Earlier this year, Pen & Sword Books released The History of the Pokémon Games, which I reviewed here. At the same time, they released the much less obviously marketable The History of Silent Hill by Samantha Morris. Similar titles notwithstanding, these are very different books. While the Pokémon volume functions primarily as a sort of encyclopedia, Morris is comparably restrictive about what she considers to be a “true” Silent Hill game, limiting her analysis to the four numbered entries, Homecoming, and Downpour.

Morris doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining why she doesn’t consider Origins to be a central title when everyone else does. Ironically, based on her descriptions of the other six games, it seems that the main problem with origins is that it’s too concerned with the lore. Despite all the Silent Hill games being connected to, well, the creepy, foggy community of Silent Hill, only the first and third games in the series have a meaningful story connection. And even that’s technically a plot twist. Silent Hill is more a vibe than a place, a sort of haunting that works its way inside-out from the terrors of your own mind, presenting a nightmare world that doesn’t even look the same to anyone else.

This sort of thematic ground is pretty common for any fans of the series. The Boss Fight book exclusively about Silent Hill 2 makes a similar sort of argument, just in more detail and focused entirely on Silent Hill 2’s own narrative. Like that text, The History of Silent Hill is stuck in an awkward place in that dissecting the themes pretty much requires spoiling the whole story, and the author can do little except beg the reader to play the game if they haven’t already. The History of Silent Hill does have happier new than the Boss Fight book did in regard to playing Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware, though, in that Morris is adamant that the 2024 remake is an exceptional conversion made by people who clearly understood what the original game was trying to do. Not to be confused at all with the 2012 remake, which ruins it by among other things, not managing the fog properly.

For the other five games, Morris recounts not just the thematic horror of the stories but also how they tend to play out in practice from a gameplay perspective. Her bestiaries of the monsters in these games describe how they act, how they can be killed, and what this says about the subconscious nightmares of the main character that imply or spawn such creatures. This isn’t exactly a player’s guide, mind you. Morris develops her interpretations of these games by stripping them down to all their individual elements, development, plot, characters, monsters, endings, and uses her generally accurate descriptions of them to create a greater thesis about what these games are actually about.

It’s a good analytical technique if only because it can help job the reader’s memory about how these games looked and felt when it may well have been ten or twenty years since they actually played them. Of course, the fickle nature of memory itself is a pretty predominant theme in these games, with the warped worlds the players encounter all being a direct case of distortions in these mental records. Laid out end to end like this, it’s easy to see how all six games are connected in more profound ways than just the lore. Morris even lays out a fairly convincing argument as to how Silent Hill 4 is unfairly maligned, as both gameplay and storywise, all of its strange departures from the formula are perfectly within the larger ethos of Silent Hill.

The post A review of The History of Silent Hill appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

As far as “retro” games go, Red Dead Redemption is kind of pushing it. The 2010 open world game was already released well into the modern AAA game production environment. Matt Margini’s tome from Boss Fight Books implicitly acknowledges how this is a different story from the Boss Fight norm in that it’s hard to isolate individual influences. For the most part, Margini describes “Rockstar” at large as responsible for the game’s design, though he does make it clear that Rockstar was fairly infamous for brutal treatment of its employees in this time period.

Despite this modern aesthetic, Red Dead Redemption has a fairly credible case for being a retro title in our hearts because, as Margini’s father notes, it’s the game where you can ride a horse. Yes, technically speaking, Red Dead Redemption is a riff off of the Grand Theft Auto genre of open world gameplay. But as Margini articulates in this book, Red Dead Redemption is also a reconceptualization of the entire Wild West genre. When reading a novel, or watching a movie, the idea of the Wild West representing freedom is an abstraction. Yet in Red Dead Redemption, you can actually play as the isolated gunslinger in an open world where you can do pretty much whatever you want. And where does that get you?

Well, as it turns out, not very far. The great joke of Red Dead Redemption, in Margini’s telling, is that its hero John Marston, actually has very little real control over the bleak, cynical world he lives in. Sure, he can do anything he wants in the open world and even has a pretty badass bullet time power to boot. But no matter what Marston does, in the long run, he double-crosses his own allies and is doubled-crossed in turn by the feds. He realizes the general hopelessness of his own situation and not only fails to stop his own cycle of violence, but we the player even get to watch that cycle continue after his own death.

These are layers to the open world genre that were not common in 2010 and still aren’t really all that common today. The unsettling implication of this story is that Marston is more being played than he is playing the game. And this is a legacy that goes back to the Western genre in general. Margini’s Red Dead Redemption book, despite being part of a line of general video game explaining books from Boss Fight, actually tends to function better as an introduction the abstract concept of the West for people who might not really know all that much about it. Red Dead Redemption itself assumes (probably correctly) that its players have at least some idea what the West is, if only through pop culture osmosis. But they’re less likely to understand the theoretical underpinnings.

Margini’s analysis on this front is accurate…mostly. Margini buys into a lot of the myths about the myths of the West that can distort some of its interpretation. The depiction of native Americans, for example, assumes a longstanding one-dimensional presentation of their appearance in the Western genre, when in fact the dark, almost comically ambiguous native American quests in Red Dead Redemption aren’t as far off from “classic” Western stories as you’ve probably been led to believe. Margini also completely misses the general cynicism of the Mexican revolutionary quests are some of the game’s most genuinely racist sequences, playing into stereotypes of Latin American cultures as being incapable of non-corrupt leadership.

Mind, Margini’s impressions are so widespread I can’t exactly fault him for presenting them as uncontroversial. He cites his sources, and his analysis in his own right is pretty on-point. His writing understands the difference between John Ford and Sergio Leone, and dives back as far as weirdly homoerotic quotes from the landmark Western novel The Virginian to make his arguments. But at the end of the day, it’s not the citations that give Margini’s book its emotional heart. No, it’s his very sincere effort to understand why, of all the games his father has ever seen him play, it’s the one where the player character can ride a horse that struck a chord with the old man.

The post A review of Red Dead Redemption from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Wee Ninja Lynx World 1-1

While console gaming has moved on from the original game, retro gamers certainly haven’t. Of course, a direct port of the game to even an ancient system like, say, the Commodore 64 will earn you a DMCA strike from Nintendo faster than you can say goomba. But that hasn’t stopped devs from making games that are almost-but-not-quite SMB. From mid-2025 to mid-2026, developer Paul Lay posted and updated versions of his side-scrolling platform game Wee Ninja for the Atari 5200 to the AtariAge forums. By its very nature, it was a technical achievement, since the 5200 wasn’t particularly known for games like these. In March of 2026, Songbird Productions announced a surprise Lynx port for release on a physical cartridge in April.

While the game is not described as a Mario clone, Lay says it owes everything to Mario. You play as a ninja, jumping and running through 32 levels, split up into 8 different worlds of 4 levels each. Jump on top of enemies to dispatch them. Bounce bricks from the bottom to potentially destroy them, or release items like power-ups and coins. Some of the green pipes can be descended to reach secret areas with more coins and power-ups, as well as to take shortcuts through the level. At the end of each world, there is a boss that you must defeat. It’s all very familiar. The level types are also quite familiar, with levels set underground, underwater, and atop high platforms.

Wee Ninja Lynx World 2-2 Water

Wee Ninja’s power-up system has more in common with later Super Mario games. Your ninja can find one of 3 different suits that will give you different abilities. All suits will allow you to take a hit without losing a life and will also allow you to break bricks by hitting them from below. The red ninja suit grants you 12 seconds of invincibility. The blue ninja suit gives you five tiny sticks that can be used to take out enemies. And the black ninja suit gives you five stones that can be thrown at your adversaries.

The game has two skill levels: easy and normal. The easy skill level allows you to take an extra hit before losing a life, on top of whatever suit you may have at the time. The normal mode is the standard one-hit, and you’ve lost a life. The game also has a password system that lets you jump to any world you want once you complete it.

The Lynx version of the game uses the same base game as the 5200 but enhances the graphics and sound, leveraging the venerable handheld’s superior hardware. One of the most obvious enhancements is the scrolling backgrounds. While the original scrolled everything on a single plane, the Lynx adds parallax scrolling, which is particularly notable in levels set above ground. The game also takes advantage of the Lynx’s expanded color palette, which really makes the graphics pop. Background elements and characters have more advanced animations and are of greater detail. In addition to the graphics, the audio has been enhanced, with new background music throughout the game. The Lynx cartridge format even allows the game to save high scores. All in all, the package is very polished and extremely high quality. Had this title been released during the system’s retail life, it would have done well.

Wee Ninja Lynx World 2-1 Snow

I love this game. It is an addictive experience, one of those “just one more go” affairs that sucks you in for hours if you let it (or at least as long as your supply of AAs lasts). Everything runs smoothly. The graphics are perfect for the Lynx screen: not too small so as to be difficult to make out, but not so large as to take up excessive screen space. It’s comparable to Super Mario Land on the Game Boy. Similar designs to the original, but made to fit the portable screen. The jumping can be a bit finicky, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be tackling levels without a care in the world in no time. The game is challenging, but not unfairly so. The addition of the easy skill level really helps to level the playing field. If you ever wanted to know what Super Mario Bros might have been like on the Atari Lynx, Wee Ninja is about as close as you’re likely to get. And it’s completely worth the price of admission.

A big thanks to Carl Forhan from Songbird Productions for the media used here, so no one has to suffer through dodgy pictures of my Lynx LCD.

Gallery

Wee Ninja Lynx World 1-2

Wee Ninja Lynx Game Over

Wee Ninja Lynx World 4-2

Wee Ninja Lynx World 4-3

Wee Ninja Lynx World 6-2

Wee Ninja Lynx World 2-2

Wee Ninja Lynx World 2-1

Wee Ninja Lynx World 1-3

The post Review – Wee Ninja for the Atari Lynx appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Easy to describe, “Typoman” uses letters to forge its “Hero.” Literally, the character’s design is an H, E, R and O.  Even the enemies and obstacles are made up on consonants and vowels. In order to advance through each level, gamers have to create words to activate and traverse the terrain, creating words like “on” and “off” in easy situations and much complex verbiage in later levels. The end result is a platformer that works, it’s got a bit of “Mario” and “Pitfall” in it, but thanks to the puzzle elements, has that something “extra” to make it stand out of the crowd.

Much of the speciality has to do with the games’ look. Right from the start, “Typoman” creates a sense of wonder and fun that you’ll enjoy. Dark and gritty with an endearing aire, “Typoman” will instantly draw connections to another fantastic platformer, “Braid.” It’s here where much of the intrigue is created, jumping around, climbing and swinging. But at the same time, the dangers that await may be too much for the average gamer. Simply put, you will die quite a bit in “Typoman.” At times, you’ll have no idea how to remedy your situation. While there’s a much-needed hint system via the GamePad, you’ll have to think a lot more than you would in the average platformer.

And here lies the caveat. “Typoman” as a plaformer alone is fun- everything works the way it should and it’s fun in spite of its at times absurd difficulty. The puzzle elements too are a hit, but create another layer to the action that is sometimes a pain to manage. The end result is a unique blend of puzzle and platforming that isn’t as enthralling as it is at first glance. Although you’ll want to play through “Typoman” in its entirety, you may find yourself getting frustrated enough to put it down.

Thanks to the success of a handful of titles over the past few years, Nintendo has become somewhat of a home for nifty indie titles. “Typoman,” even with its lack of gameplay balance, is yet another another example of an innovative and fun game that separates the Wii U from other consoles.

The Good:

Atmosphere: Similar to “Braid,” “Typoman” immerses the gamer in its world and creates an adventure you won’t want to escape from.

Wii U Enhanced: This game could be great on another console, but it’s ultimately a perfect fit on the Wii U.

The Bad:

Difficult: You’re going to perish quite often in this game and that’s enough to turn off some casual gamers.

Final Thoughts:

It’s not a perfect puzzle game and the difficulty sometimes hampers that platform experience, but combining both in “Typoman” is a recipe for success.

The post Retro Review: Typoman: ‘Braid’ meets ‘Scrabble’ appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Although it does a solid job of recreating the cute and charming world of the original series, the gameplay is lather, rinse, repeat and does nothing to pull the gamer in and invest the real time needed in order to bring out the game’s finer qualities. Simply put, although there’s a bevy of creative tools at your disposal, it takes far too long and access them and as a result, you’ll find yourself giving up well before you get access to them.

The game’s strength is the interaction between characters. A new hire at Tom Nook’s interior and exterior home design company, you’re thrust into work from the get-go, working with a variety of customers, all with special needs and desires for their homes. Over time, you begin to build the town, creating, cafes, schools and hospitals, turning the small, cozy place into a much more vibrant community. While the investment has its moments (thanks especially to the fact that you can create custom designs) and it’s always cool to check out your finished product, there are several huge problems with the gameplay mechanics, making the game something much more childish than you’d expect.

While gamers can rate the designs of others using Nintendo’s Miiverse, there’s no real way your creations are graded in the single-player mode. All you really have to do is use the content given to you by the character at the start of every new level and you could call it a day. It makes all the time and energy fine-crafting each home a waste of time and eliminates any real reward.

In the end, there’s a ton of stuff to do in “Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer,” but it’s all too fetch and repetitive to be engaging. A huge misstep for the cult-favorite series, it’s not as happy an experience as you’d expect and is only for the most dedicated AC fans.

The Good:

Amiibo Cards: Seeing new characters get into your game via the amiibo card system is one of the coolest things in the game. Trade ‘em with your friends and all of a sudden the game gets a lot beefier in terms of content.

The Bad:

Easy to Advance: All you have to do is use the required pieces on each level and you can advance. There’s little skill involved.

Too Much Investment, Not Enough Pay-Off: It takes hours to unlock the real creative versatility of “Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer” and most gamers won’t invest that much time in it.

Same Old Song: The gameplay doesn’t change much, even when you acquire new tools. As a result, you’ll get bored pretty fast.

Final Thoughts:

Although there are a fun mix of characters and the writing is what you’d expect from an “Animal Crossing” game, “Happy Home Designer” requires entirely too much work and not enough satisfaction for even the most dedicated fans of the franchise. If you’re starving for some of the series’ classic gameplay, you won’t find it here.

The post Retro Review: Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer Review: A Sorry Spin-Off appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Jupiter Fracture Title Screen

In case you haven’t heard, the classic Commodore has undergone a rebirth. Retro computer YouTuber Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson managed to gather the support and financing to purchase the bits and pieces of Commodore held by other companies and bring them together into the new Commodore International Corporation. The first major product from the company was the Commodore 64 Ultimate (C64U), a reimagining of the classic 8-bit powerhouse, functionally similar to the original with many modern quality-of-life improvements under the hood.

Bundled with the new systems was a USB drive (housed in a classic data cassette) loaded with games, apps, scene demos, and SID music files to play with. In addition, owners gained access to CommoServe, an online repository of software and media. This serves as a new distribution method for new software, as evidenced by the first game published by the new Commodore, Jupiter Fracture (stylized “Fract/ure”). The game is exclusive to C64U owners and users of the CommodoreOS Linux-based operating system.

Jupiter Fracture is a sequel to the classic Jupiter Lander game, originally released on the VIC-20 and later the Commodore 64 in the early 80s. In fact, the game was one of the earliest releases for the original Commodore 64. The game was part of the broader “lunar lander” genre, which ranged from text-only simulations to a popular vector-based arcade game. The concept was loosely based on the 1969 Apollo Lunar Module landing on the Moon. As your lander falls to the surface, you would use thrusters to overcome gravity and inertia to touch down safely at specified locations. As you used your thrusters, you would consume fuel, which made it more difficult as the game went on. Jupiter Lander changed the location from the Moon to the planet Jupiter, giving you three different landing pads on the lone level to bring your ship down on. While the game remained very simple, it was incredibly popular, and is still looked upon fondly by those who played it as new C64 owners back in the day.

Jupiter Fracture Levels

Fast-forward to 2025, and Jupiter Fracture picks up where the original left off. The story goes that on April 29, 1994, the planet Jupiter experienced a mysterious event called The Blip, which fractured the planet into a number of floating fragments. As the last surviving lander pilot, it is up to you to explore each of these fragments, land, and discover the secret behind the mystery of The Blip.

Each of the planetary fragments is composed of different material, contains different hazards, and is affected by gravity differently. You will need to navigate the narrow underground corridors of each level, avoiding obstacles such as lasers, force fields, and even mines. If you hit a wall, run into a hazard, come down too hard, or miss a platform, you will lose a ship. Just like in the original, successfully landing on a pad will earn you bonus fuel, which will be important, as the multiscreen levels are much more complex than in the original game. The slower and more accurate your landing, the more points and bonus fuel you receive.

One notable change, aside from the expanded gameplay levels, is the method of controlling your ship. In the original Jupiter Lander, you had three thrusters that you used to control your ship: a downward-facing thruster that controlled descent and ascent, and two lateral thrusters that controlled horizontal movement. In the sequel, the control has shifted back to the method used in the original Lunar Lander arcade game. Lateral movement now requires rotating in the opposite direction and thrusting, making landing that much harder.

Jupiter Fracture Level 1

This game is a great sequel to a classic title. The vastly expanded gameplay helps to elevate this game beyond the simplistic goals of the original. The addition of hazards on each of the nine levels keeps the gameplay loop from becoming stale. Even though there are only nine levels, the later ones are quite tricky, and once completed, there is still the challenge of improving your score on the next run through the game.

The sound effects are standard thruster fare, but the music is vastly expanded over the original. The compositions use the familiar themes from Jupiter Lander, but do an excellent job of making them modern and interesting. As a release intended for the C64U’s expanded audio capabilities, the game also supports dual SIDs for an even more expansive aural experience.

If there is one criticism I can level at Jupiter Fracture, it is the transition from the zoomed-out level to the zoomed-in landing view. The original game had very simplistic level graphics, so zooming in during landing didn’t seem so jarring. But here, the change from what you see around you in the full-level view to the landing view can be very different, forcing you to make sometimes split-second decisions about your descent that you didn’t initially see. Also, the sense of inertia does not always carry over well from one view to another, with slower momentum while zoomed in translating to much faster momentum in the full-level view. It is not insurmountable and doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the game, but it could certainly be addressed in future versions.

If you own a C64U, you have no excuse not to download Jupiter Facture and give it a try. It’s a great experience, and the game’s overall story is a fun analog of the death and rebirth of Commodore itself. Happy landing!

The post Review: Jupiter Fracture for the Commodore 64 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Every Boss Fight book tends to have a novel approach depending on the author, and Phillip J Reed is no different with his Resident Evil volume. In fact, his approach is distinctly unusual, with the praise for the originator of survival horror from 1996 veiled behind calling it a cheesy rip-off. Nevertheless, the story he tells is a compelling one in regard to the original game’s importance, much of which is locked behind a specific cultural moment and context we couldn’t bring back even if we wanted to.

Reed’s narrative is framed around his own first experience playing the game as a kid in grade school, with other kids. Reed didn’t like horror games in general. He didn’t even like Resident Evil that much. Indeed, the first chapter quite literally ends with him stammering that Resident Evil is just Alone in the Dark, a game he actually did play at the time. But in retrospect, Alone in the Dark is mostly resembled for being an obvious predecessor to Resident Evil, and really, probably the only game before Resident Evil itself that can reasonably be quantified as survival horror.

Where Reed starts to appreciate Resident Evil as more than a rip-off is the distinctly cinematic scope of the title, which took advantage of the still relatively novel CD format for video games to make aggressive use of voice acting and even live action scenes. The cheesiness of video game voice acting, up until Resident Evil, had generally worked against most CD games. But Resident Evil had the surprising advantage of taking itself seriously no matter how silly the poorly translated script got. There’s a good reason why Lloyd Kaufman of Toxic Avenger fame, of all people, wrote the foreward for this book. Resident Evil almost perfectly typifies camp.

One of Reed’s more interesting arguments, although I suppose he frames them more as descriptions, is how Resident Evil and Biohazard really do need to be interpreted as completely different games. It’s not just that the Biohazard audience in Japan couldn’t easily tell that the game’s English dialog sounds ridiculous. There’s also the common practice of the time where games, upon being imported to the United States, had their difficulty ramped up to dissuade game rentals as opposed to purchases. In Reed’s memories, Resident Evil is tense in part because it is very easy to die unexpectedly. Ammo is limited, and any unexpected surprise has high potential stakes, with all the tedium implied of having to backtrack through endless loading screens.

Even the loading screens, mind you, work to amplify this vibe by raising the tension. Resident Evil is very much a paradox in that it’s the more archaic, inconvenient parts of the game, the sort of thing fixed by quality-of-life improvements in modern titles, that made Resident Evil so memorable. The game is a clumsy mess where you don’t really have any idea what you’re getting into. It’s precisely that quality which makes the various turnabouts in the story compelling, encouraging a child like Reed to pick up little notes of backstory and lore, then jumble that around in his head during the gameplay experience to build an unsettling story where man is the greatest monster of all.

Resident Evil didn’t exactly break new storytelling ground in any way that can easily be communicated in text. Rather, the game was noteworthy because of its sheer immersive qualities. The voice actors, as well as the live action models, are compelling professionals despite the poor quality of their script. In one sense, the ramshackle nature of the whole production just amplifies the mystery. Reed openly acknowledges that there are some things about Resident Evil we may well never know. Many of the actors he finds didn’t even know they were in such a famous game until quite some time later.

Resident Evil is an artifact of a time where video games weren’t quite big business yet, but some people had faith enough in the concept that they were willing to try for something big, even if they weren’t quite sure how it was going to come out. And really, I doubt anyone could have intentionally come up with this game’s strange mishmash of powerful ambience and goofy execution. Never knowing where on that spectrum the next room is going to land is a huge part of the fun.

The post A review of Resident Evil from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

It’s the thirty-year anniversary of the very first Pokémon games which were released back in 1996. Nintendo is pulling out all the stops reminding us. But unofficial historians are getting in on the act too, with The History of the Pokémon Games by James Batchelor coming out on March 30th courtesy of Pen & Sword Books. The title’s a bit of an odd choice for an imprint best known for military history, although really, when you think about it, Pokémon is a war of its own.

Whether this unofficial volume qualifies as a true history will likely depend on how nitpicky you want to get in regard to the exact details. There are several factual errors in here, but all of them are roughly on the lines of statements like saying shiny Pokémon were only aesthetically different from their counterparts, with no stat differences. This wasn’t actually true, for the second generation in which they first appeared anyway, although there are very few contexts where the technical difference is all that important.

Batchelor’s history in broad strokes is accurate, although the detail goes down as the book goes on. Part of this is just because the development of Pokémon has grown so complicated over the years that by the time we hit the sixth generation, there’s really no longer any pretense of this being any kind of underdog operation. That doesn’t make the details of the first generation any less fun, mind you. The origins of Gamefreak as a literal game zine (which you can read online if you like although obviously it’s all in Japanese) never stop being fun.

Although the lack of a Gunpei Yokoi acknowledgment irritated me. We all know Shigeru Miyamato was involved, but Gunpei Yokoi is an unsung hero of Pokémon for helping Gamefreak afloat by interceding to give them the right to use Nintendo licensed characters for their puzzle games, which Batchelor incorrectly implies were premised as having Nintendo character licenses from the outset. Again, this omission doesn’t doom the book’s overall scholarship, but it does beg the question of why we need an unofficial compendium of the Pokémon games if Batchelor is just going to use the usual Nintendo story that tends to obfuscate Yokoi’s existence.

The answer? Batchelor includes, at the end of each chapter of the mainline games, an extended compendium of every licensed Pokémon game that was released during this time period. While the individual entries in this compendium are much shorter than the chapters, they’re an incredibly useful reference for anyone trying to keep track of all these games. And there’s probably no better resource than this book for keeping all these games straight, as these titles range from sleeper classics to forgotten abandonware to games Nintendo quite literally tried to destroy. Apparently, Nintendo was furious when Warner Brothers overstepped their contract and hired Cyberworld International Corporation to make a browser game based on the Pokémon 2000 movie, and the game was thought lost until 2023 when DidYouKnowGaming was able to find a copy.

The compendium tells a sort of story in itself of just how much game development has changed over the last thirty years. The crude edutainment titles of the nineties and the aughts give way to the gacha games of the teens, a trend that feels more than a little ominous when put together in a timeline like that. Only a true expert on Pokémon is likely to be familiar with even half the games that Batchelor discusses here. Sure, I might know about EV functionality and Gunpei Yokoi but I still learned a lot about spin-offs and apps from this book I doubt I ever would have found out about otherwise.

This, coupled with high quality photos, nice glossy pages, and reasonably large type make The History of the Pokémon Games a very good coffee table book. The presentation allows for much of the trivia to exceed the sum of its parts, making for a remarkably coherent narrative that reads more like a corporate history intended for internal use than marketing copy intended to sell us on more Pokémon merch. This is an easy book to recommend for any fan of the series, and even those who are just a little curious what Pokémon is even all about.

The post A review of The History of the Pokémon Games appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Choplifter for the SMS

Set the wayback machine to the early ’80s. While we had recently gotten our first home computer, the Commodore VIC-20, my cousins had been enjoying the Apple II system that my uncle used for writing sermons and the like. One of the first home computer games that I ever played was on that sturdy Apple II system, with its monochrome green CRT: Dan Gorlin’s Choplifter. A straightforward premise, easy-to-pick-up gameplay, smooth animation, and those classic clicky sound effects all came together to create a memorable gaming experience that sticks with me to this day.

When we eventually upgraded to the Commodore 64 at home, one of the first games that I sought out was the C64 version of that classic game. This version was pretty much a direct port of the original Apple II game, using the same graphics, sound, and gameplay. It was exactly what I was looking for, and it remains one of my absolute favorite games for the venerable home micro.

Fast forward to the early ’90s. In college, instead of grabbing a used NES like many of my fellow students, I opted for a used Sega Master System. I was impressed by the games I had read about in gaming magazines and found it a lot of fun when I had a chance to try the system out at a local used games shop. While it didn’t have anywhere near the NES’s game library, the games I played looked great and were fun. That’s really all I was looking for at that point. Along with the obligatory Alex Kidd game and a surprisingly competent version of Out Run, I snagged the SMS version of Choplifter. This version had the basic gameplay I remembered from the C64, but the graphics had been kicked up a notch. What I didn’t realize at the time was the true provenance of this particular version.

Choplifter First Level

Rather than a straight port of the original Apple II version, Choplifter for the Sega Master System was a home port of Sega’s arcade version. Choplifter in the arcade was delivered on Sega’s System 2 board. Instead of the simple monochrome graphics of the original, Sega redesigned it for modern arcades, using colorful, detailed pixel graphics and multiple levels of parallax scrolling. The same gameplay cycle that saw the player taking off, releasing hostages from buildings along the play field, picking them up under enemy fire, and flying them safely back to the base was kept. But additional threats, such as gun placements, missiles, and rocket launchers, were there to hinder your progress, amping up the difficulty.

Additionally, while the original game was played on the same playfield level after level, Sega’s version takes place in different environments, which adds to the gameplay variety. The first level is basically the same as the computer version. But the next level takes place at sea, with hostages rescued from various ships along the way. The additional challenge here, of course, is that you can only land your chopper on one of the ships or back at your base. No floating on the water for you, that’ll lose you a sortie. The next level takes place in a cavern. Again, you are presented with stretches of land that you cannot set down on, for fear of destroying your aircraft on a protruding stalagmite. This time, you also have a literal ceiling that you cannot exceed, as you attempt to avoid hanging stalactites. Things can get pretty claustrophobic pretty fast as you attempt to avoid enemy fire while also avoiding the edges of the cave.

Choplifter Cave Level

All of this to say, the Master System version of Choplifter wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. Fortunately, it turned out to be so much more. The System 2 board was, in many ways, a supersized Sega Master System. It utilized a Z80 processor clocked at 4 MHz, as opposed to the Master System’s Z80-compatible processor clocked at 3.58 MHz, and its sound hardware, while based on the same SN76496 processor as the SMS, doubled the number of chips and added a second Z80 for audio processing. The graphics also sported a higher number of on-screen colors. Fortunately, this all translated quite well to the home console. While the Master System takes a hit in color depth, graphical detail, and sound complexity, the core gameplay and look remain. The home conversion even amps up the difficulty a bit more than the arcade version by requiring the player to rescue more hostages to progress.

As much as I love the Master System version of this game, it is not without its flaws. The game suffers from a malady that many games on the system do: sprite flicker. By virtue of the way the game is structured, with many objects appearing at the same horizontal position on the screen, you will definitely run into sometimes significant sprite flicker, as the system attempts to display your chopper, all of the hostages wandering around awaiting rescue, and the tank that is bearing down on you all. While the programmers have done their best to minimize the impact on gameplay, it does suffer some slowdown during these flicker sessions. But it is not enough to mar the excellent overall gameplay experience.

Choplifter for the Sega Master System is a perfect example of a game you show off to your NES-loving friends, as you try to convince them there’s more than plumbers and princesses in the 8-bit gaming world. It’s the kind of arcade conversion that will make you a Master System believer: a beautiful home conversion of the arcade game that still bears the fingerprints of the iconic home-computer original.

The post Retro Review – Choplifter for the Sega Master System appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.

Fort Apocalypse Title Screen

Early in my video gaming life, one of the first computer games I ever played was Dan Gorlin’s classic Choplifter on my cousin’s Apple II. The simple presentation, on that glowing monochrome green CRT, was instantly addictive. When we got our Commodore 64 some time later, it was one of the first games I sought out. I was pleasantly surprised that the game translated nicely to the C64, but that is a story for another article. More important to this article is the game a friend of mine introduced me to, not long after that. The game seemed to me to be an evolution of the Choplifter formula I had fallen in love with: rescuing people, but now with the added challenge of more advanced combat, as well as navigating underground caverns. That game was Fort Apocalypse, published by Synapse Software. While I later found out the game wasn’t quite what I’d assumed, it didn’t change my opinion. That opinion remains all these years later.

First off, it is commonly assumed (as I did) that Fort Apocalypse is simply a more advanced Choplifter clone. Designer Steve Hales has gone on record to refute that, stating that he actually developed the concept for the game nearly 6 months before Gorlin’s hit came on the scene. He claims the idea for the game came from a dream about helicopters. The game was originally developed for the Atari 8-bit line of micros, and Synapse released the initial version in 1982. The C64 conversion, ported by Steve Hales, was released a year later. The game’s visual aesthetic is strongly informed by its Atari 8-bit roots, giving it an early-’80s action-game look and feel. But don’t let the looks distract you. This game is interesting, challenging, and, more importantly, fun.

Fort Apocalypse

Starting off at the top of the cavernous Fort Apocalypse, you must descend into the depths, rescuing prisoners. avoiding and taking out enemies, and dodging obstacles along the way. As you descend through the levels of caves, you must use your rockets and plasma bombs strategically to eliminate the obstructions between you and the goal on the bottom level, which will send you even deeper into the fort. But make sure to keep an eye on your fuel level. If it gets too low, you’ll have to head back to the fueling station to refuel before continuing your descent. Once you make it to the final room, you use a well-armed rocket to destroy the fort. But, you’re not finished. You must then make it back through the caverns, avoiding the same obstacles and enemies that hindered your initial progress, to the exit to actually win the game.

Something that makes Fort Apocalypse more than your bog-standard shooter is its strategic elements. First, your weapons are not controlled by different firing triggers, as they are in other games. They are instead determined by your helicopter’s orientation. If you are facing sideways, your chopper will fire its rockets. But when you rotate to face the screen, you will drop your plasma bombs. This adds a challenge to the cramped combat conditions deep in the caverns. You’ll need to rotate to drop your bombs to destroy the barriers allowing you access to the deeper levels of the fort, but at the same time, you’ll need to rotate sideways to fire rockets as enemies eventually appear from off-screen to eliminate you.

Fort Apocalypse

Helping you in combat and navigation is your navatron radar system. Similar to the early-warning radar system in Defender, you see a miniaturized version of approximately 6 times more area than you can see on the main screen, showing you enemies, barriers, and prisoners to be rescued. This really helps as you plan your movements through the game, and is essential, should you make it as far as destroying the fort, for finding your way back out to the surface.

As I said at the beginning of the review, the game may look primitive, but that belies its strategic gameplay and “just one more time” playability. Fort Apocalypse does what the best retro games do: balance difficulty with gameplay that is not so frustrating as to make you rage-quit and never come back to it. If you give it a chance, you will find yourself sinking hours into the game, trying to make it further into the caverns of the fort before you’re blasted by a missile launcher or crushed by a moving wall. I won’t say that a controller or two wasn’t lobbed across the room at times back in the day, but I always picked it up again and gave it another go.

While it wasn’t inspired by the classic, Fort Apocalypse benefits from the familiarity with the rescue gameplay that Choplifter made famous. But it expands on the concept, giving us a game that is part Choplifter, part Spelunker, part Scramble, and all fun. Definitely seek this one out if you’re looking for a retro shooter challenge.

The post Retro Review: Fort Apocalypse for the C64 appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.