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Playing Arcade Mahjong at Home? Or is it just a Mirage?
A lot of the things I’ve looked at on this blog have never left Japan, often for good reason. One genre that stands out in this is mahjong, a tile-based gambling game popular in Japan, associated with nudity in their arcades, and associated with old ladies everywhere else. How can we add this to our supergun? Surely that’s a question someone other than me is curious about. Reader’s note: This post will be strictly “safe for work”. The game might be too. Depends on your workplace.
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Narcissus' Direct-to-VHS Return: MGA's Space Invaders Color FX
Remember the Game & Watch Panorama Series? The use of mirrors for a clever approach to a portable color LCD console. Of course, in 1999, you didn’t need that; this was the era of the Game Boy Color, which had a color LCD screen that you didn’t need a reflective mirror light trick to get sort-of visible color. So the panorama trick was long gone, right?
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How the Segmented Game changed, through the Eyes of Golf
The 1980s were a period of slow decline for the segmented LCD or VFD game. At the start of the decade, companies like Coleco were putting out tabletop games that could compete with home console ports in quality. Even as consoles improved, portability and tricks like the Panorama Screen kept them going, and even the Soviet Union wanted in on it. But that all ended when the pixelated LCD game consoles like the Game Boy attacked, and by the 1990s, the situation and the games were a lot different. Let’s take a look at two examples, recreating one particular game.
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Toaplan v2 and the Birth of Raizing: Sorcer Striker!
Toaplan. A company known for two things: great arcade shoot ‘em ups like Truxton, and a highly questionable translation of one of those games on the Sega Genesis. But we’ll leave all your bases aside today. The “Toaplan v1” chipset I talked about in the Truxton article of course showed its age over time, and was replaced with a new one. And Toaplan didn’t just use it themselves; they licensed that chipset to a new company entering the shoot ‘em up game. Let’s dig into Sorcer Striker, Raizing’s first title.
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Giving the Jakks Atari Paddle a Spin
Some things I like to talk about on this blog are “paddle” games that use a potentiometer to control the player position, and plug-and-play consoles. Oh, and the Atari 2600. Well, it just so happens that Jakks Pacific in 2004 released something that combines both of them: the Atari Paddle. It’s like they had this blog in mind.
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Composite Mod on the CoCo 2: The UVD Board
Since at least March of 2019, the Tandy Color Computer 2 has sat there, teasing me. It has a Motorola 6847, the tragically disappointing graphics chip, paired with the terrifyingly powerful Motorola 6809 CPU (running at… substantially less than a megahertz, but we all have our flaws). Truly a machine that should provoke more interest from me than it does… except for the fact that it only has RF output. Let’s finally fix that.
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Too Good to be First-Party: Coleco's Tabletop Donkey Kong Junior
What was home video gaming like in the early 1980’s? You might consider picturing things like the Atari 2600 or the Intellivision, and those were certainly a big part of it. But another big part were the category I’ll call segmented-display games; portable systems like the Game & Watch, but also more stationary “portable arcade” machines. And in the United States, no name in home mini-arcades was bigger than that of the Connecticut Leather Company, or if you’re a friend, Coleco.
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