Holy crap, remember The Golfyssey? My lame-brained attempt to “review” a bunch of console-based golf video games and spew forth my uninformed opinions on the hardware on which they were to be had? Good times, good times. Except for that shitty black and white abomination for the Atari 5200, and the shitty full colour abomination […]
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 […]
If you were Sega, and you were at the top of the video game console market in the early 1990s, and you wanted to perform a stunning “ditch” that would send your company spiraling down to the bottom as calamitously as possible… how would you go about doing it? Well, do what the real Sega […]
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 […]