Video and Retro Games
A fun exploration of video games.
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Friday, October 9, 2026
ColecoVision | The 25 greatest games
Turbo is a questionable #1 choice. Compared to other driving games, it has a fixed perspective. I'd rather being playing Pole Position, which gives a better 3D effect. I am such a Donkey Kong fan, it would have been one of my top choices. The Q-Bert game shown appears to be Q-Bert Qubes.
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Konami Code on an Arcade1Up Ms. Pac-Man?
3 minutes ago (edited)
Ms. Pac-Man started as a third-party hack of the original Pac-Man called Crazy Otto. As a result, the original Pac-Man maze exists inside the original Ms. Pac-Man, but there is no apparent way to play it.
In the early 1980s, I started a game of Ms. Pac-Man and somehow got the Pac-Man maze for the first screen. This bug was likely very rare because I have never heard of anyone else seeing it. Maybe the glitch was unique to the machine I was playing. In very rare cases, a RAM bit will get flipped or misread, resulting in a bug.
(Chat GPT found a story of one other person encountering the same bug of getting the Pac-Man maze on Ms. Pac-Man.)
The Anniversary Arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga had a secret code to play the original Pac-Man game. There was even a bug where you could play the attract mode of Galaga for a while.
Saturday, October 3, 2026
Friday, October 2, 2026
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO VIDEO GAMES?!
1 minute ago
In the 1990s, game consoles were distinct entities from PCs. Now game consoles are close enough to PCs that it makes more sense to buy a PC. To be viable, the consoles have to offer some kind of value, like the XBox Series X did for $500, which was considerably cheaper than the equivalent gaming PC. The low price was achieved through custom hardware and mass production.
Monday, September 28, 2026
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Monday, September 7, 2026
The $10,000 Trinitron
No matter how high-tech the TV claimed to be, it still had the same fundamental limitations.
The computers that existed in the early 1980s generally output a 240p signal, although a few machines had options for higher resolutions.
In the 1990s, a friend of my mother's was showing off her 33-inch CRT TV. She asked me how much I thought it cost. I correctly guessed $3,000. Soon, however, that expensive TV would become obsolete as HDTV came along. Some of the final CRT televisions could accept an HD signal before flat-screen TVs became common.
In my final years in Utah, I saw someone giving away a 33-inch TV on the curb. I thought maybe I could use it as a video game display. It was so heavy—probably around 150 pounds—that a friend and I nearly killed ourselves trying to lift it together. I eventually had to give it away before I moved.
Shortly after arriving in Indiana, I saw another 33-inch TV sitting on a curb. I convinced the owner to haul it to my house. Again, I wanted to use it as a video game display, but I eventually gave it away. A young couple wanted it for their son's video game system.
Friday, September 4, 2026
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
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@john2001plus 42 minutes ago (edited) 1:37 Thy Flesh Consumed is my favorite Doom Episode. It has some of the best maps, although the dif...
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Now that I have mostly finished the original Doom , I am playing Doom II on the easy level. With Doom, it is a good idea to play all the ...
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@john2001plus 0 seconds ago I've now played this map on all 4 difficulties. This time I started with much less ammo, because running lo...