As I skip along my merry, chronological way through consoles and computers passed in these reviews, I sometimes feel like I’m taking a step back or two. When I played that stinking Vectrex racing game, I could have sworn it was belched forth from the bowels of the 1970s. This happened when I did the […]
When I talked about the SG-1000 before, I mentioned that it had more potential than the games library would lead one to believe. It looks to me to be about as powerful as the ColecoVision, and I actually use the MEKA emulator to play games for both systems. Unfortunately for Sega, that potential was rarely realized, […]
The Commodore 64 computer had dozens of racing games, and they ranged widely in quality. I played a fair amount of these as I was growing up, and only a handful of the ones I remember really stand out as great games. Motor Mania (1982) Ah, the joys of loading games from cassette! Who wouldn’t […]
Recently, I rediscovered the Atari 5200, thanks to an emulator that fixed the console’s horribly flawed non-centering joysticks. Being released shortly before the 1983 industry crash, this system had a short life, so there weren’t many games released for it. Only one racing game was released, and it is a port of an ultra-popular arcade […]
The Vectrex is weird. At first glance, it looks like a rather bad idea. A self-contained video game system that plays games only in black and white. If you wanted colour, you had to use the coloured translucent overlays that came with the games. When this came out in 1982, most people probably looked at […]
A great, powerful system that was also bunged by goofy telephone-joystick controllers, the ColecoVision was another high-profile victim of the 1983 video game market crash. This console had some serious power packed inside, and it could handle most arcade ports better than any other home console back in 1982. And then the crash, and Coleco […]
Well, I haven’t exactly been looking forward to this. Have you even heard of a video game console called the Arcadia 2001? There isn’t much to say about it, other than: rushed, badly programmed rip-off games dead-on-arrival for U.S. release terrible graphics and even worse sound Emerson got sued by Atari for making clones of […]
Let’s check in with that console that really should have had a longer lifespan, the Intellivision. The main things that caused an early demise for this system are of course the Video Game Crash of 1983 and those god-awful controllers. Things were more powerful under the hood than many people realized, and later games released […]
The racing games for the Odyssey² were both pack-in games on the same cartridge. I mentioned them before, and there really isn’t a whole lot to say about them. The Odyssey² game library contains some surprisingly good and memorable games, but these to ain’t really among them. Speedway! (1978) The idea behind this game is […]
Another 8-bit machine from the 1970s – the Apple II – had its share of driving games. Prepare not to be blown away by amazing displays of graphics and sound. You know, if I could stretch the boundaries of what I consider to be a racing game by wide enough margins, I could call “The […]
Many game collectors and classic gaming enthusiasts start with the Atari. And for the most part, this is where home console gaming really began. But this system has some truly terrible games. Thankfully for us, it also has some extremely fun games that were programmed by early masters of the art. Indy 500 (1977) This […]
Something else happened in 1972… the same year that the Odyssey had roused just about as much interest in this new “video game” phenomenon as it could have on its own. Atari invented Pong. Well, Nolan Bushnell kind of stole it from the Odyssey’s game “Tennis”. That’s okay because everybody else in the mid ’70s […]
Set the Wayback Machine for 1968… It’s the Jet Age. Steppenwolf, The Doors and The Beatles are blasting from your turntable. Airplanes without propellers and radios without electrical cords are high-tech shit. And these new transistors that the eggheads are talking about are replacing vacuum tubes everywhere! Technology is all moving so fast, it’s downright […]
If you are a fan of video games like I am, then you may have played a racing game or two. I love playing racing and driving games, whether they are competitive in nature or just simulations. If you read any of my Golfyssey posts where I reviewed golf video games, then you might have […]
This post may not be quite about what you think it’s about. In my “Reassessing the Atari 5200” post below, I talked about how shocked I was to learn that Atari had developed the internals for that console five years before they had released it. It appeared as though Atari sat on this technology for […]
The Atari 5200 was a dud. The story behind it is interwoven with the head-scratching tale of Atari’s journey from industry leader and juggernaut to has-been and bankrupt joke. I’m going to have to insert another link to the Angry Video Game Nerd because you should watch his review of this console. With my fondness […]
Seeing as how I pay professional comic artists to draw my lovely comics for me, I have often said that my drawing skills are non-existent and that I can’t draw. This isn’t actually 100% true. I can sort-of draw. But I will admit that I can’t draw sexy women, so you’ll never see me attempt […]
Over the past three weeks, I’ve reviewed a total of 60 golf video games for 24 different systems. This Golfyssey has taken me all the way from the lowly Atari 2600 to the PC and beyond. I’ve played terrible games that barely resemble golf and only serve to frustrate, to realistic simulations that are so […]
This Golfyssey has taught me several things. Among them, that reviewing video games is actually work. So hats off to those folks who do this for a living. Unless you’re one of those presstitutes being paid by the big gaming sites who automatically gives glowing reviews for every new shiny turd that EA shits out […]
Another hand-held console released by Nintendo, the Game Boy Advance came out in 2001. This one is 16-bit, and is comparable to the Super Nintendo in graphics and sound. By the early 21st century, video games weren’t seen by their makers so much as an artform that provided players with a fun experience as they […]
The Game Boy Color was released in 1998. Criminy, it sure took Nintendo a long time to release a hand-held console that did more than 4 colours in a palette of pea soup. The reason for this is that colour LCD screens ate batteries like some kind of… uh… like some kind of… battery eating […]
Ah, the PC. There’s a good chance that you’re reading this blog on a personal computer right now. The PC is ubiquitous for home use and work today, but it started as just another variant of the home computer back in the early 1980s. The IBM PC saw immediate success in the business world, and […]
3D gaming is where I pretty much lose interest. The primary appeal that video games have for me is their ability to stimulate my imagination, and the more like real-life these games appear, the less interesting they are to me. That’s not to say that games made for the Nintendo 64 looked anything like real-life. […]
Sega’s Rapidfire succession of new hardware releases sure did backfire on them. Released in North America only six months after the ill-fated 32X, ,the Saturn was the CD-based 32-bit console that Sega should have released all along instead of messing up the market with addons for the Genesis. Sega had burned a lot of good […]
What’s with all these Sega consoles coming out so fast? Oh, they’re not really consoles? Continuing Sega’s self-inflicted decline in the 1990s, the 32X was another addon for the Sega Genesis. It was originally planned to be Sega’s next generation 32-bit console, but was instead released as another clunky addon instead. This was even after […]
If you were Sega, and you were at the top of the video game console market in the early 1990s, and you wanted to perform a stunning “ditch” that would send your company spiraling down to the bottom as calamitously as possible… how would you go about doing it? Well, do what the real Sega […]
The Super Nintendo sure did arrive late to the 16-bit party, didn’t it? As the last of the main players to be released, it might seem a bit underpowered. But Nintendo found many ways to make it succeed, and scores upon scores of games released for the system are considered to be classics. Many game […]
Those of us past a certain age can remember ads that would promise to bring an arcade gaming experience into our homes. God knows, there were all kinds of goofy commercials playing on the impracticality of cramming several different 250 pound arcade cabinets into someone’s living room just so they could play a pixel-perfect version […]
Not many people remember the TurboGrafx-16. And it’s been justly forgotten, I think. I lived through the 16-bit console wars in the early 90s, and I don’t ever remember seeing ads for the system on TV. Then again, I live in Canada, so maybe Hudson Soft and NEC didn’t see any point in bothering with […]
When the Game Boy came out in 1989, it was the first truly successful hand-held video game console. There had been other hand-held and portable video games on the market before, and some even had multiple selectable games built into them. But the Game Boy was one of the first that took cartridges. It was […]
To continue my review of golf games for this console, I shall talk about five games in the same series – “PGA Tour Golf”. That box is for the first one of these that I played, and in my opinion the best of them all. It’s also what I consider the finest golf video game […]
SEGA! The Genesis was Sega’s finest moment. Sadly, after this they took a chapter or two out of the Commodore and Atari playbook for surefire failure which is why you don’t see them making consoles any more… but that’s a story for another post. But in the early 90s, Nintendo had to work damn hard […]
Oh, Atari. If Commodore jumped off a cliff, would you? In an effort to prove that stupid and disastrous business decisions would not be monopolized by its competitors, Atari decided to inflict 1000 paper cuts upon itself over the course of the mid 80s and 90s and thus die that slow, agonizing death that had […]
The Commodore Amiga. The Amiga came out of nowhere in the mid 1980s and proved to be the most capable and fully powered multimedia machine of its time. Hell, it was the only multimedia computer you could buy unless you were a Hollywood studio, and it was the first home computer with an OS that […]
How is it that the Sega Master System – which was technically a better game console than the NES in many ways – failed to make much of a dent in Nintendo’s sales, and failed to even have a fraction of the amount of decent games made for it? Why are there just a handful […]
The crash of 1983 made Video Game a bad word in North America. Thanks to a deluge of cheap and shitty titles for the Atari 2600, and a glut of “me-too” consoles and games and knock-offs and peripherals and accessories, the home console market reached a saturation point and was no longer sustainable. Quality suffered […]
Remember when I said that Commodore took a lead in the home computer market and turned it into bankruptcy in a rather short time? 1984. Exhibit A in this “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” strategy is The Commodore 16. Also the Commodore 116: And the Commodore Plus/4: Confused? Commodore sure was. The original […]
The Sega what? Why, the SG-1000 – Sega’s first entry into the video game home console hardware market that almost nobody remembers because it soled poorly. It sold only (legitimately) in Asia, though clones sold in other countries. One of the clones really took off in Taiwan, so there’s that. The hardware for this console […]
I adore my 64, my Commodore 64. Considering how I use (and am typing this on) a replica Commodore 64… and how both my Linux desktop and the virtual Windows XP desktop I run inside it are themed to have a Commodore/Amiga look… You could say I’m a fanboy. And as you might have guessed, […]
This console was a bad idea that brought lots of bad ideas to the market. Where to begin? First of all, it has stopgap written all over it. When the Atari 5200 was released, the ColecoVision console had already come out, and it had immediately become the number one seller in the market due to […]
Ah, the Apple II. That good old beast of a computer built by Steve Wozniak when Apple was just a wee company. I never owned one of these, but my elementary school had about a dozen of them back in the early 80s. From them, I learned the joys of waiting your turn, “no, we […]
Oh my god, did I want an Intellivision when I was a kid. I was quite young when the system was in its prime, but the TV advertisements were everywhere. One of the slogans they used was “the closest thing to the real thing”. Well, that was certainly true when you’re only comparing it to the […]
Bring me the head of Nolan Bushnell! I have fond memories of the Odyssey². As I mentioned below, I was a poor-ass kid growing up. My father bought me and my brothers an Odyssey² for Christmas one year, I believe in 1984. The system itself was released originally in 1978, so we’re talking bargain-bin, unload-it-fast […]
Ah, the Atari 2600. The video game system from 1977. Even though I have plenty of games for the Atari, I never play any of them regularly. The graphics and especially the sound are just too primitive for me to enjoy anything on this thing. In fact, some of the games that were released for […]
It has been said before that a video game console is only as good as its most prominent golf game. Actually, you know what… nobody has ever said that. Seriously, google it. No results. Same with Golfyssey. No results. Well, let’s play fast and loose with the facts then, shall we? None other than the […]
Just what you’ve always wanted! Now you can re-live the glory days of the late 80s when the Commodore Amiga computer was the most advanced multimedia computer you could get without buying a special effects workstation. Since I use a replica Commodore 64, and since I have the interface themed to look as Commodore/Amiga-like as […]
With concerns in mind about privacy and security, I have often suggested that people use Linux to browse the internet. I think that advice is particularly relevant with the recent news about government spying. I’m also aware that some technosexuals are hesitant to regularly visit Fembot Central or FembotWiki because they don’t want their partners […]
What am I doing up at 4am? I was all done sleeping, I guess. And what better time to regale you with tales of shit which you care not the least! Like the subject of these two partial screenshots I took back in January that I thought were remarkable at the time. The top image […]
One of my hobbies, I guess, is extending the usable lifespan of my first PC. This is a vintage 1998 Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8260 with maxed out RAM (384MB) and a Pentium II clocked at 266 MHz. It has run Windows 98 for most of its existence, and over the last half dozen years or […]
I don’t watch movies. I have this down to the fact that I don’t like fiction. Just ignore the fact that I’ve written a novel, four comic books and then some. But this movie is infamous. I’ve been aware of it’s existence for a few years, and I’ve actually mentally put it on my “I’d […]