The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

In part one I spoke about Defiance as part of a trend of alien invasion shows we saw early in this decade. Falling Skies like Defiance was another one of the better TV shows this short and unceremonious era produced, and that also got it’s own game. Falling Skies My introduction to Falling Skies took place in the late summer of 2011. I use to have Fridays off from my job of the time and I would often assist my wife, who was a book sales rep back then, in placing her books out at a large Walmart store. With the book section being oddly in the electronics section, I got to see TV ad after TV ad for TNT. The one ad that always stuck out was for Falling Skies , a TV show which followed a group of survivors after aliens knock out communications, and invade. Great and interesting concept, one problem though, it was on TNT a network I hate due to its non-stop commercial breaks, and the fact that it always turns the volume up on its commercial as does its sister station TBS. ...

So as indicated last week the games are piling up again especially for the PS1. This weekend although tenuous, should have a bit of room to get into a few titles though. This Weeks Buys: As previously indicated I'm trying to figure what direction I want to go in next with collecting, so it's been a very light week. Krazy Ivan (PS1) - This is another tall box title from back in the PS1’s early days. Basically it's another take on the giant mech thing. As a tall box it's a noted game, outside of that it's obscure. This Week Plays: GTA 2 (PS1) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½ - I'm slowly making my way through the GTA series although I will admit I jump around a lot. GTA 2 as compared to GTA is definitely a lot more fun and despite the isometric viewpoint you can see how the third person of  GTA 3 springboards off of this. This is actually a better game then Driver on the PS1, which I thought was better game than GTA . Graphics wise it's about as mu...

Towards the beginning of our current decade there was an influx of alien invasion and/or alien coexistence television shows that aired. To be honest I think it had a lot to do with riding the Stefanie Meyer train and hoping her next novel, The Host, would be the start this as the next big trend of alien invasion, after the vampire craze she started with her the Twilight series of books in the latter part of the last decade. The Host ’s popularity, and subsequent film adaptation more or less achieved a modicum of success residually based on her Twilight momentum, and both the novel and film ultimately failed to catch on. TV and movie executives however wanted to be out in front of the next big thing and The Host in all probability seemed like a good place to start. ABC for instance would choose to reboot V , and use some familiar faces from the sci-fi cult show Firefly to give the show a chance. The CW would give the sci-fi sub-genre a hit and miss with their Star-Crossed , an i...

I know I started mentioning this on my most recent pos t, but I thought I would take some time to talk about the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 , season 11 on Netflix. Of course I have no doubt that a million other articles probably hit on this same subject over the weekend, but I just thought I would share my thoughts on it. First of all I’m going to say this, I know there are those of you out there who probably are all over the fact that it’s not season 11, but actually season 12. There’s a yes and no to that being a true statement. Yes, it is technically a 12th season, but you have to keep in mind that many, including Joel Hodgson himself consider the very first season only a pilot season. Season 0 or “The Pilot Season” only appeared on Minneapolis's KTMA, and many of the episodes will appear with a K in front of them when catalog or referred to. So instead of being season 1 episode 3 or 103, you will see it appear as K03 and so on. Once the show was picked up ...