Tag: RETRO

You play one plucky pixel in a mission to MAKE LOW-RESOLUTION SHAPES! Except for other pixels getting in the way, no one can stop you! The only controls are the arrow keys. You control the blue pixel. Every other pixel is played by another human, and you can see their score by mouse-overing. That's about it, really. I played Swarmation for about five minutes before I was suddenly ...

You've gotta love those retro games! Color Theory is an 8-bit style platformer, wherein your blocky character jumps all over the screen and hits colored "tokens." Each level is composed of platforms in a number of colors. As soon as you hit a colored token, all of the matching platforms become transparent. So, if a blue wall is blocking your way, just find a blue token, hit it, and the blue wall ...

The Incident's retro pixel graphics look anything but iPhone-esque, but this little gem of a game takes full advantage of the iPhone's accelerometer and touchscreen. You control a guy who's caught in a falling heap of every kind of debris you can imagine. Think Tetris, but instead of blocks you have to deal with couches, cars, Easter Island heads, and more. Oh, and instead of arranging the ...

Onslaught is a fairly simple "defence" style game, but it's very fast-paced and lots of fun. You're a blocky Viking-looking dude in a dungeon. Waves of enemies enter, and you have to kill them all with a variety of weapons. You use the arrows to move, and Space to shoot. You can just keep Space pressed down permanently, too. You can use Z and X to switch weapons, and you don't have to stop firing ...

I know, I know, Zelda games are sacred. It's like trying to cover a Michael Jackson song -- you can give it your best shot, but you can't improve on something perfect, so why bother? Well, you do it for fun of course! Zelda II FPS is a delightful, painstakingly recreated version of the 1987 side-scrolling classic. No expense has been spared -- all of the original textures are there, and the ...

Uncensored isn't the first BBS I'm covering for DownloadSquad. But this one seems to have some actual users, which makes it interesting for me. Uncensored bills itself as a "fun alternative to the Information Stupidhighway". See what they did there? Eh? Clever! What it actually is (as far as I was able to tell) is a very simple messaging system. You don't have to access it via telnet like in the ...

Ahhh, the good old days. When men were real men, and websites were horrific white-on-dayglo-yellow creations lovingly crafted in notepad, complete with animated GIFs of randomly dancing M&M's and poor MIDI versions of Oasis' Wonderwall on auto-play. Miss those days? Do you? Come on, you can admit it... we're all friends here. Okay, you don't have to say anything -- I can see it in your eyes, ...

Cover Browser features an enormous collection of book and magazine covers, especially retro stuff. It's kind of cluttered, but that's understandable for the sheer amount of covers it archives. Magazine and book covers are meant to catch your eye instantly; after all, when you go to a dead-tree bookstore, how many books are competing for your attention at the same time? And what's the first ...

It seems like HD is all the rage these days. A friend of mine recently did a month-long market research before putting down a sizable lump of cash for a 47-inch behemoth. And yes, it really is very impressive. Still, sometimes I find myself wanting to go back to simpler times; back when men were real men, and ASCII animations were all the rage. Why I remember back in the good old BBS and ...

One Button Bob can only be played with an ultra high-tech Boomslang five-button gaming mouse. Well, that's not actually true. That's tech writing for you. To be honest, to play One Button Bob you do need just one button. This retro-tastic little gem casts you as a fictional character (you're going to have to guess the name). On each screen, your one button does something different. ...

I'm looking at you guys and wondering if you remember MS-DOS. I mean, I'm not that old, and I had computers that ran MS-DOS, so... there must be some people here that remember BASIC? QBASIC? How about BASIC on the Atari? Tiny BASIC? Failing that, I'm sure those of you that went through college during the dot-com bubble experienced Visual BASIC? Anyway, I'm rambling. Basically (!), there's a ...

Sure, there are fancier operating systems you can run in your web browser -- EyeOS, Windows4all, etc. -- but those of you who prefer a more low-fi, retro cloud OS experience owe it to yourselves to check out michaelv.org. It's not an exact copy of Windows 3.11 per se, but it does faithfully reproduce a number of the core features from the classic OS -- Calculator, Minesweeper, Notepad, Picture ...

Just a tiny note (because the longer I take to type this, the less time you have to get your free copy!) to say that Telltale games are celebrating Trogday by giving away a free 'Strong Bad featuring Trogdor the Burninator' game. All you have to do is type in your email address and pick a password (5 characters or more!), and away you go. I haven't played it yet, but Telltale are the same ...

When I was growing up during the 1960s, just having a remote control television felt a little "science fiction." Back then, access to leading-edge technology was unthinkable. So you can imagine my surprise when I was given a computer for my 13th birthday -- a Digi-Comp II. I vividly remember studying the outside of the box, carefully reading all the text and taking it all in. I had no idea what ...

I'm not sure when the last time was that I needed to dig through my start menu. Between the Windows 7 Super Bar and the search box Vista added, there are just easier ways for me to find and launch programs. Still, for some of my customers, friends, and family, the newer menus are just a distraction. They were fine with Windows XP's interface, and they might not want to be bothered learning ...