TimeMachinerWe can joke around that modern movies using 80s pop culture properties have not usually worked out: Battleship and GI Joe are two examples. If it hadn’t been milked to death, Transformers would’ve broken that trend. Now we get a drama coming soon that looks to actually do what Transformers could not. And that property…Continue readingTetris: The Movie
Video game music is an art form. Composers finally have their own category at the Grammy awards. But watching the music get composed for pinball in the 80s is where some real magic happens. Composer Suzanne Ciani is the main composer in this documentary video showing how she creates music and digitizes speech for Xenon.…Continue readingPinball Wizard Music
If a singular game made an impact on the arcade scene in the 90s, it is undoubtedly Mortal Kombat. This game could be the pure definition of Right Place at the Right Time. Arcades were thriving, fighting games were hot thanks to Street Fighter II, and this new game was using digitized actors instead of…Continue reading30 Years of Mortal Kombat
We tend to think that in this age of digital entertainment that things will always be accessible. But what about things such as video games that were all created before the internet? That’s where two ambitious people come in. Kelsey Lewin and Frank Cifaldi are the heads of the Video Game History Foundation, and these…Continue readingThe Game Preservers
One oddity of 90s video gaming is Sega’s clandestine work with Michael Jackson. It was rumored for many years that Jackson composed the music for Sonic The Hedgehog 3 along with Sonic & Knuckles. Even more incredible is recently-found footage of Jackson’s work with an unknown Sega simulator game where all the footage has been…Continue readingSEGA Shamone
Doom is one of the most well-known and earliest entries into successful PC gaming. Id practically invented the FPS (First Person Shooter) genre with Wolfenstein and then Doom. For years, the joke is asking if a piece of technology runs Doom. Now, we get the ultimate Doom: running in Notepad. Chris Kerr at Game Developer…Continue readingNotepad of Doom
Minecraft, one of the most popular and longest-lasting games out there, made an interesting rule change earlier this year: no integrations with NFTs would be allowed anymore. To many (or even most) players of Minecraft, this would likely be no big deal. But to a few who parlayed their servers into a play-to-earn model, the…Continue readingMinecraft Rule Change Collapses NFT Community
Facebook Meta isn’t the only game in town when it comes to virtual reality. In an approach based in… reality, Sony is developing their second PSVR hardware for the application people would actually use: playing games. Sony released its first edition of the Playstation VR add-on to the PS4 back in 2016. While it was…Continue readingSony’s Coming for Meta with PSVR2
Atari was a fascinating company, responsible for both the rise of home video game consoles in the US and also the market crash of the same industry. The legendary 2600 was everywhere in the early 80s and there was certainly no shortage of software. The company may be a shell of itself these days, but…Continue readingAn Atari Lookback
Back in November, Netflix announced it was getting into the gaming business. A slate of five titles was rolling out to start, which is really nothing. However, there was no extra charge for it. Now here we are 3/4 of a year in the future and basically, nobody’s using it. Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku has…Continue readingAbout That Netflix Gaming Service
One thing I love about retro gaming is the efforts to preserve history. There are many instances where someone stumbles upon a prototype or unfinished game and the community jumps on it to copy the code. Game preservation is super important because this software can be lost to time. Equally important is the literature surrounding…Continue readingEvery SNES Manual Permanently Archived
Fresh from the sewer and re-emerging from any late-80’s / early 90’s kid’s heart, comes the long-awaited TMNT game for modern game systems. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a modern-day take on the classic TMNT video games we saw in the arcade and on home consoles back in the day. Game publisher Dotemu…Continue readingCowabunga! TMNT Shredder’s Revenge Is Finally Here
The internet is an amazing place to mix two separate things together and create comedy. Over on YouTube, someone took a Legend of Zelda animated short and overlaid it with audio from Beavis and Butt Head. Not only does it work, but it’s quite funny. Back in the 80’s the Super Mario Bros Super Show…Continue readingThe Legend of Beavis
A funny thing happened this past week with Bandai / Namco re-releasing the classic game Pac-Land onto the Nintendo Switch. Pac superstar Miss Pac-Man was nowhere to be found. Instead she was replaced with a character named Pac-Mom and, yeah, there was confusion as to what is going on here. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica…Continue readingPac-Mom
Once again we dive into the world of NFTs. As I’ve talked about, these tokens are a huge deal in crypto circles with many using them as investments, get-rich-quick schemes, and complete rip-offs. Now we get to see the flip-side of this with the video game F1 Delta Time. This game, which bears the official…Continue readingNF(1)T
One staple of the mid-nineties is Mortal Kombat. The arcade game took the world by storm due to its digitized fighters recorded from real actors. Oh, and there was violence galore. So it came as no surprise when a sequel came out soon thereafter. Mortal Kombat II was a phenomenon and (in my opinion) the…Continue readingFinish Him
A sequel to look forward to. That’s what I’ve been calling the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie. This was the last movie I saw in theaters and was only a short time before COVID lockdowns began. Now at a lull in the pandemic, we get the sequel. And, oh man, it looks great. The trailer…Continue readingGreen Hill Zone: Act 2
For all the good Nintendo does for their products, the biggest bugaboo for them has been their online service. From the eShop being a complete mess to their online services lacking basic features, it’s something the company stumbles upon again and again. Five years after the Switch has released, they’ve come out with version 2.0…Continue readingWhy Bother, Nintendo
It’s crazy to think the Nintendo Switch has been on the market for five years. Back in 2017, it was very much a gamble. Nobody could know it would be a massive success over and over. Nintendo has rebounded from the Wii U years incredibly well. I personally bought my Switch at launch and fell…Continue readingSwitch At Five
With all the hullabaloo about the metaverse and Facebook Meta pitching it non-stop, it is a breath of fresh air to see a VR announcement that doesn’t come from Zuckerberg. Sony revealed the second iteration of their Playstation VR system that will release later this year. Kyle Orland from Ars Technica has more. As far…Continue readingMeta-less VR
It is crazy to think how information can easily spread so fast online without anyone performing any fact-checking. It’s how many “industry insiders” can pose as experts without any track record. If they nail a couple of rumors, it gets reported and that begins a flywheel of self-fulfilling credibility. Take Jon Cartwright, a video game…Continue readingInsider Impersonating
Sometimes a company has a monumental screwup so big that they simply want to move on. Never look back and never talk about it again. For Microsoft, that is certainly the 2007 “Red ring of death” debacle during the days of the Xbox 360. That video game console had a green ring surrounding the power…Continue readingEmbracing The Ring
Console manufacturer Analogue is a well-known player in the retro-gaming scene. They make high-end gaming consoles that can play retro games. The machines emulate original hardware via fancy chips called FPGAs and they are pixel-perfect recreations of what Nintendo and Sega put out in the 80’s & 90’s. Hot on the heels of their TurboGrafx…Continue readingPocketing the Games
Earlier this past week Epic dropped a ten minute demo of the upcoming game The Matrix Awakens. This uses the latest Unreal engine to render the gameplay on Xbox Series X and PS5. I could keep talking about it, but you need to see just how incredible this game looks. Epic says, and it all…Continue readingMatrix Awakens: What Is Real
Keza MacDonald has done exquisite work bringing to light the insane grind it takes to be a streamer on Twitch. “My sleep schedule shifted into the North American time zone because most of the people who were viewing my channel at the time were there,” says 36-year-old Cassie, a founder of the Black Twitch UK network, who…Continue readingStreaming To The Bone
If you’re a fan of the Atari 2600 and second generation console gaming, then you’re in for a treat. A company called AtariXP is gearing up to sell brand new 2600 games that will work on the original Atari hardware. Three games are up for pre-order: Yars’ Return, Saboteur, and Aquaventure. The games they plan…Continue readingAtari XP Publishing New Atari 2600 Games
The much-awaited Grand Theft Auto compilation for Nintendo Switch is out and talk about a disappointment. After Rockstar released the game, people have been tearing it to shreds due to an awful conversation, especially on Switch. In some ways GTA runs even worse than on PS2, a console 3 generations behind the Switch. [It’s] one…Continue readingGTA Nope
Nintendo’s big Animal Crossing: New Horizons Direct in October announced that two big updates would happen. The first being general updates to the game would bring it to version 2.0. This is to be the final update to the game. Version 2.0 brings a LOT of things like the fan-demanded Brewster’s Roost cafe, island ordnances,…Continue readingAnimal Crossing Gets Its Only DLC
Video games should always be fun (it’s my only rule when playing) but oh man, old NES games could be brutal. Weird ways to make them more difficult or lack of a good instruction manual always took a game from ‘fun’ to ‘frustrating’ quite fast. Streamer camillestreamss posted this video to Reddit last week wherein…Continue readingBack in the Day, Video Games Were Hard
This week the National Video Game Museum (NVM) has opened an exciting virtual exhibit showcasing Animal Crossing: New Horizons islands. Many of us took refuge on a deserted island in 2020 ran by a tycoon raccoon. The NVM saw an opportunity late last year. NVM put out a call for submissions from Animal Crossing: New…Continue readingNVM Opens Virtual Animal Crossing: New Horizons Exhibit