In my second life as C64 graphician jmin I'm pixeling all kind of things for fun. Yesterday, I've submitted a pic for the currently running C64GFX.com Game Loading Screen Compo 2024 which celebrates the visuals shown while a game is loading. Rules are pretty loose, so game wise, everything goes.

The first thing that popped into my head was doing a MDK pic, and guess what, IMHO it turned out pretty neat, so here it is:

For those interested, the C64 file can be downloaded over at CSDb and you'll find some background info on jmin.at.

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This one has been on my list for way to long. I fondly remember how my friends and I laughed our asses off playing Caveman Ugh-Lympics on the humble breadbin. Nothing beats a round of fire-making, smacking your oponent on the head when he's dying of laughter. Zoink!

Quite some time ago, Thomas shared a pic of his French Diablo box and boy, I fell in love with it.

Cut to almost two years later, I found a copy for cheap for my shelf.

With this, my Test Drive II set is finally complete.

Getting updates for games is great, getting free upgrades is even better and getting remasters for free is ace. Thanks, id Software and Nightdive Studios for bringing Doom and Doom II up to speed.

Some time ago, I've started to scan the back of the box with the top lid on and thus showing the both on the back scans. It definitely looks better in the 3D box, but it also a sucks having to edit the scans a bit more for fitting the rectagular shape.

Well, not anymore: low and behold, a new contraption for improving scans 1000% or more :-)

With the upload of Space Quest 6, there's now 800(!) boxes available to click through on this site.

Enjoy!

Oh, look what landed on my doorstep today! A boxed US copy of Star Wars for C64!

Misplaced my European double cassette case + inlay decades ago, so I'm more than thrilled having this one now sitting on the shelf behind me.

Sure, it's a small box and yeah, I only played it with my brothers on Playstation 2, but it's a fantastic game and a great looking box.

Couldn't say no to it.

Spent some time tweaking various things to speed up the page. 3D boxes are of course still quite a load, but starting up bigboxcollection.com should be a bit faster now.

Also squashed a couple of bugs along the way.

RetroGamer Magazine takes a look at the enduring legacy of the Thief series which first appeared on our monitors back in 1999.

The article can be found in Load 260.

Came home from a short vacation with two more Big Boxes waiting on my door step: Al-Qadim had been on my wishlist forever and Thunderscape just had to be picked up due to having added Endomorph.

A couple of C64 games arrived today:

• R-Type
• Ikari Warriors
• Death or Glory

Another fantastic article in RetroGamer magazine load 259: The Making of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary.

Back in the day, I definitely preferred DuoTris, but at the same time, MirrorSoft's Tetris always had a special place in my heart. It was all I had while all the boys and girls around me played the superior GameBoy version, and boy, was I jealous.

Then again, there's Wally Beben's mind-blowing 20+ minutes tune and all is balanced again

Cut to 2024. I've just found out on CSDb that there's a remaster, err, remix, err, recoded version out there and it has just received an update!

Let's boot it up!

The update is not just some graphical tweaks, no, it's a full re-implementation of Tetris following how the game played on other Platforms at the time. Further, there's an optional shadow as well as music and sfx options.

It does play great, not as snappy as current versions of Tetris, but still. The addition of slow/hard drop is great and the sfx are a nice touch too.

My main complaint is that the original tune is only played on the title screen and can't be selected as background music thanks to technical limitations. Bummer.

Anyway, grab a copy of version 1.1b and give it a try!

Oh boy, I'm lagging behind big time! Sry for the spare updated these post months.

Boxes are piling up everywhere but the time needed for scanning and uploading them is very, very rare at the moment but I do hope to manage at least one or two games per week from now on again.

Curious, what's gonna show up? Yeah, I thought so, so here's my backlog of unscanned big boxes:

• Adrenix
• Age of Empires
• Age of Empires II: The Conquerors
• Alien Breed: Tower Assault
• AotD 2 (inkl 1 & JitD)
• Archimedean Dynasty
• Baldur's Gate III
• Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
• Black Mirror II: Reigning Evil
• Black Mirror III: Final Fear
• BloodNet
• Blue Force
• Brain Dead 13
• Burntime
• Call to Power II
• Cannon Fodder 2
• Caribbean Disaster
• Command & Conquer: Firestorm
• Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
• Creatures
• Creatures 3
• Crudader: No Regret
• Crudader: No Remorse
• Curse of Enchantia
• D
• Darklands
• Death or Glory (C64)
• Delta V
• Demonworld
• Descent: Freespace - The Great War
• Descent 3
• Die Höhlenwelt Saga: Der Leuchtende Kristall
• Dominion
• Dragon Lore II: The Heart of the Dragon Man
• Druid: Daemons of the Mind
• Dune
• Dune II Battle for Arrakis
• Dune 2000
• Extreme Assault
• Eye of the Beholder Trilogy
• Fade to Black
• FIFA International Soccer
• Flashback: The Quest for Identity
• Freespace 2
• Frontier: Elite II
• Fury of the Furries
• Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
• Genesia
• Heimdall
• Heimdall 2: Into the Hall of Worlds
• Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller
• Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Shadow of Death
• Holiday Island
• Ikari Warriors (C64)
• Incubation: Battle Isle Phase Four
• Incubation: Mission Pack
• IndyCar Racing
• Inferno: The Odyssey Continues
• Innocent until Caught
• Ishar Trilogy
• KISS: Psycho Circus - The Nightmare Child
• Lands of Lore
• Legends of Valour: Volume 1 - The Dawning
• Little Big Adventure: Twinsen's Adventure
• Loopz (Amiga)
• Lords of Magic
• Lost Vikings
• LucsArts Classic Adventures
• Magic Carpet Hidden Worlds
• Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares
• Men in Black: The Game
• Microcosm
• Noctropolis
• Novastorm
• Pandemonium
• Pictionary: The Game of Quick Draw (C64)
• Prehistorik 2
• Prisoner of Ice
• Protostar: War on the Frontier
• Quarantine
• Quest for Glory III: Wages of War
• R-Type (C64)
• R.O.M. Gold: Rings of Medusa
• Realms (The can onl be one)
• Realms of the Haunting
• Rebel Moon Rising
• Rent a Hero
• RexNebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender
• Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch
• Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu
• Rival Realms
• Robinson's Requiem
• S.T.O.R.M
• Sacrifice
• Sensible Soccer: European Champions - 92/93 Edition
• Shannara
• Shivers
• Shivers Two: Harvest of Souls
• Sid Meier's Civilization II
• Sid Meier's Civilization III
• SimCity 2000
• SimCity Classic
• Space Hulk
• Space Marines: Der stählerne Kaiser
• Space Quest 5: The Next Mutation
• Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier
• The Space Quest Saga: Roger Wilco
• Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
• Star Trek: Elite Force
• Star Trek: Generations
• Star Trek: Armada
• Star Trek: New Worlds
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
• Star Wars: Tie Fighter
• Star Wars: Tie Fighter
• Star Wars: X-Wing
• Star Wars: X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter
• Star Wars: Rebel Assault
• Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
• Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance
• Star Wars: X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter - Balance of Power Campaigns
• StarCraft
• StarCraft: Brood War
• Stellar 7
• SuperKarts
• Swiv 3D
• Syndicate Plus
• Syndicate: American Revolt
• Synnergist
• Tachyon: The Fringe
• Take no Prisoners
• Talisman
• Tempest 2000
• Terminal Velocity
• The Daedalus Encounter
• The Dagger of Amon Ra
• The Journeyman Project
• The Last Dynasty
• The Lawnmower Man
• The Settlers III
• The Settlers IV
• Time Commando
• Torin's Passage
• Transport Tycoon
• Turrican II: The Final Fight
• Unreal
• Utopia: Creation of a Nation
• WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal
• Warcraft III Battle Chest
• Waterworld
• Whale's Voyage
• Whale's Voyage II: Die Übermacht
• Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi - Special Operations 1
• Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi - Special Operations 2
• Wing Commander: Privateer
• World of Aden: Entomorph - Plague of the Darkfall
• World of Warcraft
• World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
• World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
• World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King
• Worms
• X-Beyond the Frontier
• Zool
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor

California Games was a huge hit for Epyx and thus released on a lot of platforms back in the day. RetroGamer mag takes a look at all the versions out there in Load 259.

With pixeling for the C64 being my new love and of course still loving my big boxes too, it only was a matter of days before those two worlds crashed into each other and formed something exiting! Below, a work-in-progress screenshot of my BigBoxPixel.

It's a HiRes picture (with expanded borders) showing the first 21 games turned from 2k textures into tiny 8x40 spines using only a hint of color due to the C64's restrictions. But still, I'm sure most of the boxes are recognizable, so enjoy figuring out what's on this 8-bit shelf

OK, I've got somewhat carried away this week by joining the C64GFX.Com CharSet Logo Compo 2024 and working on my first CharSet pix. There wasn't really any concept to follow but I stumbled along while learning the graphic modes as well as the editors (Petmate and PETSCII Editor) I used.

For the PETSCII pic, I've fooled around with tiles, as in ceramic tiles and one thing lead to another an a 3DBBG (short for my social media handle @3DBigBoxGames) thingy appeared waiting to be tweaked over and over again:

Next, I tried my luck with HiRes mode, which means, pixels and color are separated and thus easier to handle. Well, it got all out of hand and I've ended up with the whole screen filled and (almost) all the available colors used in a bright fever dream color splash. One of the problems that arised is, that there's no logo there and reworking the charset to have once again 3DBBG or something there felt too tedious. I've somewhat fixed it by making this the core and just turned it into "Oh, no! What logo?" and called it quits

The competition runs from Feb 7th to April 30th, so there's still time to join in. Voting will be May 1st to May 14th.

Make sure to check out all the submitted entries:

• C64GFX.com (incl. non-demo-scener submissions like mine)
• CSDb.dk

With Nightdive Studios working on their System Shock remaster, RetroGamer magazine sat down with them and Jon Chey, the lead programmer of Shock 2, for discussing the series' beginnings, how it could be updated and what's up with Shock 3. It's a lenghy 8-page article well worth the read.

This article appeared in Load 249.

David Crookes wrote me a mail back in August 2022 after stumbeling over BigBoxCollection.com and asked if he could shoot me some questions about collecting Big Box games.

Two months later, a IMHO very well written article about our hobby was published in PC Pro magazine (issue #338) featuring not only photos, screengrabs and quotes by yours truly but also from a bunch of other fellow collectors.

Here's a .pdf of the full article

And here's the full interview: