PixelatedArcade News

Released in 1980, Bally's Xenon broke new ground for pinball. Electro Mechanical machines were on the way out with the last EM game having been released just a year prior; Solid State became the new normal for pinball with hardware that allowed for more complex games, synthesized and/or digitized sounds, and an array of other features. Xenon was not the first solid state machine or the first with digitized voices, however it was the first to feature female voices. All of the music, sounds, and voices in the game were developed and recorded by synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani, and now you can hear her original recordings! A mini-album was recently released on Suzanne Ciani's Bandcamp page featuring all of the vocals, music, and sound effects she recorded during development of the game in their isolated form. This is a rare and fascinating look behind the scenes of a classic pinball game and is worth checking out...

Greetings classic gamers! Just a quick update here; to celebrate pride month this year, PixelatedArcade would like to welcome you to check out pixelatedarcade.gay! The information is the same, but to show support for the LGBTQ community and just for some fun a few minor color and style changes are visible throughout the site; I had originally intended to add a little more, but time ran out. Also, 20% of all new registration revenue is donated to benefit LGBTQ nonprofit groups. Find out more at what is .gay?.

Code named "Peanut", The IBM PCjr was an odd creation; it's new 16 colors graphics and 3-voice sounds could have made it a spectacular PC for games but, unfortunately, it was a market failure. There were a number of reasons for this; some quirks made it not quite 100% IBM PC compatible, an odd expansion system utilized sidecars and not IBM PC style ISA cards, at launch time the included keyboard was a hideous chiclet style one, the price was considered high for a home computer, and more all made for a machine that never took the market by storm...

This past week has been a cold one in many parts of North America. Luckily, losing power hasn't been an issue for us however some planned travel had to be cancelled due to iced over roads described by one of the locals as “nearly undrivable”. Lacking the proper equipment for such conditions, it was instead time to take advantage of the time off from work and complete some code updates and fixes! The latest changes to the PixelatedArcade codebase have just been pushed live...

Welcome to 2021 everyone! Here's hoping this year turns out better than the last. It's also been a while since I've posted any updates, especially a game review, so a new review seems like a great way to kick off the new year. For previous reviews I picked out a few awful to average games, so this time around I thought I would switch gears to the opposite end of the spectrum. As the 1980's were coming to a close, Sierra On-Line licensed several games from Japanese developer Game Arts for release in North America. Thexder is likely the best known, and at the time was one of Sierra's best selling games (and deservedly so, it's a fun game I also recommend checking out). This time around, however, I'm going to point your attention to what seems to be one of Game Arts more obscure titles, Zeliard.

What a year it's been! I think it's safe to say no one quite expected the events that transpired with Covid-19 creating quite the havoc. However, as we come to the holiday season, it's time for the now traditional end of year roundup. Here at PixelatedArcade we had our own challenges as well this year which included a move to a new house. Despite everything going on, plenty of new content was still added and some fun new games were acquired for our collection...

Well, that didn't go quite as planned! Being 2020, that 5-10 minutes of downtime I mentioned in the last update turned out to be much longer...If you visited the site in the past few days, you may have found some pages not working or the site down entirely. Everything should be back online now, and I'm working on upgrading and updating the backend as well so it may be a few more days before I'm back to adding new content, but the good news is it should be a while before I have to perform a large update like this again and next time I can be prepared for some of the snafus that occurred....

Fall is here, Halloween is just a few weeks away, and because it's 2020 life is keeping as all on our toes! Coming up on November 5th PixelatedArcade will be undergoing some scheduled site maintenance; you may find the site intermittently unresponsive that evening, although (hopefully) downtime should be pretty minimal. Additionally, I've begun quietly adding some Nintendo Entertainment System games along with plans for the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and MSX coming soon. There is an impressive catalog of games for these systems individually, let alone combined, so like everything it will be a slow work in progress...