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• Post #3178790

  Listening to some music while I work, and contemplating the fact that the set of speakers on my desk are older than just about half my team. 25 years old and still sound great. 🔊 💯 #everydayretro #audio

• Post #3178789

  "Guwange" (1999) is yet another bullet hell shoot'em up by CAVE. This time, your character is on foot and movement alternates between vertical and horizontal. But you can only shoot upwards, which feels like a missed opportunity. I feel that pre-rendered graphics lack the charm of hand-crafted pixel art and really scream for a higher resolution. Still, looks good, and the bullets consume all your brain's visual bandwidth anyway. All text is in japanese, but t...

• Post #3178788

  I first played through "Beneath a Steel Sky" (1994) over a decade after its release. The game felt retro at the time, but doesn't feel any older 20 years later. It's an adventure set in a dystopian future, in Australia (a popular location for dystopian futures). It's also a more serious game than what you'd get from LucasArts, but still humourous often enough (as adventure games should be). The voices don't always match the text exactly...

• Post #3178787

  Happy towel day! 👍 #towelday #retrogaming #infocom

• Post #3178786

  Now, *this* is a demo... 🌀 The visualisation is the music, and the music is the visualisation, on a vintage oscilloscope in X-Y mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCukVSqoZyI And it really picks up about halfway through. 🔊 #electronics #music #demo

• Post #3178785

  Is "Limbo" (2010) retro yet? I guess it has always been retro, at least in style. Limbo was originally released on the Xbox 360, download-only. With Xbox Live Arcade dead since 2024, my copy of the game is stuck on my Xbox 360 and will only live as long as its spinning-rust hard drive lives. Not a retro situation, really. 🫠 I like this game. The puzzles are logical and I finished it back then in a few days. I saw it's just €0.50 on Android, and couldn't resist...

• Post #3178784

  TIL about the Pulfrich effect, whereby lateral motion can be perceived as depth due to timing differences (signal delay) between the eyes. The effect can be triggered by wearing sunglasses in such a way that only one eye is covered. 🤪 🕶️ Then you can play "Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3D" (SNES, 1993) and the background layer will appear further away (only when moving). The game originally included paper glasses featuring a darker filter over the left eye. #retrogaming #...

• Post #1489916

  "Xevious" (1982) is often considered the father of vertical shoot 'em ups. It should probably share that title with a few contemporary games (e.g. "Moon Cresta"), but it's certainly one of the very first games immediately recognizable as such — although power-ups are nowhere to be seen yet. It looks simple at first, but the air-to-air and air-to-ground mechanics become quite challenging very quickly. The repetitive music really gets into you...

• Post #1175944

  The player's character in a game may feel like a temporary identity you assume or it may feel like a proxy you control, depending on the game or the character. But also depending on the player. I wonder how much it depends on the decade. Specifically, are male teenage players any more likely to pick a female character in a game today than in the 90s? Especially when in the presence of their peers. What about older players that were teenagers in the 90s? I certainly am. #retrogaming

• Post #993513

  "Ghostbusters" (1990) for the Mega Drive has a 7.4 rating on Moby Games. Sega Retro says it is "generally considered one of the higher-quality games derived from the popular franchise". I don't follow. There's so much wrong with this game... The intro features the iconic Ray Parker Jr. theme, but the in-game music doesn't sound like Ghostbusters at all. There are *four* ghostbusters, not three. Where's Winston? Egon makes th...

• Post #993512

  John Bradley, the author of the XV image viewer, has passed away. XV evokes a great deal of nostalgia in me. It harks back to a time when Linux was simpler and felt like unexplored territory. #linux #nostalgia #rip

• Post #993511

  "Garou: Mark of the Wolves" (1999) is the final game of the Fatal Fury series on the Neo Geo. It's a great game, if you don't mind getting your arse kicked. But it's nice enough to give you the choice of tipping the odds in your favour on continue. Of course, even when you choose to take 75% off your opponent's power, it feels like the game gets harder to compensate. Arcade games cheating? No... 🙄 #arcade #neogeo

• Post #993510

  My MiSTer Multisystem² Analogue has arrived! 🎉 https://multisystem.uk/products/mister-multisystem-2/ This is my first MiSTer, or FPGA-based retro gaming device for that matter. It's a whole new world of discovery for me. ✨ The case is 3D-printed, but feels solid and looks nice. At normal playing distance you can't even tell it's 3D-printed. It kind of tempts me to customise it with a pair of "toxic green" side covers... https://multisystem.retrofied....

• Post #751315

  In "Lemmings" (1991), a certain number of lemmings enter each of the 120 levels, and a minimum percentage of them must reach the exit. You can make them dig, climb, block other lemmings, etc. as you keep them from dying. The game turned 35 last week, and I spent some time today slouching on a beanbag watching this retrospective, and then some more playing through a dozen or so levels of the Amiga version. Relaxing, and I recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulx0WE8K...

• Post #751314

  "Pinball Dreams" (1992), "Pinball Fantasies" (1992), and "Pinball Illusions" (1995) are perhaps the best computer pinball — or "flippers" in some countries — games of the 90s. They don't have the flashiest tables, but the gameplay is smooth and the music is excellent. Pinball Fantasies is my favourite of the three, specifically the MS-DOS version, because of its higher resolution (larger playing field). #retrogami...

• Post #751313

  By launching a new laptop with only 8GB of RAM and no upgrade option, Apple appears to be embracing #MARCHintosh — because 8GB of RAM in 2026 is almost #retrocomputing.

• Post #751312

  "Disney's Hercules" (1997) looks good, and seems to be regarded as one of the best Disney games on the PS1, but it feels off to me. Maybe it's from being a tie-in to a film I never saw or even remembered existed. Maybe it's from the awkward levels where you're running and must avoid obstacles, or the levels where you can move into the background, but only at random points. Or maybe it just isn't to my taste through no fault of its own....

• Post #751311

  I'm quite certain I once knew how to play "SimCity 2000" (1993)... But now I think I'll have to read the manual, and it's almost 150 pages. 📖 https://archive.org/details/sc2000_manual/page/4/mode/2up #retrogaming #msdos

• Post #751310

  "Pulseman" (1994) is weird: the graphics are often psychedelic and the music sometimes sounds... experimental. It is clearly meant to be a cross between Sonic and Mega Man but, for the most part, gameplay feels distinct from either. 👍 Pulseman can charge himself by dashing forward or running. When charged, he can shoot enemies. And when he shoots, he screams "f*ck you" at them. https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxppkc5I_mttE9OFRXuVtpxU_2VYLVvF9q 🗣️🖕 Actually,...

• Post #618886

  In "Qix" (1981) the goal is to claim most of the play area by cutting new sections at right angles, either quickly (blue) or slowly (red, more points). You move along the innermost edges and only exit to cut. If you're hit by the randomly moving lines while cutting, you die. If you stay on the edges for too long, the sparks catch you and you die. You have to keep moving and cutting. It's hard but fun. I like the abstract visuals and the very electronic sound e...