Time for another trip in the Sarcastic Gamer time machine. This week: Microsoft is born, Tecmo news and the first, of a long line, of crap DLC.

Strap in, kiddos. This is going to be a bumpy ride.

On March 31st, 1998, Dead or Alive made its way from arcades to the Playstation in North America. Dead or Alive was a fighting game that was named for the, at that time, current situation of its developer, Tecmo. It turned out that it was Team Ninja’s last shot to produce a successful game. Well, it worked. Dead or Alive set itself apart from the other 3d fighters of its time by focusing on two major aspects: speed and counters. While Tekken focused mainly on pulling off strings of combos, Dead or Alive rewarded players for having a faster response time. The game also featured the Danger Zone, which was an area that surrounded the stage. Were you to touch this area, your character would be sent flying into the air, allowing your opponent to juggle you wherever they wanted.

The game was a saving grace for Tecmo, and has gone on to spawn 3 sequels and 3 spin-offs, including the controversial Xtreme Beach Volleyball series, much to the delight of adolescent boys around the world.

Our next game was also released on March 31st, but seven years later during 2005. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory snuck its way onto Xboxes around North America. While it’s debatable whether or not Chaos Theory was as good as its two predecessors, there’s no question that the game was simply amazing. The game took the mechanics of the previous two and expanded on them without taking much away from the gameplay. One of the biggest differences was the introduction of the aural monitor which measured the sound Sam made and the sound of the enviroment around him. This meant that you had to use sounds such as thunder to mask your footsteps while sneaking around your foes.

The other big improvement was that Sam had a knife this time around. This gave the players more options during interrogations, and the ability to take out guards silently and effectively in close combat. Sneaking around had never been so much fun.

The next bit of news isn’t about gaming, as it is about an empire. Thirty-three years ago, on April 4th, 1975, a great evil was born deep in the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico. What started as a twinkle in a young Harvard student’s eyes, eventually turned into one of the largest and most influential companies in history. That company was, of course, was Microsoft. Even though they really didn’t enter the video game market until 2001, with the release of the Xbox, Microsoft had a hand in the gaming waters for many years. Whatever your position on Microsoft, you simply cannot deny the influence they have had on the gaming industry, through their operating systems and their consoles. When they work, of course.

Finally, we’ve arrived at one of the most controversial releases on the Xbox Live marketplace to date. That may be changing, though, with EA’s decision to charge for weaponry in the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company. You all know which DLC I’m talking about. It’s the Horse Armor for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and it was put on the marketplace on April 3rd, 2006. While microtransactions were popular on the Xbox Live Marketplace up until the release of the Horse Armor, the interet exploded when gamers found out that they were expected to pay $2.50 for a pretty useless skin. The rest of the content for Oblivion was worth the money, but many gamers still wonder if they learned their lesson. Time will tell.

That’s all I’ve got for this week. Join me next week get some quirky info on this week in the history of gaming. If you want to chat about these or any other games, hop on over to our forums and join in on the discussion.