The beginning

This is the first video game I played, on the first video game console my family owned. Not many people have heard of the Magnavox Odyssey 2. A little known fact, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home video game console ever released. I never have seen the first Odyssey, but I have watched videos of which were pretty funny. I recently hooked up an Odyssey 2 just to find that the system is fried and will not work, I was saddened by this since there was multiple games installed on-board the internal memory. Though I did find a video of the game we all enjoyed the most which was in a 3-in-1 ROM cartridge called Speedway!-Spin-Out!-Cryptologic! The game we played the most was Spin-Out, a simple, 2 car racing game. Some day I wouldn't mind finding an emulator for the Mac, or even the actual system to re-live some of those classic memories.

Helghan?

Yes, Helghan... the creative name for a planet of which the Helghast live in the world of Killzone 2 for the Playstation 3. I'll be the first one to admit I'm not the best at playing video games, but certain gameplay mechanics made this game very difficult for me. If you've read any other reviews of this game you know there is a slight delay when you are trying to aim, which did not annoy me too much since this was an actual feature designed into the game to make the weapons seem heavier for a little more realism. Also to add more detail to the game, the reload times take longer than the average FPS. Killzone 2 is loaded with detail, there were certain chapters of this game I just stayed in one location looking at the details of the ocean crashing on the shore with the lightning crashing down in the background. Playing this game in surround is mesmerizing, there are few games that can engulf you in their world just by fine tuning the sound effects, and Killzone 2 did this for me. I would recommend at least a rental for any PS3 owner.

Dead Samurai

I am one of the many subscribers of Xbox Live. I was very skeptical about this at first, paying for a service that everyone else doesn't charge access for. It wasn't until recently that I've been finding how much I actually enjoy this service, all I really want to talk about right now is the content I've recently purchased from Xbox Live Arcade. This game is called The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, which I've provided a video of below. The graphical style of this action platformer is very stylistic and engaging for the eyes. In between levels there are comic cells that move across the screen which I find to work pretty well, short and simple. The gameplay is simple, yet deep with the combos you can pull off (so far I suck and find the game pretty tough in certain parts). Two player is where it's at though, Ian and I played the arcade mode of the game and you get to battle together to clear waves of enemies. I would strongly urge you to pick this up if you have Xbox Live, for 800 MS points it's hard to pass up.

Back when "Rad" used to be cool to say

So this is another NES game I played this last weekend called Rad Racer. One of the things I find most interesting about this racing game is the fact that SquareSoft (now Square Enix) is the developer. They made an attempt at "3-D" in this game, when you push select, the screen starts flashing in blue and red. I remember using the supposed 3-D glasses that came with the game when it first came out, and it was horrible; so I tried to see if it was my young eyes ... it wasn't. This is the first game I can remember where you could actually select the music you wanted to listen to; I think there were three various songs you could select from. A few years later Square released Rad Racer II.

Legendary!

I'm going to start this off with something recent, yet so far away. Saturday, I relived one of my past video game experiences from the late '80s and watched Ian and Shane play together. A game I used to play frequently as a child was Legendary Wings for the NES. As you power up your character, I remember becoming nearly indestructible as the video shows below. I'd say it would be nice to have a remake of this game, but really there was nothing exciting about the characters (other than the fact they had actual wings and wore blue or pink spandex); in this type of game, they could have just as easily been just another spaceship.

My first blog post

Well I couldn't think of any valid reasons not to do this. I think I'm just going to post my random video game thoughts and know-how on this blog, but we'll see where this takes me I suppose.