The Ultimate Imagic/Atari 2600 Tier List – ALL RELEASED GAMES RANKED

Ah, iMagic — the game developer that sounds like a magician got lost on their way to an Apple Store.

This was a company forged in the golden, lava-lamp-lit age of the early 1980s, when every game idea was apparently greenlit with the question, “What if we made it… sparkly?” Founded by ex-Atari employees (read: rebels with a joystick), iMagic was part of the original console wars — back when pixels were a bragging point and “16 colors” was considered high-tech wizardry.

They cranked out titles for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision with names like Demon Attack, Atlantis, and Dragonfire, which all sound like heavy metal albums or energy drinks your mom warned you about. The games themselves were basically fever dreams: aliens swooping, dragons spitting fire, and cities blowing up with all the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon.

In the early ’80s, iMagic rocketed to fame faster than a kid mashing the fire button. Their games looked slightly better than Atari’s — a fact they clung to like a life raft on the pixelated sea of competition. But alas, the Video Game Crash of 1983 hit them harder than a poorly timed laser blast in Demon Attack, and iMagic vanished from the scene faster than your older cousin when it’s time to share the controller.

In short: iMagic was like the glam rock band of early game developers — flashy, bold, gone too soon, and still making retro gamers sigh dreamily into their CRT monitors.

Interview: Dorian Hart on Looking Glass Studios & Irrational Games

🎮 Games Dorian Hart Worked On

🧙‍♂️ Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993)

Dorian’s journey began with this immersive dungeon crawler. It was like D&D, but your party was just you, and the dungeon was a maze designed by someone who hated you.

🤖 System Shock (1994)

A pioneering first-person shooter where you battled a rogue AI named SHODAN. It was like arguing with your smart toaster, but the toaster had lasers and a god complex.

🚀 Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri (1996)

As the lead designer, Dorian crafted this tactical shooter with powered armor suits. Think of it as “Mechs Gone Wild,” but with more strategy and fewer spring breaks.

🕵️ Thief: The Dark Project (1998)

Dorian helped design this stealth game where you played as a master thief. It taught players that the best way to deal with guards was to hide in shadows and hope they had poor peripheral vision.

🧟 System Shock 2 (1999)

He returned to the world of rogue AIs and added zombies to the mix. Because nothing says “fun” like being chased by undead cyborgs in zero gravity.

🦸 Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich (2005)

Dorian co-led the design of this superhero strategy game. It was like a comic book come to life, complete with over-the-top villains and heroes who shouted their attack names.

🃏 Card Hunter (2013)

Combining tabletop RPGs with collectible card games, Dorian helped create this love letter to nerd culture. It was like playing D&D with cards, minus the snack crumbs on your character sheet.

Tour of ** NEW ** Pink Gorilla GAME STORE in Las Vegas!

Pink Gorilla Games has leveled up with a brand new location in Las Vegas! Take a behind-the-scenes tour of the store w/ Kelsey before it opened to the public, then stick around for the grand opening chaos complete with good vibes & packed video game shelves.

Las Vegas is the only place on Earth where you can lose your life savings, your dignity, and your luggage—all before lunch—and still think, “What a great vacation!” It’s a city powered almost entirely by neon, regret, and a cocktail of bad decisions served in a souvenir yardstick cup. Where else can you eat pancakes next to a guy in a tuxedo and a woman dressed as Pikachu while a bachelorette party screams in the background? It’s like someone designed a city after binge-watching infomercials and drinking Red Bull for 72 hours straight.

Vegas is where logic comes to die and Elvis impersonators multiply like rabbits. It’s the only place where a man can get married by a zombie pirate at 3 a.m. and divorced by brunch without ever changing out of his flip-flops. You’ll find luxury hotels designed to look like ancient Rome, Venice, and Paris—if those places were rebuilt by a committee of slot machines. And the best part? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, mostly because even Vegas doesn’t want to remember what you did.

Good thing I opened this brand new PSP!!

QUICK BONUS VIDEO: The Sony PSP battery—proof that sometimes, portable gaming meant “portable explosive device.”

In the mid-2000s, the PSP was the sleekest thing around. You felt like a tech god holding that black mirror of power. But little did we know… inside that shiny shell lurked a ticking time bomb disguised as a lithium-ion battery.

At First:
The battery was a loyal sidekick. Gave you a solid 3–5 hours of Lumines, God of War, or pirated UMD movies. You charged it, drained it, charged it again, and it always came back like a faithful puppy.

Then One Day…
You open the PSP case, and—WHAT IN THE POLYGONAL HELL IS THAT? The battery has puffed up like a marshmallow in a microwave. It looks like it’s trying to escape its own plastic prison. Your sleek PSP now has a weird bulge, like it grew a tumor from too much Monster Hunter.

The Danger:
Experts said, “Don’t puncture it.” So naturally, millions of teens went full MythBusters with a paperclip to see what happens. Spoiler: nothing good. At best, it hissed like a furious cat. At worst, spontaneous combustion. Congrats! You turned your handheld console into a grenade.

Sony’s Official Response?
“Oh, uh… yeah. If your battery swells up like a balloon at a kid’s party, maybe stop using it. You can send it in for a replacement!”
Cool, thanks, Sony—let me just find my 2005 receipt and fax you my soul.

The Aftermath:
To this day, PSP batteries are hiding in drawers across the world, slowly inflating like tiny chemical balloons of doom. If you hear a faint hiss coming from your closet, don’t worry—it’s just your PSP trying to take you out one last time.

It was the first handheld console that doubled as a gaming device and a potential fire hazard. Truly, the PSP was ahead of its time.

My Favorite Retro PC Games (and how to play them today)

I’m diving into the Golden Age of PC gaming (Win98/XP) and sharing some of my favorite retro PC games and how to play them today! These games have a timeless appeal and still resonate with players!

GAMES SHOWN:
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
NOX
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force 1 & 2
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines
Thief 1 & 2

PC gaming in the late ’90s and early 2000s—a time when computers were beige, monitors were deeper than they were wide, and installing a game meant you were probably going to war… not in-game, but with your system’s drivers.

Graphics Cards
You weren’t just a gamer; you were an amateur electrician. Want to play Half-Life? Better make a blood sacrifice to the gods of DirectX and hope your Voodoo2 card doesn’t start smoking. Oh, and if you had a TNT2 or, dare we say, a GeForce—congrats, you were the king of the LAN party (more on that chaos in a sec).

Game Installations
Games came on 4 CDs or, if you were lucky, a single glorious DVD-ROM. You’d click “Install” and then go make a sandwich, take a nap, and maybe grow a beard while the progress bar pretended to move. And woe to you if you lost Disc 2. That game was now just a very shiny coaster.

Internet Gaming
Online multiplayer meant two things: dial-up and lag. You’d be mid-Quake III Arena duel when your mom picked up the phone and boom, connection gone. Entire friendships were lost over 56k modems and someone yelling, “Stop downloading music, I’m trying to play StarCraft!”

Sound Cards
If you heard your game in surround sound, that meant you either had a Sound Blaster Live! or your rich friend did. Everyone else? Enjoyed Duke Nukem through the soothing buzz of mono PC speaker bleeps.

System Requirements
Every game box came with specs written in a language only wizards understood: “Pentium II 266 MHz, 64MB RAM, 3D accelerator required.” You’d read it and think, “I might be able to run this if I close Microsoft Word first.”

Ah, it was messy, it was glitchy, it was wonderful—and somehow, games felt like magic despite everything trying to stop them from running.

JRPGLive – Our Greatest Nintendo 3DS Find of All Time

Ah, the Nintendo 3DS — the magical little clamshell that dared to say, “What if your eyeballs could do squats?” Released in 2011, this handheld wonder came with glasses-free 3D, which was either a mind-blowing leap into the future or a fast track to a mild headache, depending on how steady your hands and how forgiving your optic nerves were. You’d slide that 3D depth slider up just to say you did, marvel at Mario’s floating mustache for ten seconds, then immediately slide it back down and never touch it again. But the real charm wasn’t in the gimmicks — it was in the games, which were so good they made you forget the bottom screen was mostly used to poke at maps like a high-tech pirate.

The 3DS had everything: a weirdly effective StreetPass system that turned walking through malls into RPG side quests, a camera that took grainy 3D selfies (so you could finally see yourself disappointed in depth), and a library bursting with hits — Fire Emblem: Awakening, Pokémon X/Y, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and enough Monster Hunter to destroy your thumb joints before age 30. The thing looked like a toy, sounded like a toy, but punched like a heavyweight champ in a hardware match. It even had backward compatibility with DS games, because Nintendo is the kind of friend who lets you borrow all their old stuff without even asking. The 3DS wasn’t just a handheld console — it was a pocket-sized party, a nostalgia grenade, and an eye-melting miracle all at once.

The PolyMega CD games are kinda confusing…

I review the 8 PolyMega CD game collections including Asteroids, Tiger-Heli, Bad Dudes, Breakers, Heavy Barrel & more. They are cool…but also… kinda confusing. INFO: https://polymega.com

What is the Polymega? — the game console that rolled up to the retro gaming party like, “Hey guys, I brought everything.”

Imagine if a Swiss Army knife, a vintage game collector, and a mad scientist all teamed up to build a console. That’s the Polymega. It looks like a sleek piece of AV equipment from a 2001 sci-fi movie, but inside? It’s harboring dreams of becoming the Peacekeeper of Console Wars.

You know how every retro gamer has a stack of dusty consoles, an HDMI spaghetti nightmare, and a shrine to RF switches and blown capacitors? The Polymega comes in and says, “Bro, chill. I got this.” It plays NES, SNES, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Sega CD, and PlayStation 1 games — all with one unified interface. It’s like a universal remote for your childhood.

And let’s talk about its modular design. You want to play NES games? Snap on the NES module. You want to play SNES games? Click-click, new module. It’s like Mr. Potato Head but for gaming, and somehow way more dignified.

The Polymega’s big flex is its ability to rip your discs and cartridges into a digital library. So it’s basically saying, “I’m not just a console. I’m an archivist.” It’s got the energy of a hip librarian who moonlights as a speedrunner.

But of course, there’s drama. The thing took forever to actually exist. It was like Bigfoot for retro gamers — blurry pictures, bold claims, and a small but passionate group of believers on Reddit swearing it was real. And then, years later, BAM — it shows up like Gandalf the White: late, upgraded, and somehow still cool.

In summary: the Polymega is a futuristic nostalgia machine that promises to rescue your old games from the attic and give them a new life — as long as you’re okay waiting for it to actually ship.

Gaming Off the Grid are Back with a Pick Ups Vid!!!!

Collecting physical video games is like being a modern-day archaeologist, except instead of digging up ancient bones, you’re hunting for a slightly cracked copy of Final Fantasy VII with the original manual intact. There’s a unique thrill in scouring flea markets, thrift stores, and that one sketchy dude on Craigslist who insists his garage is “climate controlled.” You lovingly stack cartridges like Tetris blocks and alphabetize jewel cases with the kind of precision normally reserved for heart surgery. And nothing beats the heady rush of peeling off a $1.99 Goodwill sticker to reveal Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance underneath. It’s cardboard crack, and you’re hooked.

But let’s not pretend it’s all glory. Your home slowly morphs into a shrine to formats that time forgot—discs, carts, mini-discs (looking at you, GameCube), and mysterious region-locked plastic rectangles. Your friends may not understand why you needed five different versions of Resident Evil 4, but you do: the PAL edition has a slightly different font and that, my friend, is worth celebrating. You tell yourself you’re preserving history, even as your partner gently asks if the Sega Saturn collection has to live in the kitchen. It does. Because in the kingdom of game collectors, shelf space is sacred, dusting is optional, and joy smells faintly of old instruction manuals and 90s plastic.

Amstrad GX4000 – Review & Overview

Ah, the Amstrad GX4000 — the gaming console equivalent of bringing a water pistol to a laser tag fight. Released in 1990, just as Nintendo and Sega were busy high-fiving their way into history, Amstrad strutted into the scene with all the confidence of a dad at a rave. Clad in a futuristic white plastic shell that looked like a prop from Knight Rider’s deleted scenes, it promised to bring 8-bit magic to your living room — assuming, of course, you could find one of the ten games that actually worked on it. With a controller that felt like it was designed by someone who had only heard of video games, the GX4000 was less “console of the future” and more “forgotten VCR that someone put buttons on.”

Technically, it wasn’t terrible—it could do a decent side-scroller if you squinted and used your imagination. But in a world where Sonic was doing loops and Mario was breaking bricks with his head, the GX4000 was mostly known for porting games from Amstrad’s own CPC computers. Translation: your console games looked suspiciously like something your uncle was programming in BASIC in 1986. Still, there’s a kind of endearing charm to its plucky little heart. Like a Yorkshire Terrier barking at a T-Rex, it had no idea it was doomed — and bless it, it never stopped trying.

PSVR2 Physical Game Collection (PlayStation 5)

😎 PlayStation VR2: Like Shoving a Jet Engine of Immersion Onto Your Eyeballs

1. OLED Screens So Crisp You Can Taste the Pixels
Sony was like, “Let’s take two tiny TVs, make them 4K, and put them millimeters from your retinas. You’re welcome.” It’s so sharp you’ll try to clean smudges off virtual glass.


2. Eye Tracking: It Watches You Watching It Watching You
Yes, it follows your gaze like a clingy Roomba. Want to aim with your eyes? PSVR2 says: “You lazy? Got you.” Finally, your eyeballs are part of the control scheme. Next stop: blinking to reload.


3. Haptic Feedback in the Headset: Because Your Skull Deserves Rumbling Too
Remember when controllers started buzzing? Now your forehead does. Take a hit in-game and your headset vibrates like it’s saying, “Hey, maybe don’t walk into the dragon next time.”


4. Sense Controllers: Finger Fondling, Upgraded
These bad boys are like if Play-Doh got a PhD in ergonomics. Adaptive triggers, haptics, motion tracking—your thumbs have never felt so powerful and so judged at the same time.


5. Tethered but Not Tacky
Yes, it’s wired. But it’s one wire. ONE. We’re no longer in the spaghetti vortex of the PSVR1 days. Now it’s more “VR umbilical cord” than “VR S&M dungeon.”


6. Setup So Easy, It Feels Suspicious
Remember PSVR1’s setup nightmare that made you question your own IQ? Now, plug in the USB-C, pop it on, and boom—you’re immediately transported to a shiny future where robot dinosaurs want to eat you.


7. Priced Like a Small Appliance, Feels Like a Small Spaceship
Sure, it costs more than a PS5. But can your coffee machine let you throw fireballs while being chased by cyber-ninjas in 4K HDR? No? Then hush.


In short, PSVR2 is like a personal teleportation device that also occasionally reminds you that you live in a tiny apartment with too many fragile lamps. It’s thrilling, beautiful, occasionally motion-sickness-inducing, and a definite step toward living in The Matrix, but with fewer sunglasses.

Retro Gaming with a Heavy Metal Soundtrack