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

I just got off the sofa after almost 24 hours of watching the Star Wars series, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi. With my back hurting from slouching and lying down, I still found the strength to sit down in front of the computer to check if there was some way I could play one of the most memorable Star Wars games, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back from Parker Brothers. Yes, Parker Bros.—the same Parker Bros. that gave us cool board games like Monopoly.
I played Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600. I …read more

Who doesn’t?
Gawd, I remember playing this arcade game everyday, from sun up till sun down, to the dismay of my parents and their wallets. Unlike in other countries where the price of playing arcade games is nearly negligible, this tropical Southeast Asian country isn’t as fortunate. Let’s just say that playing the way I did cost a small fortune.
I still count myself lucky, though. I had two arcade machines at home: Pac-Man and Galaxia, two of the best games ever to grace the halls of arcades all over the world.
Still, it’s not bad to fantasize about having an Afterburner arcade …read more

Flight simulators fall under the category of video games I want to play but can’t.
I remember the first flight simulator I played—or at least TRIED to play. It was the first generation flight simulator developed by subLOGIC that had black and white wireframe graphics (amber on my Apple IIc monitor) and featured, according to wikipedia, a very limited scenery consisting of 36 tiles in a six by six pattern.
The most frustrating part about playing this version of the flight simulator on the Apple II was the lack of joystick controls—it was all keyboard, baby. Not that I would have played …read more