The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

Two years ago I published my New Years resolutions for the upcoming year of 2014. By New Years Eve 2014 I found that I was able to accomplish roughly half of what I set out to do,  which you have to admit isn't too bad especially when you factor in family and work obligations.  2015, despite not having New Years resolutions to guide it, has been a pretty good year for me as both a gamer and collector despite the last 6 months of my year being fairly tamaltious. I've been able to add such systems to my collection as the XBox One, 3DS, Apple IIe, iMac, Coleco Gemini, Atari Jaguar, and others including my personal favorite the Vectrex. Not to mention all the games I've been able to add including a number of classics, and very nearly finishing off my Atari 7800 collection.  Throughout the last three or four months of 2015 I've been thinking about what goals I would like to accomplish as a gamer and collector in 2016, and it's a list that keeps growing. So here we go; As...

The box says Bowling Videocart 21 . It's a simple elegantly designed black box dominated by  Bowling pins and a red Bowlingball rolling at them. The box itself is in good shape but still a bit worn, after all it's 37 years old. The sticker on the front says $19.95, it looks to be from a Toys R' Us, or perhaps a Child's World but it's hard to tell and could be from one of a few thousand other places these games where sold. The center of the sticker has a pen written "A" with a circle around it, which if my memory's of old toy stores serves me correct meant the item was on clearance at some point. As for the $19.95, that would have been a substantial sum in 1978 roughly equivalent to the $59 I just paid for Halo 5 , of course whoever bought this game back then didn't pay $19.95 for it (if it was on clearance that is) and I didn't even pay that much for it either in 2015 CIB and all. Of course as interesting or as uninteresting as you may ...

Having a gameroom of any kind isn't easy when you have a family, but sometimes you do luck out. In my case it was the a-typical basement that became my mancave or as I preferred to call it my gameroom. When I first moved into my last house the finished portion of the basement was where the spare pieces of furniture and other decor quickly collected. As the first few months passed and the main areas of the house began to become de-cluttered of moving boxes, I finally had the first opportunities to begin transforming the basement into an area for my games. Sadly, time became a premium and what should have been a simple weekend project failed to get done. Then one fateful day when I went to work sick, had an equally bad day at work, I came home to find that my wife and oldest son had taken the day to work on the basement for me including putting up decor. All I can say is that it changed a bad day to a very good one quickly, and I must have just sat down there looking around at eve...

Looks like this has historically been a busy time of year for Nintendo. A few weeks ago we celebrated 25 years of the Gameboy, and today we are celebrating 30 years of the NES in North America. Once again I wish I could have written something more in depth for today, but I'm a bit caught off guard.  For me the NES came into my life later in its life in the Christmas of 1989. My system (which I still own and operate) came with the Power Pad, light gun, and triple game cart including Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, and World Class Track Meet . I also believe I was given Super Mario Bros 3  that Christmas as well. My NES and its descendants the SNES to the left and below it the WiiU. My collection also has an N64, GameCube, and Wii on standby.  My NES may not have initially been a huge go to system for me, but it did inspire me back then as well as much later. My NES would be a huge influence on my getting my Gameboy back in 1990 when I was so impressed by my NES, I decided I n...

In the last part of this series I talked about 8-bit's legacy, how its sometimes misinterpreted, and its evolution between the Atari 2600 and the NES. Of course the 8-bit era would extend back before the Atari 2600, and after the NES and its fellow generation 3 counterparts, so if I have forgotten systems like the Fairchild Channel-F and the Nintendo Gameboy you will have to forgive me since both of these systems and others are as instrumental to 8-bit as the systems I did list. With that said, it's often too easy to find some mindsets trapped into interpreting 8-bit based on technical specifications. True 8-bit is usually defined by the central microprocessor a console uses, but in my case what we are talking about here are personal definitions of 8-bit. Or to put it another way those feelings that seem to hit you when you see an 8-bit image from your favorite system, and the way you perceive 8-bit from those feelings. To be honest defining 8-bit in this way almost seems a ...

Ok, I know its pretty much been forever since I last visited this series and its a little odd coming back to it after two years. At the same time though I've learned a lot in the last two years and have had the chance to experience emulations in a lot of more ways than I had originally thought I could. In that same respect I have also found out that there area lot of folks out there who want to give emulation a try but have no idea, how or where to start. Legal Warning Due to copywrite laws it is technically illegal to emulate a game unless you own a hard-copy of said game (i.e. a cartridge, CD-Rom, Etc..), or have purchased your emulated copy through a reputable provider (ala Steam, GoG, Nintendo Virtual Console or the like) and have license to hold an electronic copy of said game. This is just one of those FYI things, although its nearly impossible to know who has "illegal" copies, and/or where they got them from. I can suggest however, that buying electronic cop...

I've started collecting again for my Gameboy's for the first time in at least 15 years. It's fun to be a little older and have a little more money to pick up some of those titles I couldn't get as a kid.  Of course when my first title Solar Striker  arrived by mail a couple weeks back, I felt like a kid all over again. Suddenly, memories came pouring back, of being 12 or 13 and looking at and buying new Gameboy games. I remember being able to put hours into those games and in most cases beating them.  My time with my Gameboy and its games was at that right time in my life when I began to notice the world around me. Super Mario Land (1&2) where my summertime games, Metroid 2  was a Christmas vacation game played before Christmas. Choplifter 2 was my after Christmas game and winter game, as was The Hunt for Red October. Radar Mission was a Saturday night buy when I was stuck at a store with my parents and a traveling companion thereafter. Most of my games had ...

About a two years ago I was having a conversation with a hardcore Atari 2600 fan   regarding a particular game we both liked, that had both an Atari 2600 port and an NES port. In the conversation I had made some comment about how that particular Atari 2600 game was good but looked better in 8-bit alá the NES. As I said that he stopped to correct me (very nicely I might add) saying that although he knew what I meant about 8-bit and the NES, that Atari 2600 games where technically 8-bit too. At first I was taken a bit back by that though,  I knew that Atari had programmed many of their games using 8-bit computers like their own Atari 400 and 800, but I never made the direct connection to Atari 2600 games being 8-bit. In my mind when comparing the offerings of the Atari 2600, to the NES it was easy to lose sight of the fact that the 2600 was 8-bit too. Even though both the Atari 2600 and the NES are 8-bit, it isn't an illusion that what you are seeing looks worlds apart. The ...

So I'm downstairs in my game room in front of the TV sitting on the floor and just staring at one of the shelves under the TV with my NES, N64, and Wii in it. My first thought is what strange roommates the three are, then it hits me that the three all have one more thing in common than just being Nintendo consoles, they are also the units released in the odd numbered game generations. The NES gen 3, N64 gen 5, and Wii gen 7. Did I do this on purpose? Well no actually, it's just how it all worked out thanks to that whole top loader/side loader thing which is why Nintendo's gen 4 entrant the SNES, and gen 6 entrant the GameCube site side by side in an adjoining shelf, and the gen 8 entrant the WiiU someplace totally different. So I sat a little while longer staring at the lineage of these systems, and I thought how it was really  too bad that I didn't have a Nintendo gen 1 or 2 system to bring everything together. Then it hit me that although Nintendo had a gen...

In part 1 I talked little bit about the Master System, it's history, and what made me consider getting one for myself. At the end I mentioned that I had gotten a Master System, and that I would be talking about my reaction to the system and giving a brief review of it in part 2. Well here we are in part 2. So let me talk little bit about how and why I got a Sega Master System. As far as how that was pretty easy, between searching my local video game store, and searching eBay I was finally able to come across a system in good condition on eBay. It came with all the necessary wiring, one controller and a few games, and between the price of the system and shipping I was able to pick up a Master System for less then $60. The whole thing arrived surprisingly well packed, and in the exact condition the seller stated.  A week after it arrived I finally found time to hook the Master System up to a secondary TV in my gameroom I use for this exact purpose. To say the least the syste...