Review : Big Mutha Truckers : PS2

Big Mutha Truckers
PS2
By Steve Fulton
(Originally published on Gamerdad.com)

Slam The Hammer Down, Blow The Doors Off This One And Give It A Big 10-22
To a 7-year old in 1977, Star Wars was the coolest thing ever conceived.  The second coolest thing was Evel Knievel and his insane jumps on motorcycles with factory suspensions.  The third coolest thing however, was American trucker phenomenon.  The mid 1970’s saw independent truckers and their CB lingo pull out of the truck stops and drive head-on into the American psyche.  Like most great American pop-culture mishaps (i.e. disco, 50’s sock hops, teenage scientists, wire-fu, bullet-time, etc.), it all started in the movie theatre.  It began with White Line Fever in 1975, continued with The Last Of The Cowboys starring Henry Fonda in 1976, reached an apex in 1977 with Burt Reynolds and Smokey And The Bandit, and petered-out (cut-off by the success of Star Wars) with the Sam Peckinpah directed Convoy in 1978. It is no coincidence that the last great western of 70’s, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, was released in 1976, smack-dab in the middle of trucker-movie era.   For a few short years (until Han Solo shot-first and rose above all comers), truckers replaced cowboys as the quintessential outlaw-heroes of the American West.   What drove this fascination with 18-wheels vehicles, and the people (mostly men) who piloted them?   The open roads and convoys of big rigs were like the romantic, wide-open spaces, wagon trains, and cattle drives of the western era.  “Smokeys” were like the corrupt town Sheriffs, or worse, the ruthless Pinkerton men.  Knowing the complicated CB language was like having a ticket into a private, FCC thumb-nosing party.   This was post-Vietnam, and heroes for kids were in short supply. As silly as it may seem, the truck-driver of the mid-70’s seemed to embody the All-American spirit of freedom, independence, free trade, and the dream of making your life into anything you want it to be.  

Review : Game : Activision Anthology : PS2

My first review submitted to Gamerdad.com.  This was not written in the gamerdad.com style.

Activision Anthology
PS2

By Steve Fulton 
(originally published on GamerDad.com)

For A Change, Nostalgia Is Done The Right Way...But Will your Kids Care?

The name "Activision" means more to me than it rightly should, and far too much than I can ever admit to

my wife.  To me at age 11, the fab-four were "David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan". I knew the names of the founding fathers of 3rd party video games better than the authors of Declaration Of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution.  Activision games were so well-crafted, they made the majority Atari's own 2600 releases look silly by comparison.  They continually released high-quality (if sometimes shallow) games, up until the end of the first great video game boom.   After changing their name to the obviously focus-group friendly Mediagenic and then back again in the early 90’s, the company started to dig into it’s own history for ideas.   In 1995 they, released three Atari 2600 Action Pack titles for the PC. In 1998 they released an Activision Classics collection for the PS1.   All of these early efforts suffered from an incomplete selection of games, and poor game emulation.