Welcome to the world of PixelatedArcade

I've occasionally explored some alternate universes to see how games could have looked had the game or hardware developers made some different decisions. There's very little point to this exercise, but it can be interesting to see what might have been. So far I've only done this in the CGA graphics realm, notably wondering what some CGA games might look like if they used a different color palette instead of the choice actually used by the game. Now it's time to move on to the next standard, EGA, and take a look at an alternate EGA universe where some better options are available. EGA improved appearances over CGA greatly by allowing 16 colors at a time on the screen from a total of 64 colors. But, for most games, not all 64 colors could be selected from; that was only possible in the 640x350 graphics mode with most games using either 320x200 or 640x200. In this article we'll take a look at how things might have been if this limitation didn't exist.

Welcome to 2026! Looking back it's now been 40 years since Gradius was released on the NES, which I spent a ton of time playing at a friends house as I didn't yet have an NES. Great fun, but geez, that's a long time ago so I must getting old! Putting that aside for the moment and looking forward, we'll be doing some behind the scenes updates throughout January. There will be some periodic downtime, possibly for a day or two, while some server and code updates are performed. Thanks for checking out PixelatedArcade, and have a happy new year!

Remember Jupiter Mission 1999? Not too long ago (by my standards) I wrote up a review of the game and, generally, wasn't impressed; overall neat idea but the gameplay was too frustrating and boring. At the end of the story, however, our hero (the player) aboard the Space Beagle didn't make it back to Earth and is instead lost somewhere near a hostile, alien world. Now it's time to take a look at the sequel, Quest of the Space Beagle which picks up the story at this point. Like it's predecessor this game is made up of a series of action and strategy mini-games, although this time around there are fewer of them. Once again the results aren't spectacular; despite some improvements in the graphics and much more tolerable loading times, irritations abound making this title one that requires far more patience than I have to enjoy.