Farsight Studios seriously needs better marketing or press relations.

Having completely slipped under the radar, Pinball Arcade was purchased by yours truly for my iPad. Seriously, when was this game released? I’ve been waiting for months on an announcement.

This isn’t the first time. The Williams and Gottlieb collections were this way for the Wii. Same for the PS3/Xbox 360 versions. And yet again, same for the 3DS. If you don’t actively keep up with and search out for these games, you are going to have no idea that they even happened. It’s only been very recently that Nintendo acknowledged that the game even existed on their eShop ratings.

Which is puzzling to me. The series has received multiple awards, been praised for its realistic pinball physics and tables based off actual tables, and for budget priced games, they are not budget quality. Don’t get me wrong: I love me some Pinball FX/Zen Pinball, but this series of silver ball titles seem to be discovered either only by pure chance, or word of mouth (like what I’m doing right now).

Pinball Arcade is one step above the previous titles in the series as it covers four companies now: Williams, Bally, Gottlieb and Stern, now with Read the rest of this entry

Long-time readers may have noted a few years back that I mentioned a title called The Simpsons Arcade. It surprised me that a few hadn’t heard of the title, but considering the still dying arcades, and the fact that the arcade game never came to consoles (only a personal computer or two at the time), I suppose that it was understandable.

Recent readers may have noticed that just last entry I mentioned certain titles just ending up in “Licensing Hell”, meaning that companies lose the rights to popular film, comic, sports association, and TV characters, so chances of seeing certain titles are nil to none. I figured that this particular title was just simply one of those casualties.

And then guess what just randomly popped out of nowhere?

Like the X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games before it, Konami pulled out another beat ‘em up based on the long-running dysfunctional family. I fondly have memories of going to the local Movieland after school (my local hometown video store had an amazing arcade) and playing as Bart until one day a group of students and I beat the game. Not that it was easy. Like other games of the time, it was designed to Read the rest of this entry

Despite my fancy gaming blog name, I actually don’t pirate games.

Seriously! I’m too much of a collector. I want the box, and the (nearing extinction) manual, and a nice, clean looking disc or cartridge with good looking cover art. And having worked in the game industry, I know game sales can determine the longevity of a department’s, or even and individual’s continued employment. There’s no reason to pirate brand new games. Stop being so cheap. And if you can’t buy new, then buy used.

Now that I’m off my soapbox, I wanted to discuss an article that I found that actually hits the other side of the spectrum, and I totally agree with.

Some of you readers may be too young to know what one of these are:

But if you said “floppy disc”, you were correct.

These were the software of the computers through the 1980′s and in some instances, early 1990′s. True to their name, they were floppy in consistency, and were about the size of a CD jewel case.

They were also incredibly easy to break.

And my “break”, I mean it only took a minute or so to interrupt the program, load the file contents, and save to another disc. And so began Read the rest of this entry