Ken Newquist 
Golden Axe is a side-scrolling, fantasy-based hack’n’slash video game that dominated arcades in the early 1990s. Released in 1989 by Sega, the game was one that my friends and I would happily pump quarters into until we completed its epic quest, usually laughing our asses off whenever we did something particularly dumb on screen. It … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Contra is a side-scrolling two-player shooter by Konami featuring two muscle-bound … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote … hundreds of polyhedral dice like those used in old tabletop role-playing games. — Ready Player One p. 10 A freeze-frame of this scene appears nearly identical to a painting by Jeff Easley that appeared on … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote I booted up my emulator and selected Robotron: 2084, one of my all-time favorite games. I’d always loved its frenetic pace and brutal simplicity. Robotron was all about instinct and reflexes. Playing old videogames never … Read more
Asteroids is a 2D, vector-display-based arcade game developed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg and released by Atari in November 1979. The gameplay revolves around a single spacecraft trapped in an asteroid field that attempts to survive for as long as possible by destroying any space rocks that get close. The Atari 2600 version came … Read more
The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Source Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by … Read more
Galaga is a 1981 game programmed by Tetsu Ogawa and released by Namco. It features a single starship fending off endless waves of insectoid starships. In Ready Player One, it appears twice: first as one of the games that Wade Watt plays in his home in the Stacks; the second as part of a virtual playthrough of … Read more
Adventure, written by Warren Robinett and released by Atari in 1980, is a fantasy adventure game for the Atari 2600. Using basic graphics, the game allows a player to navigate a series of castles and mazes to recover keys, collect treasures, and slay dragons. The game plays a pivotal role in Ready Player One, not so much because … Read more
The ‘Caspian Sea Monster’ rises from the grave – I’ve posted about the 380-ton “Lun-class Ekranoplan before. It’s a massive ground-effect vehicle, which means it’s basically a huge, low-flying aircraft/ship that’s designed to evade radar by skimming across the surface of the ocean. This one’s being towed to a new home, where it will become … Read more
After one false start and two 5-mile primer day hikes, our Philmont crew finally went on an extended backpacking trip. We did a two-day hike in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in New Jersey. Friday night we stayed at campsites next to the Millbroad Road Trailhead. On Saturday, we hiked from the Millbrook … Read more