Random observations on the classic gaming scene, courtesy of the former editor of The Gameroom Blitz.
THE RULES OF RETROBILITY Tips for designing games on 8-bit consoles Want to make your own classic video games? Here are some handy hints from someone who's made a few. Black is beautiful for backgrounds You can capture that old-school arcade feel, save resources, and squeeze a free color out of sprites by using black backgrounds. Sparse background details like twinkling stars cost you fewer tiles,…
The Sega logo briefly looked like this, with a bit of a Solid Gold/Battlestar Galactica curvature to the G. This wouldn't last for long, and the logo would soon be rebuilt into the classic blue logo we all know today. After years in the vending machine business, David Rosen’s Service Games would eventually slide into the neighboring coin-op amusement industry as Sega, making electro-mechanical…
Oh ho ho, now we’re getting into the preemo stuff! What can you even say about a legend like Nintendo, a company that was synonymous with video games in the latter half of the 1980s? Well, let’s start with some history. Nintendo (literally Japanese for “leave luck to heaven”) was into games right from the start, even back in the 19th century when gaming was strictly unplugged. The company first…
(pretty awesome) image from Gematsu On we go to the works of Toaplan! Like Emerson Lake and Palmer, Toaplan was a video game “supergroup” comprised of the best designers from Crux and Orca. Okay, “best” might not be the right word, since neither Crux nor Orca made any arcade classics. (In fact, Orca’s Springer is one of the more miserable platformers from the early 1980s, an unsteady and…
Heli-No. (image from Moby Games) Okay, so I started a Toaplan retrospective and have yet to finish it. But I just had to share this phenomenally pissy review of Tiger Heli early, because it's reminding me of my wild days as the editor of The Gameroom Blitz. Also, Tiger Heli just plan sucks. What the hell, Toaplan? If you were going to make games like this, you might as well just go back to Orca…
Playing retro video games is great! But sometimes, just playing them isn't good enough... you want to get under the hood of these old systems and see what makes them tick. That wasn't possible in the 20th century, but thanks to BASIC compilers like Fred Quimby's Batari BASIC and Oscar Toledo's exemplary CVBasic (this thing is really good, like, you have no idea), the ability to make real retro…
That's another ColecoVision game in the can. This time it's Barbarricade, a Breakanoid where the wall holds a grudge. This is the first original ColecoVision game of its kind with support for analog controllers, a feature Spectravideo's Flipper Slipper and Bit's Strike It! both lack. (Of course, you can play the game with a joystick, with three speeds for the title character, but I don't really…
Well, the results are in from the MSXdev 25 competition . The verdict? Operation Hibernation was selected as the 16th best of the fifty entries, while Eye Brawls nipped at its heels in 17th place. It's about where Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons landed in the last contest, except not really because that was out of a pool of 31 entrants. So I still lost, but I lost more gracefully this year. Hooray for…
Yoshihisa Kishimoto , the creator of Double Dragon and Renegade, recently passed away. Guess which arcade game publisher just got pushed to the top of my review queue? (image from Logopedia) It's hard to overestimate the significance of Double Dragon in 1987. Technos had already pioneered the beat 'em up genre with Data East's Karate Champ, and the side-scrolling beat 'em up with Renegade, but…
Image from... I'll be dipped, Sun Denshi. I've been a little off my game as of late, so we'll start off slow and review a couple of games from Sunsoft. Sunsoft is well known to kids who owned an NES... it was one of the star players among Nintendo's licensees, stumbling out of the starting gate with weak ports of Midway arcade hits but quickly finding its footing with exquisitely polished and…
"Who's the baddest mofo on the arcade floor?" "Who makes the games that are (almost) never a bore?" "Williams!" "You're daaaamn right." Originally known for its pinball, Williams made a smooth slide into the video game industry with its 1980 debut, Defender. Defender is the kind of arcade game that immediately comes to mind when you think "arcade games"... obnoxiously loud and colorful, with big…
(image from Arcade Shop) Hey, it's Bally-Midway! You know, the creators of Pac-Man. (angry whispering) They're... not the creators of Pac-Man? Who is? (more whispering) Namco? Where does it say that on the machine? ...Er, anyway. Bally-Midway took all the credit for Namco's work in the United States, to the point where it made its own unauthorized sequels to Pac-Man and wove elements of Galaxian…
Soar, Mighty Orbots! And take off in an extremely exciting action sequence! Back in 1985, giant robots were all the rage. Voltron! Robotech! Transformers! Mighty Orbots! As an eleven year old boy who fixated on pop culture with the intensity of a laser beam, I loved 'em all... and even tolerated Go-Bots, if nothing else was on. You could find giant robots (and even better, giant robots that…
Teh-ka-kan! Teh-teh-teh-teh-teh-ka-kan! Tecmo: Now with more ninjas! And boobs! And ninja boobs! Tehkan is dead. Long live the Tecmo. (It's Koei -Tecmo now? In that case, long live the boredom.) (The Legend of) Baluba-Louk Played: On MAME, sorry! Like Falcon's Dorodon, The Legend of Baluba-Louk is a new game built on old hardware. Unlike Dorodon or Tehkan's own Pleiades, Baluba-Louk is a largely…
The thingie in the logo is the archaeopteryx, the extinct missing link between dinosaur and bird. This brand name went extinct pretty quickly too, with the company reverting back to its original name, Universal. Universal is one of those obscure game companies that hangs out in the dimly lit corner of the minds of old-school gamers. So let’s throw a little light on the subject! The company’s two…
Welp, that's it for the Xbox brand . Turn off the lights when you leave, will you? Long story short, former Xbox head Phil Spencer and his imminently forgettable second-in-command Sarah Bond have both left the company... Spencer by choice, and Bond after being nudged out by incoming Xbox CEO Asha "Please don't squeeze the" Sharma. Sharma was the former head of Microsoft's AI division, suggesting…
For me, I mean. My latest game, Eye Brawls , was barred from the 2026 SMS Power contest, because it was submitted to SMS Power a day before it started. Or some horseshit. Funny how I'm always slightly too early to join these contests, as if the rules were enforced to specifically bar me from participation. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. "But feel free to join the contest next year!" Feel free to pick off the…
Good lord, what a dogshit year. At least the video games were pretty good! Let's take a look at some of the stuff I played in 2025, or as I prefer to call it, Anno Diablo: FINAL FIGHT MD The Sega Genesis conversion of Final Fight, a project started in Brazil three years ago, is quite close to finished, hovering at 92% completion in its most recent build. Was a Genesis conversion of Final Fight…
This just in! It's already December, somehow. It's not going to be one of my better Decembers... in fact, it could be the last December for an aging loved one, whose health has been on the decline over the last couple of months. She seemed all but invincible as early as last year, lifting huge bags of pet food and cat litter into the back of her car during grocery trips unless I was there to…
Some game consoles have smart hardware designs that keep them relevant years and even decades past their expiration dates. The Atari 2600's life spanned three decades. The Neo-Geo only died because its manufacturer SNK did, some thirteen years after its introduction in 1990. Heck, they may still be selling Master Systems in Brazil, forty years later! Their longevity alone makes these machines…
What’s the best game console ever made? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively... personal preference and other factors means that nearly everyone you ask will have a different response, and no one answer will be more or less valid than the others. (Except the guy in the back who said the game dot com. Stop screwing around and take this seriously!) Instead, let’s look at something…
It's been a month since I last posted to this blog, and a whole lot has happened in the interim. Let's take a quick look at some of the highlights... and lowlights. XBOX AND THE RISING COST OF FAILURE Things begin to feel a bit like Christmas in late October, but if you're an Xbox owner, it's beginning to look a lot more like 2001, weeks before Sega announced the end of the Dreamcast. It may even…
It's full steam ahead with my latest ColecoVision release, Operation Hibernation. Well, not full STEAM, exactly, but full Itch.IO and a full licensing contract with CollectorVision ahead. The hope is that Operation Hibernation becomes one of the headlining titles on the ColecoVision and its kin... machines like the SG-1000 (essentially a ColecoVision with the serial numbers filed off) and the MSX…
Oh yeah, I have a blog. I should probably update it, since it's been two months since my last update, and much has happened in gaming during two months. First off, I bought City of the Wolves. After a pretty weak showing during the Xbox 360 era, SNK is finally back to "bigger, better, badder" status, with fighting games that are as exciting now as their Neo-Geo counterparts were in the 1990s. King…
Gather 'round, boys and girls! I'm going to tell you a long, involved, highly technical story of how the recently released Sega Master System game Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons Remarked came to be. I'm going to do this chronologically, starting at the very beginning of the game's development cycle and coming to the very end roughly a month later. Prepare yourself for thrills, chills, triumphs,…