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I haven’t posted any new material here for YEARS and I’m sorry about that. today however is significant in that it’s 20 years since the release of the PlayStation 2 game WWE SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain (HCTP) and I would like to tell my story about my gameplay experiences with it. WWE SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain was developed by Yuke’s and released by THQ on October 27, 2003. It’s the 5th release in the SmackDown! series. (The information contained within are exclusively from the way how I remember it, so it may not be 100% accurate.) WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth (SYM) was prominently shown in TV commercials during Monday Night RAW back in 2002, but by 2003 I’d largely tuned out of watching the TVs, so I’m uncertain what kind of advertising campaign existed for HCTP. I got this game for my 21st birthday, and getting back to my dorm room my only goal was to perform the Tombstone Piledriver finisher with Undertaker (the biker one). Except that wasn’t his finisher, and I had no prior experience with any of these games at all. I was unaware of the gameplay changes that were made since SYM, and…

Here’s a list of some of the greatest Capcom beat ’em up games ever made. These were undoubtedly the finest the coin-op industry had to offer at the time. There was nothing quite like the thrill of teaming up with some people to crush some baddies. Read on and enjoy.  Final Fight (1989) Capcom Play System The granddaddy of the Capcom beat ’em ups, Final Fight took the formula set forth by Double Dragon in 1987 and improved upon it dramatically. Unlike the Konami games of the time, Final Fight employed a high degree of precision in executing the extensive breadth of moves that each character could perform vs. mindless button mashing to do random moves. Final Fight takes place in New York pitting the three protagonists Guy, Cody, and Haggar against a large street gang known as Mad Gear. The game employs a cutscene in its attract mode showing that New York City Mayor Mike Haggar’s daughter Jessica has been kidnapped by the gang. Jessica’s boyfriend Cody and his friend Guy team up with Haggar to fight the high volume of crime in the city and rescue her. Thematically the game is very gritty looking, representing the New York…

I decided to rank all the Mega Man NES games from “worst” to the absolute best. I tried my hardest to be informative and offer up as many spoilers as humanly possible because the 6 NES games are all nearing 30 years of age. If you haven’t played them yet, I strongly encourage you do so. I put “worst” in quotations because they’re each great in their own ways. Read on and be utterly shocked at how I ordered these. [All videos were performed by PinkKittyRose, because I find it baffling that a human could play these games and take no damage.] 6. Mega Man (1987) Rounding out the bottom rung of the list almost by default (for reasons) is the original Mega Man. Notably overlooked during its initial run as a small time game with one of the most infamously bad box art covers, the game didn’t receive a positive appraisal until some time later. The Blue Bomber’s first adventure pits him against 6 Robot Masters en route to the conclusive battle at Dr. Wily’s Fortress (not yet a Skull Castle). Everything that was frustrating about the later games is dialed up to about an 11 here. Virtually everything…

Google Nexus 7 Box (I might still have this somewhere…) Foreword: As has become something of a Christmas Eve tradition for me over the years, I was faced with a new challenge with my aging Google Nexus 7 (2012). I only have 2 games that I play on either my phones or the Nexus 7: Flow and Flow Free Hexes. Both games received updates that rendered them incompatible with the CyanogenMod 10.2 (Jelly Bean 4.3) ROM I was using, and since those games encompass my bedtime “chill out” ritual, that was major a problem. Upon a bit of research however I made a radical discovery that people made not just Android Nougat work on the archaic Nexus 7, but even an Oreo build as well. (Though I was unable to get GApps to work with that due to storage limitations.) That’s 3 or 4 new versions of Android since the Nexus 7’s debut of Jelly Bean, and what’s even more incredible, is with some mods it can still perform like it came out of the box in 2012. Nexus 7 unveiling at Google I/O 2012. Background: The Nexus 7 has its place in history, and its own array of lore….

Introduction: Valve’s heavyweight Game of the Year receives a mind-blowing high-definition reappointment and expansion for the ages. Background of Half-Life: Half-Life was Valve’s first game produced upon their founding in 1996 by Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell. Using the Quake engine licensed by id Software they were able to produce a horror first-person shooter that provided many innovations such as NPC (non-playable character) interaction, highly intelligent AI (artificial intelligence), and unique operational properties of the game’s vast arsenal. Couple all of these various facets to an engaging narrative across a sprawling setting and you get the recipe for Game of the Year. Released for Christmas season 1998, Half-Life’s influence on the genre was seismic with its multiple iterations of deathmatch and teamplay modes and modifications including Team Fortress Classic and the vaunted Counter-Strike. With the advent of its sequel in 2004 along with the rise of the Steam platform for purchasing and managing a library of games along with interconnectivity with a Friends list to communicate and gather gamers to play together, Valve gave the 1998 release a visual upgrade using their new Source engine. Half-Life: Source as it was called was a direct port of the 1998 game offering…

Well, I missed Maniac Mansion’s proper 30th birthday in September (oops) but I wound up getting the game on November 30, 1990. I would like to state this is not a friendly game to not know what you’re doing. In the pre-internet era as we know it, there was a limited amount of strategy guide material in Nintendo Power (September/October 1990 issue). My mom actually suggested communicating with family via fax for how to complete it. I started with the NES game, not the PC one. It is thoroughly amusing reading the tales of what lengths they went to in able to get it past Nintendo’s censorship policies. Perhaps I can elaborate on that in a future post. Don’t be a tuna head.

Sony released the PlayStation in North America on September 9, 1995. The PlayStation began its life in 1988 as the Play Station (two words) CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. A falling out between Nintendo and Sony ensued after Nintendo backed out of their deal with Sony and sided with Philips to produce the add-on instead. This motion was prompted by Nintendo and Sony being unable to determine how profits would be divided. As an aside, the new Philips deal was how Nintendo’s intellectual properties appeared in games on their CD-i platform years later. Sony chose to manufacture the PlayStation themselves instead. They opted to cater to 3rd party developers more than Nintendo and Sega had previously, garnering the support of the likes of Namco, Konami, Capcom, and Square with the added benefit of the lower production costs for CDs instead of cartridges. The PlayStation’s lower price point compared to its direct competitor the Sega Saturn turned it into a virtual overnight success. Nintendo’s blunder gave Sony the keys to the city to ultimately dominate the market with their consoles ever since.

Nintendo released Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island on August 5, 1995. Shigeru Miyamoto’s response to the overly techy pre-rendered graphics of Donkey Kong Country came in the form of this game which appeared like an animated coloring book. Bolstered by the Super FX2 coprocessor the game featured dazzling scaling effects to go along with its unique art style. Like previous Miyamoto projects, Yoshi’s Island features Koji Kondo’s rich score to amplify the game’s dreamlike aesthetics. Featuring deep gameplay that almost requires you to be a geometry angle master, there’s plenty of challenge abound in an effort to score 100s on the levels. Unlike previous Mario affairs, this one features Mario as a baby piloted by the Yoshi character introduced in the game’s predecessor on a grand journey to rescue his separated brother Luigi from young Bowser. I 100% completed this in 1996, one of my finest feats in gaming. (I hope that game save is still alive.)

Quake III Arena was released by id Software on December 2, 1999, and incidentally was one of the first games I ever got the day it came out. I wasn’t much of a fan of the change in direction to being an exclusively multiplayer game, and I have to say playing the early Test, Test Demo, and Demo Test builds of the game with a Pentium MMX 200 and a Voodoo 1 card were not very pleasant at the time. The map design seemed suspect, and the effort to remove the grappling hook in Capture the Flag, bunny-hopping (turbo running), and overemphasis on balance by making all the weapons weak really diminished how high of a ceiling experienced players could reach. The game was a hit, selling over approximately 500,000 copies worldwide and has been featured in many tournaments and ladders. It had an add-on called Quake III Team Arena featuring new gameplay types, maps, bots, weapons, and powerups. Its concept was widely accepted to the point id Software released more games based on it: Quake 4 (2005) (Multiplayer Only), Quake Live (2010), and Quake Champions (2018).

The Sega Dreamcast was released in North America on September 9, 1999. Its predecessor the Saturn was an over expensive piece of hardware while the Dreamcast employed more conventional technology to reduce its cost. The Saturn itself had almost as poor of a reputation as the Genesis add-ons Sega CD and 32X, landing Sega in an unfavorable position of public perception. It was the first console application of Windows CE, intended to port PC games to the platform or produce homebrew games. This Sega/Microsoft connection is what gave way to the original Xbox later in 2001, just a few months after the Dreamcast’s discontinuation. The original intention was to have cross-platforming between both, but the mighty Sony PlayStation 2 wiped out the Dreamcast before it could come to light, leading to its discontinuation on March 31, 2001. Sega has remained strictly a software publisher ever since, many of their games being released on Nintendo platforms and finally giving way to crossover between the Sonic and Mario franchises.