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Idle Animations, depending on who you ask, are either the animation a video game character plays when no input is given, or the animation played when no input has been received for while. Read what a number of game developers have to say about their favorites, or maybe you'd just like to sit through 20-odd minutes of sprites killing time.
posted by subocoyne on May 25, 2018 - 23 comments

Yoshi the Dinosaur in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (YouTube link), an unfinished, but still amazing, romhack from 2010 that recently surfaced. [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Apr 1, 2017 - 12 comments

Pixar's new film, The Good Dinosaur, is the second animated dinosaur film to come out in time for Thanksgiving. The previous one came out 22 years ago, with executive producer credits for Steven Spielberg and a whole host of stars lending their voices to the film, telling the story of dinosaurs coming to New York City. And it bombed. Let's go back in time and look at We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Nov 24, 2015 - 22 comments

Hyperkin's Retron 5 hardware plays real cartridges using original controllers from a variety of 8-bit and 16-bit consoles (including the NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, and Game Boy Advance), converts the output to HDMI for moderns TVs, and includes all the advanced options you usually only find in software emulators. It's winning over even the most skeptical retro gamers.
posted by 256 on Jul 21, 2014 - 46 comments

In the mid-1990s, a man named George Wood created a TV show called Flights of Fantasy on a Maryland public-access channel. The show was was dedicated to videogames, and gained quite a few detractors; Wood was not known for his playing skills, research, or good taste, and the production was rather cheap. He would also tend to go off-topic, sometimes markedly so.

It had a small following, being a local public-access show, but would have been lost forever had Wood not joined a video gaming association called NAViGaTR, who archived the entire series, edited each episode, and put them online as Gaming in the Clinton Years.
posted by Anatoly Pisarenko on Mar 21, 2011 - 12 comments

Animator OrinCreed said I Dream In Retro is "based heavily on a dream I had that was caused by a long day of playing NES, SNES, and Genesis. In the dream I was moving through different levels from many games. In each level the music was wrong and my sprite (while fitting the bit style) didn't quite work with the game. During the dream I was abusing a cheat ability to use different weapons from pretty much any game I wanted at any time. The game itself behaved as it should, with my actions being the only aberration." The result was this loving tribute and mash-up of video game titles.
posted by ShawnStruck on Jun 16, 2010 - 21 comments

Pictures of toy store video game console kiosks! via
posted by Pope Guilty on Feb 25, 2010 - 11 comments

Interested in video game emulators? Yearning for the games of yesteryear? There is probably an emulator for any 'classic' game that you could wish to play. General arcade emulators, SNES, NES, Genesis, Atari 2600, et al. For the truly curious, listen to the story of the emulator that almost was, Silhouette, the emulator Nintendo almost released.
posted by patrickje on May 13, 2002 - 32 comments