Welcome to the world of PixelatedArcade

Welcome to 2026! Looking back it's now been 40 years since Gradius was released on the NES, which I spent a ton of time playing at a friends house as I didn't yet have an NES. Great fun, but geez, that's a long time ago so I must getting old! Putting that aside for the moment and looking forward, we'll be doing some behind the scenes updates throughout January. There will be some periodic downtime, possibly for a day or two, while some server and code updates are performed. Thanks for checking out PixelatedArcade, and have a happy new year!

Remember Jupiter Mission 1999? Not too long ago (by my standards) I wrote up a review of the game and, generally, wasn't impressed; overall neat idea but the gameplay was too frustrating and boring. At the end of the story, however, our hero (the player) aboard the Space Beagle didn't make it back to Earth and is instead lost somewhere near a hostile, alien world. Now it's time to take a look at the sequel, Quest of the Space Beagle which picks up the story at this point. Like it's predecessor this game is made up of a series of action and strategy mini-games, although this time around there are fewer of them. Once again the results aren't spectacular; despite some improvements in the graphics and much more tolerable loading times, irritations abound making this title one that requires far more patience than I have to enjoy.

Welcome to the end-of-year roundup, an annual traditional where I (sort of) provide updates but mostly ramble about the state of things! I feel like I can almost start off by a copy/paste of last years update... once again I didn't keep up news updates and reviews quite as often as I would have liked. Sorry. But, a lot did get done behind the scenes in a very busy year. Some new features to the codebase have been added, including a spot for some hints and tricks (see the walkthrough for Jupiter Mission 1999 as the first example for this). A better process for noting which magazines marketing materials and more came from is in the works as well. And early this year a feature for technical specs to list video resolutions utilized was finally available. The database is slowly being update to fill in blanks with all the new features and old ones as well. So it's back to work, and I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season!