What a great pleasure and honour it is to join Steve Erickson’s most delightful conversation with one of the gaming industry’s finest: Simon Butler, weaver of pixels and tales from 8- to 16-bit and beyond.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens reboots The Phantom Menace
Star Wars The Force Awakens is a Phantom Menace reboot. Time to break out that Jedi Holocron. [SPOILERS]
Continue reading “Star Wars: The Force Awakens reboots The Phantom Menace”
Obi-Wandi Will Return
Due to engagements related to the world of academia, I have been somewhat absent from the vast environs of the interwebs. Over the next two months, I promise to return with
- a book review
- a re-interpretation of The Force Awakens
and
- the continuation of Obi-Wandi’s Blog Spirits!
The Fan Awakens: Review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens Untainted by Advance Publicity
When I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens on December 16th, 2015 I was perfectly oblivious to any advance publicity. It had all started in late October 2012, when news broke that Walt Disney Studios had taken over Lucasfilm and its many assets. Kathleen Kennedy was appointed chief officer of the once Lucas-helmed enterprise and quickly proceeded to start pre-production of the seventh Star Wars installment (whilst prepping the spin-off film Rogue One in secret) . This course of surprising events made me abandon, unfollow and ignore dozens of film-related websites and social media accounts. Old habits were instantly dropped and I started distancing myself inevitably from one of my favourite hobbies, the film industry. It is therefore that I had not seen a single second, millimeter or anything of the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens, whose midnight premiere I attended on said December 16th, 2015. I went in totally blank, here is how I received a film whose marketing machinery I had ignored with monkish patience.
Make yourself a very Speccy Christmas with Santa Sam Dyer’s ZX Spectrum – A visual compendium
Illuminated in a mesmerising green hue of ethereal beauty and presence, a home computer of old comes to life, leaps off a page in Sam Dyer’s latest masterpiece in the exceedingly rewarding “Visual Compendium“-series. Opening the impressive volume emulates perfectly that moment a computer is switched on, with every page impersonating the starkly coloured screen display of the titular ZX Spectrum. Sam Dyer’s “ZX Spectrum: A Visual Compendium” is a special experience of layered significance.
30 Years Later: Lucasfilm’s Fractalus Revisited
David Fox’s silent game changer
Oh how seductive the eternal evolution of technology! Oh what boredom lies in volumetric dust clouds of uncountable pixels, their toilsome birth betrayed only by the high-pitched struggle of a graphic card labouring inside a run-of-the-mill desktop computer. The mind slackens into a tupor of robotic keyboard spasms. Disbelief no longer needs suspension: with the visual display quite a spitting image of nature, the brain only needs to soften the roughest of edges. Oh what glory then the memories of old bestow on the stalwart art of retrography, the magic of 8-bit computing, beautifully preserved in Lucasfilm Games’ Rescue on Fractalus. And yet the most crucial ally in its creative success, the oft-forgotten and sadly underestimated manual of words crafted bold and true on sheets of paper rested inside boxes colourful and bold.
Continue reading “30 Years Later: Lucasfilm’s Fractalus Revisited”
The Complete Retro Asylum Star Wars Trilogy
The circle is now complete: from The Empire Strikes Back by Parker Brothers to the LEGO Star Wars series, the Retro Asylum podcast saga on Star Wars retrogaming is (almost) the next best thing to finally welcoming back Luke, Han and Leia in The Force Awakens. Switch off your targeting computer and let retro flow through you…
The Retro Asylum Star Wars Podcast Saga starts here!
Paul Driscoll’s absolutely astounding volume on all things Star Wars can be downloaded here!
Happy Birthday Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert reflects on his masterpiece point and click adventure about wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood on his www.grumpygamer.com site.
Check out Retroasylum’s Point & Click Adventure Games Podcast, hosted by Sam Dyer, author of the celebrated Visual Commpendium series.
Did U.S. Gold’s C64 conversion of Gauntlet ever feature speech?
While perusing vintage copies of German computing magazine Happy Computer over at kultpower.de, I read that there was potentially an earlier edition of Gauntlet on the C64 which featured “easily comprehensible speech synthesis”. Follow an intriguing dig in pixels from ages past at Frank Gasking’s always fab Games That Weren’t!
http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2015/06/gauntlet-c64-with-speech/
Review: Commodore Amiga: A Visual Commpendium by Sam Dyer, Bitmap Books
With great trepidation I turn the page to reveal the next spread of Sam Dyer’s landmark volume on the Commodore Amiga. Sadness is slowly creeping up as I briskly process the remaining years covered by Commodore Amiga: A Visual Commpendium; every letter, every pixel presented in a lavish, precisely elegant layout feasting on the glory of 16-bit graphics I savour like that eagerly sought after drop of water, enjoyed at last, after a perilous journey through a barren landscape.
The Amiga-less years have been harsh and unforgiving and this fabulous volume, clad in a pearly-white sleeve, finally provides relief to Amiga fandom. Continue reading “Review: Commodore Amiga: A Visual Commpendium by Sam Dyer, Bitmap Books”