I may be late to the party (as usual), but I recently played and finished Heavy Rain for the first time. Being a 2010 release for the PlayStation 3 (although I played it on PS4), I guess it’s technically “retro,” although personally I’m not a big fan of attaching the “retro” or “classic” or “vintage” tags to anything quite that recent. However, during the hours I poured into just one play-through, certain aspects of its design felt very familiar, and I recognized immediately why: Heavy Rain features an interesting combination of game design concepts that hearken back to adventure games of the ’80s and ’90s, but reimagined and presented through a modern filter. Continue reading “Heavy Rain’s Classic Ancestry”
Super Metroid was released on March 19, 1994 in Japan, making today its 25th anniversary.
Wow!
Quick reminder here that I founded the Metroid Database website back in 1996 — but only to preface my saying that I literally, probably, cannot write any more about Super Metroid than I have already. I’ve played it, researched it, reviewed it, examined it, praised it, torn it apart, and got an S-logo tattoo. And I’ve watched others do the same, for 25 years now. So really, at this point, all I can do is celebrate it! Continue reading “Happy 25th Anniversary, Super Metroid!!”
Even after all these years of being a gamer, this journey of research and learning about them still fascinates me as it leads me through various paths and I find myself arriving at information, games, people, or items I’ve never encountered before. Such is the case with the book I’m looking at today: a Japanese tome entitled simply Family Computer 1983-1994. Continue reading “Gamers’ Library: Family Computer 1983-1994”
Quite a while back, I wrote a nostalgia piece about the old Coleco tabletop arcade games. While those vintage toys are still cool, there are scads of impressive new mini arcade machines out now, with more on the horizon. While I’ve largely passed them by until now, some recent announcements have rendered some of these minis impossible for me to ignore.
Continue reading “Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny Arcade Games, Part 2 – UPDATED!”
With Nintendo being the protective and litigious juggernaut it has been since the launch of the NES, it seems unbelievable that they would ever allow their most famous properties to be licensed out to other companies. Yet, in the pre-NES days, when their arcade games were what made them famous, that’s exactly what they had to do to spread their brand awareness and get console ports of their games into homes. Continue reading “Nintendo’s Early Licensing Days”
Retro Game SuperHyper 