Ready Player One Video Game Replay

A male teenager climbs up the side of a stack of mobile homes, looking off into the distance, where he sees a dystopian skyline. Cover art from the novel version of Ready Player One

Welcome to the Ready Player One Video Game Replay! Ernst Cline’s dystopian novel Ready Player One (Amazon) is set in a cyberpunk-ish future in which climate change, economic upheaval, pandemics, and other catastrophes have transformed our world. Poverty is rampant, with many people living on the fringes of big cities in the hopes of scraping … Read more

RPO Replay: Contra

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

RPO Replay: Robotron 2084

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

RPO Replay – Defender

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 – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

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 – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

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

Blogworthy: Star Wars Backgrounds, COVID-19 Ruminations, Games for Quarantine, Pandemic Brain Fog

Join Meetings From A Galaxy Far, Far Away With These Star Wars Backgrounds – Zoom meetings are exhausting and boring. Make them a little more interesting by throwing Cloud City, and X-Wings, and Death Star ruins into your background. David Brin’s List of “Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales” – Looking for some new books … Read more

Rise of the Nintendad

Hat-tip to Joystiq for this Reuters story which notices that hey, parents like to game … and they’re likely to get their kids to game as well. They dub these strange creatures “Nintendads” since many grew up on Nintendo systems and are now happily doling out $250 to buy Nintendo Wiis for their kids (and … Read more