The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

It's been a disturbingly quiet week for me, but hopefully that means the weekend will be quiet too. With that said I was surprised to get about an hour and a half of play in shortly after getting home from work on Friday, which was a nice change of pace. But before I get into some of my plays... This Fridays Buy's Star Trek Generations: Beyond the Nexus  (Gameboy) - Yes, I got the PC version last week. Obviously, they're not the same game, but they do share in the fact that they are equally obscure as far as Star Trek games go. The Raiden Project (PS1) - Basically, although not openly named, this is Raiden II & III , and the only way of getting Raiden II on any system.  This Weekends Plays Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (SNES) - This is another in the “ Strike ” series of games, and I believe the first one in the series to appear on the SNES. I had covered the third game in the series Urban Strike  in another 8-bit Friday article sometim...

The date was August 23, 1991, and that year the 23rd fell on a Friday. Don't ask me to remember the day, or if I remember it having any significance because I can't. To many gamers though it was a huge day, it was after all the release date of the SNES in North America. For Nintendo fan boys everywhere it would finally be Nintendo's response to the Sega's Genesis (Mega Drive) and its hold over 16-bit games. In a pre-Internet world though Sega and Nintendo's 16-bit fight would be somewhat lost on me, as would the SNES's launch. To me on August 23rd, 1991 I was probably in or dreading going back to my 8th grade year of school. As far as gaming I was content with my NES, and even happier with my Gameboy. My first experience with the SNES would be in the summer of 1992 when I would play my brother-in-laws system, and games like F-Zero, Super Mario World , and Super Play Action Football. Later I would rent Pilot Wings when staying over the New Years Eve of 1...

About a year ago my wife came to me in a frantic state, she had a client meeting on a Saturday morning and the dress she wanted to wear was dirty, and on top of that she needed to get to bed to be up on time. So looking to spare her of some stress I agreed to stay up late and make sure the dress made it through the wash and dry process, and ended up in our room. So with a quiet house, a TV to myself, and a bedtime to be dictated by a washer and dryer I set out to find something new to watch on Netflix. I figured it was finally time to break away from my wife's picks of lighthearted British dramas and return to my own sci-fi roots, but the question was what to watch. It was at that point I ran past Star Trek: Enterprise  and my question was quickly answered. I had been eyeing up Enterprise  since I had first spotted it up on Netflix a few months before that, but I never really found the time to put the series on. The concept of Enterprise  had always interested me, bu...

In my 8-Bit Friday Diary entries,  I often talk about my Friday purchases. Of course I don't only buy on Friday's especially if I run across a great deal, or if it's an auction closing during the week. I've also previously mentioned getting a backlog of games, and starting my 8-bit Friday ritual as a way of processing those games into my collection well playing through them and finding favorites to revisit. Of course over the past few months time to play hasn't exactly been as abundant as it is in winter and the backlog has started all over again. NES, SNES, SMS, PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, Saturn, XBox 360, and Atari 7800 are just a few of the systems the backlog exists on right now. Luckily, this weekend has allowed me to steal some time to get through some of these games. But first...  This Fridays Buy's Star Trek: Generations (PC) - Well looking for a game of the same exact title for the Gameboy, I ran across this PC title. In all honestly it's a ...

A View from the Couch It’s Friday night, the TV’s on and the lights are off. Its after 10:30 PM so there’s no guilt about being a couch potato, and also being Friday there is no guilt about having to get up early for work or school the next morning. Then you hear it, “Hey, hey, hey, hey….” as The Roots sing Fallon’s intro song for The Tonight Show , and Steve Higgins voice comes on to announce the evening guests. It’s the start of a 2 ½ hour journey that you may or may not make it through, and the worst case scenario for not making it through is that you fall asleep or go to bed in order to take advantage of the little extra sleep Saturday morning may get you. Ultimately though you relax, you realize you’ve made it through another week, and now it’s late and the week can’t hassle you anymore. Sound familiar? For me late night TV on a Friday night is somewhat of a ritual and as you might be able to tell by reading this, it has been since I was a teenager. Back then it was...