In what is yet another baseball game with an I-talian manager's name slapped on it, Tony's effort is far more complex and impressive in presentation than Lasorda's.  It's got stats galore, licensed team names, real player rosters, an abundance of control options for pitching and fielding, and play-by-play commentary.  On the downside, it's also the kind of game that happens to be SO INCREDIBLY OVERLY COMPLEX that you have to either sit down and read the instruction manual or make absolutely sure you've gone through the menu screens and adjust everything just to make sure you're the one playing the computer instead of making it play itself.  It's the kind of game that would have made you beg for tutorials at the time, which we have all been made aware by now as being like making a deal with the devil for a free Chicago Dog.  And to be fair, that Chicago Dog was probably really fucking tasty.

The choppy graphics don't quite offend the eyes as heinously as Dick Vitale's "Awesome, Baby!" College Hoops, but they get annoying very quickly.  And while subpar graphics do not always necessarily equate to subpar gameplay, you'll find this game to get rather easy, and scoring is so effortless that your star players' onscreen batting averages are only eclipsed by LaRussa's blood-alcohol level.  They took every high-tech idea they could find, threw them all on here, and ran with them all in one gameplay experience like fucking an autistic hooker.

All that said, it's still a fun little baseball game.  I could make plenty more clever little metaphors for how this game plays out, but to save the best one for last, I'll use his very own daughter, Bianca, who happens to be a cheerleader for the Oakland Raiders.  She's a hot little number right now, with lots of daddy issues you might be able to ignore while she's young and attractive, but give her 18 more years and she'll start to look a little weird and you won't have the patience to jump through her sexual hoops anymore, looking instead to "play ball" with the dominantly athletic black chick.  I give it

This game stinks of 1994.  Even worse, it stinks of 1994 ESPN.  This was before ESPN became Disney-fied and started going Hollywood and got way too big for their own good.

The important thing to know about ESPN, for non-sports fans, is that they don't actually MAKE anything.  They repackage shit and sell it as their own.  This is perfectly legal in the corporate world, and they add insult to injury by pulling original content made by independent creative minds using packaged material in a way that could be perceived as productive.

Even here, they're just slapping their name on something developed by a company called Park Place and released by Sony, another notorious ripoff company.  None of this game is innovative, original, or fun.  The only draw is the smooth animation, which was done better and sooner by many other baseball games.

The insultingly basic yet often confusing controls are made that much worse when the gameplay is hideously unbalanced towards scoring.  I guess it was the harbinger of the steroid era!

The audio sounds like something out of a text to speech demo, and the intros are done by Chris "I might have invented being gayfat" Berman.  The saddest part is that THIS game got to use the licensed team names out of all the other far more deserving titles.  I give it my current lowest sports game rating: One Crudely Drawn Penis in Mark May's Mouth.

I'm not really a comic book fan, but I do like movies that are based off of them. In fact, I like movies that are based off of all types of books. Because I'm illiterate.

Up until this point the X-Men movies were two for four. Bryan Singer did an amazing job with the first two, but when he left to direct Superman Returns I don't think the crew ever forgave him because they immediately began shitting on his legacy. What they did to Hugh Jackman in X-Men Origins is unthinkable: they actually paired him with Ryan Reynolds. I hadn't seen Hollywood justice carried out like that since they did the same thing to Wesley Snipes in Blade Trinity.

So does X-Men: First Class bring back the former glory of the franchise, or is it another failed comeback attempt fueled by the need for cocaine and sluts like The Wiggles' reunion tour?

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In a surprise twist, yet another of the Genesis line of sports games with a name slapped on manages to be very, very good, yet STILL not quite up to the level of the very, very GREAT World Series Baseball ’95 released that same year.

The first thing you’ll notice is the intro screen, which sported some terrific graphics at the time. I can go as far as to say this is probably the best-looking 16-bit baseball game I’ve ever played. Gameplay is kept fairly simple and PITCHING/DEFENSE ORIENTED (how bout that?), although pitching feels a little more overly complex (and harder to fool the opponent) than WSB, and bunting is a painstaking task of combining buttons and directions instead of simply designating it to one of the other two unused buttons.

Missing the MLB license, as should be familiar with many of these types of games, you are kept selecting locations instead of official teams, although it’s fairly easy to distinguish this time around. Also, although it still does an okay job, the stadiums don’t quite feel as "on location" as in WSB. You’ll find yourself playing in Wrigley Field at night far too often, and no self-respecting White Sox fan should have to go without some angle shot where Chinatown is in the background, and with the Revenge of Shinobi "Chinatown" theme playing.

PSYCHO TIP: Pick the AL Chicago team with Frank Thomas on it. You know, the guy the game is named after. As a bonus, you can even play as Ozzie Guillen! Definitely worth a bargain bin price. I give it one Ozzie Guillen Gay Kiss.

This game is over a year old now but I’m going to review it anyway. I just bought it off of Steam when it was on sale for $4.99 and I want my goddamn money back.

I’ll preface by saying that I love both the Alien and Predator franchises. Yeah, Predator 2 sucked and there hasn’t ever been a good Predator game that didn’t also have Aliens in it, but the first and third movies are good enough to make up for all of that.

Meanwhile, there has yet to be a bad Alien movie—and if you say "Resurrection" I’ll fucking hit you. It may be the weakest movie in the series but that’s just a testament to how good the first three are, and it’s still better than anything you like. Go watch The Nightmare Before Christmas and cry about how you’ll never find true love like in every goddamn Tim Burton movie.

Even the Alien vs. Predator movies were all right considering they were directed by Paul Anderson, the guy who is systematically butchering Resident Evil as though it raped his only daughter. But Aliens vs. Predator, released in 2010 as a reboot of the original game series, should have been aborted immediately after conception. Fuck the pro-lifers. This entire review is their fault.

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Anybody who knows me knows that when I refer to somebody as fat as Tommy Lasorda, I follow the old adage: "Nobody is that fat and not gay." However, in the case of Lasorda himself, such is not the case, because his fatness is eclipsed only by his I-talianness, and we all know it is physically impossible for somebody that I-talian to be gay. The fact that he is a hideous beast of a man (redundant in the case of I-talians) is beside the point.

This phenomenon has no effect on the game itself, however; that’s mostly because it’s just another Sega game circa 1989 that has a name slapped on it and shipped out. In this game’s case, it makes little difference either way, because it’s just a fun little baseball title with no team licenses of any sort, and bare bones, basic gameplay. You won’t find a lot of depth, focus on stats, or deep strategy here. It’s very easy to pick up and play, but the controls can get tricky once somebody hammers a line drive and the announcer calls out "SHORTSTOP!" and you’re supposed to react in that split second it goes to overhead mode and you realize it’s like you’re back in little league and a ball flies past you while you got distracted by that bee stuck in the grass with its wing damaged. But somehow, you picture Tommy Lasorda and his uncanny ability to hawk diet products despite looking every bit as fat and hideous (I-talian) as always, without any visible results, and you realize everything will be okay. Just picture yourself as a weak woman, and Tommy is hugging you in your hour of need, shortly before he throws a full can of beer at you, calls you a cunt and starts screaming racial slurs at the TV. I give it

No, this isn’t going to become another retro review site. I just don’t keep up with new releases, and when you’re writing about a game that’s three months old nobody finds it relevant or endearing. If I want to be hip with the kids I’ve gotta go way back to the far off year of 2006 for my review fodder. That’s the year Alien Shooter 2 was released and is also the year I vowed that, one day, I would take the game’s developer Sigma Team and make them my wife.

“Certainly you realize that there’s no legal way you can marry a corporate entity. Such tomfoolery will not be abided!”

Settle yourself, younglings, for I live in the great white nation of Canada Land, where a man can marry pretty much anything he wants—be it another man, a video game development studio or even a woman! Canadians may be known for our politeness, but that’s only so that we can take you back home and drill you six ways from Sunday (which, up here, is the coldest, darkest day of the week and can last up to eight months).

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