The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

Star Trek has received at least one title on many video game consoles for last 40 years now. It’s a testament to the shows enduring legacy, as well as its fan base. These are fans who let the shows originality stir their imaginations and made them carry “ The Final Frontier” into the world of video gaming only a few years after the show ended. Some of the earliest versions of Star Trek games appeared as text adventures shared on the early internet in BBS’s, or in the form of short games meant to showcase graphics rather than any kind of actual gameplay. Eventually though game designers and publishers knew a true game would have to be made. In 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released thanks in part to Star Wars: A New Hope ’s success two years earlier and the constant push by Star Trek fans to bring the show back.   Star Trek: The Motion Picture , although in retrospect hardly the best of the Star Trek movies, was groundbreaking in itself, and set new territory for...

Could truth get any stranger than a fictional tale about a homemade A-bomb? The weekend before last, trying to keep on the theme of watching at least one 80’s movie per weekend this summer, I decided to watch The Manhattan Project on Netflix. If you’ve never heard of it before, than let me first tell you it’s not a historical drama about the development of the atomic bomb, that was left to 1989’s Fatman and Littleboy . Rather, this is an interesting little flick about a teenager who creates his own atomic bomb for a science fair, using plutonium he stole from a local laboratory. The film itself is somewhat obscure, and really wasn't a huge box office success either. No doubt part of the reason was that releasing a heavy drama in the summer of 1986, amongst such classics as Top Gun , Short Circuit , and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (the latter opened the same weekend) probably wasn't the best timing on the studios part. The other issue was the general theme of the mo...