PixlBit

Thanks for reading!

Sky Shark was a pretty generic shooter from Taito.  If you want to see some of their more interesting shooters, I recommend looking up Darius, Gun Frontier, and Metal Black.

1943 is one of my favorite shooters even to this day.

I didn't really get into the X-Men arcade game, but I sure did like the TMNT and Simpsons ones!

Gravity Falls is fantastic.  One of the best cartoons since Animaniacs and DuckTales.

I beat the new Zelda game.  If I can do it, I know you can! The final boss is pretty darn cool.

Thanks for reading!  I may not do an April Fools blog this year, but I'll definitely have a blog up a couple of days after.

I hope you get to play that Pong game soon  After they made that Pong game, Atari made a Break-Out update on the PSOne as well, and it was very similar to the Pong update.  It was also pretty creative.  It's a special game to me, too, because it was the first game my brother Jeff finished when he was little.  I was proud of him.

Yeah the Xevious history is crazy.  It has a super long story that even got novels in Japan.  The graphics of the spaceships in the first game are actually pre-rendered, so it was the first arcade game that did that.  I always thought it looked like you were flying over a golf course, though.

Remember how dot matrix printer paper was attached to each page back in the day?  Well when I was a kid, I took a big long roll of my dad's printer paper, spread it out from the front door to the back door, and drew a Xevious map on one side and a Zaxxon map on the other side.  Then I got out my toy spaceships and played pretend Xevious and Zaxxon with them.  That is, until my dad got home and I got in trouble for doing that (but not too much trouble, I think deep down he thought that was cool, too, even if I did waste paper).

There are actually two 3-D Xevious games.  One is called Solavou and it's a 3-D from the cockpit view kind of game and I think uses the same engine as StarBlade.  It plays the same, too.  The other one was called Xevious 3-D/G+.  It had 3-D graphics, but it was still a 2-D shooter like the original.  And it was ported to the PlayStation, unlike Solvalou (that's the name of the Xevious spaceship, by the way).

I had Marble Madness on the NES as a kid, and back then, I thought it was pretty good.  But then, I was a kid and you know how kids can be pretty happy with crap sometimes.  But I could never get the hang of trackballs so I ended up doing better on the NES version.  It was actually pretty close to the arcade game, all things considered.  Interesting fact: the NES version of Marble Madness was developed by Rare.

Xevious has a really interesting history.  I'd tell you about it, but we'd be here all night.

SiniStar scared the crap out of me as a little kid.

There was a Spy Hunter machine at the Pizza Inn near my house back in the day.  They had other arcade games, but Spy Hunter was THE game to play!  Many years later, when my brother Jeff was very young, he played Spy Hunter on one of my arcade game collections and LOVED it.  He would just sit there playing it for hours laughing manically.  Did you know that at one point, plans were made to make a Spy Hunter movie?

I loved Marble Madness.  So much so that I got it for my NES, and I rarely did that.

Gauntlet was definitely a big game, but I didn't get to play it right away because it was uusally covered by the bigger kids.  Same goes with Punch Out and Space Harrier.

I loved arcades as a kid.  When I was little, one time I was watching TV with my dad, and the news was on, and they were showing people building these big yellow box things.  At first I thought they were soda vending machines, because they were about the same size, had a coin slot, and a lighted marquee. A few months later, my mom and I were at the checkout lane at a Kroger grocery store, and I saw the same machine.  I asked my mom if I could go look at it, and she said sure.  When she came by to look as well, she gave me a quarter to put in it.  Oh if she had only known what that would've triggerd.  Turns out that big yellow box was a Pac-Man machine, and that was my first time to play it!  All the way home from the grocery store, I was constantly talking about that game.  As you can guess, it left a lasting impression on me.

It was my mom's sister, my aunt, who took me to my first arcade when I was a kid.  Before then, I had only seen a couple of arcade machines in grocery stores and roller rinks.  But I had never been into a whole room of arcade machines!  I still remember the name of that first arcade I went to: Electric Castle.

I just love arcades.  I can't explain why, there's just something about them.

I may not have an April Fools blog this year, but I am working on a blog I plan to post a couple of days after.

You should definitely play Double Dragon Neon sometimes  It's a hilarious game.