Star Gladiator

The best weapons-based fighting game is Star Gladiator, at least in terms of what the 32-bit era had to offer. Don't be persuaded by Soul Blade just because it’s the precursor to the magisterial Soul Calibur; Capcom's Star Gladiator is the superior game. Star Gladiator Episode I: Final Crusade, as the game’s title somewhat oxymoronically runs in full, has the distinction of being the first polygonal fighting game developed by Capcom in-house, and in 1996, we were fortunate enough to be graced by a PS1 port.

Space Sasquatch vs. Pseudo-Ryu

Set in a far-future fantasy, Star Gladiator Episode I is a one-on-one fighter etched out of what is evidently a larger space opera backdrop. As the title and subtitle would suggest, the game none too subtly emulates the Star Wars aesthetic. This was to be expected, though, as a well-circulated rumor has it that Capcom was originally supposed to be the developer of an official Star Wars versus fighter around the same time in the mid-nineties, until LucasArts eventually decided to attempt such a game themselves. Despite the lack of license, George Lucas’ virtuosic vision of staggering genius heavily shows through in Star Gladiator. Perhaps the most blatant arrogation is the character Gamof, a Wookie-like space-sasquatch who brays like Chewie at the moment of victory and defeat. The game's cover-boy Hayato, who readers may be familiar with given his appearance in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, is the confluence of Ryu and Luke Skywalker. From the former he bears the headband; from the latter he bears a light saber (or "plasma sword", as per the title of the eventual Dreamcast-based sequel). There are a few original characters too, among them Rimgal, the space dinosaur, Zelkin, a space blue jay, and Saturn, a grinning, green-skinned cone-head. Perhaps most puzzling is the proto-boss Gore, a levitating, warbling, macro-brained humanoid with curl-toed shoes who is billed from "Indonesia", for some reason.

This multi-specific cast of characters does 3D battle on a variety of richly drawn (if not polygonal) planets, matching a variety of light-saber surrogates against one another—plasma axes, plasma rapiers, and even plasma yo-yos. A little bit of leisurely button-mashing and you'll have braved the playable characters, setting you up for a showdown against Bilstein, the final boss. He'll use up more than a few of your continues, what with his imposing frame, all-black outfit, and phallic grill-mouthed helmet/mask combo. As you have already figured out, Bilstein is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Darth Vader. Is this degree of appropriation problematic? Not in the least, considering how appallingly executed and clunky the eventual licensed Star Wars fighting game (weapons-based, no less) Masters of Teras Kasi turned out to be. Beating Bilstein actually feels more satisfying than downing Darth Vader in Teras Kasi, not only because the LucasArts game is pure feculence, but also because you have to beat it on “Jedi” (that is, “impossible”) difficulty to unlock Anakin Skywalker gone bad. Don't waste your time with Teras Kasi; buy the unapologetic knock-off instead.

In short, Star Gladiator does Star Wars far better than Teras Kasi ever could. In view of the exemplary gameplay and the barefaced but ultimately workable plagiarism from the greatest marketing force of all time, Star Gladiator is a must-find.

MLB 2003

Fans of baseball and Aristotelian poetics are well acquainted with the story of Barry Bonds. He started as the lean, spry base-stealing son-of-a-big-leaguer, and then evolved rather abruptly into a 240-pound behemoth. In 2001, Bonds destroyed Mark McGwire's three-year old homerun record by slamming 73 round-trippers. Of course, Bonds was by this point on enough Human Growth Hormone to fell a Clydesdale…his singular flaw. Nonetheless, he embodied sheer power in its most hulking, testicularly-shriveled incarnation. Though he sullied the baseball record books (at least from the perspective of a normal man), in 2001 he truly embodied the spirit of America—superlative success by any means necessary, transcending common definitions of humanity and morality in the process.

By contrast, 989’s MLB series, perennially released for the PlayStation, was by no means superlative. The gameplay was solid, though the graphics were humdrum, the animations leaving something to be desired. There were a few years here and there in which MLB was the better PS baseball game, depending on whether EA's streaky Triple Play offering was a hit or a miss. That said, the MLB games did nothing to challenge the supremacy of Acclaim's All-Star Baseball series for N64, which was the more robust simulation in terms of both gameplay and graphics. By the 360/PS3 era, once EA had lost the MLB license to 2K Sports, MLB held out as the dark-horse candidate and would eventually become the de facto go-to baseball game year after year as The Show, a role it never assumed in its 32-bit iterations. That said, every year in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the MLB series could be counted on to turn in a competent simulation of baseball.

You may be asking: Why should any of these early MLB games be noteworthy? What does this have to do with Barry Bonds? The answer to both questions is MLB 2003. The 2003 offering was made for the 2002 season and therefore based on 2001 stats (don't ask), so in this game, Bonds brings to the dish the power of 73 steroid-aided homeruns. There are two swing types in the MLB games, contact and power, and if you use the latter as Bonds in 2003 and put the bat on the ball, you've got about a 50/50 chance of putting said ball in the right-field seats. In short, you can jack dingers like nobody's business. Play a full season, and you'll have Barry in triple digits for homers. It's sheer domination. It never stops feeling good; in fact, the one-man slugfest helps you forget that you're playing a mediocre PS1 baseball game that hasn't aged well.

Don't get your correspondent wrong: Barry Bonds ruined baseball. He's damaged the record books—or at least its homerun record section, marring it with asterisks and footnotes. But in terms of sheer video game power, the processors of MLB 2003 know no steroids and failed drug tests, so Bond’s in-game avatar is clean and pure. What we are left with is the closest simulation of a genuine 73 homerun hitter as we will ever know. If nothing else, Bonds has left a video game legacy.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so harsh on Barry Bonds. Perhaps his legendary (enhanced) performance in the real-life national pastime is as laudable as that in the virtual one as depicted in MLB 2003. After all, isn't it fundamentally American to slash a tear in the fabric of America itself and expect praise for it? In that sense, Barry Bonds is one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

MVP Baseball 2004

Electronic Arts, while legendary in the sports genre throughout the 1990s on account of perennial favorites like the Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL series, could never quite get baseball right. While it boasted the best in football, basketball and hockey, EA failed to hit the grand slam with a great baseball sim. EA’s first foray into the national pastime was Tony La Russa’s Baseball, a multiplatform series which, like its namesake, was competent but lacked personality. EA tried again with MLBPA Baseball in 1994, but the game proved unengaging in view of its cartoonish graphics, lack of major league teams, and blustery gameplay. Giving up on the MLBPA line, EA soon after launched Triple Play Baseball, a capable simulation with quality graphics and the immersive EA feel that had made the company's other sports titles stand out. However, the 16-Bit Triple Play offerings also lacked the MLB license, and were buggy. (If you had, for example, a runner on first who had rounded second before a fly ball had been caught, you could return to the bag by leaving the base-paths and running across the infield grass.) EA kept Triple Play around for the length of the N64/PlayStation era, but the games gradually declined in quality, becoming increasingly arcadey over the years. The last of the Triple Play offerings for PS, N64, and PS2 have not aged favorably.

Three strikes did not make an out for EA, however, and the company inaugurated its fourth attempt at a baseball franchise with MVP Baseball 2003. The game featured very good graphics and a meter-based pitching and fielding mechanic, adding an unprecedented level of depth to aspects of baseball that were typically underdeveloped in even the most thoroughgoing simulations to that point. MVP 2003 was still far from perfect, though: just listen for the excessively woody, wallopy bat-on-ball sound effect and you'll quickly understand why the game is best enjoyed with the volume muted.

The next year, though, EA finally delivered its long-awaited baseball masterpiece. MVP Baseball 2004 kept all the positive features of its predecessor while polishing the presentation. The result was one of the most beautiful representations of America's pastime in any artistic medium. The confines are comely, with lovingly rendered major league stadiums, chatter-friendly minor league parks and even some classic old-timey ball-yards. As for gameplay, MVP 2004 segues from pitcher-batter duels to making the putout to slow-motion replays with a silky smoothness, transforming this sport commonly criticized for its glacial pace into a delightfully breezy visual and tactile experience. Every time you go yard, you feel it in your forearms. And you'll go yard a lot, as the game is generous with the homeruns; that said, MVP Baseball 2004 never feels like anything other than a straight-laced simulation.

If you’re looking for a better baseball game than MVP 2004, you’re really only left with the following year's MVP 2005. Even with the more powerful systems that came along in subsequent years and decades, few baseball games since have even approached these two EA offerings in quality. While MVP 2005 is the superior version, your correspondent confesses a special partiality for MVP 2004. It is, after all, the last game in which you can play as his beloved Montreal Expos, the only means by which you can still sky a towering blast into the bone-white ceiling of that major league mausoleum Stade Olympique while decked in blue pinstripes. On those grounds alone, MVP Baseball 2004 will never, for your correspondent, get old. It’s the spring, summer and fall of 2004 forever.

Mortal Kombat XL

The double-entendre evoked by the Roman numerals in the title of Mortal Kombat XL, while only minimally clever, nonetheless speaks volumes as to what the game actually offers. Here we have the most polished, most complete version of the tenth iteration of the legendary Mortal Kombat series, well-peopled with thirty-plus characters including newcomers like the pert, pony-tailed Cassie Cage, millennial daughter of Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade, as well as the six-gun-slinging Roland of Gilead rip-off Erron Black.

Leatherface-hugger

It is, however, the all-inclusive downloadable content which not only makes XL truly worthy of the Mortal Kombat mantle, but also further burgeons the franchise's legacy. Out of the box, we are graced with four characters external to but totally amenable with the MK universe: these are the eponymous sci-fi super-beasts from Alien and Predator, as well as insuperable slasher-cycle icons Jason Voorhees and Leatherface. We have, of course, already witnessed Alien vs. Predator in a series of cinematic endeavors bearing that very title, though the peculiar species of manic, Manichean matchup that Mortal Kombat makes possible justifies a re-visitation of that particular battle. And while Jason and Leatherface have previously appeared in horrendous sprite-based releases for NES and Atari 2600, respectively, we had never until the release of XL seen them rendered in polygonal HD (at least until we got to be the hockey-masked maniac in 2017’s Friday the 13th: the Game), and we had certainly never seen them go one-on-one. Thus, XL facilitates a horror-movie dream match, Jason vs. Leatherface, a film you can play out over and over again across various backdrops from the Mortal Kombat mythscape. And how about Jason vs. Alien, Predator vs. Leatherface, or even Jason vs. Scorpion? The list of possibilities goes on and on. In essence, XL is the Mortal Kombat franchise fully realizing its own slasher, splatterpunk and even sci-fi sensibilities.

These were briefly explored earlier on in its 2011 precursor, which included a somewhat tepid representation of Freddy Krueger among its selectable characters. XL does far better justice to its sci-fi and horror guest stars, however. On account of its veritable shock-and-schlock, mashup-mandating Jason Takes Outworld aesthetic, then, Mortal Kombat XL will prove to be a collector's item, at least for horror and B-Movie fans.

Friday the 13th

By 1989, the sanguinary Friday the 13th series and its bloodthirsty antihero Jason Voorhees had thoroughly saturated the North American marketplace. The movies, aesthetically and conceptually lacking though they may have been, were ubiquitous in popular culture, with a sequel in release or in production every single year in the 1980s. There was also a TV series bearing the Friday name and font which managed to gain modest critical acclaim—in no small part due to the complete absence of Jason Voorhees from the show. Alice Cooper had even laid down a straining shock-rock record—“The Man Behind the Mask”—inspired by the goalie-masked goliath. Inevitably, given the Nintendo Entertainment system's embeddedness in the day-to-day lives of children of the mid-to-late eighties, video-gaming was another market Friday the 13th would encroach upon, the R-rated aesthetics of the movies notwithstanding.

Friday the 13th for the NES took the form of a side-scroller in which players control one of six Crystal Lake camp counselors. Traversing water, woods and cabins, all the while battling wolves, crows and zombies (all of which are apocryphal to the movies), the goal is to find and defeat Jason Voorhees not once, not twice, but thrice. In the meantime, the rampaging Jason is killing not only the counselors, but also the children—yes, children—vacationing at the camp. Jason's mother's head, which has now acquired the extra-canonical ability to fly, also makes an appearance as an adversary.

This discussion of Friday the 13th’s gameplay is moot, however, as the game is unplayable. Its controls are exceedingly frustrating, leading to death after death for the counselor under your control (and the children, to boot). Moreover, the camp's confines are mostly rendered in bright, primary colors and thus provide little in the way of chills. The programmers, of course, had very little to work with given the 8-bit NES format, but still, one gets the impression they didn't even attempt to approximate the Friday the 13th aesthetic. There is also, perhaps most disappointingly, no opportunity to play as Jason. This is not a huge loss, however, as Jason is, when you do find him, clad in what looks to be a purple track-suit of some sort—seemingly more like senior's active wear than the ragged waterlogged vestments we would expect of an undead serial killer who dwells at the bottom of a lake.

I wouldn't recommend this game to even the most diehard fans of the film series. Firstly, it received far too wide a release to have any value as a collector's item. Secondly, it evades the hallowed so-bad-it's-good status, which may apply to movies such as those in the series, but really doesn't work for video games. Even the recent Friday the 13th release for Xbox One and PS4, while far from perfect, is at least able to capture the general feel of the films. The NES game, by contrast, is an abomination. Collectors would be better off saving their cash for anything else related to the series. This reviewer would instead suggest perusing EBay for the two—that's right, not one, but two—novelizations of Friday the 13th Part 3. One is by Simon Hawke, the other by movie-adaptation legend Michael Avallone. Even if you despise Friday the 13th or the act of reading itself, you will still appreciate these novels far more than this game.

Chrono Trigger

The holy grail of game collecting is, quite arguably, Chrono Trigger for Super Nintendo. Complete-in-box, you’ll be paying hundreds of dollars on EBay; for a sealed copy, you may pay over a thousand. Even without a box and manual, a Chrono Trigger cartridge can run well over a hundred. The price is warranted, for the demand is there. Even when we look past the trans-historical intrigue of the story-line spanning prehistoric pasts and dizzying technocratic futures, even when we look beyond the endearing banter of the characters and the silky-smooth combat system and the enchanting trill of the soundtrack, Chrono Trigger sparks, perhaps most palpably, a strikingly vivid nostalgia. Just as the characters in the game jump through time, so too does CT shuttle us back to childhood, when we were most capable of complete immersion—often from waking to slumber—in a video game and the luxuriant world it conjured on our television screen. The Chrono Trigger cartridge is itself a teleporter to the past. But, as TV and movies recurrently warn us, there is no time travel without risk: If you do put down the admirable amount of cash necessary to secure a sealed or near-mint copy of Chrono Trigger, be prepared to face the temptation toward unlimbering the cartridge from its casing, husking it in your old weather-beaten SNES, and firing it up once again. With this possibility in mind, I would recommend the diligent collector pick up a relatively cheaper, possibly even disc-only copy of the Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy II re-release for the PlayStation 1. Herein you can sublimate quite satisfactorily your urge to re-experience the epic expedition of Crono, Marle and Lucca—and also your youth, too—without sundering the value of a bona fide collector’s item.