the Hulk Hogan scene in Rocky III and then blasting some zombies in House of the Dead 2. For all the press the Wii gets for being a party games machine, few of my friends are interested in anything more than bowling or light gun games. Bowling is good enough to warrant buying the system in the first place. When you play, you might as well be in a bowling alley. You've got beers and a couch and everyone gets up and takes their turn and then cheers for the next guy. It's social.
Demented and said, but social. (With apologies to John Hughes.)
House of the Dead 2 - and all quality light gun games for that matter - offer the perfect mindless backdrop for two grown men to talk about their love of certain women and Hulk Hogan. The zombies keep coming - if you're good enough, because the game is hard - and the violence and story are so ridiculous that you feel compelled to either shout at the screen or lay back and ignore it while you discuss something important.
And that's just what we did.
Big Steve and I may not get as many Monday night play dates as we do now once he gets married, but I know I'll cherish them all just the same.
Good luck, brother.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Jet Set Radio - Xbox

2010-04-12T15:20:00.004-04:00

In Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays, "How to be Alone," the author who gained fame for shunning Oprah with his superb novel "The Corrections" talks a lot less about being alone than his titles suggests. I already knew how to be alone, but I figured a collection of essays on the subject would be a good read anyway. Plus, I dug the his other work.
He touches on the sex-advice industry and supermax prisons, among other things. When I read this collection I was A) not alone; B) doing just fine sexually, thank you; and C) not doing anything that would land me in a supermax prison. (Regular prison, maybe.)
It was 2002 and my wife (then girlfriend) and I were living in Philadelphia. We moved there from Baltimore after a brief and passionate courtship so she could pursue graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I left behind a profitable gig tending bar, my family and most of my friends. I was in love and feared nothing. I assumed I'd find a decent bar job quickly.
That didn't happen.
The first gig I found was at an Outback Steakhouse knock-off where they train you for every front-of-the-house position before they let you behind the bar. It was the worst 3 weeks of my life. I wore a uniform and was trained by a nice kid whose mom picked him up every day. The food was lousy, the atmosphere disgusting and the cleanliness was questionable. I once worked a joint in Baltimore where every cook behind the line was on work release from prison. Those guys were spotless and worked hard. These hacks in Philly sent plates out of the kitchen with bugs in the rice and burned the bacon nearly every time.
Meanwhile, my wife spent her days walking the halls of knowledge in one of the world's greatest cities. She worked hard and made friends. An academic at heart, she loved it.
I struggled.
With $18 in tip money in my pocket I would hit the cheapest dive bar I could find for a few drafts before coming home, defeated. Annie was often asleep by the time I got in the door. I would either read or play a game on the Xbox. When I read, it was Franzen's collection of essays. Despite the love I had for my wife, I felt as alone as ever. Franzen offered nothing.
The Xbox, on the other hand, was just the mind-candy I needed to forget about the fact that I was a grown man with a writing career behind him who was currently upselling diners on fried onion appetizers in the world's worst chain restaurant.
This is when I turned to Jet Set Radio. Imagine a cell-shaded city in the future where odd-looking characters on Rollerblades tear through the landscape spreading counter-propaganda and graffiti of their own design. The game was beautifully rendered – the world it conjured as unique as Blade Runner and as imaginative as Oz. Easy to play, hard to master (the hallmark of gaming greatness) Jet Set Radio took me out of the hellhole for long enough for me to remember I was not defined by the place that issued me a paycheck. I was a young man in love who had the opportunity to write freely, meet new people and explore a new city. I eventually did all of those things, and have come to look back on my time in Philadelphia as a second college experience of learning and good times. (It helped that I soon got a better job in a better bar.)
Most of the entries in this blog are of fond memories of the good times in our lives and the games that helped to shape them. Jet Set Radio was a fine game that came to me in a terrible time. When I play it now, I remember everything I gave up in that time and all the wonderful blessings I've received since.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Super Mario Brothers - NES

2010-04-11T19:08:00.003-04:00

When my brother was in high school, I would wake up to the vibrations of his stereo, pushed up against the wall between our rooms, pounding up against the sheetrock. It would be about 6 a.m., and I couldn’t quite discern the lyrics at that hour, but I didn’t have to. I knew it would be Motley Crue’s Shout At the Devil, on regular rotation. His room was the opposite of my peach, lacy bubble, with its white, imitation-French dresser and mirror. He had a small collection of vinyl, but it had the essentials – Kiss - Detroyer, Police - Zenyattà Mondatta, Iron Maiden – Number of the Beast. This modest collection was pushed up against a glass cage holding a white rat, which I still can’t believe he got past my mother. The room smelled like boy, and rodents. The walls were still bright red, but he got rid of the Star Wars curtains and bedspread a few years back, the ones I loved to stare at while he read me Arnold Lobel. I was too old for read alouds, but I still liked marching in and flopping down on his bed. Now I just sat there, wearing his huge Police concert T-shirt, memorizing song lyrics and gawking at his weird, teenage boy-artifacts – a plastic skull that glowed in the dark, a collection of bandanas, a stolen traffic light – until he kicked me out. My new favorite activity was forcing him to look at my latest issue of YM, and to tell me which girls he thought were the prettiest. I found this beyond fascinating. The girls he picked never matched up with my choices, and the huge chasm between the male and female psyche grew ever-larger. I later aborted this mission, going back to reading Nancy Drew where the world made sense. I thought we had a good thing going until one day, he just up and moved into the basement. He was no longer a wall away, but in a whole grown-up apartment downstairs, now with a double bed, a better stereo system out of my listening range, and a separate entrance to get girls in. By now he had run away from home once, graduated high school, and been in a fist fight with my father. He was away more, and I was invited in less.
Then I found my in. My brother needed an opponent to play with him on his new Nintendo system, where he introduced me to Super Mario Bros. At first I was psyched just to be there, to get some spy time in the man-lair. I grew up with an Atari, and loved swinging on a vine over a pit of crocodiles just as much as the next kid on my block. But this was different. More and more often, my fingers would itch for the control, for that satisfying crunch of bricks, and the magical trill of notes as I expanded from a flickering rainbow flower. I could now speed through the secret passages to advanced worlds, and slide under twirling bars of fire with ease. I could even make it through those evil spiky cloud-things that followed you everywhere, like an annoying little sister. It was perfect timing for me to learn how to beat this thing. It was summertime, and I was past the age of playing outside all day with my pals. The boy who had been my best friend since birth, who lived right across the street, didn’t want to hang out with me much any more. Not even for wiffle ball. Wearing “sulky” became my new fashion statement. The perfect retreat was my brother’s dark, cool basement apartment, the best place to hide from the heat and my adolescent boredom. He worked all day for some auto-part cleaning company, and I had long, quiet days to myself. I spent way too much time down there that summer, just me against the dragon. I saved the princess dozens of times. Eventually my brother moved out, taking Super Mario with him, and I made my own claims on the basement. I threw my first boy-girl party. I had my first open-mouth kiss in its cool dark, and years later, was consciously bored during make-out sessions on the old couch my brother had left behind.
During a recent trip down into a grown-up pal’s man-lair, surrounded by Spider-man posters and action figures, my friend Victor stuck a NES controller in my hand. I have continually resisted his temptations, riding high on my preachy-horse about the mindless violence of video games. I spend my days trying to get kids to read and lecturing them to tear their eyes away from various blinking screens. He knew I had a few glasses of Shiraz, and a belly full of chicken wings. I was weak. He said, “You know you want to.” As soon as he started it up, I didn’t have to think about what was coming around each corner. I knew instinctively what blocks to bash, and how far back I would have to start running to leap safely over a gap in Mario-world. Victor and my husband were staring at me with their mouths half-open, as I plowed through the tunnels, bopping and slamming those little turtle things and using them as bowling balls against my enemies. The automatic movement of my fingers brought to my nose the smell of my old wet, basement, and I half expected my brother to reach over and give me the deadly “collar,” halfway through the game. My initial thought was that it is disturbing that there is room being taken up in my brain for the reserve of these game-playing reflexes, space that could very well be occupied by much more important information, or a more significant experience or lesson from my youth. I then realized, it was playing this game, feeling rejected by the various boys in my life, I first chucked aside my fashion magazine and saved a princess instead. Lesson learned. I strutted out of the basement after pulverizing my husband at the game. “That was hot,” he said.
By Megan Southard

100 Essays in 100 Days

2010-04-10T14:08:00.008-04:00

This is the 100th post to the Phoenix Games Blog Project. What began as an exercise in discipline - post one gaming essay every day for a year - has become a devotion to the subject of people and the games they play; our fond memories of the seemingly benign video games in our lives.
Some of these posts - by myself and a small crew of writers - are beautiful. Some are the grinding of gears.
Looking back now, I'm glad the quality of these 100 essays is largely excellent and I am forever grateful to the folks who have helped to make this happen (especially the Pride of Riverside: George Morse).
Tonight I will celebrate with my wife and another couple. No one at the table (save for myself) would call themselves a gamer. I think each of them would call their relationship with video games to be marginal at best.
I would disagree. To wit:
Megan is a close friend of mine. I've known her for longer than I've known my wife and longer than she's known her husband. I respect her in every way you can respect another human being. She is funny and smart and beautiful. And when she has a few glasses of wine and the party here is breaking up, she's pretty keen on coming down to the basement and playing some video games. I've talked her into playing Rock Band and Wii bowling, but she's a Super Mario girl at heart. I was impressed with how quickly she remembered the patterns and secret passages on the NES classic. The last time we played it she had a blast and swore she would write a blog entry for me. It hasn't happened. If someone polled her on the street and asked her if she played games I bet she would say no.
But does she have fond memories that exist because of gaming?
Absolutely.
Her husband, Jack, is an engineering type who owns a high-end bicycle shop on the East Side of Providence (www.legendbicycle.com). I've liked him since the day we met, well before he and Megan got married. The two of them fell in love at our home. Not exclusively, of course, but their courtship dovetailed with a variety of parties and dinners held here up to the point when Jack proposed to Megan on the way to our home one evening. She said yes and we drank champagne. On any one of those evenings we likely wound up in the basement, playing Warlords or some other old-school title to offset Jack's self-proclaimed ineptitude at games. He may not be a gaming champion, but he likes to play. And now he knows that his wife was a Mario junkie in the 80s. A fact that should not be kept from any husband.
And then there is my wife … my long-suffering wife. She's not a gamer. Not even close. In the near-decade I've known her we've played games maybe a half-dozen times. She claims she has a problem with depth perception or something but the truth is she just doesnt enjoy it. That's fine. No problem.
You know what one of the first things she told me about her youngest brother was?
That he owned an Xbox. We were walking in the woods on our second date and talking about our families. I told her I also had an Xbox and that he and I could link up and play together over the Internet. She thought that was cool. (She was wrong, by the way, he had a Gamecube.)
Then she told me a story about her other brother who wanted a Sega Genesis more than anything in the world back in the 16-bit days. Her parents believed any sort of media other than books or newspapers was evil so they refused to buy one for him. Not long after they ruled on this he actually won a Sega Genesis in a TV prize drawing. The first game he ever played was Altered Beast.
"I can still remember the game talking to you," she said.
"Rise from your grave!" she said.
Yup. That's a fond gaming memory.
Gaming has been in the homes of Americans since the early 1970s. We all have memories that involve video games. Whether we know it or not, these games that were once distractions have become a part of all of our lives. Some of these memories are trivial and some are as precious to us as the first time we heard a rock and roll song. On this blog we've got 265 more to go.
Thanks for coming along with us.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Scorched Earth - PC

2010-04-10T13:40:00.004-04:00

Brian was a genius. Still is, probably. I haven't seen him in a decade (we're not the kind of guys who call each other every Sunday afternoon to chat)
Through the magic of Facebook and the rare e-mail I hear he is alive and well.
A self-taught computer programmer who grew up in the Commodore 64 era, Brian was the kind of guy who could question anything and not come off as a know-it-all. We'd see a news item or documentary on TV and he'd say something such as "That doesn't seem right," and then explain why it wasn't. A new technology would emerge and he'd talk about how it probably worked - and he was usually right. I always thought he'd make a fine newspaper reporter, but he wasn't interested in the career path I had chosen.
Brian and I were friends in the middle of my college years. We were the only guys with real jobs at the time. He programmed computers and I was a copy boy at the Baltimore Sun. Maybe that's why we hit it off so quickly, or maybe it was because he looked so much like Michael Knight's evil twin from "Knight Rider" that I just had to get to know him.
Either way, Brian and I spent many an evening - especially during periods without girlfriends - shooting the breeze over late night cocktails. As a backdrop for these conversations, a video game was always being played. Most often that video game was an early PC classic called Scorched Earth. Developed back when DOS was still relevant, Scorched Earth was a turn-based strategy game featuring a tank on either side of a randomly-generated 2D map. The variety of weapons at your disposal was staggering but the interface was simple: Adjust your speed and altitude for one shot at a time. Then wait for your opponent to do the same. Scorched Earth is the archetype for an entire genre of games that has become more sophisticated since Brian and I stayed up until the wee hours discussing politics, health care, foreign policy and girls.
Of course, Brian was far superior at the game than I. This was also true for most of our other nerdly pursuits: Magic The Gathering, anything on Sega Genesis, arcade games. Having a friend such as Brian is humbling. You know he's smarter than you are and you know he has the mad skills in the dork Olympics that you'll never have. Yet he's still willing to hang out with you. Maybe that's the reason. It's like dating a chick out of your league. You know she could do better, she knows she could do better, but something about your charming self keeps her coming back.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Cruisin' USA - N64

2010-04-08T11:06:00.003-04:00

Like most kids who grow up in Riverside, Rhode Island, my family wasn’t what you would call “wealthy” during my childhood years. We weren’t poor, I never went hungry or had to wear dirty clothes and I always had fantastic Christmas holidays and birthdays, but money was tight and my parents did well to teach us the value of a dollar.
In 1989, we moved out of a three-decker on Bullocks Point Avenue (next to an empty lot formerly home to Barry’s Pizza) to a spot on the Barrington/Riverside line near Haines Park where we’ve been ever since. Our new home was a small place that like most Riverside homes still had the feeling of a summertime beach house. I was five-years-old at the time and for the first few years, me and my sister shared a room. We were young, we had bunk beds and though we didn’t have a lot of room, the whole family had plenty of fun in our little house near the bike path.
About the time I hit fourth grade, the old bedroom went to my sister and my “bedroom” became a room on the front of the house that had been converted from a porch years earlier. There was a doorway about three-feet wide between my room and the living room and I didn’t have space for anything more than the bottom half of the old bunk bed set and a cabinet-style TV from the 1970s.
I may not have needed it at the time, but privacy was a luxury I would have to go without. At least until I was 14.
I don’t remember where the idea first came from, but sometime before the summer of ‘98 I approached my parents about building a room in the basement. Unlike most of my childhood requests that came with answers like “Maybe” and “We’ll See,” my parents signed off on the deal almost immediately and within a month a contractor we knew through Little League was hard at work putting together my room in the basement.
And let me tell you, it was awesome. Until my senior year of high school, the basement became my own kind of mini-apartment. By the time we threw a second floor onto the house my senior year of high school, my basement room was covered in posters reminiscent of my entire youth, I had worn out my stereo from blasting so much loud music and I had even found a spot for my dad’s old Penguin mini-fridge.
At first, however, all I had for the gigantic room was the old cabinet TV and the bottom half of the old bunk beds. Not that it mattered. I had more privacy than ever before (something that becomes an increasingly big deal through those adolescent years) and I also had my trusty N64 complete with a copy of Cruisin’ USA.
If you happened to miss the Cruisin’ USA boat, the title is a classic racing game more cartoonish than realistic. It features easy to play mechanics with a surprising amount of difficulty on some of the more challenging courses.
Being 14, having a room in the basement, it was also the perfect game to mute while opening up my speakers to Metallica and the Smashing Pumpkins. At an age when so many of us just want to be left alone, I had a miniature universe all to myself.
Today, I still live at home and I have a great room on the front side of our house. I have a decent view of the bike path and plenty of clear shots into my neighbors homes for that “Rear Window” kind of voyeur inside all of us. Since I moved on up, the basement has been turned into an office. The ceiling that used to seem so high is only a few inches above my head.
I’ve never really been into racing games since that first summer, probably because I played Cruisin’ USA until my eyes bled but no matter how many years have passed, it’s hard not to get that feeling of being 14 whenever I venture down there.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Track and Field - NES

2010-04-07T10:59:00.003-04:00

Since it was first announced more than three years ago, the Nintendo Wii’s central selling point has remained its interactive nature. We’ve seen Wii Fit and snowboarding games with nifty looking peripherals and pilates games and a whole other series of stuff that takes gaming off the couch.
But the notion that this whole thing was some sort of new technology befuddled me. After all, when I first heard about the Wii, my mind instantly traveled to a simpler time when I didn’t work or drive. To me, the whole concept seemed cheap and under-handed.
Why? Because of Track and Field of the NES. Long before video game controllers had joy sticks and motion sensors, there was a gray mat covered in blue and red dots that allowed gamers to run sprint races and jump hurdles. There was even a long jump portion that, despite my sincerest efforts, couldn’t be tricked by my jumping onto a nearby chair.
The graphics were what you would expect from a NES title and the game was repetitive, but it was Nintendo Wii 25 years before Nintendo Wii. It even had some of the Wii’s corniness (like that dumb music in the Wii bowling alley) by way of competitors whose names mirrored difficulties.
Yes, the game may not have had the level of interaction we see from today’s Wii titles, but that little gray mat could sure take a beating and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who could get through the varying degrees of difficulty with each stage.
Today, my Nintendo Wii gets turned on about once every couple months. I like the system, I just don’t like jumping up and down alone in my bedroom when I can avoid it. When I had Track and Field, however, I never let up on the thing. Maybe it was the novelty that came with the game’s mat, maybe the title was just well done.
In either case, I’m still waiting for my Wii to give me the enjoyment I got from a much simpler game from a much simpler time.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Madden 2002 - Gamecube

2010-04-06T17:07:00.002-04:00

My father-in-law is not a physically intimidating man. He is thin and fit, does Yoga and swims in the ocean whenever possible. It is his mind, however, that you have to fear. He's a smart DC lawyer with a ravenous appetite for newspapers and political debate. I knew all of this before I ever met him. I knew that he hung around with guys like Ralph Nader. I knew he worked with Teamsters. I knew a phone call from him could have someone trembling in minutes.
So I was thinking about all of this as my wife (then girlfriend) and I drove to his house so I could meet him for the first time. It was a beautiful afternoon and I was assured I had nothing to worry about. We met and pleasantries were exchanged. Things were, however, a bit chaotic. It's not what I was used to. If my parents are having people over for a meal they start planning a few weeks in advance. The table is set at the crack of dawn. Refreshments are stocked to the rafters. Double the amount of food necessary is made and served in appropriate vessels.
My father-in-law, on the other hand, is a seat of the pants kind of guy. So when we arrived for our fajita lunch in the back yard nothing was ready. My wife sprung to action and began mixing salsa and peeling avocados. This gave me one of my first misconceptions about my wife: That she likes to cook. She says she does.
She doesn't.
But she made it happen that afternoon. I helped with peeling things and doing some dishes. To my horror I realized the switch for the garbage disposal was installed in front of the sink at crotch level. All I had to do was lean forward and the machine would spring to life and rip one of my hands off. Meanwhile, her father was peppering me with questions about politics and newspapers. I had given up journalism at the time and was tending bar. This did not dissuade him from asking me a few hundred questions in rapid fire succession that were all designed to answer the only question that really mattered to him: Are you a Democrat or not?
My wife's youngest brother, Michael, proved to be wise beyond his 13 years. He saw I was sweating it out - I'm not sure if it was the politics or the fear of a crotch-induced garbage disposal accident that was making me sweat. Either way, he motioned to the TV in the corner of the living room where a Nintendo Gamecube beckoned like a life raft on a stormy sea. I slipped out of the kitchen and sat down on the floor.
He fired up Madden 2002, a game I had never played and was sure to fail. He picked the Redskins. I picked the Ravens. His father played some Greatful Dead and I threw up a little bit in my mouth but said nothing.
The game was on. While we played Michael told me he liked to compare his dad to the Eugene Levy character from "American Pie."
"Keep it real homies," Michael said, and I laughed like an idiot. Tension was being released. Somewhere in the house my wife was chopping fajita vegetables while her father was happily burning boneless, skinless chicken breasts on the grill outside. We kept playing. Madden is a tough game to pick up and play but I managed to get by. It's a perfect game to bond over with a future brother-in-law because there's no gun violence or foul language, just the accepted violence of football and the horrible color commentary.
My father-in-law and I have grown close in the years since that first meeting. We talk politics and cook together. He's a great guy. But I will always be thankful for the rescue efforts of my man Michael and the mindless distraction of video games when faced with an awkward situation.
I won the game and refused to ever play him again to maintain my spotless record.
We went outside in time to see my father-in-law cleaning lawn chairs with an old bottle of 409 and some paper towels.
"He's keeping it real," Michael said.
He sure was.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Crackdown - Xbox 360

2010-04-05T16:39:00.002-04:00

This was the game I was playing the first time my Xbox 360 died. We were having our living room painted at the time and everything was covered in sheets and tarps. All the lamps had been removed and the only light source in the evening was the painter's industrial flashlight. I hung it on a ladder and we read or socialized in our vacant room by the harsh light of labor. It was in the room where I played Crackdown for hours on end. I found the missions and driving pretty pedestrian, but climbing the city in search of new orbs was intoxicating. It's the kind of game you play like a bastard when you first get it and then never play again once the initial high wears off.
I'd like to thank the good people at Microsoft for making sure that high was harshed prematurely. My Xbox 360 red-ringed on me in the middle of playing Crackdown. It was also a day before my wife and I were to treat ourselves to a weekend in Newport. I went through the agony of dealing with customer service and waiting for my box to arrive only to put the bricked console in it and hope for a safe return.
Then we went to Newport and got into a fight our first night there. Then we had a fine morning and a better evening and I had a T-bone steak the size of a toilet seat.
All was right with the world.
When I came home I gave the steak bone to the dog and marveled at the fine job done by the painter.
As I write this I can see Crackdown out of the corner of my eye. It sits on my recently-alphabetized Xbox 360 game shelf. It is sandwiched between The Club and Dante's Inferno - both games that give an initial buzz but wear thin quickly.
Although, I never did get all of those orbs . . .
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Ninjatown - Nintendo DS

2010-04-04T19:58:00.004-04:00

I went to my first gaming convention last weekend. It was PAX East in Boston and I met some nice folks, played great games and spent too much on food and cocktails. I had a blast and am looking forward to my next convention. While I was there I met a lot of industry folks I know but have never met in person. All my gaming coverage for the newspaper stems from e-mailing contacts all over the world (though mostly on the West Coast). There are probably 100 people I speak to via e-mail frequently but couldn't pick out of a lineup. I met a few of them in Boston and made some new contacts as well. The one guy I was most looking forward to meeting was Rob from Sandbox Strategies. Rob's a Rhode Island guy working in New York. He's a family man and a gamer of a certain age (that age would be close to mine). This all means he's a fan of games, a real fan. He can talk about the classics as easily as the newer titles and he takes none of it too seriously.
We had dinner and talked about our mutual passion and the one game he kept mentioning was something called Ninjatown for the DS.
Ninjatown is a tower defense game published by SouthPeak Interactive. It has a cute and fuzzy exterior that belies the serious game hiding beneath. There are sunny skies, lush forest and rolling hills in the land of Ninjatown where adorable and honorable Ninjas live. After the mysterious eruption of a nearby volcano, Ninjatown is attacked by hordes of sinister enemies lead by Mr. Demon, who, of course, is bent on destruction.
In a classic yet inventive take on the genre you will build armies to beat back the large variety of Mr. Demon's minions. I'm not keen on blowing into the microphone of my snazzy DSiXL (it's a loaner from Nintendo) but I did so with abandon when prompted to by the game. I also yelled into the microphone to activate a special attack, something I find hard to explain to my wife who already thinks I'm a little crackers when it comes to the whole gaming thing.
Fans of the tower defense genre should absolutely be playing this game right now. Despite great reviews this sleeper title wasn't on the lips of anyone I was talking to at the convention.
Except for Rob, that is.
There were plenty of other games he could have been trying to sell me on that night but he kept coming back to Ninjatown. It is by far my best memory of the weekend – talking shop with a guy who cares – and it's currently the only game I want to be playing. Seeing how I have yet to defeat God of War II or Just Cause II, that's saying something.
There's another game Rob mentioned a lot over the weekend, and that game is Shaq Fu for the Sega Genesis. He claims he's going to write a blog entry about it for me soon.
Well Rob, the clock is ticking . . .
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Ice Hockey - Atari 2600

2010-04-03T21:25:00.006-04:00

This blog began 93 days ago when I decided to spend a year defining the canon of console gaming. I was to post one essay every day about one of the greatest games of all time. I soon realized that, despite a few exceptions, greatness in gaming is defined as much by the experience the gamer has with the game as it is the qualities of the game itself. The blog has become a daily reminiscence on gaming from a few authors, all from different places in the world, but mostly it's been George Morse and I cranking them out. George is my reporter at the newspaper. In this business we often say things such as "he's my reporter" or "she's my photographer." By saying "my" I certainly don't mean that I own George or that he exists to do my bidding. He gets that. Most people get that. (Except newspaper photographers, who can be a prickly bunch.)
What George has certainly become is my friend.
Now more than ever I have less certainty about the future of the newspaper business and my role in it. But I know this young punk from Riverside with a good heart and head will always be a friend of my family. He knows my kids, has watched our pets and impressed my wife with his intelligence and charm (a serious accomplishment).
And there was a time before life got complicated for the two of us that we used to play video games together nearly once a week. We eventually settled into a routine of either Gears of War or No Mercy (N64). But in the early days when he was still my reporter and not yet my friend, I took great pleasure in whipping up on him in Atari games such as Activision's Ice Hockey. It's probably the best sports game for the Atari 2600 - and still one of the most fun sports games ever made. It's two-on-two hockey on a crisp rink with colorful characters. Unlike many early sports games the precision on this primitive title is excellent. Passing is effortless as is the transition from one of your players to the other. Control is perfect and, despite a decent computer opponent, playing against another human being is a blast.
Especially when that opponent is George.
I would eventually discover that George is a better gamer than I. He has beaten me at most games, but he routinely hammers me at No Mercy, which is a game near and dear to my heart. But I owned him in Ice Hockey.
This column is sure to ignite a new rivalry. Maybe George and I will take to the ice soon to revisit the Arnold Street Cup. If he manages to get one by me, I will revisit this post with an update.
Until then, consider this the definitive account of how an old man kicked his reporter's ass at a game that was created five years before the reporter was born.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Super Mario 64 - Nintendo 64

2010-04-02T11:54:00.002-04:00

It’s hard to believe that after more than 90 days of essays about the greatest games of all time Super Mario 64 has yet to appear on this site.
But that’s going to change. Right now.
Although I have played video games for my entire life, the last time I asked for a video game system as a present or gift was in the early 1990s, when I bugged my parents for a Sega Genesis. Since then, I received a Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Playstation 2 and even an Xbox 360 (a birthday present from my beautiful girlfriend) without solicitation. It’s not that I didn’t want any of these things, I just always felt guilty asking friends and family for high end electronic items that, despite their massive level of entertainment, are ultimately a waste of time that keep you from the great outdoors.
Every single time I got a new system, however, I was happy as could be. Especially when I got my PS2 with the Rocky video game.
My parents bought me an N64 for Christmas one year right after it came out, when parents of younger children than I were braving lines and mini riots at Wal-Mart to get one. I hadn’t asked for my N64, but that’s why it was the best gift I got that year.
Unlike today, this was a time when systems still came with games. The obvious choice for rolling out N64, of course, was Super Mario 64.
And boy did it deliver. I talked with countless people about this game and I have never really heard any criticism. Moving Mario from the 2D side scrolling world to the 3D world came off flawlessly. The charm of the Mario franchise was evident in every aspect of the game and the re-vamped platform format brought next excitement and adventure to a character more than a decade old.
That Christmas Day, when I opened my new system, I ended up with about a half-dozen friends sitting in my bedroom. Yes, they had all also received different types of video games and other toys for Christmas, but I was the one kid on the block with an N64.
We played Mario for hours, a lot of which was spent messing with the unnecessary but cool opening feature that allowed you to warp Mario’s face in a variety of dimensions.
In the years since my Nintendo 64 days, I haven’t picked up any subsequent Super Mario titles. I own a Nintendo Wii, so having the right system isn’t an issue, but the new games seem a little trippy and hard to follow. No, the new Mario isn’t for me. Mario 64, on the other hand, will always have a place in what I consider to be the canon of gaming.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

PGA Tour Golf II – Sega Genesis

2010-04-01T10:49:00.002-04:00

I’ve never been a big fan of golf.
Sure, there were plenty of times when I was a little bit younger and a little bit dumber that me and a few of my buddies threw back a half dozen beers a piece and stumbled over to a nearby driving range. And there were plenty of times I got way too competitive with family members and girlfriends during rounds of mini-golf. There were even a few times I tried to hack through 18 holes with an old boss who had a three handicap.
The game has always come across to me like some kind of elitist activity reserved for rich guys and athletes who are good at every other sport anyway. On TV, it’s even worse. And this is coming from a guy who can watch two hours of bowling from the 1980s on ESPN Classic Saturday afternoons.
But golfing video games, well, what kind of player doesn’t enjoy shooting a few rounds? I’ll admit, today’s mainstay of Tiger Woods PGA Tour-Whatever has made things a little more complicated and a little more realistic, but there was a time not too long ago when golf games were little more than pressing a button for power and a button for accuracy.
Like PGA Tour Golf II for the Sega Genesis. At the time it came out, it was a good-looking, easy to play game that was at least as good or better than any other sports simulation on the market. I never owned the game, instead I was lucky enough to borrow it for about a year from one of my dad’s softball buddies.
Yes, I have plenty of memories from making eagles, winning tournaments and beating my dad (of course). None of these memories, however, can rival the time my dad’s pal came to take his game back.
It was Halloween, 1990-something. Me and my sister, we weren’t even teenagers, so my parents would always take us out trick or treating. For the other kids, we left a basket of candy outside our house with a note reading “Please Take One.” You know, the notes everyone ignores before dumping 50 snack-sized Snickers bars into their pillow case.
For a few years though, we had a secret weapon. Around the corner from my front door, the driveway was pitch black, like a cave. A cat couldn’t see into that abyss.
That’s where we set the trap.
Now you might not believe this and I don’t blame you for being skeptical, but the story I’m about to tell you is entirely true and I have witnesses. Growing up, our family pet was a rottweiler topping 160 pounds named Butkus. He was huge and intimidating and could have eaten a grown man alive. He was also the most gentle, calm animal I’ve ever known. Most importantly, he was also remarkably intelligent.
So when my dad’s softball buddy came by the house to pick-up his game, he reached down into the little bowl outside out front door and took a candy bar. That’s when Butkus peered his gigantic head around the corner, staring down the right-center fielder.
I remember it clear as day, the guy, his name was Scotty, he looks at my dad and goes “I wonder what will happen if I take two?”
His hand wasn’t halfway towards the bowl for seconds when Butkus came charging around the corner, tied to a rope that stopped him about a foot from the dish. His bark echoed through the neighborhood and Scotty jumped about five feet back before landing face-up on the ground.
Over the years, I saw this repeated more times than I can count.
Now I’m not sure how my dog learned that people should adhere to the honor system of simply taking one. But he did. And no matter how long we would be gone on Halloween, our dish was never empty at the end of the night.
They say you’re not supposed to give dogs chocolate and while that may be true, every Halloween we gave Butkus a couple Snickers bars for a job well done.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Star Raiders - Atari 800 Computer

2010-03-31T12:39:00.003-04:00

My Dad's best friend was named "Bad" Francis.
Even when I was a kid, I knew what this meant. I knew he wasn't a bad man. I knew it meant he liked a good time.
So does my old man, but nobody ever called him "Bad" Manuel. Like many close friends these guys were a lot alike, but a bit of an Odd Couple as well. My Dad tends to play it safe, even when he was young. As a child I could tell that Mr. Francis was the kind of guy who took chances – risks – that my dad probably didn't take. If the Rolling Stones needed a ride across town to a gig, I'm betting my dad would have driven and Mr. Francis would have been in the back seat, partying with The Stones.
You know?
I idolized Mr. Francis when I was a kid. He was the captain of the tugboat on which my dad was the chief engineer. He lived down the street in a nice house with a pool and two pretty daughters who were around my age. His wife was beautiful and they were always nice to me. He was also a gadget guy. He had the first VCR – I remember him taping the news coverage of the Reagan shooting – and he had the first computers. He would give me his Byte magazines when he was done with them.
It was at his computer desk – tucked into a corner of a room filled with nautical stuff – where I first played Star Raiders.
This game owned me in the summer of my tenth year. I've put off writing about it because I hold the game in such high regard that I'm afraid I won't do it justice.
Played in a first person perspective, Star Raiders was admired for its graphics and relatively deep gameplay. You played a space pilot in hot pursuit of enemy Zylons. They looked a lot like Tie Fighters, and that's just fine. On the Atari 800 computer version of the game you used the keypad to enter coordinates from the map screen. Then you'd warp to the combat area and start blasting.
But when I finally convinced my folks to buy me the Atari 2600 version, I was delighted to see that it came with a special key pad peripheral for the intergalactic map stages. With the lights off and a little imagination, I was that pilot entering coordinates and flying around outer space shooting Zylons.
That's what this blog is all about. Star Raiders, even with its primitive technology, put you in the game.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Gorf - Colecovision

2010-03-30T16:46:00.003-04:00

Nostalgia can play tricks on you. Some movies aren't as good as you remember. Some of your high school buddies, the ones you thought were hilarious back in the day, are actually jerks.
And vintage video games rarely stand the test of time. Some of the games mentioned on this blog are the exceptions to the rule, but for the most part only the die-hard golden age nerds are playing Stellar Track on an Atari 2600 right now.
Gorf – the Black Sabbath of classic video games - kicks that convention in the teeth.
I come to this after today's purchase of a working Colecovision (for only $40!) completed my collection. There are some obscure systems and handhelds I'd like to add, but I'm going to lay low for awhile. While I revel in the collection I have assembled, I'll be playing Gorf.
I have absolutely no memories of playing this game as a child. I don't know how I missed it – perhaps the heavy metal sound of the arcade machine saying "My name is Gorf!" turned me off. Or maybe it was the name. Gorf? Really?
How sad for me.
I just played it for the first time and (at $7) it's some of the best video game cash I have ever spent. Gorf is four games in one, and they're all basically clones of other space games. The first stage is a Space Invaders clone that is cooler than space Invaders. The second stage is a Galaga clone that is not nearly as good as Galaga but still plenty of fun. The third stage sucks (think a weak Tempest) and the last stage, in which you attack the mother ship, is short and deceptively simple. Hit the reactor or else.
I spent the past two years casually looking for a Colecovision in good working order. They are notorious for breaking easily and most of the ones I found were very pricey. Today's purchase – from the good people at Time Capsule Comics – is the perfect classic purchase. So many times I've secured a classic console and games only to be happy to have them but sorry that they suck (Atari 7800).
Not this time.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Metal Arms: A Glitch in the System – Multiplatform

2010-03-30T13:03:00.002-04:00

We're getting more rain today than anyone can ever remember. Playgrounds are flooded up to the tops of swings. Our staff photographer almost stripped down to his underwear since he was soaked through from a morning of covering the storm. The sound of rain hitting a tin roof next door is my soundtrack.
What a great day to be playing a game.
I'm not playing a game right now, of course, I'm writing and editing news stories and trying to come up with a few editorials. But the rain is distracting me. I want to be home playing games.
More specifically, I want to be on a comfortable couch – or splayed flat on my stomach on a shag carpet in front of the TV – in shorts and a T-Shirt with adequate snacks and beverages at my disposal for some binge gaming. I'm talking about an all-day, all-night marathon with a one-player game that rewards exploration, ingenuity and a twitchy trigger at the same time.
In this case, I'm talking about an often overlooked gem called Metal Arms: A Glitch in the System.
I played the hell out of this game on my original Xbox back when I lived in Philadelphia. At the time I was suffering from Playstation envy. It was not easy to be an Xbox guy back in the day. After Halo and a few other exclusives we were usually treated to late ports of games my PS2 friends had been playing for months. The fact that these Xbox ports were usually superior to their PS2 counterparts (Hello GTA) was of little comfort while I played through "Assault on the Control Room" for the umpteenth time.
Metal Arms may have been multi-platform, but it felt like an Xbox exclusive to me. (Maybe that's because no one else I knew was playing it.) It was a blast to play. The shooting was excellent, the story was fun, the writing was funny and the blend of action and platforming was perfect. To be sure, the game was all about cool weapons – such as one that let you shoot saw blades at your enemies, literally picking them apart limb by limb. It also featured vehicles and multiplayer.
You could make the argument that any good game is even better on a rainy day. I think Metal Arms stands out because it's such a fun world to get lost in and that, unlike RPGs or sims, you don't have to think too hard to enjoy it.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Peggle - Xbox Live Arcade/PSN

2010-03-29T09:57:00.002-04:00

The kids next door had a Pachinko machine. Or at least they did until we stuffed it full of broken candy canes and their parents chucked it. (Why broken candy canes? Why not? Kids are stupid.)
I haven't seen one in years but I was always enamored with them. Maybe that's why I dig Peggle so much. It's a little more chaotic than pinball and a little more controlled at the same time. It also could be the first game I ever convince my wife to play for more than 6 minutes.
My hope is that the illusion of simplicity and the goofy characters will draw her in at first. Then I'm counting on the game's crack cocaine-like addictiveness to keep her on the couch. Still, this won't be easy. My wife isn't a gamer. She makes Tipper Gore look like an Arcade rat. She doesn't like the violence or the inactivity that is championed by many aspects of my hobby.
And her sense of its cultural relevance is not sharp. Last weekend when I arrived at the PAX East gaming convention in Boston I called her to let her know how it was going.
Me: "There's a guy standing next to me dressed like Mario."
Her: "Mario Batali?"
Me: "No, Mario. Luigi's brother. Savior of princesses. King of the platformer."
Her: " Is he cooking anything?
(It occurs to me now that someone dressed as Mario Batali at a gaming conference would be putting the I back in irony. I bet it happens at E3.)
One Tuesday night soon I'm going to hatch my plan to get my wife to play a video game with me.
Why Tuesday?
Because Tuesday is "Lost." It's the only piece of sci/fi media she's ever truly enjoyed. Since she'll be in the mood to get her geek on, I figure that's when I'll strike. Maybe a quick game before "Lost" starts. Maybe she'll get hooked? Maybe we'll skip "Lost" to keep playing Peggle?
Probably not. But you can be damn sure that I'm going to spend the next few months trying to get one of my gaming colleagues to dress as Mario Batali at E3 this year.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Star Fox 64 - Nintendo 64

2010-03-27T16:42:00.003-04:00

I used to call it Parent Appreciation Day. Since they weren't charging me rent at the time I figured I'd make it up to the finest human beings in the world by cooking them lavish meals from time to time.
But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Today was my second day at the PAX East gaming convention in Boston. Yesterday I went from booth to booth checking out new games. I was dazzled. But today I began at the top floor in the last room on the left. It was the classic console room, and they had nearly every vintage console you can imagine ready to be played for free.
I wanted to play Panzer Dragoon on the Saturn but someone was already on it. I looked at the list of available games, flipping the pages like some karaoke hopeful looking for just the right title to knock out of the park.
Star Fox 64 spoke my name.
This game debuted with the first rumble pack back when people were jumping ship from Nintendo to Sony. It also happened to be when I left journalism to tend bar and live at home with my parents at age 28. I was burned out with newspaper editing, homesick and in debt. The Gen-X cliche was actually happening in real life. I didn't have to do it, I could have stuck it out at the solid job I had and find ways to renew my interest. But it would have happened eventually. I was tired and the work was suffering. Going home to regroup and get to know my folks again was the right thing to do. And, not surprisingly, bartending is a lot more lucrative than journalism. So I had that going for me.
On my days off I'd take walks with the Old Man at Fort McHenry and play my N64 while anxiously awaiting the debut of the Xbox. Star Fox and Perfect Dark were my favorite games. Star Fox was, and is, one of the best of its kind. From its mind-blowing debut on the SNES to the superb N64 version, the game was Nintendo quality all the way. Playing it today reminded me that I need to find a copy and play it through again when I get home.
It also reminded me of the dinners I would make for my folks on Parent Appreciation Day. it was usually tapas: Clams in garlic sauce, grilled shrimp, tenderloin seared with a wild mushroom sauce. My folks can cook but they love to be cooked for as well. They're also among my favorite dining partners.
Now that my wife and I live away from our hometown and my folks are hundreds of miles away, I think often of those nice dinners we used to have. They'll be visiting us this summer.
You can be sure there will be shellfish and tenderloin on the menu.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Mafia II - Xbox 360

2010-03-26T18:42:00.003-04:00

I hadn't been on a train since I took one home to Baltimore to see my grandmother before she died. I was living in Rhode Island, working my first real newspaper job at the age of 22. I called her one morning to chat and she didn't sound right. She was laying on the couch in her "parlor," as she might call it. It was just a tiny living room in her East Baltimore rowhome where she taught me how to play poker, drink coffee and eat eggs with ketchup. As a child on Saturday nights when I would stay with her we'd watch Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. My fond memories of that parlor were replaced by one somber afternoon not long after the train arrived home. She was dead by the time the train arrived. My brother Danny met me at the station, his eyes red and wet. The wake was held in her parlor a few days later.
All of this came rushing back to me this morning as I took the train from Providence to Boston to attend the PAX East gaming conference. I'd like to think she'd be proud of me. At the age of 37 I'm trying to carve out another chapter in my career as a journalist by writing about the gaming world. She bought me more Atari 2600 games than I can count, so this one's for her.
Her memory was still with me when I walked into the 2K booth to check out Mafia II. It has all the markings of a great game: Excellent voice acting, beautiful graphics and a storyline about post World War II America than she lived through and I've only seen in movies. I played the demo and then chatted with the PR folks when I was done. They carefully took down my opinions of the game. They peppered me with questions and seemed to want to know exactly what I did and did not like about the game they've been working on for seven years.
As I told them I thought of her.
Anyone can write a gaming blog and lots of people are in the gaming press. We all have our reasons for doing this. Outside of my fascination with this new medium and the worlds it creates, this blog has been a daily exercise in self discovery for me and the other authors here to try and find the links between games and the memories they create for us. More and more as I walked around the convention today and thought about riding that train and playing that demo, I thought of my grandmother.
We called her Bushie (Boo-she). My mother has taken that title now that I have children of my own. Every day she does or says something to let us know she loves those little kids, just like her mother did for me.
It would be a stretch to say that I wouldn't be a gamer if not for the generosity of my grandmother and her willingness to drop $30 on games for me way back when.
But it's true to say my fondness for them would not be as sweet without her.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

The Legend of Zelda - NES

2010-03-25T08:46:00.002-04:00

Link owned my childhood.
I realize I am showing my age here, but I can recall a childhood free of the Internet, online play, or achievement points. My childhood was defined by two buttons only, A and B, no X, Y, LB, or RB. There were no vibrating controllers, HD, or surround sound, and motion control meant the Nintendo power pad, which was a lot more exercise than any Wii-mote. It was a time when you actually had to read the instruction manual, for both the story behind the game and to learn how to play. There were no cinematic cut scenes or in game tutorials. It was in this eight bit world that The Legend of Zelda would come to define so much of my early videogame experience and make me the gamer I am today.
There were so many things that Zelda did first that we have come to expect in videogames. It was the first game that you could save without a password. For those of you too young to remember, before Zelda if you wanted to save your game you had to write down a 20 digit line of code then plug the code back in to restart your game from that point. We lived in constant fear of missing a digit, losing a code, or just forgetting which code was the right one written on a tiny scrap of paper littered with older codes. Some games didn’t even have that; you simply had to beat the game in one sitting. Anyone remember Rygar? I beat the game once, played it all day to do so. The only other time I came close the game froze up on me during the final boss.
The game, despite the limitations of the eight bit Nintendo, felt epic. The music, which I am sure is playing in your head right now, was ahead of anything else at the time. The game had a multitude of different enemies and unique bosses, each one requiring a different strategy or item to defeat. Dungeons had secret rooms that had us dropping bombs on every wall to discover, and when we found one it usually contained nothing more than a riddle that we hoped would make sense at some point.
Perhaps most important, and often overlooked, were the heart pieces. In a time before achievement points, heart pieces were like videogame currency. The first question one gamer asked another in regards to Zelda was, “What dungeon are you on?” but the second was invariably, “How many heart pieces do you have?” Heart pieces became the barometer with which one gamer measured up against another.
Now if you were lucky, and your parents really loved you, you may have had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Every month you would pray the “tips and tricks” section would have something on one of those elusive heart pieces. If you were like me and you were not so lucky (or so loved) you would spend hours, days, burning every bush, pushing every boulder and Armos in the hopes of discovering a hidden heart piece. It is true that you could beat the game without every piece of heart, but everyone knew there was a difference between the gamer who beat the game with 11 pieces and the gamer who beat it with all sixteen.
The Legend of Zelda is the reason I am, what I call, a completionist gamer. It is not enough to merely beat the game, but I must find every item, every hidden room, every secret in a game to be happy. That is why Link will always own my childhood.
By John Schaedler

Army of Two – Xbox 360

2010-03-24T12:22:00.002-04:00

The idea was to play cards and drink vodka tonics. Instead, we wound up playing this game well into the night. It was a weekend night and I had just received this game and Frontlines: Fuel of War for review purposes. I figured we'd check them out for a few minutes and then me and the fellas would play poker. We never go to the poker because both games were pretty compelling – and, in the case of Army of Two, were perfect for co-op play.
Then we got to talking about games and films and the process of critiquing each.
For instance: What if I told you that “Predator” was as fine a film as “Casablanca?”
The hell you say?
Hell yes, I say.
“Predator” does what it sets out to do as well as any film in that genre. In the late 1980s when we were growing tired of cookie cutter action films, “Predator” came out of nowhere with a great science fiction story based on Earth and a ton of pre-CGI action filled with impressive stunts, clever dialogue and a tight story. “Casablanca” is just as flawless in its execution. So, if you judge a piece of art on its ambition, you see that they’re both masterpieces.
In Army of Two, the ambition is to bring the highest caliber of buddy film dynamics to a video game console. The result is a co-op masterpiece. Like films, games should be judged on what they set out to accomplish. This game is meant to be played with another human being – either on your couch or online – and the results are as good as any other co-op game this side of Gears of War. When played this way the game shines. Unlike the original Gears of War – which has a “when you’re dead, you’re dead” philosophy – Army of Two allows your buddy time to find and heal you when you go down. After spending hour after hour saving Dom’s ass in Gears, it was nice to finally have someone come and cover me when I got into trouble in Army of Two.
I remember at the time wishing that improvements for the sequel would focus entirely on the writing and story. Buddy films live and die by the quality of the relationship between the two buddies. Army of Two makes some progress here, but it could certainly be improved.
Sadly, it wasn't.
Army of Two will likely be forgotten by future generations, but I'll always remember it as a game good enough to get a bunch of guys to forget about drinking and gambling for at least one evening.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection - Wii

2010-03-23T17:09:00.000-04:00

Our wireless connection is down so for the past week or so I've been writing on the floor of my basement man-cave. I pulled the Ethernet cable out of the PS2 slim (why is there even one plugged in?) and connected it to our badly beaten iBook G4, now approaching its 6th birthday. All of the gaming stuff is kept down here. One of every Atari system console ever made – likewise for Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. A Magnavox Odyssey II; various Pong consoles. Of course I have an Intellivision, a Vectrex, and forgotten peripherals such as the Menacer for the Genesis and the ill-advised Tony Hawk RIDE skateboard. Like books on the bookshelves upstairs there are games down here I have never played - and just as many I have never finished. When friends come over to play games you would think the options would mean for limitless fun, but it typically involves limitless decisions. Like navigating a Chinese restaurant menu, sometimes too much is too much.
Not for me, of course, because I'll eventually play them all.
When faced with the physical timeline of an entire medium I typically choose to play something obscure. There are games I have to play (for the reviews in the paper and our web site, eastbayri.com), and there I games I want to play – such as the original Halo, which I could play over and over again until my eyes bled. But then there are games - like some books - that I want to want to play.
This collection of pinball classics is just such a game. It represents a flaw I explored briefly in my blog entry on Atari's Video Pinball. The technology of the Wii, while underpowered compared to the 360 and PS3, is still not enough - or maybe too much - to do justice to a pinball game. It simply can't be done. Playing pinball is playing pinball. You can't replicate it any other way. It's interesting that video games, a medium that strives to replicate everything from sports to driving to murder, seems to struggle the most when it tries to replicate one of its own.
This is not to say that it's not fun playing this game. It is. In fact, even more than some of my older titles from forgotten systems this game reminds me why I ever walked into an arcade in the first place.
Gottlieb is no Williams. The tables you play in this game are a bit obscure - Play Boy from 1937 and Ace High from 1957 are among the selections. But the fun is there.
Even in a basement filled with distractions and evidence of my obsession as a gamer, pinball is primal enough to be the one thing that reminds me why this medium is important, where it came from and where (I hope) it will take me.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Top Spin - Xbox

2010-03-22T14:52:00.000-04:00

Eric is at once my best and worse friend. If I was rotting away in a Singapore jail and managed to get him on the phone, he'd come and get me out. But if I want to make plans for drinks on any given weekend evening, he'll say "yes" and then (often) not show up.
He's done work on my home. He was there when I married my wife. He is even thoughtful on occasion, but he's completely unreliable when it comes to making plans.
However, if you nail him down he's always up for a good time.
More often than not that means having a few cocktails at a local watering hole and then coming home to listen to The Pixies and play "Top Spin" on the Xbox. The fact that Eric's Xbox still works is a miracle. It is often forgotten and left on for days at a time, covered in dust and spilled vodka. But it fires up, every time. And we use the big, original Xbox controller. Lovingly referred to as the Duke inside Microsoft circles, the original controllers is huge. If they would have stuck with that controller there wouldn't be a kid under the age of 12 who could play an Xbox game unless they had freakishly large hands. Microsoft came to their senses and released a smaller controller a short time after the release of the original Xbox, but I still think playing with the Duke is the way to go.
Eric's not a gamer, but he's always up for a game of "Top Spin," which is a testament to the universal appeal of this excellent tennis game. Anyone can pick up and play this game. The controls are intuitive and tight and the graphics are surprisingly good considering its age. It's certainly a game that can be mastered by better players than I. I found this out the hard way when I took it online one day and got shellacked by some kid who didn't give up one point. But it's just fine for a couple of guys who want to listen to good music and chat with something to occupy their time between the silences.
Who knows when I'll see Eric again. But when I do, I'll bet we'll play "Top Spin."
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Football - Atari 2600

2010-03-21T08:50:00.000-04:00

The guy next door worked at Westinghouse. He was an engineer. I've known him my whole life. I can remember when I was a kid thinking he looked like the guys at mission command watching rockets blast off. When an astronaut said "Houston, we have a problem," the guy they were talking to looked a lot like this guy. Black glasses, salt and pepper hair cut short, short-sleeved white dress shirts with no-nonsense ties.
And he was smart. In between building bombs or whatever it was he built all day he and his engineering buddies figured out how to hack an Atari 2600. They built this metal box that connected to the cartridge slot. On top of the metal box were two slots for computer chips and tiny levers that locked them in place. As soon as a new game came out, somehow he would come home with the chips. It was brilliant. Looking back now I realize it was illegal and probably the wrong message to send to the neighborhood kids.
But back then I was happy to be one of the neighborhood kids who got to play new Atari games as soon as they came out. His youngest son was my best pal.
And we loved to play Atari Football.
This is at once the worst sports game ever made and the best. It is ugly, clunky and about as realistic as the football game you played in school with the triangle made of paper. But it's also an absolute blast to play. Richie and I played this game for hours while the summer sun rose and fell outside. To our credit, we also played outside. But many an afternoon was spent choosing to pass or run with the three lunchbox-shaped players on the flickering screen of the giant Zenith in his living room.
Madden is the undisputed king of virtual football these days, and it deserves its success. But you didn't need an encyclopedic knowledge of professional football to enjoy a gridiron match-up when I was a kid. All you needed was the ability to decide whether to pass or throw. And if your best friend's dad was an early hacker, all the better.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Mine Storm - Vectrex

2010-03-20T17:05:00.000-04:00

I went to an all-boys Catholic high school in Baltimore, MD. It's called Mt. St. Joseph college and it has educated a few generations of Alvarez boys (or Mount Men, as my father says).
The all-boys drawback was balanced by the fact that one of my best friends, Chris, went to a public school in a waterfront community that was teeming with beautiful girls. It was also home to a fair number of rich kids with their own sailboats and expensive cars. I was no pauper, but I knew the tags on my clothes came from Sears and theirs did not. One of those kids, his name escapes me now, was right out of the rich side of a John Hughes movie.
And he had a Vectrex.
The Vectrex is a self-contained gaming system with its own screen that uses sharp vector graphics. It was a bit of a status symbol back then. Rich kids with important parents had the Vectrex. (The same seemed to be true of the Intellivision.)
While this kid's parents were in Rome for a holiday he had a party and I saw it cast aside in his bedroom. It was dusty and unused. It was forgotten.
I fired it up while the jocks did keg stands downstairs. The Vectrex comes with the game Mine Storm built in. It's an Asteroids clone that is every bit as exciting as the game on which it is based. It is crisp, difficult and rewarding.
And after I passed out that night (Mickey's Malt Liquor if memory serves) I never played it again until earlier this year. Some guy was selling a Vectrex in perfect working order for $60 online. I pounced on it.
And now it sits in the gaming museum I have constructed in the cellar. Like that rich kid from decades ago, I rarely play it. It's as if it is almost too precious to use.
But when I do I am reminded of a time in my life when I was discovering wine and women while still rooted in the arcade mentality of my adolescence.
That's $60 well spent.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Galaga - Atari 400

2010-03-19T18:49:00.000-04:00

I used tho think my brother's friend Ricky was one of the coolest guys in the world. I was probably 8 at the time, and he and my brother were in their 20s. They had cool old cars. They had pretty girlfriends. And Ricky had an Atari 400 computer hooked up to an old color TV in his bedroom. My brother was cool enough to take me over there one night. In fact, my brother Danny was always great about taking me with him when he was doing something fun.
He took me to Skateland with his girlfriend. (One night they wouldn't let him in because he had a Heineken tank top on. I thought he was a badass.)
He took me to my first arcade.
He took me to see movies and, unlike my brother Ralph, he actually paid for the tickets instead of shaking me down for the money Mom gave me for the day.
Danny was, and is, a cool guy. He introduced me to the Atari 2600 when I was a kid. This whole blog might as well be dedicated to him.
I don't know if he still talks to Ricky - if memory serves Ricky was the kind of guy who often was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong stuff - but I remember the night Ricky let me play Galaga on his Atari 400.
Galaga is to gamers what rice is to a sushi chef. If you can't hack it, you might as well find something else to do. This is not to say that I'm a master, but I can get my money's worth out of a quarter.
It's also the kind of game that haunts gamers of a certain age (30s). It pops up throughout your life. When I was a kid and Ricky let me play it while he and my brother were partying, it was a perfectly translated arcade game played on a home console. Back then, that was the highest praise you could give a game.
Years later when it was tucked into a corner of the college game room it was an old school title that was certain to attract people who knew what they were doing. When I graduated and a friend of mine bought a Galaga cabinet for his basement office, I knew it was one of a handful of games – Mrs. Pac Man, Missile Command, Donkey Kong – that would truly last forever.
But the one thing I think about more than any other when I see an old Galaga cabinet in a hot dog joint or tavern is my brother, Danny.
It's a cool game. He's a cool guy. And I was a lucky kid.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

God of War III - PS3

2010-03-18T18:58:00.000-04:00

It's my night with the kids. My wife works night shifts at the ER so I have supper and bedtime duty on my own when she's working. Supper is fun. Getting both of them to fall asleep on my own can be tricky.
Tonight was warm - near 70 degrees in the middle of March in Rhode Island. When I came home from work the kids were playing in the back yard with the sitter. Henry, just 5 months, was outside playing for the first time in his life. He wore a denim hat. Charlotte - just over 2 - giggled as she slid down her little plastic slide only to run around to the back of it, climb up and do it again over and over.
The dog chased the cat.
You know what I mean?
It was perfect.
I gave Charlotte her favorite dinner - rotini pasta with dad's sauce. She always helps me make the sauce. She adds a little sugar at the end, her little hand able to grasp the perfect portion. Henry sat in his bouncy seat and giggled while I pretended his bare feet were stinky. Charlotte couldn't take it. Every time I sniffed the little guy's feet and made an exaggerated face of disgust she laughed so hard that rotini bits flew onto her plate.
Good stuff.
They both went down easy tonight. (As I wrote that last line he started crying. Damn.) While I watched her pull the covers up I thought of the new game I have waiting for me downstairs. It's God of War III. I've played the demo and beat the two previous installments. I've read nothing but stellar reviews so far and I'm sure I will not be disappointed. The God of War series offers some of the best of what gaming has to offer: Near perfect gameplay and level design, stunning graphics, a story rooted in something the whole world can relate to (Greek mythology) and, basically, an insistence on excellence in every way.
As a sworn gamer I should be flying down the steps right now to play this game until my eyes bleed. Instead, I'm here writing this blog entry, and I'm cheating.
How?
Well … This blog has been going strong since Jan. 1, 2010. I've managed to file an entry every day for 75 days. I've written most of them, but I've had help from some stellar writers who believe in gaming and the memories it creates. I am humbled and honored by their contributions and by the readers I know (or hope) are out there. It's not easy coming up with one essay a day about a game that moved you but we've managed to do it. So tonight, as I write about my kids and the little piece of perfection I found when I came home from work to see them enjoying their young lives, I am cheating a little bit. The only way this is about a game is because I will absolutely play God of War III for hours as soon as I file this entry.
Which means I will forever associate God of War III with this perfect day in March.
Which means, I guess, I'm not cheating after all.
Nice.
See you tomorrow.
Kratos awaits.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Wrestlemania Challenge - NES

2010-03-17T13:36:00.000-04:00

For most Americans, Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest weekend event of the year. In this instance, I’m not most of America. While I love Super Bowl Sunday (due in no small part to the fact my mother annually makes at least a week’s worth of lasagna) there is another one-Sunday-a-year tradition that has defined my entire life.
After all, me and the event, we’re the same age. On May, 14, 1985, I turned one full-year old. I don’t remember it, obviously, but about six weeks before this an entire billion-dollar industry was about to explode into popular culture. The days of bingo halls and smoky basements weren’t gone, not for a couple years, but things were changing and looking back, it really is remarkable how far we’ve come.
It’s been called a lot of things. “The grandaddy of them all” is one of my personal favorites. When it (and I) turned three and I had formed the ability to assemble sentences it set the record for the largest attendance to an indoor sporting. Ever.
I’m talking about Wrestlemania – an event that created an industry. An event that used to cost $30 on pay per view and now costs more than $60 in HD. An event that pulls in celebrities and celebrates the magnificent spectacle that is pro wrestling.
A lot of people, they have this stereotype of wrestling fans. Guys in their 40s, living in their parents’ basements, collecting action figures (they’re not dolls) and of course, living a painfully solitary life. But like most stereotypes, there are a million exceptions to this rule. Like me, I’m a college educated guy who spends his days serving The Fourth Estate and reading Melville. I stopped collecting action figures when I was 12, but I still get excited when someone takes a good, clean chair shot to the face. I get even more excited when it’s a barb-wire bat but ECW as we used to know it is gone.
I always did too. Which is why, when I found myself inside Seekonk Lechmere (yeah, Lechmere. It was that long ago) two days before Christmas 1990, I instantly spotted the new Wrestlemania Challenge video game on display.
I ran to my mother, I ran to my father, I don’t remember what I said but I made it clear I needed, not wanted, this game. My mom, I remember what she said. It was two days before Christmas. Way too late to get my message to Santa Claus. Sleigh was packed, reindeer gassed-up. Try again next year.
So, I did what most six-year-old kids would do. I asked my mother to buy it. It’s 20 years later and I still remember her response.
“We can’t buy that for you,” my mother said. “It’s thirty dollars.”
To a kid my age, 30 dollars was the equivalent of entire United States Treasury. Making matters worse, I had also spotted a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II the Arcade Game. The price? You guessed it. Thirty Washingtons.
I was crushed, quite simply. There’s not a lot going on in the world of a six-year-old and learning the one thing you want has come to your attention after Santa has gathered up all your free toys for the year...my God. Give me the Flinstone shaped, chewable anti-depressants.
There was just one, minor thing. For my entire life, I been blessed the two best parents I could ever ask for. In 1989, they bought the house I still live in today. At the time, it was something like $100,000 but my mom, she was the manager of a local Mom and Pop video store and my dad, he was still making his way up the ranks at a local costume jewelry manufacturer. When minimum wage was about five bucks an hour, $30 bought a week’s worth of food. On the type of money my parents were making, a $100,000 house was everything they could afford but everything we needed. It wasn’t much, but it was absolutely perfect for the growing Morse family and my parents, they worked day-in and day-out to make me and my sister as happy and comfortable as possible.
And leaving their son, their first born child, the family namesake without Wrestlemania Challenge on Christmas morning, well, my parents weren’t about to let that happen.
So after I had torn through all my gifts from Santa, which in retrospect probably totalled about a month-and-a-half of my parents combined salaries, my mother brought me one last box.
My hands, they trembled. This one, it didn’t say Santa on it. This one, it didn’t come with some “you better leave me milk-and-cookies” provision. Nah, this one said “Love: Mom and Dad.”
I knew what was in it before I tore a millimeter of wrapping paper and sure enough, there they were – both TMNT II and Wrestlemania Challenge.
And you know how I reacted? I threw both arms up in the air, a game in each hand and I exclaimed “Two thirty dollar video games!!!”
To be honest, there wasn’t a lot memorable about the game itself. It was hard like most NES games and eventually it got replaced with newer, fancier looking wrestling titles on newer, fancier looking systems.
But that Christmas, that moment of my life, I’ll never forget it. Ever. One of my only hopes in life is that sometime in the not-too-distant future, I can get my kid to throw up his arms like an Emmy statue, a film of total happiness on his face.
In the meantime, however, I’ll going to keep getting Wrestlemania every year on pay-per-view. This year, it’s on March 28. HBK versus Undetaker II.
Yeah baby. Maybe I can get my mom to make some lasagna.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Streets of Rage - Sega Genesis

2010-03-16T19:16:00.001-04:00

Heather was beautiful. Stunning, actually. If I could post a picture of her instead of a game for this entry I would. I was a 20-year-old junior at Towson State University at the time and she was a redheaded poet a few years older and a ton wiser. She sat to my right in a film class I took for the hell of it. Each day I would wait for the teacher to call her name so I could hear her voice say "here."
It was well into the semester before I got up the courage to ask her out, and even then it was one of those non-dates that cowards like me go for so as to not put ourselves under the swinging dagger of rejection.
She went for it and, eventually, things went well. So well, in fact, that I spent one Christmas with her family. The evening prior I had said something so monumentally stupid and childish that I was surprised she didn't drop me on the spot. She forgave - but never forgot - and I was let back in. Still smarting from my dumb statement I felt uncomfortable in her mother's house. Moms had always been my strong suit. I fancied myself a bit of a charmer back then and I felt I could be endearing to a girl's mom without coming off like a jackass.
Not this time. I felt slow-witted and foolish. The words did not come. I was Samson with a haircut.
Then I heard her adolescent brother playing with his Christmas gift downstairs. It was a Sega Genesis.
Here was my life raft.
"Mind if I go play a few games with your brother?"
Permission granted. I can't remember the kid's name but he was polite and seemingly cool with having to share his Sega with his sister's boyfriend.
We played Streets of Rage. Any kid who liked Streets of Rage was OK in my book.
Suddenly the tightness I had felt all day washed away. There's no tension when you're beating up bad guys with the kid brother of your hot girlfriend. Just Christmas bliss. And I can think of no better game to play in this situation. We fought side-by-side against the dregs of a forgotten city. We laughed and cheered. Good defeated evil and, I think, I was forgiven by the end of it all.
Heather is someone I will always remember fondly. She has found love and success in this world and I am honored to consider her a friend. I could say the same of Streets of Rage. It was a beautiful game then and it's still a beautiful game now.
And, like a good friend, it will always be there whenever I need it no matter what's happened since the last time we were together.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Star Wars Arcade - Sega 32X

2010-03-15T15:01:00.000-04:00

Everything is better in the first person. How could it not be? You're the person, after all, so why not come first? Writing in the first person comes easier, talking in the first person is a given (unless you're Bob Dole) and gaming in the first person is my personal favorite.
I doubt this was what George Lucas had in mind when he decided to have Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the now famous sequence in Episode IV. Not only did that sequence spawn dozens of Star Wars video games in which you do exactly that, but hundreds more just like it that replicate the sequence in some way or another. It's old hat now, but as a pre-teen climbing into the Star Wars arcade cabinet it was as if someone had built an X-Wing just for me. The vector-based graphics were more than sufficient to up the realism and the first-person perspective was convincing enough to allow me to ignore the half-dozen little bastards lined up behind me waiting for their chance.
Many of the classic arcade racing and flying games adopted the cabinet approach, hoping to up the realism. I never bought it in games like Outrun – just because I'm moving doesn't mean I'm moved.
But Star Wars Arcade nailed it.
Much to my surprise, so did the Sega 32X version of the game. The much-maligned 32X had some quality titles during its short run, and this was one of the best. You'll have dog fights with Tie Fighters, war against Star Destroyers and, of course, deal with the Death Star yet again. The sound is excellent, especially the telltale scream of Tie Fighters zipping by you – and the explosions are first class. Few titles show off the power of the 32X as well as this, and there's even a decent co-op component.
My favorite feature? The cantina music plays while you're putting in your initials for the high score. Nice touch.
There are a ton of fine space shooters released since – many of them based on the Star Wars universe – but this 32X gem is the only one that reminds me of the lure of the video arcade in the early 80s and the feeling, for the first time, of seeing a game through my own eyes.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom - Wii

2010-03-14T19:31:00.000-04:00

"Like going to a Japanimation convention while drunk"
- The Author
Even being the Nintendo chump that I am, I had regrets about owning a Gamecube rather than an X-box or a PS2. The biggest of these was missing out on the Marvel vs. Capcom games. Megaman, the Street Fighters, even Jill from Resident Evil squaring off against the best characters out of Marvel Comics (with the notable exclusion of Ghost Rider). It’s the type of battle royal that’s normally only discussed in comics shops by overweight bearded guys.
Better late than never the Capcom Vs. series finally makes it to Nintendo with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom for the Wii. Wait a minute… Tatsunoko? To save you the trouble of Wikipediaing it yourself I’ll summarize. Founded in 1962 and mainly focused on producing animated television series, Tatsunoko is pretty much the Japanese Hanna-Barbara. Had anyone made a game where Yogi Bear and Chun-Li could steal pick-a-nik baskets from Dr. Wiley it couldn’t possibly be any stranger than this one.
The most normal characters Tatsunoko has to offer look like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers if they’d been designed during the Kennedy Administration. Sliding further into the madness that is Japanese childrens television are two separate fighters with attacks using robot dogs and a masked femme fatale whose henchmen pop out of underground tunnels to assault you with exploding palm trees. My favorite of the Tatsunoko roster is the gold Zippo lighter that transforms into a giant robot. You can guess how little Tatsunoko cares about subtlety by his name, Gold Lightan.
Cheek to jowl with this motley crew Capcom has seemingly delighted in offering up a parade of its second string properties. Sure, you can pick Ryu or Zero but why would you want to when you could play as Megaman’s sister, the star of a zombie survival game that IS NOT Resident Evil or some girl originally out of a Japanese dating simulation quiz game. What the hell is a Japanese dating quiz simulation game? Also pulled from Capcom’s freak stable is the game’s final boss which appears to be some type of demonic Faberge Egg.
Gameplay is no less bewildering with a plethora of flashing power bars, a complex move/counter attack system and the lightest punch doing several billion points of damage. Once I recovered from sensory overload and learned a few basics I was struck that if anyone devoted enough time to plumbing this game’s secrets they could become really good. No, not good like good at a normal video game. Crazy good. Line around the arcade good. I doubt I’ll ever get the opportunity but I’d be very interested to see two master players facing off, artfully trading combos and counters like a game of neon chess clocked to the nanosecond.
For those of us who don’t care about humiliating alpha nerds and obsessive teenagers at whatever multiplex or Chucky Cheese still has arcade machines the designers added a feature far more satisfying than an “easy” mode. In addition to being able to play the game with the multi-button “classic” controller, there is a simplified control scheme usable with the Wii remote turned sideways. Playing this way, with one button each for attack, special attack and call partner, the controls become as simple as those for Super Smash Brothers. While I’m sure if I’d fought an experienced player with the Wiimote method I’m sure one of us would have felt cheated it was perfectly fair for matches against the computer or my equally clueless friends.
The game’s crowning insanity is that it, taken as a whole, actually works really well. Regardless of where they came from the characters are colorful and entertaining with highly individual fighting styles. The simplified control system made the game playable without giving me the feeling that I was just mashing buttons. There’s an ocean of depth to Tatsunoko vs. Capcom if you want it but pains have been taken to ensure the game is not frustrating to the casual gamer. It’s a rare title that manages that balancing act successfully. Personally, I’m never going to Netflix the first 8 seasons of “Gatchmen” or learn the button sequence that performs a “baroque cancel” but I just may keep the game rented for a few longer days than I intended to.
By M. Jacob Alvarez
mjacobalvarez@gmail.com
www.hypnospiralcomic.com

36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples - Sega 32X

2010-03-13T16:47:00.000-05:00

As I continued my efforts to make my post-college life as collegiate as possible, I found myself living in a house with other like-minded folks right around the time that The Sopranos debuted on HBO. Johnny and I shared the top apartment, which was little more than a flophouse for our 20-something exploits in the restaurant/bar scene in Providence. I worked at the newspaper and tended bar at his restaurant on the weekends. Good times were had. Hangovers were the norm.
But Sundays were sacred.
There was a little BBQ place on Hope Street called The Pitmaster. Pretty stupid name, but the guy lived up to it. On Sunday's we'd get a few racks and sides and watch this new show on HBO about a guy named Tony and the ducks in his Jersey swimming pool. If you were not on board with The Sopranos from the beginning it's hard to explain how magical that first season was to watch. Especially the pilot episode. Pilot episodes typically suck. A new show needs time to grow and develop. Not so here. The pilot was phenomenal.
So were the ribs.
After The Sopranos there was golf. Sega golf. John and his brother, Phil, are both fine golfers. Me, not so much. But we were equals on the Sega and equally enamored with this excellent game.
Even now that the Wii Motion Plus makes it easier to pretend you're actually golfing and EA's Tiger Woods series boasts near photo-realism, this old school golf game holds up well. It's is easy to pick up and play and sophisticated enough to be a challenge. I still own it and I still play it. The game represents a style of play that was fun first and realistic second. With no analog stick or motion controls, it relied on a time-tested button press mechanic for the swing and simple grids and gauges for the greens. It was much more accessible than today's golf games - save for maybe Wii golf - and, like the Pitmaster and The Sopranos, it's days are over.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Baseball Stars – NES

2010-03-12T09:17:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve played video games with my dad.
When I was a kid, my family was the first one that I knew to own a Nintendo. In retrospect, I’m sure the system coming into our house was my dad’s doing because when we got the thing, I was way too young to have even known what it was, my mother had no interest in it and my sister was about three-and-a-half days old.
By the time I was got to four or five though, I spent more time on the thing than anyone. I was a kid, it was the late 1980s and we owned a Nintendo. It was perfect. In the mix of hours upon hours spent in front of the TV playing Super Mario Brothers, my dad and I would share the thing every now and again.
We started with Contra, the classic side-scroller shoot-em-up title. We’d usually get a level or two in and then get really frustrated and turn it off. Sports games were a different story. There were some epic match-ups we had that would span the NES and SNES generations. At the time, I needed, not wanted, to win every match-up. You see when I hit my teenage years I gave up on any dreams I had of being a pro baseball player or basketball player, but when I was a kid, all I wanted to be was Tom Glavine.
I wasn’t ever very good at athletics. I wasn’t bad, I was never picked last, but I was never picked first either. In a baseball line-up, I usually hit sixth. My dad, however, he was one of those guys who made it look effortless. He played softball and basketball and volleyball and everything he did just looked like the right way to do it. I couldn’t hit the ball as far as he did, throw it as hard as he did or make the catches he could and to be honest I still can’t.
But man I could kick his ass on video games. Especially with titles like Madden, I would beat him down every time … unmercifully. I’m talking 11 rushing touchdowns in a single game with Emmitt Smith. I’m talking about a glitch that made sure the fake field goal play work every time.
But baseball games were a little different. Yes, I won probably 90 percent of time, but it was never a blow out. Always a close game. Back then, there wasn’t a lot of nuance to baseball titles. You pressed A to swing. You pressed A to pitch. You pressed A to run. So regardless of how much time I spent playing the thing the relatively non-existent learning curve made baseball match-ups between me and Pop an evenly matched affair.
For awhile, we played Bases Loaded. Then we got Baseball Stars, which is considered by many to be the best NES sports title ever.
And for good reason.
As an avid sports gamer, there’s a lot me and my brethren take for granted today. You know, things like create-a-team and season mode. But in 1989, these things were other-wordly. Not only was Baseball Stars easy to play, the new features of trading players and season modes made it fun to play over and over again.
Which is probably why my dad and I played it so much.
But much, much more important than game modes or graphics, Baseball Stars has a direct tie to one of the most vivid memories of my entire life. I had to be six or seven tops. Me and my dad, we’re in my room playing a game of Baseball Stars. My dad pauses the game, asks me if I hear “that.” I ask him if I heard “what.” He said it must be nothing. We go back to the game. Play for a few more seconds. Then he stops the game again. Gets up and leaves the room. I follow him.
When you walk into our kitchen, you can see down a few steps to a landing by our back door. When we come around the corner, there’s a guy dressed all in black running out the door from our basement.
Its 7 o’clock at night and every light in the house is on. Me and my dad, we were talking so loud the neighbors could hear us, but apparently it didn’t stop some idiot from propping open our back door with a bucket and sneaking into our basement.
So my dad, he takes off after the guy. He would have caught him too, except he remembered I was in the house and who knows if there’s anyone else in the basement. So he comes back inside. Takes a look into the basement from atop the stairs.
And then it happened. A moment that has been repeated and a story that has been re-told at Thanksgivings and Christmas dinners for the last decade-and-a-half. Trying to scare the unknown thug who could still be lurching in our basement, my dad looks at me.
He says: “GJ. Get my gun.”
And me, the bright, earnest, good-hearted seven-year-old I was, I respond honestly.
I say: “Dad. You don’t have a gun!”
I said it because the fact of the matter was my dad did not own a gun. Never has. But now, not only did me and my dad know it, the unknown lunatic creeping around downstairs did now too. So my dad descends into the basement, unarmed but unafraid and thankfully, there was no one down there. After a quick inspection, we found nothing was taken. I still live in the same house now and while no one has broken in since, I’ll never forget that game of Baseball Stars.
Especially since after we checked the house one more time, I won.
by George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Donkey Kong Country - SNES

2010-03-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

There are very few people, if any, who will argue that Donkey Kong is one of the single most important franchises in video game history. Not only has “DK” been successful in both arcades and on home consoles through a variety of generations and titles, the character of Donkey Kong is one of the most iconic ever, right up there with Link and Mario.
They even made a documentary about two guys basing their lives on holding the Donkey Kong arcade record.
When I was a kid, with my Nintendo, I was never a big fan of the classic Donkey Kong-style of game. You know, the ones where you play as Mario, leap over barrels and climb up ladders to save Princess Peach. They were repetitive and graphically unimpressive and horrifically difficult. But then 1994 came and courtesy of developer Rare and publisher Nintendo, I was able to become the ape. It would end up selling more than eight million copies. It would also become one of the most famous side-scrolling game evers. There were rhinos and crocodiles and a whole assortment of other beasts.
It was called Donkey Kong Country (DKC).
The first time I played DKC, I was in a department store about a week before Christmas. My mother, she was off looking at curtains or something but me, I was watching some kid take Donkey Kong and his buddy Diddy riding around some snowy wilderness, blasting out of buckets. The kid eventually got called away and I took over. I jumped on an ostrich and instantly, I was hooked.
Within minutes I was pulling my mother away from her curtain browsing. It was the week of Christmas and I was going to be damned if DKC wasn’t one of the first presents I opened. She didn’t buy it for me, not that day. Meanwhile, this kid who lived across the street from me (spoiled rotten by a wealthy grandmother) he had DKC. He was the first one in the neighborhood to have it so in the days before Santa came me and the other two boys from the neighborhood crowded round his TV, waiting to see what levels came next.
Then Christmas came and we all got a copy and we didn’t see each other for a few weeks. I ended beating the game over and over again for as long as I played Super Nintendo. My sister also got in on the action, beating it a couple times herself.
Hoping to cash in the success of DKC, Nintendo released DKC2 a couple years later. It wasn’t bad, but like most sequels, it failed to capture the magic of its predecessor. The same thing can be said for Donkey Kong 64. Not a bad game but not a great one either.
Even with these lackluster subsequent releases and the clunker that was Donkey Konga, however, DKC is a title that will always live on as one-of-a-kind.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

NBA Jam - Sega Genesis

2010-03-10T12:00:00.000-05:00

Do you, dear reader, remember that fantastic scene in "Swingers" where Vince Vaughn's character is playing NHL 94 against the boy named Sue using the Chicago Blackhawks' superstar center Jeremy Roenick? If not, here's another reminder. "I'm gonna make Wayne Gretzky's head bleed!" That scene was my favorite from the film at that time. It encompassed my way of life as a freshmen/sophomore in college. My group of close friends and I played NBA Jam while getting our pre-party on before going out on the town or hitting up whatever party was going to have the hottest college ladies in attendance. I first learned of the game when I worked in an arcade fresh out of high school. At this arcade, there were three huge games. Each one had its own big screen and each one always attracted a crowd. Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam. Eventually NBA Jam made its way onto Sega Genesis and that's where my buddies and I played the hell out of it. There were a few obvious omissions from the game, like Michael Jordan and Shaq, but the game consisted of some really good twosomes from all of the NBA teams. Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning on the Charlotte Hornets, Patrick Ewing and John Starks on the New York Knicks, but for me, the fearsome duo of Horace Grant and Scott Pippen of Chicago Bulls fame were my team of choice. That's not an easy thing for me to say considering I am a lifelong Los Angeles Lakers fan. But, the Lakers on NBA Jam were more like the real life Clippers, just plain terrible. The Bulls team was awesome. Scott was the best all around player in the game. He could bomb threes and dunk on most players. Horace was big enough to block most dunk attempts and he could dunk. I always felt that the best combination of players/teams in the game consisted of one outstanding offensive player who was still big enough to buck smaller players and one defensive stud that could block shots. I think NBA Jam stressed defense more than offense. NBA Jam allowed goal tending as well as gave players the ability physically knock and manhandle your opponent while stealing the ball, an act we lovingly referred to as buck or bucking. The game also dictated defensive style, depending on which direction you played. You could goal tend almost every shot thrown up if you played in one direction while the opposite direction made you rely upon bucking. Of course, you did both defensive actions regardless of direction, but it was sort of like home court advantage (it might have been actually, though I am not sure). If you defended the basket going in one direction, you had the advantage. To score, you had to play creatively on offense. You couldn't go up and dunk the ball or stand beyond the arc to shoot threes. You had to pass the ball, look for you AI team mate, hit the outlet passes and rain home a quick three or fake your defender into jumping too early or late and then bang on him with a massive dunk. When we played it wasn't unusual to see a final score of 15 to 14 or a 21 to 18 game. The way we played NBA Jam - defense ruled over offense. To play against us, you either played great defense and took advantage of mistakes or you got shellacked.
What I also loved about the game was that it lent itself to taunting. With our scores being so low, if you were able to go on a run and score three baskets and hear those glorious words strung together – "He's on fire!" – it was a badge of honor. It was even better if you could get at least one bucket while you were flaming hot. If you had thrown down several seriously massive dunks you might be able to simultaneously back your opponent's virtual backboard and his morale at the same time in the 4th quarter. If you could hold your opponent to zero points in one quarter and you didn't even have to say a word.
Years later, there was a failed attempt at a franchise revival, and I played it on the PS2, but the game had lost something. Or maybe I had grown up and wasn't in the same carefree time (college) to enjoy it, plus I no longer was surrounded by the same great bunch of guys, but the original NBA Jam will always be my favorite game ever.
By Jim Redner
JimRedner@TheRednerGroup.com

Black - Multi

2010-03-09T16:23:00.000-05:00

There's talk that the creator of Black is working on another shooter. Why it's not Black II I have no idea.
With games such as Borderlands and Bioshock leading the charge towards more intelligent shooters, it's nice to dust off a title such as Black and revel in how ridiculously fun and stupid it is.
I played Black like a fiend on my original Xbox about five years ago. I vividly remember my wife (then girlfriend) talking to me about a serious problem one of her family members was facing while I was plodding through the middle of the game. Her voice was like a bird chirping next to a leaf blower. The game was so loud, so enamored with guns and bullets that it was all I could do to turn away. I'm sure I eventually gave her the attention she deserved (she must have made me turn the game off over dinner or something) but while I was playing the game I just couldn't be bothered. It came out near the end of the road for the big black box and was just the sort of swan song the system needed. I know it was a PS2 game as well, but Black seemed right at home on the Xbox. It was big and powerful and looked like it meant business.
The story was laughable, especially the live-action cinematics with cigarettes dangling and tough guys talking about hot spots in the mystery-laden world of military operations. I still have no idea what the story was about, but I remember the guns were given the same treatment cars receive in racing games and the gameplay, while woefully lacking a multiplayer component, was tight.
I've tried to play it a few times since. It has not aged well. The inability to skip past the terrible cinematics make it hard to stick with it, as do the ten dozen other fine shooters that have been released since.
But back at the end of the Xbox lifespan, when I was sick of killing the Covenant, Black made for a fantastic week of mindless gaming.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Resistance: Fall of Man - Playstation 3

2010-03-08T14:31:00.000-05:00

I brought home my Playstation 3 on a sunny afternoon while my wife was at work. I knew I had at least three consecutive hours of gaming bliss ahead of me before she got home. Gamers with no children or spouses don't know what this feels like. The more hectic your life becomes the less time you have for gaming (naturally). But the unexpected benefit is that you cherish your precious gaming hours even more than you used to. Three hours alone with a brand new console was much appreciated. The windows were up in our home and the breeze was soft.
Confidence was high.
And then I spent an hour fiddling with the interface and downloading a bunch of required garbage (little did I know this would happen all the time). The cord to juice up the wireless controller is about as long as a spaghetti strand so I sat right in front of the TV like a kid. Some of the games I brought home were weak – what can I say, I'm not much of a Heavenly Sword fan. Sadness was setting in.
Then I tried Resistance: fall of Man.
If it was a book I'd read it.
If it was a painting I'd stare at it.
This launch title has a fantastic story based on an alternate reality on Earth that is as gripping as the rock solid gameplay. It's a difficult game that manages to stay challenging, not frustrating. It's not the prettiest game ever made, but it certainly made for an impressive launch title for the most powerful gaming console ever made.
And it finally gave Sony a weapon in their Halo war.
My wife got home right on time and I was back in the real world, cooking dinner and then introducing her to the beauty of Blu-Ray technology. When she fell asleep I was back in the game. It's one of those rare games that you need to play until you beat with no other gaming distractions.
It took awhile (free time is at a premium) but it was worth it.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Missile Command - Multi

2010-03-07T13:44:00.000-05:00

I spent a lot of time at pool halls when I was in high school. When I finally got my license there seemed to be no better place to spend a weekend evening. Playing pool and putting quarters in the jukebox was cheap and fun. Short of getting a fake ID and making a fool of myself in a bar this was as close as a teenager could get to doing "adult" stuff.
But we were definitely still kids.
My friend Geoff and I spent a lot of time at the Blue Jay pool hall in Catonsville, MD. Geoff is one of the finest human beings I know. He's a family man, a good friend and a kind soul. I've known him since high school and I don't believe the day will come when I don't call him one of my closest friends.
Even though he's living in London now I still feel close to him.
And back in the day when Missile Command was the coolest game at the pool hall, no one was better than Geoff.
I always looked at Missile Command as such an "adult" game. Not only was it crushingly difficult, but it was about planetary destruction - something that was on the tip of the tongue back in the days of Regan and the movie "War Games." Given its serious tone and steep difficulty I rarely played it, but I always admired it.
A few years ago I stumbled across an Atari 5200 in mint condition with a trackball controller that was still in its box. I got it home and started looking through the games. Aside from the fact that it looks cool and it's from Atari, there are few things to endear the 5200 to most gamers. It's widely considered a failure. However, playing Missile Command on the 5200 with the excellent trackball controller is fabulous. Memories of Geoff beating his own high scores and a young John Connor watching the end screen in the arcade scene in "Terminator 2" come rushing back to me each time I play. It's one of those games that makes a case for the system. If all you ever did with a 5200 and the trackball was play Missile Command, it would be worth it. It's not the finest version of the game available, and it doesn't even look that good.
But the trackball controller is absolutely perfect, and an old Atari needs all the love it can get these days.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Sports Talk Baseball - Sega Genesis

2010-03-06T11:18:00.000-05:00

I’m 25 and I’m getting old.
Before I get into this little blog entry, let me explain this statement, which I know may not make a lot of sense to some of you readers out there. I’m sure plenty of you in your 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond look back at your-mid 20s and think about what it would be like to get back there and do it all over again. You wonder how on Earth I could look be in my-mid 20s and feel old.
Kind of like my current train of thought on teenagers.
When I was 17, 18-years-old, I would play in these bands. We would be out on Wednesday’s playing midnight timeslots at The Living Room in downtown Providence to 15 people if we were lucky, but I would jump around like a lunatic and throw around my bass like I was headlining Saturday night at Bonnaroo to 70,000 screaming hippies. The next day, I’d get up and go to school, have a band rehearsal that afternoon and work a six-hour shift. On the weekend, well, let’s say I got into my fair amount of trouble, the details of which probably don’t have a place on this blog.
It was the typical youthful feeling of invincibility. I could do anything for as long as I wanted and there were no side effects. It was beautiful and glorious and awesome and all sorts of hyperbole. Nothing ever ached and scrapes seemed to come and go like spring rain showers.
Nowadays, my lower back hurts if I don’t get seven or eight hours of sleep a night. I still play shows, but I can keep an ice pack in my freezer because my elbow hurts most of the time. If I go without coffee, I’m grumpier than a 90-year-old shut-in. After a half-hour on the treadmill, I’m sweating worse than James Gandolfini trying to put on socks.
And few things, if any, make me feel older than the current trend in video games to make every title some kind of multi-player online extravaganza. When I was a kid, multi-player was you and three or four friends staying up all night, eating popcorn and pretzels, sneaking onto the forbidden Internet and hoping the sound of a dial-up modem didn’t wake up your buddy’s parents. Winning a game didn’t mean you could brag because another kid in the room might just give you a Charlie Horse or a “Hurts, Don’t it?”
Now, multi-player is Warcraft, it’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it’s Halo, it’s Madden, it’s getting pounded by some pre-adolescent punk from Arkansas who doesn’t have a job and likes to talk junk over the flimsy Xbox 360 headset. It’s realizing that you really don’t know all of Sub Zero’s moves in Mortal Kombat. It used to be that one kid would be the best on the block or in the neighborhood and that was all that mattered.
Now, the neighborhood is the friggin’ planet and if you somehow manage to destroy your personal life and ascend to MMO glory it’s a short-lived and empty feeling inevitably cut short because millions of people who have sacrificed even more of their personal lives are waiting to take you out reminiscent of Oswald to JFK in ‘63 … The pink mist.
It’s not fulfilling and annoying and it makes me want to scream.
So yeah, I hate online multiplayer and yeah, when I have a children, they will probably be wicked good at it and love it and unable to think of a time when multiplayer gaming only went as far as a controller cable could stretch. They’ll beat me at most games and my life as a gamer will probably dry up when I’m no longer able to keep up with the annual advancements that come with every Madden installment.
I guess you could say it all started at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, New Jersey. When I was a kid, my dad was really into softball. I mean really into it. I’m talking 200 games a summer on six different teams and seven or eight games on any given Saturday in the sweltering heat of a New England summer.
One year – I wasn’t even 10 – his team advanced to a regional tournament scheduled for New Jersey.
So, like me and my family did dozens of times before and after, we packed up our mini-van with snacks, our 165-pound rottweiler named Butkus, a couple rowdy, younger players and hit 95 South to ‘Joisey.
Within a day my dad’s team got knocked out of the tournament so we went to Six Flags and did this cool safari where some small monkey ripped the lining off this guy’s windshield. I’ll never forget that. He freaked out. Should have probably paid more attention to those “cars taken at owner’s own risk” signs.
Most importantly, however, we brought along my Sega Genesis. Long before bitter game reviewers (like myself) were bashing sports titles for using the same commentary lines year after year, there was a Genesis title known as Sports Talk Baseball (STB). Much like the name implied, a broadcaster actually said things that corresponded to what was going on in the game.
In the early 1990s, it was mind blowing. Simply and completely mind blowing.
Anyway, with so much time to kill because my dad’s team had been knocked out of the tournament so quickly, the Genesis served as a welcome way to pass the hours before we made the four-hour trip back home Sunday night.
But it didn’t take long before my dad’s teammates found out we had a video game system with us. For one, unforgettable afternoon, I took on each of my dad’s teammates one-by-one. Like a hitman, I notched down every game I won and before the sun had dropped most everyone had fallen to my Genesis-prowess.
Except for this one guy, some older looking fella they called Whoop. About halfway into my methodic dispatching of each and every opponent I faced news got ‘round the hotel that Georgie Jr. was kicking ass and taking names. By the time Whoop came calling, 20-some-odd players, their kids, their wives, their girlfriends and their parents had crowded into our double-queen-bed-sized hotel room.
Somehow, we also found a spot for Butkus.
After a quick visit from hotel security (who couldn’t believe we weren’t a hair metal band getting ready to hurl a TV out the window) the match was on. The crowd was rowdy, the atmosphere was intense and in the background of it all was the odd-sounding play-by-play of STB.
And wouldn’t you know it … I lost in a 12-inning epic. The score was 13-12, I’ll never forget that. I even played as the Oakland A’s, the version of the team when they had Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco and Ricky Henderson doing all kinds of PEDs! It was unbelievable. I put on a brave face, I laughed, I smiled.
But inside, I was devastated, crushed, disenfranchised. Pissed to high hell.
It was the last time for more than a decade I would ever want to play video games with anyone, ever. When I finally did decide to make the leap, my college buddies were playing something called Halo on some other thing called Xbox.
At the time, I had never heard of a sticky grenade. Since then I’ve developed a fear of Post-its.
So yeah, the multiplayer thing has never been the same for me. In the hours before we left Jersey that day, I kept thinking to myself how the hell that old guy Whoop had possibly defeated me on Genesis. This guy was a grown-man. His childhood was over. As far I was concerned, he was practically a retiree. One foot in the grave the other on a banana peel.
Then the other day, I asked my dad, I said ‘how old was the guy Whoop back in Jersey?’”.
He looked at me and he said: "I think he was about 25."
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Final Fantasy VII - Playstation

2010-03-05T19:15:00.000-05:00

It’s the summer of ‘97 and my buddy Joe “Q” (who introduced me to how great the original Playstation truly was) just got this RPG. It’s three discs long and the main character is some guy named Cloud who looks like a total Gen-Xer, complete with seven or eight inches of spiked blond hair.
The first level is a terrorist mission to plant a bomb on a reactor in some city named Midgar. I’ve played plenty of RPGs in the past, but a true-to-life terrorist mission? My God.
Needless to stay, as a 13-year-old boy I was instantly hooked and with three discs of gameplay, it made for quite a summer.
Don’t worry, we also found time to actually get outside as well, playing B-Balll and riding Huffy’ unlike today’s youths who shy away from the sun like vampires. Get off the couch kids. Grab a Whiffle ball bat or something. (And 10-years-old is too young to be drinking coffee. Have some water, or some juice. Too many kids walking ‘round middle school hallways with spare tires if you ask me.)
The game was Final Fantasy VII and while the title has gone on to become what is widely considered the most popular and successful installment of the franchise’s history, we were playing it on the street date before the endless reviews and nostalgia would permeate any and all Internet articles about the title.
It only took a few seconds before we could both tell this wasn’t your grandmother's RPG.
For starters, there were no knights or medieval themes. The world, now known as “Gaia,” was some largely industrial kind of place. This one guy on your team, he even had a hand that was a gun. And it wasn’t blowing magical bullets or some nonsense, it was bringing straight heat.
Yes there were spells and swords, but this wasn’t what I had seen in the past, not by a long shot.
It was, as matter of fact, the single biggest turning point in the history of RPGs. Think about it. Today, we have Mass Effect. Today, we have Fallout. Both are set in futuristic, extremely industrialized settings. In this generation of consoles, the only successful RGPs set in the romanticized 1300s or 1400s (conveniently missing The Plague) were Elder Scrolls and Fable, both of which pale in comparison to the success of the aforementioned Bioware and Bethesda titles.
And if you ask me, it all started with FFVII.
On top of the new setting, the game added an interesting array of mini-games, like snowboarding levels. It also allowed for extensive exploration and on top of defeating the game’s main villain, Sephiroth, there was a second, ultimate extra boss for those who wanted to take their characters to the limit.
Looking at it now, the graphics aren’t anything impressive but at the time they simply didn’t get any better.
More than 12 years may have passed since the last time I played FFVII, but I’ll never forget it. Especially when I spend so much time playing today’s RPGs.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Spider-Man - Atari 2600

2010-03-04T16:41:00.000-05:00

Even when I was a kid I never understood why Halloween costumes were typically adorned with a picture of the dude you were supposed to be. Why can't I just wear a Darth Vadar costume? Why am I stuck in this plastic fire hazard with a picture of Darth Vadar on the front while my cheap, itchy, sweat-laden Darth Vadar mask keeps slipping off my face? (And what parent lets their kid go as Darth Vadar? Sure, he was the coolest. But he was also murderous bastard bent on genocide.)
The same goes for Spider-Man. It's the greatest superhero costume of all time. There's nothing a young boy would rather walk around in than a full-on Spider-Man costume. But, back in the 1970s, those costumes sucked too. Even Underoos wouldn't cut it because people didn't want to see kids walking around in their underwear. (Just ask my parents. They were summoned to my elementary school to be told I had a habit of showing off my Spider-Man Underoos to the girls during gym class.)
The closest I came to feeling like Spidey when I was a kid was while I played the excellent Parker Brothers video game for the Atari 2600.
This iconic game still holds up well today. Spider-Man is rendered nicely in blue and red with black webs that carry him up a building filled with bomb-wielding thugs. The gameplay is easy to pick up but difficult to master. Unlike a lot of early games, failure is not met with immediate death. If a bad guy breaks your web some quick slinging can get you back on the building.
Waiting for you on top of the building is The Green Goblin himself - and he looks good, too.
When it comes to video games, Spidey has been luckier than most of his crime-fighting colleagues. On average he easily gets the best video games. And he had a great start.
Even his primitively-rendered 8-bit costume looks better in this game than the garbage I was forced to wear when I was a kid.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Altered Beast - SEGA Genesis

2010-03-03T12:34:00.000-05:00

It had been a long time since I touched a Sega Genesis in February of 2002.
And a recording studio on Maple Avenue in Barrington named after a popular beer company was certainly the last place in the world I would have ever expected to come across such a childhood relic. But, as the sound engineer me and the band affectionately referred to as “Tom Hanks” mixed our less than mediocre tracks upstairs, all five of us (along with one guy’s girlfriend, I guess you could call her our “Yoko”) were glued to our lead guitarist, blazing through levels of a game that allows players to battle demons as a long-dead centurion who can transform into a wide array of mythical creatures.
It’s called Altered Beast and it’s awesome.
A little background:
In Feb. ‘02 I was a senior in high school, 17-years-old. We booked studio time in the middle of the week. Not only was this my first time in the recording studio but it was the first time I had been allowed to skip school. For the 11 years between kindergarten and eleventh grade I was always one of those kids that got a perfect attendance certificate at the end of the year. It wasn’t because I was some saint. I tried to stay home as much as anyone.
It was my mom.
This one time, when I was in elementary school, I told her I had an ear ache. She sent me to school. A trip to the pediatrician later that day revealed an acute inner ear infection. This other time, I said I had a stomach ache. She sent me to school. I didn’t even make it to lunch before the janitor was throwing saw dust on the floor next to my desk.
She’s a great mom and I love her to death but come hell or high water, I was going to school. At least until the last half of my senior year of high school, after a Christmas Eve acceptance letter from URI arrived. I must have earned it, at least in my mother’s eyes, because I missed at least one day a week for the rest of the school year.
The week my band hit the recording studio, in February, I took an extra four days of vacation. Today, I don’t think anyone even has a copy of the recording we made eight years ago. Honestly, I don’t even think I remember all the songs, I just remember they were loud and at the time that pretty much meant they were good.
But what I do remember is Altered Beast.
In the studio’s basement, the engineer had built this cool kind of “hang-out” room with a fridge and a radio and over-sized leather couches and a Sega Genesis. Within seconds of seeing the Altered Beast cover, which shows a giant werewolf creature, I had the game in and running.
I wasn’t very good at it, but one of my guitarists was. When the mixing was done and the engineer called us up to hear the final product, I didn’t even care. We were on the last level. We were about to beat Altered Beast and conquer the evil demon God Neff who had kidnapped Zeus’ daughter Athena.
We beat the game and while I’ve never played another round of Altered Beast there are few video game memories, if any, that stick out more in my mind than that one.
As for my trend of skipping school, I eventually found out my mother was right all along. I tried the same thing at college the next year and got bounced out faster than Conan from the Tonight Show.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

The Bigs 2 – Multiple platforms

2010-03-02T12:10:00.000-05:00

America’s national pastime - freshly cut grass, the crack of the bat, the smell of hot dogs at the ballpark. The sacrifice fly, the strikeout, the suicide squeeze, and the long ball. It’s the love of the game. The ambiance of what makes baseball so great. The plays that make you leap out of your seat with your heart racing, filled with goose bumps as your team wins the game. Those are the special moments that people remember which bring them back to the ballpark again and again. But what about the other stuff? The eleven foul balls during an at bat, the constant delays between pitcher and catcher, manager visits to the mound that drag the game out just a bit too long.
Don’t get me wrong; I love baseball. I love everything that makes baseball the great game that it is, but yes, there are the times where even I wish I was tuning into SportsCenter to catch just the highlights. So I guess the question is: Can you mess with the formula of baseball?
Most definitely.
Think about a baseball game that focuses on only the highlights of a game. Let’s lose all the stuff in between and concentrate on the high impact and excitement. Lets call it The Bigs 2. The Bigs 2 captures every over-the-top moment in baseball that you love with a twist. How about the dynamic catches? The true speed of a fastball? Or the shear power of the long ball? The Bigs 2 has it all. With oversized, exaggerated players and enormous ballparks that come to life, The Bigs 2 gives you all the drama you want in a baseball game. Yes, I do enjoy a simulation baseball game. I like being able to warm up my pitchers in the bullpen or shift my outfielders depending on who is at the plate but games like that really don’t translate well into local multiplayer action. If you have ever read anything I have written in the past, you know my opinion on how important it is for games to have a great local multiplayer value. Sure you have your online games but there has to be room for games that oblige to multiple gamers who play together locally. The shear enjoyment you get playing with your buddies while in the same room is priceless. The look on there face, the tension in the room and the pressure from onlookers are all quality gaming elements that you can’t experience by playing online.
The Bigs 2 accommodates up to four players to experience the high powered baseball action of your favorite sports teams. I've never played a baseball game that is simply as fun as this game. No down times or pausing for station identification, just baseball at its finest. And when I say finest, I mean over the top. When you have a speed baller on the mound you'd better expect an 109mph fastball cruising through your wheelhouse. Or maybe your slugger is up at the plate and finally connects on the pitch he's been waiting for and launches it into another time zone. I'm talking about big time, right out of "The Natural" drama. Lights will explode, signs will fall, basically you will remodel ballparks with a swing of your bat. But don't get too carried away just yet because you may just see a fielder scale the outfield wall like a mountain goat and rob you of your glory in front of your hometown. It works both ways. Third basemen will barrel into the stands for a foul ball. Talk about catcher/runner collisions at the plate? You better be wearing your helmet. This is baseball on the juice and that's a good thing. Even though it may sound like a different kind of baseball, it's hands down the best baseball game I've ever played. The over-the-top action and multiplayer that The Bigs offers simply screams replay value. This is a game worthy of your money and a space in your library; a perfect example of why we buy video games.
You haven't seen anything like this since the Mighty Casey struck out in Mudville but this is far from a strikeout, it's a grand slam.
By Stephen O'Blenis

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Xbox, PS3, Gamecube

2010-03-01T19:39:00.001-05:00

The tagline for "Superman: The Movie" said "You will believe a man can fly."
And we did. Decades later this is still the comic book film against which all others should be compared. They simply nailed it.
I could say the same for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The tagline should read: "You will believe YOU can run on walls." The game so effortlessly hands over the controls to the player, so perfectly intuits man and machine, that you can believe in the moment that it's you soaring around the ruins, reversing time and careening off walls and poles with ease.
If not for the recommendation of a good friend and beloved Philadelphia bartender (yes, I know a lot of bartenders) I might have missed this title. I'm typically not much for platformers of any kind. But John - who claims he will write for this blog one day - told me this game was perfect. Unlike me, John will not waste time with a bad game. John won't let a game's flaws slide. Suffice to say, if John is playing it it's a great game in every way.
So, you know, I took his advice.
And I still play this game today. It is the best of the last-gen trilogy and far better than the last installment. Even with it's often infuriating difficulty and painful trial and error, the game set the right tone. It knows just when to give the platforming a break and let you kill some bad guys. And when that nearly gets tedious, you'll find yourself putting Spider-Man to shame with some acrobatic feats and clever puzzle-solving.
There are hundreds of great games in the history of this medium, but not all of them elicit the sort of universal praise and respect you hear about this one.
It stands - or sands - the test of time.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire - N64

2010-02-28T09:30:00.000-05:00

Jeff was a bartender at the restaurant down the street. When I moved to Providence he and I became fast friends. It was a nice joint with good food and live jazz on the weekends. When I wasn't drinking there, writing stories for the newspaper or kicking around my new city, I was researching this new Nintendo system that was boasting true 3D graphics. I had been out of the gaming culture for a long time. I assumed that a system this impressive could produce only the best games. I didn't know - or maybe I chose to ignore - the fact that every great system plays host to tons of crappy games. I learned that lesson the hard way as I searched for a decent fighting game for the system.
No dice.
Luckily one of the first games I bought was Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire. When Jeff the bartender came by to check it out I was playing the Battle of Hoth section (little did I know how many more times I'd play that battle in future games).
"It looks just like the movie," he said, and I agreed.
Of course it looked nothing like the movie. But the 3D jump was so huge on the N64 - and particularly that game - that we were convinced games would never look any better.
I played that game all the way through in just a few sittings. The Hoth battle may be the best part of the game, but the third-person action/shooting and the always popular Star Wars space battle sections were excellent.
There's a lot of buyer's remorse in the gaming world. I've dropped more money on more crappy games than I care to remember. But this one was different. It was a perfect introduction to this new generation of gaming and the fun I would have with that system. The N64 is still among my favorite systems if only for the reason that – despite a plethora of bad games – the games that were great on that console were truly great.
To wit:
Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Wave Race 64 and Star Fox 64 … to name just a few. The passage of time may have diminished the once awe-inspiring graphics of these titles, but they're still as much fun today as the day they were released.
This excellent Star Wars title deserves to be among them.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Street Fighter II - SNES

2010-02-27T13:20:00.000-05:00

Man I suck at this game. But that doesn't mean I don't have fond memories in which it played a major part.
I was a sophomore at Towson State at the time. I lived on campus with a dude who made Captain America look like a degenerate. He was a nice guy but not a lot of fun. I spent most of my sophomore year with a group of guys who, like me, had about as many female prospects as the nerd character in a John Hughes movie.
But we had beer and video games.
Dave had a SNES and lived off campus. Dave was – and still is – a cool guy. He's also the kind of guy who is good at games. Cards. Risk. Basketball. You name it, he can probably pick it up and master it quickly. I don't think Dave ever practiced playing Street Fighter II, but I know he could kick my ass at it every time. He always picked the sumo dude. I picked Ryu because I figured a karate stereotype would have the advantage. I kept thinking that as Dave repeatedly launched that fat bastard into the air and slammed me down over and over again. I never won.
Not once.
Luckily this was right about the time when I discovered scotch and Tom Waits. We'd play that game - and others - into the wee hours while sipping cocktails and listening to "Small Change" or "Rain Dogs." Sooner or later we'd put the controls down - or someone else would finally beat Dave and pick a different game - and we'd just listen to the music.
I know you super video game geeks out there revere Street Fighter II and I have no intention of cheapening its legacy with this boozy essay. But whenever I see that fat dude – his name is E. Honda - I get thirsty for a scotch and a little Tom Waits.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Mortal Kombat - SEGA Genesis

2010-02-26T18:21:00.000-05:00

In 1994 I move to Charlotte, NC to intern at The Charlotte Observer for the summer. I was 21. It was my first time away from my hometown of Baltimore and I didn't know a soul.
The pay was good and the city was filled with pretty women and good restaurants. Another reporter intern and I shared a $500 apartment in a faceless subdivision. We didn't get paid until two weeks in and, since we both blew our cash supply just to get there, we ate a lot of fried bologna sandwiches. I can remember eating one with him while watching OJ's Bronco on TV.
Yes, it was that summer.
I learned a lot that summer, a lot of which was good. My roommate was the first black kid my age I really got to know as a friend. Charlotte is an interesting city and a perfect place for a 21-year-old reporter to discover if he's got what it takes to do the job. And, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of beautiful women in that town.
On the other hand, I struggled to find a voice there. I was unsure of myself in the beginning, feeling as if I had left all my talent in a suitcase back home that I forgot to bring with me. My mentor - the staff reporter who was supposed to show me the ropes - was a tired man with little enthusiasm for shepherding a punk around the city.
And sometime in July a large, painful cyst developed on my lower back - way down on my lower back.
Yeah, right there.
I had to have the thing lanced by some doctor I had never met and then explain to my editor why I had to miss damn near a week of work because I could barely walk, much less sit in front of a computer.
Man, that sucked.
It was during this week that I ate a lot of Pizza Hut delivery pies and played the hell out of my roommate's copy of Mortal Kombat on the venerable SEGA Genesis.
I'm not much for fighting games - especially if there's any blocking involved - but I could play Mortal Kombat on the Genesis. And I did. A lot. Back then the game's gore content was literally off the charts. I remember the commercial that built up the hype for the game's home console port - some joker yelling MORTAL KOMBAT! and thousands of kids running through the streets.
I wasn't doing much running that week, but I jumped around a lot and sent fireballs into the faces of may an opponent with Liu Kang. I still play the game today - either on my Genesis or on the surprisingly good Game Gear version.
It says a lot about a game that can bring a smile to a man who is literally out on his ass.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Wii Fit - Nintendo Wii

2010-02-25T18:01:00.000-05:00

Getting my wife to play a video game is about as easy as getting the Pope to cook breakfast for Satan.
I’ve tried and tried, but she just doesn’t care for them. So when the Nintendo Wii came into my life I knew it was my last shot. Be careful what you wish for.
I’d like to officially thank the good people at Nintendo for making a “game” that my wife enjoys so much that I may finally have to wait my turn for a chance to play. (And this comes on the heels of my mother’s now infamous Christmas Eve Wii Bowling massacre.)
Wii Fit is actually more of a game than I originally thought. It has all the classic hallmarks of a good game: Challenges, score keeping, goals, a learning curve. However, it is the game’s other qualities that drew my wife’s attention. As a pediatric health care provider, she is suspect of gaming from a health perspective. She is also — like most medical professionals — skeptical of any product that promises health benefits.
She was impressed by the approach and science behind Wii Fit. The game goes into a surprising amount of detail — but not too much — regarding your health and how it is judging you. Its science seems sound and its ability to gauge your physical ability is impressive. (But don’t get carried away. It’s no substitute for your annual physical.)
It’s a useful tool — as a working mother, my wife doesn’t get to enjoy yoga classes as much as she used to. Wii Fit can help. And it’s fun.
After some quick BMI and wellness goal business is over, Wii Fit goes straight into Nintendo’s trademark approach of using fun to entertain, teach and (sometimes) enlighten.
The balance board is incredibly sensitive, not to mention heavy and sturdy. Although she focused her time on the yoga, the game also sports a variety of strength, aerobics and balance-based games that are a lot of fun and get the job done.
If you want to work up a sweat, you will.
And that’s the idea, right? Working up a sweat for an extended period of time while having just enough fun to forget you’re working out is probably just what Doctor Mario ordered to get you gamers (and non-gamers) in shape. Just to make sure the balance board doesn’t gather dust, the game will track your BMI daily and help you stay on track to achieve your goals.
Wii Fit is not the answer to a personal trainer, but it is a fun way to get exercise and plot a course to better health. As other games start to take advantage of the exceptional balance board peripheral, I think you’ll find this is an excellent addition to the growing amount of Wii stuff accumulating in your living room.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Pong

2010-02-24T11:16:00.000-05:00

Was it Arthur C. Clarke who posited, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?"
I was a little surprised when Victor first suggested I submit the occasional guest posting to his video game blog. I'm not much of a gamer. I'm a digital immigrant, but I was born on the cutting edge of the generation shift. I'm old enough to remember playing Pong. Yes, Pong: the simplistic simulation of table tennis. And yes, I sucked at that game too.
Now, many of you may think NES is the Prehistoric Era. So let me peek through the mists of history and legend and try to describe Pong for you.
In terms of hardware, Pong was one box, a bunch of wires, and two knob controllers. There was no cartridge. The software for the game was inside the box. I can only assume it was on some chip, but for all I know, it could've been even more primitive. I was too young to know the actual price, but I know it was expensive, probably at least as great in late 1970's dollars as the latest and greatest gaming system today. And remember, all you got was one game.
Visually, Pong left much to be desired. It was a black screen, a white bouncing cursor, and two mobile, white bars at either side of the television screen. I don't think there was any kind of music, only the tinny sound of "bip" when the cursor bounced off a bar or the side of the screen. Still, this was amazing to us. We could interact with the TV; like magic.
I won't say Pong truly entertained us for hours. It had its place in our play rotation, but in the carefree youth of the 1970's we still ran around the neighborhood; sometimes we even rode our bikes out of the sight of our parents! My friend – who actually owned the only Pong system in the neighborhood – and I liked to build forts in his living room and pretend they were spaceships. Pong, and later his Atari system, filled the role of our mission controls. Using our imaginations, the game systems took us to far away worlds where we battled space aliens.
Sure it seems silly now. But remember, this was also the time when Commodore Vic 20's managed the flight systems of the entire Battlestar Galactica (the original model, under Lorne Greene's reliable command). Primitive computer line animation was cutting edge. A few years later, Disney's Tron really blew our minds with bleeding edge computer generated graphics like the light cycles. "Whoa!" as Tron's distant relative Neo might say.
The world's all changed now. I see preview trailers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, or the brand new Heavy Rain, or even the new Aliens vs. Predators games, and I sit stunned. It's hard to imagine these are the evolution of Pong. Today's games have complex stories, near-photo realistic graphics, and full-fledged soundtracks. You can walk around a fully realized world, and interact with it. Heck, Pong's program could probably easily fit on my smart phone and still leave enough computing power to play a high fidelity ringtone of Beethoven's 5th Symphony when my VoIP call comes in.
That's 30 years of progress, it's magic, and people just take it for granted.
By John Fitzpatrick

Borderlands - Xbox 360

2010-02-23T14:57:00.000-05:00

I've spent my entire gaming life avoiding Role Playing Games. Mostly because I'm lazy and not fond of reading things on a TV screen. Also, I find most of the Japanese RPGs a bit unapproachable. Realizing this is a gaping hole in my video game enjoyment, I'm working to change it. I'm even considering giving the Final Fantasy games a try.
One of the (perhaps) unintended results of the success of Bioshock is that it introduced shooter fans to some simple RPG elements. I liked the game so much that I gave Fallout 3 a try - a game I wouldn't have touched a few years ago.
Which led me to Borderlands.
Of all the games I played in 2009, Borderlands is the one I can’t stop playing.
First, the game is a bit of a surprise. Blending a first-person-shooter with role playing elements in a post-apocalyptic wasteland sounded a lot like Fallout 3. I was doubtful that Gearbox Studios would pull it off. They did, beautifully. In the game you play as one of four deadly scavengers searching for The Vault – which promises loot beyond your wildest dreams – in a bombed out wasteland that is as colorful as it is bleak. In this open world you can stay the path by taking mission after mission that will lead you to the prize, or you can wander through the wasteland looking for adventure or loot. You’ll likely do both. Either way, you’re going to have a good time. You’ll have an even better time if you bring along some friends. The multiplayer package in this game sets the bar for casual co-op.
The shooting is as good as any first-class FPS and the role playing elements keep you coming back. Also, even though this game is set in a desolate land of death it manages to be funny and satiric while never taking itself too seriously.
A steady release of quality downloadable content means this game will stay popular until its inevitable sequel is released.
In 2009 everyone was heaping praise on Uncharted 2. I disagree. I think Borderlands was the best game of the year, and it continues to enchant.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

NFL Fever - Xbox

2010-02-22T15:37:00.000-05:00

I met my wife while I was tending bar at a dive in Baltimore. We had live rockabilly music on Thursday nights. Other than that, the place limped along on a thriving KENO business and the hipster drunks I was able to attract on most nights. My wife would be uncomfortable walking into a TGIFridays by herself. The fact that she walked into this joint on her own was one of many signs that let me know she was the one for me. She was to meet a friend of hers there but her friend was late.
She sat at the bar and I fell in love.
A few months later I moved into her Charles Village apartment. On my first night I brought a bottle of Makers Mark and my Xbox.
She should have known what she was getting into, but she stuck with me anyway.
She worked with special needs ESL families during the day and I made cocktails all night. I'd wake up late, have a little coffee, walk the dog and then come home and take the Baltimore Ravens to the Super Bowl over and over again on Microsoft's launch football title.
Anyone who knows anything about football and football games knows NFL Fever was no Madden. But it's no NFL Blitz either. The game was deep enough to not feel like an arcade button masher and accessible enough for folks who don't have playbooks memorized.
Which means it was perfect for me.
Monday nights at the bar were always slow, so we decided to start showing movies on the half-dozen TV screens that hung above the bar. I used the Xbox since we had no DVD player there. When everyone left for last call I'd pop in NFL Fever and the cook and I would play a few games. He wasn't much of a sports gamer and neither was I.
But no one looking at those TVs would have known any better.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

War Games - Colecovision

2010-02-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

My appendix exploded the day before I was to fly to Orlando with my girlfriend and another couple. I was misdiagnosed in the ER and almost died. It was a nasty little emergency operation that did not go well. A ruptured appendix is no joke. I was out of work for a month and spent most of my time on the couch. Moving was difficult. A nurse dropped by every few days to change the dressing on the wound in my gut.
Oddly, what I remember most about this period in my life (1998) are the games I played while laid up on the couch for a month.
The best of these was War Games.
The girlfriend was kind enough to bring me her brother's old Colecovision (I never had one as a kid). After putting in a ton of time with Donkey Kong - what a mother that game is - I stuck in the War Games cartridge with low expectations. I was happily surprised to find a deep, challenging war simulator that is still one of the best move tie-in games I have ever played. Not only do the sharp graphics do justice to the iconic war room in the film, but the gameplay is tense and exciting. It's a little bit Risk, a little bit Missile Command and a whole lot of fun.
I was on some powerful pain meds back then so my memories of the game are spotty - as was my time with the Colecovision. But the impression was strong enough that I've been trolling the auction sites lately looking for a working Colecovision (they break easy) so I can play the game again.
Would you like to play a game?
Yes Joshua.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Perfect Dark - N64

2010-02-20T13:32:00.000-05:00

I learned to love Perfect Dark when I began hiding in my parents' basement.
I was 28 years old when I took a break from journalism and moved home to Baltimore.
By "home" I mean my parents' home. Not content to merely be a Gen-X cliche I decided to work full time at a busy bar and pay down some debt before making my next move. I wasn't sure what that next move would be, but I managed to make a decent buck slinging drinks and got to spend some quality time with my folks after six years of living in another state. To be sure, I cherished the luxury of seeing them every day.
But living with two inquisitive senior citizens does have its challenges. With a lot of time on their hands they began to take extreme interest in my life. They both run on different schedules. My mother sleeps about two hours a day and spends the rest of the hours "occupying" her time. My father awakes around 8 a.m., has his coffee and then stretches the morning paper out over the next 3 to 6 hours. This means the questions my mother would ask me when I came home at 3 a.m. would also be asked by the old man when I'd join him for coffee around 9 a.m. As if operating from a fragmented hive mind, they each asked the same questions but didn't know that their counterpart was also doing the same. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions:
1. Did you earn a lot of tips last night?
2. How's the car running?
3. Are you sending out any resumes?
4. What do you want for breakfast?
5. What do you want for lunch?
6. What do you want for dinner?
7. What are you in the mood to eat tomorrow?
I had an N64 set up in the basement with a few games. I eventually realized there were only two things I could do in peace in their house: Use the bathroom and play video games.
I did a lot of reading in the bathroom, and my gaming became the habit that eventually led to the obsession it is today. One game I can thank for this obsession is Perfect Dark. I don't need to spill a lot of ink over how good this game is. If you're reading this chances are you know that Perfect Dark is (gasp!) better than Goldeneye in every way. I played this game daily, right up until the day I went to Gamestop to buy an Xbox at launch. Perfect Dark looked great, was packed with innovations – especially the cool weapons – and had the perfect foil for a guy trying to find ways to extend his gaming time indefinitely - bots. You don't see bots in games much these days. Game developers must think we're all online all the time and don't need virtual friends to slay in deathmatches.
Wrong.
The bots in Perfect Dark were good enough to keep me playing long after I had beaten the stellar campaign. I can only hope they're included in the upcoming XBLA release of this classic title. The N64 controller, once revered as a breakthrough, is still great - but I'm looking forward to playing the XBLA Perfect Dark with Halo controls.
Now if only my wife would let me play for more than 10 minutes without asking me what I'm cooking for dinner . . .
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

MVP Baseball 2005 - PS2

2010-02-19T11:12:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve been totally satisfied with a baseball video game. Growing up on titles like Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, Baseball Stars and Bases Loaded, the great American pastime was a fixture of my youthful video gaming experience.
At least until 2006.
In 2005 EA Sports released the final installment of its incredible “MVP Baseball” franchise. Though I’ve spent the last few summers with titles like The Show and MLB 2K-whatever, not a single version of either franchise has come close to matching my enjoyment of MVP. They don’t have bad graphics and there really aren’t too many faults with the gameplay mechanics, but the overall experience of both contemporary baseball titles feels just a little short of complete.
So when my Xbox 360 broke for the third time in three years late last month, I pulled out my Playstation 2 and threw in MVP Baseball 2005, the one with Manny on the cover.
Simply put, it was like stepping back in time.
Long before I was a responsible newspaper reporter who went to bed early and stayed out of night clubs, I was a young man who got into the kinds of non-violent trouble a lot of 20-year-old suburban college students with part-time jobs they really don’t care about get into. Not to get into too many details, but the summer of ‘05 marked my 21st birthday and saw many late nights spent drinking with friends while chasing girls, few of which I actually remember.
But the summer of ‘05 also came with plenty of MVP Baseball 2005 and for some inexplicable reason a healthy dose of Coldplay, both of which have occupied the majority of my free time for the last couple of weeks. I may not be as young as I was in the middle of last decade, but sitting in my computer chair wearing a pair of faded old flip-flops is the closest thing to time travel since Marty McFly and Huey Lewis.
And while the graphics of MVP Baseball may pale in comparison to what we see today, the gameplay is like riding a bike. Within a couple of games my slider was breaking 9-to-3 and my curveball was dropping 12-6. As for my heater, the stinky-stinky cheddar, it wasn’t moving anywhere but straight down the pipe past sweet swings of hickory.
Oh, and the homers, well, let’s just say plenty of virtual fans were leaving the 2005 virtual Turner Field with a lot of virtual souvenirs.
The last couple weeks proved so fun, in fact, that even though my Xbox 360 has since returned, I haven’t touched it. Even with all of it’s bells and whistles the Xbox 360 cannot match the shear of capability of MVP Baseball 2005 – time machine, disguised as a video game.
Oh, and there is nothing wrong with a guy liking Coldplay. It’s good music. Maybe it’s time to get over yourself a little bit and broaden your horizons.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Wii Bowling - Nintendo Wii

2010-02-18T11:30:00.000-05:00

For most of my life Christmas Eve was the most important day of the year. My entire family would gather in my mother's basement for a feast inspired by our Italian heritage but flavored heavily with our Spanish and Polish roots. The table would buckle under the weight of paella, fried squid, perogis (a Polish dumpling), raviolis, fish empanada and more. When I was a kid and my parents were younger it was quite a party. Sangria would flow during the meal and anisette was sipped with coffee for dessert. The kids went to Midnight Mass and came home and opened one present. One year a couple dressed as Santa and Ms. Claus broke down in front of our house. They were hustled into the basement and fed immediately.
When I got older I was allowed to invite friends to come by after the meal. We stayed up all night and left late to play pool at the local hall that was open on Christmas Eve.
As the years rolled on it became clear that my mother could no longer handle the huge meal and all of the responsibility that came with it. On the last Christmas Eve in my parents' basement my brothers and I helped with the cooking. After that, my brother Danny started hosting it at his house.
It's still a fantastic evening.
But it's not the same.
A few years ago I brought my wife and our first child back home to Baltimore for Christmas. I don't know why I decided to bring along the Wii, but I did. After we left Danny's a few of my nieces and nephews came back to the house in which I grew up and we set up the Wii downstairs. We hastily threw together some sangria and started bowling. My mother, already in one of her flannel nightgowns and exhausted, came down to watch.
Then she blew my mind:
"Can I try it?"
Her first ball was a strike.
My mother held the Wiimote like her mother once held bingo markers – waiting for numbers to be called. Before each roll she'd nervously walk in place a little bit, her slippered feet poking out from under the long night gown.
Then she'd roll.
Three strikes and one humiliating game later, my 74-year-old mother had handily beaten the son who writes about video games and two of her college-aged grandchildren.
And once again, there was a party in the basement on Christmas Eve.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspaper.com

Horse Racing – Intellivision

2010-02-17T11:04:00.000-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, may I call your attention to the young man holding the mysterious rectangular device! Draw closer and notice that it is unlike anything you have seen before. Such exotic technology can only be called a wonder.
But wait, does the room begin to fall away? Do you begin to question your senses? My friends, you are no longer the drab urbanites that you imagined yourselves to be, clad in corduroy and stiff, plaid shirts from Sears. You, my friends, are the elite! Cash overflows from your pockets! Your top hats cast shadows on those rabble in the cheap seats. You, my friends, are high-stakes gamblers in the sport of kings, and tonight the rumble of hooves around the track promises glory to the luckiest few — or to those who have a discerning eye for a winning thoroughbred.
It was 1979, and I was 7 years old. With its 12 buttons on the front, two buttons on each side and a magical, silver wheel at the thumb, I held the most astonishing gaming controller ever made – the Intellivision controller. It put the Atari’s single joystick and red button to shame. And I, in my thick nerd glasses and aqua corduroys, was using this magical device to draw a crowd of actual grownups – probably half in the bag from several hours of partying – to play a game with me.
A game. With a child. In the midst of a grownup party. This had never happened before. And it was all through the magic of one of the least-sexy games ever created: Intellivision Horse Racing.
The game itself was simple even by Intellivision standards. Four horses started out of the gate. Two of them could be controlled by players, who raced them against each other and the computer-controlled steeds. The controls consisted of the dial to move up or down, one button for “coax” and another for “whip.” The horses would get tired quickly; you could usually get away with two coaxes and one whip. Any more shenanigans from the jockey would cause your horse to rupture something or other, leaving you to slog mournfully around the track while everyone else was watering their horses and tipping mint juleps.
As a mano-a-mano affair, Horse Racing was a miserable failure. But the real magic of the game came in the betting. You see, while only two players could actually control horses, up to six players could participate in the betting. Before each of the 10 consecutive races, the game was a round-robin affair where each person in the room weighed the odds, sized up the ponies based on past races and decided whether to choose an easy favorite to win or pick the exacta for big money. The green horse looks like the clear favorite, but his last win was a six-furlong race with a dry track. Can he go the distance for 12 furlongs in the mud? How sharp are these gamblers I’m betting against? Should I play it safe with the easy odds that pay low, or go for broke with the longshot? I don’t know, they've been drinking Stroh's all night – they don't seem to be very focused.
And of course, they weren't. At least not as much as I was. But this was the chemistry that brought a crowd of grownups into the living room to play a game with a 7-year-old. As the whiz kid running the show with this rare, new "family entertainment system," I felt like a million bucks. It’s a scene I wouldn’t witness again until the invention of Wii bowling. But corduroy doesn't come in that color anymore, and now I’m one of the grownups.
By Shane Hoffman

Left 4 Dead - Xbox 360

2010-02-15T13:02:00.000-05:00

Zombies, zombies, zombies. Everywhere you look these days you’re almost guaranteed to find something zombie related. People fear that one day there will be a zombie apocalypse where we’ll find ourselves standing together, whether in a mall or local gun shop, and fending for our lives in hopes of a rescue. For years, movies have dramatized our demise by zombies with fun, no brainer action flicks but it wasn’t until Left 4 Dead on Xbox 360 did I realize how much fun it would really be if it did happen.
Left 4 Dead is basically every climatic moment of all your favorite zombie movies rolled into one. You and three other teammates are stranded in four different scenarios and have to band together to make it to the “finale” and escape the zombie ridden escapade. Left 4 Dead is really the first game for me that really embodies survival; and when I say survive I mean teamwork. If you don’t work together as a team then you might as well forget about getting to the chopper. But with every game, there is a twist. You may struggle together, heal each other, even defend your friend from the zombie horde but then it happens: How will you act when you are running to the boat and your friend goes down? Will you attempt to rescue him and put yourself in jeopardy? (Think of everything you’ve been through together.) Or do you selfishly turn away and run saving your own life?
This is what makes Left 4 Dead so genius. For approximately an hour, you and your buddies have been blasting zombies into next week on your journey for survival in hopes of a rescue. The next thing you know you are holed up inside an old farmhouse, cornered in a bathroom, low on ammo and finally the rescue vehicle pulls up. Then it’s decided. Go! Everyone makes a break for it. Jumping out windows, down broken stairs, covering as much ground as possible. Who will survive?.
I have spent countless hours with my friends blasting zombies for pure fun while wondering along the way “will I make it?” It’s the concept that makes this game one of the best I have ever played. You really care about your teammates when you’re playing and if one goes down, you make sure to get them back up. Left 4 Dead may not look like that pretty shiny gem but it’s so much more than eye candy. You won’t find graphics like a Gears of War or Modern Warfare but it doesn’t have to be. The gameplay brings this platinum title to glory. But the best thing about this game is that fact that if you don’t survive; you had a heck of a ride getting there and you can’t wait to do it all over again. That is what makes this game great. The replay value is endless.
In my personal opinion, Left 4 Dead is the greatest survival/teamwork game ever made. Strong words but I’ll let the game do the talking for me. If you haven’t played Left 4 Dead then I highly recommend you get yourself a copy. Even if you don’t have any friends to play with you’ll have no problem hooking up with three strangers and trying your luck at survival. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Four strangers banding together, fighting for survival. Wonder where they got that idea from? Join the fight against the zombie apocalypse. It’ll be the most fun you’ll ever have fighting for your life.
By Stephen O'Blenis

Mechassault – Xbox

2010-02-15T12:56:00.000-05:00

`"It's like the best arcade game you've ever played."
Those words of praise came from the man who would one day marry my oldest niece. He's a photographer, a gamer, and a hell of good guy all around. He's the kind of guy whose recommendations you take to heart.
And his last name is Champion. So he's got that going for him. Which is nice.
Without his recommendation I may have never picked up Mechassault. I had been burned by bad mech games before. I've found them either too complicated or almost unplayable.
Mechassault is simple, to be sure, but it's one of those games that is nearly impossible to put down once you get into it. I found myself thinking about this game all the time, planning my strategy for my return to the planet where me and my colleagues crash landed and encountered the Word of Blake cult.
Mechassault boils down the awesome power of huge mechs to a twitchy shooter that is like Halo in its simplicity. Smooth controls make it so your mech always does what you want it to do. Changing weapons is easier than blinking your eyes. Defensive maneuvers – such as jumpjets and cloaking – are useful and intuitive. And finding your way around the world is easy.
All this would mean nothing if you didn't have a cool world to tool around in and some decent enemies.
No problems there.
Everything in this world is destructible. A lot of games make that claim, but Mech Assault does it so well that you'll find yourself hanging back in some stages just so you can level entire cities. The enemies – from lowly grunts and tanks to towering mechs – are just challenging enough to keep you coming back. (And when you manage to kill those mechs, the explosion and sound effects that accompany the accomplishment are fantastic.) Being an original Xbox game means the graphics are excellent - they still hold up well.
When the game came out I didn't have Xbox Live, so I missed out on the thrills of playing this game online. With those servers shutting down any day now, I know it was not meant to be.
Maybe I'll get lucky in the future, because there are two games from the original Xbox that absolutely demand sequels. Crimson Skies is one of them – this is the other.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Operation Wolf - Nintendo Entertainment System

2010-02-14T09:45:00.000-05:00

It was the late Eighties. My matinee heroes were Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and Bruce Willis. And there in the arcade stood a cabinet with an Uzi sticking up in place of a joystick. Ah, the lovely sidescrolling action unfolded as a cast of thousands of swarthy, Hispanics from some unnamed Central American country (Val Verde, perhaps?) popped up ready for me to cut down in a hail of simulated gunfire. How could any red-blooded, jingoistic, American boy fail to love Operation Wolf?
Of course, the problem was that arcade games cost quarters. And being something of a cheap bastard, I never liked plugging quarters into those machines. Still, Operation Wolf called to me. My brother saved up his quarters to buy a Nintendo. I remember the box of grey and taupe plastic and the rectangle controllers. The system also came with a gun-shaped controller for Duck Hunt. Point and pull the trigger. Could it be any more simple? I played a few rounds of Duck Hunt in my day, but I was never a big gamer.
Then Operation Wolf came out for Nintendo, and I shelled out the $50 for it. I missed the simulated blowback Uzi, but I was happy. The amazing thing for me was how close to the cabinet game it looked. No longer did I have to plug quarters into the machine. I played for hours until one day, I beat the game. As I recall, the ending had my first-person shooter character rescue some hostages, shepherd them through another round, and then jump onto a transport plane out of that pixilated green hell-hole
I went to college about that time. One Friday night I went down to the rathskellar and saw another cabinet game standing there. It was Operation Thunderbolt: the sequel to Operation Wolf. This was a two player version and had two MAC-10 submachine guns sticking up from the cabinet. I sidled up next to the crewcut fellow freshman playing the game and plunked my quarters in to take control of Player 2. Together, he and I blasted away at the African hostage takers (really, could you make such a politically incorrect game these days?) until these newest hostages were saved. And between us, it didn’t take as many quarters as I feared. All that home practice paid off. My wingman was an ROTC cadet. He and I became fast friends and shared a dorm room the next year as well as assorted other adventures.
After graduation, he got commissioned as an Army infantry officer and – soberly -- shot things for real. Sadly, I haven’t talked to him in far too long. He’s been a little busy these past nine years. I google his name sometimes; you’d be surprised what you can find online. He was part of the Army 1st Infantry Division task force that supported the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq. He was widely quoted out of context in the media on the use of white phosphorus incendiary rounds during that battle. But knowing him, he’s probably prouder of his efforts to organize his area of operations for the first free election in Iraq in decades. That was also reported – but not as widely.
By John Fitzpatrick

Virtua Fighter – SEGA 32X

2010-02-13T11:24:00.000-05:00

I've always been a sucker for underdog products.
When everyone else was playing with Star Wars figures, I was still playing Army men.
When my best friends were collecting all those cool He-Man action figures, I was kicking it with Crystar: The Crystal Warrior (Never heard of him? You're not alone.)
And when the gaming world scoffed at the SEGA 32X and looked ahead to the superiority of other machines, I marched right out and bought one.
I've never regretted it.
At the time I was a cub reporter with the Providence Journal – living in a large house with grad students and restaurant workers. We stayed up late, had lots of parties and pretended we were still undergraduates. When I first brought home the 32X it was a revelation. We didn't know it was a poorly marketed albatross for the venerable SEGA Genesis. We just knew it came with a lot of extra wires, looked pretty high tech and allowed us to play the best fighting game ever made for people who don't know how to play fighting games: Virtua Fighter.
We spent many evenings passing around the controller in makeshift tournaments. We marveled when Pai's little hat would get knocked off by a kick to the face. We cheered when one of us would pull off a flawless victory - a "perfect" – against an opponent.
We drank beer and mashed buttons.
It was not an elegant way to spend our evenings, but it was not an elegant game. Even someone who had never played before could hack their way to victory if their timing was right.
Or if they chose to play as Pai. Easily the best fighter of the bunch, her victories mounted like so many quarters at the bottom of an arcade cabinet. Until one day, a roommate with too much time on his hands was able to utter these now-famous words:
"I beat Pai with Mau today."
And what a day it was.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

The Club - Xbox 360, PS3

2010-02-12T12:34:00.000-05:00

Is it my dedication to heralding forgotten titles that drives me or is it the fact that I am woefully behind in my gaming because I can only play for so long before my wife and child reclaim me for their own selfish agenda (such as parenting, being a good husband and cooking things on the grill for them)? Who knows?
What matters is The Club, despite being quickly forgotten last year, is a fun game from SEGA that I don't want you to miss.
What if a developer known for racing games made a shooter? The answer is The Club. Bizarre Creations, the Project Gotham folks, apply the seat-of-the-pants racing sensibilities to this shooter and the result is a game unlike any other I've played. It rewards quick reflexes and gives new meaning to the term "twitchy" gameplay. There is no time to stop and think, no time to hide and snipe, and no time for love, Dr. Jones.
You gotta run and gun in this game, and even that time-honored expression doesn't fully embody the gameplay of The Club. (A side note: Anyone who has played the Project Gotham games is familiar with attention to detail and the clean graphical style for which Bizarre Creations is known. This is also evident in The Club. The opening cut-scenes – in which the characters are introduced – are excellent. The crisp graphics and lighting effects are also a joy to behold. What's best is that the graphics – while excellent – don't get in the way. Since this is not a game in which you are rewarded for stopping to smell the roses, that's a good thing.)
Once you choose a character – I recommend one that's fast – you are put through a series of shooting galleries in elaborate settings with a varying set of rules. There is some variety here, but every game involves you quickly killing as many enemies as possible in a timely manner. You are rewarded for creative kills and encouraged to kill quickly and repeatedly by a combo meter that keeps filling up as long as you're dishing out the death. If you let too much time pass without a kill – or by shooting one of the many "skull shots" littered around the game arena – your combo meter will drop. It drops fast and it's one of the features that keeps the adrenaline pumping while you play. (It's like trying to keep your line tight while you head to the next checkpoint in a racing game.)
There's a skeleton of a story here but that's not why you're playing The Club. You're playing it because it's a fine test of speed and accuracy that rewards folks who like to retry a mission until they nail it. For the rest of us – casual killers, if you will – The Club is a fun pick-up-and-play game that offers a nice diversion from the typical shooter.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball – Super Nintendo

2010-02-11T10:35:00.000-05:00

In the mid 1990s there were few athletes, if any, more famous and seemingly superhuman than Ken Griffey Jr. Long before Mark McGwire ate steroids by the handful (not that it helped him hit homers) and Barry Bonds’ head grew to hippopotamus-like proportions, Griffey Jr. was the great American hope to smash Roger Maris’ famed home run record.
He was also the only real person in Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. Though the title had a MLB license, it didn’t have licensing from the players’ union, which meant real stadiums and teams with imaginary players. One of the best parts of the game was how these “fake” players would be given nicknames so anyone with half a brain could figure out who they were really supposed to be.
Long before anyone used a joystick to determine the downward action of a 12-6 curveball, baseball video games were simple and repetitive affairs. In Griffey’s baseball game, pitches were either fast or slow, strikes or balls. Hitting was also simple. You pressed a button and you swung the bat.
If a batter struck out, they would either sigh and put their head down, yell at the umpire or my personal favorite, snap a bat over their knee. All-in-all, the game was simple and charming.
Including me, there were four boys who grew up in my neighborhood within two years of each other. Every one of us owned this game.
The home run derby was fun and the season modes let you go from something like 20 games all the way to a full season of 162 games. No matter how many games you played or how many times the same music looped over and over again it never got old.
Oh, and you could hit 575– home runs. Maybe the imaginary players in this game were on imaginary steroids too.
By George Morse
gmorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Final Fantasy Tactics - Playstation

2010-02-10T10:20:00.000-05:00

Mediocre graphics, stupid music and super repetitive gameplay.
At a glance, that’s a brief summary of the 1997 Square Enix release Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT). A spin-off of the Final Fantasy franchise (one of the most successful franchise in video game history) for the original Playstation, this game was released in-between the main title’s seventh and eighth installments.
Despite some of its obvious shortcomings, however, FFT is easily one of my favorite games of all time. Why? Because no title released on any console ever has done such a remarkable job of fusing the RPG and RTS genres. While you can level up your character and open up different abilities and spells based on experience, the in-battle fighting system only allows so much energy per character for each turn, creating a strategic element not seen in many RPGs.
The game also allows you to wander back and forth between areas picking fights with random villains for an infinite period of time without having to advance the story. What this means is you can get your team to a God-like level of power before even embarking on the second mission, making the main story line a cake walk covered in carnage and the bones of your enemies.
Yeah, that’s what I liked about it. Forget the main story. It’s something to do with medieval knights or something. I don’t even remember it. But I don’t care about it now and I didn’t care about it then. All I cared about was running over gangs of thugs with my wizard and a monk who could shoot shockwaves from his fists. When I was a younger fella, I lived in a house down in Providence with a few friends. By the time we moved out, I had played the game so much and annoyed my roommates so extensively that one of them hid the game from me.
To this day, none of them have admitted to doing it, but I know at least one of them reads this blog and buddy, I know the truth.
FFT is awesome and while many franchises release spin-off titles that flop miserably, this release is a valuable addition to the Final Fantasy universe. You can play it for months or even years and never get bored, at least I didn’t.
By George Morse
gmnorse@eastbaynewspapers.com

Pac-Man - Atari 400

2010-02-09T09:28:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid all I wanted more than anything was an Atari 2600, just like the one my best friend had hooked up to the one television they had in their house. Unfortunately for me, Rachel lived further away than I was allowed to ride on my pink Huffy, so it was only about every other weekend when we'd hunker down in front of the state-of-the-art 20-inch screen playing Combat until her parents came down the split-level stairs to catch Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs on 20/20. Alas, my dreams were thwarted when one Christmas my dad presented my sister and me with our big shared gift that year: An Atari 400 computer. A COMPUTER. Because he wanted us to learn something about this upcoming home computing revolution he'd read about in Popular Science. The computer came with some kind of drawing program that my dad referred to as a "game," and I dutifully occupied my Christmas drawing multi-colored circles. As much as I tried to hate that computer, I will confess that I did learn a thing or two about programming, mainly because I enjoyed making the computer respond with obscenities whenever I typed the right BASIC command.
I had the sense to save my Christmas money that year and head on down to the videogame kiosk in the local Sears, where I was delighted to find that I could, in fact, buy games for my nerd machine. The first game I plunked down about $50 for (keeping in mind this was some time around 1983 - in today's dollars, that's what, like $750?) was Pac-Man. The ride home in the front seat (this was also before seat belts and kids riding in the back until they're eligible for the draft) of dad's blue AMC Hornet was torture. I think I even asked to jump out of the car at the traffic light 6 blocks from home because I knew I could run home between the neighbor's yards faster than dad could get there on solid pavement. My plea fell on deaf ears and I had to wait out those last few blocks before I hopped out of the car in the gravel driveway, cleared the chain-link fence, and sprinted up the stairs to the attic playroom.
The best part about the fact that the Atari was a "shared' gift was that though my sister was only about a year older than me, her interests skewed toward boys and makeup, whereas my interests were of the ilk to position me for the It's Academic team I would compete on 5 years down the road. That is to say, the Atari was mine alone. This became especially important after I slammed the cartridge into the slot and discovered that this version was BETTER than the system at Rachel's! This Pac-Man wasn't a washed-out blob on a pastel background! The colors were vibrant. The dots were nearly round (round dots - a revolution in home computing, indeed!). There was music, just like the Pac-Man at the arcade up the street that I wasn't allowed to visit because that's where the less-respectable girls in the neighborhood went to smoke with the 20-year-old counter jockeys.
I can't say I know how long I played that day, but I do know it was dark when mom called me down for dinner and I couldn't move my thumbs for most of that night thanks to the joystick cramp I'd grown to ignore. And I doubt I ever got off the first screen. But I was hooked. I played probably the entirety of the next day, and every day thereafter before AND after school, stopping only to eat and throw something together each night and call it homework. It was around this time that Rachel started figuring out that boys existed and that the way to hang out with them wasn't to sit in an attic staring at a 15-inch tv screen with poor horizontal hold. But I continued saving every dollar I could get my hands on and soon had a fairly decent collection of now-classic games: Asteroids, Galaxian, even Centipede (with the roller-ball joystick that I think my dad finally chipped in for one day at Sears after he saw how crestfallen I was upon learning that you had to buy it separately). I never was really especially good at any of them (a pinball wizard, I wasn't), but I could beat my own high scores fairly reliably and that was enough to keep me coming back for a time. Some time over the next few years, I must have figured out that boys weren't entirely gross and I started kinda wanting to hang out with them too, which meant less time spent in the dusty attic playing Breakout. Which was probably not an entirely bad thing. It also meant that the precious twenties from Grandma's birthday cards were destined more and more for the Fashion Bug rip-off up the street. The 400 was at some point upgraded to an 800, and finally replaced by a ColecoVision (a real videogame console, finally!). There was an all-too-brief period in which a boy who actually enjoyed spending time with me also enjoyed playing Jeopardy! on the Coleco (which held what we believed to be the best Easter egg of all time, wherein "Schwarzenegger" was an acceptable answer to all Final Jeopardy questions, as long as you spelled it correctly). Thereafter, the sum total of my gaming experience over the next 20 years consisted almost entirely of watching a succession of significant others unlock all the cheats for the NHL series on PlayStation.
This year, the big family present I picked up was a Wii system, with a 4 and 5 year-old in mind. I was almost nervous about Christmas morning, when the kids awoke to find a Wii controller in each stocking, remembering back to my own thinly-veiled disappointment on that Christmas nearly 30 years prior. I thought for certain that my daughter would cry out that all she wanted was a Snuggie blanket. (A big thank you to the incessant marketing machine that is the Sprout channel; thanks to them she also desperately needs Wonder Hangers.) But after spending a little time designing our personalized Miis, we all discovered that the preschool set likes to box. And play tennis. And do yoga (the Wii Fit was SUPPOSED to be for me, but I find myself waiting in line for it at the end of the day). It's fun, and probably somewhat good for all of us too. And maybe someday, my daughter will wait on the porch to meet the UPS truck carrying her hot-off-the-presses copy of Wii jai-alai that was advance ordered on Amazon. But for me, that first "running through the neighbor's yard to get home that much faster and start playing" honor will always belong to a little yellow semi-circle and a few computer-generated ghosts.
By Jo-Ann Kriebel