Sasha's Retrobytes 🏳️‍⚧️

Sosadillatron's Virtual Boy in front of a Pulp Fiction poster that makes it look like Uma Thurman is looking through the visor.

What are you playing, Uma?

Yeah!

Aha, I had it on C64 and was a huge Ghostbusters fan, so I played it lots. Didn't get very far with it and it felt like I accidentally reached the stay puffed marshmallow man bit once and then never again.

"Then earth and fire and air and watery rage Then tree and flesh and stone did understand And know the law of Magister, shaman and sage Lord of the Old Time, ruler over beast and man." Castle Master has some deep lore written fully in verse by the odd and enigmatic Mel Croucher (often best know for the 1984 Deus Ex Machine), talking of ancient times in England where the omnipotent Magister ruled over everything, then the rise of mankind and their many civilizations that never last, and the Normans who built a mighty structure named Castle Eternity, made out of the very rock and soil that is the epicenter of the Magister's power while he slept for centuries and, after waking up, unleashing his magical fury and turning the king and all subjects into ghosts and beasts to haunt the halls of the castle. You choose your character, a prince or princess, as your sibling is imprisoned in Castle Eternity and your first task is to figure out how the hell you're supposed to enter the castle and avoid the deep moat with no more than a shark swimming in it!

Entering one of the huts full of hay bales, a pitchfork and a spirit in the form of a cute black bat with triangular red eyes. The earth shakes (or perhaps that's just you) when you encounter one of the inhabitants turned ghost and critter by the Magister with the message "SPIRITS!!" shown in the bottom part of the screen, and the only way to be victorious is to sling a rock with your slingshot at the spirits, probably because they're just not used to the idea and just flee.

Outside the castle is the Wizard's Hut, the home of a dirty and smelly old wizard that everyone ridiculed but in eventually learned was the Magister himself, risen back from his slumber. We see a the lowest of polygons (this game has very primitive but charming graphics) with a table and a chair with a six-pronged star and some cheese on the table. Let me tell ya, this game has A LOT of cheese to much on throughout the castle.

The castle stables, with a beautiful pinkish-red horse made out of like ten polygons, being a good boye. You open the gate of the stable so the horse can go free if it wants, but it kinda just looks like it wants some food and a pat on the head.

Castle Master (DOS) (1990)

1/4

Aww, it's so cool to see Castle Master's graphics like this and how well they have lo-fi indie game vibes. Very special game to me on C64 and Amiga, the first 3D world I ever saw.

Expert Track (Jet Wave/Wave Shark, Arcade, Konami, 1996)

Mario lines up his opening drive on a crisp, clear day for golf with some friends // Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour for Nintendo Gamecube, photography on CRT TV

Swing you arms, from side to side, come on, it's time to go! Do the Mario!

🍄happy MAR10🍄

A page from Hobby Consolas with three screenies of roughly textured graphics and a green dragon in flight and some details and drawing parallels to the Virtua graphics (presumably Racing and Fighter)

A very early glimpse in Hobby Consolas magazine of Sega Saturn classic Panzer Dragoon in development, presumably at the stage where it was going to be a 32X game. The graphics definitely have that feel.

Very cool stuff.

Oh, I don't think it was a very well known game or released outside of Poland anyway, so totally understandable you did xD

Aww, thank you for sharing it! I have a similar memory with an earlier Demo One and it being the first thing I played on my new PS1. Very special day in my memory too <3

xD It's what immediately came to mind

A scan of the cover of X68000 The Game Selection Best Selection cover, with what looks like CGI rendered orange muppet with googly eyes and a rendered open maw, leaning in from the corner of the page against a cyberspacey background like they're trapped in existential horror cyber dimensoons

"You must help me…. get back… Muppet Show… Dr Bunsen… Computer… Experiment… gone wrong… Pulled into Cyberspace.... Bring me… Blue Data…"

Color corrected to best of my ability, squatting in the middle is Tanaka-san and you can see computers with a game screen in the middle monitor all set up on metal racks behind them

Amazing photo of Square development members on the "Suishou no Dragon" project, including Miki Yukinoura (雪ノ浦美樹) and Hiromichi Tanaka (田中弘道) @vgdensetsu.bsky.social has a nice profile for Miki vgdensetsu.net/mikiyukinoura/

Snippet about Faxanadu from Famimaga 1987 that I have been going through the past few days

This is the only preview I know of that spells Faxanadu like Fa-Xanadu (ファ・ザナドゥ), I wonder if they were going to go with that to more clearly call out that it is a Xanadu game but changed mind? Also this gives a strong implication that it stands for Famicom Xanadu...(maybe this is a known thing)

What if the Apple ][ had run on Field-Sequential? One thing I remain fascinated by is the field-sequential color system. Essentially, unlike composite video, which sacrifices color depth in space, field sequ...

New blog post! A what-if scenario where we try to see how a home computer designer might've dealt with the field-sequential color television, had the Korean War not stopped that standards' rollout. Enjoy! nicole.express/2026/the-app...

The Early History of Falcom YouTube video by Bowl of Lentils

In the celebration of Nihon Falcom"s 45th anniversary, I can' recommended enough to watch this great video about the history of Falcom by @bowloflentils.bsky.social

Very instructive 🤓😎

#NihonFalcom #Falcom

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIcb...

Totally understandable, especially given I've had similar issues with the NHS and GPs these last few years and my health struggles. It's still desperately underfunded and glacially slow to the point of despair.

This is a picture of a Macintosh Quadra 700 with a Radius Precision Color Pivot displaying the Mac OS 7.1 desktop. It is in "portrait mode" which means I got the drivers working.

Got my Radius Precision Color Pivot monitor working for #Marchintosh I had to recap four Macs before I could find one that would show color. Now I have to fix 2 of the 4 Macs and go through the rest of my Macs while I'm at it. Got two Portrait displays to check too. #vintagecomputer #retrocomputer

I hadn't either until a couple of days ago and pencilled it in for a check-out play.

Lovely stuff <3 I'm fond of Toshbas; they always tend to work out to my favourite TVs.

Yeah, totally get you on that. I'm playing stuff now on my bigger CRTs I only ever played on small tvs back in the day, and how good they look still kinda jars with my mind's eye rememberances from then.

Destroy lights, so you can stalk...

The stealth mechanics go beyond just waiting of enemies to patrol and extend to shooting out lights so you can creep around in the shadows, and a paucity of ammunition.

This is such an interesting game to dig around in, especially blind, and one of those in which you can see the seeds of stuff like Metro 2033.

Moody beats, coloured smoke and lighting, and industrial sci-fi architecture based on a real-life ironworks.

A 1999 Polish FPS that looks like it use the Quake II engine but in fact runs on its own, and plays more like a stealth game than a run-and-gun.

📺: Pył (Dust), Optimus Nexus (DOS PC)

An angled photo of the finish line with its large shell-like fan roof between two pillars and lots of ad boards and the crowd

A shot of classical pillar ruins on a raised plith looming over an arcing corner. Two cars are in front.

A seafront view of white Mediterranean homes next to the sea. A boxy white car can be seen in front of the driver's view.

A shot of the road course going past and up a waterfall, cars about the make the steep climb to a tunnel

Go on, take the car for a spin around picturesque Mythical Coast. 🏁

You won't regret it.

📺 : Rage Racer, Namco, 1996. (PS1, Composite)

That's the one, yep.

Oh, yeah, it's not. Something that would have worked better if it hadn't been tied to following the events of the movie.

Aha, it does! One of those ohhh riiight moments.

Ohh will totally fit in with that vibe.