The 5 Most America Video Games Ever
Let's talk about America. Specifically, America video games. No, not American video games, but America video games. Games that truly embrace the spirit of this country and how freaking awesome it is. Games that barf the 80's. Games that explode for no reason. Games that could have their entire soundtrack replace with the song "America (Fuck Yeah)." It's that kind of list.
Friday Flashback: Batman (NES)
Anyone who grew up with an NES in their house knows that 99 out of 100 times, any game based on a movie is going to suck. Still, there are always the rare, wonderful occasions where the trend is broken and the movie game is actually well-made and fun to play. Sunsoft's NES adaptation of Batman is one of the first examples of those games.
Batman both closely follows the movie and has nothing to do with it. The levels are ostensibly based on settings in the film, and the game has several great-looking 8-bit cutscenes with images straight from the movie. It also has level designs, enemies, and weapons taken straight from Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man.
Friday Flashback: Resident Evil 4
I know Resident Evil 4 is only 5 years old. It still deserves its place as this week's Friday Flashback for a very simple fact: it would be a far, far better purchase than a ticket to see Resident Evil: Afterlife. Currently Amazon has Resident Evil 4 for the Wii 
And yes, a review for that cinematic debacle I witnessed this evening will be coming, very soon.
Friday Flashback: Shadow Warrior
Considering all the hype surrounding the surprise revelation at PAX that Duke Nukem Forever will be completed and published in 2011, and that Gearbox will be doing the deed, it's time we look at a certain FPS game. It's a game with an in-your face hero, who runs around different levels and uses tons of weapons to reduce his enemies to bloody chunks, all while making funny quips while he does it. It's a game where you can find naked or almost naked ladies in various places. It's a game made by 3D Realms.
That's right, I'm talking about Shadow Warrior.
Friday Flashback: Deja Vu
Nintendo was notorious for censoring potentially offensive or graphic content in its games, especially in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. That's one of the reasons why ICOM Simulations' 1990 release Deja Vu is so impressive. This first-person adventure game, in the same vein as Shadowgate, brings some genuinely gritty and dark storytelling to the NES (the game was released before then on the Amiga, Commodore 64, PC, Apple, and Atari ST).
Friday Flashback: Jazz Jackrabbit 2
In the 90's, all the game companies wanted to make their own Mario or Sonic. Usually this manifested in a handful of crappy cash-in side-scrollers featuring some generic fuzzy animal with attitude. That flood of forgettable critters, combined with the waning PC gaming market near the end of the last millennium, is probably why Epic Megagames' Jazz Jackrabbit 2 fell through the cracks and never got the attention it deserved. Which is a shame, because Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is awesome.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a surprisingly entertaining shooter/platformer that combines both high-speed adventuring and tons of gunslinging into one of the best side-scrolling experiences on the PC. The game plays like a cross between Sonic the Hedgehog and Earthworm Jim. You play the titular green alien hare, whose purpose in life is to fight the oppressive hordes of the space tortoises. To do this, you get to use tons of different guns like flamethrowers, freeze guns, and laser beams to blast enemies, all while running at near-hedgehog level speeds through conveniently curving and sloping levels.
Friday Flashback: Shatterhand
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World hits theaters today, and to celebrate a game with an endless stream of video game references this week's Flashback is going to look at the game behind one of the most obscure references: Shatterhand. In the comics, Scott's band was originally called Sex Bob-Omb, but changed its name to Shatter Band, after the NES game Shatterhand.
While it never became particularly popular, Shatterhand was awesome from the moment it hit American stores, from its ridiculous box art of a chubby biker punching the logo with his cyborg hand to its Ninja Gaiden-meets-Bionic Commando graphics. The game was developed by Natsume, which also produced the NES non-classic-but-still-great Shadow of the Ninja, which itself played like Ninja Gaiden meets Bionic Commando.
Friday Flashback: Dune 2
Starcraft 2 has been on a lot of gamers' minds lately. It's certainly been eating up my attention and time for a good part of the past week. To commemorate the game we've been waiting a decade for, this week we're going back to the origins of the game, and indeed the very genre itself. No, not Starcraft. No, not Warcraft, but that's a good guess. No, this week's flashback is the godfather of all RTS games: Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty (or The Battle For Arrakis, depending on whether you're looking at the game's box or its title screen).
Friday Flashback: Commander Keen
This week's flashback is a bit of a strange one, because it's not a game I've played a million times and have memorized perfectly. In fact, I'm not even sure if I ever played it on my own computer. However, it still holds a place in my heart because it helped while away the hours during my high school's programming class. After I finished my BASIC assignments (yes, BASIC was all my high school had), I played one of two games on the computer lab's systems: Virtual Pool and Commander Keen.
Friday Flashback: Descent
Quake might be considered the most important game in introducing true 3D graphics to PC gaming, but it's not the first to do it. A year before, Interplay introduced a title that not only used 3D, polygonal graphics, but introduced full 3D movement into the gameplay. While Descent isn't as memorable as Quake in the history of PC gaming, it's arguably a more impressive game.
Descent is a unique cross between an FPS and a space sim. Instead of moving around floors, bound by gravity, you fly a heavily armed exploratory craft over all three spacial axes. You can fly back, forward, left and right, plus up and down, literally giving the genre a new dimension of action and exploration. Of course, this did give rise to some issues with motion sickness. Over a decade before Mirror's Edge came out, Descent had weak-stomached gamers tossing their lunches in scores.
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