ScottVee Gaming

On our Sedona trip, I hooked up that new retro game box and poked at it for about an hour.  Since we have been binge-watching the original Addams Family series, I showed Anne the crude old Fester's Quest game.  It starts with him chilling on a roof or patio somewhere, and a UFO lands and starts messing up the place.  Fun. After my last comment about how none of the creatures or details have any info or backstory, I found the original game manual on archive.org. Even then, the creatures are barely mentioned.  There are globules that sit there and skeeters who spin off mosquitos that bite you.  There is an inventory screen with more items than I was expecting, including light bulbs and a noose that will summon Lurch to wipe out all on-screen enemies. It's a shame that the main game play is so terribly slow, and the Continue option takes you back to the start.  You get to keep your items, but there is no way to run or sprint.  Just walk walk walk.  ...

There was a street fair in town on Sunday,  and though we almost never see a product we want or need anymore, one table had a little game console with 700 retro arcade games installed.   I couldn't say no to having a treasury of games like that at my fingertips. It was easy to set up.  It turns out that about half of these were Japanese editions that I would not be able to read,  though there would be some surreal element to not knowing what is being said. Still,  that left a few hundred,  including classics like Defender, Galaga, Ghostbusters, Arkanoid, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Panzer Attack, and others.  Scrolling through a list of hundreds of items is tedious. It is really odd looking back now, how these games had so little memory or file space.  It's amazing they could deliver so much content with so few resources.  These days,  for a simple game, we'd probably pack a dozen mp3 tracks for music, but each of those files is 1...