A great end to a good retro year. We had a bumper crowd along to our last meeting for 2017 – quite a few first timers that heard about us at PAX.
The arcade machine was in full flight with people playing R-Type (our game of the month), Puzzle Bobble, Street Fighter, Puzzle Fighter variants and various shmups. Angela and Robert brought a Mega Drive II with a Mega CD and were playing a home brew Sonic the Hedgehog title. Peter and Chris maintained their devotion to Castlevania and brought along various vinyl Castlevania soundtracks that they played on a record player they brought with them. Rylan had a SNES Mini Classic and Aleks brought a Playstation along with some notable games from his huge haul earlier this year – Vib Ribbon, Tomba and Tomba 2. I brought along R-Type on the Core Grafx (our game of the month) for anyone to play.
During the announcements there were discussions on new retro titles, new retro consoles and remakes of NeoGeo favourites (Limited Run Games Windjammers on the PS4). We discussed R-Type which everyone found challenging. Did you know that the TurboGrafx version was made the same size as the arcade version but with limited resolution of the screen it scrolled up and down slightly. Also the TurboGrafx version included all 8 levels but the earlier PC Engine version had the games split into R-Type I (stages 1 to 4) and R-Type II (stages 5 to 8) on Hu Cards. We chose Milon’s Secret Castle (NES) as our January 2018 Game of the Month. During that discussion it was obvious that Shmups are popular so they became the theme for January 2018 – bring along your favourite shmup on your favourite console. During Show and Tell I showed off a few floppy disk emulator variants and discussed their use with the Amiga, Amstrad and Atari ST.
We finished 2017 with a quiz of console startup sounds played from my phone by through Rob and Angela’s retro ghetto blaster they brought with them. Aleks got the most correct to receive his choice of prize – an Avenger light gun for the Playstation and SEGA Saturn. Second place Victor got a wireless controller and DVD controller for the PS2. Third place Angela got a knockoff copy of Puyo Puyo Tsu for the Mega Drive which was our November Game of the Month.
Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. I hope you get the opportunity to play during the holiday period. Looking forward to seeing you early in the new year.