In a couple weeks, the remake / reimagining of Evil Dead will be in theaters. Will it be any good? I have no idea. The original Evil Dead is one of my favorite horror movies, because while it’s not super serious, it’s also not completely goofy like it’s two sequels.
The launch lineup of the original PSX here in America was generally thought of as a wasteland of awful games that looked really, really good. Toshinden, NFL Gameday, that shitty ESPN extreme games game, they all looked amazing. But besides the erection-inducing graphics, the gameplay was generally absent. I’m pretty sure most dogs could play Toshinden at an expert level. It didn’t much matter though, as no one had ever seen graphics this damn good on a home console. Shit, most arcade games didn’t look this good. So none of us much cared if you could beat the games by rubbing your ass on the controller. At least they looked amazing while we were doing so. I wish I could say today’s game was different. But it was just another case of eye-melting graphics over gameplay that wasn’t much more advanced than a Tiger Electronics game.
Hey guys, remember Spawn? Remember how any single issue of his comic contained enough teen angst for at least four Linkin Park albums combined? Yeah he was really popular for a few years in the nineties when that angsty stuff was sorta new and IN YOUR FACE. Now he just comes off as that one guy you avoid on the bus at all costs, because if you happen to have to sit next to him then get ready to hear a year’s worth of sadness and pain in just a little over ten minutes. And much more exposure than that will have you cancelling the rest of your plans for the week just so you can sit in an empty bathtub and stare at your hands. Yeah that was pretty much Spawn. Spawn sucked.
Greetings, readers! This is Amanda writing the intro because I am sick of being left out of MAN Challenges. And WHAT A Challenge it was this time! It seems that the other writers decided to compete viciously over a game. The “contra” game I guess, judging by the title they told me about, maybe. They had an email thread going and I sort of looked at it a few times and it seems like Billy Holiday and Jeremy P were getting angrily competitive. Over Contra? I don’t even know what that is.
I missed mentioning it a couple of weeks ago, but the Playstation just recently had its 15th anniversary. Now besides making me feel old as shit, it has made me feel pretty damn nostalgic for what I consider the last great gaming-only home console. The sheer amount of games that changed genres forever that came out on the PSX is almost mind-blowing when you sit back and think about it. Most of them having concepts, graphics, and gameplay that no one had ever seen before, but has since laid the blueprint for almost all modern games. Metal Gear Solid, Twisted Metal, Gran Turismo, and yes, even… Toshinden.
So what happens when you make one of the worst fighting games of all time (Rise of the Robots), have received nothing but negative reviews since it was released, and is generally regarded as a joke among gamers. Do you:
or:
Jesus Christ how have I not put Skullmonkeys in this thing before? I am in sheer shock and disbelief that I somehow have never included one of the best platformers made for the PSX – and one of my personal favorite games of all time – on this site. Apparently I have not. Well, let’s rectify this problem real quick: hey guys, you ever hear of Skullmonkeys? No? Well fuck off, because it’s the best damn platform game you never played.
There is obscure, and then there is obscure. I think today’s game qualifies as the latter, as I am the only known person to have ever played it as far as I know. Over the course of a decade, I have literally never met another living soul that has played Herc’s Adventures. Occasionally, someone will think they’ve played it, only to quickly realize they are confusing it with Disney’s Hercules, or some bastard game port of The Amazing Adventures Of Hercules/Xena TV show. And wondering how more people have played those two games, yet never heard of Herc’s Adventures just makes me want to mumble to myself on a park bench at 3AM in the morning. It’s their loss, though. They missed out on one of the best action RPGs of the PSX era that still holds up pretty well over a decade later.
