Retro stuff galore, virtual Farming and new games got.
Atari 2600 (played on a Retron '77)
Berzerk - This plays great. The original arcade game always scared me a little bit. That shock sound when you touch a wall or get zapped before you vaporize is always jarring. Getting chased by crazy Otto is terrifying as well. They should have made this a movie instead of Battleship.
Cosmic Ark - I was turned on to this via the Retro Games platform on Xbox. The original cart actually looks better than the Xbox version and is more playable largely because I only played it in challenge mode on Xbox which is the highest difficulty. It makes me think of Lunar Rescue a bit because of the screen where you send a drone out to collect people (or whatever they are) on the surface before returning to space and shooting asteroids. The game gets fast and difficult pretty quickly but I got farther than the Xbox version. A very cool game.
Dark Chambers - Sort of like Adventure but you can shoot. It's also a very rudimentry origin of Gauntlet. I enjoyed it but I don't enjoy the identical rooms from screen to screen. How do you even navigate such an environment?
Frogs and Flies - More fun with a second player, but okay for a little bit against the computer. I feel like this should have had a later expansion, or been as a second screen for Frogger: you cross the river and then catch some flies. Why not?
Galaxian - Plays more like Galaga. Wasn't there a second screen for the arcade Galaxian? It didn't make it here, I don't think. Fun shooter for 2600 though.
Golf - An old favorite. I was surprised to find that Minigolf came out before this. I had only played Golf and only learned of Minigolf much later.
Phoenix - A good shooter for 2600 that simulated the arcade game pretty well. It's hard though.
Solaris - Interesting game with some similarites to Starmaster. Here, though, you have a screen flying over a planet and rescuing people. It feels like a complete game and not one with obvious compromises because of the limited hardware.
Stampede - My all-tme favorite 2600 game from Activision.
Starmaster - Not sure exactly how to play this but I warped around the galaxy and shot at enemies and docked at a space station for more fuel. Objectives? Huh?
Super Breakout - Plays okay with a joystick controller but not very accurate, and thus it's hard to get very far. I'm dying to try a arcade cabinet version and see how that plays.
Venture - A favorite of mine from the arcades and on Colecovision. I only recently discovered it was ported to 2600 as well. It's fine but with reduced graphics.
Game Boy (played on a GBA SP but not the AGS-101 version)
Alleyway - The first year of Game Boy was '89, so I included games released that year. I happen to have this Breakout clone. It plays so well. I just love it. It includes moving walls and Mario shaped walls. I also love the pocket sized GBA SP and its square shape. It's a perfect take-anywhere game system. I only wish I had the AGS-101 version with the brighter, back-lit screen.
NES (played on a Retron 3)
Astyanax - A decent 2D side-scrolling brawler ala Castlevania or Ghouls and Ghosts. Not easy though. I keep getting knocked into pits.
Final Fantasy - I got hooked on this more than any other retro game this holiday. I made a party of three mages, red, white and black, and one martial artist. Stupid maybe? But I survived a good while, rescued the princess, beat up the pirate and got a ship. Then I got slaughtered by fish-men. How was I to know they were resistant to fire? Good luck running in this game. It never lets you go. I could have continued but to save time I'm playing permadeath.
Pin-Bot - Jeremy Parish praised this and I wondered why. It's good in ball physics and a good approximation of the original pinball table, but it's just one pinball machine.
Sky Shark - A port of the arcade game I played in my little college town pizza shop when I was at school. It's a vertically scrolling shooter like Xevious but set in WWI or II or some fantastic combination with prototype tanks that shoot flak. The original is visually stunning and this is pretty sketchy, but it plays well enough. Limited continues though kept me from finishing it. It's hard and unforgiving.
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - I pretended this was a single player RPG like Skyrim and rolled one fighter and took him into the maze. I lasted... well, I didn't last even one encounter with skeletons. What the heck? I feel like this game should allow some freedom of character/party creation and let you get somewhere with different types of parties, but no. If you don't do six players: three fighters, a thief, a cleric and a mage, you just won't make it. I'd love to rewrite this game to allow more varied gameplay. It'd be fun to mess around with this Apple computer port I've played so many times before.
Xbox Series S
Farm Together 2 - Chugging away now at level 170. I've just been expanding my fields to harvest more. I also used one of the rooms in one of my houses to model my real room and set it up with the furniture I'd like to get in real life. I have the Ikea app's room modeling tool on my phone as well, but room planning in FT2 worked very well. I just saved a screen shot to look at when I go buy furniture. Hows that for making video games useful in real life?
Purchases
State of Decay - $5. I played this on Game Pass a while back as well as it's sequel and loved it. Now I own it. I may actually go find a Xbox One hard copy to own as well in case the digital world collapses.
Anno 1800 - $7. I've been dying to try this series that has until now only been for PC. I can finally try it out. I mean, I could play it on Game Pass, but I'm going back down to Game Pass Core this month and won't have access to it.
R.B.I. Baseball (NES) - $5. I couldn't get it to work. May just need a cleaning but it could be bad traces. I hope I can get it working.
Xevious (NES) - $5. Same as previous game. I hope cleaning will fix it.
Carvinal Games Mini Golf (Wii) - $5. Carnival Games was entertaining so maybe this will be too.
Uncharted: Drakes Fortune (PS3) - Free on a buy 3-get-1-free with the previous 3 games. I have Uncharted 2 and 3 physical so why not? It's essential material for my PS3. Of course I have the remasters digitally on my PS4, which came with my system, but original hardware is ultimately best for the best stuff.
That's a holiday. I'm reading Terry Pratchet's The Colour of Magic, watching 80s TV show Star Fleet (a Japanese marionet scifi show like the Gery Anderson Thunderbirds) on youtube, and am about to watch Howl's Moving Castle on DVD because I'm also reading that book, which came out in the 80s, even if the Studio Ghibli movie came out decades later.
Over and out.
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