Café på Bit & Retro Gaming in Skellefteå

April 29, 2015 by stopXwhispering

This weekend I visited a dear friend way up north in Sweden :) I brought an NES so we could try out some adventure games and also play my latest Tetris acquisition, Tengen Tetris, since my friend loves Tetris! ^_^ We had loads of fun with the co-op mode of Tengen Tetris, and also played a bunch of other games, like Xexyz!

Xexyz is an awesome adventure game that merges platforming action with sidescrolling shooting ^_^ It’s also really pretty and colorful, and you get to see fairies in bath tubs! haha ^_^

Another game that we played was Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth which is also really cool :) It is also a merge of platformer/shmup, but it also has a strategic boss battle element :) This dinosaur was really annoying >_<

We also played Zen: intergalactic ninja! This game is hard!! But I love how they’re making it all about environmental friendliness haha ^_^ Every stage is about fighting pollution in some way, and in the bonus stages you recycle trash! LOL! I’ve never encountered such an environmentally aware Ninja ;D

Last game we played was Karnov, and we got stuck on the 5th stage with the dinosaur boss that appears a second time >_< The game was a bit glitchy, we got stuck sometimes inside walls and had to wait for the timer to run out and kill us, lol…

On Saturday we went into town and visited the GAME store. They had quite a lot of retro games, apart from three big glass cabinets by the entrance they also had more shelves around the counter :D I picked up quite a lot of games here ;D

At the end of they day we visited a really awesome place called Café på Bit! It’s a café/arcade! Mainly focusing on console gaming but they also had some pinball machines and an arcade machine with Pixelbot Arena (a game produced by a local talent) :)

Apart from all the setups, CRT’s and consoles, they also had a whole wall of games you could choose to play! :D They had the entire NES library that was released in Scandinavia ^_^ And some games were even for sale! I picked up a few great ones ;D I’ll tell you all about them in my next post ^_^

We spent 4 hours there, all three of us were playing the same game, the only game I was interested in playing since I knew I couldn’t play it at home: Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril! I’ve seen the game maybe once before, and I know it’s a new game released for the NES (in 2006 I think) made by one guy. It was extremely difficult! You just had to memorize every step! We were competing on who would finish it first, after four hours none of us were even close to finishing it haha ^_^ I made it the furthest though, to boss no. 2…

Café på Bit was really cosy, too bad it’s so far away from me :( Probably around a 15 hour drive! I recommend anyone visiting the north of Sweden to check it out though! ^___^

I’ll get right on writing my next post about my pickups! I came home with almost 20 games! :D

Atari Tetris Arcade from 1988!

April 13, 2015 by stopXwhispering

I got my first arcade cabinet! And it’s a classic! :D Also one of my favorite games ^_^ I have over 20 different Tetris games for various systems, and up until now my favorite has been Tetris BPS for the Famicom, but now I think my ‘new’ Atari Tetris arcade is my favorite! :D I might be biased, because it’s just so big and pretty and my highscores stay on there, but it’s definitely a great Tetris game!

The cabinet is in good condition. The control panel, the top light and the screen is in very good condition! But I will have to do some work on the sides to restore it to it’s former glory, it’s gotten a bit chipped around the edges. Nothing some wood filler and paint can’t fix ^_^ I haven’t moved it into my game room yet, I’m waiting to finish restoring it first.

The game is divided into missions, compared to regular Tetris which is usually just endless. The missions are to clear certain amount of lines, and the stages get harder by adding obstacles (bricks) in your path. You can play two people against each other and race to see who finished the lines first! :D

There’s also three different difficulty settings you can set it to. Easy, medium or hard. I’m slowly taking over all the previous highscores on the machine ^____^ Thankfully I can open the coin holder so I can re-use my quarters ;D

This Tetris cabinet was developed by Atari and released in the arcades back in 1988. This version of Tetris was later ported and released by Tengen for the NES in 1989. That’s one of the few Tetris games I actually don’t have yet :( But now I have the original version of it anyway ;D ……. writing about this here just made me go to eBay and pick myself up a copy of Tengen Tetris for the NES.. so I will have it soon ^___^

There was a lot of controversy around the Tengen version for the NES, after some legal disputes about publishing rights Nintendo won the publishing rights and Tengen had to recall their game from stores and destroy remaining inventory. There’s apparently less than 100,000 copies of the game in existence! I can’t wait to try the Tengen version out as well!

I love all puzzle games, especially Tetris! The objectives of this arcade Tetris game are fun and the music is great! It’s also very special to play on an arcade cabinet instead of through a console.. I think I might be hooked… already scouting for an SNK cab for my Neo Geo MVS games ;D

I will take some more pictures of my Atari Tetris arcade once I’ve fixed it up :)

Zoids Densetsu for Game Boy

April 5, 2015 by stopXwhispering

I recently got Zoids Densetsu for the Game Boy. I didn’t think much of the few Zoids-games I’ve played for the Famicom, but this one got recommended to me, so I thought I’d give it a try ^_^

It’s amazing! A side-scrolling shooter where you play as various “Zoids” (giant robots), dodging blocks and vulcanos and killing enemies! The music is also extremely catchy! I spent quite a lot of time with it in the couch last night, and I managed to get past the first boss and make it to the third stage. The difficulty increases fast though, and I haven’t gotten past all those erupting volcanos on stage 3 yet >_< This is definitely a challenge I will re-visit and try to beat! :)

You can check out some of the gameplay that I recorded here:

This week I also got a few other games in the mail. They were all NES games, Challenge of the Dragon, Super Turrican, and two pirated games with 32 in 1 and 40 in 1 ^_^ Challenge of the Dragon was a really shitty game! But the box looks awesome ;D