Okay, this isn't as great a deal as Game Tengoku Cruisin' Mix Special was, and the games themselves aren't as good, either. But these two side-scrolling platformers nevertheless provide a certain twisted sense of entertainment with their oddball play mechanics and a downright bewildering East-meets-West presentation. Did you...
Toy manufacturer Parker Bros. dipped its proverbial toes into the video game industry back in the early 1980s, producing Atari 2600 games that run the gamut from pretty decent (Star Wars Empire Strikes Back is so fondly remembered that fans continue to convert it to other formats) to the slow, dull as dishwater conversion of...
Courtesy of Cohost user Daav and collector Kelsey Lewin, here's Bernie Stolar's surrender- er, battle plans for the Sega Saturn in 1997. Stolar insisted that "virtually all" Saturn games "utilize polygons instead of sprites," which was the prevailing trend of the late 1990s, but not the Sega Saturn's strong suit. (To put it...
Westone's Clockwork Aquario is the quintessential arcade game... loud, colorful, and unapologetically dumb. Perhaps a little too dumb, considering that it missed arcades entirely and was instead ported to modern game consoles like the Nintendo Switch. While it's great from a preservation standpoint that Clockwork Aquario was...
Here's a game I used to enjoy in MAME and on the Sega Saturn... Jaleco's Game Tengoku, a silly overhead shooter set in the world of video games, with tons of obscure references for the nerdiest nerds. (My favorite stage is the one where the game shifts into 8-bit mode, and you have to battle your way through Space Invaders and...
A few years ago, I reviewed eight of the Data East games offered by Johnny Turbo (yes, the hefty, hairy shill for the TurboDuo) for the Switch. Why the heck is Johnny Turbo selling Data East games and not Turbografx games? Who knows....
Here's an article I posted years ago about purchasing games from the now largely defunct Toys 'R Us chain of toy stores. Buying video games at Toys 'R Us was such an arcane, labyrinthine experience. It felt like a sacred ritual!...
From Cohost. Too bad they couldn't fit the trademark symbol from Namco Museum Encore in there somewhere!
Long-running retro gaming site (and a key resource for this magazine) AtariAge is having a fire sale on games for the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800. All games in the sale will be marked at 10% off to liquidate the stock of software featuring intellectual property the site can no longer sell without running afoul of copyright...
Evidently Microsoft considered an attempt to purchase the Sega part of Sega-Sammy Studios. Personally, I'm not sure I'm totally comfortable with Sega games being Microsoft-exclusive. I'm also not hugely fond of an American company taking over a Japanese one and possibly spoiling what made the company so special, but what the...
Roy Wood Jr. (who you may recognize from The Daily Show) examines the absurdity of fighting game backgrounds in this funny clip.
https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/9f2f1987-655b-4157-b585-772039caa02b/consoles%20are%20pcs.png...
Smart television sets. They're all over the place these days, and they often rely on Android to run streaming services like Netflix. Here's my question, though... Is a smart TV smart enough to run emulation apps like RetroArch, and can it do it well enough to be worth the bother?...
They are shutting down everything?! Uh oh....
What FrameRater said. This Metroid Zero Mission-style overhaul of Sonic Triple Trouble is a full-featured, Genesis-quality Sonic game, with Tails as an onscreen sidekick, exciting 3D bonus stages, and new content that was either missing from or not even possible on the Game Gear. Could this be the next Sonic Mania?
Here's a fun article from my old blog reviewing all the games in SNK Arcade Classics. As classic collections go, this is one of the better ones on the PSP, and that system had a whooooole lot of them to go around. (Other classic game compilations I'd recommend for this underrated handheld include Midway Arcade Treasures, Sega...
"What's so great about this?," you might say. "Final Fight is available on like, a million formats!" Yes, but this is the Sega Genesis. It's exciting to watch this 16-bit console designed for tight budgets handle Final Fight, the mammoth arcade hit with graphics that put Double Dragon and Kung Fu Master to shame. Between its...
British gaming YouTube channel SwitchUp (really, they're British enough that they talk about saveloys, and frequently) has offered a brief recap of Nintendo's recent Direct presentation, discussing everything from a Super Mario RPG remake with vastly improved graphics to the peculiar Super Mario Wonder, which really leans into...
M Network was one of the underachievers among the Atari 2600's many third party developers. As a division of Mattel, the makers of the competing Intellivision, they had no reason to bring their best work to the 2600... and so they very much didn't. Games by M Network were almost certain to be vastly inferior to their...
Thanks to the massive success of the NES, the once-popular Atari 2600 was given something few game consoles ever get... a second chance at life. Atari, under the direction of its new CEO Jack Tramiel, resurrected the 2600, offering it as a budget alternative to its own Atari 7800 and the competing NES and Master System....