Shane Raistlin Monroe has released the February edition of Retrogaming Radio, which, as always, is loaded with great content for anyone even remotely interested in retrogaming and classic computing. Shane has even been kind enough to review my book Dungeons and Desktops.

Magic Engine, programmed by brothers David & Cédric Michel (chapeau pour votre grand émulateur) has been around for a while now. The first generation ran on MS-DOS, and I am proud to state that I registered it as soon as I became aware of it.

System: NEC Turbo Duo (Super CD)

Release Date: 2006

Developer: MindRec

Rating: Good

Meteor Blaster DX Signature Edition is the latest and most elaborate version of the long-running series of homebrew games in NEC's Super CD format from author Bt Garner and his company, MindRec.  Signature Edition is essentially the same Asteroids-inspired product as the other DX games, save for some slight graphical tweaks, a hidden extra ship, a hidden extra demo, an upgrade to the Loop bonus game, and personalization options.

As luck would have it, I came across an amazing stash of Panasonic JR-200U (aka, Panasonic Personal Computer or PPC) stuff for about $40 shipped that puts my previous collection for this system to shame. In fact, the only major item not present in this new haul was Wordwatch. There will be no need for me to re-hash what was in the prior "A Long Visual Look at..." as you can just read it for yourself if you haven't already. Since all of the setup stuff is already taken care of, I can get right into this haul and PART 1, which will briefly lead into coverage of one of the interesting games now in my possession (subsequent parts will naturally follow suit in various degrees of detail).

First, here's a photo of the new stash, followed by a few cursory findings, then a preliminary look at the first game:

In lieu of doing this as a traditional Photo of the Week - Know your History! feature, I decided that this extremely obscure, but not particularly valuable vintage personal computer deserved a bit more attention.

KQ3 Remake: Can Alexander navigate his way down the mountain without falling to his death a thousand times? I doubt it...

About a year ago, Infamous Adventures released an unofficial VGA remake of King's Quest III: To Heir is Human. While graphically it is impressive with a nice MIDI score, the voice-acting is so cringe-worthy one wonders if it was done on purpose to pay homage to early CD-ROM video game voice-acting! It's worth a try for those who enjoyed the original and it was developed with Adventure Game Studio, a great Graphical Adventure Game toolkit that I need to start tooling around with.

King's Quest III VGA -- Infamous Adventures
Adventure Game Studio

In a record store (there's an anachronism for ya), I would call it the cutout bin. I guess at Toys R' Us it could be called the same. I laid out the $9.99 for Atari Anthology for PS2. Is it worth it? I'm not sure.

I never had the Atari 2600, having only played it at friend's houses, until I got my Atari computer, but I always remember looking at the JCPenney catalog each year at the screenshots of the games and circling which ones I would get if I actually had an Atari. This is back when the JCPenney in East Brunswick, NJ still had a cafe and I would eat the blueberry cheesecake with my older sister, who worked in the catalog department.

So tonight, I tried a few of these games, in lieu of a few extra hours of sleep, job hunting, paying bills, or whatever else folks do at night when they're not playing video games (yeah, I could think of a few others).