Passion for Pixels Retro Gaming Podcast

What really counts as a violent game? Do we really need to worry about the children? What's really at stake? On this episode we tackle the nebulous issue of violence in video games and do our best to provide our answers to these questions and more!

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Did you know that the first computer game to have boss fights was a dungeon crawler called DnD, that ran on a computer called Illiac, owned by The University of Illinois? Boss fights have been a staple of video games ever since, so we decided to dedicate a whole episode to our favourite (and least favourite) boss fights. Which are the cliches we can do without? What are the criteria that makes a boss fight a fulfilling challenge? Who tops our list of most memorable boss fights? Download or stream the latest episode to find out!

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From the ludicrous Jaguar pad to the sublime DualShock for the Sony Playstation, on this episode we dissect the evolution of controllers. Find out our thoughts on the best overall pad for retro gaming with a modern setup along with our feelings on the best and worst ergonomics. Also, did you know the Sega Genesis/Megadrive pad works out of the box with the Atari 2600?

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Passion For Pixels is back from summer holidays! In this episode we catch up on what we’ve been playing the last couple of months, before we delve into our main topic: classic racing games.

The legacy of racing games goes back all the way to the early days of computer games, and we talk about how the genre has evolved from 1972’s Speed Race. We also devote some time to our classic racing game favorites, like OutRun, RC Pro-Am, F-Zero, Micro Machines, Super Mario Kart and more!

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As the gaming industry took off in the mid 1990's, so did gaming trade shows. From E3 to Blizzcon, this episode covers the good, the bad, and the ugly of gaming trade shows. Are they really all they are cracked up to be or is it just useless hype?

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Few companies have dominated the gaming scene as Blizzard Entertainment has for over 20 years, and their logo has become synonymous with top-notch innovative games that are unquestionably worth your money.

Blizzard, known as Silicon & Synapse in the early 1990's, are today known for franchises like WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo, but we also take a look at their older classics, like Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing and Blackthorne.

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Point and click adventure games like Monkey Island and Broken Sword had their heyday in the mid '90's. After having been more or less dead for the last 15 years the genre is now seeing a small resurgence, with among others, Tim Schafer getting back to making adventure games. In celebration of the return of the adventure game genre we get into our favorites of the golden age of adventure gaming, and it turns out that Stian and Danny don't have the same games at the top of their lists.

In an attempt to see the genre without nostalgia tinted glasses, Stian gets some hands on time with an old classic he never had the chance to play back in the day: The Dig. How it holds up and whether this genre can hold the interest of 30 year olds and not just kids with a ton of time on their hands, are among the topics of the tenth episode of retro gaming podcast Passion for Pixels.

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For this episode of Passion for Pixels we finally turn to PC gaming and talk about late 80's and early 90's shareware gaming.

The shareware gaming era started with bedroom programmers making their own games and shipping them out to their customers. It grew from there into a profitable business, and one of the main innovators of the time was John Carmack. Carmack was one of the founders of id Software, the company behind shareware titles such as Commander Keen and Doom.

As opposed to game developers like Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima, John Carmack was actually a programmer, and we talk about how that might influence someone's perspective when creating games.

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This episode starts off with us talking about Japanese game director, producer, writer and designer Hideo Kojima. We talk about the games that inspired Kojima to become a game developer, his earliest work (ever heard of Penguin Adventure?) and how his most well known series of games, Metal Gear Solid, came about. Once again it's a story of how the limitations of the console's hardware forced the developers to think outside of the box.

We also talk about the pros and cons of Kojima's style, which draws heavily on his fascination for films. Does his games feel too static at times, when the cut scenes drag on for too long?

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This episode we're talking classic console launches, starting with the launch of the NES in the US in 1985. We talk about figures and facts from launches spanning the NES to the Dreamcast, reminisce about our memories of the different launches and talk about how the advertising impacted us in different ways.

The videogame crash had put the industry in shambles, and Nintendo was trying to bring their console to an almost dead market when they released the NES in 1985. Did you know that it took more than a year from the NES was launched in New York until it was available nationwide - more than three years after the Japanese release of the Famicom? Console launches back then were not surrounded by the same amount of hype and propaganda as they are today.

We talk about the launch of the Sega Master System and the Sega Genesis. Stian tells about his memories of the Super Nintendo launch as a kid in Norway, and how this put videogames on norwegian TV for the first time.

We also talk about the launch of the Phillips CD-i and conclude that the console was actually way ahead of it's time, but very poorly marketed (and had terrible games).

We talk about the launch of the Panasonic 3DO, the Sony Playstation, the Sega Saturn, the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Dreamcast as well.

Did you know that the Sega Saturn was released in the US the same day that it was first shown to the American public at E3? Someone at Segas advertising department would probably get fired over that decision if it happened today.

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