PixlBit

Last month was a great month for gaming. Seriously. It was better than some years of gaming. I went on a buying spree I haven't been on since I was a young adult buying PS1 games.

One of my favorite games of the early 80s, Oil's Well, was a computer game made for early 80's 8-bit computers by Sierra On-Line. Its premise was that you had discovered oil (conveniently in the form of pellets), and you were trying to drill it before big-name oil barons pirated it from you.

The first week of September 1999 was a busy week for Electronics Boutique, Software Etc, and all the other video game retailers at the time. You were in one of two lines, or perhaps both. One was for a new console, the Sega Dreamcast. The other line was for one of the most anticipated games of the year - Final Fantasy VIII. I was part of the latter group, excited for this game having played and replayed FFVII. 

The next few weeks are going to be loaded to the gills with games for me. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to score the Seasons of Warfare Edition of Fire Emblem: Three Houses at Best Buy in Scottsdale.  It was sold out everywhere else in town, and was only available online through scalpers selling it for $150-200 and up, so as soon as I found it at Best Buy I was on the 101 to snatch it up.

My best friend in childhood got an Atari 2600 Jr. in the twilight years of the system. The 2600 Jr was one of those newer Ataris that was black plastic instead of wood grain. So until he got a NES, we played a lot of well-renowned classics that benefitted from advances in coding but are sadly sometimes hard to find today, like Solaris. One of my favorites, however, was Vanguard. As a kid, I thought Atari made this game, since Atari did the home licensing. I would have never connected it with the same company that did games like Athena, Ikari Warriors, and King of Fighters.

So we've just had E3, and the year is half over. We have the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlet on the horizon, as well as rumors of a Switch hardware revision. But there are a lot of games coming down the pipeline, including some games which finally havs a release date after God knows how many years. So here is what I'm looking forward to. 

Hamster's most recent release of its Arcade Archives this week is a 1982 game called Pooyan, by Konami. 

Lately, I've been playing three classic compilations on my Switch. Two of these are from Konami - the Castlevania and Contra Anniversary Collections. Konami has been re-releasing a lot of its old library lately, after being largely a no-show in the gaming world since the huge fiasco over Kojima Productions and MGS V. Hopefully they're taking a few hesitant steps back into the gaming world beyond Yu-Gi-Oh and Pro Evolution Soccer. They're even jumping into the mini-console scene with mini TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine consoles - the consoles were originally developed by Hudson Soft, and ownership therefore passed to Konami when they bought Hudson.

So it's been 90s week on my Switch this week. I got Turok a little over a week ago, and then I've also been playing a certain little known PS1 RPG that somehow just found its way onto a Nintendo console over 20 years later. And that got me thinking about the N64.