For those of you who don’t know, Console Classix (CC) is an online video game “rental service” of sorts that focuses on classic games. It beat GameTap to the punch by a number of years, and yet still remains relatively obscure. To go along with my VC&G review of that service, I recently conducted an interview with Console Classix’s President and co-founder, Aaron Ethridge, via email. He was generous in answering the many questions I posed to him, and I find his responses honest and fascinating. The following interview is long, but if you’re interested at all in CC, it’s well worth the read. His answers were edited for spelling, structure, and minor typos only; everything else is as he wrote it.

[ Continue reading VC&G Interview: Aaron Ethridge, President of Console Classix » ]

Time’s up for the first Name Those Pixels challenge! Sorry I’m so late with my second entry, but between Thanksgiving and my new Wii, I was a bit distracted last week. Speaking of which, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and enjoyed your new PS3/Wii or your console of choice last weekend.

This week, I’m going to mix it up a little bit. We move from the 8-bit era of Roger Rabbit and Magic Johnson into the 16-bit era. The zoomed in view doesn’t really look very helpful when it’s 16-bit, but I gave it to you anyway. And here’s your hint: it is a U.S. Sega Genesis release. You can see Challenge #2 in the image above. As always, post your guesses in the comments section of this entry. Good luck!

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Here’s the answer to last week’s challenge. Those of you who noticed that it was the Tradewest logo are very astute. Actually, when I was cropping the picture, it didn’t really occur to me that it was their logo. Hopefully the color scheme was unique enough to differentiate from other Tradewest games. Here is the full screen of the game:

Magic Johnson’s Fast Break (NES)

Congratulations to Lone_Wolph (who got it first) and extrarice, you got the correct answer of Magic Johnson’s Fast Break.

The popularity of “TV Games” units seems to have waned a bit recently as overexposure and, to some measure, public apathy, have set in. After at least three years on the market, the newly reborn dedicated home video game concept (pioneered by Jakks Pacific) is a product line whose novelty has finally begun to wear off. TV Games and their countless imitators are everywhere you go; you’ll see them as impulse gifts in stores like Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, or even in less likely retail outlets like Kohls or Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Literally dozens of different units of varying levels of quality line the shelves of my local Target, for instance. But their absolute retail ubiquity doesn’t mean that a few good new ones aren’t leaking through. Jakks Pacific’s line of classic game units, developed by HotGen of London, have typically retained a high standard of quality over the years. And it’s their latest Super Pac-Man TV Games unit that I’ll be discussing in this review.

[ Continue reading VC&G Review: Super Pac-Man TV Games Unit » ]

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, which means we cook a lot, eat a lot, sleep a lot, feel uncomfortable around somewhat estranged relatives a lot, prepare to spend a lot, officially start Christmas a lot, and generally take it all for granted, despite the title of the holiday. In order to break with American tradition, I thought I’d offer a personal list of things that I think we — vintage computer and video game enthusiasts — should be thankful for. After all, these things let us enjoy our hobbies. Without them, we’d be collecting dirt and not even know what it’s called. Pay attention, my friends, as we start off serious-ish and degrade into something resembling silliness — but it’s all in the name of holiday fun.

[ Continue reading What Computer Nerds Should Be Thankful For » ]

Hello, Matt Groves here from mgroves.com. RedWolf thought that the recent Name Those Pixels contest I ran on my blog would make a great weekly feature here at Vintage Computing and Gaming.

So welcome to the first Name Those Pixels contest, VC&G edition. The object of the challenge is to guess which video game the pixels (shown in the image to the right) come from. If necessary, I will provide clues in the comments if no one is coming close, but based on the guesses I got the first time I did this, there are a lot of clever people out there who will get this right away.

To play, write your guess in this post’s comments section. The answer to this week’s challenge won’t be revealed until next week. I only ask that if you know the answer for sure, please don’t spoil it for everyone else by linking to a full screen shot of the game.

To start you off, here is your very first hint: this is a U.S. NES release.

Enjoy! –mgroves

I’ve wanted an Apple Lisa since I first set eyes on one around 1994 in my middle school library. I was studying there with a class when I spotted an exotic-looking Apple machine sitting on a cart across the room. After puzzling for a bit, I realized that it must be an Apple Lisa, an almost mythical machine that I had read about in The Journey is the Reward, but I had never even seen a picture of until then.

I had already been collecting computers for at least two years when I saw the machine, and I was always on the lookout for more additions to my collection. I had heard of a little-known machine called the “Lisa” that Apple released somewhere between the Apple III and the Macintosh, but I had never seen or used one. So when I spotted the Lisa in the library that day, it was an epiphany to me — the Apple story was vividly coming together in my brain. Knowing that the Lisa (a Lisa 2, as it turned out) in the school library was obsolete, I feared that the librarians wouldn’t know what to do with it and would throw it away. I had to take action, but I was painfully shy, and I was only about thirteen or fourteen years old. I was afraid to ask them about the computer because I figured they wouldn’t take me seriously. So I convinced my mother (the best mom ever) to drive back to the library after school and ask the librarians if we could buy the Lisa from them. The librarians had to decline the offer, since it had been donated to the library and was property of the county school system. Sadly, I fear that the Lisa in the library probably met a nasty fate not too long after that incident — a victim of short-sighted middle school bureaucracy.

[ Continue reading The Apple Lisa: My Holy Grail, Attained » ]