RetroSection
Bringing Past To Present
Commodorathon – Games 13-18
Apr 18th
For the next six games RetroBear takes on the role of a soldier wanting revenge, a large ape, some kind of space warrior, a large headed boy in a nappy and the Last Slapfighter. Sounds like a cheese induced nightmare but it isn’t….
How I might look when the remaining 405 games have been played.....
Saturday 16th April 2011
Six more games, six more ranges of emotion. The task is proving very tough indeed if only for the failure of games to load. There are still hundreds of games to get through so let us waste no time and crack on with the next batch of games to see what joy/despair they bring.
Commodorathon – Games 7-12
Apr 15th
Up next for RetroBear are more technical problems, an ancient arcade conversion, one of the most popular board games in the world turned into a computer game and two of the most notoriously bad C64 arcade conversions. Cover your eyes and ears as this will not be pretty…..
Oh no - not WEC Le Mans AND Enduro Racer !!!
Thursday 14th April 2011
I am not looking forward to the next batch of games considering that it contains two absolute all time C64 nightmares. At least that is what legend says, after all my opinion may differ from those who have gone before me. We shall see as Day 2 of the Commodorathon commences….
The Commodorathon – First Games Reviewed…..
Apr 13th
So the moment finally arrives. RetroBear reviews the first games in the C64 collection and encounters a dodgy coin-op conversion, two crappy film tie ins (and we all know how much he loves those) and a few technical problems….
Rumble In The Jungle
Ridding the streets of scum
Jungle Fever
Tuesday April 12th 2011
The Commodorathon begins. Armed with little more than a pint of orange squash and having surveyed the task ahead this show is officially on the road. This does mean starting with a lot of film tie ins which from previous columns you will notice are not my favourite genre. However they were first out of the drawer…..
GAME 1 : RAMBO FIRST BLOOD PART II (1986, OCEAN SOFTWARE)
You are Rambo armed to the teeth with weapons and your tasks are simple – rescue the POW’s without engaging the enemy. That is easier said than done as the enemy are quite happy to engage you. Escaping the first task in a helicopter, you then return to the camp you just visited to rescue some more POW’s before then taking on an enemy helicopter. Beyond that, well it’s difficult to say because that is as far as I got.
At the time of release it went head to head with Elite’s conversion of the arcade smash Commando. The two games are very similar except with Rambo you go up the screen, then back down it and then back up it. I’ll get to Commando at some point in the future but having played it a few months ago I do prefer it, though it is far from a good game.
Call Me Ishmael – RetroBear tackles his Moby Dick
Apr 6th
One man. One machine. Over 400 games. Retrobear is on a quest to play every single Commodore 64 game in his collection, without prejudice. That is not going to be an easy task.
The only rules are as follows :
- All games in the collection must be played – no exceptions no matter how bad a game’s reputation
- A minimum of 3 games per post will be reviewed
- Where possible the games will be compared to the coin-op original
- I must keep the faith
C64 Goodness
This week got me thinking as to what to do next with the site. Whilst posting comments on various systems and bits of gaming history is all well and good, what I feel is lacking most is actually playing the damn games and reviewing them. The problem with that is where to start ? I mean it’s not as if I have a small amount of games to be going along with that would take a short period of time to cover.
Retro Reviews : The Nintendo Game Boy
Mar 28th
This time Retrobear embarks on a journey of tiny screens, funny shaped and coloured moulded plastics, sore fingers and a gem of a machine. It’s the juggernaut of the handheld world, the Nintendo Game Boy.
Truly a robot in disguise - the original Game Boy with Handy Boy attachment - providing additional light and stereo sound
Ahhhh the Nintendo Game Boy and it’s family of smaller more portable sequels that completely and utterly dominated that sector of the market. Never mind fighting the console wars on the 16 bit front, Oh no, Nintendo had a much bigger trick up it’s sleeve. The launch of the Game Boy in 1989 gave it an almost unrivalled position as King Of The Mini Micros. That’s not to say that there wasn’t any competition – there was and many firms tried their best to wrest the stranglehold that Nintendo had, but all failed.
Retro Review – An A-Z Through My Collection
Mar 23rd
Michael Jackson once sang that ABC was easy as 123. If only he knew what that meant at the time. This week, Retrobear has a walk through his collection, stopping off at letters D, F and Q as well as the other 23 in the alphabet. Sesame Street this isn’t and any comparisons to Muppets will be frowned upon….
An every day occurence for Retrobear - the endless struggle against the simple things in life
Its quite often hard to pick a favourite computer or console, let alone a favourite game from my collection of retro goodies. Quite frankly I would think about hurting the feelings of the ones I neglected and the amount of hours (or in The Running Man on the C64’s case, minutes) we had together, getting to know one another and the sheer joy that we gave to one another during those few stolen moments. OK, that is sounding a bit sick so I shall move on.
History : The 1983 Video Games Crash
Mar 13th
Seeing as the world as we know it appears to be collapsing around our ears, it seems fitting that this week RetroBear looks back to 1983 and how the home video games market literally imploded. A tale of blood, tears and unsold cartridges follows…..
The Atari Landfill in New Mexico - Resting place for the VCS versions of PacMan & E.T.
I have always found history to be a fascinating subject. Upon my travels and trawls through retro gaming, I came across the Video Games Crash of 1983. At the time I would have been 7 years old and more interested in Marmite and Lego as to why a company such as Atari entered meltdown. It’s a fascinating lesson that had repercussions for the rest of the world and was something that took a number of years to recover from.
Retrospective : Pac Man Championship Edition DX
Mar 6th
Pac Man was one of the biggest games of the 1980’s if not the whole of video gaming. Now Namco are giving the old yellow peril the dust off and a new chapter in his impressive history. So chomp down on your power pills with RetroBear as he looks at PacMan for the New Generation….
He's back. And this time he brought his missus and the nipper
Chances are if you are like me (i.e. over 30 years old) then one of the first games you would have come across in your youth would have been Pac Man. Whether it be Pac Man the arcade game or Pac Man on the Atari 2600, you would have been chomping up those power pills and eating ghosts before you knew how to count to 10. It should be said that along with Donkey Kong, Asteroids and Pong this is one of the titles that put video gaming on the map.
Past and Present
Feb 25th
In this week’s retro column, the Retro Bear goes on a rant about the fine line when deeming a game or games system to be truly retro, and shows he is quite happy playing new generation console games just as much as the old ones…
Originally Posted to GameFancier.com on October 26th 2010
Scouring the internet recently it amazes me just how much of a debate classifying retro games actually provokes. Try telling someone that the PS1 is retro and you are likely to get a volley of abuse in return. Surely a console 15 years in existence deserves to be tagged as retro ? After all it was released before the N64, yet that is deemed to be retro. I can’t really work out what the difference is and can only presume it’s because the PS1 is CD based as opposed to the trusty old cartridge. More >
Tripping Down Memory Lane Again..
Feb 25th
The Retro Bear looks back at the second stage of his retrohood, including those all important first encounters with Mario Kart and Street Fighter II without the aid of rose tinted spectacles….
Originally Posted to GameFancier.com on October 12th 2010
Lame gamesplayers need not apply
My knowledge of game consoles was rather poor when I was younger and just discovering games. Spoiled with the Amiga 500 you came to believe that anything on that machine was arcade perfect, and you sneered at the mention of anything to do with Sega and Nintendo. How wrong we all were – by the mid 90′s home computing, as it was known, was restricted to slow running PC games (and most of those games were flight simulators, ideal if you fancied a career as a pilot) and consoles such as the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo were the must haves.
My mate Jim got me interested in the console side of things. He originally had a Master System and raved about the delights of Psycho Fox and Shinobi, all titles that were not available on the home computers. I even made him an offer to buy the console and games off him for £10 a week, but he was unsurprisingly dismissive of the proposal. He then upgraded to a Mega Drive and was the only person I knew (and still know) to have a Mega CD. More >