Retro Culture 🕹️

The Amiga’s startup hand was holding something that looked roughly like a Workbench disk. Roughly was the problem. Bernd Schmidt’s emulator had produced a badly distorted version of the familiar picture, and there was still work to do before anyone could call this an Amiga they would want to use. Schmidt fixed his blitter code, and the picture improved. Later, Workbench booted from a floppy image with a convincing color display and… Read more

There is no hurry at first. Ecco swims through clear water, noses toward the other dolphins, and throws himself into the air because it is a lovely day and the game lets him. Then he jumps high enough. The sea begins to turn, his family disappears into the sky, and the pleasant little dolphin game becomes something else entirely. That opening has been catching people off guard since 1992. Ecco the Dolphin… Read more

The motion tracker has noticed something. You have not. There is another stretch of corridor ahead, a door you would rather not open, and just enough ammunition to make investigating seem like a decision you might regret. For a moment, Atari’s famous number has left the room. You are far too busy worrying about the Alien. When the Jaguar found the right game, it could do that. Tempest 2000 could turn an… Read more

Twenty-five years ago, Rockstar gave us an entire city to explore, a criminal empire to build, and more ways to get into trouble than we knew what to do with. And video games would never be quite the same again. On 22 October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III arrived on the PlayStation 2, taking the franchise out of its familiar top-down perspective and dropping players into a fully realized, three-dimensional Liberty City.… Read more

Some sequels give you more of the same. Others take everything you loved about the original and turn it into something truly special. For me, Fable II was the latter. On 21 October 2008, Lionhead Studios released Fable II for the Xbox 360, returning players to the fantasy world of Albion for another adventure filled with magic, monsters, moral choices, and that wonderfully peculiar British sense of humor. The original Fable was… Read more

Grace is behind the counter, the books are not selling, and Gabriel Knight has found something much more interesting to do than improve the situation. There have been murders in New Orleans. He thinks they might make a good novel. Grace has had considerable practice listening to his good ideas. You can understand why Gabriel would rather hang around St. George’s Books than worry about the business. There is coffee, a newspaper,… Read more

Seventeen years ago, Gearbox introduced us to a planet full of murderous psychopaths, terrifying monsters, more guns than anyone could possibly need, and one of the most annoying robots in video game history. And I couldn’t wait to get there. On 20 October 2009, Borderlands arrived in North America for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with the PC version following on 26 October. Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games,… Read more

Fallout: New Vegas — Sixteen Years Later, I’m Still Wandering the Mojave Getting shot in the head and buried in the desert was merely character creation. On 19 October 2010, Fallout: New Vegas arrived in North America for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, bringing another massive post-apocalyptic adventure to the Fallout universe. After Fallout 3, New Vegas was an automatic pre-order for me. There wasn’t much debate about it. I took… Read more

The wave curls over your surfer, and for a moment the little screen seems much too small for what is happening on it. There is blue water, a moving board and just enough time to make a spectacularly bad landing. The television is somewhere else. You are holding California Games in your hands. In 1989, that was a persuasive reason to stop and look at an Atari Lynx. Its screen lit up… Read more

Some games are great. Some games are terrible. And then there are games like Stubbs the Zombie, which are just… interesting. The premise is interesting. Both good and bad. The gameplay is interesting. Also good and bad. But just because a game is interesting doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good game, right? On 18 October 2005, Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse arrived on the original Xbox, offering players a… Read more

Mega Man is on the Genesis. You spot his name in the menu and stop scrolling. Here is the little blue fellow you associate with a Nintendo controller, ready to take on Dr. Wily on Sega’s machine. Call somebody over, choose the game, and wait for the download. A minute is a long time when you want to see whether this is really going to work. For North American players at the… Read more

The house is locked. Knocking does not help. Neither does asking the computer to open the door again, although you give that a try. Beside the path is a mailbox. Well, you might as well look. That is how an evening disappears in Zork. You go looking for a way into a house and end up underground, carrying a sword, worrying about your lamp and wondering where the thief has put something… Read more

Change characters in the NES version of Maniac Mansion and you change the music. The mansion is still a terrible place to spend an evening, but now the teenager you have sent into it has brought a different record collection. Bernard gets twitchy electronic energy. Razor gets something with teeth. A few rooms, a few verbs and a handful of little sprites become a house full of personalities. You can spend an… Read more

The world is turning beneath you, the sun is coming up over its edge, and a choir is singing before you have founded a single city. You could click through to the game. For a little while, though, Civilization IV makes waiting at the menu feel like a perfectly good use of your evening. The song is Christopher Tin’s Baba Yetu. Its words are a Swahili setting of the Lord’s Prayer, the… Read more

You have remembered the pirates, the music and at least three jokes. You have not remembered what to do with the thing in your inventory. Twenty minutes into Monkey Island, the old routine is coming back nicely: walk into a room, annoy everybody in it, leave with something that probably belongs to somebody else. For a while, getting the game to start could be the hardest puzzle of the evening. The disc… Read more

Saints Row started as a GTA clone. There, I said it. And I liked it anyway. When Saints Row 2 arrived in North America on 14 October 2008 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Volition wasn't exactly trying to hide where the inspiration came from. The original game had borrowed generously from Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the sequel wasn't about to abandon that formula. But here's the thing: Saints Row… Read more

I recently received a gift that left me with one very serious question: how have I been missing this in my life? The gift was a handful of issues of Old School Gamer Magazine. Actual magazines. Covers you can hold, pages you can turn, and articles that stay put while you read them. I opened one expecting a pleasant little dose of nostalgia. What I found felt like somebody had reopened a… Read more

The coaster looks magnificent. It climbs above the trees, twists through the park and has enough loops to justify the money you borrowed to build it. The test train makes it back to the station. You open the ride, sit back and wait for the queue. Nobody wants to get on. Welcome to RollerCoaster Tycoon. You may own the park, but the little people wandering around it have opinions. Some want a… Read more

Remember the days of yore, when Double Fine made great games instead of blowing budgets on their latest vanity projects? When Jack Black was more interested in entertaining us than lecturing us? These days, Black and Double Fine's Tim Schafer look like twin gray-bearded hobos arguing over which one smells worse. But the 2000s were simpler times. Back when somebody could pitch a video game that looked like an Iron Maiden album… Read more

You hear Daytona USA before you see it. Someone is singing the name at full volume. Around the corner, a row of red racing seats is waiting, and your friend is already claiming the one beside you. For years, Sega made the arcade trip worthwhile. You could have a good console at home and still want a go on that enormous motorcycle, the moving flight simulator or the racer linked to seven… Read more

The houses are getting nicer. The treasury is running out. Somebody wants pottery, somebody else wants a temple, and the person carrying the food has taken the wrong turning again. If you played an Impressions city builder, you probably recognise the situation. You arrived with a sensible plan for a Roman settlement or an Egyptian town. A few hours later, you were rearranging roads so a woman with a basket would walk… Read more

Sometimes I don't want a deep story, complicated mechanics, elaborate character progression, or moral choices that will come back to haunt me twenty hours later. Sometimes I just want to grab the biggest gun I can find and start blastin'! And that's exactly why I've always had a soft spot for Serious Sam. On 11 October 2005, Serious Sam II arrived on PC and Xbox, delivering another ridiculous helping of oversized weapons,… Read more

You have found a snorkel. You have found a coin. You have found a perfectly innocent reason to press the fire button. A moment later, you have found the title screen. For an egg with such a cheerful face, Dizzy could be a menace. His adventures offered enchanted forests, pirate ships and neighbours who always needed a favour. They also offered the possibility of losing an evening's work because you put down… Read more

A broken water chip, a world full of mutants, and absolutely no guarantee you'd survive long enough to save anybody. Welcome to Fallout. On 10 October 1997, Interplay released Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, introducing PC gamers to a radioactive wasteland unlike anything most of us had experienced before. Set in the year 2161, nearly a century after a devastating nuclear war, Fallout put players in the boots of a… Read more

George Stobbart went to Paris for a holiday. A clown, a bomb, and a dead man had other plans. George is an American tourist whose afternoon outside a Paris café ends in an explosion. He survives, but a man inside does not. Most people would give the police a statement and book an earlier flight home. George starts investigating. He has no special training for this sort of thing, just a quick… Read more