I loaded the system disk into my computer and started the game. First couple quests things in the town to unlock the starter equipment.

Graphics and sound are good.

It can load saved games (of which, the previous owner left a couple... ) And save. The 30-year-old magnetic tape came through. Minimal grinding and churning !!

The gold cave is a maze but I have my old strategy guide.

Ogre Battle is one of the best RTS franchises of all time. Which is surprising since it is a console game. You play as army leader <your name here> organizing a rebellion against an evil empire. The game consists of micromanaging how your army units are formed, where they go, who they attack. For each character in a unit, you pick out equipment, formation and role. Battles themselves play out automatically according to what attack policy you use, but you can also interrupt the flow of battle to issue some commands.

What makes this game so great is the gameplay and level of polish. The gameplay is complicated enough to be immensely replayable, without feeling bogged down by too many shoehorned-in mechanics. The polish comes from the nice pre-rendered backgrounds in the battle scenes, character and spell animations with a lot of frames and a lot of variety. Ogre Battle 64 really nailed this type of art direction imo, but MotBQ is where it all started.

The in-battle and out-of-battle gameplay are very different from each other- it changes from this customizable turn based thing to your typical RTS with an overworld map. The closest other game I can think to compare it to is Bahamut Lagoon (NOT Lagoon different game)

The game has thirteen different endings depending on decisions- some picky, some irreversible- you make throughout.

A long time ago, I rented this game repeatedly but I wasn't able to beat it. Some jerk rented it after me and over-wrote my save. IIRC they also named the overwriting character "BUTTS" or something dumb.

Other related titles in this franchise are Tactice Ogre- of the same "Tactics" genre as Final Fantasy Tactics, Dynasty Warriors Tactics etc- and Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber

Dying 10000x at Lion King Souls: Ashes of Rafiki

It's in the original RadioShack box and everything, plus instruction books and inserts. I can't believe it, they're practically like new...

This is a 6809-based machine which was first released in 1983. It runs BASIC and the form factor comes built in with the keyboard. It can save and load programs from cartridges (called "Program Pak"s). The name TRS stands for Tandy/RadioShack- the manufacturer Tandy produced this hardware, and Radio Shack distributed it. Remember when Radio Shack was two words?

As it happened I did not have one of these growing up, but as a child we had an Apple IIc which was from around that era. I have fond memories of learning how to program in BASIC on that machine, writing small programs and simple text games, and the task of having to figure out how to debug them. The TRS-80 really reminds me of that whole experience. Now, in more colors than my former binary color dipslay. I went and cleared the screen to green, blue, and magenta just to make sure.

Testing it out on gigantic CRT just because I had a spare jack there

I installed Windows 98 to the "space heater computer"

Is it possible to install 98 to an Intel Core-i5 with 4GB of DDR3 RAM?

Turns out, yes. If you spoof it to only enumerate 1GB, plus a bunch of other sketchy edits to system.ini and config.sys.

Finished Super Mario RPG (SNES)

Do you remember back when Nintendo's first party titles tried to push the limits of the current technology?

Since I had done the "finish all my Super Nintendo games I currently own" I bought this new one. This game was not technically new to me since I played it all the way through as a child but I wanted to re-visit it.

I'm of the opinion that this game is the spiritual precursor to Paper Mario. They share the same role-playing elements and comedic style. Before SMRPG- and not counting weird outlyer games like "Mario is Missing"- Mario was a side-scrolling platformer and that was basically it. This was a first in having a Mario game with a character-driven story, EXP and inventory management, and so on. It has a very disctinctive level of polish, and so I think Paper Mario went on to build on this idea later.

SMRPG- which is top-down isometric 2D- achieves a "3D-looking style" through pre-rendered 3D graphics and creative ways of having planes overlap each other. You would not guess that this game was for a platform optimized for copying 16x16 sprites since literally nothing appears to have square boundaries. So many things have curved, irregular edges and unusual types of blending. The sprites all look like shaded 3D models because they are (were). One other game that comes to mind which used these same techniques is Donkey Kong Country 1/2/3 but SMRPG has larger, more varied worlds and characters and so I think it represents a greater level of achievement.

Given the sizes of sprites and envrionment with the lack of repitition or content recycling, I have no idea how they were able to fit a game of this size into 32MB. Performance-wise it was one of only a handful of games that were accelerated by the SA-1 chip though.

The game uses QTEs in all fights which keep things from getting boring or too grind-y.

In this game someone from the Final Fantasy franchise makes an appearance. In this playthrough I beat Culex, an optional boss- for the first time. I can see why this was optional. This was harder than literally anything else in this game including the final boss.

Japanese, USA and German respectively.

The Germans do not mess around with their box art

Finished Rocko's Modern Life, the SNES action game based on the '90s Nickelodeon cartoon.

I remember watching this cartoon thinking was pretty funny while also kind of gross because when I was little, I didn't like seeing eating of hearts, brains, etc. It looked really disturbing. Don't know if I'd find it gross now? Apparently the show also had lots of innuendos which had to have gone totally over my head at the time since I don't recall that.

The video game inspired by the cartoon is essentially escort mission genre. There are a bunch of puzzles and obstacles, and you must guide your silly dog Spunky to the goal (golden fire hydrant) at the end of each level.

Spunky moves indiscriminately, autonomously forward- but you can make him switch directions or pause in one spot for a short time, and manipulate the environment to affect where he goes. The game allows you to pause and view the entire map if you want, so you can plot out a course of which items and environmental features to use. Overall difficulty I think is low-med.

The environments and sprites are pretty sizable and visually consistent with the cartoon. There are lots of frames of animation in things. The game makes use of wavefile sound (actual voice clips). I don't have rosy nostalgia goggles for this cartoon, I don't have them for this game either, so it was just okay.

The game is not very long or difficult- I played basically the entire thing while on a Skype call with my mom. Now I'm finally running out of SNES games not-yet-beaten.

Maybe it's time to suck it up and get Ringed City.

Finished Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for SNES.

Released around the same time as Final Fantasy V, but it is a way lower level of technical achievement compared to the mainline Final Fantasy games from that time. It has very tiny sprites with two-frame animations, not very many maps. In terms of gameplay there are some things to like: no random encounters, and your character can jump and use a weapon to interact with the environment. The plot is kind of thin and forgettible.

Everything made sense once I read about the origins of this game. Apparently, this was meant to be an introduction of Final Fantasy to a wide western audience, including children, since in the late 80s, early 90s console RPGs had yet to gain as much traction in the west as they did in Japan. That requirement meant streamlining all the combat and equipment system, and having something more action-oriented in the map aside from just walking around. And, having characters that are simpler. They further reduced the difficulty and grind by making it so you can save anywhere, rather than fixed save points, and all battles can be re-tried.

FFMQ has one really good thing: the soundtrack. Unlike the mainline Final Fantasies from around that time, it was not composed by Nobuo Uematsu. So the music feels distinctly different. Less anime-ish and more old-live-action-movie-ish. It's almost at the point where a game like this does not deserve a soundtrack this good.

Some people call FFMQ the "worst Final Fantasy". Maybe it is but it is not worse than Final Fantasy XIII.

favorite music

Japan VS USA box art