| September 25, 2007... You
Say Halo, I Say
Goodbye |
Today, I bought a copy of
the latest Halo game... and I've not even sure why.
You'd think that I would have taken Halo 2 out of its
shrinkwrap and put it through its paces before stepping up to
the sequel, but I guess I succumbed to all the hype. The
reduced price made it that much harder to resist... they were
selling Halo 3 for $54.99 at the local college, a ten percent
discount!
In the past, no discount
short of "buy none, get one free" would make me
consider picking up a first-person shooter.
However, my time with the Bioshock demo has me looking at the
genre in a new light. I wasn't sure what to expect from
it at first, but the game turned out to be one of the year's
best, with a refreshing deep sea setting and the best graphics
to ever hit a game console. If Halo 3 is even close to
as inspired as Irrational Games' surprise hit, it will
have been a worthwhile investment.
All right, let's shift
gears from the present to the past. I've added reviews
of Mountain King and Wizard of Wor to the 52
Hunter. These games are especially near and dear
to my heart, gobbling up hours of my childhood in the mid
1980's. If you don't own a 5200 but don't feel like
going the emulation route, there's still hope...
both titles are available for the Atari 8-bit computer
line, and they're exactly the same as their 5200 counterparts,
sans the irritating controller. Whatever you do, don't
miss out on these games... and don't make the mistake of
buying the ColecoVision version of Mountain King!
| September 20, 2007... The
52 Hunter Debuts |
There's new blood on the
Blitz... a section dedicated to that most underappreciated of
consoles, the Atari 5200. It's a good history lesson
and a nice companion piece to the 26
Hunter,
so I recommend both young and old to give it a
look.
I'm in a misanthropic mood
right now, so I'm going to end this post on a high note
rather than souring it with personal grievances.
Farewell to you all.
| September 15, 2007...
Walking on the Moon (plus other game
reviews) |
In case you were
wondering, and even if you weren't, here are a few of the
games I've been playing lately...
MOON PATROL
EX: You know, I don't spend much time
with cell phone games. I don't feel that the
average handset is well suited to interactive
entertainment, but I'm willing to overlook my personal bias
for this remake of a childhood favorite. Unlike most
cell phone conversions of 1980's arcade hits, Moon Patrol EX
has been enhanced rather compromised, with more detailed
graphics and a jazzed-up version of the already catchy
soundtrack. Here's the biggest surprise... the game even
PLAYS well! You only need three buttons to blast the
looming aliens, bound over craters, and charge your way to the
next checkpoint, and that's not too much to ask even from a
crowded cell phone keypad.
SUPER COBRA
(ENTEX): Before Gradius, there was Super
Cobra. And there weren't too many good conversions of
Konami's exciting helicopter ride, either. One of the
few ports that cut the mustard was the tabletop game by
Entex... it's about as colorful as the average Virtual Boy
title and there's only four stages (with the bank heist
replaced by a less creative bombing raid), but it plays pretty
well, and there's a perfect difficulty setting for practically
every player. Flipping the skill level switch
and turning the speed dial on the right side of the unit
lets you adjust the speed, ramping up the challenge or just
letting you zip through the first round in the blink of an
eye. I don't know how it compares to Tomy's kissing
cousin Scramble, but it fares pretty well against Epoch's
Astro Command.
HULK: TOTAL
DESTRUCTION: Stop me if you've heard this
before. You're a genetically altered superhuman, wiping
out crowds of foes and scaling tall buildings to collect the
little green orbs perched on their rooftops. What
separates Hulk: Total Destruction from the subsequently
released Crackdown (aside from the Halo 3 demo) is a heaping
helping of violence... instead of keeping the peace, you're
tearing it to bits with your bare hands! It's a very
cathartic experience, with the green menace
effortlessly throwing boulders, ripping apart towers,
and flattening tanks. You want tough? This
new Hulk makes Lou Ferrigno look like Pee-Wee
Herman!
SONIC AND
THE MAGIC RINGS: Nintendo, you're putting me in
a really awkward position. I want you to win the latest
console war, and you're doing that, but I want to be
comfortable rooting for the Wii, which I can't do
when I'm not having fun playing it. Third party
developers like Sega keep pumping out lackluster games
that make terrible use of the Wiimote, and you've done nothing
to whip them into shape. Sonic and the Magic Rings is
just one example... to its credit, Sega has put more effort
into this than the usual hackneyed GameCube port, but the
control is an absolute mess thanks to its dependence on that
increasingly aggravating Wiimote. If this controller is
supposed to make games more intuitive, then why does it leave
me confused and frustrated in nearly every game that requires
it? Granted, I've only played a little of Sonic and the
Magic Rings, but what I've tried so far doesn't leave me
wanting more.
| August 27, 2007...
Pre-Class Jitters (plus, classic console
mods) |
It never fails. It doesn't matter if I'm thirteen or
thirty-three... in elementary school or in college. I
can never get any sleep on the first day of class! Here
I am, bleary eyed and sleep deprived, sitting in front of my
laptop when I should be lying in bed. Yet I know that
I'd just be staring blankly at the ceiling or the inside of my
eyelids if I shut off the computer and tried to get some
rest. So here I am, updating my increasingly neglected
site while grinding my teeth down to the gums worrying about
what's in store for me this semester.
I should be glad that summer is finally at an end,
though. My college loan finally arrived last week, just
in time to pay off most of my credit card bill, the rest
of my income tax, and the textbooks I'll need to complete my
classes. There's even enough money left over for a small
army of classic game consoles, along with the parts I'll
need to make them Y2K compliant.
Actually, make that Y2007 compliant. See,
systems like the ColecoVision and Atari 5200 weren't designed
for today's high-definition television standards.
They weren't even designed for the low-definition
standards of the 1990s! No, these consoles give you a
single RF cable that supports both audio and video, and does
neither particularly well. I love a good classic gaming
experience, but this is one part of the early 80's I have
no intention of reliving.
Fortunately, I don't have to, thanks to the hundreds
of young gamers who grew up to be electronics
engineers. Do a little hunting on eBay and you'll
find A/V mods for every antique console under the sun,
with the obvious exception of the Vectrex. Some of these
modifications are ridiculously involved... frankly, you'd be
better off building a fusion reactor than putting this
one together. However, there are a
few out there that can be handled by any schmo with at least a
little soldering experience and enough bravery to take apart
their old systems. This Atari 2600 Jr.
mod by hacker par excellence Ben
Heckendorn could be finished in the time it takes to watch an
episode of Star Trek... maybe half of one if you're watching
Voyager or Enterprise and the show's too boring to distract
you from your work!
| August 19,
2007... Unholy Diver (plus, adventures in
Atari 5200 collecting) |
I'm way behind on my updating duties, on both this site and
the blog. Honestly, I just haven't had that much to
discuss lately. Maybe things will pick up when college
starts next week... at least, I sure hope so!
So I'm hearing rave reviews about Bioshock, that game where
the deep-sea diver rescues kids from men armed with
wrist-mounted wasps. Frankly, I'm having a hard time
believing that it even exists... that scenerio sounds more
like a dream you'd have after a
week of sleep deprevation. I suppose seeing is
believing, so I'll have to rouse my Xbox 360 from its months
of hibernation and download the free demo.
What else we got? Oh yeah, there's that Atari 5200 I
just ordered from eBay. This is going to be the second
one in as many weeks... the last system cost me five
dollars, but I got what I paid for if you know what I
mean. I should have more luck with this
one, which the previous owner swears is in
good working condition.
Of course, when it comes to the Atari 5200, procuring the
system is only half the battle. The next step is to find
a controller that doesn't completely suck, and anyone who owns
the console knows how difficult THAT can be. Just ask
that Angry Video Game
Nerd guy! There are options
available to me, though. The first is to buy the Wico Command
Control joystick. It's a refreshing
departure from other game controllers of the early 1980's,
with clean, fluid movement and just the right amount of
resistance... but its Achille's Heel is a stupid 9-pin plug
that makes it useless without the Y-cable included with
the stick. I do have the stick, but guess which part I'm
missing?
The next option is to build an adapter. I could
either settle for a simple Y-cable for that Wico stick,
or go all out and make an adapter that accepts either old
PC joysticks or the Sega Arcade Pad, that Rolls Royce of
classic game controllers. Naturally, the most versatile
adapter is also the most difficult one to build,
requiring a handful of resistors and integrated
circuits. The frustration mounts when you consider that
the instructions available online are incomplete, listing only
half the parts necessary for the modification.
The only option that's NOT available to me
is buying an adapter. It's not that I don't have
the money for it... it's just that nobody offers them.
Believe me, I've looked around! There used to be a
controller converter called the Redemption available on
AtariAge, but it's since become a thing of the past... like
the dinosaurs, or competent US presidents. I guess it's
solderin' time for me, then! Here's the
schematic I've got planned. As you
can see, it's not going to be an easy task...
| August 11,
2007... Re-Activator
Debuts |
There's a new sister site to The Gameroom Blitz... I call
it Re:Activator, and it's a blog that exclusively covers
classic video game systems and homebrew
game releases. It's a segment of the industry that
doesn't get much press, and I figured it was time that
changed. Click the Blog link at the top of this page to
give it a look!
| August 10, 2007...
Super Sea Louse |
I've added two articles to the History page, including a
review of the trashy teen comedy Joysticks and a detailed
look at the early beta version of Gunstar
Heroes. Both features were offered
exclusively to members of a short-lived premium service on the
site, but now, everyone gets a shot at them!
There's also a video
review of Lead that repeats my
earlier observations on the game. If you want to see
those musings brought to life through the power of moving
pictures, this link's for you!
What else we got...? Oh yeah, there's some
not-so-good news about the online NES database. After
several hours of typing, swearing, then typing again, I
discovered that the database software I'm using sucks in ways
the human mind cannot conceive. I never had any serious
complaints about OpenOffice before, but Base changed that in a
hurry. When it's not freezing up, it's corrupting files,
and when it's not doing THAT, it's throwing every error
message under the sun in my face. Fortunately,
I'll have plenty of chances to shop for an alternative when
college starts in a couple of weeks.
In collecting news, I've got an Atari 5200 and an Atari
Lynx coming my way in a few days. The original plan was
to get a ColecoVision to replace the one I lost in Arizona all
those years ago, but those systems have been going for boku
bucks on eBay, so I went with the next best thing. I
have fonder memories of the 5200 anyway... I spent a lot of
time sitting in front of that console colossus back in
the mid 1980's, playing Wizard of Wor, Mountain
King, and Moon Patrol until my eyes glazed over like a
summer ham. I have every intention of reliving those
days, but the tricky part's going to be finding all the games
I once owned.
I'll have more luck finding games for the Lynx... in fact,
the system comes with six of them, ranging from the futuristic
3D shooter S.T.U.N. Runner to CyberVirus, one of the system's
later and more impressive releases. Now I've just
got to track down Xybots and Roadblasters and I'll be set!
Wait, wait! There's one other thing. I just
played Ephemeral Fantastia, which I purchased a week ago for
the low, low price of two dollars. The price wasn't low
enough. This has got to be one of the most schizophrenic
role-playing games ever made... you'll be walking along for a
couple of minutes, looking for armored crabs to slay, and
all of a sudden, you're told that it's nightfall
and sent to a castle on the other end of the
island. Hey, knock it off! I'm not Scott Bakula,
and this isn't Quantum Leap. On the plus side, Ephemeral
Fantasia introduced me to the super sea louse, which will go
down in history as the best-worst enemy ever in an
RPG. Not only did I not know that lice live
underwater, but that they come in regular and super-sized
varieties!
| August 7,
2007... Taking the
Lead |
Rez... on the Atari
2600? Maybe not, but Lead is as
close as you're gonna get. Designed in Italy by hobbyist
programmer Simone Serra, Lead is a shooter split into several
different stages. Each stage has a different goal, but
all of them take place in a tight corridor that doubles as a
musical scale. Any onscreen events, whether it be
shooting aliens or dodging meteorites, play notes depending on
their position on the scale. Blast an enemy on the left
hand side of the corridor and you'll hear a high-pitched
tone. Zap a foe on the right and a low-pitched note is
your reward.
Like any good twitch game on the 2600, the screen is
tightly packed with threats, but in Lead, this not only
makes the gameplay more intense, but enhances the
astonishingly complex soundtrack. This effect
of "synthestasia" is more profound in early builds
of the game (including Lead 1K, included as a bonus in the
latest beta), but the new versions have a lot more
flair. Once you've finished a stage, your ship
streaks toward the next one, and when you're struck by a stray
asteroid, an EKG meter warns you that a flatline is
just seconds away if you don't press the fire button to
continue. At the moment, pressing the fire button
doesn't actually let you continue, but I'm confident
that this flaw will be addressed in future builds. Even
with it, this has got to be the most exciting development for
the 2600 since the introduction of Fred
Quimby's Batari BASIC in 2005.
Before I go, I wanted to make three announcements
regarding The Gameroom Blitz. The first is that
I've finished a new video review... click
here to check it out! The second is
that I've added a history section to the
site. This handy page lets you check out past Blitz
updates, from September 2001 to July 2007. There are
also a handful of articles from the early days of the site,
brought back with new material that puts the
rants on 1990's pop culture into perspective.
Finally, I must regretfully announce the cancellation
of Awesome NES. All the content originally written
for the book will be added to an online database similar to
the rarity guides on Atari Age... that
way, it can easily be revised and modified when
necessary. That just wasn't possible with the book,
where any necessary changes broke the layouts of five or more
pages, resulting in hours of monotonous editing. On top
of that, I wasn't really thrilled with the prospect of
publishing a book that might be torn to shreds by its
picky target audience. If I make a mistake with an
online database, it costs five minutes of my time to fix
it. If I made a mistake with a book, it costs
thousands of dollars and leaves me with hundreds of unsellable
first editions. For someone with limited funds but
plenty of server space, the choice is obvious.
| August 2,
2007... Man, That's a Short
Post! |
I don't have much to say, but plenty to
post! There's a new video
review on my YouTube page, a recently
rediscovered Saturn review, and two
redesigned system pages. Check
'em out!
| July 28,
2007... The Lost Rings
Relaunch |
Holy cow, it's been six days since my last update!
However, this should make it worth the wait...
I finished the design for the new Saturn review page,
with a few changes to the mock-up I posted on the site a
couple of months back. All that brushed metal was giving
me a headache, so I replaced it with the gold trim used on the
spines of Japanese Saturn releases. The steel in
the original design has been relegated to the navigation
bar hanging above each review. There are six blue orbs
inside the bar... they'll be used to return to the front
page and access photos of the reviewed game, once I've set up
the necessary links.
So far, I've only got one review dropped into the new
template, but you can rest assured that more are on their
way! Maybe one of these days I'll even take a break from
YouTube and write some new ones!
| July 22,
2007... The Crappiest Handheld Web Browsing
Since the Game.com |
So, just how
many new Atari 2600 reviews are on The
Gameroom Blitz? Click here to find out!
Anyway, I just got paid, and decided to celebrate my
newfound wealth with a handful of games. My booty
included Astro Boy and Namco Museum for the Game Boy Advance
(I keep misplacing Namco Museum for some reason...), Sega
Superstars for the Playstation 2, and Me and My Katamari for
the PSP. I've heard the latter game has more.
Aggravating. Pauses. Than a William Shatner.
Speech. However, for nine dollars, I'm more than willing
to put up with them!
I also stumbled upon the DS browser that everyone's been
hating lately. Hey, I couldn't resist... it was
only twelve bucks! Besides, it's really not that
bad, if you can accept a 20th century web surfing experience
come ten years too late. There have been many
advances in online technology over the last ten years,
and the DS browser can't take advantage of any of them,
even with the included expansion cartridge. You can't
even play WAV files, for cryin' out loud! What is this,
the friggin' game.com?!
There are many valid complaints you can make about this
browser, but speed isn't one of them. Let's try to keep
things in perspective here... this is a Nintendo DS, not an
Alienware laptop. Frankly, I was surprised that it ran
as quickly as it did, loading compatible sites at roughly 56K
speeds. My beef is that many web sites DON'T run on the
browser, and the ones that do are mighty fugly until you
switch to the overview mode (which switches OFF all the
onscreen links). In short, the DS browser is that "kind
of sort of" Internet you've heard about in the Apple iPhone
commercials. It works in a pinch, but it'll be a painful
pinch!
| July 17,
2007... Come on and Safari with
Me |
I just ironed out the issues The
Gameroom Blitz was having with Safari, so Mac owners
(as well as those PC owners crazy enough to eschew Firefox for
that browser) can now surf the site with confidence!
| July 16,
2007... Talk Vex with Jess
Johanson |
Good news, everyones! I've redesigned the review
pages for nearly all the classic game systems on the web
site. The new Vectrex page in particular
is a big improvement over the old model, looking great on
Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox,
and- HOLY CRAP! Even Safari can't break
it! Now if only I could get that browser to
properly display the index page...
Speaking of which, I've taken the liberty of posting links
to all the videos in my YouTube account on the right hand side
of the page. My love for writing has started
to fade after fifteen years (as you could probably tell from
the dearth of fresh content on this
site...), but producing and directing videos is an
invigorating new experience for
me, with possibilities that just aren't available in
plain text. Maybe it's just a phase, but even if it is,
most of my creative energy will be devoted to making
videos until it's out of my system.
All right, all right, enough about me. There's some
exciting news from Belgium, the land of French speaking
musclemen and... uh... what else are they known for
again? Anyway, after many years of development,
programmer Kristof Tuts has finally completed his clone
of Galaxians for the Vectrex. Vectrexians actually looks
better than the already awesome beta version of the
game once offered on Tuts' web site, with a polygonal
introduction (!!!) and aliens redrawn to better match their
arcade counterparts.
However, this added polish comes with a heavy price... the
game will retail for forty Euros when it's released on
cartridge, which comes out to a whopping fifty-five dollars
for us poor Americans. And that's not even counting the
shipping costs from Belgium! Here's hoping
that Tuts finds a more economical alternative for us
cash-strapped US gamers, because as good as Vectrexians looks,
it's hard to justify spending seventy plus dollars on it when
designers like John Dondzila and Alex Herbert have released
equally fantastic games for a small fraction of the
cost. As much as I love retro gaming, I'm not paying
Xbox 360 prices for Vectrex-grade action.
| July 13, 2007... A
Random Grab Bag of E3
News |
Now that it's all over, let's take a look at the major
announcements from this year's Electronic Entertainment
Expo...
THE REAL SLIM SHINY: The two years
of speculation from Kotaku turned out to be true... more
or less. Although it doesn't feature a built-in flash
drive, the slimline PSP does offer most of the other cool
things that the rumors had promised. The UMD drive is
faster, thanks to extra RAM in the unit. The battery
life has been doubled despite a reduction in size. And
here's a shocker that nobody expected... the PSP's shoddy
D-pad has been greatly improved, and there's a video port at
the top of the system that eliminates the need for those
kludgy third-party television adapters. The only problem
is that the system, despite all the improvements, hasn't
really changed in appearance at all. It's even shinier
and a little bit smaller than before, but practically
everything else is exactly the same... not a bright idea
when you consider how radically changed the top-selling DS was
in its Lite iteration.
CAN YOU DRIVE STICK?: Soon you
will thanks to Hori's arcade sticks for the Xbox 360 and
Nintendo Wii! These guys have been making arcade-quality
joysticks for game consoles since the days of the
Super NES, so they know their stuff ... and they
certainly know how to make it better than MadCatz or
Pelican. The Wii stick matches the system's blue and
white color scheme, while the Xbox 360's own
controller includes a Virtua Fighter 5 theme, just in
time for that game's August debut. Both sticks
will come in handy for those retro gamers who can't stand
playing their old-school arcade favorites with the wimpy Wii
wand or the awkward Xbox 360 pad.
THE FALL AND RISE OF THE PS3 PRICE
TAG: Just when you thought Sony was coming to
its senses, along comes sneering SCE executive Kazuo Hirai to
raise the price of the Playstation 3 back to
$599. Yes, yes, the new unit boosts the hard drive up
from sixty gigs to eighty gigs, but it also drops the Emotion
Engine chip that makes playing PSOne and PS2 games such a
breeze. Now Playstation fans will have to settle for
software emulation, the same rotting albatross that had been
hung around the neck of the Xbox 360 from the moment it was
released. Even without Ken Kutaragi at the helm, it
seems like Sony's video game division just can't
catch a clue about the repellant price of its latest
console...
PERIPHERAL VISION: Not much software
was announced for the Nintendo Wii, but hardware is another
story entirely. In addition to the previously mentioned
Hori arcade stick, Nintendo itself will release two new
peripherals for its popular console. The first is a 21st
century update to the Zapper, a gun-shaped shell which houses
both the Wii remote and its nunchuck accessory. The
second is a rocking board designed for use with WiiFit,
Nintendo's latest out-of-left-field game designed especially
for adults. It's a risky gamble for sure, but then
again, so were Brain Age and Nintendogs...
There's also the unconfirmed rumor that all models of the
Xbox 360 will drop in price by a hundred dollars by the end of
the month. I'm not holding my breath on this one, but if
it does happen, that will make the core model fifty dollars
LESS expensive than the current cost-cutting king, the
Nintendo Wii! I'm all for it, man. Cheap consoles
are a good thing for everybody... unless you're Sony, of
course.
| July 7,
2007... Jackpot! (also, E3
speculation) |
Cool, check it out! It's seven, seven, oh
seven! We're not going to see anything like this
until... uh, August of next year.
And now, some bad news. It looks like the video
review will be late this week. However, when you take a
look at these two pages, you'll understand
why. It took much of the Independence Day weekend to
finish this design, but it looks like it was worth the time
and effort. Looking back, it's hard to imagine
how anyone could stand the previous layout, including the
guy who created it!
That about does it for me, folks. Hopefully there
will be more to discuss in a week, after the Electronic
Entertainment Expo has run its course. Personally, I'm
hoping for more news about that supposed slimline PSP that's
been rumored for over a year now. Will flash memory
be built into the new handheld? Will the screen's
refresh rate be improved? Will the speed of the UMD
drive be given a boost? Or is it all just a bunch of
crap? We'll all know in a week.
| July 1,
2007... RIP Tips and
Tricks |
As I was adding Mandi Paugh's review of
the underground hit Puzzle Quest to the site, it suddenly occured to me that the
review pages on this site are a total mess. I
have a funny feeling that before the year is through, I'm
going to have to give them the full Web 2.0 treatment,
adopting a layout that's attractive and loads quickly no
matter what hardware you use to view it. I'll also need
to divide the review pages by system rather than manufacturer,
because as it stands now the pages are so enormous that
they take entirely too much time to edit.
Before I go, let's have a word of
silence for Tips and Tricks. I loved that magazine,
especially during its golden years in the late 1990s, and it
will be dearly missed. Hmm... all right, that ought to
do it. Stay tuned, folks... a new video review is just
around the
bend! |
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