“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 have never been a PC gamer. When Half-Life came out for the PC, I was still rocking my Commodore 64 (which was just a teensy bit short in the RAM department). Besides I was too busy with my PS1 to worry about insanely awesome FPS games with pitch perfect atmosphere; I had some Battle Arena Toshinden to conquer.

In all seriousness Half-Life dropped with the force of a judo throw from Segata Sanshiro (which is equivalent to 10 megaton bombs.) It completely revolutionized the FPS genre. Everything from the graphics to the story to the puzzles to the combat pushed the genre in fantastic new directions. Even dedicated non-PC guys like myself stared enviously at our buddy’s copy and hoped for a console port.

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On a very special episode of “Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast”, we are joined by special guest Randall Johnson… er.. Smith… Portman… Guy. You know, from the JPAG.

In What We’ve Been Playing, Randall kicks us off with “Battlefield: 1943″ and also super nerdy D&D talk. We talk about the second episode of “Tales of Monkey Island”, Jonah is in the Beta of “Champions Online”, while Jesse talks “Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance” with a focus on the games’ story and has also finally finished “Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time”. Brittany gives her thoughts on “Tomb Raider: Underworld” while Wesley reports on the iPhone game “Hysteria Project”, the original “Half life” and the XBLA hit “Shadow complex”. We also all give our takes on the “Batman: Arkham Asylum” Demo.

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