Duke75

My friends and I used to love Tag Team on the NES. The trick is to be very patient with it - most wrestling games at the time encouraged button-mashing to win. Once you get the hang of the "punch - select move" gameplay, it's no big deal, especially once you learn how many button presses it takes for each particular move. Another thing is that it had more of the "show" feeling of wrestling than many games at the time did. Going outside the ring, hitting the other guy with a chair, guys "hulking up" and kicking your ass...the tricky thing with wrestling games is that it's not enough to just do a fighting game, you have to nail the feeling of theatricality, too, which I don't any wrestling game truly got in the right balance until Aki's N64 games. Mat Mania is my favorite arcade wrestling game. Still gets a lot of play through MAME from me

My mom and stepdad were pretty into Star Raiders and Pac-Man until the 5200 controllers broke. Now my mom mostly just plays Mahjong on the computer while my stepdad watches golf on TV nonstop.

Part of the post-NES fixation seems to me the increasing perception of video games as a storytelling medium. I can't count how many modern video game reviews I've seen that spend paragraphs going on at length about the story and characters of the game before finishing up with a comparatively brief and often primitive discussion of the actual gameplay. If you're coming at it from that perspective, pre-crash gaming might seem alien to you ("What's the story of this Asteroids game?" "Well, you shoot the asteroids before they hit you." "BUT WHY?!?!").

I think this goes with any kind of hobby/enthusiast press, whether it's video games, comic books, music, cars, guns, etc. The "press" that covers these topics needs to stay in good with the producers to keep getting access to the material, plus a lot of the guys who staff the magazines or websites are probably aspiring to actually get into the industry and their job is good for networking...

I do think I've gotten better. I think it's because I'm better at just watching the game and analyzing my strategy, whereas when I was a kid I would just pick up and play and rarely think about what I was doing. A good example is Castlevania - as a kid I would jump all over the place and never thought deeply about which subweapons were best and the result was that I usually topped out somewhere around the Grim Reaper battle. Playing it as an adult, I realized the keys to success were jumping and attacking only when necessary and generally hanging on to the holy water for most levels and this helped me beat the game pretty handily. I don't think my reflexes have necessarily slowed down, but I play when I'm tired more often (playing late at night vs. afternoons) and I tend to think so much that it just naturally delays my reactions compared to the mostly instinctual/reactive way I played as a kid.

A blog: https://woodgrainwonderland.com/ Reviewing every Atari 2600 game in alphabetical order.

I liked Nintendo back in the day because they made some arcade games I liked, like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye. Those guys want to make a console? Yeah, that sounds good to me. I had a lot of fun with the NES and didn't think it suffered too much from lazy side-scroller design (those 16-bit consoles, OTOH...). Something that always strikes me about Atari's post-2600 consoles is that they never evolved their games enough. I like the 7800 version of Asteroids, but it's just Asteroids again but with better graphics. Nintendo figured out that it was okay to change the formula a little. I'm pretty happy with gaming right now because the indy/homebrew scene is big enough that I can always find something to play while comfortably ignoring most of the overhyped AAA releases, and thanks to all the sales and bundles out there, I don't even spend much money doing so.

The problem is that even if they're confronted with these kinds of accounts, witch hunters will just adopt the perspective that the women have "internalized the patriarchal oppression" or something along those lines to dismiss them. Can't let anything get in the way of a good 2 minute hate

Sadly, a lot of people do that very thing.

"Nolan Bushnell Denied Award for Crime of Living During 1970s"

Haha, I've been replaying this off and on for the past year or so and the last time I played it, a few months ago, I got hung up on the lack of fire arrows, too. So I need to get those next time I play and I'll probably beat it when I do. I really liked the game when I originally played it but I have to admit that I find it very ponderous compared to the 2D games.

Yeah, I've noticed this as well. Even fairly good historians tend to start everything with the NES, often dismissing what came before as too primitive to generate substantial discussion, especially since a lot of the younger guys are really into the "games as storytelling medium" stuff and not as much into, say, analyzing gameplay algorithms.

A combination of just being in the mood to play certain games or maybe a certain type of game, or sometimes just hitting the "select random game" in Launchbox a few times to see what comes up and catches my interest. I've become pretty good about focusing on a small number of games at once and not allowing myself to get distracted so much that I can't finish anything.

Yeah, I've tried doing the X360 backward compatibility and it's barely tolerable.

Nope, there are numerous Xbox exclusives that have never been ported. A bunch of Sega titles (e.g., Gunvalkyrie, JSRF, Panzer Dragoon Orta, etc.), Crimson Skies, Kingdom Under Fire, the Otogi games, Deathrow, Breakdown, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc. Maybe not to all tastes, but the Xbox was a neat system for oddball titles. Microsoft didn't really know what it was doing, so it just threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see if anything stuck. I got a lot of enjoyment out of my Xbox and it kind of pisses me off that I can't emulate my games.

I had a Colecovision. In our case, we originally had a Telstar Pong clone system, and then we got the CV because my older brother was really keen on it and the 2600 was already looking old. When my parents divorced, my mom got a 5200 to help us stay entertained when we visited her (she was also really into Star Raiders for a bit). We were the only people I knew that had either of those systems, though. Every other family either stuck with the 2600 or ended up getting an NES a few years later, or maybe a C64. Never met anyone who had an Intellivision, though.

Not 2600 but I had an idea for a Mount and Blade-type game or maybe an action-strategy inspired by the Mars books. Create a character who travels to Barsoom and starts putting together a warband to take on and bring to heel the various factions there, find someone to marry, and eventually work your way up to becoming Warlord of Mars. Tarzan would be a good character for an open world game - swing around the jungle, ride elephants, put together squads of apes and big cats and other animals, find random people that need help and beat up bad guys... There's tons of potential in Burroughs's work, especially since his writing was so action-packed. The Colecovision game is pretty cool, though.

Nice review but - I have to nitpick - Imagic is pronounced as if you're combining the words "imagine" and "magic". I've noticed lots of people these days say Eye-Magic, as if it's an Apple product

I can't say I've had any contact with the MAME guys (maybe that's good!), but frustration with the UI is how I ended up using Launchbox as a frontend for MAME (and some other stuff). It's served me well, although it's not the only option out there.

That GranDoll game looks pretty cool. I'll have to look into that one... The Warriors on Xbox/PS2/Gamecube. I think this was the best game to come out of that "let's make games out of classic movies" fad that industry went through during that generation. This developer called The Collective created a really good beat-em-up engine for the Xbox-exclusive Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. You can throw holy water in a pool and then toss vampires in for instant kills, break chairs to create stakes, and generally do a lot of cool improvised stuff. The company went on to use the engine for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, which is also pretty cool, but Buffy is the better game. The C64 had a really interesting version of Alien. You would have to gather supplies to defend yourself and escape the ship but the identity of the crewmember who gives birth to the alien and the identity of the killer android are randomized every time you play, so Ripley could be dead at the start and Ash might be one of the good guys. And you would have to manage the mental states of your characters to try and keep them from going catatonic or something as things get more stressful. It's slow-paced but I like the idea of a game that takes the premise of a movie and goes in its own direction instead of rehashing the plot like so many do.

Since I was a just a kid, I can't speak to precisely why the 5200 failed but I can say that we had one shortly after it launched and the whole family loved it. Until the controllers broke. The weird thing was that it wasn't like they went through some great trauma - they just literally stopped working overnight. I remember playing Star Raiders one day, getting up the next day to play some more only to find that they joystick was hopelessly jammed. We weren't technical-minded people so we just sort of shrugged and used the second controller until that one stopped working in the same way, and then the console simply went in the closet never to emerge again. I dunno, I guess we weren't sufficiently motivated to buy replacements... We did enjoy it while it lasted, though. The games looked and sounded great, and although the non-centering joysticks were peculiar, it was just something we got used to. I also had a Colecovision at the same time and that was the system that got most of my attention, but I thought the 5200 was a good competitive system. It's not like the Coleco controllers were much more enjoyable to use... At the time the whole thing about the Crash was way beyond me. I just remember Atari 2600 games started being sold by department stores for $1 a piece, which, being a kid with almost no money, was awesome for me. I never stopped loving video games and when the NES came along I was pumped for it because I trusted that the people who made Donkey Kong could make a cool system.

Just naming what comes to mind first... Pressure Cooker Demon Attack Adventure Yar's Revenge HERO Pitfall Seaquest Atlantis Keystone Kapers Dragonfire

I was messing around with Jaguar emulation this past weekend for the first time in a while and although a lot still doesn't run, there is some encouraging progress at least. Some games that didn't work right last time I tried it, like Rayman, now seem to work pretty well. It's just frustrating that I still can't get a good game of Tempest 2K or AvP going

Can't go wrong with any of the AKI games. Even the later "non-wrestling" wrestling games like Def Jam Vendetta and Fight for New York. As much fun as those games are, though, it's depressing that they're still better than anything being released now (can I have a great Lucha Underground game, please?).