Get your copy of “The Robots of Love” out, because it’s time for you and me to go through it page by page. Like a DVD commentary, this will be the first in a series of “Writer’s Commentaries” that I’m going to post for the comics I commissioned. You can also read a little more […]
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time and a lot of my own money creating and commissioning artwork for the ASFR community. To me, the most significant expenditures in time and money have been to create the stories, animations (and most of all) comics that I have released. I spent hours upon […]
We’re back into hand-held territory, and that means a step back from the realism of the sixth generation consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast. Here we trade those features in for considerations of portability. The Game Boy Advance was really nothing to sneeze at though. It was a 32-bit hand-held, though to me, most […]
If you’re reading this, I bet you owned or have played a PlayStation 2. That’s a safe bet to make with the best-selling home console of all time. What can I say about the PS2 that most people don’t already know? It was birthed on the frozen fjords of ancient Viking Scandinavia by Legendary Feared […]
Growing up as I did in the 70s and 80s, I was exposed to the glory of 8-bit sound effects when I was a kid. These kinds of synthesized sounds invariably accompanied the revelations of fembot characters, like on the old Bionic Woman show. Since then, electronic beeping sounds have been one of the pleasures […]
Dreamcast, oh, Dreamcast. My beloved Dreamcast. I’d better get my fanboy raving out of the way early. One of the most revolutionary consoles ever to be released, right up there with the likes of the Atari 2600 and the NES. While those two were phenomenal success stories with equally phenomenal lifespans, the Dreamcast’s life was […]
Handheld game consoles sacrifice power and features for portability. Comparisons are less and less acute these days, but back in 1998 when the Game Boy Color came out they were pretty stark. We’ve gone from 64-bit computing and 3D polygonal rendering back to 8-bit low-res bitmap graphics for these reviews. Oh, and kiss analog steering […]
All of last year, I had a delightful ninja cat calendar adorning my wall. I found that one on reddit in 2012, and I kept that in mind near the end of 2013, hoping that a similar awesome calendar would pop up there. Well, I didn’t see one. So I’ve made my own 2014 wall […]
Tis the season, etc, etc, etc. Lorem ipsum dolor, and all that. Back in 2011 when I commissioned the wondrous “S.A.S.S. Renegades“, the artist A.B. Lust sent me a Christmas card featuring some S.A.S.S. agents decked out in seasonal regalia. Now that the full comic has been finished and released, I can share this extra […]
I didn’t say a whole hell of a lot about the Nintendo 64 when it popped up in The Golfyssey, so I’ll rectify that now. Coming on the heels of the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, those two systems were its main console competition. Please don’t make me laugh by mentioning the Atari Jaguar. […]
If you were a console gamer in the mid to late 1990s, chances are you did your gaming on a PlayStation. It wasn’t just competitive, it didn’t just outsell the other consoles, it dominated. There were two big reasons why this was. Reason number one was the ease of programming and developing games for the […]
The Shemale Android Sex Sirens are back! Two full years in the making, here is the epic futuristic sci-fi tale of two very lovely robot super-spies and their adventures. I’ve teamed up once again with the extremely talented A.B. Lust to bring you this sequel to 2011’s “Shemale Android Sex Sirens“, and it stars Sarina […]
I really like my Sega Saturn. I was a young man just out of my teens when this console was released here in Canada, and I was living on my own and dirt poor, so I didn’t buy one. But I always wanted one, and nine years after it came out, I got one. I […]
When I think of the 32X, I almost invariably think of it as one of the reasons that the Saturn failed. Lesson: If you fuck over your game developers and your customers, you might jeopardize your future endeavours. And since the 32X was dead on arrival and given only token support, its game library is […]
Oh boy. You know you have one craptacular shitfest of a console when you’re forced to resort to infomercials to sell it because no one wants to buy the damned thing. I bet a fucking ShamWow can display better graphics than the Atari Jaguar. This was purported to be the first “64-bit” console, but only […]
The Sega CD had some disappointing offerings when I reviewed golf games for the system. It’s often looked back upon as Sega’s first hardware blunder, and if you look into the history of the Sega CD, you will find the story of a good idea botched by bad management and poor timing. There are loads […]
I’ve always wondered why Nintendo stuck such a crappy processor into the Super Nintendo. It had roughly half the processing power of the Sega Genesis, and it really left Nintendo’s 16 bit console crippled. When I talked about the SNES in The Golfyssey, I didn’t fully realize that some aspects of the SNES hardware were […]
From four colour low-res 8-bit portable racers, we now swing to the other end of the spectrum and check out the high-end home arcade system that was literally a home arcade system. The Neo Geo had its share of racing games, though it’s library is more well known for the awesome fighting games that SNK […]
And now on Robotman’s blog, it’s time we put away our fancy, expensive home consoles and television sets and pick up a handheld system. Put on those pea-soup coloured glasses too, because it’s time to revisit the original Game Boy. Our specs are lowered again for this post. Not only are we going back to […]
It’s time to check in with Sega’s fondly remembered 16-bit powerhouse, the Genesis. This is one of my favourite retro consoles for many reasons, and I can even overlook the frequently maligned sound chips. There isn’t much else to say about this console that I didn’t say in my golf video game reviews, so let’s […]
It’s time to revisit everybody’s favourite 8-bit system! I mean, the 16-bit system with the 8-bit system feel! (EDIT: The TG-16 actually has an 8-bit CPU. The graphics processors are 16-bit.) I ragged long and hard on the TurboGrafx-16 when I reviewed some golf games for it. A lot of TG16 games really don’t hold […]
Oy. Here we find ourselves in Underwhelmsville again, population 7800. Like I mentioned before in The Golfyssey, the Atari 7800 was shelved for two years before it was released in an attempt to compete with none other than the legendary NES. The graphics are shitty, regardless of how many terrible-looking sprites this system can handle […]
Even though the Amiga first came out in 1985, the games I’ll be looking at today were all from the 1990s. The Amiga was already ahead of its time, but now we’ll be looking into the future for one stop on our journey through console and computer hardware. If this unsettles you, don’t worry. Our […]
Sega not only had better hardware specs in the Master System compared to the NES, but they also had a history of making successful and critically acclaimed arcade racing games like “Hang-On“. It is because of these factors that when you compare the game libraries of the NES and Master system, you will find the […]
The NES has a massive library of games, so I don’t have to go scraping the barrel for racers. I’m happy about this because I really don’t like having to play through bad racing games just to tell you all what you already can guess. Excitebike (1984) You can tell from that iconic box art […]
As I skip along my merry, chronological way through consoles and computers passed in these reviews, I sometimes feel like I’m taking a step back or two. When I played that stinking Vectrex racing game, I could have sworn it was belched forth from the bowels of the 1970s. This happened when I did the […]
When I talked about the SG-1000 before, I mentioned that it had more potential than the games library would lead one to believe. It looks to me to be about as powerful as the ColecoVision, and I actually use the MEKA emulator to play games for both systems. Unfortunately for Sega, that potential was rarely realized, […]
The Commodore 64 computer had dozens of racing games, and they ranged widely in quality. I played a fair amount of these as I was growing up, and only a handful of the ones I remember really stand out as great games. Motor Mania (1982) Ah, the joys of loading games from cassette! Who wouldn’t […]
Recently, I rediscovered the Atari 5200, thanks to an emulator that fixed the console’s horribly flawed non-centering joysticks. Being released shortly before the 1983 industry crash, this system had a short life, so there weren’t many games released for it. Only one racing game was released, and it is a port of an ultra-popular arcade […]
The Vectrex is weird. At first glance, it looks like a rather bad idea. A self-contained video game system that plays games only in black and white. If you wanted colour, you had to use the coloured translucent overlays that came with the games. When this came out in 1982, most people probably looked at […]
A great, powerful system that was also bunged by goofy telephone-joystick controllers, the ColecoVision was another high-profile victim of the 1983 video game market crash. This console had some serious power packed inside, and it could handle most arcade ports better than any other home console back in 1982. And then the crash, and Coleco […]
Well, I haven’t exactly been looking forward to this. Have you even heard of a video game console called the Arcadia 2001? There isn’t much to say about it, other than: rushed, badly programmed rip-off games dead-on-arrival for U.S. release terrible graphics and even worse sound Emerson got sued by Atari for making clones of […]
Let’s check in with that console that really should have had a longer lifespan, the Intellivision. The main things that caused an early demise for this system are of course the Video Game Crash of 1983 and those god-awful controllers. Things were more powerful under the hood than many people realized, and later games released […]
The racing games for the Odyssey² were both pack-in games on the same cartridge. I mentioned them before, and there really isn’t a whole lot to say about them. The Odyssey² game library contains some surprisingly good and memorable games, but these to ain’t really among them. Speedway! (1978) The idea behind this game is […]
Another 8-bit machine from the 1970s – the Apple II – had its share of driving games. Prepare not to be blown away by amazing displays of graphics and sound. You know, if I could stretch the boundaries of what I consider to be a racing game by wide enough margins, I could call “The […]
Many game collectors and classic gaming enthusiasts start with the Atari. And for the most part, this is where home console gaming really began. But this system has some truly terrible games. Thankfully for us, it also has some extremely fun games that were programmed by early masters of the art. Indy 500 (1977) This […]
Something else happened in 1972… the same year that the Odyssey had roused just about as much interest in this new “video game” phenomenon as it could have on its own. Atari invented Pong. Well, Nolan Bushnell kind of stole it from the Odyssey’s game “Tennis”. That’s okay because everybody else in the mid ’70s […]
Set the Wayback Machine for 1968… It’s the Jet Age. Steppenwolf, The Doors and The Beatles are blasting from your turntable. Airplanes without propellers and radios without electrical cords are high-tech shit. And these new transistors that the eggheads are talking about are replacing vacuum tubes everywhere! Technology is all moving so fast, it’s downright […]
If you are a fan of video games like I am, then you may have played a racing game or two. I love playing racing and driving games, whether they are competitive in nature or just simulations. If you read any of my Golfyssey posts where I reviewed golf video games, then you might have […]
This post may not be quite about what you think it’s about. In my “Reassessing the Atari 5200” post below, I talked about how shocked I was to learn that Atari had developed the internals for that console five years before they had released it. It appeared as though Atari sat on this technology for […]
The Atari 5200 was a dud. The story behind it is interwoven with the head-scratching tale of Atari’s journey from industry leader and juggernaut to has-been and bankrupt joke. I’m going to have to insert another link to the Angry Video Game Nerd because you should watch his review of this console. With my fondness […]
Seeing as how I pay professional comic artists to draw my lovely comics for me, I have often said that my drawing skills are non-existent and that I can’t draw. This isn’t actually 100% true. I can sort-of draw. But I will admit that I can’t draw sexy women, so you’ll never see me attempt […]
Over the past three weeks, I’ve reviewed a total of 60 golf video games for 24 different systems. This Golfyssey has taken me all the way from the lowly Atari 2600 to the PC and beyond. I’ve played terrible games that barely resemble golf and only serve to frustrate, to realistic simulations that are so […]
This Golfyssey has taught me several things. Among them, that reviewing video games is actually work. So hats off to those folks who do this for a living. Unless you’re one of those presstitutes being paid by the big gaming sites who automatically gives glowing reviews for every new shiny turd that EA shits out […]
Another hand-held console released by Nintendo, the Game Boy Advance came out in 2001. This one is 16-bit, and is comparable to the Super Nintendo in graphics and sound. By the early 21st century, video games weren’t seen by their makers so much as an artform that provided players with a fun experience as they […]
The Game Boy Color was released in 1998. Criminy, it sure took Nintendo a long time to release a hand-held console that did more than 4 colours in a palette of pea soup. The reason for this is that colour LCD screens ate batteries like some kind of… uh… like some kind of… battery eating […]
Ah, the PC. There’s a good chance that you’re reading this blog on a personal computer right now. The PC is ubiquitous for home use and work today, but it started as just another variant of the home computer back in the early 1980s. The IBM PC saw immediate success in the business world, and […]
3D gaming is where I pretty much lose interest. The primary appeal that video games have for me is their ability to stimulate my imagination, and the more like real-life these games appear, the less interesting they are to me. That’s not to say that games made for the Nintendo 64 looked anything like real-life. […]
Sega’s Rapidfire succession of new hardware releases sure did backfire on them. Released in North America only six months after the ill-fated 32X, ,the Saturn was the CD-based 32-bit console that Sega should have released all along instead of messing up the market with addons for the Genesis. Sega had burned a lot of good […]
What’s with all these Sega consoles coming out so fast? Oh, they’re not really consoles? Continuing Sega’s self-inflicted decline in the 1990s, the 32X was another addon for the Sega Genesis. It was originally planned to be Sega’s next generation 32-bit console, but was instead released as another clunky addon instead. This was even after […]