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Videogaming Illustrated (Issue 4, Feb 1983)

Sunday, April 8th, 2018

At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:

It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).

This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!

That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:

(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)

And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:

The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!

There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.

What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:

That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…

The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:

Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)

Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:

It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!

Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?

Posted in Games, Movies, Retro, Tech, Time | 1 Comment »

Buried Treasure

Thursday, March 22nd, 2018

Last year I went on an expedition into a tomb that had been sealed for decades: a crawlspace upstairs in J & J’s house. I found some startling things in there, mostly in great condition, and one of the most remarkable was this:

The Game Of Time And Space eh? This beauty was published way back in 1980, and is a board game made for and by ‘anoraks’. Back then I would have loved it!

Here’s what it says on the back:

Note that the complexity claims to tend low…

The game includes a big board, some boring plastic pieces (instead of cardboard versions of The Doctors?) and loads of cardboard tokens.

Here’s the board:

And a closeup of a very fanciful depiction of Gallifrey:

And here’s a selection of tokens:

Gameplay is a little like Dungeon and consists of the player moving around the board trying to find several treasures which are initially face-down and often protected by monsters. A selection of items can assist with movement, combat etc. and once the player has the pieces he is after he returns to Gallifrey to win.

A read of the rules seems to contradict the summary on the back: this game seems overly complex and tedious to play. I couldn’t convince KLS to have a go, but I imagine the item wrangling and large variety of rules does not a quick-and-easy game make.

Look at this quick reference rulebook for instance, which every player gets a copy of for reference:

As I said, by nerds for nerds 🙂

It’s also got very little to do with Doctor Who, in the sense you could easily change some names and art and the game would be the same. Shouldn’t time travel or regeneration been themes?

One day I’ll play this, and possible I’ll update when I do. But for me it’s an ancient and treasured part ‘of the collection’!

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Time | 1 Comment »

The Tiny Arcade

Sunday, February 11th, 2018

Bernard gave me this for Christmas:

It’s a tiny arcade machine. Better yet it’s a kit that needs to be assembled! Here’s what it looked like out of the box:

The critical components are indeed tiny, and fit easily into the palm of my hand:

Here’s the screen being tested:

Assembly of the case was tricky but not difficult, and I actually had more trouble affixing the super-adhesive ‘cabinet art’. Once finished, it’s tiny (about 8 cm tall) and very impressive:

The back is open to access the electronics, which include on/off switches, a plug to charge the battery and a micro SD card port:

The unit runs off an arduino-derived chip (I believe), and supports a tiny OLED screen that is very sharp and bright. There’s several basic games included but to be honest most are little more than tech demos. Amongst clones of Flappy Bird, Tetris, Space Invaders and even R-Type there is however a charming little roguelike by a Japanese dev:

Bernard has one too and wanted to compete on some games. Like a cur he hasn’t submitted scores yet so here’s some for him to aim at:

(To be honest these were just my scores for one game of each)

Anyway I’m very impressed with this thing. It’s completely open so I could in theory write my own game for it. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Posted in Crafts, Games, Models, Otaku, Retro, Tech | 1 Comment »

Space Crusher

Sunday, November 26th, 2017

I picked this up at a local con the other weekend:

It’s a Tandy/Radio Shack LCD game from 1985! “Penetrate Space City” the blurb says, fighting enemy spaceships and meteorites whilst enjoying ‘quick-action fire’ and ‘battle sound effects’.

Here’s the contents:

As you can see it’s in remarkable good condition as well as being complete in box. You’ll also note it has four-way control. What sort of game is this…?

A quick look at the manual revealed all:

It’s a Scramble clone! And – for an LCD game – a fairly sophisticated one at that.

And yes, it still works perfectly:

The field scrolls to the left continuously and you have full control over your ship. The controls themselves are weird (Nintendo had debuted the d-pad by now so they should have ripped that off) but they are responsive and the game speed isn’t too fast.

Strangely everything is worth 2 points, and the game ends when you score 2000 (or run out of lives of course). I haven’t played it enough to see how long that would take, but my guess is easily more than one full loop.

As a kid I would have loved this game. As an adult I love the purity of it. A real gem of a find at a local con 🙂

Posted in Games, Otaku, Retro, Tech, Toys | Comments Closed

My Collection: Genesis

Sunday, September 17th, 2017

Sega released the Sega Megadrive in Japan in late 1988. About a year later it was released in the US as the Sega Genesis. I can recall when the PAL version came out in Australia back in 1990, but was still so entrenched in arcade gaming that I didn’t think much of it.

When I came to America KLS owned one, and that system is still in our possession today. Usually when I do these posts I list all sorts of details about when it was purchased and how much I paid for games and that sort of stuff, but for mysterious reasons virtually all my Genesis games were omitted from my game collection database, so I can only say the bulk of my Genesis games were purchased ‘before 1996’.

The system itself is very large and very black! Ours is a first-generation, which means only RF outputs on the back and quaint additions such as a headphone jack and volume switch right on the console! I don’t have a CRT TV anymore, so I have to connect the RF signal to an LED flatscreen which isn’t ideal… but at least I get a picture! You can see me playing Wonder Boy above, which is a fantastic game. I only wish it were arcade perfect like the Master System version 🙂

The Genesis for me always felt like a strange bridge between Japanese and European gaming. Take Alisia Dragoon for instance, which is a Japanese action-platformer featuring a female protagonist that owes no small debt to Turrican. The box art for the US version is a classic in my opinion, and while (slavishly?) adherent to the game itself suggests a lot more than what’s in the box. The game itself, like all action games of that era, is brutally difficult. I thought I did pretty well in stage one but the game said I was only a ‘worm master’:

The vast majority of my collection are RPGs. KLS and I purchased some of these in 1993, but I suspect others made their way into my collection as I was reviewing for Working Designs. A few have stickers on them that show I bought them used, but many games are near mint condition, obviously bought new. I recall owning (and playing) many more games than what’s in my collection right now, which means some were traded in back during that regretful period in the late 1990s. I wonder how many and which ones?

Here’s my current collection in entirety:

There’s some giants in that box, including Phantasy Star II, III and IV, the first three Shining games, Landstalker, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Shadowrun and Beyond Oasis. All of these games have aged well and are extremely playable today.

Amongst the very few items related to the Genesis that were in my database are the date of the last game purchased (Shadowrun for $20 in 1996) and the purchase of this item in early 1996 for $149:

That’s a Nomad, or portable Genesis. It was a spectacular failure for many reasons including high cost and dreadful battery life (about 2 hours on 6 AAs). Mine is in great condition as you can see, and I could easily sell it for more than I paid for it 21 years ago 🙂

Here’s a closer look at the blue boxes on the bottom of the collection photo above:

That’s my Sega-CD game collection. The Sega-CD was an add-on for the Genesis that was released in 1992. We have the second version released in 1993 that changed the form factor to sit alongside the main console. You can see it on the right in the photo at top. It was an exciting addition way back then since games on CD were very new and promised a lot. Sadly they rarely delivered, and the CD add-on was never much of a success. Mine still works, and I played a few of the games last weekend. I was pleasantly surprised by the fast access speed and short load times, especially compared to what I remember.

Some of my Sega-CD games incidentally are quite valuable. I should get around to the post about my priciest games one of these days…

I was recently watching a Youtube video and they commented the release of the above game, Fatal Labyrinth, was ‘immoral’ since the game itself is so unplayably bad. This gave me an idea, and I am seriously debating visiting this single roguelike game in detail in a future post. Interested?

The Genesis is a classic and important system in the history of home consoles, and was home to a great many absolutely fantastic games. Sadly I own few of them and because of my stubbornness about emulation will forever be deprived from playing them because I’ll not pay $750+ in any hurry for Slap Fight on the Megadrive! But I’m glad I have what I do, and will continue to keep the old Genesis safely tucked away until next time I set it up for some retro fun.

Posted in Games, Otaku, Retro, Time | Comments Closed

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