Let's Read - Nintendo Power #9
1989 comes to a close with the Nov./Dec. issue of Nintendo Power, but the big N isn't leaving the 80s behind with a whimper. They're going out with a BRICK. Or rather, a bunch of bricks in the form of a puzzle game from a Russian mathematician that would turn adults and children alike into absolute zombies in the coming months. I'm talking about none other than Tetris, and its impact on the gaming world makes it ripe for inclusion as this issue's cover feature. "G
So I've been fussing around with a few hidden object games over the last couple of months which is why my progress on this blog has been...infrequent to say the least. Some of them have been crap, a couple of them have been good, but only one has stuck out so far enough to make me want to write about it on here, and that's Dire Grove.
Dire Grove is just one game in a series known as "Mystery Case Files". These have been published on a number of platforms including the Wii and the DS, b
You want to know something? Jack Kilborn isn't right in the head. They say you've got to be a little off upstairs to write horror stories in the first place, but...sweet mother of pearl, somebody dropped Kilborn on his skull five or six times then fed his psyche into a Veg-O-Matic for shits and giggles just to see what would come out on the other end ("It slices...it dices...it warps fragile little minds..."). The most likely culprit? Joe Konrath, the real live writer behind Kilborn's pseudo
It's been a while since my last one of these, and I find myself desiring to get back on the horse, so let's get this party started up again, shall we? Hold on to your seats boys and girls, and LET'S READ!!
Hot damn, this issue brings back memories. Aside from the first issue, this is the earliest issue of the magazine that I still own in physical print format (I had issue #9 a long time ago, but it met with a gruesome accident involving Kool-Aid that I'm still not willing to discuss). In any
There are a couple of Retromags members on my PS3 friends list, but I'm not sure if you all knew that outside of blasting Necromorphs in Dead Space, or ruling the city streets in Saint's Row, I spent an awful lot of time in Sony's online avatar-based virtual world called PlayStation Home. If any of my readers ever ran across me on there, feel free to chime in and say hello in the comments--I was "Areala" on there, just as I am here. I know, how original, right? Anyway, I got involved with Home
Realizing I haven't posted a blog entry in well over a year is kind of becoming an annual event here in my Retromags world. I'm not as active as I should be, as I'd like to be, and much as I wish I could promise to change all of that, I don't make promises I can't be certain of keeping. One of the most recent things I blogged about was the question of what happens when one's desire to keep up with gaming flounders, and as it turns out, there's still no cut-and-dried answer to that. Playing video
We all know Easter Eggs. Not the kind the bunny goes around hiding, but the little hidden things programmers and designers leave in the game for players to find. Most commonly, these are debugging codes that allow you to skip levels, fill your inventory, max your powers, become invulnerable or other tools that let testers whisk quickly from one place to another without having to play the game from the start time after time after time. Less commonly, you'll find things like hidden playable cha
Areala's "What If..." Game Design series is a partially-serious, partially-tongue-in-cheek, completely-hyphen-laden look at what would happen if things that are not currently video games were turned into video games under her supervision.
Part One
Our first foray into this strange and uncharted world of would-be game design merges two of Areala's most favorite things: Dungeons & Dragons and adventure games in an effort to create the ultimate player-slaying nastyfest. I speak of none
Combing through the archives, I thought it would be fun to review some classic games here in the blog, and since adventure games have always been enjoyable to me, I decided to write about a quirky and unique but often frustrating and entirely too short one from the DOS era. "Daughter of Serpents" (also released later on CD-ROM and re-titled "The Scroll") is a point-and-click graphics adventure along the lines of King's Quest or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. But while those titles wer
Yes, you read the title correctly: 'Survival Horror without the horror.'
"What the hell are you talking about, Areala?"
Glad you asked. You'll note that if you remove 'horror' from 'survival horror' you are left with just one thing: survival. And while this description could apply to a great many games since nearly every video game has "not dying" as one of its prerequisites for winning, there's something to be said for a game that tries to take a different approach to things. Disaster Repo
This is not your typical Areala blog entry, as will readily become apparent when you keep reading. I know that normally my writings deal with video games of some kind, and occasionally books, but today I decided that I have neglected music long enough, and it was time to fix that. And what better kind of music to write about than the kind that has been relegated to the clearance bins of history but that is still deserving of your attention. There's certainly plenty of it out there, especially
Presumably at some point Phillyman will find a better blog entry to feature on the front page than mine about why I care about old magazines and it will no longer be featured so prominantly. Since this is a sort of follow-up to the original entry, I thought I'd better make sure that I pointed to the original which can be found right under this rock here. While it is a follow-up, it's not a direct sequel, and you can easily read this entry without having read the other. I just love shameless s
November of 2009 saw the release of a new roleplaying game on the Nintendo DS (at least here in the US) entitled "Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain", developed by Big Blue Bubble Inc. and published by Aspyre. In it, you take on the persona of an adventurer who is very interested in getting his (or her) hands on the loot inside the previously-abandoned Dwarven mountainhome of Firetop. Legend speaks of treasure troves of gold coins, sparkling gemstones, and magical trinkets galor
No, seriously, ignore the hype Sony and Microsoft have been dumping into the press about their new motion controller Wii-toos for a minute, and think. Do you care about this? Do you know anybody who does? The answers you come up with, after careful consideration, are more than likely, "No," and "No," respectively. I'm not hating on either Sony or Microsoft (I own a PS3), and I'm no Nintendo fangirl (I don't own a Wii). I'm simply asking the question that nobody else in the gaming media seem
I received the following message from an individual who identified himself as Leonard Huntings (though this is possibly a pseudonym). It was apparently reconstructed from an analog source and remastered for internet distribution. It's a little creepy...
Appended to this message was the video itself, which I am presenting here:
It's currently impossible to know where this video orginated, as I don't know anybody named Leonard Huntings. An educated guess would be that it somehow ti
Let's Read - Nintendo Power #6
Welcome back folks to another exciting episode of Let's Read magazines with Areala! Today, we're tackling the sixth issue of Nintendo Power. Why are we tackling the sixth issue of Nintendo Power, you ask? Because we've already taken care of issues 1-5 in previous blog entries, and it's always best to avoid redundancies.
A quick look at the cover will tell you that this is, in fact, the May/June issue from 1989, and the feature everybody will be talking
I've spent most of my free time today watching the news. Story after story, report after report, picture after picture, of the aftermath of one of the worst tragedies to hit Japan since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And while the tragedy may seem remote and half a world away to somebody who lives in Indiana, there's still a part of me that is shaken, awed, and ultimately humbled by what is happening right now.
This blog is usually reserved for my thoughts on video games and gaming-r
If there's any question that is bound to throw me for a loop (aside from "What's your favorite book?"), it's this one. I love when people ask it, because it means that they are at least faking a mild interest in my life, but at the same time I hate when people ask it because it means that they expect some sort of answer besides, "How the F&@$ should I know?"
My musical tastes run from one end of the spectrum to the other, and that means that you'll find in my collection everything from 60s
In the days before the Internet started shoving a cruel, pointed stake into the hearts of video game magazines, we had no choice but to trust the reviewers who got paid to do what we all wished we could get paid to do: play lots of video games and then write about it.
The guys and gals of the gaming journalism world were supposed to be our lifelines, making sure we didn't buy the crap and didn't miss the gold. Usually they were on the money. But sometimes...well, deadlines can do strange thin
Magazine demographics often come into play when deciding what ads agencies will submit to a particular publication. In the case of this ad, which came from the very first issue of Next Generation magazine in 1995, their attempt to reach an older, more mature audience meant they got stuff that wouldn't fly in the pages of EGM or GamePro, which were targeted at a younger teenage audience.
Check this out though: that's an offer to write a horror fiction story for a video game inspired by Clive Ba
Dear Daddy,
I hope it's OK that I call you 'Daddy' because it's all you ever heard me call you when I was a little girl. I suck at buying cards, so this letter will have to suffice. Basically, I just wanted to let you know that I love you, I hope everything is well, and that I've been trying my best to be the sort of kid you'd be proud to claim as your own.
A huge part of who you are influenced my formative years. Whether it was a quick trip into town to pick up a bite to eat at McDonalds,
I feel like I've hit the wall, both creatively and when it comes to gaming. I've so far ignored this current generation of games, as none of the "next gen" systems on offer feel like they have anything to offer me, and yet this creates a conundrum for me. I honestly cannot remember the last time a game absolutely blew me away, and yet looking back through the past, through my own memories, I can see dozens upon dozens of instances. Some of them were gaming "firsts", such as the first time I saw
Well, it's October, which means the desire for pants-wetting fear has come back into vogue for a few weeks. So what better way to celebrate spooky season than a write-up about some games which genuinely scared me at one point or another!
Note that this is not a "best of" list, or similar type of ranking. The order here isn't indicative of a specific game necessarily being better than the one below it, or worse than the one above it. All I'm ranking here is how effective these games were at
Yes, yet another blog on the Internet.
Why? Because I can. 'Nuff said. Everybody say hello to the new redheaded step-blog at Retromags, written by a real, live redhead.
*huggles*
Areala
My PS3 suffered the Yellow Light of Death problem today about an hour into my playtime of the Silent Hill HD Collection which I had just purchased today. *sigh*
Skyrim FINALLY gets its DLC released on the PS3 this coming week, and for the first week it's available, Bethesda is offering it at 50% off to apologize for taking it so long to get here. Gonna miss out on that sale, because there's no way I'll have my PS3 fixed in time. *double sigh*
Sending my PS3 in to Sony to get it repaired wil
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