Vulpes Lusor

Boxing Day, December 26th, is the day when servants in the British Commonwealth would traditionally be given boxes of presents by their employers, as they were expected to work on Christmas Day itself. Forget about crimes of the upper crust though, because today we're going to be talking about boxing video games. You know, about people punching each other while wearing shorts. After writing a bunch of Christmas articles this month I've begun to worry what interesting holiday topics I've left for me to write about in subsequent years, should this blog actually last that long, but at least I'm unlikely to run out of boxing games to talk about in the near future. More specifically, this time we'll be talking about really old boxing games from the '70s and early '80s, for systems that our primitive forefathers turned to when they wanted to play what passed for video games back then. Here we go! Heavyweight Champ (Arcade, 1976)   This early Sega arcade game about...

It's Christmas! I mean, it's literally Christmas Day—the evening of, no less—as I write this. Yes, I'm finally back with more Christmasified games. I didn't intend for this to take so long, but I had a lot of things (including, it must be admitted, laziness) get in the way. Right now I'm listening to Trans-Siberian Orchestra's  Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24  on loop to give me the energy to finish, so in the interests of getting it out before Christmas is over and I'm forced to scrounge together an article about New Year's games, let's get cracking! Holiday Lemmings (PC, 1994)   There are actually a number of Christmas-themed  Lemmings  games, variously called Xmas Lemmings  or  Holiday Lemmings , and the subseries includes both shareware demos intended to entice you to buy normal  Lemmings  games and full paid releases like this one. Lemmings  is perhaps a natural fit for Christmas, or at least winter, as the real-life lemming lives in t...

Japan only recently began to celebrate Christmas through what I'm assuming was a combination of international capitalism and the American occupation following World War II, and that means it doesn't have quite the significance or connotations it has in the west. Oh, the Japanese surely give each other presents for Christmas and use Santa as a symbol of giving, but they've also developed a number of other Christmas traditions, such as dining on a bucket of KFC (to the point you have to order ahead of time if you want your chicken on Christmas Day). Most importantly for our purposes today, Christmas is also seen as a romantic holiday for young couples. As a result, there are quite a few dating simulators where the protagonist's stated goal is to find a girlfriend before Christmas, not to mention full-on eroge (erotic games) inspired by the season. As I've mentioned before, I'm not one to look down my nose at getting sexual gratification from a video game if that...

With December well underway it's officially the Christmas season, and that means I have an easy topic to cover over the next few posts! Yes, expect the coming few articles to be especially holly jolly. After all, for many of you, Christmas is intimately associated with video games, for that was the time of year when as a child you received the better part of that year's digital bounty. But relatively few games—or at least relatively few decent games—are explicitly themed around Christmas. Not to worry, a surprising number of prominent classic games had a coat of Christmas paint applied to them and the result put out as a special Christmas edition. That's right, we're kicking things off with an interesting little phenomenon: official Christmas versions of games that have little to nothing to do with Christmas. Here we go! Outlaw Golf: 9 Holes of X-Mas (Xbox, 2002)   Outlaw Golf  is a mediocre golf game distinguished by raunchy humor, and I am 99% sure that the train of...

In my continuing quest to choose article topics based on in-jokes that will appeal to a very niche audience, here's a quick survey of old video games that feature the word "Arcturus" in the title. First, some background: Arcturus is a red giant star located about 36.7 light-years from our sun; "Arcturus" derives from ancient Greek and can be translated as either "guardian of the bear" or "guardian of the north", and the star is part of the constellation Boötes (a name derived from the Ancient Greek word for herdsman). Given this stellar pedigree I wouldn't be surprised to see that at least some the games we'll be looking at today are space games, but I'm holding out hope for a game where you have to protect an adorable bear cub, or perhaps the entire country of Canada.   Escape from Arcturus (Apple II, 1981) Immediately I'm proven right about space games. Putting that aside, well, artists at the dawn of a medium are often not ...