The Pop-Culture E-Zine
What toys will you be getting this Christmas? If you want to get an idea of what holiday toys have been popular over the last 50 years, take a look at the below infographic. Do you recognise or still have any of these toys? Looks like Atari, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony made the list. I can’t believe Commodore nor Sega didn’t make the cut – must be an American list (haha!).
source: Abby Ryan Design
If you thought the demakes of modern games were cool, then perhaps you will reconsider when checking out some of these video games that just didn’t make it to our beloved consoles. Oh how I wish I could get my hands on Square Enix’s Retail Manager 13!
source: Fake Video Games
Before you tear out your hair at the current costs of the latest generation consoles, spare a moment to reflect upon the consoles that came before them. The below graphic shows the original retail price ($USD) and the price adjusted for inflation. No wonder my parents could never afford the Atari 2600! Very interesting indeed.
source: Reddit
Little did we know that Sony would change the video gaming landscape once they entered the fray with their Playstation console in late 1994. Sony smashed the opposition and had a hand in choking out their rival, Sega (Ed: I am still livid over that!). Sony cemented their place in the gaming pantheon with the world’s best selling console of all time, the Playstation 2. The gaming world has changed quite a bit over the last decade with the merge of gaming with online home entertainment and social media – thank you Sony (Ed: sarcasm?). With four video gaming systems in the bag (excluding their handhelds), I wonder what Sony will come up with next?
At the time I found Ready Player One, I was up for getting into a good, well, a great, journey book. Walking through the airport on my way home from an August conference in Vegas, this book somehow stood out as a perfect story to spend my trip being engrossed in. The description on the cover read, “Enchanting…Willy Wonka meets The Matrix”; which was exactly the perfect description to raise my interest.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is set in the year 2044 and tells the story of Wade, a young kid full of passion for the 80s, on a quest for his prize – the solution to a virtual reality game OASIS, left behind by a famous videogame designer and retro aficionado, James Halliday. Along the way were puzzles and various Easter eggs left within the game, and solving the game meant consequently inheriting Halliday’s hidden fortune.
After reading a few pages in the shop, I was hooked and had to buy the book. For me, it seemed to have just the right mix of all the best elements of honest geekiness, and lots of 80’s retro references. While the story is about a video game, the quest feels much more like an enchanting quest, closer to Journey to the Center of the Earth than say, Tron. Mix in with that feeling a ton of references to John Hughes’ movies and a sense of that “man against the machines” feel of films like Terminator 2, or The Matrix, and you’ll have a feel for what Ready Player One was like to read.
Something that really worked in the book, was the way Cline creates the feeling of a much bigger world than what is currently happening. There is a definite shared appreciation and understanding that emerges between Halliday and the young “Gunters” who are pursuing the final prize that he has hidden within his game. The book bounces between what is happening and flashbacks and quick historical explanations of why something is, and seeing the story of the quest unfold through the young eyes of Wade as he realises the full extent of evil in the corporation that pursues them so closely.
Like the author, I grew up with arcade video games and all the referenced 80s films and music, so this book really struck a chord of familiarity and excitement with me. Even without that, the story still came across with a lot of heart and feeling. It isn’t overly technical or clinical, yet still was a great follow up to prolong the rush from the conference I’d just been to.
Without giving away too much of the story, there were also some great moments of triumph tempered nicely with the warm 80s backdrop. The pace varies throughout the book which adds some great dynamics of tension, elation, as well as calm moments of reflection in-between.
I’d recommend this book to anyone who loves 80s movies ranging from the science fiction of Back to the Future series to the teenage revelations of The Breakfast Club. There is an assumption that the reader is familiar with these. The geeky elements are also there to please old gamers too. Even after my flight landed, I was still glued to this book. It literally made me grin later when I realised that the author had actually followed up with running a competition and had given away a real customised DeLorean!
Reading this book was indeed a thoroughly enjoyable journey, which left me with a sense of nerdy excitement that makes you want to go and play old arcade games and hack away on a computer to 80s music. Read it now!
Ready Player One [by: Ernest Cline] is available paperback and for the Kindle.
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diaf23
Retro, science fiction, horror movie fan and breaker of things.
Follow diaf23 (dieinafire23) on Twitter
For me, modern games lack the cache or flair of classic games from the 8 and 16-bit era. If you want that certain nostalgic value injected into modern games, then feast your eyes on the below demakes by the talented artist, Junkboy. If these games were available, I wouldn’t hesitate in forking out my hard earned dollars for them.
All images sourced from: JunkBoy
Do you remember what you were into in 1994? Perhaps it was the fashion, the music, or Jim Carrey’s ‘Stanley Ipkiss’ character in The Mask that you most fondly remember about 1994? I know, it was that run-and-gun platform video game called Earthworm Jim that you most definitely recall about 1994. Yep, that’s it.
Take a trip down memory lane with this nostalgia-filled video tribute to the year 1994! A very good year indeed.
source: Slacktory
When you get a personal invitation to attend a retro gaming event run by the Weird and Retro crew, you know you need to clear your schedule and be there.
The retro gaming event at Aftershock 2013 was part of the overall Monash University Computer Games Boot Camp (CGBC) interactive and industry engagement event. The whole event is the brainchild of Andrew Owen – a remarkable individual with creations that need to be seen to be believed – but more on that in a future article!
Aleks “Serby” Svetislav from Weird and Retro (WaR) extended the invite to us, which we were more than happy to oblige and attend. As usual, the buzz generated by an event run by WaR always brings on a rush of adrenaline. With a firm greeting handshake, Serby ushered us inside the Monash University auditorium.
My pupils dilated once I saw the TempFest2000 (all Tempest 2000 game versions!) setup in front of a large wall projection. Serby (and the WaR crew) always know how to leave a hardened retro gamer totally gobsmacked! With Tempest 2000 versions running on the Jaguar, Saturn, PC, PlayStation to the “I’ve never seen it before” Apple Mac, my mind was well and truly blown.
Even when the doors closed on the Aftershock 2013 gaming event on Saturday evening, we stayed back and chatted with Serby. I even got introduced to a new Pringles potato chip flavour which I am now frantically searching to buy from a certain American grocery store here in Melbourne.
The Aftershock 2013 event wrapped up last Sunday with a showcase of homebrew game releases and of course, some 4 player Power Stone 2 mayhem on the Sega Dreamcast! What a way to wrap-up proceedings!
As they say, all good things must come to an end. It was, as per usual, a pleasure catching up with Serby and Daz Retro. These kinds of events remind me of why I love the retro gaming scene – the passionate nostalgics just like me.
On our social media network we asked the following question: “what two classic consoles would you merge to form one classic (hybrid) system?”. The responses were many and varied – from the predictable marriage of the SNES and Mega Drive, to the totally radical sounding Dreamstar 64 (Dreamcast plus the C64).
My entry into this hybrid merge of two classic consoles would be the 72-bit JagCore Engine – Forged by the gaming gods in a super nova billions of light years away. More BITS equals more fun! Do the New Math! That would be the advertising pitch if the SNK marketing folks were involved in selling the union between these vintage systems.
Some of the highlights of the JagCore Engine would include the sliding feature: sliding the CoreGrafx component on top of the Jaguar reveals the cartridge slot to play classic games like Tempest 2000 and AVP. Once you are tired of the Jaguar titles, you just plug in a HuCard and blast away aliens in one of the many awesomely cool shoot’em ups from the PC-Engine library.
Well, you can keep on dreaming.
What two classic consoles would you merge to make your perfect gaming system?