A couple of years ago, I got the chance to replay Another World on the Evercade. That was great! It stirred up great memories of me showing of my Amiga 500 with the intro. I never got very far into the game back then because of the trial and error gameplay, something I had enjoyed enough for an entire lifetime with…

I haven't been playing many games recently and I want to change that. I have all these wonderful games, but keep returning to the same few. I've actually played quite a few games from my PlayStation collection, so it should be relatively easy to trivialize that backlog. I'll starts with Disco Elysium. I've played for about 90 minutes and I'm already thinking about starting over with a less balanced character. Let's see if I can get into this game!

I really like the cover art of Manhunter: New York. The imagery of the hooded eyes in the red sky overlooking the skyline of New York City with the damaged Statue of Liberty and the shiny silver lettering. It all seems very intriguing somehow. Therefore, it's no surprise that I've been on the lookout for the sequel, Manhunter 2: San Francisco…

I finished Airlock rather quickly after my first play session. It's a very short game. I expected a little more for a game that has a physical release. Ultimately, instead of the Amiga, I played the game on my laptop to be able to play it whilst on my commute. Due to security restrictions I couldn't get a Z-Machine interpreter installed, but I did manage to install Dosbox and played it that way.

The Drifter is certainly up there with some of the best point-and-click adventure games I have played. So you can imagine my delight when I found out that Reboxy has made a big box edition of the game. The box looks absolutely gorgeous. It's very glossy with an enormous picture of the protagonist Mick on the front in all his pixelated appearance.

My project of transferring my games collection from an app to a custom database is progressing nicely. I've now scanned in all the big box games from my second set of bookcases and added them to the collection. Two more sets remaining...

Played the text adventure A1RL0CK from SpaceWhale for about an hour and already managed to get stuck. I picked up things, managed to die, got the elevator working, sent down a disc with it that's now gone, but must be a good thing because my points went up. Now what? That damned door in the screening room stays shut.

After almost 20 hours into Red Dead Redemption 2, the wanton violence became too much and I couldn't stand it anymore. I already started to be annoyed at the earlier shakedown missions, but now I decided to go along and rob a train. That involved smashing my rifle butt into innocent people's faces. Not fun! I know that I'm being hypocritical, because a few months ago I enjoyed playing…

BigBoxCollection: high-res 3D boxes of over 800 games from 1983 to today

Probably one of my first computer game experiences as a child was playing games on my friend's Sharp MZ-700 with simple games like Snake & Snake or a game where you guided a giant character across a landscape littered with triangles that had to be jumped over and probably things that you had to duck for. I wish I remember what that game was called.

My poison-green Commodore 64 was yearning for a keyboard upgrade. Not only did I choose this Green Breadbin case from Retro Fuzion because it contrasts from my Light Blue Amiga 500 and Bright Red Amiga 1200, but also because it would look awesome with red keycaps. Only problem was that the keycaps weren't yet available. But now they finally are! And they look awesome! They feel awesome too, because the Blingboard64 has mechanical switches.

Gameroomramblings is moving to another hosting provider. I hope all goes well. In the meantime you can visit the temporary gameroomramblings.nl for new content. There are some exciting additions there!

I finished Zelda: Link's Awakening, managed to get Colossal Cave not to crash and gave Red Dead Redemption 2 another chance. The last part of Link's Awakening wasn't as difficult to figure out as some of the earlier parts of the game. The last instrument was pretty straightforward. The dungeon itself was quite elaborate, but fun to figure out. The final fight felt very rewarding with its various stages.

Issue 15 of Debug Magazine contains almost 100 pages with previews, reviews, articles and reports of independent games and the scene. This is my first issue and I'm very impressed with the quality of the contents as well as the magazine itself. It's colorful, yet easy to read, has nice sturdy pages and a fun layout. I'm discovering lots about what's going on in the indie scene.

After my recent purchase of Wing Commander II, I looked at the local online marketplace for other games in the series and saw this original soundtrack from Wing Commander: Prophecy. My copy of the game didn't contain this CD and it was only a couple of euros,  so I figured it would be a nice addition. I never played this Wing Commander game, so I didn't know what to expect and I was surprised to find out the music sounds industrial with elements of techno with heavy mechanical beats.

Almost one year after I got another Commodore cartridge release, I got yet another one: Star Ranger. I now got 10 of them: C64601 Jupiter Lander *C64602 Kickman *C64603 Sea WolfC64605 Radar Rat Race *C64606 Clowns *C64610 Tooth Invaders *C64612 BlueprintC64613 LazarianC64614 Omega Race *C64615 Wizard of WorC64616 Le Mans…

There are a couple of attractions about game collections. There’s the aspect of handling the physical object; just holding it in your hands and browsing through all the contents is probably the main thing for me. There’s a strong element of nostalgia attached to it. I like looking at my copy of Ultima VI for […]

Zelda: Link’s Awakening has managed to stump me for the third time. Let me talk about this: The first time was when a random attack from an enemy revealed a passageway that I was supposed to find with a shovel (the way to the Animal Village). I must have dug up half the island, but […]

I always keep an eye out on the local online marketplace for any games that I'm interested in for my collection, but a few games keep eluding me. So I took some time to find reasonably priced copies from further away. On Ebay UK I found one seller that offered two such games: X-Wing: Imperial Pursuit and Wing Commander II…

I made some changes to the gameroom recently. I placed the flatscreen on a bigger tv stand on the right hand side of the CRT and I replaced the shelves with books and magazines with more bookcases. That creates more breathing room and leaves me with more shelves to put games on. The drawback is that I can display less books and magazines facing forwards.

Now that Colossal Cave is constantly crashing on me, I grabbed the Switch 2 to play Zelda: Link's Awakening. This is one fun little game. The objective is simple: No saving Hyrule this time, just trying to escape the island you're trapped on. How? By playing music to a gigantic egg with a lot of different instruments of course, which will break it and assumingly hatch a bird that can give you a ride out.

We always associate the old big box PC games with great artwork and containing thick manuals and loads of floppies. But that's not always the case. There are a lot of examples of ugly box art, like the US version of Lands of Lore II, the second Legend of Kyrandia or third Goblins, but even if the art looks nice, there are also a lot of examples of badly printed boxes.

It’s funny that the only Zork game that I didn’t have in my collection is the one with the lowest number. Zork Zero is not a game that frequently pops up on my local online marketplace. The early games do pop up every once in a while and the later games are more readily available, […]

I've started roaming around in Colossal Cave and it's quite a relaxing experience knowing that the goal of the game is just explore the cave and find some treasure. No gigantic "save the world plot" this time and no random battles when you're just standing still to take in the sights like in my previous game Final Fantasy VII. …

After my first failed attempt at beating the final boss in Final Fantasy VII, I took some time to level up my characters. I went back up the Northern Cave, all the while fighting monsters, only to find out that I couldn't get back up the airship because I was already passed the point of no return. So I made my way back down again.

Guillotine has made a Big Box Collector’s Edition of Colossal Cave. It comes with some cool items like a pin, a canvas map and mini posters. It’s much nicer than the rather sparce PS4 edition from Limited Run. The sleeve of the ‘ice’ edition of the game looks really nice and totally unlike any other […]

Picked up two games that were on my wish list. The Polar Express was on my wishlist As I understand it, Companions of Xanth is the first adventure game from Legend with purely a point-and-click interface.

I finished Runaway: Twist of Fate. The last part was quite good. I liked the puzzle where Gina finds a way to talk to Brian through two cans and a piece of string. I used the hint system a couple of times. For instance to figure out that you must use the scarf on the […]

I think I need to get my roommate his suspenders back so that he feels like a proper contortionist again and I can convince him to get into the airduct. The evil nurse took his away so I need to lure her out of her office. Brian keeps mentioning that the last time the radiators […]

I’m currently enjoying a vacation and that’s usually a time to spend some time at handheld gaming. When I packed my Evercade I chose four carts to re acquaint myself with.

While the previous visit to a car museum reminded me of OutRun, our visit to the Musée Automobile – Conservatoire National de Véhicules Historiques in Diekirch, Luxemburg made me think of Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. While not an Esprit, this is probably a Lotus Europa (the museum lacks a lot of the usual signs), it […]

In Final Fantasy VII, just like in VI, there comes a time when you can fly your own airship around the world. And that’s a very liberating experience. You can go (almost) anywhere you want without the constant hassle of random encounters. Granted, the ship also let’s you do that, although that’s confined to shallow […]

After a long search I’m excited to finally fill a small gap in my Ultima collection. […]

I bought an interesting old adventure game called Mindfighter, a third text adventure from Acornsoft called Countdown to Doom, a game called Kobayashi Naru that completes a trilogy of adventure games in my collection and an Edward Norton movie from 1998 called American History X. Browsing auction sites for Commodore 64 games sorted from cheap to expensive can provide interesting results.

I'm now almost 18 hours into Final Fantasy VII and I've done a lot of interesting things: I've raced Chocobos, infiltrated a corporation headquarters, fought alongside a giant animated toy directed by a kat and a made friends with a killer dog/lion(?), I fought all sorts of crazy enemies, from carrots to giant acorns, golems, giant flies, spiders, birds, robots etc, and even a dragon.

Picked up an old school rpg with an old school hefty manual. Seventy pages of instructions with screenshots, tables, lists and codes. I think I'll put this aside for a cold winter day.

I'm not a big fan of scary movies, but there are a few that I like. I have copies of a couple of my favorites like The Thing, Event Horizon and The Shining. Other favorites are Alien and Re-Animator. I was looking for  releases on VHS for those and succeeded in finding the first three Alien movies on tape.

I have always regretted not getting a physical copy of Hired Sword II for the Commodore 64. I had an Ebay search going for a long time which finally gave a result. I jumped on it and although I had to pay more than double the amount that the original game sold for the price was still okay. It fits in really nice with my copies of…

The Drifter's ending was every bit as dramatic as I'd expected from some of the more intens moments of the game. It had the right mix of action, interaction, storytelling and drama for this part of the game. No endlessly walking back and forth, no doing multiple actions over and over again. Just perfect. My only niggle was the part where one of the characters woke up from a coma while the whole plot hinges on the attempts to prevent the coma in the first place.

Since I have my new Amiga 500 case I was in need of a new Gotek solution. The old one was hacked into my previous case by the previous owner and of course I didn't want to do that in my new case. I also didn't want a Gotek as the internal drive anymore. It's hard to read the display and i like to put in those floppies on the side once again.

The first chapters of The Drifter proved very entertaining but not very difficult puzzle wise. Some puzzles play out in real-time and required a couple of tries. The game offers subtle hints after a couple of tries which is really helpful. The first one I couldn't wrap my head around turned out to be logical after I learned what to do.

I’ve never really been into roguelikes, but I figured it was time to finally give the genre a fair shot. What better way to start than picking up Roguecraft DX on the Evercade? I’ve put a little time into it, but it hasn't quite hooked me yet. I'll have to play more. Next, I came across The Last Tomb, an interesting game on a very orange cartridge release for the C64 from the guys over at…

The case badge that came with my new Amiga 500 case from A1200.net didn't appeal to me, so I got a nice and shiny badge from BadgeMan at Retro 8Bit Shop. And while I was at it, I also bought a MiSTer badge for the Amiga 1200 case with the MiSTress 1200 I/O Board inside. My Amiga 1200 case already has the Skid Row badge on it, so I didn't know if I would like another thick badge on it. I therefore also bought a transparent sticker. But the extra badge looks awesome so I put the MiSTer sticker on the CRT monitor for now.

A Commodore 64 enthousiast from the Netherlands should have a game from Dutch developer John Vanderaart in his collection. In keeping with the focus of my games collection on (text-)adventures and rpg's, I got a copy of De Sekte... (The Sect...) from 1985. According to the front cover it is a Electronic Novel (Elektronische Roman) and it's the first in a series.

He pleasures nobody, and he does it all in glorious 256 colors. A slapstick point & click recalling the golden age of 1990s adventure

It has been a long time that I went to a retro games convention. The last time was years ago in Tilburg and yesterday I visited again. It was much bigger this time around and it proved that four hours weren't enough to see it all. I bought some nice stuff though: Super Mario 64: This was one of the few games I had back in the day for my N64 and up until now I only had a loose copy.

I escaped from Tristam Island! That turned out to be easy and quickly done after my latest breakthrough. I solved a puzzle about getting into the Major's office all by myself, which made me feel rather smart. And after that it was only a matter of fiddling with some wires and controls. Nice ending, especially with the extra background information that the physical media provided, although I don't have a clue what the rock samples are about.

Most games are about questing, I get that, but having the actual word "quest" in the title of your game seems rather cliché. So it isn't as big as a coincidence that two unrelated games turn up at the same day with that specific word in the title: Time Quest and Chrono Quest II. Time Quest is yet another game from Legend in my collection.

I wanted to start this post by questioning why I even like playing text-adventures. I get lost in my own maps and I suck at solving puzzles. That was after being stuck in Tristam Island. Previously I had managed to gain entrance to the White House, but then I could go no further. There's a contraption in the lobby that opens a door, but I couldn't figure out what to do.

I don't have many Myst-like games. I enjoyed Myst, I have a copy, and I also have Riven and Exile, and although I've been meaning to, I've never actually played those. The only other such games I have are The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour. I only have them because I have fond memories of watching the game being run on a tiny television in the local toy shop, and they came bundled together in nice big boxes and were cheap.