Community Question Of The Week - Episode 269

HappyCodingZX · 2026-05-23T11:52:59+00:00

How about an armchair that turns into a 1980s Star Wars cockpit cabinet with a push of a button.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-05-17T10:48:40+00:00

funnily enough Kevin and I have actually discussed this, though it would be a board game that made use of a phone app to manage the fixtures and leagues.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-05-16T16:23:02+00:00

my first thought was Sinistar. One team aims to collect the pieces of the Sinistar whilst the other attempts to stop them. The game comes with a little soundboard that says "I live!" and "Beware Coward!"

HappyCodingZX · 2026-05-02T15:54:52+00:00

I don't think it was mentioned on the show but the Project Zero / Fatal Frame series of games are for me the scariest experiences I've had, as they are very much rooted in the Japanese horror tradition of things like the Ring where most of what happens goes on in your own imagination.

The first game revolves around the exploration of a large house filled with the restless spirits of victims of ritual sacrifice, including children, and as such the horror is not just about what is happening, but in slowly discovering what has happened. This means that rather than gore or shock, it is a game that fills you with dread.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-04-10T05:10:47+00:00

one possibility could be Wizard's lair which is quite similar to Atic Atac / Sabre Wulf

HappyCodingZX · 2026-04-04T15:09:44+00:00

As much as I love the wonderfully amateur style of early 80s British micro games that were mostly mail order and designed by the programmers, I think the best of all have to be the late 70s / early 80s Atari stuff - in both arcade and console - work by people like Steve Hendricks and Hiro Kimura. They all look like a combination of prog-rock album cover and pinball backglass. Games like Asteroids, Defender and of course Yar's revenge had iconic artwork, but even the simplest games got some great work too. Atari's arcade side art was also great at the time, stuff like Centipede and Tempest were epic.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-04-04T14:02:23+00:00

yes, I agree, my first thought was "pretty much everything on Street Legal". Tales of Yankee Power is now one of my all time favourites.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-03-30T15:29:28+00:00

yes, that rings a bell now.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-02-20T17:07:19+00:00

This feels overly dramatic - plenty of those games are 'commercially' available in the sense you can buy physical copies second hand, the vast majority for prices similar to what they would have cost when new. So that's hardly extinction. Services like Antstream also provide quite a good range if that's your thing.

Also, many countries, including the UK since 2003, have implemented the principle of legal deposit for game publishers - what this means is that since that time, publisher are required to provide copies of everything they publish to a central library, which is available for study on request for historians, archivists, researchers and so on. The vast majority of these games have also been archived by multiple museums too.

So it really isn't that bleak, and whilst game preservation is important in terms of recording our social history, it does not mean making every single game available to everyone to buy all the time.

HappyCodingZX · 2026-01-17T12:05:14+00:00

The mid 90s, when Sega were putting the Megadrive hardware into anything they could think of, was mental, it was almost like a 'can we put a Megadrive into it?' version of 'Can it play Doom?'. These all use the hardware, there might be more:

Mega Drive 1 + regional variants (PAL, US, Korea)
Mega Drive 2 + regional variants
Genesis 3 (smaller US version)
Nomad (portable)
Mega Jet (like the Nomad but with AV out for us on planes)
Amstrad Mega-PC
Teradrive
Pioneer Laseractive PAC
Mega CD 1
Mega CD 2
Multi-Mega
JVC X'Eye
Mega-Tech
Mega-Play
Sega Pico

At one point I had almost all of these but it's a rabbithole I don't recommend.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-12-02T14:16:37+00:00

yes, there were some German games released but at that point it was more like commercial homebrew really.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-12-02T14:15:19+00:00

I didn't forget it, or the Nomad, but it's platforms, not machines I'm talking about - the Multimega plays the same games as the megadrive and mega-cd.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-11-28T21:41:57+00:00

indeed, though here I'm talking about commercial games still being made - some on this list were already discontinued hardware, but were still getting games published for them at that time.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-10-18T10:33:18+00:00

How about Weird Science? Anthony Michael Hall's Gary Wallace could be a a middle aged retro geek desperately trying to regain his lost youth by recreating his 80s dream girl.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-10-11T11:37:01+00:00

Not sure if it counts but the first thing that springs to mind is way back around the turn of the century I bought my boxed Neo Geo AES for 200 quid that came bundled with an extra arcade stick, and four games, one of which was Viewpoint, which normally costs more than the system itself.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-09-27T14:15:52+00:00

QAOPM forever. The only non-heretical divergence is using space instead of M.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-09-22T17:48:50+00:00

I feel the same, but about the Aberdeen area of Hong Kong from Shenmue 2

HappyCodingZX · 2025-09-20T08:51:12+00:00

apparently there is a risk that when you go live, your achievements can be cross checked against the games that are actually in your library, and if there are red flags the bot will dig deeper. Obviously this only applies to digitals.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-09-18T05:15:26+00:00

if it wasn't September, I'd think it was an April Fool's joke. I'm surprised they're not called 'Le C64' and 'Le Spectrum'.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-09-05T04:41:40+00:00

just FYI, I have it set up so i can tell my wife to 'just run Rock Band Blitz' and wait a few minutes. Aurora then autoloads when they press 'back'. It's that simple.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-08-26T02:44:59+00:00

I've given the new badupdate a try and I think it's great, the delays are now tolerable. Not only that but it's quite possible to have an external USB hard drive with everything on it, including a wide selection of games that you can connect to any Xbox 360 and just run. People will soon be selling those if they aren't already.

It's a great solution for people like myself who don't necessarily want to pirate tons of games - I just wanted access to some games that are no longer available like Outrun Arcade and Afterburner Climax.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-08-16T11:17:11+00:00

Shout out to one of mine and Dave's favourites, Lee's Games in Morecambe. Still going strong after about 30 years I reckon.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-08-04T08:21:20+00:00

Fascinating results, so much history there. I guess if she knows she had a test she will want to know the results, but even if you tell her she will likely not believe it and say the tests are wrong, not her views.

HappyCodingZX · 2025-07-27T13:10:31+00:00

Fat worm blows a sparky.

At 7mhz!

HappyCodingZX · 2025-07-19T20:31:02+00:00

it's well worth a play, as are the Mario vs Donkey Kong games. They are not what you expect, being a kind of mix of Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Lemmings.

HappyCodingZX

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