New Ebivision Power Off! Game and Contest

[+Nathan Strum]

Wow... just a little bit of anger there, huh?

 

I don't know about the whole cartridge thing. My problem with Supercade (the book) was that for a "visual history of the videogame age", many of the images were extremely poor quality, looking like low-resolution scans taken from web pages, or poorly scanned images with some sort of grain filter applied in Photoshop to give them a "look" (and the name of that "look", incidentally, is "stop me please, before I use Photoshop filters again"). My biggest gripe though, is that there were far, far, far too many pages wasted with MAME (and other emulator) screen captures. I was really disappointed that I'd spent good money only to buy a coffee-table book full of stuff I could see on my own computer any day of the week. Emulator screen captures completely lack the authentic visual appearance and appeal of vintage video games. I would have rather seen a lot more photos of actual arcade machines and game systems (and more archival photos from back-in-the-day as well). The MAME screen caps just seemed like a really lazy way to fill up space. There are enough collectors out there with working vintage games to have shot some really good-quality photos of the real things, and professional photographers who know how to shoot pictures off of video monitors. The worst offenders were the vector games, where the lines were all broken and pixelated. Most of the other screen captures weren't even corrected for pixel aspect ratio so images were incorrectly squashed or stretched.

 

I found Supercade to be a thoroughly disappointing book. I'm still waiting for that elusive, high-quality, definitive, coffee-table book on classic videogames.