[Editorial] Guess what’s next on I ❤ Old Games! – 22/10/17

Hello guys,

Autumn has come (or Fall if you’re americans 🙂 ) so this is the time of the year in which the best thing to do is stay home and enjoy all the games bought in the past months.

During this last week I finally received Retro Gamer issue #172, for sure one of the best I’ve ever read so far along with #164 when the cover story was that of Resident Evil, which is one of the games I love the most and that scared the shit out of me the most. I was longing to receive the mag since this month the guys of RG revived, even if only this time, Super Play Magazine that is dedicated to the 20+1 games featured on the SNES Mini, the new Nintendo replica console I proudly own 🙂

During the week I also received the Spectrum games I’ve bought two weeks ago. Since I’m short on games, I thought to start to build at least a basic collection and the dozen of cassettes I’ve received are perfect for this. The Speccy games libraty is huge, really huge (something around 20k titles, as much as in the C64 library more or less), so everytime that pops up a new auction for a lot of games I’m always interested because, even though some of the most common games are always included in the bunch, there are as well new games I didn’t know.

In the next weeks the plan is to stay still concentrated on the ZX games and, since I’ve found some very interesting handbooks, trying to learn to program games based on the Z80 assembly. This is a brand new challenge for me since I know almost zero BASIC and even less assembly, so my starting level is below zero. I’ve found three books about it, in english and in italian and I really want to see if I can undertand what’s written inside and if I will manage (one day far in the future) to write my own mini game. I’m very excited by the idea and I hope I could figure out how to do it soon!

Unfortunately my goal to buy stuff I’ve seen online has been blocked by a fucking fine I’ve received from the police for a real stupid thing. I was really pissed off by receiving it and even more pissed off when I saw I had to pay more than 200€. Probably they think I’m Bill Gates son, I don’t know…

This was a shame because I’ve seen some great 8-bit computers for a very competitive price online. A great eBayer was willing to sell an Atari 800XL, a ZX81 a TI-99/4A, an Atari XEGS, an Atari 600XL and an Atari 400 that for me were absolutely underpriced: all of them looked new, clean, they all had their own cables and manuals and most important they were working. Probably for all these reasons, after a few hours they were unavailable, since someone smart and richer than me had already purchased them all. I really need to have more funds to invest 🙂

Luckily I saw that this seller from time to time lists some very good stuff so I’ll keep my eyes open in order to buy something cool. Even though in a near future the think I’ll most likely look for will be more space where to put my stuff.

I think I need to move to a larger flat……

GAMES

• Europa Universalis IV
  Begun: November 16th, 2016
  Status: 60% completed, on hold
• Duke Nukem – Episode three: Trapped in the Future
  Begun: January 4th, 2017
  Status: 60% completed, on hold
• Super Mario Bros. 2 – The Lost Levels
  Begun: January 16th, 2017
  Status: 12% completed, on hold
• Castlevania
  Begun: January 24th, 2017
  Status: 66% completed, on hold
• Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
  Begun: April 25th, 2017
  Status: 33% completed
• Super C
  Begun: June 23rd, 2017
  Status: 57% completed

BOOKS

• Retro Gamer 172
  Begun: October 18th, 2017
  Status: 24% completed
• The Ultimate History of Video Games
  Begun: November 16th, 2016
  Status: 4% completed, on hold

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