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Retro: Atari Jaguar console
Wed, 05 Nov 2008

Aside: My baby girl recently started speaking in 2-3 word sentences; last night when I tucked her into bed, she said "love you daddy." Another life achievement down, and well.. it just doesn't get much better than that one :)

Atari was a great company in so many ways, but I'll not go into that here. Their last real console release was the Atari Jaguar around the same time as the Sony Playstation (original), and we all know who won that race. Truly it was no competition.. the Jag was a cool platform, but it really could not compete with these more 3D oriented machines. And a lot of its software was _terrible_ (and that is being kind.) Still, it maintained Atari's playful feal with some games being very original, and always feeling like the designer was not so much a corporation but a drinking buddy. To me as a retro collector, an Atar fan, retrogamer and coder .. the Jag was always a like-hate relationship.

I mean, it had Dragon's Lair on CD. *heart*

But it also had Kasumi Ninja, which is not even as good as Custer's Revenge if you catch my drift.

Anyway, through my various moves I've dragged my poor Jaguar around, but today I've sold it off. A fine seeming lad picked it up and sounds like he'll have some fun with it, for which I'm glad. I mean -- we retro guys go through a phase of wanting to collect it all but in practice we just rarely have the space and eventually have to specialize. But more .. I like to get things into a good home, and if I'm not going to fire up this classy little beast, ever, might as well move it on along to someone who will. A museum piece kept in the dark is worthless.. a museum piece on display is worthy. So I'll miss this little machine, this indestructable black box (none of this red-ring BS in old hardware!) .. but on the other hand, my home will be forever clean of Kasumi Ninja.

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Retro: EAMON, one of the earliest CRPGs
Fri, 11 Jul 2008

The term CRPG refers to Computer-based Role Playing Games, such as the current Oblivion, but tracing back through Eye of the Beholder and back to Temple of Apshai and so on. The earliest examples were more text based due to their mainframe origins, and later the slow transmission rates of modems. Enter EAMON .. I've not done any history lookups here but its going back to the Apple 2 days, and I experienced it on the almighty Atari ST .. so back around 1987 or so I'd guess I fiddled with the system.

As fans of "Choose Your Own Adventure" style books (Steve Jackson ftw!), my brother was an aspiring adventure author at the time, putting together little adventure novellas on pads of paper. (You number each page, and at the end of a given page you have options that give you page numbers to turn to should you take that action. The pages are randomized to make it hard to guess where a given series of actoins may lead. Ultimately there are numerous plot endings, but usually more than a few times your character gets killed along the way, forcing you to re-start. Fun stuff.) I remember going through the Public Domain archives of local groups, and through BBS file listings all over the province (racking up huge bills all the time through long distnace charges), trying to find (well, to be honest, pirated games) some adventure authoring tools for him. There were a few systems, including EAMON, but they were just too complicated for us. Still, I remember playing a few EAMON games.

Well, t'other day I stumbled across EAMON Deluxe, a port of the EAMON system to DOS a decade back. The beauty of this is that you can still run it today on your modern PC (and hopefully someday he'll release the source so that it can be brought to Mac, Linux and so forth.) You could always fire up an emulator (Atari ST, Apple 2, C64 and so on) and play the games there but this makes things pretty easy.

Further, the lad has pulled all the many EAMON adventures together into a big archive, including user supplied reviews of the adventures. Now, I should note that EAMON was not a game.. it was a system, supplied with a few simple text adventure games. But the author supplied tools to make your own adventures and many did.. so there are literally hundreds of additional goofy little text adventures. (These are of different style than the pure "IF" Interactive Fiction games I've gone on about before; those are pure adventure games with no dice rolling, no skills per se and include such classics as Zork or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. EAMON is one of the first CRPGs, in that you play a character who increases in powers and gold and gear and so on over playtime, and also is a less lofty academic pursuit; the EAMON gamelets are not novellas in adventure form, but early examples of kill-and-loot games.) Fun for short bursts, which hits a certain spot in my heart.

One facet of the system I admire is this .. you have a character and you pick an adventure to play through; the character persists between adventure gamelets.. so while you might be in a fantasy gamelet (the majority) one time, the next could be sci-fi. The EAMON system defines the system, and suggests certain damage levels.. so while a new player might have 20 hit points before dieing, a slight damage hit is 1 damage, while a heavier stroke is 2 or 3 points, say. So you take your character including gear game to game and grow him over the lifespan, regardless of the actual adventure the character is in.

That is pretty ahead of its time.

Anyway, if you want to try a quck text hack and slash game, that plays and feels like a light text adventure, and definately hardcore retro.. EAMON could be just the thing.

I may just have to look around for some source.. porting this to a handheld could rock my socks :)

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Retro: Best of Sega Genesis (Megadrive)
Fri, 28 Oct 2005

Trucking along with the best of's I here give you the notables for the Genesis/Megadrive, from this posting here on GP32x.

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Retro: Best of the Miggy
Fri, 28 Oct 2005

As with some of my other 'best of' lists (see here) I made a post on one of my favourite little message boards to find out what folks thought were the best of breed for a given platform - in this case, the Commodore Amiga. Certainly this isn't as hardcore as making a voting website with account registration and blah blah blah, but its a good way to get a list of games recommended when you're a newbie to a given platform. So without further ado, heres a tally of the responses - the leading number is the number of times mentioned in the thread for the given game. I hope you find the list useful!

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Review: The Stelladapter - A Giant Red Phallus
Wed, 12 Oct 2005

If theres any doubt about my being a nerd with a capitol En, pull up a chair while I out myself most ashamedly.

Likely everyone knows that I'm a classic arcade machine collector (R-Type and Pacman are part of everyones gameroom right?), which translates into my ranting about "the real thing is the only way to go" and that emulation "just doesn't get it right" (which is funny, my being an emulator author and all.) Of course, I don't always have time to swap game PCB's (pc-boards) in a machine just to fire up a game - though I do like to say "big toys for big boys" and pull out really big cartridges. Next in line is to crack out a real retro console such as an Atari 2600 or Super Nintendo (or my beloved STacy) -- but they're usually stored away somewhere in a box. (Well, I do fire up Empire - Battle of the Century once in awhile on the STacy) So whats a knurd to do when hes too lazy to head down into the basement or dig around in dusty packing boxes to find his Vic-20? Sure, fire up an emulator on your local PC or laptop of course. But how do you simulate the 'real machine feal' with an emulator? How do you get as close to the metal without digging out a console that weighs more than its age?

Stelladapter - plug your 15 year old joystick into your PC, thats how. Yeah baby. Well, at least I'm not running a D&D campaign right now ;) I'm looking at you n008.

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Retro: Best Movie/Comic/Hero Games
Fri, 07 Oct 2005

For more background on what I'm about here, see my previous article. Essentially, I'm asking people for their 'best of' lists for platforms and genres so we all know what to do when we nab a new emulator or machine from the flee-market. In background I'm also working on my 'favourite games played [by me]' article, which takes awhile to remember things for :) Anyway, to the task at hand!

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Retro: Best or Notable Commodore 64 Games?
Fri, 07 Oct 2005

Previously, I wrote about my favourite or notable Atari ST games and the posting turned out to be fairly popular -- a good way to jog the memory or find games if you never actually had an ST (or wide exposure to its game library.) With emulation being so popular, retro-gamers everywhere have all the past platforms available.. but no idea how to operate them, or what to look for if they do. (It can be funny sometimes when some 14 year old writes to ask some obscure GEM question.. how to rename a file in the mouse based GUI, etc. Weird stuff to get in your inbox :) Anyway, we all had different machines as kids (ahh, back in the day when there were different machines!) so we're all needing to find out what to fiddle with. My family went from Atari 2600 to Commodore Vic-20 to an Atari 520ST and I proceeded to skip over the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis platforms until much later, so my gaming experiences are very different to the 'average gamer'.

Not that I have time to actually play games of course, but you all know that I love making lists of every possible thing :) That said, I've started a few threads on one of my favourite message boards to ask what peoples favourites were and to help build a list of things I'd like to try when I do get time, and to amuse everyone of course! Now, I am hoping to receive an old-school joystick-to-USB adapter soon, so time will have to be made..

A quick summary follows.

Oh, I just found a site that does this, but doesn't cover so many platforms. While it does cover SNES, it doesn't go into Vectrex or Amiga for instance, so its not very comprehensive.. but its a good start, and I'm sure other sites abound.

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Retro: My list of Atari ST 'canon' - games you simply must try before you can call yourself a nerd.
Fri, 07 Oct 2005

This is a non-exhaustive list of games I played or found otherwise interesting or significant on the almighty Atari ST. Of course I physically played hundreds more, but these I found interesting or amusing enough to comment about and thought they might help give focus to folks who never had an ST or the resources (*cough* BBS piracy *cough*) to see them all personally. This is of course just my list, and so won't include a lot of great titles other people enjoyed.. but what can you do? :)

This took *way* too much time to put together :)

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