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Alf 2: Collision Detection is Hard, Blog Posts are Harder
Remember Alf? He’s back, much sooner than I expected. In fact, I wasn’t expecting to cover this topic again. But the post on Alf has proven to be one of the most successful in the history of this blog, and it wasn’t very clear about my conclusions, and I could’ve done better, so let’s pick this up and beat this topic into the dust.
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Holding out for My Hero: The Sega System 1
I promised you a deeper dive into the Sega System 1 arcade system in the Pitfall II article. And now we get it– let’s never say I don’t keep a non-zero fraction of my promises. We’ll also take a look at another System 1 game, My Hero, and look at how the game was ported to the Mark III/Sega Master System.
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Collision Detection is Hard: The Story of Alf
Today we’re talking about ALF. It’s a surprising move for Nicole Express; we do not condone cat-eating. But neither did Alf, eventually. In any case, we’re not here to talk about the television show (which I’ve never seen) or the pogs; we’re here to talk about ALF for the Sega Master System. By request!
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Adaptation and Re-adaptation: The story of Pitfall II
The video game console originated as a way to bring arcade experiences (specifically, Pong) into the home. But the home game took on a life of its own; playing a game in your house that you can play indefinitely is very different than a game that needs to constantly shuffle through new players to get the quarters of each. One early game that understood that difference was 1984’s Pitfall II. Let’s put on our amateur video game analyst hats and take a look into gaming history.
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Valuestar in the Valuesky: The PC-9821 V13
You might have heard of the PC Engine. But did you know? NEC didn’t just make engines for PCs, they made PCs themselves too. And now I have one! Let’s take a look, figure out what it’s deal is, and try to do something on it. A gift to the blog, courtesy of the Doors and Dungeons Podcast! Let’s… clean keyboards and debug sound card issues?
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Review! The Sears Tele-Games Pinball Breakaway
Sears, Roebuck & Co. A name that will surely echo throughout American business forever; of course, such a storied department store chain would dip its toe into the video game market, and we all know of Sears Tele-Games, their rebranded Atari line. But now Atari, despite their new Video Computer System, has released a new standalone console, and Sears has dutifully followed. Why is Atari having regrets?
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Neo Geo Genesis: The Alpha 68000
The Neo Geo: we’ve talked about it a lot on this site. And it’s an interesting system, so why not? Its sprite-based graphics system proved flexible enough to allow it to last up until 2003, at which point all of its 2D competition had moved on. But instead of looking at the end, let’s look at the beginning: the arcade systems that led up to it.
