Saturnology
Manx TT Superbike
David reviews the Saturn port of the Manx TT Superbike. While not the most featured game in the world. the Saturn edition is definitely worth a spin.
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014 – Typical American
Knock knock! Who’s there? It’s FREEDOM. Oh look, it brought along its best friend LISTENER EMAIL. (Eagle screech)
Duke Nukem 3D
Like most of you, I picked up my free copy of Duke Nukem 3D this week over at GoG. If you somehow missed out on this deal, you can read on below about what a gloriously exciting classic the game is, and why you should go out and play it today!
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N64 Connoisseur
Samus and the Nintendo 64 Needed Each Other
Nintendo did a tremendous job of featuring its biggest stars on the Nintendo 64. Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, Donkey Kong, Link, and even Pikachu all got at least one game of their own for the system. Pikachu even got a special version of the Nintendo 64. There is someone missing from that list, however. Someone who also needed to be featured and was sadly left out. That someone is Samus Aran, of Metroid fame.
The Fair Shake
Wizards and Warriors
My girlfriend had this past weekend off after dealing with unruly customers for several days in a row. Being the holiday season and all that, it frays nerves and she rightfully wanted a day to just hang around the house and really, well, do nothing. It seems the older one gets, the rarer those days become. I had the ‘regular Nintendo’ set up in the living room from the night before, when I had a late night session of Castlevania. I woke up the next morning to the inspiring soundtrack of Wizards and Warriors. I forgot how enjoyable this game is, and truthfully hadn’t really played it in years.
The Retro Critic
THE HOBBIT
Something a little bit different this week, let’s take a look at a text game!
I’ve been playing a bunch of them over the past month so I thought I’d talk about The Hobbit since the movie’s out this week and all.
Back in the day, the game did really well in terms of sales and it got gamers slightly closer to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, so close in fact that the game even came with the book! The scripting language in the game (or “parser”) was slightly more advanced than in a lot of other text games in that you could actually combine items and ask more complete questions with adverbs and such.
So that all sounds pretty awesome. Can you imagine? Actually interacting with Tolkien’s novel?!
*geekgasm*
Games of Christmas past: A look back in time
I’m sure if you are reading this the odds are pretty high that you have a game under your tree this year or put one there for someone else.
I sometimes think back to games I was given at this time of year as a kid, and I’ve decided to share some of those memories today.
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013 – Fish-related Games
May I interest you in some fish, fish-related games, or terrible fish-puns? No? Don’t be a crab; I cod find some good ones for you! I’m sorry if you think that pun was carp, but thinking of these in a snapper is difficult.
…
I’ll sea myself out.
The Power of HTML 5: Keeping the Classics Alive
Technology. Technology, and the constant advancement of the internet. To me, they are an exceptional tour de force in the world of gaming. For others, they are everything that is wrong in gaming today. But let us digress, and just take a step back and look at the wonderful games they can provide us. Read on to learn the power of HTML 5!
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The Fair Shake
Psycho Fox
If you’re over the age of say, 25, you most likely remember the Toy’s R’ Us video game aisle. No games were actually stocked on the sales floor. Instead, an entire aisle with pictures of game boxes lining one wall greeted you. You grabbed a small ticket off the wall under a picture of a game box that represented the store’s inventory. No tickets left for a paticular game? SOLD OUT. The elderly woman working the counter of the small bank-teller like room up front, way past the cash registers, would hand you a game in trade for a ticket, after you paid for it, of course. It was fun and added to the excitement of buying a game, for me anyway, like ‘OMG this is a big deal’. Often times you had one game on your mind that was ‘coming soon’, checking each visit to the store, waiting and hoping for that game to arrive whenever you walked down the game aisle.
RetroHate
Stairway to Hell
Notice what he’s scowling at…
Stairs. Animators hate them. Daleks (were) confounded by them. They whine and groan like a little kid after getting socks for Christmas instead of a Nintendo or Sega. They break when you least expect it. They taunt you with the promise of victory at the top. They write with permanent markers on video game cartridges. They kidnap children, beat up old ladies, assault women, kill teenagers and, and…wait, what was I talking about? Oh right. Stairs.
To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to stairs in video games until recently. My attention/hate came to a head when I couldn’t progress through a certain game because I didn’t ascend a set of stairs exactly the way the game wanted me to. So I decided to let off some steam here in my second RetroHate feature. Let’s talk Stairs!
The Retro Critic
COOL WORLD
Ah Cool World.
My childhood wouldn’t have been complete without the nightmares and headaches caused by this bizarre little partly-animated flick. A big fan of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? at the time, despite how terrifying Christopher Lloyd’s Judge Doom truly was, I expected the Brad Pitt-starring cartoon film noir to really be the next best thing but it just freaked me out.
Something tells me I might enjoy it more re-watching it today though, we’ll see.
I never played any Cool World game back in the day because, as far as I was concerned, Cool World was evil and needed to die. But, after having tracked down a copy of the Game Boy game since and giving it a go, I can finally confirm that…
Cool World is evil and needs to die.
Or that one game, at least.
Now I’ll give it that: it probably has the best Game Boy opening ever.
What does 68.5 hours get you from world record gamers?
Apparently, not a damn thing.
One of the common themes in my professional life surrounds the world record video gaming communities and their habits of creating Beverly Hills 90210 plot points almost daily. As a guy who has written about and/or pushed out a lot of these types of stories into the mainstream press for years, my e-mail inbox often makes the remarks in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters sound normal and balanced.
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012 – Cross Dimensional Pollution Genocide
Hey guys, Andrew here. I just want to tell you all that I have literally no idea what’s going on with the title of this podcast. I chose Galactus as the background image because he’s the closest non-offensive thing I could find that’s related to the title.
Map Quest
Map Quest: Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
Edutainment is something that’s fairly saturated these days. You can boot up your iPad, smartphone, or Facebook account, and nab pretty much every sort of teaching tool known to man. Whether you want your child to learn their ABCs, 123s, or anything in-between, some sort of anthropomorphic mascot will be there ready to help.
Me? I didn’t have that much to choose from, but alongside classics like Reader Rabbit, Number Munchers, and Super Solvers, I taught myself.
Carmen Sandiego helped immensely, whether she wanted to or not. Read More