Tag Archives: games

If you breathe, you know what Pokémon is. You’ve at least run into a Pikachu or perhaps even a Bulbasaur at some point in your life, and you might have a vague inkling that it’s a game about collecting creatures, with the goal being to, as both the song and the box says, Catch Them All.

The thing is, this is actually a lot fucking harder than you might think–so I set out to do it myself. In a copy of Pokémon Blue for the 3DS, after two-and-a-half years of on-and-off play, I now have a save with a full 151 possible Pokémon caught. I have screenshots of the journey.

What possesses a man to go to such obsessive lengths? What keeps people from doing the thing listed on the box? Why does Lt. Surge have such a fine ass? Join me, friends, and I will answer all your questions.

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I’ve recently been really enjoying RetroAchievements. It’s a site where you can unlock Xbox Live-like achievements for older games, provided you’re using a hacked emulator logged into the site. It’s a novel concept, and it’s a nice excuse to dig back into some of my favorite Atari games and try “mastering” (getting all the achievements in) them.

When I covered Racing the Beam on this blog back in 2020, I mentioned one of the games covered in that book being Atari’s Pac-Man. It’s a great tale of disappointment, one of Atari’s programmers given a mere 4K of ROM to produce the flagship game of the 1981 Christmas season. The results were not pretty, and along with E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, became the poster children of the glut of low-quality games being produced at the time and later symbolized the “game burial” in the Sunnyvale desert where Atari famously dumped their excess stock.

Game reviews of VCS Pac-Man often don’t dissect it any further than “it’s ugly and plays like crap and you already knew that”. But how does it play like crap? What are the little details that make it such a below-average port? Is it playable on its own merits, despite how alien it is to the arcade version? That’s what I’m here to discuss. You might want to wear ear protection. Continue reading →