Here’s a video of Scramble that YouTube user tr0d took from the series How to Beat Home Video Games:

Okay. Now that the mix up has been cleared, I’d like to thank Chris Herr for the heads up. Here’s a video of the real Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the Vectrex:

Post from: EveryJoe

Re:Retro viewer: That’s not Star Trek!

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 Consumer Electric and eventually by Milton Bradley Company in the early 1980s. The Vectrex was markedly different from its contemporaries in the sense that you didn’t need to plug it into a television to play games as it had its own monitor.

Going back to the topic at hand, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was one of the first games created for the Vectrex Arcade System. The object of the game is simple: Fly the USS Enterprise through nine space sectors and destroy everything the ship encounters with phasers and photon torpedoes.

It’s a great game, despite its simplicity. But if you have a Vectrex, you might want to check it out. Oh, and to answer your unanswered question, yes, that’s the Enterprise. It looks like a Klingon Bird of Prey, though, or a Romulan Warbird.

Post from: EveryJoe

Woot! Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the Vectrex

\r\n\r\nPretty little Lego spaceship, eh? It\’s actually a model of Samus Aran\’s gunship in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and is part of a collection of images on Flickr known as Metroid Quarantine. The collection of Metroid-related pictures is but the tip of the iceberg. The group also has a website known as (what else!) Metroid Quarantine, The Metroid Blog.\r\n\r\nGo check out Metroid Quarantine\’s other photos.\r\n\r\nOh, and if you\’re wondering what Samus Aran\’s gunship looks like in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, here\’s a reproduction:\r\n\r\n

\r\n\r\nFirst image courtesy of Metroid Quarantine and paulishdog. Second image is from the Metroid wiki. Samus Aran and Metroid copyright belong to Nintendo.

Post from: EveryJoe

Metroid Quarantine: Samus Aran and her universe in Lego

As the player explores more of the area, they will encounter power-ups that can be used to pass the previously encountered obstacles, allowing them to explore further, as well as backtrack, in order to find more power-ups and advance. While players are tempted to complete the game quickly, as there are multiple endings determined by the length of completion time, the concept of gradually increasing abilities and therefore acquiring access to previously inaccessible areas, encourages the player to go back and obtain all available items and power-ups.

\r\n\r\nAnother reason for my desire to play Metroid on the Nintendo Family Computer Disk System is the three-slot save system (as opposed to the Nintendo Entertainment System\’s version that allows players to enter passwords to basically \”save\” their progress and advance in the game).\r\n\r\nMore Famicom Disk System and Metroid in later postings. Ciao for now.\r\n\r\nImage painstakingly (it\’s freakin\’ 87.7 MB!) downloaded from Temple of Doom, a fellow retro video games fanatic. Copyrights to Nintendo Family Computer Disk System and Metroid are owned by Nintendo.

Post from: EveryJoe

I probably would’ve played Metroid

Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy is a real-time tactics video game developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment and published by Microprose on October 28, 2000. The game is based on both the 1997 movie Starship Troopers and the book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

It’s so short! Am I the only video game player who played the game?

The graphics and sound aren’t shabby as this video shows:

The gameplay is great, that I can attest to. Me and the guys (read: my college buddies) had a blast playing the game 9 to 5 (yes, we had day jobs, but Starship Troopers took precedence) back in the early 2000s.

Post from: EveryJoe

Starship Troopers: Just a footnote in video game history?

Yeah, those words I scrawled on the image above are exactly what I told my mother, oh, about 25 or so years ago, the age of video gaming discovery when Atari, Coleco and Nintendo dominated the market with their (then) outlandish-looking contraptions. I wasn’t pining for any of those, though. I was after a cool watch.

In this corner of the world, however, we also discovered, to our delight, that we can bring our video games to school with us, and not just leave them at home to gather dust. Well, there was, of course, the Game & Watch, but Nintendo didn’t really take into the account the plight of schoolchildren and their worst fear: confiscation.

Uh-huh, I lost about three Game & Watches—Octopus, Fire, and Helmet—to the grubby fingers of male primary school teachers. Curse them!

Fortunately for us, Casio stepped into the void and introduced the Casio Game-10, shown above in its most basic, uhmm, look. The game that came with it was pretty simple. You controlled a spaceship and you needed to shoot down enemy ships on the other side of the small LCD. It’s so simple that you can only move your ship left or right.

But the Casio Game-10 gave us, the schoolchildren of the 80s, exactly what we needed: A fix for our growing video game addiction and the perfect disguise that shields it from the prying eyes of school teachers.

Post from: EveryJoe

Blast from the past: Casio’s first game watch

Here’s a brief background for those standing on the far side of the moon:

Moon Patrol is a classic arcade game by Irem that was first released in 1982. It was licensed to Williams for United States of America distribution.

In the game, the player controls a moon buggy, viewing it from the side, that travels over the moon’s surface. While driving it, obstacles such as craters and mines must be avoided. The buggy is also attacked by UFOs from above and tanks on the ground. Moon Patrol was one of the earliest linear side-scrolling shoot ‘em ups and the first arcade game to feature parallax scrolling.

Anyway, in the game, you take the role of a police officer from the city of Luna, mankind’s first metropolis on the moon. As you may have already surmised, you drive around Sector Nine, home of the “toughest thugs in the galaxy,” with the objective of jumping over craters and getting rid of enemies while you’re at it to earn points.

Needless to say, like my Frogger and Space Invaders run, I sucked at Moon Patrol, failing even to hurdle the first stage. A few more days of playing Moon Patrol might give me a little edge, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.

Aside from the arcade version (and the current Flash animation version), Moon Patrol has been ported to a number of consoles, including the Apple II (on which I played Moon Patrol for hours on end), the Atari 800, 2600 and 5200, the Commodore 64, and the Nintendo Game Boy Color.

Post from: EveryJoe

Moon Patrol: Crater upon crater of hopping fun

What a surprise! I’ve just discovered that I suck at Space Invaders, a couple of days after learning that Frogger isn’t as easy to play now as it was back in the 80s.

It’s a surprise because I play Chicken Invaders, an arcade-like PC game that parodies Space Invaders. Needless to say, this spinoff is just as successful as the game it mimics. Hooray for Interaction Studios.

Going back to our topic, I played Space Invaders not on the Atari 2600 (on which I spent countless hours kicking alien butt back in the 80s), but on a Flash animation version made by the same guys that developed the Frogger version I mentioned in my previous post.

The Flash version isn’t as hard as the original. This is probably because in the Flash PC version, you get more mobility for your spacecraft courtesy of the keyboard compared to the 80s arcade and Atari versions of the game which made use of the joystick.

What makes the original version more palatable than this copycat is the sound. In this Flash version, you won’t hear the distinct chug-chug-chug sound that gets faster as the aliens move a notch down, to a point that it’s already unnerving.

Here, give the Flash animation version a try.

Post from: EveryJoe

Haha! I suck at Space Invaders, too

As an example, I give you Retro Games by Sander van Kessel. Enjoy!

Post from: EveryJoe

Old video games in clay animation

I’ve only played Star Fox a few times in the past, but if I had a guide like this back then, I’d probably finish it, too … in a few days … or maybe a few months. Haha!

Post from: EveryJoe

Speed Run: Star Fox in less than 20 minutes