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These past few months have been shaping up towards being rather hard on my gaming budget. There are too many upcoming games that I really want, and me being me, I'll probably end up getting all of them even though I am currently working my way through the Xenoblade trilogy. Incidentally, unless Bayonetta 3 really, really knocks it out of the park in October, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is likely to be my GOTY.

How primitive were graphics in video games in their early days? Some games didn't even have graphics. Instead, these games had textual descriptions of your environments and the on-screen action. You interacted with these games using a command prompt. 

In the summer of 2000, I needed a new game to play. At that time, I was still a PS1 gamer. Being a RPG lover, my two choices were Square's Chrono Cross and Valkyrie Profile, a game from a resurgent Enix and Tri-Ace, makers of Star Ocean: The Second Story from a year prior. Of the two, Valkyrie Profile looked more interesting, so that's what I went with. And while I did later play Chrono Cross, I wasn't too impressed by it. But Valkyrie Profile went on to become one of my favorite PS1 RPGs, and considering how many of those there were, that was pretty impressive. 

In the late 80s, I started seeing Tetris in computer stores. Created by Russian engineer Alexey Pajitnov while in the employ of the Soviet state agency Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG), the first version of Tetris to hit the US was published by Spectrum Holobyte for the Mac, under license from ELORG. As such, Pajitnov never saw a penny of royalties, these going straight to the Soviet government (he finally gained legal rights, and therefore royalties, to his creation in 1995, after the USSR collapsed and Pajitnov himself had moved to the United States.) A rather bare-bones version of the game, it nevertheless set the standard for the series going forward, including copious Russian imagery and music. It was kind of interesting seeing this blatanty Russian game in computer stores, it being five years since the infamous Able Archer 83 incident and two years since Gorbachev instituted the glasnost policy. 

One of my more recent purchases was the Switch version of Dragon Ball Z; Kakarot, which was on sale pretty cheap at GameStop. The game has been out for awhile on PS4 and Xbone, the Switch finally got a late port. So I picked it up. I'm a sucker for RPGs, after all.

Another year of gaming comes to an end. I guess it was kind of a sleepy year for games if you like big tentpole titles, but I honestly found plenty to play. Almost all of my gaming was done on Switch, which is set to pass both the Wii and PS1 in total install base by the end of the year. I didn't really bother pursuing the PS5 or the XSX|S this year, as there isn't a lot on those systems to justify a purchase.

Over the years, there have been many different types of cartridge software released. Where music and video media (eventually) became standardized, each game system had its own form of storage media. In addition to carrying interchangeable game software, companies tended to make the design and appearance of the cartridges themselves distinctive as a marketing gimmick. Most of us have memories of having game cartridges in boxes, not to mention blowing on the edge connectors when our games glitched out. So here's a brief overview of various game cartridges throughout history. This is not an exhaustive list.

Donkey Kong made me a fan of Nintendo very early on. To this day, DK is my favorite arcade game of all time. I loved it for being one of the most colorful, expressive games out there. It was probably as close as you could get in the early 80s to having a playable cartoon show. So naturally, when more Nintendo games started showing up at the arcade, my young self was excited. And if any game could tear me away from DK, it was Mario Bros. 

When I was a kid in the pre-NES days, vertical shooters were a large part of my gaming diet, as they were a huge part of the gaming landscape. Since my family had home computers, I played clones more than I did the arcade originals or their official home versions on consoles like the 2600. These games generally fell into one of three major categories: Space Invaders clones, Galaxian clones, and Centipede clones. In this blog I will talk about the games that spawned the third type of shooter - Centipede and Millipede.