Did Pac-Man have a secret family?

The love between Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man has been celebrated in video game circles for decades. But how did this second child come about? Did Pac-Man have a secret family or a bastard child? Tonight, we investigate.

Nine months after the release of the pinball machine Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man (the only time we see her actually taking Pac-Man’s name… though it also seems to be hers anyway) came Baby Pac-Man, a video game pinball hybrid that probably made more in merchandising rights than in the arcade coin box.

Out came the original Pac-Man cartoon, with little Pac-Baby as one of the characters of the Pac-family, who lived in Pac-Land (can we say narcissist?). All seemed normal in the world of Pac-Peoples… at least as normal as round yellow people who eat one another and wear nothing but hats, boots and gloves can be anyway.

Atari Poop

Atari Poop – Double Dragon

One of the most bizarre and, quite frankly, stupid, things I can imagine a video game company doing is porting an arcade game to a variety of systems from one console generation one year, and then porting the same game to a 12 year old system from the previous generation a year later. Well, that scenario perfectly describes what Activision did with Double Dragon, porting the arcade hit to the NES, followed by the Atari 2600 the next year (the same year as the Atari 7800, SMS, among others), and you know what, although a truly bizarre move, the result was absolutely not stupid and frankly nothing less than groundbreaking! Trust me.

1 More Podcastle

022 – Literally the Worst Episode Ever

This house of podcast cards we’ve built is falling apart around us. Bailey and Jason pick games that Hunter can’t trash talk, Hunter makes a revelation about the Retro Showdown rules, and the union we contracted to make our header images is on strike, so we had to make do. We’ve had a good run, guys.

Pixelstalgia

Les Enfants Plastique

Retro Recap

Retro Recap – February 10th, 2013

This week in Retro Recap: Atari’s not totally screwed, Namco-Bandai sell out your childhood, we lament about not being rich, and the UK gets all the fun. Plus: dancing!

Commander Keen

In case you haven’t seen it already, Tom Hall is creating a spiritual successor to his game Commander Keen, and is asking for your help via Kickstarter. This of course seems like a prime time to dive into what made Keen not only a great platformer, but a defining game of the early 1990’s.

Saturnology

Sonic R

David digs into the divisive Sonic racing title, Sonic R. While David is nostalgic for the time he spent with this game years ago, he doesn’t pull any punches in this review.

The Fair Shake

FC5025: The Mystery of the Blue Disk

So as you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been a DOS/PC gamer since I can remember, dating back to a Tandy 1000 in the mid 80’s (640k of RAM whoo hoo!) Combine this with the fact I tend to be a ~~hoarder~~ pack-rat, and you wouldn’t be surprised to read that I have a big stack of 5.25″ disks… rather, I have several big stacks all over the place. Since my girlfriend and I set up a game room last August, I’ve been itching get a few disks going to see what’s on them since I consolidated everything gaming in one central location. I know what’s on the ‘labeled’ disks and I’ve covered some of these games in previous articles, but I’m actually more interested in the shareware/obscureware disks. The game room has an old Pentium 4 based eMachine computer that served me well for almost 10 years, but no 5.25″ floppy drive. (I could fire up my old 386, but it needs a power supply and a battery soldered to the motherboard.. ergo, it sits in the closet).

The Retro Critic

COWBOY KID

Howdy, partners!

Time for some good ol’ fashioned NES game reviewin’!

This week, Western-themed game Cowboy Kid takes center stage as we go back to the classic Nintendo console for more retro shenanigans leaving the Commodore 64’s shocking Psycho shlock and the weird and wonderful world of Weird Dreams far behind, for the time being.

Cowboy Kid sees you play as a gunslinger who goes from town to town on various missions. Ironically, you start off without a gun but instead walk around town stabbing anyone that comes your way.

If classic games were new today, what could they be blamed for?

The supposed evils of video games is once again filling our “news” networks with headlines and politicians with sound bites.

The “debate” ain’t new… going back as far as 1976’s Death Race, which allegedly was going to turn youth into automotive terrors. However, there are plenty of games that I could have easily seen the media attack over time for various ills of society.

Here are some angles they clearly missed or would probably apply if the game was new today.

Atari Poop

Atari Poop – China Syndrome

China Syndrome is a 1982 action/puzzle/shooter-ish game for the Atari 2600 sandwiched between two unbelievable conspiracy theories.

As for the first conspiracy, have a look online and you’ll find out that China Syndrome refers to either a movie, this video game, or a theory regarding the safety of nuclear power plants and that the first two are loosely based on the third. It appears that some people thought the power plants made in the 60s weren’t very safe. In particular, there were worries that a loss of coolant could potentially cause a meltdown where everything would burn through the bottom of the reactor and continue straight through the centre of the Earth, and exploding on the other side in China.

Now, you might be thinking “What were these people, idiots?! China isn’t on the opposite side of the Earth in relation to the U.S.!” You’d be right to think this, to a certain extent. China isn’t at the opposite end of the world; however, the reason it’s called the China syndrome and not the Australia (or somewhere off the coast of Australia) syndrome is because an American reactor never melted down straight thrown the Earth’s core and exploded on the other side in Australia.

Pixelstalgia

ToeJam even looks like Twizzlers

1 More Podcastle

021 – Ding it up!

DING!

Dr. Juggernaut is DING! here in full force, and he brought DING! along a strong addition DING! to his DING! medical DING! team: a bell. (DING!)

In other news, we make the official decision on the best point-and-click adventure game of all time, and we spend a bit too much time talking about dancing phalli.

DING!

Retro Recap

Retro Recap – February 3rd, 2013

Welcome to Retro Recap! Each week, we leave out a news trap at retrorecap@1morecastle.com and see what flies in. Here’s what we found:

Making those Old Games Shine

One of the downfalls of old games is, well, they eventually begin to show their age. Yes, they may be your favourite, but after 20 years of playing them you might want a little more. I’m not saying the games are bad of course, there’s just some room for an extra feature or two. This is where mods come in. Read on to learn about some mods that will breathe new life into some of your old favourites.
Read More

RetroHate

Line Em Up!

Fighter Dude used “Hand Wave”

I have a very complicated relationship with Role-Playing Games or RPGs. On the one hand I love the open-ish worlds, the deep story-lines, the interesting characters, the complex character leveling and the strategic battles. On the other, I hate the confusing world maps, the constant random encounters with enemies every two feet, the vague or cliched story-lines, the often paper-thin characters, the overly complex item and leveling system and the plodding pacing that often requires level-grinding for several hours before you can enter a new area. So yeah, it’s complicated.

The Fair Shake

Alien Crush

I have a confession: I’m not much of a pinball player. Maybe I was born in the wrong era. Don’t get me wrong, the local bar/pool hall that my circle of friends and I diligently haunted every weekend for years has a High Speed table, and I always gravitated to that instead of Golden Tee. I’m not Anti-Pin, just personal preference. The concept of Pinball-as-video-game always seemed odd to me, from Atari’s Video Pinball (which my girlfriend always finds time to play whenever we make it up to FunSpot), to the RPG-esque Pinball Quest on the NES, out to this weeks game, Alien Crush, on the Turbo-Grafx 16.

The Retro Critic

WEIRD DREAMS

You ever meet someone, fall in love then later find out they were possessed by some kind of demon when they attempt to poison you and transfer their evil to you through messed-up dreams which slowly kill you from within?

No?

Then that must be the plot of Commodore 64/Amiga game Weird Dreams.

Want to know if video games cause kids to become violent? Ask those who’ve played and grown up.

It’s a daily feature on television right now, and the language is getting strong.

The “violent video game” debate goes back as far as 1976, where people were up in arms over Exidy’s Death Race and what it could do to the psyche of those who played it. Berzerk was targeted in 1981, said to make certain that young players would grow up to be violent people. Mortal Kombat is perhaps the most famous of the controversial games, setting forth a chat that resulted in Congressional hearings and the ESRB Ratings system.

And yet here we are again. It’s 2013 and every day since the horrible Sandy Hook events in December there has been someone in the mainstream media or behind a podium ripping into video games and using them as a scapegoat. From claims the Newtown, CT shooter gained a “false sense of courage” from Call of Duty to Ralph “Darth” Nader saying the video game industry is equal to “electronic child molesters” it seems there are no punches to be pulled by the pundits wanting to blame video games for the world’s ills.

So… where are the gamers in this chatter?

Pixelstalgia

Grooooovy, Giygas

Page 51 of 65« First «...10 20 30...49 505152 53...60...»Last »