Retro Matsuri

A trio of machines headed to Wausabicon this Saturday, Jun 27th! Wausabicon is a manga/anime/gaming meetup, so the club is leaning into the theme, and pulling some unusual hardware out of storage! The Casio Loopy (yes, from the calculator, watch, and piano company) was a very niche video game system marketed exclusively at little girls. It had less than to games before they discontinued it. It had a built in sticker printer which takes up about half of the console. The NEC PC-FX was the successor to the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16 here in America) and it was a 2D sprite monster right as the PlayStation and Saturn were leaping into 3D. The PC-FX pivoted to more "mature" titles, with only a handful of "normal" video games ever released.

I mean, not necessarily. There are color palettes and techniques that look fantastic on a flat screen, but horrid on CRT.

Like, look at this kitty:

Looks great here, but with a CRT filter? Completely obliterated.

Pixel art that wasn't designed to look good on a CRT doesn't always look better on CRT.

He has to be built with a completely different approach:

An important figure in not only Namco history but also an innovator in the genre of electronic music is one Haruomi Hosono, formerly of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Here on display is his 1984 album simply titled “Video Game Music”.  Made up of re-purposed Namco video game sound effects, it is a very early example of a successful chiptune album. He produced this shortly after YMO disbanded, and closely before he worked on music for Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Video Game Music was not Hosono’s first foray in to the chiptune genre, as years prior in 1978, YMO’s debut album featured sampling of sounds from games of the era.

In the 90s-2000s even the early 2010s to a degree, the internet was a place confined to the computer room. Or desk in the living room. You had to share it with your family, wait your turn on the computer, wait for the dail up and if someone had to make a phone call you had to get off the internet. You'd go into that dedicated room/desk area, sit down for maybe a few hours and play some flash games, check emails/MSN, check your friends MySpace/Facebook and log off and continue life in the real world.

It was fun not just because the internet was more customisable and lawless back then, but because it was a place you visited and got exited to see what had changed in a few days when you went back into the computer room and logged on again.

Now we live here, surrounded by the same shitty apps, all copying each other, slaves to the algorithm, limited customisation, and endless community guidelines. It's in your pocket on your phone, your bag on your laptop, your tablet, smart watch, etc.