The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

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 ...