Zoyous

I think VR does have that feeling of a leap forward, but unfortunately it has several dings against it... nausea is a factor for many, but beyond that it's just about as isolating as can be, and it can get sweaty and cause some fatigue to your head and neck. Still, I think it's a worthy technology and it will continue to get better. I don't think the addition of realtime raytracing to the next gen of high-end consoles is going to provide much of a wow factor. If you're technically-minded, you know it's been a long time coming and is not easy. But for most people, it'll have to be pointed out to them, and they may not have ever noticed it was missing before. But there is a lot of interesting ground to explore with physics simulations that weren't possible until recently. The last game I remember giving me a familiar feeling, similar to the "wow!" of playing the Atari 2600 as a young kid, was Portal.

I always thought the Atari 2600 version of Defender was a very elegant adaptation to an arcade control scheme that had at least two buttons too many.

Depends on how fast you can type.

Here's my treatment for the Missile Command move: When a battery leak fries the circuit board of an early-80s era automated M.A.D. recursive thermonuclear retaliation system in some forgotten missile silo in Putin's Russia, the sky lights up. Thousands of missiles are en route to and from both Russia and the USA, and the new generation of feckless millenial military staff is completely in over their heads. They've never used the emergency trackball controllers in their consoles and don't know how they work. As the final hour before impact tick down, it's up to a ragtag international coalition of American and Russian retro gaming enthusiasts has to step in and work together to defend their respective cities. But can they overcome the language barrier... and the ping?

I just read a review of it on Amazon that says that it includes the copy protection challenge questions that require you to refer to the original manual (or just be extremely knowledgeable about geography) in order to receive promotions. Aside from that problem, I think this would be cool to get for my daughter and for us to play together.

For an action game that I've heard several people say is relaxing, try the Sega Master System version of Hang On. Yes, it's based on a quarter-munching arcade game, but something about the SMS version is pretty meditative... the drone of the engines and a fairly accessible difficulty level (it doesn't really get increasingly difficult, it just kind of cruises at the same level of challenge throughout) make it so that, with a bit of practice, you can enjoy some pretty long and mellow play sessions, as the game cycles through different stage backgrounds and loops overall several times.

So you're trying to match and remove tiles in pairs, and the tiles have to be free on their left or right side to remove them. They also can't have a tile overlapping on top of them. So in this image there is (what I call) a "3 of dots" on the top of the stack in the middle of the screen. You can also see two other "3 of dots" near it, but neither one of those tiles is "free." One is overlapped and the other has tiles on both sides of it. Near the bottom left, there are three "1 of dots" tiles. The upper two are free so you can match and remove those, but the bottom one isn't free yet. In the top right corner there is a Season tile (Winter) which you can match and remove with the Summer tile that is near the middle right of the second level. There are four of each type of tile, and the strategy comes into play when you have to make a decision about what order to remove them - especially if you can't see all four at the same time because some are still concealed under others. If you don't like the mahjong style tiles, you can press pause and go into the options and choose different designs. Also somewhere in the menu you can find a hint about what move to do next. The game will stop automatically if it's impossible to find any more matches. A couple of other notes - I found a setting in the game options where you can choose only a "winnable" layout; confirming that, by default, the game generates random layouts which may or may not be possible to fully clear. Also, over on the right side of the menu, you can find options to change to layouts of different shapes/designs, but I haven't tried many of those yet to see if they are harder or easier.

I recently got back into Shanghai. It's available for pretty much every system through the turn of the millennium. I've been playing Shanghai II on the Genesis - I get the impression that the layouts are completely random and, as such, they're often impossible to completely clear. But it's too complex for me to know for sure... like if I had just selected a different tile 20 moves ago, maybe it would have been possible? I seem to remember that I cleared the layouts more often on the Master System version. The SMS layouts may be pre-designed - my wife played it quite a bit and said she got the impression that they were repeating after a while. But in any case, it's a pretty relaxing game for me, although it has that "just one more" addictive feeling that might keep you up late!

I would shine a light on the Sega Game Gear. Although (like every other handheld system) it was overshadowed by the Gameboy, it was still quite successful - amassing a library of almost 400 games and selling over 11 million units in an interesting variety of different-colored models. In fact, the entire 8-bit line-up of Sega systems is fascinating because they enjoyed success in different regions, so just when you think you've seen everything they have to offer, you discover seemingly hundreds more games that you hadn't heard about before.

Mercs - 51,800 79,050 - I've only previously played the SMS and Genesis versions of this, so it was cool to check out the original. It's always an uneasy feeling playing a game with this control scheme after you've gotten used to a twin-stick or rotary stick setup. Berzerk - 2770 - I've got a lot of good memories of playing this in the arcade, as well as the 2600 version. Unfortunately that doesn't exactly translate into playing the game well. My impression now is that it's nightmarish how slowly you move. Having a slow-moving video game character just fills me with a physical feeling of tension! But check out that awesome bezel artwork. It doesn't get much more intense than that!

Let's see that pinball machine! 😁

Oh, that's cool! I don't know GLBasic, but I have made a couple of games using Gamemaker Studio. I usually just compile to Windows, but I wonder if I could get something running on the Caanoo. By the way, thanks for the detailed write-up of your development process! It's cool that you revisited and expanded upon a project from back in the day.