Tag Archives: retro gaming

Features, MoeGamer Awards 2018

The MoeGamer Awards 2018: Best System to Collect For in 2018

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The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards that I’ve devised in collaboration with the community as an excuse to celebrate the games, experiences and fanbases that have left a particular impression on me in 2018. Find out more and leave a suggestion here!

Over the last couple of years, I’ve become very enthusiastic and passionate about my gaming collection, and my infinitely patient and wonderful wife has done a fantastic job of configuring two of the rooms in our house to display said collection — the living room contains all the reasonably current stuff (basically PS1 onwards) while the upstairs study is a “retro room”, consisting of Atari 8-bit, Atari ST and Philips G7000 Videopac games.

I’ve been adding to my collection from all angles over the course of the last few years. But if I had to pick one system that I’ve enjoyed collecting for the most this year? Not necessarily the cheapest, but one that is enjoyable to collect for? That’s what this award is about.

And the winner is…

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Podcast

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 14 – Point and Shoot

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Hello you! It’s time again for a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, featuring me — the Internet’s Pete Davison — and my co-host Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels!

The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos; you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes. Subscribe. Semicolons.

Or you can hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.

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One-Shots

Digitiser: The Show – The “Gaming Show Broadcasters Are Too Scared to Make”

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Before the mess that is today’s Internet, gaming fans were a bit more limited in where they could get their information from.

There were a variety of gaming magazines that came and went over the course of the ’80s, ’90s and early ’00s… but one of the most enduring and memorable publications in British gaming wasn’t even printed on paper.

I’m talking about Digitiser, which ran from 1993 to 2003… and now it’s back as a joyfully chaotic show on YouTube.

Continue reading Digitiser: The Show – The “Gaming Show Broadcasters Are Too Scared to Make” →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: The Last Starfighter

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Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.

Any kid who watched the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter longed to hear those words for real — to put the skills they’d learned in video games to the test with real conflict against invading forces!

Unfortunately, Atari’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of the movie didn’t quite make it to market in time, instead finally seeing the light of day in 1986 as the hastily rebranded Star Raiders II. However, the original, fully playable prototype of the game in its original The Last Starfighter format has been well-preserved over the years… so it’s that we’ll be taking a look at in today’s video!

Follow Atari A to Z on its own dedicated site here!

Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Beyond the Ice Palace

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I never played this game back in the day, but it was one of those titles you saw all over the place in the early days of the ST.

Throughout the ST’s lifespan, it played host to a variety of different bundle packages, many of which were extremely generous in terms of the number of games and applications they included. Beyond the Ice Palace was a regular inclusion in such bundles, and as such became reasonably well-known.

Loosely inspired by action platformers such as Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Beyond the Ice Palace sees your green-booted, gender-ambiguous hero(ine?) battling their way through hordes of enemies and admiring how the ST’s lack of sound channels meant that a single sound effect could mess up an entire musical composition.

Follow Atari A to Z on its own dedicated site here!

Announcements

Around the Network

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If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I have a few ongoing side projects right now.

I wanted to draw a bit of attention to them for those who primarily follow this site — and also just to take a bit of pride in my work elsewhere!

Let’s take a look at what’s been going on elsewhere on what I’m choosing to think of as “The MoeGamer Network”, then…

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Encounter!

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The Atari 8-Bit played host to some great games, many of which drew fairly unashamed inspiration from popular arcade games at the time.

In some cases, these “derivatives” provided an interesting twist on their inspiration’s formula — or in some cases improved upon it. Such is the case with Encounter! by the late Paul Woakes, an enormously talented (and mostly solo) British programmer who developed some of the most technically impressive games of the 8- and 16-bit era.

Encounter! wears its Battlezone inspirations on its sleeve, but it mixes things up with much faster-paced gameplay and a challenging “hyperspace” sequence between stages. Watch me fail at the latter aspect in particular below.

Capcom, Essentials

Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: It’s The Belt For You, Lad

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Those of you who read my coverage on Senran Kagura: Estival Versus will know how much I enjoy the beat ’em up genre… and how much I appreciate its history.

With that in mind, Capcom’s announcement that it would be releasing a new product simply called Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle made me kiss £15.99 goodbye even before the package was released. Doubly so because it was also coming to Switch… and who doesn’t want to bust some heads on the go?

Today we’ll take a high-level look at the package as a whole, then over the course of a series of Capcom Essentials articles in the coming weeks, we’ll explore the individual games in the collection in more detail. Suffice to say for now that £15.99 is a very fair price for this bundle, and I highly recommend it to all fans of the genre.

Continue reading Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle: It’s The Belt For You, Lad →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Dandy

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For the retro gaming and retro computer enthusiasts among you, here’s the continuation of my ongoing project to explore the library of the Atari 8-Bit.

Released through the Atari Program Exchange (or APX), an initiative by Atari that allowed amateur and professional programmers alike the opportunity to get their projects distributed commercially, Dandy by John Howard Palevich turned out to be a rather influential game.

Originally intended as a multiplayer networked adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons before being simplified and refined into the four-player action dungeon crawler it ultimately became, Dandy would be a defining influence on Atari’s later arcade hit Gauntlet… and it’s not hard to see why.

Community, One-Shots

The Importance of Preservation

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In case you missed the news, one of the biggest and most long-running sources for emulators and ROM files on the Internet, EmuParadise, has announced that it is undergoing some changes.

Specifically, the site will no longer be providing games for people to download free of charge; it will be continuing to maintain its database of emulators and hosting its community features, but the main draw for many — the extensive catalogue of ROMs for a variety of systems — has gone away, with every download link now leading to a page which states “this game is unavailable”.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is emphatically a bad thing. But let’s talk about it anyway.

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