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Graphical tricks in classic video games – Your questions answered!

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Here’s a list of graphically impressive retro games—with a side of snark and nostalgia:

🎮 1. Donkey Kong Country (SNES, 1994)

“Rendered so hard, your SNES needed a juice box after.”
Rare flexed its silicon muscles with pre-rendered 3D sprites that looked like someone stuffed a Silicon Graphics workstation into a banana.

🕹 2. R-Type (Arcade, 1987)

“Scrolling left to right never looked so aggressively biomechanical.”
This game made you question whether Giger was moonlighting as a sprite artist. Also: lasers. So many lasers.

🦑 3. Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis, 1992)

“Because nothing says cutting-edge like an emotionally haunted dolphin.”
Wave effects, lighting, parallax scrolling—and existential dread? Ecco had it all.

🕯 4. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS1, 1997)

“Come for the vampire hunting, stay for the unnecessarily fancy capes.”
2D never looked so lush. Every hallway looked like Dracula’s interior decorator went to town with a velvet fetish.

🚀 5. Star Fox (SNES, 1993)

“Polygons so sharp they could cut your lunchables.”
The FX chip said “screw pixels” and gave us wireframe dreams rendered in what felt like 4 FPS, but we loved every choppy second.

🏙 6. Shadow of the Beast (Amiga, 1989)

“The graphics were so good, nobody noticed the game was impossible.”
16 layers of parallax scrolling because someone clearly had something to prove.

🌈 7. Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995)

“Time travel, techy wizardry, and sprites with more expression than most actors.”
Akira Toriyama’s art came to life like a pixelated anime fever dream, and the backgrounds were works of art.

👾 8. Metal Slug (Neo Geo, 1996)

“Beautifully animated chaos. It’s like Looney Tunes joined the army.”
Every explosion was lovingly hand-drawn by someone who really wanted you to enjoy blowing stuff up.

💀 9. Doom (PC, 1993)

“Yes, it ran on a potato. Yes, it still slapped.”
Those pseudo-3D corridors and pixelated demons were revolutionary. Also, 90s kids’ first intro to heavy metal and Hell.

👁️‍🗨️ 10. Out of This World / Another World (Amiga/SNES, 1991)

“When minimalist polygons punched you right in the feels.”
Rotoscoped animation and cinematic presentation that made you think, “Am I playing a game, or watching a French art film about loneliness?”

Want a ranking based on how hard they flexed their consoles? Or ones Claude might enjoy watching with you in a few years (minus the demon hordes)?

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Kill the Chainsaw Sisters in 1 second | Resident Evil 4 Remake

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Defeat the Chainsaw Sisters in 1 second: Resident Evil 4 Remake. Pretty clever!

Resident Evil 4—the game that asked, “What if survival horror had an insane amount of roundhouse kicks?” and changed the industry forever.

You play as Leon S. Kennedy, a man whose hair is impossibly perfect for someone who spends most of his time dodging chainsaws and fighting cultists in a grimy Spanish village. His mission? Rescue the U.S. President’s daughter, Ashley Graham, who has mastered the fine art of getting kidnapped and yelling “LEEEON!” at the worst possible moments.

Gone are the slow, tank-controlled zombies of old—this time, the enemies are faster, smarter, and way too into agriculture (seriously, why does every enemy have a pitchfork?). The villagers, infected with Las Plagas, don’t just shuffle around groaning—they full-on sprint at you, throwing hatchets, chanting ominously, and occasionally sprouting tentacle-heads just to keep things interesting.

And let’s talk about the Merchant, the game’s true MVP. This gravel-voiced entrepreneur appears everywhere, somehow dragging his entire arsenal of guns and rocket launchers through haunted castles and underground labs just to say, “What’re ya buyin’?” Legend.

Resident Evil 4 also gave us the most action-movie moments ever crammed into a horror game—outrunning a giant mechanical statue, suplexing cultists, a knife fight on top of a table, and an entire section where Leon rides a jet ski because, at that point, why not?

It’s over-the-top, ridiculous, and absolutely one of the best games ever made. 10/10 would suplex a monk again.

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Ranking and Reviewing Mindscape NES games

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JohnRiggs – Mindscape published many games that people have heard of, some ported from computer, some ported from other companies. Heres a look at all 20 games from Mindscape for NES.

Mindscape—the gaming company that was like that one friend who almost made it big but kept tripping over their own shoelaces.

Founded in the early ’80s, Mindscape tried its hand at everything: educational games, adventure games, simulation games—basically, if there was a genre, they threw something at it to see if it would stick. Sometimes, they struck gold (The Chessmaster, Prince of Persia ports), and other times, well… let’s just say they had a talent for making games that made you wonder, “Who asked for this?”

By the ‘90s, they had their hands in everything from DOS classics to weird licensed tie-ins (The Terminator, Mario Teaches Typing—yes, that was them). But as the gaming industry grew into a high-stakes blockbuster business, Mindscape, bless their hearts, kept plugging away with a mix of hits, misses, and “Wait, they made that?”

In the 2000s, they did what many game companies do: get passed around like a hot potato in a series of acquisitions before fading into the gaming history books. Today, they live on in the memories of ‘90s kids who remember booting up Reader Rabbit or getting inexplicably frustrated at Madeline games.

RIP, Mindscape—you were weird, and we kind of loved you for it.

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Champ Games 2024 Homebrew GAME RANKINGS for the ATARI 2600!

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The Atari 2600 was the OG console, the granddaddy of gaming, and the reason your parents thought “video games” meant Pong. Released in 1977, it was basically a wood-paneled time machine that transported families straight into pixelated bliss—or chaos, depending on who got stuck with the unresponsive joystick. With its faux-wood trim, the 2600 looked less like a gaming console and more like it belonged in your dad’s rec room next to the shag carpet and avocado-green sofa. But don’t let the retro aesthetics fool you—this machine was a beast in disguise, packing 4 whole kilobytes of memory. That’s barely enough to save a Word document today, but back then? Pure wizardry.

The games were simple yet maddeningly addictive. Who needs a cinematic cutscene when you have a square pretending to be a tank in Combat or a rectangle heroically rescuing princesses in Adventure? And let’s not forget the iconic controllers: single-button joysticks that felt indestructible until you got mad during a Pitfall! session and threw one against the wall. Atari 2600 games had something for everyone, whether it was dodging missiles in Missile Command or, uh, experiencing the infamously terrible E.T., which taught us all an important lesson: even classics can have their flops. It was crude, charming, and occasionally frustrating, but the Atari 2600 was the spark that ignited the gaming industry. Without it, your PS5 would just be a really expensive Blu-ray player.

Featured, Mobile & Handhelds

‘Too Big’ For Steam Deck: AAA Games Are Struggling On Valve’s Handheld

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Oliver Mackenzie (Digital Foundry) does his best to run the latest triple-A games on Valve’s handheld. Which games run well? Which games run well and look decent? And which games are indeed simply ‘Too Big’ for Steam Deck? Does a more powerful handheld like the Asus ROG Ally power past the Deck’s problems?

The Valve Steam Deck, aka Gabe Newell’s love letter to PC gamers who secretly wanted a Nintendo Switch but were too proud to admit it. This chonky handheld beast is basically a gaming PC crammed into a device the size of a grilled cheese sandwich on steroids—portable enough to take anywhere, but still big enough to make your wrists question your life choices after an hour of Elden Ring.

What Makes It Special?

  • Runs your entire Steam library—which means you can finally ignore 90% of the games you impulse-bought during a Steam sale… on the go!

  • Has trackpads! Because Valve still believes that trackpads are the future, despite a decade of gamers collectively going, “Ehh…”

  • Customizable as heck—want to install Windows? Emulators? A toaster simulator? Go wild.

  • “Portable,” but in a “you might need a dedicated backpack for it” kind of way.

The Downsides?

  • Battery life is… negotiable. Playing a high-end game? Congrats, you have about 90 minutes before your Deck turns into an expensive paperweight.

  • It’s big. Like, big big. Holding one is like gripping a sci-fi weapon from a movie where The Rock has to save the world.

  • Linux-based OS, which is great if you love tinkering, but if you’re just trying to play games, you’ll occasionally feel like you’ve been thrown into IT Tech Support mode.

Final Verdict?

The Steam Deck is a glorious, slightly impractical marvel—perfect for anyone who wants to game anywhere, anytime, and develop forearms like a Greek statue in the process. It’s the closest thing we have to a true portable gaming PC, and for that, we salute Valve. Now if only they’d make Half-Life 3…

Featured, System Reviews, Mobile & Handhelds, PC Games

OneXPlayer G1 Gaming PC – It’s Powerful…but WEIRD

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The OneXPlayer G1 is like a gaming laptop and a Steam Deck had a wild night out and accidentally created a boxy, overpowered handheld that can run Cyberpunk 2077 and give you a forearm workout. It’s the device for people who think, “Sure, I want portability—but I also want all the frames, a full keyboard, and a controller that cramps.” MORE INFO: https://bit.ly/43qnp59

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Sega Neptune Project – a Sega Genesis and 32X onto a single board

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The Neptune Project: ► Project Github: https://github.com/Board-Folk/Neptune ► Follow COSAM: https://x.com/cosam_the_great?lang=en

The Sega Neptune, the Bigfoot of gaming consoles—some say it existed in prototype form, others claim it was just a fever dream brought on by Sega’s caffeine-fueled brainstorming sessions in the ‘90s. Either way, this mythical beast was supposed to be a Sega Genesis and 32X hybrid, combining two things that Sega fans already had separately into one convenient package…

Why Was It Special?

  • It would have saved gamers the hassle of duct-taping their Genesis and 32X together like a Frankenstein creation.

  • No need for extra cables! (A big deal in the era where Sega consoles needed more wires than a ‘90s home office.)

  • It had a cool name! Seriously, “Neptune” made it sound like it could survive in deep space… unlike the Saturn, which actually launched and promptly sank like a gas giant in quicksand.

Why Did It Never Come Out?

By the time Sega was maybe, possibly, sort of ready to release it, the Sega Saturn was already on the horizon. Sega realized that selling a console that was technically two years outdated was probably not the best strategy—although, let’s be honest, that never stopped them before.

Thus, the Neptune was unceremoniously abandoned, joining the ranks of lost Sega hardware like the Sega Pluto and the Dreamcast’s dignity post-2001. Today, it remains a legend, whispered about in retro gaming circles—the console that could have been, but probably would have been a bad idea anyway.

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The Rise and Fall of the SSX game series. 😢

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The SSX series is what happens when someone says, “What if we made snowboarding… but completely unhinged?” and then followed through with maximum chaos. Short for Snowboard Supercross, SSX first launched in 2000 and instantly turned the slopes into a gravity-defying playground. Forget realistic snowboarding — in SSX, you could launch yourself 300 feet into the air, pull off a triple backflip while grabbing your board with one pinky, and still have time to wink at the camera before landing perfectly. The game didn’t care about physics; it cared about style.

Every SSX game had the same core philosophy: snowboard like you have a death wish, rack up points, and look cool doing it. The characters were all basically extreme sports superheroes — like Mac, the lovable goofball who treated snowboarding like a rock concert, or Elise, who probably did double backflips just to grab a sandwich. The courses were pure chaos, ranging from death-defying mountain peaks to neon-lit night runs, and the soundtrack? Absolute fire. (Jurassic 5 while shredding a glacier? Yes, please.) By the time SSX Tricky came out, the series had achieved cult status, teaching players that if you’re not pulling off a mid-air worm while flying over a bottomless ravine, are you even snowboarding?

Featured, Travel

Game On Expo in Phoenix Arizona – It’s Almost Here!

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The Game On Expo is happening in Phoenix, AZ at the the Phoenix Convention Center. The dates are April 4th-6th, 2025. I hope to see you there!

More information can be found here: https://gameonexpo.com/

What is Game On Expo?  Phoenix’s annual pilgrimage for gamers, nerds, and anyone who thinks life should come with a health bar and a save point. This three-day festival is a glorious mash-up of retro arcade nostalgia, tabletop chaos, cosplay shenanigans, and enough gaming merch to make your wallet cry in the corner.

What to Expect?

  • Vendors selling everything from rare SNES cartridges to anime plushies that stare into your soul.

  • Cosplayers who have put in more effort into their outfits than most people do into their day jobs.

  • Tournaments where button-mashers and pro-level players clash in a battle of reflexes and broken controllers.

  • Voice actors from your favorite games & YouTubers, there to sign autographs, answer burning fan questions, and occasionally indulge in meme-worthy moments.

And let’s not forget the arcade section, where you can test your skills on vintage cabinets and realize that, yes, your childhood skills at “Street Fighter II” have completely abandoned you.

Whether you’re there to compete, collect, cosplay, or just bask in the glow of RGB-lit everything, Game On Expo is a weekend of glorious geekery where everyone speaks fluent nerd. Just be prepared to walk away with a bag full of collectibles, a phone full of photos, and a deep sense of regret that you didn’t buy that limited-edition Zelda print when you had the chance.