A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS
Let's take a trip to Kansai with an archive of the music BBS XD First Class Networks!
CD-ROM Journal
Exploring multimedia games and software of the 90s and beyond.
Latest posts
Father Christmas
One of the strangest artifacts of video games as a global medium is that games aren't always developed in the places they're meant to be released. It must be a strange experience developing a game knowing that people in your own country are unlikely to ever see it. The subject of this post is one of those games: developed by a British team located in the UK, based on a series of books by a British…
IGF 2026 Games I Want to Talk About
For the last few years, I've been a judge in the annual Independent Games Festival. With judging wrapping up for the year, I wanted to write about some of the games I found interesting this year. In previous years I posted my lists on a social media site that's no longer available, so this year I thought I'd bring it here to you, my loyal readers.
Moon Light Café
Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar... and sometimes it means something that's only notable for being early. Today's disc is one of those.
Crosscountry BC
When I started this blog, I had ideas about games I wanted to write about—but some of those games, I couldn't write about yet, because neither I nor anyone else had them. Well, after years of searching, I've finally found one. Meet Crosscountry BC.
Rodem the Wild
I've been invited to guest over at the excellent Indie Tsushin, so you can find my latest post over there. I wrote about iTA-Choco Systems's excellently strange Rodem the Wild (Yaken Rodem, 野犬ロデム).
Jingle Cats
If you were listening to the radio in the 90s, or got a certain flavour of email forward, there's a good chance you've heard the song Jingle Cats. The original novelty single from 1993 is exactly what it sounds like—pitch-bent cat meows set to music to create the illusion cats are "singing" Jingle Bells. It was an absolutely huge hit and, between 1993 and 2009, led to the release of four…
Lucha Doll and Poranger Fonts
As long as computers have existed, we've had the desire to type funny little symbols into them. Until emoji was standardized globally in the 2010s, though, we really didn't have that many options for typing funny characters—unless you had a computer with dingbat fonts. Windows users of a certain era probably remember the Wingdings font that came with the operating system, but for many people…
Hiropon: Takashi Murakami’s Early Digital Works
NOTE: The artwork discussed in this article contains explicit nudity and sexual content. Excerpts of the work are depicted for the purpose of commentary.
Under the Fir Tree: The Day of St. Claus
What kind of life would a dog have at the North Pole? What could a puppy do to help Santa? Under The Fir Tree: The Day of St. Claus (もみの木の下で The Day of St. Claus), an interactive storybook for Mac released in 1994, follows a small dog after they get stranded far from home and adopted by Santa.