Life's Game List

Ah, Tony Hawk, the man who was once a skating legend and is now living an eternal life of people mistaking him for a guy who looks like or has the name of Tony Hawk but is not Tony Hawk. And also, ah, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater,  the famous PS1 hit that introduced lots of kids to their favorite college rock. And maybe, Tony Hawk. Anyway, so this is the third one of those. Up to this point, they were developed by Neversoft, the company you may know as the one with that weird slithering eyeball logo. That's how I remember them, anyway. They mostly are known for developing the Tony Hawk  games, but they also developed Spider-Man  (a PS1 favorite of mine), and more recently, developed Call of Duty: Ghosts  before being merged with Infinity Ward and then being made defunct. Apparently Pro Skater 3  shares the title with Grand Theft Auto III  for highest rated PS2 game of all time on Metacritic, and the magazine "Next Generation" ranked as the 14th-highest sel...

I didn't own this, but I owned Rogue Squadron III  growing up (they're very similar). I'm pretty sure I picked it up out of a GameStop bargain bin for $5 and took it home, played it for one afternoon and decided it was too hard and shelved it for the next decade. Sometime in high-school though, in an effort to beat some of the games I had shelved over the years, I remember taking it down and playing through it, but to be honest I don't remember much about it. Rogue Squadron II , as you might have guessed, is the sequel to another game called-- again, as you might have guessed, Rogue Squadron , that came out on PC and the N64. They were both co-developed by LucasArts and a company called Factor 5. You know the former most likely (they basically just make Star Wars games now, but once upon a time they made point and click adventures like Grim Fandango , and Monkey Island ), but the latter are more obscure. They're the developers for the Turrican  series on SNES a...

AKA - "Disney's Tarzan: Freeride" in Europe Oh boy, another random franchise Gamecube game for a cartoon. I'm kind of starting to wonder if I ought to have limited myself to Japanese releases or something now, because that would cut out a lot of this kind of stuff, and most of the sports games... but I'd feel bad eventually and want to do them, and then I'd have to go back and do nothing  but cartoon and sports games to catch up. Ugh. So let's play Tarzan. Tarzan: Untamed  was developed by the same team that developed Batman: Vengeance : Ubisoft Montreal. That was a lot of colons. And by the way, they never got over this penchant for naming games with keywords separated by a colon-- consider "Assassin's Creed: X" and "Rainbow Six: X," etc. Anyway, apparently the game takes place some unspecified amount of time after the 1999 Disney Tarzan movie, but the Wiki isn't really clear, and I don't even remember hardly wh...

The success of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater  in 1999 on the PS1 sparked some competition, and within that competition was a 2000 PS1 game called Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX . Apparently Dave Mirra was a BMX rider who held the most medals in the X Games in the BMX category. On Wikipedia, I learned that the original game had ragdoll physics, and got curious-- As soon as I looked at a video of the game for two seconds, I knew it was developed by Z-Axis (later Underground Development until their 2010 closure), who had developed Thrasher: Skate and Destroy  just a year earlier. My brother and I used to play it constantly on a demo-disc just to mess with the hilariously glitchy ragdoll physics which would cause the character to slam into the ground and bounce 10 feet in the air unexpectedly. Unfortunately, they fixed the ragdoll physics in the real game, which I eventually purchased, and was greatly disappointed that they were no longer so silly. Anyway, in 2001, Z-Axis apparently fel...

In the '90s, Sega had a development division known as Sega AM3. Primarily known for making arcade games, they slowly transitioned into making some console games during the early 2000s. As a result of making various hit titles for the arcade, like Virtua Tennis , and, yes, Crazy Taxi , they were rebranded as "Hitmaker". Anyway, that's where our story ends with them-- they made Crazy Taxi  for the arcades, and this here is an arcade port on the Gamecube, developed by Acclaim Entertainment Cheltenham, formed by previous members of Psygnosis' south west studio (are all these developers getting confusing, yet?). We're gonna bump into AE Cheltenham a few times throughout our Gamecube journey, pretty much just developing racing games for the console, so I guess Crazy Taxi  is in line with that expectation. The original Crazy Taxi  was a pretty big hit, as evidenced by the fact that you actually know what it is (at least, I bet you do). That being said, I notic...

In the early '90s there was a Batman cartoon called "Batman: The Animated Series," that was apparently pretty beloved (it won four Emmy Awards...). And nothing good can ever exist without there being a reboot of it, so in the late '90s, they rebooted it as "The New Batman Adventures," with some new characters and what not but apparently the same general idea-- though apparently they made it more cartoony and simple looking because of budget. It still won two Daytime Emmy Awards though so I guess it did alright for itself. Well anyway, that show ended in 1999. Fast forward 2 years and you'll get to where I need you to be: the release of Batman: Vengeance  on the Gamecube. I don't know what he's getting vengeance for but I'm sure it'll be a real hoot. This game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, who would go on to develop Assassin's Creed  6 years later, which to be honest completely blows my mind when I think about it for more ...