As I sat in boredom over the holidays, I was thinking of my life in video games and all of the things that had a major affect on my gaming. I made a short list of some things that have happened in the last 20+ years of video games and came up with these top 5:

5. Mortal Kombat VS. DC going soft on the fatalities

Yeah, this might not be a big deal to many, but to think that the best looking Mortal Kombat game was censored down to a Teen rating is disheartening. Back in the 16-bit days we got to see fatalities in their full glory. Decapitations, exploding bodies and impaling corpses were a welcomed addition to my Sega Genesis library. For some strange reason, MK VS DC got dumbed down for a broader acceptance. It’s a beautiful game no doubt, but the draw of the MK series was always the violence. The off camera Joker fatality really pissed me off. Did you know that these fatalities aren’t censored in the European version? Watch this entire clip to see the uncensored Joker fatality.

4. The Coleco Adam computer system

Coleco really took the industry by storm with their Colecovision game console. It was the first console to have near arcade perfect ports like Donkey Kong and Venture. The Colecovision had 2 strong years before the video game crash and then shortly after releasing the Adam Computer, which was a Colecovision and a home computer all in one, it disappeared from store shelves and was never to be seen again. It was expensive and had many hardware problems. It is said to have had a 50% failure rate on the tape drive. People still say the Xbox 360 had the highest failure rate. Chew on that pundits!

3. The Sega Saturn launch

I was one of the many thousand that was happy that Sega released the Saturn several months earlier than they had scheduled. The price was a scary $399, but Sega had sent a Saturn and all the launch titles to my house for review. I was having a great time but apparently, 3rd party developers and retailers were pissed that Sega left them out of the early release surprise. Because of this and an extremely difficult development cycle, the Sega Saturn was passed over in favor of the Sony Playstation. The Sega Saturn was a great machine to play Japanese imports on and I still use mine to this day.

2. Tengen(Atari) Tetris copyright infringement

Atari owned the rights to the ONLY arcade version of Tetris. Nintendo owned the rights to publish the game on non-Japanese consoles and handhelds. Because of this, Atari lost the suit to Nintendo and all arcade perfect ports of Tengen’s Tetris were pulled off the shelves. It’s a damn shame because the Tengen Tetris was extremely better than the Nintendo version. It made the Nintendo version look like a 1st generation title. It was based off the arcade and allowed two players to dual on the same screen. It also had the dancing Russians! My cousin still has a copy of this game. You can pick it up on Ebay for about $50. Here’s a video of the gameplay from both the Nintendo and Tengen versions:

1. The Red Ring Of Death

It’s amazing how this generation has turned out. Imagine, a system with a 33% failure rate still selling at a fast pace! Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is arguably the best console ever released. It’s got great online play, great games and great features. Too bad all of this was marred by shitty hardware QA. This lead to Microsoft losing billions to try to fix problems they should have never had. I think Microsoft had to release a year early to stifle the Playstation rush. It worked, not 100% in their favor, but it worked. I think if they had the choice to wait a year and release day and date with the PS3 or still release early with the hardware issues, Microsoft would still release early. Let’s hope this is fixed with the Jasper so we can move on with our lives.