Being a Trekkie, or Trekker, as my good friend Filemon is wont to point out, anything that has something to do with Star Trek piques my interest. Now couple this interest with video games, then you’ve got an explosive combination.
Speaking of explosive, this video I found on YouTube totally blew me away:

As you may have already surmised from the title, the video features the classic game Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the Vectrex.
The Vectrex? Oh, yeah, you might not have heard of this 80s console. It’s an 8-bit video game console developed by Smith Engineering and distributed by General …read more

Dangnabit! Someone beat me to writing a good book about retro gaming! Haha!\\\\r\\\\n\\\\r\\\\nSeriously now. Yes, someone has beaten me to the punch, but at least we get quality retro gaming tips and tricks from Chris Kohler, who has written a gamut of video gaming articles for a number of conventional and unconventional media like Wired, Official Playstation Magazine, 1up.com, IGN, Gamespy, Nintendo Official Magazine UK, and Electronic Gaming Monthly.\\\\r\\\\n\\\\r\\\\nHere\\\\\\\’s a little bit more about the author of Retro Gaming Hacks:\\\\r\\\\n\\\\r\\\\n
Kohler\\\\\\\’s first book, Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life, was published by BradyGAMES in September 2004. …read more

\r\n\r\nSo who hasn\’t heard of The Three Stooges? You know, Larry, Curly and Moe? No? Doesn\’t ring a bell? Well, if you have no inkling who the three are, then you probably don\’t belong to the generation that watched the original black and white series or their voluminous re-runs.\r\n\r\nI watched a few seasons on the boobtube when I was younger, even the ones with Shemp in it. Yep, before Curly, Shemp was the one taking the beating from Moe, and sometimes Larry. Hmmm, before I go on to the gist of the story, let\’s take a closer look at The …read more

I guess you already know how I feel about Swashbuckler, a 1982 computer game for the Apple II created by Paul Stephenson and published by Datamost. Sorry, Paul, it’s just so … boring.
Oh, I used to enjoy playing it, back when I was, what, 10 years old. I thought I could rekindle the flame by watching a video of Swashbuckler, but no go, unlike other Apple II video games.
The problem: Swashbuckler grew old pretty quickly. Check out this entry in Wikipedia about the reception of the game (emphasis in bold face mine):
Computer Gaming World gave Swashbuckler a glowing review, only …read more

I’ve been writing mini-reviews of Apple II games this past week for posting on Re:Retro in the near future. The progress has been slow, and the reason for this is nostalgia. I just can’t stop myself from reminiscing, and I’m starting to crave … a thirst to play the video games I had played on the Apple IIc in the early 80s.
What’s funny about the whole situation is I honestly can’t remember how many video games I played on the Apple II, or what their titles are, for that matter. So every time I come across an Apple II video …read more

It’s funny how memory works. There are some information stored in the human brain that you can access instantaneously, while others are so deep in your subconscious that it needs a trigger—usually through one’s senses—to get them out. This is exactly what happened to me earlier today when I came across this picture:

For those who are totally unfamiliar with what seems like a Rorschach inkblot test, it is a screenshot from Choplifter, a 1982 Apple II game developed by Dan Gorlin and published by Broderbund. Yes, this image triggered a memory, of playing Choplifter almost 16 hours a day on …read more

If the little stick guy from Lode Runner only had a face to go with the way he/she/it moved across levels and mowed down bad guys, his/her/its mug would probably be plastered on every video game magazine available at least once a year.
What? You’ve never heard of Lode Runner? Well, that’s kinda impossible, but for those who aren’t kidding when they say that they’ve never even seen stick man running around brick platforms, climbing stairs and collecting mounds of what seems to be gold dust, here’s a little backgrounder for you:
Lode Runner is a 1983 platform game, first published by …read more

Whenever you activate the game Snake on your shiny Nokia phone, have you ever paused to think who programmed the game or if the mobile phone is the game’s first platform? No, I didn’t think so.
Well, I did. Not because of curiosity, unfortunately. It’s because I programmed a game just like Snake in Basic language back in the early 80s on my rusty Apple IIc.
“Wait! You mean to say you’re the creator of the first Snake game?”
Duh, no. What I mean is, “I was around 10 years old at that time, and I had been studying how to write different …read more

I’ve been racking my brains for the past seven months, trying to figure out the name of my first handheld video game. Well, I’ve found it, and needless to say, it has gotten me excited enough to yell “putik,” a slang of the derogatory term “puta,” which means, among other things, a four-letter word I’d rather not write down here.
It’s the Tomy Digital Derby, and I’ve scoured the web for pictures and videos of this jellopy right after rediscovering its name. I have, however, settled on posting a video of how the Tomy Digital Derby works:

The reason why I put …read more

Remember Night Driver and all those nights you spent dropping quarters in the arcade machine while chomping down on slices upon slices of pizza? Well, I do, and about a dozen or more other people, remember playing video games not in the comfort of our own homes, but at the nearest Shakey’s Pizza Parlor.
I also remember that the different Shakey’s branches in this little tropical country I call home had different video arcade machines, ergo, different video games.
The most memorable, though, is Night Driver, a 1976 arcade game developed and released by Atari Inc. Its claim to fame is that …read more