Complete: Odyssey 2 Adventure Magazine Collection

 

Started: January 1982 with the first issue

Finished: Late 2019 with the final issue

Magazines were an absolutely critical part of the early days of videogaming, and in an era with no internet, absolutely essential for players to learn about upcoming releases for their systems. In addition to commercially published periodocals like Electronic Games, most game companies began publishing their own public relations type of magazine, and the Odyssey 2 had Odyssey Adventure Magazine.

The first issue arrived, if memory serves, shortly after or at the same time as Christmas of 1981. Inside the console box was an application for membership in the Odyssey Adventure Club, including a one-year subscription to the magazine.

Of course I was all in on that, and each quarterly issue seemed to arrive with the latest big game release. Just as I was picking up Pick Axe Pete in the summer of 1982, the latest issue arrived heralding the game's release. As a young nerd, I also began corresponding with the magazine, getting replies (I will someday detail that correspondence in another article), and submitting tips.

I did not renew my subscription after getting the first five issues, and picked up the sixth issue at the local Magnavox dealer. Which was good, because my tip for Invaders from Hyperspace was published in that issue. By mid 1983, I was moving onto the Commodore VIC20 and the console videogame crash was underway, so I assumed that there were no further issues of Odyssey Adventure Magazine anyway.

I found out years later that I was wrong when digging through the archives of Digital Press, which emerged as the central videogame collector's website of reference once the internet was available. There was indeed a seventh issue featuring the game Turtles on the cover, and I no longer had a complete collection of Odyssey Adventure Magazine.

Thus, when I turned to Ebay in 2019 in order to complete collections of Electronic Games magazine and the North American Odyssey 2 Software Library, I also began a constant search for that missing issue. Of course, it was the rarest. The premiere issue is fairly common, but later issues become more rare as you get toward the end of the run.

I finally found it afer six months in a set with other issues and promotional material, and paid a pretty penny for it. The postmark is dated July 25, 1983 and it was filled with the usual articles, and since it is basically a part of a company's public relations, no sign that the whole company was about to collapse and Odyssey was almost finished with videogames.

Magazines from that era are a treasure trove of information, sure, but they also capture a lot of the energy and joy of a larger gaming community coming together for the first time to share our love of this hobby. Odyssey Adventure Magazine was always a positive and hopeful publication with an eye on a future that never came for the brand, and now I finally have a complete collection, and thus a more complete picture of Odyssey's final days.

Beaten: Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise (Switch)

 Sometimes, a game's story, characters, and all-around quirkiness can help the player overlook technical issues and seemingly primitive graphics. There has never been a much better example of this than the two Deadly Premonition games. 

The cult status of the first one, emerging in the years after its release, is testament to this."How did you know it had cult status?", one might ask, to which I answer "I saw a boardgame version of Deadly Premonition at a videogame trade show a few years ago." That's how you know a game has made it, just ask Zaxxon.

I downloaded Deadly Premonition Director's Cut for the Playstation 3 as a Playstation Plus free game at some point in the 2010s, sat on it awhile, then checked it out in 2016 and loved it. It's a silly masterpiece but a joy to play. Lots of it is original, some of it is derivative, but all of it is such a refreshing change from the giant studio cookie-cutter stuff (I'm looking at you Ubisoft) that I couldn't help but play, if just to see how wacky it was going to get.

When an unexpected sequel turned up on the Nintendo Switch this summer, I decided my enjoyment of the first game warranted a day one purchase.  Plus, I'm sure the cult fame of the first one granted the team more development funding and therefore the second game would be a much more polished one.

Well, not so much, and the rageful internet panned the sequel's technical issues and other gliches, as it is rightful to do. Nonetheless, and once again, everything under the hood the game is running along fine in terms of story, character, setting, music, and style. 

As the main character Francis York Morgan, you are tasked with solving murders in the small town of Le Carre, Louisana. There is a supernatural element to it as well, and in traditional Japanese norms, a bright and fiesty teenage girl sidekick. It's set in a relatively small open world which the player navigates by skateboard (fast travel is unlocked early on though). 

Combat is fun enough with just one gun that uses rubber bullets -  but I only counted 6 enemy types (3 natural and 3 supernatural) and 3 boss fights total. All of it was easy and not frustrating at all, which is good since the focus of the game is in interacting with the zany characters and solving the case.

Lots of side quests (kill 30 squirrels, gather ingredients for something. etc.) and some unique mini-games (stone skipping) add filler that is good, because sometimes you get stuck without much direction as to what to do. At one point, I was supposed to find 6 Anaconda Skins at "Park". I visited what I thought was the park, looking for anacondas and not finding them. Later, I realized that the skins were just more random loot lying around the park.

Crafting exists to use up all that random loot, but as usual, I did not dive in too deep. After some basic enhancements to my gun and physical stats, I really never found the crafting something I wanted to or needed to return to time and again.

The overarching story between both games comes to a head in a climactic and satisfying conclusion, wrapping up all the character threads and opening a small door for more Deadly Premonition. I hope a third game does show up in a decade or so, because the game's technical primitiveness is only forgivable by its charm, and I don't think that anyone's patience with those issues could be put aside for more frequent installments. 

Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing in Disguise is a fitting sequel and yet another triumph of substance and style over technical expertise and programming elegance. I'd recommend it only for gamers who still care about that difference and want something truly unique once in awhile.

Beaten in 2011

Here are all the games and DLC add-ons that I beat in 2011. I look at this list and wonder how I squeezed all of it in.

Highlights include doing sequential trilogies with Killzone and Gears of War, 2 whole Bethesda RPGs (including all of the DLC for Fallout 3), and the sheer joy of exploding blimps with artillery over occupied Paris in The Saboteur.

Full:

Singularity (PS3)

Heavy Rain (PS3)

Enslaved : Odyssey to the West (PS3)

The Saboteur (PS3)

Dead Space 2 (360)

Splinter Cell Conviction (360)

Bulletstorm (360)

Crysis 2 (PS3)

Fallout 3 (PS3)

Portal 2 (PS3)

Killzone (PS2)

Killzone 2 (PS3)

LA Noire (PS3)

Gears of War (360)

Infamous 2 (PS3)

Killzone 3 (PS3)

Duke Nukem Forever (PS3)

Two Worlds 2 (PS3)

Deus Ex : Human Revolution (PS3)

Dead Island (PS3)

Gears of War 2 (360)

Gears of War 3 (360)

Resistance 3 (PS3)

Rage (PS3)

Uncharted 3 (PS3)

The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim (360)

Saints Row The Third (360)

F.E.A.R.(360)

Stacking (PS3)

Dead Nation (PS3)

Costume Quest (PS3)

Infamous : Festival of Blood (PS3)

DLC Packs:

Enslaved : Odyssey to the West - Pigsy's Perfect 10

Fable 3 - Understone

Fable 3 -Traitor's Keep

Fallout 3 - Operation Anchorage

Fallout 3 - Point Lookout

Fallout 3 - Broken Steel

Fallout 3 - The Pitt

Fallout 3 - Mothership Zeta

Mass Effect 2 - The Arrival

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood - The DaVinci Disappearance

Heavy Rain - The Taxidermist

LA Noire - The Consul's Car

LA Noire - The Naked City

LA Noire - Slip of the Tongue

LA Noire - Nicholson Electroplating

Gears of War 2 - Road to Ruin

Deus Ex : HR The Missing Link

Complete: Magnavox Odyssey 2 Software Library (North America)

Started: December 25, 1981 with Speedway!/Spin-Out!/Crypto-Logic!
Finished: Fall 2019 with Nimble Numbers NED!

It all began here for me as on Christmas morning of 1981, the Atari 2600 I had asked for ended up being a Magnavox Odyssey 2, I suspect thanks to a shady salesman at the O’Neils store at the Richland Mall in Mansfield. As I always say, I made the best of it and thankfully Odyssey cranked out a lot of great titles before the crash of 1983.

As a teen with negligible income, I was at my folks mercy in terms of software acquisition for it, getting new releases for good grades and birthdays, and for larger chores. It worked out well as new Odyssey 2 releases were months apart. I managed to pick up a few older games as well when they became discounted. Christmas of 1982 brought my last big roundup of Odyssey 2 games, as well as the Voice, the add-on voice synthesis peripheral.

By early 1983, the Odyssey 2 was at least fifth place in the market, but the last few games were stellar, including Killer Bees and a port of Demon Attack. As the great crash of 1983 took hold and consoles went down, I managed to talk mom and dad into a computer with the Commodore VIC 20, and the Odyssey 2 started gathering dust. In the fall of 1984 I picked up one last discount game in Volleyball and considered my collection done at that point.

Pictured above is my first inventory of any video game system, with prices. Some of the games - Freedom Fighters, Pick Axe Pete, and K.C’s Krazy Chase - were release day prices. I moved on to the Commodore 64 for the rest of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s I had started picking up older games at the same stores I was buying new games.

In addition, those early eighties consoles started popping up in flea markets and thrift stores and I was cleaning up. In an age before eBay, where few of us were thinking to preserve the games of yesteryear, I had my run of a major metropolitan area for years. Additional Odyssey 2 games were certainly picked up then, along with extra consoles and controllers.

In the early 2000s I turned to eBay to pick off a few rare Odyssey 2 games I had missed. Atlantis was the only other third party release for the Odyssey 2, again by Imagic.  Power Lords, the last Odyssey 2 game from Magnavox/NAP , was a weird tie in to a comic book/toy line or something. I also picked up a few amazing homebrew titles during this decade as that scene exploded, but they are outside the scope of this collection.

Of course the Odyssey 2 survived the Purge I did on eBay around 2007-2008, and in 2019 I decided to track down the relatively cheap remaining titles to round out the set. It didn’t take long as none of them were very rare, but it took a while to find SID the Spellbinder and Nimble Numbers NED with  the extra documents they contained.

Thirty eight years after obtaining my first piece of video game software ever, I have completed my first complete collection of every commercially released title for a system. Say what you will about Odyssey, they fought hard in the face of Atari’s market dominance, with inferior hardware and virtually no third party support.

You never forget your first love, and I’m glad I’ve held onto mine, and completed the software library for it. Decades from now I hope to still be playing U.F.O. or getting my retired friends to sit down for a session of Quest for the Rings. The Magnavox Odyssey 2 was my first video game system, and if it ends up being my last one, I’d be okay with that.

Beaten: Ys Book 2 - Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Whew, that was close. Again.

Pictured above is my stunning defeat of the final boss of Ys Book 2, the Turbografx 16 CD classic that took me 30 years to get around to playing. Ys Book 2 is actually Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter, originally released on Japanese computers in 1989 before getting bundled with the first Ys game for the Turbografx 16 CD. 

Fantastic music, cutscenes, and polished gameplay shine through this straightforward masterpiece of its time. You start Ys Book 2 bereft of your armor, weapons, and most items  from Ys Book 1, but levelling continues from the first. Pacing is perfect and you level as you explore with no need for grinding, but occasionally you’ll find a sweet spot and go for it anyway.

The major addition in Book 2 is magic wands and MP to power their effects. Since the first wand was fire, and shot fireballs, I assumed the others would be also elemental themed effects, but Ys is a little offbeat in its design. Instead, the other magic included useful effects like teleportation back to any town, shield, and disguise as a monster. 

While disguised as a monster, you get access to monster only areas and converse with the enemies, who sometimes offer useful clues regarding your next step. It added an unexpected and wholly delightful twist on the normal gameplay.

Most boss fights were epic challenges worthy of song with insane attacks and razor edge margins for error. Hell yes I used the save anywhere feature of the Turbografx 16 Mini to save optimal gameplay runs on a few of them. If I started out good in a boss fight, I’d save that point and start subsequent attempts from there. Again, don’t judge, I’m middle-aged.

Some of the boss fights were pushovers, but I’ll take it. 

I previously stated that back in the day I was not convinced that Ys Book 1 &  2 was the killer app that would make me take the plunge and get the Turbografx 16 CD. I was wrong and I know that this game would have been a favorite of mine back then. Here in 2020 hindsight is still 20/20, but at least I got to play it now thanks to the current wave of 90s retro gaming nostalgia and the good-enough-for-now Turbografx 16 Mini.

Beaten: Ys Book 1 - Ancient Ys Vanished (Turbografx 16 CD via Turbografx 16 Mini)

Well that was close.

Pictured above is my stunning defeat of the villainous Dark Fact, a final boss whose name is as silly as his attacks are deadly, and whose end signifies the end of Book 1 of this legendary Japanese action RPG series. Originally released in 1987 for some obscure Japanese computer I've never heard of, this epic remake arrived in 1990 for the Turbografx 16 CD with both Book 1 and Book 2 (Ancient Ys Vanished - The Final Chapter).

Man, I wanted to play it back then. But even a bachelor's budget can only go so far and there was a lot of hardware to get in the early 1990s. I passed on the very expensive CD Rom drive for the Turbografx 16, as there were not many titles beyond Ys for it that I wanted to try. Hey, I had a TurboExpress though, and that was money well spent.

It's a strange early entry into the action RPG field where a lot of the norms get twisted a little. You're not allowed to use any items such as a healing potion during a boss fight, for example. Most unique and at first just bizarre is the combat where you simply bump into monsters to do damage. Just equip your best gear and run right into them, no button presses required. There is some nuance involved, as making your collision with the enemy head on can be less effective than hitting it at a corner or from an angle. It's hard to define in words and it definitely takes a minute to get used to but once the player gets the feel for it, it's like if Robotron didn't have guns and instead you chest bumped the robots. And you're in a dungeon.

Also weird is that instead of the standard 8 or so dungeons of equal proportion, Ys Book 1 has a small outdoor area with two towns, and three dungeons total, the last one being 25 levels tall. Also, there is very little warning that once you go into that 25 level final dungeon, you cannot go back to the villages again.

There are a few items and better gear to get, and the dungeons present labyrinthine layouts and puzzles to move forward. In my playthrough I hit a dead end after beating the penultimate boss fight and had to backtrack way down the tower to find an item to move forward.. Take the whole package together with the beautiful CD soundtrack and cutscenes, and the fact that this came out in 1990, and Ys Book 1 makes for a rewarding and exciting videogame experience even in 2020.

I have to wonder what other undiscovered treasures are hidden in the vast unknown library of 1980s Japanese computer software. As Apple, Atari, Commodore and others battled in the North America and European markets, it appears as if a number of computer models in Japan were getting software like this while I was playing Sword of Kadash on my Commodore 64.

Ys Book 1 ends and a gorgeous CD cutscene drops the player right into Book 2. With all levels intact, but no gear nor items it seems. Just the six books I gathered throughout Book 1.  Onward I go.

Complete: Electronic Games Magazine Collection

Started: Early 1982, 2nd Issue
Finished: Late 2019 All issues

Few moments in my personal video game history were as pivotal as picking up the second issue that early 1982 day after school. One of the my neighborhood cohorts showed us his copy and within minutes we were on our ten speed bikes racing toward the newsstands. Long before the internet a small town of 13,000 could support three newsstands, and that's on top of every grocery store, drug store, department store, and convenience store selling magazines too.

Videogaming was a thing. A hobby or pastime that gets big enough to get a magazine has by some sort of metric made it and as I turned the pages I began to understand what a much bigger world it was. From handhelds to consoles to the vast unknown of computer gaming it was all masterfully covered by the now legendary journalists Bill Kunkel, Joyce Worley, and Arnie Katz. In that second issue they establish review standards and journalistic integrity that only makes their comprehensive coverage of the field so amazing.

I missed one or two issues over the years but in 1985 the run ended shortly after transforming to Computer Entertainment, which was the launching point for my Commodore 64 collection. Consoles were done, and videogame magazines were gone with them. Over the years I referenced them from time to time as I built my retrogame collection.

I eBayed them during the Purge ahead of my wedding, not seeing much reason to keep them around without the games. A few years later I began to regret it, and finally in the summer of 2019 I decided to see if I could round them up. How hard would it be to complete, I wondered.

It took about four months without much effort, but some amount of cash. I consider them essential research materials if I continue to ramble online about it well into my sunset years.

Ys-ing Into the Turbografx 16 Mini

I've had a week to play around on the finally-shipped Turbografx 16 Mini console, a tight little unit larger than similar mini consoles from Nintendo and Sega. As promised, it came with one controller, a back cover, and a lineup of classic Turbografx 16 and PC Engine titles.

The PC Engine is the Japanese name for the console, and as such all of its titles are in Japanese.  On some games it doesn't matter, as the player can just jump in and play. In fact, the vast majority of games that make up the PC Engine lineup are amazing bullethell shooters, schmups, or what have yous where the screen is full of bullets and I die quickly. It's never been my genre, but damn this console is a treasure trove of the golden age of them.

It is very regrettable that there wasn't a localization effort for these titles, though. I've always been curious about Snatcher, which is on here, but unplayable for me in Japanese.  Adventure games in the lineup like Jaseiken Necromancer and The Legend of Valkyrie would have been worth exploring as well.

Also annoying is that some of the titles exist twice on the console, in both libraries. So, let's talk about the Turbografx 16 side of the library. With these mini consoles you take what you can get with the lineup and there is no way that every game one personally wants or fondly remembers will be on there. That being said, there are definitely some essentials on here (Military Madness, Splatterhouse, Neutopia, Ninja Spirit, Dungeon Explorer, Chew Man Fu, JJ & Jeff, Bonk's Revenge), 2 CD ROM games I never got to experience (Ys Book 1 & 2, Lords of Thunder), 2 Working Designs classics (Cadash and Parasol Stars), and some middle of the road stuff (Moto Roader, Power Golf), and a few more shooters that are not on the PC Engine side.

Missing on the TG16 side are Bonk's Adventure, Devil's Crush, The Legendary Axe, TV Sports Football, and the system pack-in game Keith Courage in the Alpha Zones.  I would even put Bonk 3 on that list for completness. Regrets aside, this mini console is perfect for my limited retrogaming needs, and the main draw for me is getting to play Ys Book 1 & 2 after a three-decade wait. I'm at the second major boss in that game already, and still enjoying its gorgeous art and amazing music along with its quirky combat. 

It is absolutely great to have this beloved old friend back in the roster, albeit with its limitations. I would recommend it to any retrogamer who needs a fix of this classic era but does not have the desire to go all in on building a full Turbografx16 collection.

Beaten: A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

The David Crane classic A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette has been in my backlog since March of 1992, surviving the Purge with my entire Nintendo Game Boy collection, and occasionally played via the Gamecube's essential Game Boy Player attachment over the years. Admittedly, my earlier efforts were short sessions at best, but I recognized some of that David Crane (Pitfall) design magic and vowed to return to that title.

The player controls Boy, who is accompanied by Blob, a fiesty AI companion that will just murder you at times for not paying attention to the game design, dammit. No, serously, when you enter a new room, Blob will follow, and if you're stopped at the edge of a cliff or some "what's it even for" stamping machine, he will push you ahead to your death.

And that's what the real puzzle of this game is - figuring out the mechanics and rules so you can navigate to the intended puzzles. Boy goes from zero to a hundred with just more than the slightest urging of the D-pad, and making short steps to be in just the right place involves micro-tapping the direction and hoping you don't start sprinting - which by the way ends in sliding, to add distance to your already-overshot attempt to put yourself on just the right pixel.

The brilliance of the game design really shines when you figure out what jellybean to feed Blob at what spot. Different flavors get different results, and learning how to use them to overcome obstacles is a blast. There's not a plethora of these moments in the game, but they are a treat.  Most of the gameplay will be figuring out how to trampoline up to ledges and high places in caverns to collect treasures and other items.

Admittedly, I beat the game but did not play for a perfect run, where I also collect all of the treasures. If I ever decide to try that, though, I know where they all are thanks to this map I made:

Earlier this year I had my "Play games from every era of gaming going forward, you're getting old" epiphany, so I went waaaay back to William Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, the first text adventure. While playing, I mapped it out in the very primitive MS Paint, but in spite of the frustration and limitations of that program, I had as much fun mapping the game as I did playing it.

I've always been a map nerd, and in the early days of gaming players were on their own with that one. There was little to no room back then for the program itself to map it all for you, so it was graph paper, pages of notes, and meticulous exploration of complex and devious dungeons. I still have a vast set of file folders with maps and notes from that era, and recently broke out my folder for The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown to test it against the remaster released on the XBox One. The maps still held up!

So, when I decided to take on A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette, I broke out a much better program than MS Paint known as AutoCAD. The same program I use at work to create shop drawings for clients turned out to be a great videogame mapping program.

Again, I enjoyed that nerdy mapping buzz as much as the game itself. While I won't do it or even need to do it with every game I play, once in awhile I can scratch that old itch, as much a part of my personal videogame history as the games themselves.

Iron Man VR Demo Impressions (PSVR)

See, my blog is not just a whimsical dance through videogaming's history, I can cover new releases too, right off the servers, like a million younger sources you might find on the internet, but with a middle-aged viewpoint.

Iron Man VR for the Playstation 4's VR headset, which I guess most folks call PSVR, came out with a playable demo a few days ago, and I got to sneak in a full playthrough of the demo this morning.  It utilizes the move controllers and from the first time taking flight, it immediately feels like they nailed it.

For the most part, anyway. In the tutorial area at the rocky shoreline near Stark's Malibu home, the player is given some targets to blast with repulsors, some hoops to fly through, and some other targets to rocket punch. The tool tip that popped up when it came time to rocket punch went away too fast, and I'm not exactly sure how to do that move. Nonetheless, I pulled it off during my clumsy attempts to figure it out and proceeded to the main demo level.

You get to play as Stark himself, chatting with Pepper and AI assistant Friday aboard the Stark  corporate jet before all hell breaks loose. The villain looked like the Ghost, sort of, and he/she hacks the plane into crashing, muttering the usual villain taunts and vague references to revenge. As Iron Man you fly around the jet, defending it from waves of drones, and sometimes flying close to broken parts of the plane to repair them. 

I don't think the level was on rails, but it took little effort to stay near the jet or get back to it after beating another wave of drones. The same ease came with the jet repairs that pop up during this chapter - I intuitively swooped in on those attempts to keep the jet in the air. Once you fly into the marker at the repair spot, the game goes into a mini-game where you move Reed Richards - sorry, Tony Stark's arms and hands to specific positions to initiate the repair action.

I slipped and said Reed Richards back there because Tony's arms in the game seem to stretch comically long when you reach out. I could not hold back a chuckle the first time it happened, and laughed even harder when I did it as Stark in the plane. I suspect that's just one of those VR things that have to be so the game works for players with all sorts of armspans.

So yeah, Iron Man VR controls beautifully, at least I think after taking it for a spin. Decent visuals and a good enough story for a demo make this a demo worth playing a few times at least, and should keep my interest in the July 3 release of the full game.