PixlBit

I remember those days of shared keyboards on computer games. I never played Star Control 2, but it was made by some of the same people who made Starflight, a game I did play and enjoy.

Back then, I was still calling locally run bulletin board systems and playing simple games online like Legend of the Red Dragon. It was sad when they all closed down after people started using the Internet instead. I went to a couple of BBS parties in Oklahoma City where you could actually meet some of your opponents in the online games in person. The person behind my mortal nemesis in online games turned out to be a very pretty Thai-American woman (who was also 13 years older than I was, so there was no online love story to be had here, unfortunately).

Centipede was one of my favorites, along with Millipede. It was a truly sadistic game, forcing you to divide your attention between the centipede and the scorpions at the top of the screen and the spiders at the bottom. They were probably my favorite games that were originally made by Atari back then.

 When I was a kid, I also saw an Armenian made knockoff of Centipede that ran on hacked Galaxian hardware. It had the look and sounds of Galaxian rather than Centipede, and there was even a scrolling starfield in the background as in Galaxian and Galaga. The mushrooms changed colors when you shot them instead of showing deterioration. It was called War of the Bugs, or Monsterous Manouvers in a Mushroom Maze. That's how it was spelled on the title screen. I even made a Youtube video and wrote a blog about it on Pixlbit.

In KI's attract movies, they actually advertised it as running on the same hardware as what was then called the "Ultra 64" (a name they dropped because of fear of a potential copyright conflict with Konami, which had created a shell company called "Ultra Games" to sidestep Nintendo of America's limits on the number of games they could release every year). The game was made using Silicon Graphics workstations, and SGI was one of the main designers of the N64 hardware, but it was still a bit misleading of them. Cruis'n USA was a better representation of what the N64's graphics would actually look like. I believe they were originally planning to release it as a launch title for the Ultra 64/N64 when they wanted to release it in 1995 alongside the PS1 and Saturn, but the N64 got pushed back another year so they made a SNES version to try to tide people over and convince them to wait another year instead of buying a PS1. When the N64 did launch, they ported KI2 instead.

True that. I still wanted Lunar. Thankfully they remade those for a console I actually owned, and it was awesome playing them after five years of wanting them. I'd have even bought a Saturn to play them.

I played it in the arcades, too, but I was surprised at how much the SNES version sucked. It was slow as hell. I eventually bought the PS1 version at a used game store for a couple of dollars and it's a lot better.

The NES Classic left of a lot of my favorites: Dragon Warrior I-4, Faxanadu, and Ultima: Exodus. I didn't actually expect the last one to come out on the NES classic, as it was a bit obscure and its copyright is held by Electronic Arts. But Dragon Warrior should have been easy enough for Nintendo and Square Enix to put on the NES Classic. I also would have liked Wizards and Warriors, which was made by Rare and I guess would be owned by Microsoft now.

My Switch came with the Neon Red and Blue Joycons instead of the gray one.

I was going to say that the PocketStation was another memory card/gaming hybrid. The VMU made it onto the market in Japan a couple months before the PocketStation did, though. The VMU actually started being sold before the Dreamcast itself did. The thing I remember about the PocketStation is that Final Fantasy VIII used it to play a minigame which would power up the MiniMog summon and even touted it in the instruction manual, but we never got the PocketStation.

It's amazing. I remember when CDs were first sold in stores. They looked so futuristic compared to vinyl records. When CD-ROM came out, game designers heralded it as a Godsend and quickly filled CD-ROMs with FMV movies. I also remember Laserdiscs.

Now, CDs look as out of date as 8-track tapes did, and Nintendo has gone back to cartridges for the Switch. Even Sony used cartridges for the Vita. In the gaming world, we've come full circle. Heck, even the iPod and Napster, which kicked off digital music, look like relics now.

I wanted a Sega CD back in the day for the Working Designs games: Lunar, Lunar 2, Vay, and Popful Mail. But I was still a kid and my parents weren't going to spring for a $150 add-on for a $150 console plus games, so I got a SNES and got Final Fantasy III (VI) on it. I preordered the Lunars when they came out on PS1, and they are still among my favorites. I even still have the complete packaging for both of them. I did try Sonic CD later on. Playing Final Fantasy VI for 16 hours straight when I first got it was the closest I ever got to a drug trip, LOL. I was wandering around the yard like a zombie. My mother was yelling at me about sitting up all night playing games. I think. My memory was kind of iffy on that incident.

I rooted for the Eagles because the Cardinals were long gone. :(