by William Schwartz | Jan 27, 2025 | 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, Console/Handheld, Early IBM DOS, Gaming, Indie Built-Retro Inspired
With the appearance of the role-playing game on video consoles, a genre less about actual role-playing and more about navigating enemy dungeons via numbers rather than reflexes, we also saw the appearance of grinding. How grinding works is simple enough. If...
by William Schwartz | Jan 21, 2025 | 2020s, Console/Handheld, Gaming, Reviews
What first stands out about Inspector Waffles: Early Days is just how cute the idea is. Inspector Waffles is a PC detective game from 2021. While Inspector Waffles also has a retro visual design, it’s more akin to early flash games on the PC in the early...
by William Schwartz | Jan 18, 2025 | 1970s, 2020s, Gaming, Opinions, Pinball, Reviews, Stern
Last month, Amazon Prime’s Secret Level adapted fifteen video games to short, animated films. Some of these could fairly be described as retro video games, though the bulk of them dated to the twenty-first century. But one of the odder ones of the full...
by William Schwartz | Dec 16, 2024 | 2010s, Reviews, The Story Of...
No one can ever quite agree what really makes a video game retro. Ten years old used to be a good yardstick, but as time marches on, and ten years ago now includes the PlayStation 4, well, that’s not generally a good definition. Strangely enough, though,...
by William Schwartz | Dec 9, 2024 | 2000s, 2020s, Reviews
In the classic situation comedy Gilligan’s Island, which deals with seven colorful castaways stranded on an island, there are two versions of the theme song. In the first version, five of the castaways are named, while two of them are filed away under the...