Sigh. This is the very reason why I, a video game fanatic, hate living in a little tropical country. There are just some video games that I’m bound to miss. Take Choplifter III, for instance. Although the game was released for the Game Boy, the Game Gear, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s, and I owned two of the aforementioned video game consoles, I still missed it.
Fortunately, there are video clips of Choplifter III to make up for the loss. Check one of them out here:

It’s a little more complicated than the original Choplifter but is …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

In my last post I talked about Karateka, giving a little background about the video game (for those who don’t know about it) and lavishing my praise on, in my humble opinion, one of the best fighting games.
I mentioned that Karateka had all the elements of a good video game, including humor. Well, if you consider the hero getting creamed by the supposedly helpless princess funny, that is.
In my search for a video clip of this little bit, where the hero approaches Princess Mariko in a fighting stance and gets a good kick in the face, I’ve found a different …read more

Sigh. Where do I begin? Karateka is more than just a 1984 computer game Jordan Mechner, the brains behind hit adventure game Prince of Persia. It’s also more than just one of the best fighting/adventure games ever produced. Gawd, it’s better than that! It’s one of the few video games that, in my humble opinion, epitomizes what video games should be—entertaining, fun, visually appealing, and challenging.
Little did Mechner know, back when he designed the game while attending Yale University, that Karateka would capture the hearts, minds, and imagination of an entire generation of video game players. I should know, I …read more

A few posts back, I answered fellow b5media video games channel blogger Aiza Bautista’s meme on what games I currently play. My answer included “a plethora of old video games, including Super Mario Brothers, Adventure Island, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, and Contra. Well, I’ve talked about the first two and the last game on the list a few times already, but haven’t gotten down to saying anything about dear ol’ Carmen. So here I go …
First off, it’s important to remind you, dear readers, who Carmen San Diego is. This is especially important for those who …read more

My sword and armor may be rusty and crumbling with age, but my wits are still intact.
Playing Ancient Art of War, a battlefield simulator developed by Evryware and published by (gasp!) Broderbund in 1984, again gave me a refreshing break from the weekly wars I wage in the arenas of my current genre—MMORPGs. Come to think of it, this granddaddy of real-time strategy games has also lent me new insights on battlefield strategy that most (game) strategists call Rock-Paper-Scissors Unit Balance, with one unit trumping another.
In the case of Ancient Art of War, it’s much simpler than today’s generation of …read more