The Scorpion King: Best GBA Game Starring The Rock?

By all rights The Scorpion King: Sword of Osiris for the GBA should be an abomination. It is a licensed game in a sea of shitty licensed games for the GBA, and it is based on The Scorpion King, a movie, starring The Rock, that was a spinoff of The Mummy, a pretty lackluster series to begin with. Granted, I have never seen the film version of The Scorpion King, but I don't think it is bold of me to assume it isn't any good. Maybe it is because my expectations were so insanely low, but I was surprised to find that it's not that bad. Sure, it's nothing amazing or unique, but it is a very competent game.

My Nostalgia For Motocross Maniacs

People that know me know that I am a huge fan of portable game consoles. People that know me really well know that I got into them rather late. Sure, I had a Game Gear, but the first handheld I owned that was actually portable was a the Game Boy Color I got not long after launch. Before that I only ever used the Game Boys of friends on occasion. The first Game Boy game I ever played was a little game called Motocross Maniacs by Konami, which happens to also be one of the earlier Game Boy releases. I liked it a lot back then, but until I found this cartridge with a severely mutilated label, I had not seen it in about twenty years. When the worker at the register asked if I knew what game it was, it was feel of great success when he confirmed that it was, in fact, Motocross Maniacs.

(C-12) Final Resistance

For a system that has so few good third-person shooters, I was surprised that I had never heard of (C-12) Final Resistance, which is an unusually decent for a game on the first Playstation.. As it turns out, I probably hadn't heard of it because, in the United States, it didn't come out until 2002, nearly two years after the PS2 was out. It was made by SCE Studio Cambridge, the same developers responsible for the MediEvil series and the version of LittleBigPlanet for PSP. It was originally released in the EU in 2001, which seems more reasonable than when it came across the ocean more than a year later. I don't know why it took so long. Certainly, a game from a Sony studio released by Sony themselves could have been released sooner.

Pac-Man 2: An Unexpected Adventure

If I were to ask the common man what the sequel to Pac-Man is, the response would mostly likely be Ms. Pac-Man. But, in reality Ms. Pac-Man wasn't so much a sequel as a hack, originally called Crazy Otto, but that is story for others to tell. The only time Namco had the courage to name a game as a true sequel was with 1994's Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, which isn't at all like the previous games in the series, but is weird and interesting in its own right. I played it on Genesis, but as far as I know there isn't a big difference between that and the SNES version.

Blast Corps: Not A Crappy Metal Subgenre

It's strange. I had remembered playing Blast Corps back when the N64 was new, but I didn't remember anything about it other than it was about breaking stuff. As it turns out, that was pretty much the whole game. It is one of Rare's earlier N64 titles, and it was mainly made by a small group of young developers in the company. It wasn't a launch title, but it came out early enough in the system's life cycle that it was probably played by most people simple because they were looking for games to play on it. It is a decent game, considering the situation, but it's not a brilliant game either.

I Finally Play Deus Ex

Deus Ex is definitely a unique and interesting game. Developed by Ion Storm and released in 2000, it is a game that was the first to do a lot of things, and was praised for doing them, but has never been properly replicated or built upon. Hopefully the soon-to-be-released Deus Ex: Human Revolution will remedy this. I am not the most qualified person to write about this game. During it's day, I had never even heard of it, and the nearly universal approval of the game had only reached my ears a few years ago. I purchased it during a Steam sale some time ago, but I never got around to it for whatever reason.

Back to Paperboy's Future

Here is some advice that could potentially save you tens of dollars. If you ever see a game with the LJN rainbow logo, especially if it is an NES game, don't buy it. I don't care if it only costs a dollar, chances are really good that the game isn't worth that much. What brings this topic on is the impressively terrible Back to the Future for NES. It was developed by Beam Software, a company that has made a lot of crap, but also a few interesting titles, such as the SNES version of Shadowrun. It doesn't really matter, it was payed for by LJN, and it is based on a movie license, so it clearly has a 0% chance of being any good.