SteveW

There's a nice story about Forbidden Forest in one of the latest issues of Retro Gamer Magazine. He wasn't a game player, he was a movie buff. Which is why he designed Forbidden Forest with such a cinematic style. I'd like to see that kind of approach to games done more often. I vote for Cosmi. I always appreciated them for throwing on a TI-99/4A version to a few of their multi-computer games like Aztec Challenge, Spider Invasion, and Slinky. I have to hand it to any company that would even attempt a Q*Bert clone like Slinky, programmed in TI BASIC. With their other games they moved on to Extended Basic, but Slinky was done for a base machine, which was a great technical feat.

I could swear that I read somewhere that a VB multicart or two were rumored to have been found in Hong Kong, with all the published games along with some unreleased stuff and tech demos.

"Hot enough for you?" "No, it's not hot enough. Why don't I warm myself up by setting your ass on fire?"

My favorite Star Wars games were Dark Forces (Mac) and Star Wars: Demolition (Dreamcast). Demolition got a lot of flack back in the day, but if you play it for a while, you'll figure out the gameplay and will have fun with it. It was a good update (and many bug fixes) to Vigilante 8: Second Offense.

I've got a couple of them, but only one with the power supply. I bought the first one at Electronic Discount Sales in Arlington, TX, where a lot of Telegames's tornado damage stock ended up. Ah, I remember that day, walking in and seeing the shelves loaded up with Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, Intellivision, and Colecovision games, all dirt cheap. I picked up a lot that day!

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If you're an action gamer, and you have a Dreamcast, GameCube or Xbox (with LIVE), you might try out Phantasy Star Online. I can't tell you how many hours i've wasted with this game. It's a good action game, but it's also a fairly heavy RPG. Usually those don't go together. That's why I don't play traditional RPGs, because I absolutely hate turn-based fighting. Turn based battle sequences started out because the consoles and computers of the day weren't capable of doing a real-time battle convincingly. Nowadays, that's not a problem. But most RPGs that come out of Japan are turn based, which for me is agonizingly slow and boring.

The nice thing is, there's three Movie Trading Company stores around me, so I'll have lots of choices. I just wonder if they're going to bother with movie rentals and sales too, or will they minimise that stuff to one side of the store and scrunch in collectible stuff too?

Who knows, you might plug it in and find out that it's actually Atlantis II.

GTA was actually British.

Lately, i've been using the standard controller. I have a Spectravideo controller, but it's in bad shape and doesn't work too well. A few days ago I bought a Super Action Controller, but it doesn't want to go up all the time. I think I might try out my Telegames DINA joypad on my Colecovision, just to see if they're compatible.

Aw crud, it's been such a long time since i've fooled around with TI BASIC, I can't remember the proper commands. Otherwise i'd write a quick program you could type in to test your sticks. The Caps Lock thing is what people tend to get screwed up on. For some reason, up on the joystick can't register with the caps lock key pressed down. Your best bet would be to buy an adapter so you can use Atari compatible joysticks on your TI. A few different companies made them back in the day. Hopefully one won't be too hard to track down.

My uncle has a side business doing videos for weddings, recitals, that kind of thing. He's got a couple of Commodore monitors in his editing room, too. He's never even owned a Commodore 64. It's just that those things are incredibly reliable, and will last until the end of time. When the sun expands and incinerates the Earth, then shrivels to a tiny white drarf until it ultimately uses up it's last nuclear fuel and goes dark, there's going to be nothing left in the solar system except a bunch of Commodore monitors floating in orbit.

Wow, the GBA sold 20 units? No wonder they're going to kill the Gameboy line, when the DS sells 262,000 in comparison. I knew the Xbox was doing bad there, but they really seemed to have shunned it completely. And the 360 is looking bad, too. Microsoft doesn't do the goofy-ass kinds of games that the Japanese like. Just flood the Xbox with a bunch of beef bowl restaurant simulators and junk. The Japanese love games like that one for the DC that was a bus driving simulation. Just create a game that simulates standing in line waiting to to pay your car registration, or waiting in line at the post office when there's only one counter person. The Japanese would go nuts for it!

Well, that sucks. But at least I know to start looking more closely at laserdisk players when I find them in the wild. I usually find Pioneer units when i'm looking, but now I know to keep my eyes open for a Halcyon.

Erm...... I used to think the same way too, until I bought one. It was kind of a letdown. If you had one when they were originally on the market, you would have enjoyed it. If you look at it in 2006, it's hard to evaluate. Out of the 20 games i've got, only a few really stand out. I hope you enjoy it. I'm just worried that you're building the idea up in your mind that it's going to be a lot cooler than it really was. And you need The Voice module attached to it to make it talk like that video.

Pretty much any Psygnosis games are good for display. They had incredible looking games. The gameplay wasn't always as stellar.... There was an OCS game called Unreal that I always liked, and it was pretty impressive looking for it's time. In one section, you'd fly a dragon through a nice scaling 3D landscape, then it was on foot to kill some baddies with a burning sword. Great graphics. Robocop 3D was a good looking polygonal game. Another OCS game which looked better than the hardware was capable of. Motor Massacre was another favorite of mine. Drive around in a top-down viewpoint, scavenging for gear on foot in mutant infested ruins. I especially remember the sound effects. Yet another OCS title. Vaxine is a great looking game. The gameplay is pretty confusing (especially if you didn't have the instructions like my copy) but the raytraced look really stood out. OCS. Speaking of raytracing, I hope you have the Amiga Juggler animation. Throw that on there for a little while. That'll bring back some memories. Metal Mutant would be nice. I haven't tried that one in years. It's said that Silmarils ported the game over to the Lynx, but for some reason Atari never licensed it. I always liked the look of the game, and the nice background sounds of crickets and such. Part side scrolling shooter, part puzzle game. OCS.

Today, I went out to the local flea market (one of the biggest in the state) and didn't find anything in the bulk of the market. So I went to the collector guy at the back, who's always got whatever I might need, and picked up a Colecovision Super Action Controller for $10. And behind his counter, I saw that he had a Coleco Zaxxon tabletop arcade game. I've been interested in tracking some of these down for years, but they're hard to find in the wild. I bought it off him for $35. I love going to his booth, I usually walk away with something really great. Stopped at a Goodwill and bought one of those two-player Tetris plug-and-play units, $3. I've been wondering if these are any good, but didn't want to pay $25 to find out.

I used to have that bug too, but lately i've come to realise how much junk i've got. I've got loads of storage tubs filled with all sorts of things. Nowadays, i've started passing things by if I don't have any need for them. I can't pick up everything I see because it's kind of cool. Today, I bught a Coleco Zaxxon tabletop game. I couldn't help it, i've wanted to pick some of these classics up for years, but I never find them for sale. But my local source for all things classic, the guy out at the flea market with all the marvels of early '80s electronics for sale, had one for $35. I couldn't resist. I guess the bug bit too hard.

Ooooh, he says it's rare. Doesn't that make it immediately more valuable on eBay? "Combat for the 2600 - Rare! [email protected]@K!" Trustworthy tesimony, indeed. I had a Voodoo3 card in my old Mac clone. Turns out the high end ATI Rage 128 card that had just come out wouldn't work with my machine's PCI slots, so I took it back, bought a Voodoo3 card at half the price, and flashed it's BIOS with the beta software from 3Dfx's web site to make it Mac-compatible. Great little video card, but my computer ran really hot. I think the internal heat might have killed my CD-R drive prematurely.

I always believed that the SG-1000 used the same video processor as the TI-99/4A and the Colecovision, and that the SMS used a next-gen version of that processor. Both consoles used a Zilog Z80 CPU, and since the SMS's video chip was downwardly compatible, it could run SG-1000 carts. The SMS doesn't have the video problems of the TMS9918A video chip, 320 by 240 resolution with a big ol' buffer window framing the screen. I wonder if SG-1000 games, played on the better video processor in the SMS, would have the same problem with pixels dropping out after having more than 4 sprites on a scanline? Or would the updated processor compensate?

Dude, you've gotta tell us about that one. One of the rarest consoles of all time. Wasn't it supposed to be a computer too? What's it like to use?

Is it a floppy disk drive, or a datasette drive? A Colecovision would be worth the price of shipping if it worked. I've found that few of them seem to work after all these years, though. I have four, and only the last one I picked up functions with only decent reliability (It almost never works right away, I have to press the restart button to get the games to work). If you're talking about the ADAM module with the built-in datasette drives, then go for it. It might cost a few dollars to ship, but it would be worth it for a computer collector. I'd personally like to fool around with one, and type in some Apple II BASIC programs to see how compatible the ADAM is to the Apple II.

I never knew that! That is kind of funny. Yup, that was in the interview with Jerry Lawson from CGE 2004. But the guy wasn't a janitor, he was a programmer with a really violent temper. He'd punch a hole in the wall in frustration, then he'd promise to repair it later. You can download the interviews from that show here.

It looks like it says Lincoln International. Come to think of it, I saw something that looked like a mechanical Pong device, built inside what looked like a plastic TV set replica, that looked like a kid's toy. The 'screen' (just a piece of plastic the lights shone through) looked like it was around 13 inches, like a lot of TV sets at the time it came out. I saw this thing a couple of times at a flea market around a 3 hour drive away. It probably won't work, since both times I saw it the thing was left outside, exposed to the elements.