With a release date of 2015, Life Is Strange is another one of those games that’s kind of pushing it in terms of the “retro” designation, although if you’ve ever seen the game in action, graphics aren’t the strong suit and Life Is Strange certainly looks like it could come from an earlier era. Of course, the art style isn’t really the point. The story is. The five-episode adventure game follows the teenage Max as she returns to Arcadia Bay, finding evidence of disturbing crime all around her. In her Boss Fight book, Kaitlin Tremblay also has a novel take on the nostalgia aesthetic of retro gaming, likening Max and other characters to her own experiences as a teenage girl. Albeit a cooler one than the typical author of a Boss Fight book, as she would go to parties and drink booze.

I’m a little reluctant to discuss the plot of Life Is Strange in too much detail here because even relative to other Boss Fight books, Tremblay’s tome really hinges on the reader having some experience with the game. This is mainly because Life Is Strange’s gameplay revolves entirely around choices. As Max, the player has to decide the best choice of action to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s not often obvious which choice is the right one and, as Tremblay notes, kind of the point of the game is that, as in life, there really isn’t such a thing as a “right” choice. There are always unintended consequences. And even the game’s time travel mechanic allowing you to pick different choices doesn’t help as much as you’d think.

Tremblay’s analysis delves a lot into the narrative purpose of choice in games, noting that it’s not something you can easily graft onto any random story. Her argument that Life Is Strange represents a uniquely effective utilization of choice mechanics is backed up, not just by her descriptions of the choices, but even the game’s own Steam statistics. You can find out how many players did what in their own playthroughs, and the numbers are likely to be closer to fifty percent than you’d think. This even applies to the notorious “Bae or Bay” choice that closes out the game, which itself is an excellent demonstration of other narrative arguments that Tremblay makes in regard to whether we care about characters or settings in a game.

For all this, Tremblay does have a foot firmly planted in the real world. The opening where Tremblay discusses her party girl lifestyle isn’t bragging, it’s to set up an anecdote about that time some creepy guy she didn’t know kept calling her at home, and it took a disturbingly long time to get him to stop. Assuming anyone even did get him to stop, as opposed to his just stopping on his own. The police were useless. To paraphrase another classic game, the lesson Tremblay took from this was to only trust her friends, the police will never help her.

And that’s why she (and plenty of other gamers) identified so strongly with Life Is Strange. Fundamentally, this is a game about how awkward and weird it can be to be a teenage girl. Which makes it kind of funny that apparently Life Is Strange was made by a bunch of French white guys. There’s a strong social justice bend throughout the book, as might be expected, although it feels surprisingly archaic given that the book came out earlier this year. A big reason for this is just that most Life Is Strange discourse happened several years ago, and this discourse is always changing. Although at the same time, some of Tremblay’s sources can be a bit arcane. I’m not even sure how she found this video by Shareef Jackson, which only has a few hundred views.

But all of the material Tremblay cites is interesting and relevant. Life Is Strange is a game that allowed her to understand herself better, both on a personal level and in terms of her own work as a narrative designer. But just on a broader philosophical level, this book has quite a bit to say about how the choices we make in games are, or should be, more about us than about the games themselves.

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Earlier this year, Pen & Sword Books released The History of the Pokémon Games, which I reviewed here. At the same time, they released the much less obviously marketable The History of Silent Hill by Samantha Morris. Similar titles notwithstanding, these are very different books. While the Pokémon volume functions primarily as a sort of encyclopedia, Morris is comparably restrictive about what she considers to be a “true” Silent Hill game, limiting her analysis to the four numbered entries, Homecoming, and Downpour.

Morris doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining why she doesn’t consider Origins to be a central title when everyone else does. Ironically, based on her descriptions of the other six games, it seems that the main problem with origins is that it’s too concerned with the lore. Despite all the Silent Hill games being connected to, well, the creepy, foggy community of Silent Hill, only the first and third games in the series have a meaningful story connection. And even that’s technically a plot twist. Silent Hill is more a vibe than a place, a sort of haunting that works its way inside-out from the terrors of your own mind, presenting a nightmare world that doesn’t even look the same to anyone else.

This sort of thematic ground is pretty common for any fans of the series. The Boss Fight book exclusively about Silent Hill 2 makes a similar sort of argument, just in more detail and focused entirely on Silent Hill 2’s own narrative. Like that text, The History of Silent Hill is stuck in an awkward place in that dissecting the themes pretty much requires spoiling the whole story, and the author can do little except beg the reader to play the game if they haven’t already. The History of Silent Hill does have happier new than the Boss Fight book did in regard to playing Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware, though, in that Morris is adamant that the 2024 remake is an exceptional conversion made by people who clearly understood what the original game was trying to do. Not to be confused at all with the 2012 remake, which ruins it by among other things, not managing the fog properly.

For the other five games, Morris recounts not just the thematic horror of the stories but also how they tend to play out in practice from a gameplay perspective. Her bestiaries of the monsters in these games describe how they act, how they can be killed, and what this says about the subconscious nightmares of the main character that imply or spawn such creatures. This isn’t exactly a player’s guide, mind you. Morris develops her interpretations of these games by stripping them down to all their individual elements, development, plot, characters, monsters, endings, and uses her generally accurate descriptions of them to create a greater thesis about what these games are actually about.

It’s a good analytical technique if only because it can help job the reader’s memory about how these games looked and felt when it may well have been ten or twenty years since they actually played them. Of course, the fickle nature of memory itself is a pretty predominant theme in these games, with the warped worlds the players encounter all being a direct case of distortions in these mental records. Laid out end to end like this, it’s easy to see how all six games are connected in more profound ways than just the lore. Morris even lays out a fairly convincing argument as to how Silent Hill 4 is unfairly maligned, as both gameplay and storywise, all of its strange departures from the formula are perfectly within the larger ethos of Silent Hill.

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As far as “retro” games go, Red Dead Redemption is kind of pushing it. The 2010 open world game was already released well into the modern AAA game production environment. Matt Margini’s tome from Boss Fight Books implicitly acknowledges how this is a different story from the Boss Fight norm in that it’s hard to isolate individual influences. For the most part, Margini describes “Rockstar” at large as responsible for the game’s design, though he does make it clear that Rockstar was fairly infamous for brutal treatment of its employees in this time period.

Despite this modern aesthetic, Red Dead Redemption has a fairly credible case for being a retro title in our hearts because, as Margini’s father notes, it’s the game where you can ride a horse. Yes, technically speaking, Red Dead Redemption is a riff off of the Grand Theft Auto genre of open world gameplay. But as Margini articulates in this book, Red Dead Redemption is also a reconceptualization of the entire Wild West genre. When reading a novel, or watching a movie, the idea of the Wild West representing freedom is an abstraction. Yet in Red Dead Redemption, you can actually play as the isolated gunslinger in an open world where you can do pretty much whatever you want. And where does that get you?

Well, as it turns out, not very far. The great joke of Red Dead Redemption, in Margini’s telling, is that its hero John Marston, actually has very little real control over the bleak, cynical world he lives in. Sure, he can do anything he wants in the open world and even has a pretty badass bullet time power to boot. But no matter what Marston does, in the long run, he double-crosses his own allies and is doubled-crossed in turn by the feds. He realizes the general hopelessness of his own situation and not only fails to stop his own cycle of violence, but we the player even get to watch that cycle continue after his own death.

These are layers to the open world genre that were not common in 2010 and still aren’t really all that common today. The unsettling implication of this story is that Marston is more being played than he is playing the game. And this is a legacy that goes back to the Western genre in general. Margini’s Red Dead Redemption book, despite being part of a line of general video game explaining books from Boss Fight, actually tends to function better as an introduction the abstract concept of the West for people who might not really know all that much about it. Red Dead Redemption itself assumes (probably correctly) that its players have at least some idea what the West is, if only through pop culture osmosis. But they’re less likely to understand the theoretical underpinnings.

Margini’s analysis on this front is accurate…mostly. Margini buys into a lot of the myths about the myths of the West that can distort some of its interpretation. The depiction of native Americans, for example, assumes a longstanding one-dimensional presentation of their appearance in the Western genre, when in fact the dark, almost comically ambiguous native American quests in Red Dead Redemption aren’t as far off from “classic” Western stories as you’ve probably been led to believe. Margini also completely misses the general cynicism of the Mexican revolutionary quests are some of the game’s most genuinely racist sequences, playing into stereotypes of Latin American cultures as being incapable of non-corrupt leadership.

Mind, Margini’s impressions are so widespread I can’t exactly fault him for presenting them as uncontroversial. He cites his sources, and his analysis in his own right is pretty on-point. His writing understands the difference between John Ford and Sergio Leone, and dives back as far as weirdly homoerotic quotes from the landmark Western novel The Virginian to make his arguments. But at the end of the day, it’s not the citations that give Margini’s book its emotional heart. No, it’s his very sincere effort to understand why, of all the games his father has ever seen him play, it’s the one where the player character can ride a horse that struck a chord with the old man.

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Every Boss Fight book tends to have a novel approach depending on the author, and Phillip J Reed is no different with his Resident Evil volume. In fact, his approach is distinctly unusual, with the praise for the originator of survival horror from 1996 veiled behind calling it a cheesy rip-off. Nevertheless, the story he tells is a compelling one in regard to the original game’s importance, much of which is locked behind a specific cultural moment and context we couldn’t bring back even if we wanted to.

Reed’s narrative is framed around his own first experience playing the game as a kid in grade school, with other kids. Reed didn’t like horror games in general. He didn’t even like Resident Evil that much. Indeed, the first chapter quite literally ends with him stammering that Resident Evil is just Alone in the Dark, a game he actually did play at the time. But in retrospect, Alone in the Dark is mostly resembled for being an obvious predecessor to Resident Evil, and really, probably the only game before Resident Evil itself that can reasonably be quantified as survival horror.

Where Reed starts to appreciate Resident Evil as more than a rip-off is the distinctly cinematic scope of the title, which took advantage of the still relatively novel CD format for video games to make aggressive use of voice acting and even live action scenes. The cheesiness of video game voice acting, up until Resident Evil, had generally worked against most CD games. But Resident Evil had the surprising advantage of taking itself seriously no matter how silly the poorly translated script got. There’s a good reason why Lloyd Kaufman of Toxic Avenger fame, of all people, wrote the foreward for this book. Resident Evil almost perfectly typifies camp.

One of Reed’s more interesting arguments, although I suppose he frames them more as descriptions, is how Resident Evil and Biohazard really do need to be interpreted as completely different games. It’s not just that the Biohazard audience in Japan couldn’t easily tell that the game’s English dialog sounds ridiculous. There’s also the common practice of the time where games, upon being imported to the United States, had their difficulty ramped up to dissuade game rentals as opposed to purchases. In Reed’s memories, Resident Evil is tense in part because it is very easy to die unexpectedly. Ammo is limited, and any unexpected surprise has high potential stakes, with all the tedium implied of having to backtrack through endless loading screens.

Even the loading screens, mind you, work to amplify this vibe by raising the tension. Resident Evil is very much a paradox in that it’s the more archaic, inconvenient parts of the game, the sort of thing fixed by quality-of-life improvements in modern titles, that made Resident Evil so memorable. The game is a clumsy mess where you don’t really have any idea what you’re getting into. It’s precisely that quality which makes the various turnabouts in the story compelling, encouraging a child like Reed to pick up little notes of backstory and lore, then jumble that around in his head during the gameplay experience to build an unsettling story where man is the greatest monster of all.

Resident Evil didn’t exactly break new storytelling ground in any way that can easily be communicated in text. Rather, the game was noteworthy because of its sheer immersive qualities. The voice actors, as well as the live action models, are compelling professionals despite the poor quality of their script. In one sense, the ramshackle nature of the whole production just amplifies the mystery. Reed openly acknowledges that there are some things about Resident Evil we may well never know. Many of the actors he finds didn’t even know they were in such a famous game until quite some time later.

Resident Evil is an artifact of a time where video games weren’t quite big business yet, but some people had faith enough in the concept that they were willing to try for something big, even if they weren’t quite sure how it was going to come out. And really, I doubt anyone could have intentionally come up with this game’s strange mishmash of powerful ambience and goofy execution. Never knowing where on that spectrum the next room is going to land is a huge part of the fun.

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It’s the thirty-year anniversary of the very first Pokémon games which were released back in 1996. Nintendo is pulling out all the stops reminding us. But unofficial historians are getting in on the act too, with The History of the Pokémon Games by James Batchelor coming out on March 30th courtesy of Pen & Sword Books. The title’s a bit of an odd choice for an imprint best known for military history, although really, when you think about it, Pokémon is a war of its own.

Whether this unofficial volume qualifies as a true history will likely depend on how nitpicky you want to get in regard to the exact details. There are several factual errors in here, but all of them are roughly on the lines of statements like saying shiny Pokémon were only aesthetically different from their counterparts, with no stat differences. This wasn’t actually true, for the second generation in which they first appeared anyway, although there are very few contexts where the technical difference is all that important.

Batchelor’s history in broad strokes is accurate, although the detail goes down as the book goes on. Part of this is just because the development of Pokémon has grown so complicated over the years that by the time we hit the sixth generation, there’s really no longer any pretense of this being any kind of underdog operation. That doesn’t make the details of the first generation any less fun, mind you. The origins of Gamefreak as a literal game zine (which you can read online if you like although obviously it’s all in Japanese) never stop being fun.

Although the lack of a Gunpei Yokoi acknowledgment irritated me. We all know Shigeru Miyamato was involved, but Gunpei Yokoi is an unsung hero of Pokémon for helping Gamefreak afloat by interceding to give them the right to use Nintendo licensed characters for their puzzle games, which Batchelor incorrectly implies were premised as having Nintendo character licenses from the outset. Again, this omission doesn’t doom the book’s overall scholarship, but it does beg the question of why we need an unofficial compendium of the Pokémon games if Batchelor is just going to use the usual Nintendo story that tends to obfuscate Yokoi’s existence.

The answer? Batchelor includes, at the end of each chapter of the mainline games, an extended compendium of every licensed Pokémon game that was released during this time period. While the individual entries in this compendium are much shorter than the chapters, they’re an incredibly useful reference for anyone trying to keep track of all these games. And there’s probably no better resource than this book for keeping all these games straight, as these titles range from sleeper classics to forgotten abandonware to games Nintendo quite literally tried to destroy. Apparently, Nintendo was furious when Warner Brothers overstepped their contract and hired Cyberworld International Corporation to make a browser game based on the Pokémon 2000 movie, and the game was thought lost until 2023 when DidYouKnowGaming was able to find a copy.

The compendium tells a sort of story in itself of just how much game development has changed over the last thirty years. The crude edutainment titles of the nineties and the aughts give way to the gacha games of the teens, a trend that feels more than a little ominous when put together in a timeline like that. Only a true expert on Pokémon is likely to be familiar with even half the games that Batchelor discusses here. Sure, I might know about EV functionality and Gunpei Yokoi but I still learned a lot about spin-offs and apps from this book I doubt I ever would have found out about otherwise.

This, coupled with high quality photos, nice glossy pages, and reasonably large type make The History of the Pokémon Games a very good coffee table book. The presentation allows for much of the trivia to exceed the sum of its parts, making for a remarkably coherent narrative that reads more like a corporate history intended for internal use than marketing copy intended to sell us on more Pokémon merch. This is an easy book to recommend for any fan of the series, and even those who are just a little curious what Pokémon is even all about.

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On March 31st, Boss Fight Books confirmed that it had acquired enough funds via its Kickstarter campaign to go forward with its latest project, a book about the 1997 strategy game Age of Empires, written by Richard Moss, an Australian gaming historian whose work is catalogued on his website here. Richard Moss has already interviewed 29 employees from Ensemble and Microsoft in this time period for the project.

The huge scope of the project is such that Boss Fight Books had hoped for, and now will be, publishing the Age of Empires book in two volumes, one the paperback copy that is standard for the publishing house, and a special edition hardcover edition featuring color photos, which are not typical in Boss Fight Books. The last such special edition hardcover was for the Goldeneye 007 book, which was the 29th title published by Boss Fight Books. Additionally, going forward Boss Fight Books is revamping their cover style, and is now commissioning original art instead of relying on stock images. Jack Grimes designed the cover for this book from the concept art stage.

As of this writing, the Kickstarter campaign has amassed $8,472 as it sets its sights toward stretch goals. At $10,000, Boss Fight Books will commission bookmarks based on the cover art, to be included alongside the special edition. Rewards continue in $5,000 increments until the final level, $50,000, where all backers who ordered physical books will receive free eBooks. Backers will also receive eBooks of Video Game Maps: SNES – Volume 1 at the $15,000 stretch goal level and Bottomless Pit: Running and Jumping Through Platform Games – Volume 1 at the $30,000 stretch goal level.

As is typical for Kickstarters, the pledges function as preorders. An $8 will yield a standard eBook, $16 for the paperback or the special edition eBook, and $30 for the special edition hardcover. All versions, plus bonus contents and special thanks in the hardcover and online, require a pledge of $60. The Boss Fight Books edition of Age of Empires is expected to see publication sometime in June as an eBook, July as a paperback, August as a deluxe eBook, and October as a hardcover. The Kickstarter campaign ends on April 28th.

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One of the most popular books of the Boss Fight series, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is finally back in print. It’s easy enough to see why. Despite its odd place in the canon, with the game being a rushed project designed to make use of the Zelda assets already developed for the Ocarina of Time before the Nintendo 64 hardware became obsolete, history has smiled broadly on the carnivalesque vibe of this game. Author Gabe Durham has an interesting thesis as to why. As he tells it, Majora’s Mask is interesting because it’s a race against time. Both textually, and literally, with the designers stuck on their first ideas mostly because they didn’t have time to come up with any others.

This more than anything else, Durham argues, is why The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is so genuinely, intriguingly weird. It’s a mundane theory that paradoxically sticks out precisely because Majora’s Mask is notorious for the theorycrafting it inspires. Like for the game being a symbolic representation of the stages of grief. Or how the whole game is just the aftermath of Link being dead, in some sort of purgatorial afterlife. Majora’s Mask also somewhat indirectly sparked the ever-notorious Zelda timeline discourse, simply because, as the first game after Ocarina of Time, questions are immediately begged as to what happened to the world of the adult link who defeated Ganon, if the young link of Ocarina of Time’s ending got lost in the woods afterward and landed in Termina.

Durham’s down-to-earth analysis is convincing in part because he relies on a lot of actual interviews with the designers of Majora’s Mask, and it’s always striking how much more they care about playability and efficient use of existing assets than necessarily giving the project clear authorial intent. It’s interesting, for example, that the only reason Ocarina of Time bothered with the time travel at all was because Shigero Miyamato kept insisting on a child Link model when they’d developed the adult Link model first. These parts of the book are a fun depiction of Miyamato’s eccentric management style, with his arbitrary requirements and cryptic communications would inspire developers to go in any number of weird directions.

It’s quite appropriate then, that weird begets weird. Durham covers the infamous Ben Drowned creepypasta early on, and it’s fun to see the contrast with the very practically minded Nintendo workplace that actually made the game and the bewildered fans in the years to come who posted many a YouTube video on the subject trying to figure out what Majora’s Mask is even about. It’s easy enough to see the depth of Majora’s Mask secondhand through Durham’s descriptions of other descriptions because so much of what’s going on doesn’t sound like a video game. This is, quite literally, a game where Link meets dying people and/or their ghosts, tries to pacify them, and then wears their masks to try and solve puzzles.

Majora’s Mask is a strange text to engage with. The text is filled with weird little jokes that no one who made the game could have reasonably expected that many people would ever see, just because every NPC has their own reaction to any of the two dozen odd masks you might be wearing when talking to them. And Majora’s Mask also defies easy categorization because it can’t really be completed on a single cycle. One task or another must inevitably be left undone, and Link finishes the game again a wandering hero, oddly detached from the world of Termina that he saved. Despite lacking the epic overtones more common in Zelda games, this tale of a doomed world coping with its inevitable end as the moon crashes into it leaves a lasting ambivalent impression that touched even people like Durham, who didn’t play the game when it was new, but only learned of Majora’s Mask as more people do every day by its ominous reputation.

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While many video game publishers refused to acknowledge such a change, arcade-inspired baseball games have existed in the past, even before the steroid era. Titles the likes of Baseball Stars, Clutch Hitter and Super Baseball 2020 all hit the fun factor out of the park at points, but arcade giant Midway, known for the NBA Jam and NFL Blitz series, nailed it with MLB Slugfest 20-03, which ironically appeared only on home consoles. With real players, stadiums, over the top commentary and an intuitive turbo system that took a page from their previous classics, the original Slugfest was a combined million seller on the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube and earned three sequels. While far from the gameplay innovator of titles like Konami’s Bottom of the Ninth and Sony’s The Show, it’s easily one of the most enjoyable arcade baseball experiences to ever appear on a home console.

But by all estimations, MLB Slugfest 20-03 should have been an arcade game as well. Producer Mark Flitman, who was assigned to the project after his work on NFL Blitz 20-02, saw the game as one that symbolized the change of the company’s approach to the market. While Midway was the king of the arcades for a lengthy period of time in the ‘90s, thanks to games such as Mortal Combat and NBA Jam, times were a changing. It was up to Flitman, who had a lengthy resume of successful titles with Acclaim, to make sure the team, who largely developed for the arcade, made the transition needed to create a successful console game. “I love a challenge and I had never done a baseball game before,” Flitman said. “When I started at Midway, the game was in early stages of development and it was also expected to be for the arcade. Unfortunately, shortly after I started at Midway, all arcade development was terminated.”

It certainly helped that Flitman had been a long-time fan of the sport. Growing up in Chicago, the memories were plenty. And with no prior baseball game on his resume, Flitman, who previously served as producer on several WWF and Marvel Comic-based games at Acclaim, was essentially fulfilling a life-long dream of being a part of a baseball game. “When I was a kid, we were all baseball fans. In Chicago, you had to decide if you were going to be a Cubs fan or a White Sox fan. It seems like yesterday that I would take the El train to Wrigley Field and watch the Cubs,” Flitman said. “I remember one specific outing where a friend and I went to the game and bought the scorecards so we could keep score as the game progressed. The game was delayed due to rain. We sat in the seats for about two hours and finally decided to go home. When I got home an hour later, the sun came out and the game was back on. I kept score at home watching the rest of the game on WGN channel 9. I was very unhappy.

“Another baseball memory was ‘lagging.’ Every school day at recess, we would take our pile of baseball cards outside and find a wall. You and your opponent would lag cards. This involved tossing a card against the wall and taking turns until one of you got a card to land on top of a previously thrown card. When that happened, you got to keep all the cards that had been tossed. It was basically gambling for grade school kids. All my old baseball cards have bent corners and

scratches.”

Wear and tear on baseball cards was to be expected from kids, but at Midway, video game development was serious business. Flitman knew that all too well.  Managing a team that consisted of industry legends Sal DiVita, Mark Turmell and veteran Jamie Rivett, who later programmed WWE All Stars, TNA iMPACT! and NBA Ballers and the pressure to create something special was always apparent. “Slugfest was one of the most difficult developments I had worked on, but not because of problems,” Flitman said. “It was due to the team’s talent and their quest for perfection. The baseball players had to look as good as possible. Every detail in a stadium had to be shown. That’s a lot of players and a lot of stadiums. Motion capture had to be the best possible. Gameplay balance had to be tested over and over to be just right. That’s just the visual elements! This game was also a groundbreaker in audio use because I believe it was one of the first games to have humorous audio banter during loading times.”

With reigning All-Star, Gold Glover and Silver Slugger Alex Rodriguez on the cover, the original Slugfest had what many players wanted from the start, but the game wasn’t one to be judged by its cover alone. According to Flitman, the special parts of Slugfest were under the hood. “We had a few local baseball players in the motion capture studio to get some footage on stances, swings, etc. I don’t even remember Alex Rodriguez coming into the office,” Flitman said. “I think he was minimally involved if at all. Most of the fun stories happened in the audio recording sessions. I did make numerous trips to NYC to get approvals and reference materials from the MLB and the MLBPA. I loved my trips to New York and I had good relationships with both licensors. My contact at the MLBPA actually worked with me at Acclaim before he went to the MLBPA so we had a history.”

With many of the small details that could bog down some producers taken care of, Flitman was able to play a larger role in the game than he did in his previous work on the Blitz series. That meant helping shape the audio presentation. Ask anyone that’s played MLB Slugfest 20-03 and they’ll tell you, the commentary is what makes the game truly stand out. Although a quality baseball game on its own merits, it’s hard to put that “wild” Midway flair on a game as tame as baseball. While the addition of turbo influenced gameplay tremendously, it was still a baseball game. What made Slugfest undeniably “Midway,” was the game’s play-by-play and color commentary.

“Even though I was the producer on the title and was involved in the full development cycle, I am personally most proud of the audio banter between the two commentators,” Flitman said. “We had an idea to have two commentators talk during loading screens. We wanted a straight man and a partner that was, how do I say this with style, ‘nuts.’ There were some local talents on the radio that had silly sports personalities. I had a few in mind and contacted them. I held some auditions and we got very lucky with Kevin Matthews and his Jimmy Shorts character. Tim Kitzrow did the audio for NBA Jam and was the perfect straight man. What we did was schedule a number of recording sessions over a few months and I would spend time coming up with lists of unusual situations. At the session, I would tell the guys the situation and they would improv. For instance, I remember in 2002 LA had a ‘Rally Monkey’ that they would show on the big screen during the playoffs and it would inspire the fans and the team. So, I said that Jimmy should bring a ‘Pennant Pig’ into the booth and let it out of the cage causing havoc. Or Jimmy should leave his bag of peanuts by the window of the booth which would accidentally cause unsuspecting birds to fly into the window.

“One of my favorites was Jimmy not being in the booth a few minutes before game time and when he called Tim to tell him he was going to be late due to a traffic jam, you could hear him ordering food at a drive-thru. I would walk around with a small pad of paper in my pocket and whenever an idea struck me I would jot it down. Everyone contributed ideas, but I was very much into the comedy and the characters. I loved writing humorous situations and have these talented guys go crazy. Growing up in Chicago and hearing Harry Caray announce the Cub games was definitely an influence. He would go off on tangents that had nothing to do with the game but were unintentionally hilarious.”

While the audio shined as one of the coolest parts of the game, Flitman was instrumental in adding something else he feels was a hidden treasure. “Everyone knows that most Midway titles had hidden characters, but for me, Slugfest was different,” Flitman said. “I was friends with (Spawn comic producer) Terry Fitzgerald and (creator) Todd McFarlane. When I was working at Acclaim, Spawn comics were just getting started and we thought it might make a good game, so I visited Todd at a comic book signing at Nassau Coliseum in NY. We exchanged numbers and developed a relationship. I knew Todd was a big baseball fan and asked him if he and Terry wanted to be hidden characters in Slugfest. They were ecstatic. I took a trip to Arizona and got pictures of them for the team to create the graphics. During one Todd interview, he even played Slugfest just to show how he was the whole team in the hidden mode.”

Away from adding those cool extras that were signature to a Midway Sports title, such as unique hidden characters, the development of Slugfest was far from straight ahead at times. More accustomed to developing games for the arcade, Flitman said the team fought itself with a penchant to make things perfect, which made it tougher to do the most important thing in console development- get a game out on time. That, coupled with some “nasty” bugs towards the end of development made the fun seem more like business at times, Nevertheless, Flitman believes the time spent on the Slugfest series was important to his future development as a Producer. Serving as a writer and producer on Slugfest 20-04, the original Slugfest definitely allowed Flitman to exhibit his versatility. “Working on Slugfest made me a much stronger producer because of the strong opinions of some very talented people,” Flitman said. “Everyone was dedicated to this game and would do anything to achieving our goals. We had countless all-nighters. Due to the unique personalities, we would also have clashes and at times things could get a little heated —‘He’s on fire!’ There were many times that I had to make peace or make decisions that did not make everyone happy and definitely did not make me the most popular person in the room. I quickly learned that you can’t make everyone happy all the time.”

That being said, Slugfest was definitely a learning experience, but after his work on Blitz 20-02, Flitman was no longer the “new guy.” On Slugfest, Flitman was more involved than he ever was before at Midway. That, if anything else, made the game a far different experience for him. Flitman, who also was a producer at Hasbro Studios, has plenty of things he can hang his hat on and Slugfest is one of his most cherished experiences of his game career. “The games shared common themes of sports and over the top elements, but I enjoyed Slugfest a little more because Blitz got me familiar with Midway, the personalities, the work habits and their style of gameplay, but Slugfest was original and Blitz was a follow-up,” Flitman said. “I loved getting involved on the ground floor. How does it feel to know that this game is still appreciated after so long? It’s always great to know that a game has legs and can hold up over time, the problem for me is that I never really know. I have no idea if anyone is still playing with any titles I produced or any toys I made. I’m always surprised when someone tells me that they enjoyed something I was involved with when they were younger. Not that I don’t think what I did was good, but that it was actually a memory that they hung on to is fantastic.”

If anything, Slugfest, without a doubt, created more memories than Midway’s sports titles the year before. Even if it wasn’t initially put in a situation to. Like NFL Blitz 20-02, MLB Slugfest 20-03 was also released late, hitting the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube on June 23, 2002, a good three months after the start of Spring Training, when most baseball games come to market. However, unlike Blitz 20-02, which suffered in sales due to its tardiness, Slugfest ended up with over a million combined units in sales. Luckily, all the extra time in development to create a game with a real sense of identity, something different from the offerings of Sega and Electronic Arts at the time, was apparent to gamers.

“The game is special because of the extreme dedication that the whole team gave it. Everybody was involved 100 percent,” Flitman said. “I believe it was the first over the top baseball game and I know that the comedy audio was very special for the players that discovered it. We included a lot of audio and a lot of variety. After loading the game a few times, a player would realize that the audio was different and the characters really had personalities.”

That attention to detail is what Flitman believes truly sets the game apart. So much so that Flitman saw a missed opportunity at Midway to take over the baseball genre entirely. “Slugfest was a great looking, fun baseball game with the usual Midway over the top elements,” Flitman said. “In fact, the game looked so good, in hindsight we probably should have made Slugfest and then made another totally realistic baseball game without the over the top gameplay elements. I bet both titles would have been a hit.”

The post MLB Slugfest 20-03: No Arcade? No Problem appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

For fairly light reading at under two hundred small pages including notes, Mike Sholar’s PaRappa the Rapper provides a surprisingly compelling argument for representation theory. As he argues, we can’t look at PaRappa the Rapper in a vacuum. Rap was huge in the nineties, yet it also had something of an identity problem because so much of the genre came to be defined by violence, sex, and bling.

But PaRappa the Rapper, as a rhythm game, is very literally about rap music as music- not its stereotypes. Think of PaRappa the Rapper from the perspective of a kid, who’s not into violence except as childish fantasy at best and only has the most basic understanding of sex. Bling is important, yes, but mainly practical. Sholar makes a point of the level where PaRappa is quite literally just trying to earn money from a flea market. All of the six levels in PaRappa the Rapper have fairly mundane, relatable goals on the literal level, none of which involve violence or fighting. But on the more philosophical level the message and catchphrase “I gotta believe!” is intended to be something the player can take and relate to their everyday lives.

PaRappa the Rapper is, in Sholar’s description, principally a game about self-expression. This thesis starts out strong but straight up becomes indisputable in the final chapters, where Sholar explains, among other things, how Cool Mode works. Without getting too specific, let’s just say that despite PaRappa the Rapper’s reputation being that of a relatively short, linear game without much in the way of replay value, it turns out that Master Onion was more literal than anyone realized when he said Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind.

The mechanical explanations of how PaRappa the Rapper works are also quite detailed. Sholar gives a good overview of the technical issues with PaRappa the Rapper remasters, which can be problematic enough a person could actually be justified in wanting to play them on original hardware. Then there are the stories of the people who actually made the game, particularly the American voice actors who were, unsurprisingly, badly exploited by the intermediaries who contracted their talent out to Sony.

You don’t really need to know anything about PaRappa the Rapper to get anything out of this book. If anything, ignorance might help- I certainly didn’t know much about this game aside from the name and appearance of the title character before I got started. But it’s an engrossing story nevertheless. I’ve yet to play the game myself, but I did watch a YouTube longplay to better understand the vibes Sholar discusses, and I can see why it made such strong impact on him.

PaRappa the Rapper by Mike Sholars – Boss Fight Books

The post A review of PaRappa the Rapper from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Curious Video Game Machines reveals the fascinating stories behind a bevy of rare and unusual consoles, computers and coin-ops – like Kimtanktics, a 1970s wargame computer made out of calculator parts, or the suite of Korea-exclusive consoles made by car manufacturer Daewoo. Then there’s the Casio Loopy, a 1990s console that doubled up as a sticker printer, the RDI Halcyon, a 1985 LaserDisc-based machine that could recognise your voice, and the Interton VC 4000, a German console made by a hearing-aid company, as well as a range of bizarre arcade machines, from early attempts at virtual reality to pedal-powered flying contraptions.

There are tales of missed opportunities, like the astonishingly powerful Enterprise 64 computer, which got caught in development hell and arrived too late to make an impact on the British microcomputer market. And there are tales of little-known triumphs, like the Galaksija DIY computer kit that introduced a whole generation of Yugoslavians to computing before the country became engulfed by war.

Pen & Sword Book Cover / Jacket artwork

Featuring exclusive interviews with creators, developers and collectors, Curious Video Game Machines finally shines a light on the forgotten corners of video-game history.

About the Author

Lewis Packwood has been writing about video games professionally since 2013, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Retro Gamer, EDGE, Eurogamer, Wireframe, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, PC Gamer and Gamesradar+, among others. He contributed to the AR-enabled book Convergence: How the World Will be Painted with Data by VR evangelist and Forbes columnist Charlie Fink, and he is chief editor of the video-game website A Most Agreeable Pastime.

The post Curious Video Game Machines A Compendium of Rare and Unusual Consoles, Computers and Coin-Ops appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.