The following is part of a series about my past experiences with arcade games and running them in MAME. I will only write about games I remember playing in an actual arcade, not games I only discovered through MAME.
You know in Pac-Man, that one ghost Blinky, who doesn’t actually blink? What if he did “blink” or rather, flicker in and out (you know like “real” ghosts do)? In fact, what if all the ghosts in Pac-Man flickered in and out of view? The game would probably be near unplayable.
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For my first few post, I will be taking a look at the issues of the Nintendo Fun Club News that I have. Read More
こんにちは! Today I’m looking at a fun little puzzle game for the Famicom called Devil World. Devil World is a puzzle maze video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Famicom by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. A lot of people feel that it is a Pac Man clone, and in some ways it definitely does resemble it, but it’s also different in a lot of ways. It was released in Japan on October 5, 1984 and eventually in Europe on July 15, 1987 but due to the all of the religious icons in the game it went against Nintendo of America’s strict policies so it was not released here. This makes it the only game designed by Miyamoto that hasn’t been released in North America. The great thing is like a lot of his other games, you can just pick up and play without having to know Japanese to play it.
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As the lists came in, I got to see certain games slowly move up in number of votes. Sometimes this made me excited because it was a game I loved, and other times it made me anxious because it was a game I had absolutely no interest in playing. Gradius fits into the latter category. I’d never really played it before, but I’ve pretty much never liked a single shmup I’ve played beyond 2nd generation of consoles (think Atari 2600). To say I wasn’t excited to see it make the list would be an understatement.
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Point and click adventures have been a part of my life ever since I first discovered Myst over 20 years ago. I have been playing through Doublefine’s superb Broken Age recently and wanted to revisit some examples of the genre from my childhood. It so happens that my daughter, Mae, has been experiencing some trouble sleeping lately and has been asking to leave the light on longer each night. In order to try to combat this fear of the dark, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce her to a game that helped me fight this common childhood fear. Read More
With Hyrule Warriors around the corner, I was surprised at the lack of experience of most of you with Koei’s flagship franchise. Well… given the relative limited mainstream success and critical acclaim and sheer number of sequels made despite this absence of popularity, it might be closer to the company’s paddleboat ( or pédalo if you will). In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this series really embodies the spirit of a paddleboat. Navigating at a slow pace, unable to move faster no matter how fast you pedal/press “x.” Everywhere you look water/soldiers, barely hindering your progress. You can go co-op to have at least someone to talk to while you’re grinding away. Most of the paddleboats/characters you see do look kind of good in their goofy way, but I’m always surprised they’re viable choices to sail on a lake / fight on a battlefield. You see my point.
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こんにちは! Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Started a new job, had a bunch of training then I had a vacation in Vegas. But now I’m back and ready to go! Today I’m gonna continue to talk about the Famicom, but this time focusing on the attachment known as the Famicom Disk System. The FDS system is pretty cool and plays games that look like 3.5 inch floppy disks. The beauty with this type of cartridge/game is it allows you to save your game! There were machines in a lot of stores that would allow you to erase the game on the disk you had and save a new game onto it. Which seems awesome but when you buy a game online now, even though it has a label saying it’s one game it could actually be something totally different.
Final Fantasy was one of the first NES games I played. I can still remember first turning it on and being disappointed almost immediately. I was 9 years old and wouldn’t start studying English for another two years, so all that text that was meant to tell me important things was practically unintelligible. Luckily, I lived in Canada, and for some awesome reason, almost everything on the box and in the box was in English AND French.
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The following is part of a series about my past experiences with arcade games and running them in MAME. I will only write about games I remember playing in an actual arcade, not games I only discovered through MAME.
You like multiple playable characters in games, right? Especially when those characters each have their own unique abilities? Of course you do, multiple playable characters make games more diverse, fun, interesting and replayable. Except when they don’t.
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It’s that time again. The time that we all sit down for another edition of Raising A Gamer. As interesting as it might be to see my 4 year old’s take on a classic beat em up or shooter, we are in for…you guessed it, another Disney related movie game! Hey, I said I would let her pick the games so this should have been expected. Now don’t get discouraged yet because on the surface this game looks reminiscent of another very enjoyable Genesis title.
I’m not usually one to dabble into controversy, but sometimes, the subject is too important to ignore. There’s only one thing in gaming news worth fussing about these days and it’s the Super Smash Bros. roster. NOTHING ELSE! Indeed, I think Nintendo fans all around the world can agree that nothing can even dream of reaching the impact of a Super Smash Bros. announcement, leak and/or joke related to said leak.
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The fact that a typewriter and ink ribbon would have a prominent place in video game history is certainly strange. Such an antiquated technology would seem to have no place in a modern entertainment medium; leave it to Resident Evil, the harbinger of survival horror games, to make saving your game progress as difficult and annoying as using a mechanical typing machine.
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Hello again 1 More Castlers, other lurkers and people who don’t want to be identified as being an entity dependent on or associated with a website! Some of you may follow me on Twitter (shameless plug) and, if that’s the case, you probably know that I have recently completed for the first time in my adult life both games in the Chrono “Series”(Link to the Chrono Trigger review is in order). How you can call two games a “series” is a mystery, but that’s not why we’re here.
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Prior to writing this, I had never played the Atari 2600, but have always admired the system from afar. My father-in-law, upon learning that I have been contributing to a retro gaming site, let me adopt his 2600 that had been sitting in his garage for at least two decades. I hit the retro gaming jack pot on this one! This unit I inherited came with twenty plus games, extra joysticks and extra paddles. The 2600 fits all that extra hardware in a deliciously 70’s “Tele-Games Center”. The build quality of the 2600 is stellar, the faux wood grain and polished switches still feel great and the click when sliding in a game cart is more satisfying than any other cartridge based system I have ever played. The Atari 2600 has to be one of the most attractive pieces of video game hardware ever mass-produced. But this entry of my Raising a Gamer series isn’t about attractive hardware with the build quality of the Great Wall of China…it’s about introducing my four year old daughter, Mae, to amazing retro games. Read More
The following is part of a series about my past experiences with arcade games and running them in MAME. I will only write about games I remember playing in an actual arcade, not games I only discovered through MAME. Read More
Welcome retro ladies and old school gents, today I begin a new sub-series that I think I’m going to call “Ocarina of Crimes.” Yes, I am here to bash The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Bear in mind that this is one of my favorite games and one I played growing up (despite only having finished it on the 3DS recently). However there are still many, many things wrong with the game, some of which drive me up a wall. One of those things is the game’s checkpoint system.
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Sticking with the theme from my first piece, I wanted to revisit another definitive game from my childhood to share with my daughter, Mae. This time I figured we would try Disney’s Aladdin for the Genesis. This game had everything I thought a small child could want, magic, monkeys with swords, rugs. I was so excited to share this one with my daughter. I couldn’t wait to see her face light up when she got to the extremely satisfying yet terribly difficult Rug Ride level. But after playing Aladdin for a while I realized that while Mae definitely enjoyed parts of Aladdin, the game was just far too difficult for a 4 year old as a whole. With all of the jumping, climbing, apple throwing, and navigating through lava, I could tell she was getting frustrated. Read More