The Super Nintendo sure did arrive late to the 16-bit party, didn’t it? As the last of the main players to be released, it might seem a bit underpowered. But Nintendo found many ways to make it succeed, and scores upon scores of games released for the system are considered to be classics. Many game […]
Those of us past a certain age can remember ads that would promise to bring an arcade gaming experience into our homes. God knows, there were all kinds of goofy commercials playing on the impracticality of cramming several different 250 pound arcade cabinets into someone’s living room just so they could play a pixel-perfect version […]
Not many people remember the TurboGrafx-16. And it’s been justly forgotten, I think. I lived through the 16-bit console wars in the early 90s, and I don’t ever remember seeing ads for the system on TV. Then again, I live in Canada, so maybe Hudson Soft and NEC didn’t see any point in bothering with […]
When the Game Boy came out in 1989, it was the first truly successful hand-held video game console. There had been other hand-held and portable video games on the market before, and some even had multiple selectable games built into them. But the Game Boy was one of the first that took cartridges. It was […]
To continue my review of golf games for this console, I shall talk about five games in the same series – “PGA Tour Golf”. That box is for the first one of these that I played, and in my opinion the best of them all. It’s also what I consider the finest golf video game […]
SEGA! The Genesis was Sega’s finest moment. Sadly, after this they took a chapter or two out of the Commodore and Atari playbook for surefire failure which is why you don’t see them making consoles any more… but that’s a story for another post. But in the early 90s, Nintendo had to work damn hard […]
Oh, Atari. If Commodore jumped off a cliff, would you? In an effort to prove that stupid and disastrous business decisions would not be monopolized by its competitors, Atari decided to inflict 1000 paper cuts upon itself over the course of the mid 80s and 90s and thus die that slow, agonizing death that had […]
The Commodore Amiga. The Amiga came out of nowhere in the mid 1980s and proved to be the most capable and fully powered multimedia machine of its time. Hell, it was the only multimedia computer you could buy unless you were a Hollywood studio, and it was the first home computer with an OS that […]
How is it that the Sega Master System – which was technically a better game console than the NES in many ways – failed to make much of a dent in Nintendo’s sales, and failed to even have a fraction of the amount of decent games made for it? Why are there just a handful […]
The crash of 1983 made Video Game a bad word in North America. Thanks to a deluge of cheap and shitty titles for the Atari 2600, and a glut of “me-too” consoles and games and knock-offs and peripherals and accessories, the home console market reached a saturation point and was no longer sustainable. Quality suffered […]
Remember when I said that Commodore took a lead in the home computer market and turned it into bankruptcy in a rather short time? 1984. Exhibit A in this “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” strategy is The Commodore 16. Also the Commodore 116: And the Commodore Plus/4: Confused? Commodore sure was. The original […]
The Sega what? Why, the SG-1000 – Sega’s first entry into the video game home console hardware market that almost nobody remembers because it soled poorly. It sold only (legitimately) in Asia, though clones sold in other countries. One of the clones really took off in Taiwan, so there’s that. The hardware for this console […]
I adore my 64, my Commodore 64. Considering how I use (and am typing this on) a replica Commodore 64… and how both my Linux desktop and the virtual Windows XP desktop I run inside it are themed to have a Commodore/Amiga look… You could say I’m a fanboy. And as you might have guessed, […]
This console was a bad idea that brought lots of bad ideas to the market. Where to begin? First of all, it has stopgap written all over it. When the Atari 5200 was released, the ColecoVision console had already come out, and it had immediately become the number one seller in the market due to […]
Ah, the Apple II. That good old beast of a computer built by Steve Wozniak when Apple was just a wee company. I never owned one of these, but my elementary school had about a dozen of them back in the early 80s. From them, I learned the joys of waiting your turn, “no, we […]
Bring me the head of Nolan Bushnell! I have fond memories of the Odyssey². As I mentioned below, I was a poor-ass kid growing up. My father bought me and my brothers an Odyssey² for Christmas one year, I believe in 1984. The system itself was released originally in 1978, so we’re talking bargain-bin, unload-it-fast […]
Ah, the Atari 2600. The video game system from 1977. Even though I have plenty of games for the Atari, I never play any of them regularly. The graphics and especially the sound are just too primitive for me to enjoy anything on this thing. In fact, some of the games that were released for […]
It has been said before that a video game console is only as good as its most prominent golf game. Actually, you know what… nobody has ever said that. Seriously, google it. No results. Same with Golfyssey. No results. Well, let’s play fast and loose with the facts then, shall we? None other than the […]
The other day I was creating configuration files for my Amiga emulator. You see, the Amiga emulator is rather complex. Not only must you select which disk image or images you’d like your emulated system to run, but you must also choose which version of the Kickstart rom, which chipset, which RAM configuration, which CPU, […]
Have I made fun of Microsoft Bob before on this blog? I don’t believe I have. Well, if you’ve ever heard about MS Bob before, you probably didn’t hear anything good. Read that link above to find out what the fuck was going on. To this day, I don’t think anyone really knows why the […]
I’ve been having a delightful time playing old PC video games on my Windows 98 laptop. As described below, it’s a fairly new cheap laptop that runs Lubuntu as its OS and runs Windows 98 in Virtualbox. So I decided to fill up the massive 10GB hard drive I gave it in VB by installing […]
If you were to redefine clusterfuck, how would you go about doing it? About three weeks ago, EA – The Worst Company in America – released a long awaited sequel to one of the best-loved video games of all time. Now, you may already know what SimCity is, and you may have already heard about […]
Since I run my shiny new (old) Windows 98 installation inside VirtualBox, there are some things that just don’t work. Like I mentioned below, Midi is one of them. But a lot of DOS functionality seems to be broken too. I’ve noticed that whenever a DOS window opens, my screen goes black and all I […]
Okay, I’m 15 years late in celebrating this operating system. And I think I can only celebrate anything Microsoft or Windows at all because it fills a particular niche for me. This is odd for me to like Windows 98 so much, because it was Windows 95 and Windows 98 that taught me to hate […]
I like to try out different operating systems. This is mainly because I am a geek. I like to see what some group of developers has done with a kernel and a desktop environment and a software ecosystem. Linux is a good example of this. I should actually say GNU-Linux. Technically (those of you who […]
I’ve mentioned before on this blog that I loves me some old stragety video games. I particularly like Age of Empires and Age of Empires II, as they hit my history geek sweet spot in just the right way. So I was delighted to learn at the end of 2012 that an unofficial expansion pack […]
Go ahead and listen to this song right now. Watch the video if you want. That Rob Halford is one entertaining dude. My favourite singer, by the way. He even edges out Dan McCafferty for that honour. But I digest digress. I’m not even going to pretend that this post is about that song you’re […]
Cue scientifical music. That’s better. This post is the first post written on my “writing laptop” since I dun reformatted the hard drive since I dun got me a rootkit on it. See below for the horrid, treacherous details of that. Sordid? Yeah, add sordid to that list of adjectives too. Am I making any […]
Wow! This is a neat blog! Some of it’s funny and some of it makes sense! And it’s all about me and the silly things I like! Yes, it’s been a very long while since I’ve updated this blog. Not to put too fine a point on things, but that’s because I have virtually no […]
Praise be to Uncle Furry, for he hath bestowed upon me a 10 year old Thinkpad with which to bask in the glory of Windows 98 SE! Hosanna! I had originally considered reinstalling one of the virtual Windows XP setups I run as a virtual OS inside Linux. As you are probably tired of hearing, […]
Here’s a long and uninteresting story. Kind of like everything else on this blog. Except some of this drivel is mercifully short. Anyway, I am a fan of the 1996 game Civilization II. I play it a lot. It wastes a lot of my time, actually. I’ve spent hours playing it when I should have […]
Well, I tested CivII on my other computer. Lasted, well, up to a few minutes ago. My god, I can waste SO MUCH time with that game. It’s like crack. Crack that lasts more than 12 minutes, but crack nonetheless. So needless to say, I only have time to drink some tea, read some news […]
Anyone ever hear of a computer game called “The Sims”? I know, it’s pretty darn obscure. I bought the first version back in… oh… let’s check Wikipedia again… 2000. I remember I was reading about what a different kind of game it was. I found it appealing because I liked to design, build, and decorate […]
Yesterday afternoon and this morning, while taking codeine for my delightful headache, I’ve been playing another round of Civilization II. You know, that 14 year old game that I can just never get enough of. This time, I was playing as the Zulus. I’m fond of reading (via text-to-speech software) Wikipedia articles about the history […]
Family Guy’s jokes are usually pretty contrived, and one can usually see them coming from six blocks away. But sometimes they’re done so awesomely that one has to admire them. Like this. Anyway, this was supposed to be a day for me to get all kinds of stuff done, but I had to sit around […]
What a lazy layabout I am. Also, I am a nerdy neerdowell, a silly scofflaw and a mischievous malcontent. And I have had a day of fun with my two very old computers. One of these I have had since 1998. The other is a recent acquisition, courtesy of Uncle Furry. Thanks Uncle Furry! First, […]
So, there’s another day wasted. All I did today was read news, funny stuff and assorted articles on Wikipedia while I played Civilization II. I’m Russian. Actually, in real life my dad is an ethnic German Russian. A Volga German. So I do claim a certain affinity with things Russian. Especially this: Okay, so I […]
I got off work at 2:30pm today. And that’s a good thing because I’m mentally and physically exhausted from Wednesday… and the rest of the week too. But mostly Wednesday. What a fucking day. And Wednesday is in honour of our god Odin. Praise be to him! You see, Odin had some crows to help […]
I’ve still got that 10 year old Thinkpad. And I’m still enjoying it. Here’s a status update for those of you waiting breathlessly for such information. This puppy now dual boots both Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 98 SE. That’s a month-old operating system coupled with a 12 year old operating system on a 10 year […]
Well, I did lots of stuff yesterday, so today was declared to be Vegetation Day. I accomplished not much more than sitting on my ass playing video games and reading. To be specific, I played another long round of Civilization 2 while I had my text-to-speech program read articles on Wikipedia about geological epochs. You […]
Digital Restrictions Management. What a fucking sick joke this is. I just read about another DRM system that has gone down in flames. This time, like so many times before and many more times to come, the paying customers who were dumb enough to be sold defective goods are being shafted. So, you paid for […]
Ah, Vegetation day. Silly me… working hard all week. I should have known better than to not be born to parents who are filthy fucking rich. I spent today doing laundry and playing around with my Amiga emulator again. Not so much actually playing, as still making “configuration files” that allow me to load the […]
No, not Furries. I have a friend who is a furry, and this shall serve as a shout-out to him. ;) So, what I’m trying to get at is that basically I have all kinds of projects on the back burner and here I am during the weekend and I’m playing games on the computer. […]
So I’m in the late stages of “Vegetation Day”. Today, I have been spending time with my Amiga computer emulator and the games I have for it. The emulator, WinUAE, is the most complicated emulator I have. It took me damn near forever to figure out just how to use it properly. And you can’t […]
Ah, vegetation day. I try to make that Saturday, but I was too busy yesterday. And now on Sunday I sit around and do as little as possible. That’s a shame because I have a ton of stuff I need to get done. Oh well. Right now, as I did rather recently, I am playing […]
You may or may not know this, but I am a geek. I am a nerd. Dork. Etc. And making maps of Island 1 and Island 2 from a 1986 game made for a computer that no one uses anymore is probably among the geekiest/nerdiest/dorkiest things I’ve ever done. So without further ado, here are […]
Today – between bouts of doing laundry, working on FembotWiki and wishing I had more time off – I loaded up my Commodore 64 emulator and played a bit (several hours) of Questron. Back when I was a young lad, my Father bought me and my brothers a Commodore 64. It was the first computer […]
Another day, another load of time spent playing Civ II. That game is addicting. I kicked everyone’s ass and won the game, of course. I read more about ancient Chinese history too. I’m such a geek. I just updated FembotWiki, and now it’s time to get to bed. But not before I bitch about Windows […]
It’s way past my bed time. Good lord, it’s almost 11 PM! I long ago declared Saturday’s to be my vegetation day, but I end up doing a lot of work anyway. Still, that didn’t stop me from playing Civilization II again today. I like Civ II because it can run on my virtual Windows […]
