Last week’s Maximum Letdown saw yours truly mercilessly tear apart a crap fighter, so this week’s Lost Classic sees me shift gears and praise an underrated fighter from the period. Silly name aside, Metamoqester showcases beautiful graphics and frenzied gameplay, not unlike something made by Capcom and SNK. You play as one of three warriors out to kill a series of monsters. The monsters are huge and tough, but thankfully you have an array of attacks to stop them. You can also team up with a friend to battle them. With only 5 levels, the game is short, but it’s still an awesome fighter. In a perfect world, we’d see a sequel, or at least a home version which lets you play as the monsters. As it is, if you come across the cabinet, you’d do well to plop a few quarters in.

Okay, I admit. My knowledge of the D&D franchise extends little beyond this game and Baldur’s Gate. However, weather you’re a newb to the role playing franchise or an expert DM, this game is easy to get into, and there is much to enjoy about this game. Weather it’s the deep intricate fantasy plot, the ability to craft and customize your character as you see fit, or the MMORPG-lite multiplayer, Neverwinter Nights represents the best of PC RPG games. It’s main draw however, is the Aurora toolkit, which allows players to craft thier own adventures. To date, players have crafted over thousands of mods, and the community is still active to this day. NWN Diamond Edition features the base game, along with the three expansions: Shadows of the Undertide, Hordes of the Underdark, and Kingmaker. These three expansions add even more to the campaign, and will keep you playing for dozens of hours. NWN Diamond Edition is available pretty much anywhere you buy PC games, and Gog.com has recently released a DRM-free version of the game available for $10. If you love PC RPGs, then you owe it to yourself and check it out. Also, head over to http://nwvault.ign.com/ for the latest community-created resources.

Now that the Thanksgiving turkey is digested, and your Black Friday shopping is finished, it’s time for a special 3-in-one edition of $20 GOTW, Lost Classics, and Maximum Letdown! Our first two games on the list are available either at or below the $20 mark anywhere you buy video games, so you don’t need to wait until after any holiday, camp out in front of the store, stand in line at Best Buy, or fight through the parking lot to cash in on these savings. The third game, not so much, but it’s a Maximum Letdown, so chances are, you aren’t gonna want it anyway. Anyway, click below and lets get started!
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Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

As Marvel Comics emerged into the 21st century, they were also emerging from bankruptcy. Thanks partially to the success of the hugely popular X-Men and Spider-man cartoons, along with Capcom’s widely successful Marvel fighting games, more people were reading the comics more than ever. With a sure-to-be blockbuster X-men movie on the horizon, along with an influx of new readers, things were only looking up for The House of Ideas.

There was only one problem: accessibility. With over 40 years of history behind them (60 if you count their years as Timely/Atlas), it was, to say the least, difficult for the average ‘man on the street’ to pick up a comic book and know what’s going on as well as a hardcore reader would. Heck, look at some of these things. Clones? Alternate Universes? Dystopian future timelines? Resurrections? 4 different versions of limbo? Clones of people from alternate universes battling resurrected people from alternate versions of dystopian timelines (and I’m not exaggerating either. All of these things were in a Marvel storyline at one time or another, often times, more than one at a time). Hardcore readers were having a hard enough time keeping up, so imaging how hard it would be for someone whose X-men and Spider-man knowledge came primarily from the cartoons. However, Marvel devised a solution: Ultimate Marvel.

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Forget about Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” campaign. This is how you fight the war on drugs. You, bad ass DEA enforcer/SWAT Power Ranger agent Max Force and your buddy, the equally bad ass DEA agent/SWAT Team Power Ranger Hit Man grab your machine guns and rocket launchers, and arrest every dope fiend, d-boy, thug, and even dog (yes, dogs can be arrested) you come across, and if they refuse to come quietly, then use your rocket launcher to blow the ever living shit out of them, and watch as they explode in a shower of blood and guts. You’ll visit seedy places such as the K.R.A.K. stop, which believe it or not, is a drug lab. Wow, these cats are so flagrant that they’ll put it right out there that they’re running a crack den. Along the way, you’ll either blow up, arrest, or arrest AND blow up heroin dealers, killer clowns, super strong retarded dope fiends who dumpsters stuff at you, and guys wearing mullets who throw hypodermic syringes at you, which are presumably full of their product. You even get to get behind the wheel of your car and run criminals over.

It’s obvious that American Gangster Frank Lucas doesn’t run this drug cartel, and your main enemy is a remarkably evil bastard named Mr Big, a huge head in a wheel chair. When you beat him, he turns into a demonic robo-skull-snake thingy which you also have to kill. This was ported to Nintendo thanks to Acclaim. In a hint of irony, the NES version was promoted as the first NES game with a strong anti-drug message…yet all references to drugs were removed. Even the K.R.A.K stop was changed to K.W.A.K stop. Oddly enough, the blood and gore was still retained. Of course this was one of the many games that were re-released on the Midway Arcade Treasures compilations. The main theme is even easy to hum along to as well.

Narc was the first game that bought a real solution to the drug problem facing our nation: dress up like a Power Ranger, grab your guns, get behind the wheel of your corvette, and kill everything that moves, including dogs, hippies, and morbidly obese heads stuck in wheel chairs that turn into giant demon robo-snake skull heads after taking enough damage. It’s just too bad that Midway’s 2005 attempt at a remake was nowhere near as interesting (or original) as this classic.

Fun Fact: Narc’s Max Force was featured in the Power Team animated series, which was Acclaim’s answer to Captain N. The series centered around a teenager named Johnny Arcade as he commands a team of semi-popular characters from Acclaim Video games such as Wizards and Warriors.

Note: This is also coming to Playstation 3.
The sequel to 2007’s sci-fi role playing masterpiece, Mass Effect 2 once again raises the bar for RPGs. Set two years after the events of the original Mass Effect, you once again step into the shoes of Commander Shepard as he/she joins the organization Cerberus, an underground organization dedicated to protecting humanity at any cost. An all new alien menace is abducting entire human colonies, so Shepard has been tasked with putting together a team of bad-ass space mercenaries and stopping them. However, stakes are high, and many say that this is a suicide mission.
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From the ‘so bad it’s good’ department comes Blood Warriors. Developed by Japanese company Kaneko, Blood Warriors was one of the many fighting games that sprung up during the 90s that attempted to cash in on the popularity of Mortal Kombat. Now granted, it’s still a pretty crappy game, but it’s like Super Street Fighter 4 compared to games such as Way of the Warrior and Survival Arts. It does the “digitized actors and bloody graphics” routine as expected, and of course the localization, to say the least, is lacking. Playing as one of 9 stereotypical Japanese warriors (the cast features such ground breaking character designs as a samurai, a ninja, a female ninja, and a Kabuki Warrior, who, like all other Kabuki Warriors in fighting games, attacks enemies with his hair), you beat the crap out of each other in 2 rounds. If you win the match, you can pull off a fatality by the press of one button! Hay, one-button fatalities! That’s one improvement Blood Warriors has over Mortal Kombat! Too bad there isn’t much else to rave about. Well, the character costumes are improved over all the other Mortal Kombat ripoffs at the time. That’s not saying that they are very good, but at least they are better than say, Blood Storm’s mongloid Running Man characters. It’s one of the rarest arcade games in the world, so however you can play it, you should play it. It’s almost like the fighting game equivalent of an Ed Wood movie.

The name Halo has become synonymous with Xbox. Ever since Halo 2’s non-ending, fans have waited for 3 years straight for Bungie to finish the fight, and this sequel does not disappoint. Taking strides forward in both single player and multiplayer, Halo 3 closes out the trilogy in style and it gave players plenty of reasons to keep it in thier consoles long after they are finished with the campaign. Well, at least until Reach came out.
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