Emulation can get a bad rap sometimes. I think that mainly comes from people who don’t really understand what they’re talking about. I also think it comes from people who are just opposed to the very concept of emulating a video game outside the original hardware for which it was intended. Since I discovered the […]
As you may or may not know, the Odyssey² was a home console that included a full Qwerty keyboard. The few quiz games available for it take advantage of this setup. Math-A-Magic! (1980) Yes, another math quiz game. But this one is probably the easiest out of all of them to play because of the […]
Though the hardware was released a few months before the venerable Atari 2600, the Apple II computer was capable of a few more tricks than that console. I chalk this up mainly to the fact that it’s a computer with a keyboard and the fact that it’s hardware was expandable. The graphics are nowhere near […]
Among the Atari 2600’s vast and vastly inconsistent library of games are a couple that qualify as quiz games. And yes, they are both math quiz games. We’re not going to see anything so astoundingly complex as words just yet. Basic Math (1977) This launch title for the 2600 (when it was still known as […]
Back in 1976, video games were still a very new phenomenon. The Fairchild Channel F was not the first home video game console, but it was the first one that allowed for interchangeable game cartridges. And even with the rudimentary tech inside the console, the game library shows signs of creativity beyond just Pong. Math […]
It’s time for another batch of video game reviews here on Robotman’s blog. This time, I’ll be focusing on the exciting, engrossing and exhilarating world of quiz games. Hang on to the edge of your seat, because nothing gets the blood pumping like a round of 20 Questions played on your old 8-bit computer, am […]
Because I’m a cheap bastard, and in the spirit of making things for myself, I’ve made a wall calendar for myself to use that celebrates old video game consoles. This one is the sequel to last years calendar that I made, and it features twelve lesser-known and less popular consoles. Give it a download if […]
That LSD stands for Lovely Sweet Dream, don’t you know. Or one of many other things like in Limbo the Silent Dream, in Life the Sensuous Dream, in Logic the Symbolic Dream, in Leisure the Sonorous Dream, in Laughter the Spiritual Dream, in Lunacy the Savage Dream, in Linking the Sapient Dream, or one of […]
“S.A.S.S. Renegades” is my latest commissioned comic, and the sequel to “Shemale Android Sex Sirens“. Along with my comic “Sexdroids in Space”, it is the comic story of which I am most proud. I hadn’t originally intended to make a sequel to S.A.S.S. Before I posted that comic, I contacted the lovely Sarina Valentina, who […]
S.A.S.S. is a beautiful thing. Spoilers will be plentiful, so if you have never read the comic, I suggest you do that first. This third major comic of mine was a diversion for me, both in the kinky sense of the word and in another. First of all, it was the first comic I had […]
Comic number four that I commissioned was Future F.A.I.T. It was always meant to be the first in a series of comics, but I have yet to commission the next part. Future F.A.I.T. is a light-hearted and (hopefully) funny homage to and parody of classic SciFi tropes and settings, and it stars the lovely Kiwi […]
“Can’t I just call it ‘audio restorations’ or something sane?” you’re probably wondering. Why not be megalomaniacal about it? I am quite awesome at it. And one day – one day – I shall have me a tropical volcanic island lair/headquarters with the volcanic mountain carved into the shape of my head. One day. But […]
My Video Carnage reviews have all wrapped up, and I’ve done the circuit from console to console, all the way from the lowly Odyssey to the Xbox. I’ve stopped in with some computers along the way to check out the driving there,and all told, I reviewed 99 games for 33 systems. Now it’s time to […]
I’m back with the second half of my Road Rash series reviews. The first five games I reviewed can be found here. Road Rash 3D (1998) This was the second Road Rash title I ever played, and it was one of the first games I bought when I first bought my PlayStation 2. In fact, […]
Well, I’ve plowed my way through all of those 2007 remixed Genesis albums I talked about a while ago. If you don’t know what I mean when I talk about Mikeification, read that post. It’s audio editing. Do I sense? Not mind. Now that I’ve actually listened to all those albums in their remixed form, […]
Back in 1988, NEC released the world’s first disc-based video game system in the form of an addon for their PC Engine console. This was in Japan, where gamers got the new tech first in those days. The CD-ROM² added some extra power to the base console, and game studios took advantage of this to […]
I’ve babbled before about what I call “Mikeification” – which is essentially audio restoration. I use an audio editor to modify the music I listen to so that it sounds more pleasing to my ears. I’m not talking about mashing it up with something else, or adding dope beats. No, primarily I take my old […]
Despite what you might have read, this is not the worst video game ever made. This is definitely a terrible video game, and I do loathe it. I can find no enjoyment in playing it. But the story of E.T. is historically important, and it’s interwoven with the story of Atari’s fall from the top […]
Oh my! I use Firefox for all of my browsing needs. This is because Mozilla is one of the few entities left who are actually still striving and working to keep things on the Internet open and free as opposed to closed and restricted. I also really like the browser itself because of the sheer […]
It’s the operating system that won’t die! And even though I primarily use Xubuntu and other Linux-based operating systems for my PCs, I still use Windows XP. I also use Windows 98, but that’s another blog post. My use of Windows XP is restricted to a virtual machine here on this main computer of mine. […]
For years and years now, I’ve been searching the old Googles for images of robot women. Some of these searches have been quite fruitful. And other’s not. But there is this one album that kept popping up whenever I searched for the term “robot woman”. Since I’m a music fan too, I tried to find […]
Now that I’ve gone from Odyssey to Xbox and burned chronologically through all the console hardware I own and emulate, I’m just going to focus on one series of racing games in particular for these next two posts. There are many popular and well-known racing game series that have come out for various consoles over […]
You ever see that old episode of the Twilight Zone? The one where this guy can never find any time to read his favourite books, then the H-bomb hits and then he has all the time in the world to read his books? But then he breaks his glasses and can’t read his books? I’ve […]
No, not the Red Ring of Death Special. I’m talking about the original Xbox here, the one released by Microsoft in 2001. My spellcheck wants to change Xbox to bijoux. Ha! Selling only about 16% as many units as the PS2 sold, the Xbox is seen by many as a failure in the console market. […]
We move on to the second comic I commissioned, “Sexdroids in Space”. This one is tied with “S.A.S.S. Renegades” for my favourite out of all my comics, and it’s because I love the story I came up with. I’m not sure that most people who have read “Sexdroids in Space” realize what it’s really about. […]
Get your copy of “The Robots of Love” out, because it’s time for you and me to go through it page by page. Like a DVD commentary, this will be the first in a series of “Writer’s Commentaries” that I’m going to post for the comics I commissioned. You can also read a little more […]
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time and a lot of my own money creating and commissioning artwork for the ASFR community. To me, the most significant expenditures in time and money have been to create the stories, animations (and most of all) comics that I have released. I spent hours upon […]
We’re back into hand-held territory, and that means a step back from the realism of the sixth generation consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast. Here we trade those features in for considerations of portability. The Game Boy Advance was really nothing to sneeze at though. It was a 32-bit hand-held, though to me, most […]
If you’re reading this, I bet you owned or have played a PlayStation 2. That’s a safe bet to make with the best-selling home console of all time. What can I say about the PS2 that most people don’t already know? It was birthed on the frozen fjords of ancient Viking Scandinavia by Legendary Feared […]
Growing up as I did in the 70s and 80s, I was exposed to the glory of 8-bit sound effects when I was a kid. These kinds of synthesized sounds invariably accompanied the revelations of fembot characters, like on the old Bionic Woman show. Since then, electronic beeping sounds have been one of the pleasures […]
Dreamcast, oh, Dreamcast. My beloved Dreamcast. I’d better get my fanboy raving out of the way early. One of the most revolutionary consoles ever to be released, right up there with the likes of the Atari 2600 and the NES. While those two were phenomenal success stories with equally phenomenal lifespans, the Dreamcast’s life was […]
Handheld game consoles sacrifice power and features for portability. Comparisons are less and less acute these days, but back in 1998 when the Game Boy Color came out they were pretty stark. We’ve gone from 64-bit computing and 3D polygonal rendering back to 8-bit low-res bitmap graphics for these reviews. Oh, and kiss analog steering […]
All of last year, I had a delightful ninja cat calendar adorning my wall. I found that one on reddit in 2012, and I kept that in mind near the end of 2013, hoping that a similar awesome calendar would pop up there. Well, I didn’t see one. So I’ve made my own 2014 wall […]
Tis the season, etc, etc, etc. Lorem ipsum dolor, and all that. Back in 2011 when I commissioned the wondrous “S.A.S.S. Renegades“, the artist A.B. Lust sent me a Christmas card featuring some S.A.S.S. agents decked out in seasonal regalia. Now that the full comic has been finished and released, I can share this extra […]
I didn’t say a whole hell of a lot about the Nintendo 64 when it popped up in The Golfyssey, so I’ll rectify that now. Coming on the heels of the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, those two systems were its main console competition. Please don’t make me laugh by mentioning the Atari Jaguar. […]
If you were a console gamer in the mid to late 1990s, chances are you did your gaming on a PlayStation. It wasn’t just competitive, it didn’t just outsell the other consoles, it dominated. There were two big reasons why this was. Reason number one was the ease of programming and developing games for the […]
The Shemale Android Sex Sirens are back! Two full years in the making, here is the epic futuristic sci-fi tale of two very lovely robot super-spies and their adventures. I’ve teamed up once again with the extremely talented A.B. Lust to bring you this sequel to 2011’s “Shemale Android Sex Sirens“, and it stars Sarina […]
I really like my Sega Saturn. I was a young man just out of my teens when this console was released here in Canada, and I was living on my own and dirt poor, so I didn’t buy one. But I always wanted one, and nine years after it came out, I got one. I […]
When I think of the 32X, I almost invariably think of it as one of the reasons that the Saturn failed. Lesson: If you fuck over your game developers and your customers, you might jeopardize your future endeavours. And since the 32X was dead on arrival and given only token support, its game library is […]
Oh boy. You know you have one craptacular shitfest of a console when you’re forced to resort to infomercials to sell it because no one wants to buy the damned thing. I bet a fucking ShamWow can display better graphics than the Atari Jaguar. This was purported to be the first “64-bit” console, but only […]
The Sega CD had some disappointing offerings when I reviewed golf games for the system. It’s often looked back upon as Sega’s first hardware blunder, and if you look into the history of the Sega CD, you will find the story of a good idea botched by bad management and poor timing. There are loads […]
I’ve always wondered why Nintendo stuck such a crappy processor into the Super Nintendo. It had roughly half the processing power of the Sega Genesis, and it really left Nintendo’s 16 bit console crippled. When I talked about the SNES in The Golfyssey, I didn’t fully realize that some aspects of the SNES hardware were […]
From four colour low-res 8-bit portable racers, we now swing to the other end of the spectrum and check out the high-end home arcade system that was literally a home arcade system. The Neo Geo had its share of racing games, though it’s library is more well known for the awesome fighting games that SNK […]
And now on Robotman’s blog, it’s time we put away our fancy, expensive home consoles and television sets and pick up a handheld system. Put on those pea-soup coloured glasses too, because it’s time to revisit the original Game Boy. Our specs are lowered again for this post. Not only are we going back to […]
It’s time to check in with Sega’s fondly remembered 16-bit powerhouse, the Genesis. This is one of my favourite retro consoles for many reasons, and I can even overlook the frequently maligned sound chips. There isn’t much else to say about this console that I didn’t say in my golf video game reviews, so let’s […]
It’s time to revisit everybody’s favourite 8-bit system! I mean, the 16-bit system with the 8-bit system feel! (EDIT: The TG-16 actually has an 8-bit CPU. The graphics processors are 16-bit.) I ragged long and hard on the TurboGrafx-16 when I reviewed some golf games for it. A lot of TG16 games really don’t hold […]
Oy. Here we find ourselves in Underwhelmsville again, population 7800. Like I mentioned before in The Golfyssey, the Atari 7800 was shelved for two years before it was released in an attempt to compete with none other than the legendary NES. The graphics are shitty, regardless of how many terrible-looking sprites this system can handle […]
Even though the Amiga first came out in 1985, the games I’ll be looking at today were all from the 1990s. The Amiga was already ahead of its time, but now we’ll be looking into the future for one stop on our journey through console and computer hardware. If this unsettles you, don’t worry. Our […]
Sega not only had better hardware specs in the Master System compared to the NES, but they also had a history of making successful and critically acclaimed arcade racing games like “Hang-On“. It is because of these factors that when you compare the game libraries of the NES and Master system, you will find the […]
The NES has a massive library of games, so I don’t have to go scraping the barrel for racers. I’m happy about this because I really don’t like having to play through bad racing games just to tell you all what you already can guess. Excitebike (1984) You can tell from that iconic box art […]