Back when I had a game gear, I bought Aladdin for it. I had played the Genesis version of the game and liked it, and it was quite challenging! I headed to a toys R us store a few weeks later (after I had saved up enough money) to get the game gear version. Mistake!

While the graphics were nice for the device, and the game play did not disappoint, the game was too easy! Quite literally I was at the final stage, beating the final boss of the game, within hours of having purchased the game! I remember being happy that I finished the game, but quite frustrated that I had plopped $30 for a game that took me two or three hours to finish.

Comparatively, Sonic the hedgehog, the game that came with my game gear, took me YEARS to finish! OK, this was partly because of the whole battery problem, but even when I got the power adaptor for my game gear it still took MONTHS to beat, it was quite challenging! Oh well! Live and learn?

Tags: video, games, video games, sega, gamegear, disney, badgames

OK, so last week I wrote about Populous II. This week, on a similar theme, I am remising about a game called Black and White (and its sequel Black and White II). One of my friends, who is really into Real Time Strategy games, bought this pack, but he did not really like it (I guess he’s more of Panzer General type of RTS fan).

Never one to turn down a game, I took the games in and gave them a good home. In the game you play a god, and you use a giant hand to perform various miracles such as saving people, creating forests, encouraging crop growth, and so on. The game is almost like a SIM city clone. You can get people to worship you through good will, or through fear. I’ve used fear tactics when I was frustrated that my enemy god’s subjects would not worship me when I gave them food (and other) miracles. It’s surprising how much more worship you get through fear rather than being a kind god (or course in the end being a vengeful god reflects poorly on your stats, if I remember correctly).

In any case, I got to the last level of the game, but I had a hard time moving through and finishing. The last stage was de-forested, over cropped, and possibly over-mined. (in other words, humans were there), so it was difficult to expand my sphere of influence and maintain enough power to destroy my enemy god’s temple. On top of that, the game suffered from not being backed up, so when my hard drive died, so did my save-file. Oh well. If I ever have some time, I may get back to it because it was quite an entertaining game (despite the constant “we need food!” whines of the people)

Tags: video, games, video games, macintosh, SIM, RTS

In the days of my Performa 635CD (somewhere between sophomore and junior year in high school), I bought something called a MacPackAttack at my not-so-local microcenter. The pack contained ten games (on CD-ROM!!!), and one of them was Populus II: Trial of the Olympian Gods. My initial reception of the game was a lukewarm one. I was more used to the Tetris type Platform type of games. One summer I was quite bored, so I started playing more of Populous and I got sucked in!

The game is Sim game, where you have control over a certain amount of land, and your goal is to increase the number of the people that worship you (oh yes, you play an up-and-coming God), enhance their standard of living, and obliterate the people that worship enemy Gods. While I found the difficulty of the game to be a hard one, I eventually made it all the way to the end. If I remember correctly there was an Achilles spell that I could use to make my people superhuman (after a certain amount of experience and population as reached) and they could do my bidding – i.e. obliterate the competition.

It was quite an entertaining game for what it was, and there have been others that have followed in its footsteps and have made games like Populous that are entertaining (black and white comes to mind)
Sadly, there is no YouTube video that showcases the gameplay.

Tags: video, games, video games, DOS, macintosh

Back (in 2004/2005) when I was rediscovering the joy of gaming on the Mac, one of the of the games that I bought at my local Apple Store was Spyhunter. This game is a reworking of the original top-down arcade game to bring it up to date with modern 3D graphics, sounds, animation and overall excitement. I don’t remember how much I paid for the game, but I remember not feeling extremely entertained.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the game, but I vaguely remember that the price-to-entertainment value being low. I enjoyed the driving aspect of the game, but the shoot-em-up aspect was diminished by the difficult nature of driving while shooting, and the difficult nature of subsequent stages.

I recall getting near the end, but I never really finished the game. After my Mac hard drive died in and it had to be replaced, I didn’t have the save files backed up, and I did not want to start from scratch. The video bellow, taken from the PS2 version of the game, illustrates the game play.

While I have the disc, and I can most certainly play it on my Mac Mini, I don’t think I will be playing this game again any time soon as a ‘serious gamer’ (except maybe as a mini-game).

Tags: video, games, video games, macintosh, action

Recently I started listening to Retrocity, a retro gaming podcast, and Sega and the game gear were mentioned. Back when the Game Gear was released, I already owned a Gameboy (which I had bought with my own money), and I was vacationing with my dad. My ‘goal’ was to own an Atari Lynx, a Gameboy and a Game Gear. In order to get a day closer to the goal I asked my dad to buy me a Game Gear for my name day that summer.

The unit, as far as I remember, cost about $150. I was absolutely in love with the device! I only had two or three games for it, but by the time I donated it, I had amassed a whopping 7 games! The love goggles did muddy up my perception of the unit by a lot! While the colors were great, something that the Gameboy did not have, the thing ate up battery power like there was no tomorrow! The unit took six AA batteries, and that would give you an hour and a half to two hours of play time.

In order to make the unit worth while you needed to get a power adapter to hood directly into the car’s cigarette lighter port, or your home’s electrical outlet. The Game Gear went mostly unplayed before I bought the adapter (3 years after I got the unit!!!) simply because batteries were an expensive proposition, and in retrospect not environmentally safe. In the end I donated my Game Gear so it could find a good home with people who would play it a lot.

The Game Gear did have several different attachments one could buy, like a television tuner (I craved one of these since I did not have a TV in my bedroom – but never got one), and a Master System cartridge converter (also cool but in those days there was no ebay, so I could not get my hands on any cheap games)

In retrospect, for the money I paid for the Game Gear, Adapter, and all the batteries I went through, I maybe should have bought some more Gameboy games, and one of those magnifier/illuminator gadgets to play games in the dark. Oh well! This is what happens to early adopters, sometimes!

Tags: video, games, video games, sega, gamegear

Back in the days of the original gameboy (bought mine in 1990), I did not have that many games. I had Tetris and Super Mario Land. My first expansion was when I was visiting my relatives and I spent a lot of time at Toys R Us stores where relatives bought me games

One of these games was Megaman II. I had never played Megaman before, but my 11-year-old mind thought that “2” must be better than “1” so I got this Megaman to start with. I didn’t get to play the games I bought until I returned to Greece (which is where my gameboy was). I spent a lot of time on the first four bosses! I remember playing Metal Man first, and once I got to the end of the state and beat him (after many, many hours of game play), I found out that the game was not over! Darn!

I haven’t played many Megaman games after that. I have maybe played some stages on Megaman and Megaman 4 on the NES, and I have “Mega Man Powered Up” and “Mega Man Maverick Hunter X" on the PSP. What I failed to realize was that Rush (the dog companion) was not found in other Megaman games (at least the ones that I was exposed to), and it was quite a bummer.

While I no longer have Megaman II (I gave the game away, along with my gameboy), I would gladly play through it again. It was a lot of fun! Following is a video (1 of 6) that goes through the first two stages of Megaman 2, on the gameboy.

Tags: video, games, video games, megaman, gameboy

Who remembers Alone in the Dark? No! No! Not that awful Uwe Bohl film! The DOS (and subsequent Mac Port) Alone in the Dark! I bought the game back in 1995 (or was it 1996?) I still have the CD-ROM somewhere with my antique software holdings. I remember playing the game on my Performa 635CD on lazy summer afternoons. The video bellow shows how choppy the graphics were, but there was nothing scarier at the time than having a zombie come after you and you have no place to run and hide!

Maybe I should get DOSBOX to get reacquainted with this game…

Tags: video, video games, games, entertainment, DOS, macintosh, classic, system7

I’ve been hearing about Patapon on the 1Up Yours podcast for a while now, so I decided to do a YouTube search to see a bit of the gameplay. Every review I’ve seen gives the game thumbs up, and on Amazon it’s only $20. Seeing the video on YouTube made their silly little pata-pata-pata-pon song stick in a mental loop (I think I’ve been rick rolled).

Here is some wiki information on the game: CLICK

Also, the amazon product page if you are interested: Patapon




Tags: video, games, video games, patapon, PSP

Back in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1 I witnessed the heyday of Shareware on disk. Even though I owned a Mac, I could not resist deals when I went into the Staples that was next door to my dad’s garage. I saw prepackaged disks with games such as Wolfenstein for $5 (if I recall correctly). My dad and I used to visit friends with Intel 386 machines, so I always brought along the shareware that I bought at Staples.

One of these titles (and the only one that I really remember) was Wolfenstein 3D. This game was something else! I think that Wolfenstein 3D was my first FPS, and in a dark room it scared the living daylights out of me.

Here is a quick video of the game play of Wolfenstein 3D:

Tags: entertainment, video, games, video games, wolfenstein, DOS

Back in the day, when I had an SNES (version 2), and five games, one of those five games was Inspector Gadget. I got the game because I really liked the cartoon when I was growing up. The game, from what I remember, did not disappoint (mind you I was 12 at the time).

I never really got an opportunity to finish the game (a mix of family issues, eventual theft of my SNES and associated games, and relocation to the US), but when the golden age of emulation started, it was one of the first games I played on an emulator, and my response to it was a bit different. I don’t know if I had changed, if it just felt different playing it on a computer monitor than a television, or if using a keyboard instead of an SNES game pad was a turn off.

I still like the game. The game play wasn’t bad, and the aesthetics were in line with what I consider Inspector Gadget aesthetics to be. All things considered, it wasn’t a bad platformer.

This game video will give you a sense of how the game looked and played.

Tags: video, games, video games, SNES

Not much to say today. Its just an all around great spy game.

I started playing it on my Mac (back before the malfunction), and managed to finish the game.

It really did bother me that they never ported Splinter Cell 2 and Splinter Cell 3 to the Mac.

Tags: splinter, cell, macintosh, video, games, video games

This past weekend, in between sanding and scraping, I managed to get some time to play a video game or two.

This ritual usually starts with picking a game, playing for 10 minutes, and if it sticks, it sticks, otherwise pick another.

Since I am a bit stuck (and frustrated) with not being able to off NULL in Metal Gear Portable Ops, I decided to go back to a game that I have not played in ages (since February 2007 if I am not mistaken) - Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.

I had stopped playing the game because I was not making any progress. I was about 5% done with the game when I had to go rescue some thugs from the police. Of course the police won't just let you go in and pick them up, they'll follow you, chase you, ram you if you are in the car, and get in a fire fight if you are out of it. After numerous trashed cars, and many times either getting busted or wasted I gave up.

Recently I discovered some cheats which have made the game worth while again. I gave myself some weapons, enabled the health and armor cheats, and made myself never wanted by the police. This had made the game much more enjoyable and I can now focus on the story of the game, rather than getting killed over and over and over again.

The game is still quit time consuming. I spent a greater part of Sunday playing the game and I am still only about 12% done. I guess this game will take a while to finish, but now that it was made a bit easier, I guess I will be finishing it.

The weird thing is that the main character (the one you play) in the game reminds me a lot of one of my former classmates. The digital Tony Cypriani is almost the spitting image of this former classmate.

Tags: video, games, video games, GTA, cheats

One of my first PC games was Prince of Persia, on my godmother’s 286 running Windows 3.1 and DOS. The controls were a bit clunky, the sword fights not that good, and I kept falling to my death in those endless pits. I don’t know what was worse for the prince, falling and dying from the impact, or falling and dying from the impact and being sliced by stakes on the ground. I never finished the game, but it was quite entertaining.

Tags: entertainment, video, games, video games, price of persia, DOS, 286

Back in the day, my grandfather had gotten me an NES clone with a cartridge that supposedly had 100 games on it, it did not. The thing looked like the picture to the left, minus the Zapper clone. In any case, I spent a lot of time playing Contra on this clone system. The controllers on the clone were a bit stiff, but that did not impede my enjoying the game. I don’t think I ever finished the game because I ended up breaking both controllers – both of which were hardwired into the console. If you have an opportunity to play it, give it a shot. It is quite an entertaining game – especially when you get the power-ups.

Tags: NES, video, video games, entertainment, shooter

Back in the good ol’ days of the Amiga…well I didn’t own one! One of my good buddies though did and he had a ton of games! One of those games was the Chaos Engine. I really enjoyed this game.

The game play was great. I really enjoyed the top-down shooter, it reminded (and still does remind) me of the days that I spent in arcades playing such games. I never really played the game through to the end. The following YouTube video, even though long, should give you a good idea of what the game was about.

I had purchased Amiga Classix 1, 2 and 3 a while back. I think it’s included in it. Maybe I should fire up an emulator!

Tags: video, games, video games, amiga, chaos, engine, shooter

Back in the day I owned an Atari 2600, but it was VERY difficult to get cartridges for it. My grandfather did not know, and I was too young to know. So in typical grandfather fashion, my grandpa got me a cheapie clone of an Atari 2600 clone with a number of games burned into the ROM. I remember the joysticks were pretty bad – they kept breaking! (maybe I was too rough with them).

In any case, I started playing this game which I later found out was called Pitfall. I enjoyed it, but I kept dying next to a scorpion. Maybe it’s time to revisit this game


Here is a review of the game (nice video of the game):



… and here is the original television commercial (yeah the video is pretty crappy, must be an old VHS dupe):

Tags: video, video games, atari, 2600, PItfall, joystick

Well, that was an interesting weekend!
With the end of the semester drawing nearer (and most of my deliverables done) I decided to take a small break from it all and make some progress on one of my games. I started with Daxter, but I am stuck, moved on the Prince of Persia: revelations, but again I am stuck. So I decided to continue with Metal Gear Portable Ops. I had made some progress, already, but hadn’t touched it since Christmas of 2007.

So…I spent most of the day recruiting enemy soldiers, placing spies, gathering new gear, and I even managed to kill python unfortunately in this endeavor I lost Centipede, one of my best soldiers – he had both great stamina and health levels – oh well!

I am now at the Airport, recruiting commandos so I can easily infiltrate without being spotted.

Tags: video, video games, metal gear, PSP

OK, I never owned an NES, but my brother did!
When I was visiting my mom and siblings in Canada back in the early early nineties I got a lot of NES time. Duck Hunt was something that came on the same cartridge as Super Mario Brothers and it used the Zapper (a gun like thing). That game was fun – but I really hated the hound that made fun of you when you messed up…

Tags: NES, entertainment, video, games, video games, mario, duck hunt

Back in the days of the 2600, I owned two games (it was hard to find cartridges in Greece). One was Donkey Kong, and the other was Galaxian. I think that I spent more time playing Galaxian than Donkey Kong. One thing that stands vividly out is that Galaxian came with a small comic book that described the back story of the game! You don’t see that any more


Here is some game footage, and a review:

Tags: atari, 2600, video, video games, games, entertainment

Ah, sweet nostalgia!
I recently saw a video of Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 (my first console).
Donkey Kong was one of my first two video games. Sure it wasn't graphics intensive...but it I owned it

Tags: entertainment, video, games, video games, atari, 2600

Recently I've been playing Syphon Filter Dark Mirror for the Sony PSP. I've been wanting to play this game for quite some time, but only got it recently when it became part of the 'best hits' collection and thus the price dropped to a more affordable (in my mind) price of $20. In the game you play agent Gabe Logan (for the most part anyway) in his quest to root out some terrorist cell and stop their evil plot of causing great harm to the world (in other words it's sort of like Metal Gear Solid, James Bond, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell).

I played through the game in Easy mode, and now I am in the process of playing through it in Hard mode. The story is quite interesting, and it doesn't get boring (at least I did not get bored), and the game was fulfilling enough to evoke yearnings of a sequel. I think for $20, this game is well worth the price, and if you don't mind buying used (or renting), I think it's well worth giving it a try. Of course, hard core games have probably already played this game, and I am just convincing the laggards (like myself) who wait for a game to go on the reduced pricing bin before they buy it. Playing through the game in normal or hard modes unlocks extra stages to play (which I guess complete the syphon filter story). The first one is Narbonne (a city in the south of France). This was a rather short stage. Having vacationed in Narbonne a few years ago, I was expecting to go around and explore some of the city and see if the game version was as I remembered the real version to be, however this was not the case. All things considered, I liked this game.

Tags: PSP, video games, espionage, entertainment