PixelatedArcade News

This past week has been a cold one in many parts of North America. Luckily, losing power hasn't been an issue for us however some planned travel had to be cancelled due to iced over roads described by one of the locals as “nearly undrivable”. Lacking the proper equipment for such conditions, it was instead time to take advantage of the time off from work and complete some code updates and fixes! The latest changes to the PixelatedArcade codebase have just been pushed live...

Welcome to 2021 everyone! Here's hoping this year turns out better than the last. It's also been a while since I've posted any updates, especially a game review, so a new review seems like a great way to kick off the new year. For previous reviews I picked out a few awful to average games, so this time around I thought I would switch gears to the opposite end of the spectrum. As the 1980's were coming to a close, Sierra On-Line licensed several games from Japanese developer Game Arts for release in North America. Thexder is likely the best known, and at the time was one of Sierra's best selling games (and deservedly so, it's a fun game I also recommend checking out). This time around, however, I'm going to point your attention to what seems to be one of Game Arts more obscure titles, Zeliard.

What a year it's been! I think it's safe to say no one quite expected the events that transpired with Covid-19 creating quite the havoc. However, as we come to the holiday season, it's time for the now traditional end of year roundup. Here at PixelatedArcade we had our own challenges as well this year which included a move to a new house. Despite everything going on, plenty of new content was still added and some fun new games were acquired for our collection...

Well, that didn't go quite as planned! Being 2020, that 5-10 minutes of downtime I mentioned in the last update turned out to be much longer...If you visited the site in the past few days, you may have found some pages not working or the site down entirely. Everything should be back online now, and I'm working on upgrading and updating the backend as well so it may be a few more days before I'm back to adding new content, but the good news is it should be a while before I have to perform a large update like this again and next time I can be prepared for some of the snafus that occurred....

Fall is here, Halloween is just a few weeks away, and because it's 2020 life is keeping as all on our toes! Coming up on November 5th PixelatedArcade will be undergoing some scheduled site maintenance; you may find the site intermittently unresponsive that evening, although (hopefully) downtime should be pretty minimal. Additionally, I've begun quietly adding some Nintendo Entertainment System games along with plans for the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and MSX coming soon. There is an impressive catalog of games for these systems individually, let alone combined, so like everything it will be a slow work in progress...

Under normal circumstances I would have spent the past week at Dragon Con and then a few days afterwards editing all of the photos I took. Unfortunately, the event was cancelled; I can't say I blame the organizers, social distancing is quite impossible there and given the current situation with Covid-19 it had the potential to be a real disaster. Instead, I spent the week tending to real life obligations; if you would like to see my past photos, check out the set at PixelatedImages Dragon Con Gallery. I also just learned today that MAGFest (The D.C. area Music and Gaming Festival), originally scheduled for January 2021, has also been cancelled for the year. Same story, and again it's hard to blame the organizers for having to make this tough decision. Other events, while not officially cancelled yet, are (I'm sure) watching the situation closely. Not much of an update this month, but I do have a lot more to add to PixelatedArcade and PixelatedImages, so until then thanks for checking in and please stay safe, stay healthy, and take care!

A while back I started what I intended to be a series on CGA colors and then a pandemic and other forms of real life intervened! Well, after a delay from what was supposed to be some sort of a timetable I'm finally returning to CGA graphics and how they can possibly be improved. In the first chapter, I considered an alternate universe where IBM had made a minor change to the hardware allowing for a different color. This time around, I wanted to keep the possibilities in the real world; given the actual options, what if developers had made a different choice? While many games have chosen a palette that looks pretty decent (at least as much as is possible with only 4 colors), I find other games use a less than ideal selection. As before, what constitutes “better” is highly subjective, and I'm sure not everyone will agree with my opinion...

It is almost July of 2020! You might think a pandemic would be the perfect time to get a ton of site updates completed and content updated due to being stuck at home, but as I mentioned in the previous update we're in the middle of moving here which takes up a large amount of time. The process has, of course, taken three times as long as I originally estimated and when I'm not moving boxes, I'm taking a break to add more information to PixelatedArcade. The exciting news for me is that the final boxes of our game and hardware collection has been moved out of storage just this morning, so plenty more scans, photos, screenshots and more will be coming later this year.

I also wanted to point out a few other cool things which can be found around the web...