The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

There's nothing like scoring that one item on Black Friday, that's at just the right price and that you've waited so long for.  Too bad I don't really know what's that like. The closest I really came was in 2011 when I picked up my XBox 360 with Halo: Reach , Fruit Ninja , Kinect, and a few other items for about $199 at Best Buy, but really no one was in line for that so... With that mentioned I'm not trying to say that I don't have good memories from Black Friday, or that I haven't picked up a few games here and there on that day. So here are some of my memories: Black Friday 1992 - I was a Freshman in high school, and my mom, my sister and I set out to go to a local mall. The problem was that we all got a late start, and my mom and sister didn't really feel like messing with lines at the mall, or traffic. So instead we hit various stores one town over, and still made a day of it. To be honest I don't know what we really set out to look for...

A few weeks back in my Columbus Day Weekend edition of 8-bit Fridays, ( http://retrovideogamingblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/8-bit-fridays-columbus-day-weekend.html ) I spoke of being on the hunt for a new arcade machine, and my unsuccessful attempt at buying one that weekend. I also closed by saying I had a few irons in the fire, and one of those actually paid off as of the Wednesday after I wrote that. Thanks to a little known app known as OfferUp  I found a guy selling a X-Arcade cabinet (sans Tank Stick, and computer) in a nearby town. He had listed for $1, yes $1 and there was no way I could walk away. So once I did some research on how much it would be to replace the missing parts, I contacted him to make sure the offer was correct and made a deal with him to pick it up. Of course this is a big and very heavy machine which meant I had to rent a truck to pick it up, so although it was a dollar to buy there were going to be expenses to get it. When I finally got to his house ...

Everyone is going apeshit crazy about the NES Classic right now , and they pretty much have been since it was first announced a few months back. For me though, it's something that's fallen under my personal radar, and been mentally categorized with the likes of the Atari, Sega, Coleco, and Intellivision Flashback systems. Owning both an original NES, and a Retron 5, plus the actual carts of the 30 games that come preloaded on the Classic it's one of those things I really haven't felt the need to run out and buy. You’ll have to forgive me if I catalogue the NES Classic in with other Flashback systems but that's essentially what it is. The only major difference is that in the Classic’ s case the original manufacturer, Nintendo, is the one making the system instead of a third party in the case of the others.  When it comes to these Flashback systems, the only ones I actually own are the Colecovision, and Intellivision systems mainly because I didn't wan...

I was in the process of talking to a group of sci-fi model builders about whether they had considered building models of the Raza from Dark Matters , or The Lifeboat from Timeless , when the conversation lead into older sci-fi shows. Of course Firefly came up as well as a few more obscure shows like Defiance and Falling Skies . It was at that point someone brought up how Defiance was a bit of a rip off of Alien Nation, but that’s not something I could comment on having never really watched either show. Then someone brought up an argument I hadn't heard in years, being was DS9 a preemptive rip off Babylon 5 or was it vice versa? Now, this was something I hadn’t heard or even thought about in years since both shows would emerge as totally different and distinct as they progressed through their various seasons. Back in the day though (and by that I mean 1993-94) DS9 and Babylon 5 fans had a long standing feud over whose space station themed sci-fi show was the real McCoy (n...