I was never a huge comic book nerd growing up, but I always had a soft spot when it came to Spider-Man. I ate up the cartoon like the sugar injected cereal that accompanied it’s viewings. I dumped a small fortune of birthday money on action figures and playsets. When all the parental planets aligned and I was able to rent a game from our local Hastings, I would usually pick up Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage.

To give you a brief overview, Maximum Carnage is a early 90’s beat’em up out out by LJN/Acclaim that features Spidey and Venom as they try to put a stop to the serial murder Cletus Kasady, better known as the symbiote infused supervillain Carnage.

While I had some really great games for the SNES, Maximum Carnage still stands out to me as the most memorable. Since we were a Nintendo town for the most part, and only one of my friends even had a Genesis, I didn’t know this game came out on anything other than SNES. That being the case, I still hold it among my top favorite SNES games of all time. When I found it recently at a used bookstore, I decided to pick it up to see if it actually was any good or if my memories were blurred thru the lens of nostalgia and youthful fanboy-ism.

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“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

I was looking through the rack of PS1 games and saw a title I had never seen before, Skeleton Warriors. There was no booklet and no back. All I had to go on was the CD itself, which featured a Skeleton Warrior. Assuming it was some sort of terrible fighting game, I grabbed it in the hopes of making fun of it in a FOG Review. I popped it into my PS3 and watched the barely comprehensible CG cutscene at the beginning and felt more confident than ever that I had grabbed a mediocre fighting game.

Instead, I had apparently left with a mediocre, side-scrolling beat-em-up.

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A luxury cruise liner has been taken over by “modern day” pirates, and it is up to three heroes and their monkey to save the day in the Dreamcast beat-em-up, “Dynamite Cop”.

I have decided that I do not like that one line description, as it gives the impression that this game makes sense. Oddly enough, the nonsensical nature is what makes the game so much fun.

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Lone Wolf and Cub is the story of a former samurai turned assassin and his infant son as they travel the path of meifumadō , “the Road to Hell.” The epic fight scenes go hand in hand with historical detail and philosophical lessons. This manga has influenced everyone from Frank Miller to Quentin Tarantino and popularized the idea of the Ronin (the masterless samurai).

There have been 7 films, 2 television shows, and a futuristic sci-fi comic retelling. Yet here in the west, Lone Wolf and Cub has remained at best a cult hit. I was thinking how amazing a video game based on this series would be.

I was even going to write an article about how kick @#$ a game based on this would be. Then, like the good phony journalist that I am I started doing a little research and found someone had already made it. But it doesn’t exist.

Read on to learn more about the mythical Lone Wolf game and why it needs to be remade for XBLA. (more…)

"Raise the roof!"

Movie tie-in games have a history of not living up to the source material. Movies based on TV shows have the same problem. So what chance does a movie tie-in based on a TV show have? As it turns out, not a lot.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (SNES) is a beat-em-up that does not even attempt to follow the plot of the movie, other than having the same final boss, Ivan Ooze.

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We all have those games that we miss the first time around. With the busy release schedule of modern gaming, no one has time to play everything. That is why we at WingDamage present to you “Fashionably Late Reviews“. This is our series on games from the current generation of consoles that we may have missed on their initial release, but have gone back to experience now.

Sometimes, when I’m hanging out in Gamer Time, I come across the most ridiculous looking/sounding games I’ve ever heard of. Enter “Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad”.

It goes without saying that this game was designed with a young, male demographic in mind. Even if you were to look past the name, the translation of which is basically “sword fighting big sister”, and the cover art, you’d still have the back of the box to deal with. Here it explains that this game features “Sexy Samurai Sisters”, “Nonstop combat and swordplay” and a “dress-up mode”. Yeah, you read that right.

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"Snap Into A Slim Jim!"

Since Cain first turned to Abel and hit him with a rock, people have enjoyed hitting people. The Final Fight games have been letting people beat up other people and eat random ground meat for years. Most gamers are (or should be) familiar with the story of Mike Haggar, Cody, and Guy’s quest to walk to the right and pound people in the face, and to save Haggar’s daughter/Cody’s girlfriend. Most either experienced the sweet multiplayer joy of the arcade or at least the fun solo SNES experience. What most folks don’t realize is there was actually an NES version of “Final Fight”. Read on to learn about this lesser known member of the Final Fight family.

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