Yesterday, August 2, 2018, I took a day off work.
I know, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but look, I work my tail off 6 days a week, and with a family and a lot of responsibilities, I actually don’t get a lot of time to myself to enjoy this hobby that I blog about. So I decided to give myself a day off, and hit the road on a day trip that I have had in mind for a long time.
Of course, it revolved around video games. Continue reading “Introducing the Arcade Road Trip 2018 series”
I did a whole blog post a while back about how much I love joysticks/arcade sticks/fightsticks. (Actually, I don’t play a ton of fighters these days, so I guess for me they’re more “shmupsticks.”) Whatever you want to call that slab of arcade-perfect precision control, I have added them to most of my game consoles, and they’ve enhanced my enjoyment of shmups, fighters, and arcade classics immensely.
So when I realized that I had a handful of shmups on the PlayStation 4, I started to want to add an arcade stick to that platform as well. Then I picked up the Street Fighter II 30th Anniversary Collection, and remembered how much I HATE playing Street Fighter games with a pad, so that made up my mind in a hurry: time to shop for a PS4 stick.
But in this day and age of cool custom arcade sticks, I knew one thing: it couldn’t be just ANY arcade stick.
35 years ago today, on July 15, 1983, Nintendo released its new video game console, the Family Computer, in Japan. Happy Birthday, Famicom!!
“In my day, we didn’t have no innerwebs to search and instantly find maps and passwords and solutions to our Nintender games. We had to play them by ourselves, with no help, and draw our own maps, and write down the clues that some mistranslated NPC gave us, and write out our own passwords, and if you screwed up one single letter, it was no good and you had to go back to the beginning of the game and start it alllll over, and that was the way it was, and WE LIKED IT!” Continue reading “Ye Olde NES Notebooke”
Bill Kunkel is a name you should probably know. He, along with friends and business partners Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley, were extraordinarily important figures in video game history: They created the very first video game magazine, Electronic Games, in 1981, which covered arcade, home console, and computer video games throughout their Golden Age until the Crash in 1984.
Not only that, but within those pages, Kunkel himself coined gaming terms we all take for granted today, such as “Easter egg” and “screenshot.” Yeah, that was Bill Kunkel. Continue reading “Gamers’ Library: Confessions of the Game Doctor by Bill Kunkel”
It seems that no matter what game genre we “retro” or “classic” gamers may cite as our favorite — be it platformers, maze games, puzzle games, fighting games, etc. — the shmup, or shootemup, or STG, or shooting game, or scrolling shooter, or whatever you want to call it, is almost universally revered. Despite the various strengths and weaknesses of individual titles, the shmup, as a genre, seems to be beyond reproach for many retro gamers.
Whyzzat?? Continue reading “Why Shmups?”
Okay, so if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, it’s been established that I’m a geek for laserdisc games. With that said, I recently dove back into that rabbit hole and came up with something interesting: a game I had never heard of, hidden in plain sight.
Continue reading “Lost and Found and Lost Again: Chantze’s/Triad Stone/Strahl”
In addition to being a video game nerd, I’m also a little bit of a movie buff. So with a number of interesting documentary films on arcade video games having been released in the past ten years or so, I’ve done my best to catch a lot of them. So let’s pop some corn and tear open a packet of Twizzlers, round a bunch of them up and check ’em out, shall we? MOVIE SIIIIIIIIGN! Continue reading “Arcade Documentary Roundup”
What are we playing? We’re playing what pretty much everybody and their gramma is playing this week, which is Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. And with good reason, because it’s rad. Continue reading “What Are We Playing? 05.31.18”
Lately, there’s been an influx of little-bitty arcade games hitting store shelves. There’s the steadily-improving “Arcade Classics” series that can be found at Walmart; the keychain-sized Tiny Arcade series; the working, accurate scale models coming from Replicade; the forthcoming Neo-Geo Mini. All of these have been reminding me of the original Coleco mini tabletop arcade games that came out in the early 1980s, when I was a kid, and how badly I wanted them. Continue reading “Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny Arcade Games”
Way back in October 2016, I plunked down a little over 40 bucks to back a Kickstarter project for a newly-developed PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 game titled The Henshin Engine, which at the time was slated for a March, 2017 release. Welp, in April of 2018, the game finally shipped, and with a newly-modified title of FX Unit Yuki: The Henshin Engine. I’ve been playing it since I received my copy, so let’s check it out!
Continue reading “FX Unit Yuki: The Brand-New PCE/TG16 Game!”
Recently I was talking to my friend Zac at his shop, Press Start Games, about methods of getting original NES hardware back to working order. While discussing replacement of the infamous 72-pin connector that seemingly causes 90% of NES problems, he told me about the boiling method, and how it can yield even better results than installing new aftermarket connectors. Boiling? Like literally boiling the connector in water?
Turns out, yep.
