The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

That's right I'm going to be talking about the Atari 5200 again! If you read my Retro Gaming New Years Resolutions (http://retrovideogamingblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/retro-gaming-new-years-resolutions.html) you probably know that one of my resolutions for this year was to get both an Atari 5200 and 7800 added to my collection. Thankfully some excellent finds on eBay have allowed me to get both systems recently, and my beloved 5200 was the first to arrive at my house.  My personal history with the Atari 5200 dates back to 1987 when I came home from school one day and my Mom presented me an Atari 5200 and some games that she had gotten from an ad in the paper. I was never a huge video game nut as a kid but I did enjoy getting these systems when they bought them for me. My father hooked it up to the back of our early 70's Zenith wood console TV, and I was off an running usually playing it for an hour or so after school everyday. I remember some of the games she bought home wi...

Happy Valentines Day!!! Is your day Imagical yet! Sorry for the pun but I wanted to take some time to talk about video game maker Imagic, and my love for their games.  Now if your not familiar with Imagic don't worry, unless your an Atari 2600 player that is, in which case shame on you for not knowing.  Imagic was formed by former Atari programmers and executives in 1981, who left Atari after the company began to become more restrictive on its programmers due to the fact that it was taken over by Time-Warner Entertainment. It was at this same time that Activision was also formed for the same reason. I could get into detail on the great split with Atari but you can find a plethora of articles and even a few books written on the subject, if your interested.  Overall the split was over programmers looking for an outlet that would let them stay creative and experiment with new techniques in game making, and allow them to receive personal credit for these ideas, somet...

So it's winter which means that the weather has given us a good excuse to sit around and play video games without the guilt of wasting a nice day. For me I have finally had a chance to play Halo Wars  a real-time strategy game based on the Halo world of games. Halo Wars is essentially a prequel to the entire Halo series, taking place 20 years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved . But unlike Halo which is a sci-fi future soldier-based FPS, Halo Wars is real-time strategy game. I enjoyed playing the game and found it to be both challenging and fun but also found it to be somewhat short. As I played it though I also couldn't help feel as if I could enjoy it more on a PC rather than the Xbox 360, and as I thought more about that feeling I knew it in some way had something to do with my history of playing RTS games on PC and not consoles. I was also struck by the fact that Halo reminds me of Command & Conquer .  Command & Conquer actually di...

When 2013 drew to an end my final count of Atari 2600 games collected in 2013 numbered 85. This isn't too bad considering I didn't start collecting until mid-October.  But even though 85 is an impressive number there is some debate among Atari 2600 game collectors as to what number of games actually makes a serious collector. Some say that the 60 mark takes you into the realm of serious collecting what others seem to agree that the 90 mark is where the serious collection kicks in. As a kid with an Atari 2600 and remembering other folks around me with 2600s the average amount of games per person seemed to range between 20 and 30. Anything above those numbers  indicated that a person was an enthusiast of the system and of gaming in general. So to me the 60 mark seems a good indicator that a person has entered into the realm of serious collecting of Atari 2600 games, yet at the same time I believe there's definitely some credence to the 90 mark.  You see looking just at the ...