PixlBit

Howdy, folks. Since a lot of long-dormant 1UP alumni are coming out of the shadows, I figured I'd hop on that little bandwagon. When in Rome (or Baltimore)....

One of the most prominent developers on the Atari 8-bit line was, of course, Activision. Known as the world's first third party developer, Activision was formed by disgruntled Atari employees with the promise to treat individual developers like rock stars. If you ever read a manual for a 2600 Activision game, you've seen the "about the author" bios for each of them. Eventually, as Activision grew and became more corporate, its employees would leave and form their own companies. Most notable among these were Accolade, Absolute Entertainment, and the best known of all of the baby Activisions, Acclaim Entertainment. By 1990, Activision completely flamed out, was bankrupt, and well on its way to going out of business. A new CEO that came from the grocery store industry, one Robert "Bobby" Kotick, was hired... and the rest is history.

One of the great things about the Atari 130XE was its arcade ports. With the exception of the abysmal Dig-Dug port, aberrations like the 2600 version of Pac-Man were rare on the Atari 8-bit line. The 8-bit Ataris generally had the most arcade-faithful ports available on any platform at the time. Given that arcade games were still the jewels of the gaming universe at the time, this helped cement the 130XE's place as an awesome gaming platform.

In 1987, my dad got my mother yet another new computer: the Atari 130XE. And let me tell you, I spent a lot of weekends and weekday evenings over the next few years in the computer room.

After our TRS-80, our family's next home computer was the TI-99/4A, which my dad bought in 1981-82. The TRS-80 belonged to my mother, the TI belonged to my dad. My dad was less open to allowing me to play with his computers since he used them for work, so it was a treat to get to play this one.

I have been around computer and video games for almost my entire life. My first gaming experiences I can remember were with the Donkey Kong, Dig-Dug, and Ms. Pac-Man machines at the Vekol Commissary in Maricopa, Arizona, near where I lived at the time. However, I never had an Atari 2600 at home, though my cousin in Gilbert had one. Instead, I got a lot of my home gaming fix on home computers, at least until I got my first Game Boy in 1989.

In 1998, having played and replayed Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil 2 to death, I was looking for something new in the gaming department, and with my immense enjoyment of FFVII, I really wanted a new Squaresoft game more than anything. This was in the summer, before Square began putting out games like Parasite Eve and Xenogears. One day at Target, I saw Final Fantasy Tactics on sale. I wasn't sure about the tactical gameplay, but I figured it was cheap enough that if I didn't like it, no harm no foul. Long story short, I got hooked on Tactics, enough to where I made it one of my 20 favorite games of all time on 1UP a few years back.

At the beginning of the year our thoughts turn towards what games we want the most that are (supposedly) going to be released this year. Looking ahead to 2016, given my tastes in gaming, it's looking like a good year, certainly leaps and bounds ahead of 2014 and 2015. Lots of RPGs coming down the pipeline. There's probably a lot of other stuff I'm not even aware of yet.

Greetings, Pixlbit denizens! I hope you all had a good holiday. I had a good holiday with my wife, our kid,  and our grandkid. We didn't do anything spectacular this holiday. We wanted to go see the Christmas trees in Washington, DC, but an incrediblly heavy rainstorm that hit DC and Maryland that afternoon put a damper on those plans, so to speak. Oh, well, it's been surprisingly warm here and I like that a heck of a lot better than the ice and snow they're getting out west!

Every once in awhile, the subject of "which cancelled video game do you wish had been released?" comes up. My answer to this subject is always the same