The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

The Stanley Cup Western Conference Playoffs have been a real nail biter for us Blackhawks fans. By the time some of you read this you may know the fate of the Hawks whether the are out of the standings or alive and well and in the finals. But for now on this morning of Friday May 30, 2014 they are at 2 games to 3 against the LA Kings in the Western Semi-finals.  But for the last few weeks as the finals have narrowed down the remaining competitors I couldn't  help thinking about hockey in the world of video games.  For me there are two favorites the above   classic Blades of Steel  on the NES, and the below Ice Hockey  on the Atari 2600.  Now, I know what your saying "really all the great NHL 20xx, games out there and you choose these two?". The answer is "Yes, I did". You see I think the thing that is missed with modern sports games is that they get too serious. It becomes to much about picking the right players, and stats and drafts and all that and t...

The Atari 7800 and I have a complicated past, dating back to 1988. It all started when was given an Atari 7800 for Christmas that year, that I quickly found out didn't work. Of course it was no major loss since I got my Atari 2600 Jr. out of the deal. But I always thought that someday I would like to own an operating 7800. Of course I jumped ship to my NES the following year, then PC gaming a few years after that, and so on and so forth. Then for a Retro Gaming New Years resolution last year I made aquiring an Atari 5200 and 7800 one of my goals for this year. In a previous posting I covered the first part of reclaiming a 5200 into my collection, but there was only about a weeks deference between the arrival of the 5200 at my house in March, and the arrival of my 7800.  Atari 5200 and 7800, with a 2600 Jr in the background. The 7800 as you can probably guess was an eBay buy. I picked it up for less then $40 with a small stack of games included. The seller stated he ...

Star Fox , and Firefly  suck far worse than  ET! Wait you didn't think I was talking about Starfox  the SNES classic did you? Or that I was talking about the Joss Whedon, Nathon Fillion classic Sci-Fi show Firefly ? Hell no! Becuase those are actually good things.  I'm talking about Star Fox , and Firefly  from a forgotten game publisher called Mythicon. Of course lets not forget their third game Socerer either. If you read my last article, "Alamogordo: ET vs Economics"  (http://retrovideogamingblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/alamogorgo-et-vs-economics.html?m=1) than you probably know that I refered to third party developers who flooded the market with knock-offs and games that where far from awesome, and who ultimately caused the "Crash of 83'". To me Mythicon is one of these companies.  You see while   poor old ET  is getting the blame and the shaft, there are far worse games out there. This even prompted Hugues Johnson host of the podcast the Th...

The date is April 27, 2014 and after years of urban myths, rumors, and attempts to prove or disprove them, a mix of video game enthusiasts, archeologist, tech writers, hucksters, filmmakers, and newsmen looking for a story on a slow news day, all descended on a garbage dump outside of Alamogordo, NM for the “dig” of a lifetime. This would be the day that a site within the dump is finally excavated to find out if in 1983 Atari dumped consoles and games here. After a long and arduous day the urban legend would prove to be far more fact then fiction, except for a few things that many choose to overlook.   You see the urban legend says that the dump was all the result of Atari’s E.T. video game, supposedly the worst video game ever made, and supposedly so bad that “it made the already bad Atari, even worse….and crashed the video game industry” keep in mind I am paraphrasing but this is the legend. Of course if you’ve been looking up the “dig” online you have probably read over a...

To me the NES is the epitome of a retro gaming system. As big of a fan of Atari as I am there is nothing like the feel of opening the door on the NES, putting the cartridge in, pushing it down, closing the door and hitting the power button. You feel like your not just playing a video game but starting an adventure. Over the past six months I have grown my NES collection to nearly twice the size it was when I walked away from my NES in the mid-90's. Many of the games I added are classics, those NES essentials anyone who lived in the NES era could tell you that you had to have to experience the NES in all its glory.  A funny thing happened though as I began to add new games, the NES began to act up a bit with having to take the games out and put them back in again, or blow in them to get them to work. Then there was the day I put Excitebike in for the first time, and got glitches galore. After that my games began glitch on and off until that one dreaded day. I remember it cl...