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

Raster Blaster, now there’s a great pinball simulation game. Come to think of it, it’s probably the first home computer pinball simulation game. And I had it on my archaic Apple IIc, and played with it from dusk till dawn—at least, during long summer vacations.
Of course, compared with today’s generation of pinball simulation games, Raster Blaster looks crude, with only a handful of bumpers, slingshots, and targets. We have to hand it to Bill Budge, writer and designer of Raster Blaster and its successors, though. He, and not Raster Blaster, paved the way for more elaborate and accurate pinball simulations.
So …read more

What do you do if you only have a 386 PC on your desk and need to sate this craving for world domination? Why, play Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, of course. And this is exactly what I did back in 1994, when I had been stuck for hours on end manning the editorial offices of the college paper.
Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, or simply Conflict, is a turn-based government simulation game designed by David Eastman and published by Virgin Interactive in 1990. Although available for DOS, Atari ST, and Amiga, I played it only on DOS on (yes, you …read more

I’ve been asking this question since the early 2000s, and I don’t know for the life of me why I didn’t bother looking the answer up with Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to ruin the mystery. It turns out, however, that the disappearance of Strategic Simulations Inc. is not a mystery after all.
Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of …read more

Space, the final frontier … or so James T. Kirk thought. It turns out the final frontier is in our computers, this vast world called the Internet and the myriad virtual worlds occupying it (read: MMORPGs). Ah, but that’s fodder for another blog. On Re:Retro, we want this question answered: What happened to the space fighter genre? I’m not the only one asking this question. There’s also Len, an avid reader of this space.
I remember a time when we never ran out of video games set in space—from simulations to epic dogfights, from futuristic mechanized combat to daring rescues of …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