Every inch of this sci-fi shooter screams “even though Japanese developers created me, I was made specifically for American audiences”. This sentiment would later be the driving force behind games such as Breakdown, Dead Rising, and No More Heroes, games that have achieved cult-like status. Smilebit/Sega’s Xbox shooter might not have been perfect, but its steampunk setting and science fiction vibe helped it carve an identity of its own.
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Well, now that the turkey is digested and the Black Friday bargain hunting is done, it’s time to get a start on your holiday shopping. Of course, I’m here to help you get a head start. For the $20 GOTW, I’ve got one of those new-fangled rhythm games that the kids seem to love so much, and for the lost classic, I got one of those old-school style PC RPGs that a select few tend to love.
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The following may or may not be an actual conversation between me and a college roommate.

My Roommate: Yo Will! Check out this book I read for history class!

Me: You actually read? I thought you just played football and lifted weights all day!

My Romomate: Heck yeah! It’s called Romance of the Three Kingdoms! I thought it was some sappy romance novel, but it’s got sorcerers, babes, dudes getting their heads chopped off, dudes chopping their wives up and eating them and all kinds of crazy $#!t!

Me: Awesome. They made some video games about it you know. You select a Chinese general, kill hundreds of enemies, and you even get to ride on horseback!

Roomie: I already know about that. Koei made them and they’re called Dynasty Warriors. So that’s what those games are based on…

Me: Nope, Capcom made them, and it was a pair of arcade titles called Dynasty Wars and Warriors of Fate. They’re arcade games, so they’re a bit hard to find.

Roomie: Awesome! I’m gonna find them right now!
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It’s Halloween weekend! Time to dress up in your costume, scare the neighbors, and grab some candy! Along with Powet’s creepiest games feature, this week’s Lost Classics and $20 GOTW focus on some very scary video games. We’ve got the most recent Castlevania along with an adventure title from the Playstation era. As a bonus, we even threw in some import love. Click below and check out the scares.
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Remember all those old Warner Brothers cartoons with the weird Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson-style contraptions? You know, the one where the ball goes down a ramp, knocks over a line of dominoes, sending one down onto a teeter totter with a lit candle at the other end which burns a hold in a rope allowing a piece of cheese to drop into a mouse cage, making the mouse inside run while powering a pulley which opens a door that hides a spring-loaded boxing glove behind it? Or how about the one where a toy car with a matchstick attached to it rolls down a ramp, striking the match lit, then lighting a small firecracker which sends a small rock flying on top of a button which activated a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box that bumps a wooden plank holding a small glass of water which knocks over and pours into a measuring cup which then gets heavy enough to activate a catapult that flings a bomb at the unwitting target? Ever wondered how cool it would be to actually build one yourself? Well thanks to developer Kevin Ryan and publisher Jeff Tunnell, now you can. The Incredible Machine was originally published by Dynamix and Sierra Entertainment. From 93 to 95, the series had the same developers, but a different group of developers worked on 2000’s Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions and 2001’s The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions. The entire series and intellectual property was acquired by Jeff Tunnell’s Pushbutton Labs earlier this month.
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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.

When Sony entered the market as a console manufacturer, they began a whole new era of gaming, and much of it was due to the rise of disc-based gaming. Disc based systems at the time were becoming more commonplace due to CDs being easier and cheaper to manufacture. Since they could hold more information than floppy disks and cartridges, it was easy to see why they were becoming increasingly attractive to developers. Even before the Sony, there were already several disc-based systems on the market, although few of them fully utilized the potential of the added storage space and horse power of the medium. The Sega CD for instance, was merely an add-on to the Sega Genesis. Most of its line up either consisted of amped-up versions of Sega Genesis titles, arcade ports, and interactive movies. such as the controversial Night Trap. The Super CD, an add on for the Turbographix-16, had a slightly more impressive lineup (including the highly sought after Dracula X), but it never made it beyond the borders of Japan. The 3DO, which was a standalone system, carried many of the interactive movies that graced the Sega CD, and it also boasted arcade-perfect ports of games such as Samurai Showdown and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. However, its high price tag prevented it from making a huge impact in the marketplace. The Phillips CD-I, just plain sucked.

Around the early 90s, Nintendo wanted to jump into the CD gaming market. Originally, it was Sony who would help them develop the technology that would power the new system. Sony was of course no stranger to gaming. Under the name Sony Imagesoft, they developed and published several games for their soon-to-be competitors (in fact, you may have even seen a couple of them as Lost Classics). However, the deal would fall through due to lawsuits on both sides, and Nintendo opted to go with Phillips instead. That deal would also fall apart, and Nintendo would eventually abandon the concept of a CD based gaming system altogether in favor of cartridge-based the Nintendo 64. It’s because of this reason that many suspect that the Playstation is what Nintendo’s CD system would have been. Regardless of weather or not that rumor was true, it was ironic that Sony, the people slated to work with Nintendo on their new hardware, instead usurped their place as top dog console manufacturer.
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A lot of you are probably playing through one of Maxis’s most recent hits, Spore. In that game, you create a species and take it from a single-celled organism all the way to an intergalactic space empire, designing their buildings, armor, and vehicles along the way. It seems huge in scope, and it is. However, Maxis has done a similar game in the past, called SimLife. In SimLife, players are tasked with creating an ecosystem, complete with plants and animals. They can also tinker with the genetics of the world’s plants and animals just to see what they can create, and even alter the climate and topography just to observe its effects on the flora and fauna. As the game’s tagline says. this game is truly the genetic playground. It may seem overwhelming at first, but thankfully, there is a tutorial to help players get started. Players can either take on one of the game’s scenarios, or just experiment in sandbox mode and see what they can create. Like many of Maxis’s older games, SimLife has been unofficially classified as abandonware, but you can still find a copy on amazon by clicking the thumbnail above. Hopefully given Spore’s popularity, Maxis can work on a sequel to this game. Come to think of it, it would make a great add-on for Spore.

This past weekend I featured a big article on the Nintendo Entertainment System’s most influential games. This didn’t make the list, but it was still an excellent sports title from Nintendo’s early days. Back then, beating Mike Tyson was a rite of passage for any hardcore gamer. Of course, en route to face him, you also went face to face with several fictional boxers, each of them becoming memorable in their own right. Who could for get King Hippo, Glass Joe, or Don Flamenco? Sequels to this game later appeared on the Super Nintendo and most recently the Wii, but this NES classic is the most well known iteration of Punch Out.
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